Unfortunately, her backlash against Mrs. Sawyer’s presence suggested a much less palatable alternative. The rogue’s wolf seemed to be in complete command of the shifter’s body and mind, meaning she was reacting like a cornered animal instead of like a scared human.
The bloodling also appeared to be deep in fight-or-flight mode....and either choice would be an unacceptable decision. If the wolf fled, she’d be dashing through suburban yards and stumbling across everything from pets to toddlers. On the other hand, if the rogue chose to fight—well, Mrs. Sawyer already looked to be on her last legs just from hanging around in the heat all afternoon. It wouldn’t take much to put the very pregnant teacher in the ER.
I wanted to yank Mrs. Sawyer out of harm’s way, but sudden moves were contraindicated. So, instead, I murmured a question to let both participants know I was present. “How long’s she been like this?”
Sure enough, Mrs. Sawyer was visibly startled by my words. In contrast, Lupe hadn’t forgotten I was tiptoeing toward her across the lawn.
The wolf hadn’t forgotten, but that didn’t mean she accepted my approach with equanimity either.
Instead, Lupe growled out that ultra-quiet rumble that was more indicative of imminent attack than of warning. And she sprang...not toward me but toward the closest living target—Mrs. Sawyer.
Bad decision on my part, I berated myself even as I shoved the teacher to one side. There comes a time when a cornered wolf simply attacks, and I should have realized Lupe was at that breaking point already.
Out of the corner of one eye, I saw the pregnant human land hard on the rough ground. She emitted a squeak that reminded me of nothing so much as the death cry of a captured mouse, and I hoped the sound wasn’t yet another sign that I’d made the wrong decision.
But surely even a human could handle a bounce on her bum? The jostling had to be preferable to the agonizing pain that sprang up in my leg as Lupe crunched down until her teeth nearly met through the flesh of my calf.
Holy cow. That hurts.
As much as the leg in question throbbed, though, I realized after a heart-wrenching moment that the attack had only been a warning. The rogue could easily have torn out a chunk of meat that would have left me in the hospital for weeks. But, instead, Lupe maintained enough shreds of her humanity to stop at puncture wounds.
Still, she held the pose for a long moment, lupine eyes meeting my human gaze. Then my attacker growled loudly in an auditory admonition she hadn’t taken the time to fully bother with the first time around.
I stood my ground, ignoring the blood that oozed out of Lupe’s mouth and combined with canine drool to form rivulets soaking the bottom quarter of my jeans. The salty liquid must taste good to her animal brain, and I could only thank my lucky stars that at least a hint of the human teenager I’d met under the bleachers hours earlier still hovered behind Lupe’s eyes. Otherwise, I had a feeling the rogue would have swallowed my blood and dug deeper for more.
Instead, Lupe growled one more time then spat out my bloodied leg with an expression of distaste. Point made, she stalked away, sidling up beside Mrs. Sawyer with a posture that both promised and begged for protection.
“Ever since she got out of the car,” the teacher huffed at last as she rolled over and pulled herself into a sit. Pregnant women, apparently, were a bit like turtles—if you knocked them over, they had a terrible time getting back on their feet.
Luckily, though, Mrs. Sawyer didn’t seem to blame me for her fall. Instead, she continued to ramble in that calm, quiet voice that eased the rigid hairs running the length of her student’s spine. “Lupe was a trooper in the car. But we showed up at the same moment as some other wolves and things got fraught there for a while.”
I had a feeling Mrs. Sawyer’s words were the understatement of the century. I could just imagine Hunter’s half-feral bloodlings coming face to face with a wolf who had barely been holding onto her own humanity. There would have been territorial disputes and rank disputes and general I-don’t-like-you-very-much disputes. All things considered, I’d be surprised if my aching calf was the only bloodshed Celia’s yard had seen that day.
More unexpected was the fact that my current situation seemed less dicey than it had been a few minutes earlier. Perhaps my lack of retaliation had calmed the rogue, or maybe she was soothed by the way her teacher ran tentative fingers through her fur. Either way, Lupe’s tension gradually eased as she slowly sank down into a crouch.
