by E. A. Copen
When I finally stopped, it was because the adrenaline had finally worn off and my back leg hurt even worse. The burning pain spread up the leg, into my butt and tail, making it all but impossible to move once I went down. Eden was still a good ten miles away, and Paint Rock closer to twenty. I wasn’t going to make it if I shifted. Only my wolf could cross that distance, and the bullet in my hindquarters meant I couldn’t even do that.
I lay on my side in tall grass for a minute, panting and whining to myself, cursing. Now what? Judah could be dead, Espinoza too, and it was all my fault. Judah and Espinoza had trusted me and I let them down. I had to get them back, but I couldn’t do it alone, and I couldn’t do it lying in an open field in the desert.
I tried to get up and fell back down. Nope. Not going anywhere. At least, not like that.
The sound of tires crunching over rocks vibrated through the ground. I lifted my head and let my tongue fall over the side of my mouth, breathing fast to cool myself. Headlights danced through the tall, dry grass. A car rolled by and shook the pebbles near my snout. Another drove by after I waited a few minutes. The road, whichever it was, seemed to be well-traveled. I could shift back and maybe catch a ride, but I didn’t think anyone would stop for a naked man standing in the middle of the highway. They would stop for a dog. At least, I hoped they would.
With a mighty huff, I forced myself back on shaky legs. It was a risk, pulling the old injured dog maneuver. I was as likely to get hit as I was to actually get a ride, and I had to bank on not being driven pronto to the nearest emergency vet clinic in San Angelo. I needed to go the other way.
I limped up to the last bit of grass near the highway and crouched down, waiting. The trick was in the timing…and hoping the guy at the wheel wasn’t drunk or asleep. Oh, and avoiding trucks. I might survive being hit by a car, but a truck not so much.
A car appeared in the distance on my side of the road. I hunched down and waited, counting and holding my breath. When it was close enough that I could read the license plate, I leapt out and stopped, turning my head to face the car. The hood dipped as the driver applied the brakes. Tires squealed. I braced for an impact that didn’t come. When I was sure it wasn’t going to hit, I cracked open one eye. The grill was right in front of my face.
The car door opened and I hurried into position, lying splayed across the road with my injured rear leg displayed. I whined when the figure leaned over the hood to get a better look. “Ed?”
I cracked open an eye, cut off my whine halfway through, and looked up into Bran’s face.
The passenger side door opened and Angel got out. “What is it, babe? Is it dead?”
Now, it was one thing for Bran to see me lying there, playing the injured dog card to try and snag a ride. He wasn’t a werewolf and so I didn’t have to worry about making an appearance for me. However, it was another for Angel, his wife and a wolf outside my pack, to see me like that. I rolled as soon as I heard her coming but paused when I had to move my injured leg. I turned for a better look and saw my whole leg was red and sticky with blood. As soon as I saw it the fur started to itch so I leaned over to give it a good cleaning with my tongue. Maybe that’d ease the pain.
“Edward Petersen. One of Sal’s wolves,” Bran said.
Angel squatted down next to me and tilted her head to the side. “Is that a bullet wound?”
I tried to scoot away from her, to hide the wound in some way. Angel may have been a werewolf, but she wasn’t in my pack, and that meant she was potentially dangerous. Being injured in front of an outsider made me prey, something I didn’t want to be.
“Looks like,” Bran said and slid one arm under me.
The last thing I wanted was for Bran to pick me up. I squirmed, but that just wound up making things awkward. And it hurt a lot, too.
“Calm down,” he said and hauled me up as if I weighed nothing. “We’ll take you back to the pack. You can shift in the back seat. Angel can help.”
If it’d been anyone other than Bran, I might have bit him for how he manhandled me, especially in front of a werewolf who wasn’t pack. But Bran and Sal were practically brothers. The only reason Angel wasn’t pack was because she had a record. Chanter didn’t let anyone who had done time into the pack. Arrested was one thing, time inside was another.
