by Renée Jaggér
They climbed out, shutting the doors gently, and darted across the street when it was clear. They headed for a tall hedge, which they promptly crouched behind.
Squinting through a gap in the twisted branches, Bailey mumbled, “I think—yeah, I can see through the window.”
“Oh, right,” said Roland. “I forgot you have super Were senses. Anything?”
She frowned. “Not really, just a few empty, dusty racks. Cross this one off the list, I think.”
Slowly, they crept out from behind the hedge, past the first warehouse and toward the side of the next building. They kept to the shade. They weren’t going to any great lengths to sneak around and hide, but it was obvious to them both that it would be best not to blatantly announce their presence.
At least, not yet. When the time came, Bailey wanted Oberlin and the rest of the bastards to know exactly who’d come for them and why. Her right hand rolled itself into a trembling fist.
“What,” Roland inquired, “if I might ask, is the plan? I have a few notions of my own, but since pursuing those pricks was your idea, I’ll start by asking you.”
They half-crouched against the side wall of the warehouse, keeping themselves flat enough to avoid easy detection from the front and below the line of sight of the windows.
“Find them,” Bailey stated. “That’s Step One. Once we pull that off, Step Two’s to charge in, kick ass, and take names. Don’t think we need more than two steps. Simplicity is the beauty of the whole thing.”
Roland's face was stony. He’d narrowed his eyes and was rolling his tongue around his teeth as he weighed the pros and cons, the dangers and opportunities.
“Eh,” he replied, “that might work, although it’s not what I had in mind. If we see them before they see us, I should be able to concoct something that will—”
“Oh, come on,” she interrupted. She only slightly increased the volume of her voice—it was still a whisper—but she added a cutting edge to it. “We’re already doing more than enough sneaking around if you ask me. I think it’s well past time for you to be the big scary badass wizard you ought to be.”
He stiffened as if someone had thrown something at the back of his head. “What the hell does that mean?” he asked, blinking.
“You’re supposedly this powerful magic user, right?” she explained. “I’ve seen you do a few things that are pretty impressive, but mostly you just keep running away, or hiding, or trying not to deal with things directly. Right now, you’re trying not to get into a fight with a few werewolves you already beat the shit out of.”
He grunted low in his throat as they crept toward the rear of the building. “Yes, but we don’t know if it’s going to be just them. The fuckin’ Russian Mafia could be in there with ten guys with AKs.”
“Well,” she shot back, “can’t you, like, deflect their bullets back at them or something?”
“In theory.” He sighed. “I’ve never been able to try that one. You know, in the field, in real-time, when the boot hits the grindstone or however the hell the saying goes.”
She waved a hand impatiently. “I get the picture. No time like the present to test that shit out, though.”
He didn’t answer, and as they reached the rear corner, she looked pointedly into his face. “Roland,” she began, her voice softer now, “those witches want you bad. Even if you hadn’t told me, I would have been able to tell once they showed up in the flesh. Women can see these things. Whatever this gift you have is, it’s clearly something special.”
His eyes stayed locked on hers and widened.
Bailey went on, “Maybe you think that by fleeing from your full potential, you can also get away from them and that other crap you told me about—people just wanting to be near you so your power rubs off on them. But you can’t run away from what you are. Having power like that, you might as well put it to good use, like helping me save a couple of innocent girls from whatever the hell these assholes have in mind.”
The wizard raised the knuckle of his forefinger to the space between his upper lip and his nose, and his eyes went distant.
“Oh,” the young woman added, “and don’t worry about the moral ramifications or whatever of kicking their butts again, or about how the folks back in Greenhearth—human or Were—might react. These guys aren’t good people. They’re not well-liked even by the locals in their own town, after all. Daddy Oberlin can buy tolerance, but not respect. Dan and his crew are assholes at best, and at worst, they might be goddamn kidnappers.”
Roland gave an oddly flippant shrug and loosened up again, regaining some of the swagger she recalled from their first meeting.
“Once again,” he stated, “you have a point, I’ll admit.”
She smiled. “Several points, thank you. But good enough; I’ll take what I can get. Now let’s get those sons of bitches.”
He raised an eyebrow at her choice of words, then nodded. Together, they rounded the corner.
Nothing—just weeds, mud, and gravel. Bailey peeked briefly into the rear window, but the warehouse was completely dark within. Nothing suggested anyone was inside, or had been in days or weeks.
“Well, that’s a bust,” she murmured.
“Onward,” Roland said, “to bigger and better things.” He gestured toward the next structure, which was half again as large as the one they’d just examined.
They took three steps forward, then stopped dead.
Peeking around the back of the next building was the rear end of a lifted SUV, white and slathered with purple and blue flames.
The werewolf almost whistled. “That settles it.”
Moving even more slowly and trying to make no noise, they crossed the short span of open ground and again smashed themselves against the wall beneath the window. They waited there for a few seconds while Bailey listened.
Her eyes widened, and she gestured for Roland to lean closer to her.
“I can hear breathing and movement, plus I can smell them,” she said in the softest whisper she could manage.