It was obvious, though, that there was exactly zero chance of us getting the wolf back into a vehicle in the near future. Hunter had been right—if I wanted to keep the pack together, Celia wasn’t going anywhere this evening.
Still, with the witch-hunter potentially snooping around the perimeter, it was more imperative than ever to tempt Lupe under cover and behind walls. “How do you feel about basements?” I asked, eying the exterior cellar door that slanted away from the side of Celia’s house. My mother had never mentioned the sublevel, so I had high hopes the space wouldn’t have been recently occupied.
In other words, the room might not set Lupe off with the scent of outpack shifters.
“I think basements are delightful,” replied the plucky human, using Lupe’s back as a handhold in order to leverage herself onto her feet. “Lead the way.”
“YOU MIGHT AS WELL CALL me Nina,” Mrs. Sawyer said a few hours later.
Above our heads, the last rumbling of feet and paws had stilled long since, although a hint of smoke suggested someone was still filling his belly. Probably Cinnamon—the bottomless pit had the astonishing ability to burn pasta, but at least he made up for his lack of culinary talents by consuming everything he singed.
Meanwhile, the teacher, the rogue, and I were curled together in a nest of comforters that barely made up for the fact that our abode lacked all other modern conveniences. The walls were bare studs, the floor was packed earth, and the only illumination came from a bare bulb attached to a dangling beaded string.
Oh, and did I mention the spider currently crawling across one of my feet? Sure, it was just a daddy-long-legs, but the tickling of the arachnid’s tiny appendages was driving me nuts.
I couldn’t flick the bug aside, though, because Lupe had finally settled down...right on top of my thighs. She was still in lupine form and I wasn’t entirely certain her human brain was awake enough to influence her behavior. But at least the wolf was acting almost cordial as she licked the wounds she’d created on my right leg.
I hoped wolf spit would do the trick at preventing infection since I’d decided not to mention the punctures to Celia when she showed up a couple of hours earlier. The pack had apparently decided my one-body mother was the least likely to alarm Lupe, so they’d sent her down to check on us after teacher, wolf, and I had settled into our temporary den. Predictably, Lupe had growled at the human’s approach, but she hadn’t physically attacked as my mother tossed bedding down the exterior stairs that formed the only entrance to the dark, dank room.
“Do you need anything else?” Celia had asked then. I expected her to broadcast fear or at least annoyance in response to the convoluted band of shifters who had descended upon her formerly immaculate residence. But, instead, my mother seemed to be taking her uninvited house guests in stride.
Upstairs, I had a feeling every shifter had been given a toothbrush and a bed...or at least a pallet on the floor. Even Nina and I were well supplied with food and water stored on the shelves behind us. Trust my mother to be prepared for an erratic werewolf to hole up in her unfinished basement.
Still, she hadn’t offered bandages and hydrogen peroxide, and I hadn’t asked for the items. Hunter would be down here in an instant if he caught wind of my injuries, never mind that Lupe’s wolf would react unfavorably to her lair being invaded by an uber-alpha. So in an effort to keep the erratic teenager calm, I’d simply shaken my head and watched as Celia climbed back up the stairs and shut us into the dim basement for the night.
Now I did my best to
ignore the throbbing pain and to put up with Lupe’s incessant licking while carrying on the craziest getting-to-know-you conversation of my life to date. “I never did catch your first name last week,” I admitted in response to the one-body’s re-introduction. “I was too caught up in trying to act human while keeping Lupe from tearing the school apart.”
“I know,” Nina answered, blue eyes twinkled in the dim light. “I was waiting to see how long it would take you to ask.”
Before I could make a stab at further conversation, though, my attention was sidetracked by Lupe once again. The rogue had got over her licking fetish at last, and now she shifted nervously, rubbing one forepaw after the other across the bridge of her nose.
