by J. L. Wilder
It was a beautiful dream, a sweet fantasy. Hazel knew she was dreaming, and yet, couldn’t this be her future? What was to stop it from coming true? She looked around at her little family, drinking it all in. We’ll have this someday, she promised herself. This will be our family. Me and Emmett and all our children. We don’t need anything else.
A pained sounding howl rent the air. The dream evaporated around her and Hazel sat bolt upright.
She was surrounded by guns.
She looked to Emmett. He laid on the ground panting, his face gray with pain. A wolf crouched low behind him. The wolf had sunk its fangs into the muscle of Emmett’s calf and was holding on, refusing to let Emmett move. She started toward him.
“Don’t!” Emmett cried, holding up a hand to stop her. He closed his eyes and trembled. “Don’t move.”
“Wise advice,” said a familiar voice. Its owner stepped out of the shadows. He was one of the Savage Rangers, she knew. The alpha? She thought so. “You want to listen to your friend,” he said. “If you move, my boys will shoot you.”
Hazel was terrified, but she managed to speak. “You won’t shoot me,” she said. “You want me alive. I know you do. You’re bluffing.”
The Ranger smiled. “Well. I said shoot, not kill. But if you don’t believe we’ll do it, try us. Go ahead. Run to your little boyfriend and see what happens.”
“Hazel, don’t!” Emmett yelled.
He didn’t need to tell her. She could tell by the look in the Ranger’s eyes that he meant what he said. Yes, they wanted her alive, but they could easily put a bullet in her without killing her. If she thought taking a nonfatal bullet would have actually helped Emmett, she would have done it. But all it would do would be make it harder for her to help him later. She held still.
The Ranger grinned. “Smarter than she looks,” he said to his packmates.
“We knew she was smart,” one of them said. “She keeps escaping.”
“No, she doesn’t,” the Ranger said. “You don’t escape, do you, Hazel? You wait to be rescued. You’re just a pawn in this game. You’re just waiting, while all these packs pass you around, waiting to see where you’ll end up.” He bared his teeth. “You should have known it’d be with us. We’re the strongest. We’ve been the strongest this whole time.”
“What are you going to do?” Hazel asked.
“Come on, you know the answer to that, don’t you?” he asked. “And here I thought you were smart.”
Of course, she knew the answer. “Say it,” she bit. “Say what you’re going to do.”
“What, you think I won’t say it? We’re going to breed you, of course. We know who you are. You’re the last of the Cavallon line. Your litter’s going to be huge. We’ll be the dominant pack on the east coast when we’re done. We’ll be able to wipe out the Coywolves, and we’ll definitely be able to take care of any nomads who come into our territory.” He sneered at Emmett.
Emmett let out a grunt of pain.
“You’re hurting him,” Hazel said. “Let him go. Please.”
“Can’t do that,” the Ranger said. “He’ll attack my people.”
“He won’t attack anybody! Jesus, look at him!” He was slumped on the ground, his fingers digging into the dirt, his teeth gritted. “Just stop hurting him!”
The Ranger eyed her speculatively. “I will if you come here,” he said.
She got to her feet immediately, with no hesitation, and walked to his side.
“You’ve got to come with us,” he said. “You’ve got to stop escaping. Or being rescued. Tell him you don’t want him to come after you.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Say it,” the Ranger said.
“I don’t want you to come after me.” She hoped to God he knew it wasn’t true.
“Tell him if he comes after you again, you won’t go with him.”
“If you find me again, I won’t go with you.”
“Make him believe it, Hazel. If we catch him near you again, we’re going to kill him.”
“Don’t come, Emmett,” she said. “Don’t. They win. I’m sorry, but they win.” And now, she hoped he would believe her, that he would give up the pursuit. Because they were telling the truth, she knew. They would kill him if he came for her again.
Emmett lifted his head from the ground. His face was sheened in sweat. “They’ll have to kill me,” he ground out. “Because I am never going to stop trying to save you. Never.”