He nodded, then pointed toward a barely visible door in the side of the warehouse at the back end. He wiggled his fingers and pantomimed opening a lock with a key.
Bailey gave him a thumbs-up and followed him toward the door. Suddenly she didn’t feel quite so gung-ho. It wasn’t that she was afraid of Dan; it was more that Roland’s earlier words about potential heavily armed mobsters waiting in there had begun to sink in.
She stood still as Roland touched the knob, gently turned it, and found it locked. Then he closed his eyes and touched the tip of his index finger to the keyhole. A few seconds later, it clicked faintly, and the door began to move.
Catching his eye, she mouthed, “Let me go first,” and crept past him. He waited a few seconds before following.
Within, the building was mostly dark, save for a single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling nearer the front. Here in the back, there were only a few half-rotted wooden shelves, some rusted steel shelves, and a couple of big empty boxes.
Near the front were a few men. Bailey could smell Dan Oberlin among them, but before she examined the group in detail, her attention was drawn to something in the middle of the building, not far beyond where she and the wizard now knelt.
Cages, one against each side wall, big enough that they were probably intended to hold ponies or goats, or maybe large dogs. The cage on the left had four occupants; the one on the right, zero so far. The four in the left-hand cage were young girls ranging in age from about twelve to fifteen, she guessed.
And with absolute certainty, she could say that all the girls were Weres from packs in her region of the Cascades. If not from Greenhearth, then from other nearby towns or isolated homes in the mountains and valleys. Her pulse quickened.
Outside, the pier was close enough that she could hear the water of the river lapping against it, creating just enough interference that she couldn’t quite make out what the men up front were saying. On the plus side, that meant any sounds she and
Roland might make would be obscured, as well. She just hoped they were too involved to smell her and Roland.
A figure detached itself from the group and came toward them—or rather, toward the cages. It was Dan Oberlin, still wearing his long coat, a small form under each arm.
Bailey’s eyes almost bulged out of their sockets. One of the girls was none other than Lauren Heuerman, who, according to Gunney had disappeared last night.
The other was Emma Nimberger, another Greenhearth resident. She must have been the girl from the south side who’d also been taken a couple of days ago, whose name Gunney hadn’t been able to recall.
Both were Pack. Both had zip-ties around their wrists and ankles and duct tape over their mouths and they lolled in a stupor—probably drugged, or maybe just exhausted from the long ordeal of their kidnapping.
As Bailey and the wizard watched from the shadows behind a box, Dan deposited the young ladies in the empty cage to the right, bringing the total up to six prisoners between the two enclosures. He shut and locked the door, then strode back up front to talk things over with the rest of the group.
By now, Bailey’s eyes were better adjusted to the dim light, and she was over the initial shock of seeing the girls. She studied the figures at the other end of the building.
Predictably, Oberlin had three of his minions with him—Chins, the gangly fucker, and the beefy guy whose hand she’d bitten. The redhead wasn’t with them, probably thanks to the ankle he’d twisted in Roland’s magic mudhole.
In addition to the four South Cliffs, there were also three tall, bearded men in clean dark brown suits. Bailey had no idea who they were. They might have been Weres, but she’d have had to get closer to smell them in order to tell. They might also have been ordinary humans.
She turned to Roland and breathed, “Hey, do you have a spell that can, uh, amplify them? I can’t hear.”
“Way ahead of you,” he responded just as quietly, closing his eyes and making a motion with his right hand as though drawing a string closer to them.
Five seconds later, the conversation among the men was abruptly as clear as though Bailey were standing three feet away from it.
“…reasonable price, since we might be looking to resell them,” one of the suited men was saying. “We’ll probably keep some, but other packs will clearly be interested.”
Dan grunted. “We just quoted you a reasonable price. Lot of risk to us, you know. We gotta make a goddamn profit here, and like you said, there are other people interested. Birth rates are so low that we can afford to wait for the highest bidder.”
Bailey’s skin crawled as it all came together in her head.
Throughout the Were community, there was occasional yet pervasive grumbling about how their people were having fewer children. Their ancient mating traditions were not working well in the modern world. Things were changing.
The pressure she had been subjected to was part of it. Female werewolves of fertile age, even if just barely, were highly prized. It was only a matter of time before some scumbag thought to try to sell teenage girls into forced marriages, allowing packs to grow their numbers at the cost of anything resembling basic decency, let alone legality.
A red haze of shuddering rage began to fill her, beginning in her brain and spreading to every part of her body.
“So, then,” the wizard breathed. “That’s it. It’s just as bad as we feared it might be.”
“Yes,” Bailey almost growled through her now-clenched teeth. “It is.”
Roland nodded and spoke again hurriedly before she could do anything.
“I’m not going to try to dissuade you from launching a rescue right here and now. That would be pointless since I know you that well already, but there’s some stuff we have to think about. Like, for example, if the fight goes badly for us, we might not be able to get out safely with the girls. The last thing we want is to get ourselves killed or captured without saving any of them.”