She lifted herself to her feet, then sank back down. She turned around in a circle like a dog creating a bed, only to pad to the darkest corner of the basement rather than taking advantage of the nest. She huffed out a gusty sigh then sniffed the air.
Together, Nina and I stared at our charge with the intensity of hunters, only to shrug a few moments later when the rogue flopped back down onto our feet and returned to her obsession with lower-body cleanliness.
“Well,” the teacher said at last when Lupe appeared to have settled in for the night, “I think it’s high time we all got some sleep. Light on or light off?”
Glancing down at the rogue who had finally drifted into boneless slumber while draped completely across both of our legs, I allowed myself to relax at last. “Well, unless you have a solution for getting up without waking the werewolf, I’d have to vote for light on.”
Chapter 23
I WOKE TO LUPE’S TONGUE on my nose, the scent of smoke heavy in the air. The basement was pitch dark, the bulb either having burnt out or—I realized as my sleep-fogged brain kicked into gear—the house’s electricity having once again been cut.
Hot air rises.
My inner wolf’s sudden foray into physics made no sense until I realized what she was trying to impart. If we smelled smoke down here in the basement, it had to be so much worse up where most of the people I cared about had bedded down for the night.
We needed to act fast.
“Now would be a really good time to shift back if you can, Lupe,” I said, even though I didn’t expect any sudden surge of humanity out of the rogue. Instead of waiting to see how the wolf would respond, I rolled over and felt around in search of the pregnant teacher who had fallen asleep inches away from my side. I meant to shake the woman awake, but I think I accidentally stuck a finger up her nose instead.
“Wha...?”
“Stay down,” I ordered, preventing Nina from jolting upright with a firm arm across her chest. “I’m pretty sure smoke is bad for your pups. I’m going to make sure I can open the door, and then we’ll get you out. Wait here.”
Raising the collar of my t-shirt so it draped across my nose, I ignored my own advice and stood erect. Yes, I could have crawled, but the image of Hunter—and Celia and Ginger and everyone else—succumbing to smoke inhalation made me choose speed over caution.
I only stubbed my toe twice on the way to the door, but I did manage to topple a set of metal shelving over onto my head. A variety of hard, pointy objects rained down around me, but I was actually glad of the mistake. Because the sound of creaking floorboards above my head finally signaled that someone was alive and alert in the main part of the house.
The pain of being pummeled—plus the ache in my right leg and jaw—was overwhelmed by adrenaline, and time seemed to skip ahead of me as I lurched toward the door. Faster, faster, faster, demanded my wolf.
I’m doing the best I can, I answered. But, unfortunately, I was now facing my first real hurdle of the night and my previous speed may well have been for naught.
Because Celia hadn’t expected this space to be used as anything other than occasional storage. So she’d installed the door tilted at such an awkward angle that I found it impossible to open from the inside.
“I don’t remember this thing being so heavy,” I muttered through gritted teeth, shoving upwards with all my might. Yesterday afternoon, I’d managed to break into the basement on my own. But now even leaning my back against the door and using the strength of my legs barely made an impact on the massive metal barrier.
Then Nina was there beside me, having completely disregarded my orders. “On the count of three,” she told me. “One, two, three.”
Together, we hefted the door upward, and the effort was just barely sufficient to allow a trickle of air to waft in through the crack. I’d hoped the whiff of outdoors would have been redolent with scents of mown grass and summer dew. But, instead, all I smelled was smoke, smoke, and more smoke.
“You shouldn’t be straining yourself.”
The words cutting through the darkness might as well have been snatched from my mind since I’d been pondering the exact same conundrum. Was it worse for Nina to be breathing the smokier air at this altitude and shoving against a seemingly unbudgeable door...or to sit back and watch as we all went up in flames?
“Glad to have you join us,” the teacher huffed, realizing at the same moment I did that the voice had emanated from the formerly lupine rogue. Still, Nina didn’t step back and let us work as I suspected Lupe had intended. Instead, the one-body continued: “I’ll stop straining myself as soon as we get this door open.”
