But this?
Nothing.
Not a peep.
If he couldn’t hear them, that meant one of two things. Either it was a UFO, which not even a man who could shift into a wolf believed, or it was a stealth helicopter. He’d heard rumors from his buddies still at the Pentagon that something like this was coming, a stealth helicopter that would be even quieter than the modified Black Hawks SOCOM had used when they’d inserted Seal Team 6 to take down Bin Laden. But the guys had told him it was always in development, that the prototypes had only been shown to the military and hadn’t been picked up for production yet.
He grabbed his glass, finished off the last finger and a half of liquor. It burned all the way down, but didn’t help his nerves.
What if Jaeger-Tech, the company that Jake had implicated in the killing of Mary’s pack, had managed to get hold of one of those prototypes? Or several? He’d seen the pictures Jake had. Jaeger-Tech had military grade hardware, and they had trained soldiers to operate their equipment.
But, no, the Department of Defense wouldn’t ever authorize that.
Would they?
Unless, of course, the Pentagon didn’t know about it. Jaeger was about as under the radar as any multinational conglomerate could get, it seemed. With as little information as they’d been able to dig up on what they sold, who they did business with, and who they employed, they might as well have been a James Bond organization.
And, if Frost Security knew about Jaeger-Tech, it was reasonable to believe Jaeger knew about Frost. Had he been mistaken in thinking that their existence in Enchanted Rock had gone unnoticed? That they’d been able to live out here in relative anonymity, just doing their security work during the day and running the pack at night?
And now, here they were. Hovering just beyond his property. In sight of his house. If he’d been in his wolf form, his hackles would’ve been raised as he let loose a growl at these interlopers on the fringes of his territory.
Mouth dry, Peter licked his lips as he watched the nearly silent helicopter break from its hovering pattern and fly off behind the mountain, almost like it had realized he spotted it. Staring at where it used to be, willing it to never reappear, he slowly began to shake his head. Empty whiskey glass in hand, he headed back into the house. He turned and went down the hall to his bedroom, intending to grab his phone, but stopped outside Mary’s door.
He listened to her breathing, to its easy, even, slow rhythm. Not a care in the world penetrated her deep slumber, not a worry about half-recollected myths and ghostly memories disrupted her sleep. She was as innocent as any seventeen-year-old shifter girl could be. The worst she’d ever hurt was a rabbit or a deer, nothing more than game.
Peter’s heart felt heavier and heavier the longer he stood there. He’d never had children, and Mary was as close to his as he’d get. They’d even started cooking together, and she’d become a full-fledged, albeit smaller, member of the pack after he’d plucked her from her foster home in Edmund, Oklahoma the year before.
If Jaeger-Tech was coming for the pack, that meant they were going to get a second chance at Mary. And, innocent as she was, she didn’t deserve to be hunted down like some vermin.
He took a deep breath, resumed his course to the bedroom, and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. He needed to call Jake, needed to tell him he’d changed his mind about Lacy. That, in her downtime when she wasn’t working on Zeke Rogers’ case, she was going to be assigned to hunting down these Jaeger-Tech bastards.
And then he’d pull the whole team in. No matter what it took, they’d find these bastards. They’d put all their operational knowledge together, pinpoint their enemy, and they’d strike.
He paused, phone in hand as he was about to call Jake. A veritable ton of realization fell on his shoulders, causing him to slump down on his bed.
But what if he was wrong? What if that wasn’t Jaeger-Tech that had just been hovering within sight of his cabin? What said they had that kind of equipment at their disposal?
Jaeger-Tech wasn’t the only one flying out here. It could have just as easily been someone else. What about the US Military? They had plenty of bases in Colorado, particularly Air Force bases. Maybe this was just an experimental aircraft that they were testing out in the mountains, to examine its capabilities and push it under extreme conditions? After all, his friend at the DoD had said something like this was coming down the pipeline. Hell, that was the only way Peter even knew about its existence.
He bit the inside of his lip and tried to make sense of it all as he stared down at his phone. There were too many questions, too many variables for him to consider. Especially at a little past three o’clock in the morning on just a few hours of sleep.
And the lack of sleep had certainly been getting to him, especially as the dreams had gotten worse. Just the other day when he’d been in the office with Jake, he’d reacted with genuine, misdirected anger. And then when Matt had screwed up and gotten spotted by that crazy old lady, he’d called him up and bitched him out like he wasn’t anything more than a PFC in boot camp. Admittedly, Matt Jones had screwed up. Like FUBAR screwed up. But Peter, normally the reserved and calm, almost frigid leader of the group, had just snapped.
They weren’t in the military. Matt was still a member of his pack. And, more importantly, he was a friend. Peter never should have unloaded on him like that.
He took another deep breath and turned off his phone’s screen before setting it back down.
He was letting his fear control his actions. Letting his anger, from some perceived intrusion into his territory, control his reaction to the problem. He’d never had this problem before not even with his father. In the past, he’d refused to come at the world from a place of anger or fear. Once you lost control of your own focus, the opposing force had already won. They’d put you off-center, and that’s when you began to make moves that would prove to be your downfall.