Bailey turned her eyes to his, and an unexpected rush of emotion hit her, briefly eclipsing her anger. He cared—about her, and about the young Weres they were here to help. She was almost ashamed of assuming he was cowardly earlier. Really, he was just trying to be sensible so they’d be more likely to succeed.
She gave a slow nod. “Yeah, good point. So what do you suggest?”
His mouth twisted in a strange way. “I’m going to give you a number and I want you to text it, saying exactly where we are.”
She squinted, wondering if he had friends in high places he hadn’t told her about yet. “Uh, okay. Whose number is it? And why can’t you send it?”
Now the expression on his face started to make sense—it was a mixture of resignation, impatience, and amusement.
“My phone’s still in the truck. And it’s Shannon’s.”
Bailey bit her tongue and clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from bursting out with a barrage of profanity that might give them away. After she swallowed her initial outburst, she lowered her hand.
“What? Why the hell should we contact her?”
She went cold for a moment, afraid Roland might be aiming to barter with the witches—their help in exchange for his body.
He seemed to sense her train of thought, and his demeanor shifted back to warm and reassuring.
“As a diversion. We’ve got a lot of werewolves here, and the guys in the suits might have guns. And we have half a dozen girls to bust out of cages; that’s a lot of work to do. Why not allow ourselves to focus just on the girls by leading a trio of powerful, unpleasant, pissed-off witches onto a collision course with our furry asshole friends here? I mean, you were right, we can’t call the cops since this is a supernatural matter.”
A slow smile spread across her face. “Roland, you’re a genius after all. Not bad.” She pulled out her phone as he gave her the number.
“Just, uh,” he instructed, “say something like you’re through with me and she can have me. You know, like you’re telling her woman to woman that I pissed you off and now you’ll collaborate with them against me. Girls do shit like that all the time, don’t they?”
Bailey frowned. “Some do. I don’t, but yeah, I get the idea.” She typed in an appropriate message, mentioning that they were in the third warehouse in the northwest pier district, then tapped Send.
Roland chuckled very softly. “I’m sure they’ll be here very soon.”
“Probably,” she agreed, recalling the insane jealousy, envy, and possessiveness that had practically oozed off the three sorceresses. She wasn’t much looking forward to seeing them again, even though they and Oberlin’s gang might send each other to hell, or at least to jail or the hospital.
Bailey turned toward the cage with the four girls. “I’m going to video this so we have— Fuck!”
Roland frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“No space on my phone. Well, the girls’ testimony will just have to do. After we get them out of here.”
In the chaos that was no doubt about to erupt, they just might be able to pull off this little rescue mission. Maybe.
Chapter Thirteen
The South Cliffs and the three business mobster types wandered closer to the front doors. All of them now either had their backs turned, or were blocked from sight of where Bailey and Roland were.
Better still, they weren’t looking at the cages.
Bailey inhaled. “Let’s get this show on the road. We can probably free at least a couple of them before your girlfriends show up and crash the party.”
“Aye,” Roland agreed. “But be careful. We don’t want them to find us beforehand.”
The young woman didn’t stop to acknowledge his words, but she nodded. She’d succeeded at getting him to be more proactive, and it was only fair that she accept his advice about doing things the smart way.
She crawled toward the cage on the left. Her instinct was to make for the other one since that was where Lauren and Emma were—girls she knew from her own pack and town—but it made mor
e sense to start with the enclosure that was easier to reach.
The wizard followed her. For his part, he was contemplating how best to get the cages open—whether to magically open the doors or to melt through the bars at the rear. The former might make noise. The latter would create light. Neither was perfect.
But luck was on their side in one regard: the wind outside had picked up and was sloshing the Willamette roughly against the pier, creating enough ambient racket that they’d have to do something really stupid to be heard.
Bailey reached the edge of the cage and rolled toward the wall to allow Roland to examine it. He did, thinking quickly.
During the brief inspection, two of the girls turned their eyes toward them. They seemed aware of the pair’s presence but didn’t react; their gazes were dull. Sedated, Bailey concluded.
“Okay,” the Seattleite whispered, “I should be able to heat up the bars enough to bend them aside in the rear here and then slip the girls out one at a time. It will only take a couple minutes. You can lead them back to the door.”
“Sure thing,” Bailey agreed.
Roland licked his lips and rubbed his forefingers together, almost the way a person might rub two sticks to start a fire. A soft red glow appeared on his hands, and Bailey suddenly worried that their foes might see it. Nothing happened, though.
The wizard then gripped two adjacent bars, holding onto them to transfer the magical heat energy and pulling in opposite directions as they began to glow. The metal rods softened and moved gradually apart. One of the girls retracted her foot to avoid being burned. They weren’t totally insensate, then.
After Roland removed his hands, the bars cooled and darkened. He waited for a moment and then tapped the metal to ensure it wasn’t hot enough to cause harm. He also checked the size of the gap. Should be big enough for teenagers to squeeze through.
He reached through the bars, grabbed the nearest girl’s ankle—fortunately they weren’t zip-tied like the new arrivals—and pulled her toward the gap with one hand. With the other, he raised a finger to his lips to remind her to be quiet. She didn’t protest.