Angel climbed into the back of the car on one side while Bran opened the door on the other. He deposited me on the seat so that my head had to lay on her lap if I wanted to keep my legs up on the seat. Then, Bran got back in front, did a U-turn and headed back toward Eden.
I didn’t get much time to think about where we were going or how I was getting there. Angel placed her hand firmly under my chin and made me raise my head to look her in the eyes. I jerked away, trying to avoid it, but she held me, so I just growled.
“Don’t give me that macho bullshit,” she snapped at me. “I know you’re about as likely to bite me as you are to fuck me so don’t even try. I’m not going to hurt you. Well, much anyway.” Her dark lips turned up in a smile and her grip on my jaw tightened. “Now, that bullet’s probably silver. Shifting’s going to be a bitch, but you’ve got to do it unless you want to get stuck like that, you hear? I’m going to help you, like it or not. Now, look me in the eyes, dammit.”
I kept my gaze averted. A lot of humans think that werewolves don’t look each other in the eye because it’s a dominance thing. It’s way more complicated than that, especially for someone at the bottom of a pack like me. Locking gazes like that is overwhelming, especially if the other party is stronger than me or has more status. It’s like being hypnotized but by something ugly and horrible. I can see the monster inside, the ugliest, darkest side of their wolf and it scares the piss out of me, sometimes literally. Seeing that activates the fight or flight parts of the brain and can have other effects other than feeling queasy. Someone at the top like Sal or Valentino could force me to shift or keep me from shifting with nothing more than an intense glare.
That’s what Angel was going to do. She wanted to force me to change, and I didn’t want to change. With the bullet inside, it could tear more, bury it deeper. There could be more serious damage, especially considering all the other injuries to my legs when they were broken before. What if it hit an artery during the shift? Sal had always said—
Angel dipped her head into my vision and caught my eye. She had beautiful eyes, the kind that were hard to look away from. They were blue with lines of green and a ring of brown that danced around the center. The pattern in the color made it look like someone had cracked a precious gem and let another one grow inside. But they were also sad eyes. Painful eyes.
Then I saw the beast. She was small and black with wild eyes. Blood and saliva coated her teeth and lips as she snarled. The fury that burned inside those eyes was raw and pure, threatening to boil over at any minute. Just one wrong move and that beast would rip someone’s throat out.
The image of the beast faded, replaced by a curious reflection of a face I knew all too well. Dark, curly hair sat in a mess, eyes bruised and saggy from lack of sleep, a head too big for that scrawny neck. My own reflection stared back at me.
And that’s when I knew the beast I had seen wasn’t Angel, but me.
I drew in a deep breath and felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my left ass cheek. At the same time, I was suddenly aware of how cold I was. I looked down and saw that, without realizing it, I’d shifted back into my human self. Five fingers on each hand, every mole in its place. “What was that?” I asked Angel, my voice strained from the sudden change. “I’ve never…”
Again, I heard the wolf inside demand. Look at her again.
I wanted to. I wanted to see myself in Angel’s eyes all over again. I needed to so I could understand what she’d done. No, that wasn’t quite right. I just needed to. There was no good explanation why.
She pulled a wool blanket up from the floorboards of the car and wrapped it around me without meeting my eyes again. “Quiet, now,” she said. “And try not to b
leed on the upholstery too bad.” She sat down, crossed her arms and legs and fixed her gaze forward.
Between wherever we were and Paint Rock, I tried to strike up a conversation twice. Angel made it clear she didn’t want to talk and Bran reiterated the fact by telling me to shut my damn mouth.
“Don’t you want to know what happened or how I got shot?” I gestured to the window. “Look, Judah and that cop need help. I can take you to them. I know where they are.”
“Sal would be very angry if we went with you without speaking to him first.” Bran shot me an angry look in the rear view and then adjusted it so he didn’t have to look at me. “Rushing in without a plan is not a good idea, Ed. We must speak with the pack.”
“You’re not listening to me!” I shouted. “They could be hurt or dead. We have to go back!”
“We will speak with your alpha,” Bran said, calm and firm as always.