What had begun this change? Had it been growing closer to Mary? Had it been the shifters in his pack finding their own mates, and the old memory of what he’d once had coming back?
Whatever had caused it, he’d pull Jake into his office in the morning, as soon as the ex-homicide detective set foot in the building. He’d tell Jake to start investigating suspicious flight patterns and landings in the surrounding area, just like what he had done with Edmund. Then they’d get Lacy to start researching. Jake had been right; it was better to be safe than sorry, and Peter had been wrong.
It was as simple as that.
Peter laid back down, his hands beneath his head as he stared up at the barely illuminated ceiling. He knew he should close his eyes and try to get some sleep, but try as he might, he just couldn’t seem to shut them against the reddish glow of the alarm clock.
It turned out that the whiskey and the breather out on the deck hadn’t done much for his nerves after all.
Chapter Thirty – Matthew
That night was not exactly a bright, shining example of my decision-making skills.
I’d tossed and turned for the last few hours, my mind cluttered with Rebecca’s words, with her promise to leave with me if I had to run to evade the crime syndicate. Leave her job, leave her own family, and start over with me.
Of course, I had no intention of leaving. If the mafia was going to come at me, I knew Frost Security would go right back at them, but twice as hard. We wouldn’t take any prisoners, either, or play nice and fair. They had no idea what a force of five military trained veterans could do, especially when you needed special bullets to kill them. And I had no qualms with letting those assholes figure things out the hard way.
Especially after that note they’d left.
But it wasn’t about whether or not I’d actually have to leave. It was the implication underlying her promise to me. She wanted to be with me. She’d give up everything to do it, and would start over if she had to.
I’d almost leaped over the kitchen island and torn her t-shirt from her body, and ma
de her mine. But my words with Peter back in his office, about my recklessness, about my not following protocol, had come back to me as clear as a summer morning.
“Protocol,” I whispered to myself as I sat up in bed. “Motherfucking protocol.”
That’s what all this revolved around. Me having to do a job. Don’t get me wrong, I understood the reason behind it. We couldn’t taint the information we were gathering, couldn’t put our clients at risk by becoming personally entangled with them.
But, goddammit, it sucked. To have the woman of your dreams, your soulmate, the person you’d been looking for your entire life, just down the hall from you? Can you even begin to imagine the temptation there? The struggle?
I couldn’t either, before that night.
To make matters worse, as the sounds of night continued to drift in through the window, as the rabbits continued to frolic and the deer continued to rummage, my inner wolf seem to whisper to me in a gravely voice: “Just run it off. You did it last night. Just don’t go to town.”
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head. Leaving Rebecca here would be just as bad.
“Come on,” it almost whined back, “cut me some slack here. You’re antsy, I’m antsy. You can stay within sight of the cabin. Your ears will pick up any cars approaching. Come on, do it.”
I groaned a little. Annoyingly, the wolf half of me was right. I would hear or see anything approaching, provided I didn’t stray too far from the cabin.
“Yeah,” it seemed to growl again, “you can do it. Everything will be fine, and you’ll be able to at least catch a few Z’s. Promise I won’t tell anyone.”
I sighed as I threw the covers back and swung my legs out of bed. I glanced over at my sidearm on the nightstand, weighed whether or not I should take it. Yeah, I probably should. I’d just leave it on the coffee table, though, near the front door. If anything did happen, and I had to get to it, it would be a couple steps inside before I had it in arm’s reach. I stood up from the bed and, wearing nothing but briefs, padded out of my bedroom with my holstered sidearm.
I stopped at Rebecca’s door and listened to the soft sound of her breathing, to her steady, relaxed inhalation and exhalation.
“Well, since you’re here,” the wolf seemed to whisper, “and since she’s there…”
“Shut up,” I muttered as I turned from her door and headed into the living room. “You’re getting a run, and that’s it.”
I placed my sidearm on the coffee table and eased my way out the front door. I caught the screen door before it could slam shut against the frame, and gently let it fall into place after I stepped out onto the front patio.
The cool air was a blast of freshness. Crisp, clean, and no hint of humidity as, all around, the world continued to thrive in the dark hours. Over one way, I heard the rabbit from earlier. I heard a possum feeding its babies a little ways beyond. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a family of raccoons rummaging beneath a log for grubs.
Immediately, I began to relax. All the tension from the day, of my having to fight back my more primal urges toward Rebecca, began to melt from the muscles in my shoulder and back. I suddenly felt like I could breathe deeper, run faster, and laugh louder.
I kicked off my briefs in a rush and stepped out onto the gravel yard. There, with the rocks digging into the pads of my feet, I began to shift. My skin prickled and began to itch as the hair sprouted from my body like buds on a tree in winter. The bones in my legs re-knit themselves into new patterns, curving, my knees restructuring so the joint would bend the opposite direction. I whimpered softly as I pushed the transformation and sped it up.
After a few minutes of pain and discomfort, though, I was fully transformed into a wolf. It took all I had to keep myself from howling at the top of my lungs, to keep from announcing to the wildlife around me that the forest’s true predator had arrived. Not a dog, not a coyote, not even a wolf. A shifter.