The Ranger stared at Emmett for a long moment. Then he gestured to one of his men. “So be it. Kill him.”
“No!” Hazel screamed, the sound seeming to tear out of her.
“Like hell,” said a new voice.
Everyone looked around.
Dart stepped into the light, gun in hand.
Chapter Eighteen
EMMETT
Emmett was in a haze of pain, but the sight of Dart cut through it and cleared his thoughts. They were still badly outnumbered. There were at least ten Savage Rangers around them, and he wasn’t going to be able to fight with his leg in the state it was in. But Dart had gotten the drop on them.
And he’s still alive.
Where were the others? That was the real question.
It was answered almost immediately. One of the Rangers turned his gun from Hazel to target Dart, and as soon as he did, a voice whispered, “Freeze, asshole.”
Emmett recognized that voice. Would have recognized it anywhere. Pax.
There was a clicking sound that he recognized as several guns being cocked, and suddenly, three more members of the Rangers dropped their own weapons to the ground, looking skittish. Those cocking sounds had probably been too close for their comfort, Emmett thought. He couldn’t see Judah or Xander—and God, he hated the thought of Xander with a gun in his hands—but he knew they must be here if the rest of the pack was. He felt a brief twinge of disgust at the way the Savage Rangers were crumbling. There was no steel at all in them. They were brutal, yes, and dogged in pursuit of what they wanted, but as soon as they were asked to face danger, they folded like a bad hand of poker.
His own pack would never have been so weak. He was overwhelmed with pride.
It was Judah who spoke next. “I’ve got a gun on your alpha,” he said, still invisible in the shadows. “So, we’ll let him decide how this plays out, yes? You can all go back up to the road where you left your bikes, get on them, and leave. We won’t stop you. Our packs can go our separate ways, and we’ll never trouble each other again. That’s option number one.”
“She’s our omega,” one of the Rangers—one who was still holding his weapon, who hadn’t been spooked into dropping it—said. “Let us take her with us and we’ll go right now.”
“No,” Judah said, his voice calm. “That isn’t one of the available options. Option number two is this: you try to move against the omega, or the gentleman on the ground, or any of us, and the shooting starts. And it starts with me putting a bullet in your alpha’s brain.”
Silence. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath. Emmett certainly was.
“All right!” the Rangers’ alpha said. It was practically a howl. “Okay. All right. Everyone stand down. Lower your weapons, for God’s sake!”
The Savage Rangers exchanged glances. Clearly, some among them weren’t thrilled with the direction this was going. But they’d been given an order by their alpha. One by one, guns around the circle were returned to their owners’ sides.
“Okay,” Judah said. “Now, everyone head back up to your bikes. Ride east. Your alpha will be behind you, when I’ve heard you all leave.”
“How do we know you aren’t going to shoot him once we’re gone?” one of them argued.
“You’ll have to trust me.” Judah’s voice was flint.
“Trust you. Right.”
“Ask your alpha, then. Do you want them to stay or go?” Emmett had never heard Judah sound so hard, so threatening.
“Go,” the Rangers’ alpha jabbered. “Ta
ke the bikes and go. He’ll do what he says. Go, now!” The man’s voice was awash in fear.
The Savage Rangers looked disgusted, but they followed the order that had been given. They turned and trudged toward the highway, making their way through the beans.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Everyone listened and waited to see what would happen next.
Xander stepped into their patch of moonlight, a gun held loosely at his side. He holstered it quickly and dropped to his knees beside Emmett. “Don’t move,” he said quietly. “You’re really bleeding.”
Hazel whimpered.
“Give me your gun,” Pax said, holding out a hand to the Rangers’ alpha.
“Man, come on.”
“Give it to him,” Judah advised.
The alpha handed the gun over.
Pax examined it. “How long do you think he’s going to be able to stay in command of his pack?” he asked the others. “Now that they’ve all seen him submit like this, I mean.”
“Not now, Pax,” Judah said.