No matter what I said, he wasn’t going to budge. The guy did what he always did and treated me like I was still a kid. I was almost twenty-two, hardly a kid by anybody’s standards. Bran wasn’t the boss of me.
But Sal was, and when he found out I’d let Judah be taken, he was going to lose his shit on me. I’d be one werewolf sans a head. “He’s going to kill me,” I muttered and sank further into the blanket.
“No one on our side dies tonight.” Angel sounded sleepy. Her eyes were closed, too.
“We have to go back and get them,” I said, leaning toward her.
“The pack has no responsibility to retrieve those humans,” Angel said, turning her gaze out the window. “And if they were any other humans, they probably wouldn’t.”
I worked my fingers into fists. “What do you know about pack life, huh? Outsider.”
I meant it as an insult, but Angel took it in stride. She turned back to me, a bored expression playing on her face. “One day, pup, but not today.”
We didn’t say much else to each other until we pulled into Chanter’s driveway. All the lights were still on. The door opened when we pulled up and Sal stepped outside.
When he saw it was me and not Judah, the pain was evident on his face. Sal tore down the stairs to meet me, turned me around and sniffed the air before pushing me back to stand at arm’s length. “Where is she?” he demanded, his temper waking the wolf inside to peer through his eyes.
I shrank away. “I’m sorry,” I managed before I stepped wrong. Pain shot up into my lower back. All the blood rushed to my head along with memories of being trapped in the cave pit with Judah two years ago when my legs were broken. The next and last thing I remember thinking was, Wow, the ground is really close.
~
I woke up on my back, naked, surrounded by faces staring down at me. My vision spun, but I recognized them by smell.
“He goin’ to make it?” Istaqua asked and then bit into a cracker.
“If you’re going to take a bullet, the best place is in the ass,” Bran said. “Plenty of padding.”
“If Ed had an ass, maybe,” Sal added. I couldn’t see where he was, but I had the weirdest pressure in my left hip, going down my left leg. “He should be ready now. Roll him.”
“Wait,” I croaked, but nobody listened. Istaqua grabbed my feet and Bran my shoulders. On a three count, they flipped me like a pancake face down onto the sofa.
“All right, hold his arms.”
“Thought you said he’d be numb?” Istaqua said as Bran grabbed my wrists and pinned them to the pillow.
“I said ready. I don’t have any of the good stuff left. Best I can do is dull it. Digging out bullets hurts like a son of a bitch either way. Hold him good, Bran.”
I turned my head sideways and choked out a panicked “Wait.”
Sal didn’t listen.
On a pain scale from one to ten, getting shot rates somewhere around a ten. Digging out the bullet with decade-old army medic tools while lying face down on a sofa is probably at least a sixteen. I think I ate half the pillow and had started in on the cushion before it was over. While he was digging, I could barely breathe, so talking was out of the question. When it was over, I didn’t want to talk. My throat was scratchy from all the screaming and whining. But I didn’t have a choice.
“They’ve got Judah,” I moaned as soon as Sal started bandaging.
His hands paused in their work. “I know.”
I told him everything I knew, down to the last detail. I wasn’t sure if they needed every detail, but I also didn’t know what would help. It was always best to overshare than not say enough in my experience, at least when it came to werewolves. Sal would know if I lied or left something out and, with Istaqua and Bran sitting right there, I didn’t want to give them any excuse to not like me. That could be bad for my health.
When I’d finished telling everyone everything, the room fell silent. Istaqua was the first to speak. He crossed his arms, tilted his head up and said, “Judah Black is a human and not bound to the pack. I see no reason that pack should risk their life to rescue her. She chose her path. There are consequences for going in alone. No more blood needs to be shed over this.”
A loud growl echoed through the room. I pushed up but didn’t dare flip over onto my back. My ass was still way too sore.
“That’s my mother you’re talking about,” Hunter growled. “Maybe you’re too much of a coward to go after her, but I’m not.”
The front door opened.
“Hunter, wait,” Sal called. He stepped into my field of vision to glare at Istaqua. “We’re going for her. You going to stop us?”