The world around the cabin sprang into vibrant life as my nose took in the smells like a sommelier, swirling it around, loving every little difference in the tones and colors it produced, lighting my mind up like the campfire from just a few nights prior.
I bounded out into the trees, my legs burning off the nervous energy that had kept me tossing and turning all night, the lust I felt for Rebecca feeding my body as I raced through the woods. My tongue hung out of the side of my mouth as I leapt through the air, sailing over a deadfall tree, easily clearing the fifteen feet with no problem.
This was it, my favorite part of life. Existence in its purest form, where I could truly become one with nature.
Now all I had to do was figure out how I could tell Rebecca about it without her freaking out. How could I convince her that this was real, that I was more or less a human being who could love and feel the same way she did?
All the other guys had managed it, and had told me their stories. I just needed to find the right moment, the perfect time, to unburden myself to her. None of the opportunities I’d had this evening, like outside the restaurant, or just as she’d climbed out of my pickup and started heading for her front, had panned out because of me getting cold paws.
I knew that if I could get the right setting, the right situation, I could tell her. All I had to do first was close this case, then we could move on with our lives together. Because, deep down, I knew that was the truth of our bond. We had a destiny together, a path that was going to lead us through life. Hand in hand, arm in arm…partners until the day we died.
I let out a low howl of excitement, one that I knew was quiet enough and lacked enough force to carry down off the mountain.
Unfortunately, it turned out that when I got to tell her wasn’t my decision to make.
Chapter Thirty-one – Rebecca
I awoke with a start from the strangest dream I’d ever had, stranger even than Matthew Jones coming in through my bedroom door with a firefighter’s ax.
The cast of Goodfellas had been in my kitchen cooking up pasta and talking back and forth in their Jersey accents about how they were going to stuff me in a trunk, then take me out to a cornfield somewhere in Nebraska and bury me. Joe Pesci’s character even looked at me, framed in the doorway to my bedroom, and asked if I was talking to him.
I shivered as I lay there in bed, cold sweat drying on my forehead, and pulled the covers tighter.
But then, after I’d flipped the pillow over to the cool side and rolled over on my side, I heard it. The wolf howl.
It cut through me like a hot scythe through butter, slicing into the core of my being. I sat upright in bed, my breath coming faster and faster than I’d ever experienced. I threw back the covers and leapt out of bed onto the cool hardwood.
I couldn’t explain the emotions inside me. They were one part fear, two parts attraction. Not to the wolf, but to the idea of the wolf. The idea of running free, of racing through the woods with my pack, my mate. And then it dawned on me—wolves were gone from Colorado. Or, at least, they had been, except for the one Gladys had seen outside my bedroom window the night before.
There had been a wolf outside my bedroom window. And now there was one outside my bedroom window in a completely different house.
I swallowed hard and let that sink in for a moment.
What the hell was going on? Was I being stalked by some wolf? Some creature that wasn’t even supposed to be anywhere around here?
Whatever was going on, I instinctively knew it wasn’t normal. It was like looking at an optical illusion on one of those gently sloping hills that didn’t match up with the background, where a car that’s placed in neutral appears to roll up the incline instead of down. Something just felt off. Not bad or evil. Just strange.
“Matthew,” I whispered, panting a little as I went to the bedroom door. “Matthew will know what to do.” I stepped out into the hallway and, feeling a little ridiculous since I hadn’t heard the wolf howl again, knocked on his bedroom door.
“Matthew?” I asked through the door. “You awak
e?”
No answer.
Maybe his great hearing, where he could hear me scream from all the way outside in his truck while he was driving by, didn’t apply while he was asleep? I knocked harder.
Still no response.
I looked down at the doorknob, unsure if I should breach his privacy. Could I? I mean, what if he slept in the nude or something?
I shook my head as I licked my lips. No, bad idea. That was a bad way to disincentivize me from barging in.
My breathing began to quicken. Somehow, I felt that the wolf was coming closer to the cabin, its four paws pounding into the dirt and rocks as it rocketed toward me. How was I feeling this? Why?
I quickly decided that if I didn’t get an answer on a second try, I would just go in. “Matthew,” I said more loudly as I rapped my knuckles on the door. “Are you awake?”
Nothing.
My mouth suddenly dry, I reached down, grasped the knob, and turned the handle. I closed my eyes tightly, hoping and not hoping simultaneously that he had at least most of his clothes on, and burst inside like an annoying kid sister. “Matthew?” I asked.
Still not a word.
I opened one eye and cast a look at the bed.
It was unmade, the blankets twisted and unkempt. But it was empty.
My heart began to beat faster. Oh no, oh no.
“Oh, my God,” I said, my voice almost breaking, “where did you go?” I backed out of his room and headed down the hallway and around the corner into the living room, the tips of my fingers slowly guiding me down the planked walls.
The living room was dark, with the only light coming in from the umbrella of stars that seemed to surround us entirely this far up the mountain. I called out to him again, but didn’t receive an answer.
And that was when I heard it.
The panting.
The panting of something like a dog outside on the porch.
I sunk low, nearly squatting, and snuck through the living room. As I passed the coffee table, I glanced down and saw Matthew’s pistol in its holster.
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