“Just saying. Hard to follow a leader who’s such a complete pansy. They’re going to find their bonds broken, I bet you anything. If they come after us again, it’ll be in groups of two or three. Not as a whole pack. This pack is finished.”
He was probably right, Emmett thought. It would be hard to submit yourself to such an obviously impotent leader. He wondered what his pack would say when they learned he’d fallen in love, that he’d disobeyed his own vision for the success of their pack. The outcome would almost certainly be the same. They would lose trust in him. They wouldn’t be able to follow him anymore. The pack would fracture.
Now, Dart holstered his gun and walked to Hazel’s side. “You all right?” he asked her.
She nodded shakily. “How did you find us?”
“We’ve been tracking these idiots.” He gestured toward the alpha Ranger. “For decent trackers, they really don’t have a handle on the art of subtlety. You’d think they’d know better. But I guess maybe they’ve never had anyone on their tail before. When we couldn’t figure out where Emmett had gone, we checked your house first, but you hadn’t been returned, so we decided to follow them, because they were probably following you.” He laughed. “Would you believe they rode all the way to Colorado before they turned around and went back to your house? And they never realized we were on to them.”
“Why’d you let them kidnap me again?” she asked. “If you knew what was going on...”
Pax’s face darkened. “We didn’t post a guard,” he said. “Once you were back home, we turned our attention to finding Emmett. We trailed him to some stupid seaside town—what the hell were you doing there, Emmett? And then, by the time we figured out we were wasting our time there and turned around...”
“They already had me,” Hazel finished.
Judah had been listening to the sounds from the road. “Okay,” he said. “They’re gone. You can follow.” He released the alpha. “Or maybe you want to go your own way. Not sure they’ll be wild about having you back now.” He shrugged. “Up to you.”
The alpha, looking thoroughly spooked, turned and bolted for the highway.
“Where—” Emmett gritted his teeth as a wave of pain hit him. “Where are your bikes? We’ve got to get out of here.”
“No way,” Pax said. “You can’t ride. Not with your leg like that.”
“They bit him.” Hazel sounded horrified. “One of those Rangers actually bit him. That’s not...” she looked from one of them to the next, anxiety written on her face. “That’s not normal, is it? This isn’t just me being too human again? Shifters don’t actually do that to each other?”
“Well,” Pax said, “We don’t. Tasting human flesh is a bit much for us, even if the human in question is in the form of a wolf at the time. Lie down, Emmett, for God’s sake.”
He was struggling to get his feet under him. “We can’t stay here,” he said. “They might come back.”
But the moment he tried to put weight on his injured leg, it buckled beneath him. He collapsed, panting, holding himself up with his arms, his vision spotty, his head swimming.
“Get him on the ground,” Judah said. “Dart, run back to the bikes and get the first aid kit. Hurry.”
“What are you going to do?” Hazel sounded frightened.
“Field surgery,” Judah said. “He needs stitches.”
“Stitches, here? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Well, we’re not taking him to a hospital,” Pax said. “Even if we could afford something like that, which we can’t, they’d ask all kinds of questions, and they might want to keep him overnight, and he’s right about the fact that we need to get out of here as quickly as we can. I don’t think the Savage Rangers are going to come back this way as a pack—I don’t think they’re even going to be a pack for much longer. Without their alpha at the helm, they don’t have enough uniting them. But once they’ve split, some of them might decide on their own that it would be fun to seek revenge.”
Emmett felt the world spin beneath him. He closed his eyes. Hazel’s hand gripped his tightly. “He’s so pale,” she said.
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” Judah said. “That was a deep bite.”
Emmett wondered how badly mangled his leg really was. He wasn’t going to try to sit up and look at it, though. Even lying flat on his back, he felt like he was going to pass out at any moment.
The sound of footsteps signaled Dart’s return. Judah opened the tackle box that served as their first aid kit and rummaged around. “Xander, hold the flashlight for me, okay? Emmett, this is going to sting some. You might want this.” He pressed a folded piece of leather into Emmett’s hands. Emmett nodded his thanks and put the leather between his teeth.