Istaqua narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms. “You should let the humans see to humans, Saloso. You are overextending your reach. How many times have you run to save her?”
“Fewer times than she’s saved the rest of us. We owe her, but this isn’t about that. Life isn’t a scale to be balanced.” Sal raised a finger and pointed in Istaqua’s face. “It’s not about exploiting people to get something back that helps you. That’s not how we do things here in Paint Rock. Here, we look after our own. That means pack and the family and friends of pack and anyone else I feel like taking care of. This is my territory. My people. And I’m going after her, me and anyone else who wants to come.”
“Hell yeah,” said Angel. “Count me in.”
Bran nodded his head. “I’m with you.”
I winced as I pushed up off the couch to stand and stumbled. Bran helped me stay on my feet. “Me too.”
“No, friend,” Bran said, shaking his head. “You’re already injured.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “If you don’t take me with you, I’m just going to go anyway. I don’t need your permission.”
“And if I forbid it?”
I turned to face Sal, unable to read his face. The scent coming from him was a mix of worry and fear, but also anger. “My alpha is about to walk into hostile territory with a bear shifter and a packless werewolf and leave the heart of his pack behind?” I raised my head. “After he took a bullet for the alpha’s girlfriend?”
Sal grabbed his leather Kings jacket from the back of a chair and shrugged it on. “Ed took a bullet and got back up. I’d say he’s proven himself. If he wants to come, I won’t turn him away.”
“I’m coming, too.”
Every head in the room turned to the hallway where Gideon Reed stood, hand gripping his side. He was pale and sweaty, but I still jumped back at the sight of him. Last time I saw him, he was trying to kill me, after all.
Sal pushed toward him. “You need to get back inside that ash circle right now.”
Reed lifted his clenched hand, letting a small trail of ash fall from his fist to the floor. “Cedar, sage, tobacco, and rose.”
“You forgot the redwood.” Sal crossed his arms. “What of it?”
“For the last day, it’s protected me against that spell. It may work to keep the rest of you from falling under it if it can be applied. Right now, I have some tucked in my pocket and some in my hand here. It’s weakening the effect
, even if I can still feel it pulling at me.” Reed held his hand out, the silvery ash resting in his palm. “Without it, you’ve got no chance of resisting him.”
Sal sighed. “I have more and I can apply it, but that still doesn’t mean you should come. Look at you. You’re half-dead. These people have already done a number on you.”
Reed pushed off the wall with a shoulder. “These people are making a mockery of my beliefs, hiding behind their church and using God as their excuse to do evil. And if I had stopped them a decade ago, they wouldn’t have been able to do what they are doing. They are here because of me and that gives me more right than anyone to fight.”
“If you want to come, I won’t stop you,” Sal said, nodding.
Reed nodded back in thanks.
“What about Mom’s new partner? That half-vampire guy?” Hunter asked.
The room went quiet and everyone exchanged glances.
“Hunter,” Bran said after a long pause. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Tell him the truth, Bran.” Sal gripped the back of a chair. “The night Judah got the shit beat out of her, his scent was all over her.”
“Are you saying Abe broke her arm?” I shook my head. “Why?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t trust him.”
I sighed and looked down at my hands. Without some kind of focus, I wasn’t going to be much use to Sal in a fight. My teeth and claws were mostly for looks. Still, I’d be damned if I was going to sit this one out. Judah needed me. I needed to be there for Mara, too.
Sal sighed. “Ed, you go with Bran and Angel. Reed, you’re with me. I’ll drop Hunter and Mia off with Nina.”
Hunter huffed. “I can fight.”
“Not if I say you can’t!” Every wolf in the room, Angel aside, lowered their heads when Sal barked in his alpha voice. “And you’re going to stay with Nina and stay safe. Now, go and get your sister and her diaper bag. We’re going.” Sal turned the collar on his jacket up and grabbed his keys off the counter before turning to face Istaqua. “You need to get gone before I come back.” He jerked open the front door.