I tensed as Lupe’s teenage form ascended the stairs and brushed past me to take her place against the barrier. There was barely room here at the top for two women, let alone three, and I knew the rogue’s wolf wouldn’t be thrilled at rubbing shoulders with a shifter she didn’t entirely trust.
My guess was unfortunately spot on. Despite the pitch darkness, I could feel Lupe’s eyes land on me. She growled softly, the wolfish utterance slightly mangled by her human voice box. “Don’t think this means I like you,” she muttered.
But apparently the overarching danger was enough to sate the aggressions of the girl’s inner wolf. Because when Nina counted down a second time, we all three hurled our bodies against the metal barrier as a unit.
Again, the door slipped open only a few inches, but this time I heard something snap on the other side. The witch hunter locked us in with a stick through the hasp, I guessed. Of course he had—even from within the basement, it shouldn’t have been this difficult to break free.
I expected Lupe to urge us onward as soon as we heard the barrier splinter. But instead she waited patiently until Nina’s breathing was even once again. “Now,” the teenager said at last.
This time, the door flung open with so much force it clattered against the side of the building and bounced back to bop me on the head. Rubbing my cracked noggin, and squinting against the flickering glow of firelight, I could barely see Lupe shoving free of the now loose barrier.
There was no time to gawk, though. Instead, I hustled Nina from behind as Lupe pulled her from above. Over the human’s head, wolf-filled eyes met and locked.
“Get her to safety,” I said, not bothering to push alpha compulsion into the order. My weak animal half wouldn’t have been sufficient to force Lupe’s obedience against her will, but it didn’t matter. The teenager had the only person she cared about pressed close against her side, and she didn’t plan to let the one-body fall.
So I didn’t wait for a verbal acknowledgment before turning away, my mind already moving on to the other innocents endangered by the conflagration. Celia’s yard was unfortunately empty of angry shifters, which meant my pack mates were still inside the burning building.
Breaking into a run, I rushed to break them out.
THE DOORS WERE LOCKED from the inside and blocked from the outside. While the basement had only been graced with a stick—likely an afterthought—the witch hunter had attached a padlock latch to the outside of both doors on the main level. And even though the screws therein were crooked, I didn’t have any tools handy with which to remove them.
The windows were even more ingeniously cemented shut. Our opponent must have t
aken advantage of our extended absence to prepare for this very eventuality because a hardened line of liquid nails proved no one would be opening those potential exits any time soon.
I didn’t think to check the windows yesterday, I berated myself. My pack and I had gone over the house with a fine-tooth comb after returning from our skating adventure, but with the AC on there’d been no reason to try for a breeze. Nothing had seemed out of place and Celia’s scented air products had prevented us from smelling whether anyone had entered the locked home during our absence. So we’d shrugged off the possibility of invasion and assumed Celia’s den was safe.
Now two dozen plus innocents were paying for my misjudgment. I raced around to the back of the house a second time, skirting the flames that were licking out through the dining-room wall as I headed for the kitchen. The heat sipped at my sweat and sapped my strength, but I didn’t bother to give the fire any wider berth than was absolutely necessary. There was no time for wasted steps when my pack was trapped within a structure that looked poised to burn to the ground.
My wolf howled within my skin, maddened by combined proximity and inability to help our endangered friends. Because they were definitely still inside. Where the house had been quiet earlier, now I could hear Hunter’s bloodling pack baying from the back of the house and I could only assume two-legged shifters were also alive within those same walls.
Distant sirens meant help was on its way...or so I hoped. But I had a sinking suspicion the firefighters would arrive too late. Especially since I’d yet to see any signs that my pack was conscious and actively working to escape.
What I need is an ax.
Before I could go hunting for tools, though, a window splintered beside my head. Shards of glass rained down onto Celia’s no-longer-quite-so-perfect lawn and smoke billowed out of the opening.
Alpha Underground Trilogy Page 34