The sting of antiseptic being poured over his leg was enough to make him want to howl. He clenched his teeth and focused all his energy on not squeezing Hazel’s hand too hard. He didn’t want to hurt her. She bent over him like a willow tree. “It’s okay,” she said, and although her voice was trembling, she wasn’t tearful. “He’s going quickly. That was the worst part, I think, and it’s over. You’re doing good.”
He nodded, eyes squeezed shut.
“Dart, I need your hands here,” Judah said, his voice tight with strain, and suddenly, there were too many hands on the heated flesh of his leg. Pax was at his head, strong arms holding his shoulders down, and Emmett felt the pierce of a needle in his already sensitive flesh. This time, he did howl.
“Easy, buddy,” Pax said. “Never thought you’d be one to howl at a few little stitches.”
“Oh, go right to hell,” Emmett ground out.
“Can’t today. Other engagements. Maybe some other time, huh? Hey, it’s good to see you alive, by the way.”
Emmett nodded, gritting his teeth as the need pierced him again. “Yeah. Same. You won the fight? The night we ran for it?”
“There wasn’t really a fight, to tell you the truth,” Pax said. “We’d been tangling with them for what was probably a minute and a half when one of them ran over and shouted that the omega was gone. Everyone kind of scrambled up and took off after that. I had Dart follow, just to see where they were going, and the rest of us cleared the area and went back to her house to see if you were going to take her straight there. When Dart came back, he had a lead for us, and we all headed out after the Rangers.” He grinned. “You really led them on a chase!”
“Yeah, we thought—mm—we thought we’d lost them.”
“You had,” Pax said. “They had no idea where you were. I mean no idea. I sent Xander in to spy on them a couple times—”
“You what?”
“He’s the smallest. He’s the quietest. He’s great at subterfuge.”
“He’s sixteen. You can’t send him in alone. He could get hurt.”
“Don’t get all worked up. He did a great job. Anyway, he listened in on some of their conversations, and they had no idea what they were doing. They lost your trail in Connecticut. They
just kept riding in the same direction, hoping they’d pick it up again.”
“Not actually that great at tracking, then, I guess?”
“I’ve definitely seen better.”
“I’m all done here,” Judah said. “Gotta disinfect it one more time, and then we’ll wrap it and you’ll be good to go.”
Emmett groaned. “Skip it, why don’t you?”
“Because I don’t want a three-legged alpha, that’s why. Stop whining and hold still.”
Emmett braced himself, but the pain wasn’t nearly as bad this time. He supposed it was because the wounds were closed now. He sat up gingerly and watched as Judah wrapped his leg in gauze. “Thanks,” he said.
Hazel rested her head on his shoulder. He could see tears tracking their way slowly down her cheeks. He was impressed, what with everything that had happened, that she’d waited until now to cry.
The others were looking at them, though, and Emmett knew they’d arrived at the conversation he’d been dreading. He was going to have to confess everything. He was going to have to tell them how he’d betrayed the ideology he’d set for their pack, how he was a failure as a leader. At least I got to see them all one more time. At least I’ll leave here knowing they’re all all right.
But to his surprise, it was Dart who spoke first. “We’re not taking her back to Rhode Island, are we?”
“No,” Emmett said. “We’re not.”
“Probably for the best,” Pax said. “Doesn’t seem like they know how to protect their own, those Coywolves, does it?”
“But that isn’t why,” Dart said, his gaze fixed on Emmett. “That’s not why we aren’t taking her back.”
“No, it isn’t.”
A long pause.
“How far has it gone?” Judah asked quietly.
So, they knew. They all knew. He wasn’t going to have to shock them with the news. That was something to be glad of, at least. “She’s pregnant,” he said. “She’s having my babies.”
“You can’t already know something like that,” Judah said.
He shrugged helplessly. “I know we can’t. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I think it’s because I’m a Cavallon,” Hazel cut in.