by JJ King
There were two employees standing behind the counter, a young girl, and an older man. The young girl was country fresh with clean blond hair in a ponytail and eyes the color of the sky. She stood ready to take their order, either an exceptional employee or new to the job and still untouched by the working class blues. The man kept glancing at Sylvie, his eyes wide in astonishment that “the” Madame LaFlamme would be in an ice cream shop.
“Que désirez-vous Madam?” The young girl asked them what they’d like with a strong French accent that Katherine had often found herself nostalgic for in Vancouver. She’d lost her accent a long time ago thanks to the endless lessons her mother had arranged for her and the boys. Having the ability to speak multiple languages was a great asset but having a strong accent while speaking them counteracted it.
It was definitely a pleasure to speak in her native language again.
Sylvie ordered a pistachio soft serve in a bowl and delicately took a spoonful into her mouth, moaning low in pleasure. She pointed the spoon at Katherine, “Would you like a taste? This is divine.”
“No thanks mama. I’m leaning towards a crème brulee.” She turned to the counter and smiled at the girl who beamed back. “Un grande crème brulee s’il vous plait dans un cône de gaufre avec du caramel. Merci.”
Her ice cream came covered in caramel sauce and wrapped in a waffle cone, which she took gratefully and began to nibble on. After paying for the treat she sat down with her mother at a nearby table and began attacking the melting homemade ice cream.
“Oh my God,” she said through mouthfuls, “great idea mom. We haven’t done this in ages.”
Between undignified slurps and licks, Katherine answered the questions she’d known would come and felt blessed for such a nosy mother.
“I love him, Mom, so much that I could burst from it. I’ve never felt this way before in my entire life and I’m half scared to death and half over the moon. Am I making any sense?” She lifted the cone to lick at a drip from the bottom then looked to Sylvie who was beaming at her and absently rubbing her wedding ring.
“Of course you’re making sense, ma fille. Why do you think your father and I have been happy together for such a long time? I know the feeling you speak of. I know it very well.”
Katherine looked at her mother’s emotion filled eyes and saw her, finally, as a woman. After nearly 300 years of life she saw what every young woman eventually saw, that their mother was just an older version of themselves. The realization was stunning.
She reached out and touched her mother’s hand, intertwining her fingers with Sylvie’s and squeezed. She opened her mind to her mother and felt the instant give of the mental barriers that every wolf kept erected in their minds. They opened up to one another and sat, filled with joy and tears, sharing the overwhelming love they each felt for life, family, and their soul mates.
After a few minutes, Katherine disentangled their fingers and looked down to see melted ice cream on the table and her hand. She’d zoned out so completely that she hadn’t felt the cold on her skin. She glanced around to see if anyone had noticed the intimate moment and was pleased to see that the shop was buzzing along as it had been before. Only the storekeeper kept glancing at them with his suspicious eyes, but that was nothing new.
“I should run to the bathroom before we leave. My hands are filthy. Meet you at the car then we’ll do some shopping?”
“Sounds like a plan. Don’t forget your face.”
Katherine walked towards the back of the shop with a grin on her face. Once a mother, always a mother, she thought.
The women’s bathroom was at the far end of the dark hallway, next to an emergency exit door that stood ajar so that air could move through the building and provide a little free air conditioning.
There were two stalls in the bathroom and both were empty but Katherine preferred to wait and go somewhere a little more sanitary so she walked to the sink and pushed the soap dispenser. She turned on the hot water and soaped up her hands, rubbing away any lingering stickiness from the delicious treat that she’d wasted. She made sure to wash her mouth even though it was already clean.
As she turned off the water and grabbed a paper towel the overhead light began to blink on and off, bathing the small room in alternating light and dark. Her eyes normally adjusted easily to the dark but the flashing from dark to light make it hard to adjust to anything.
The only warning she had was the hairs on her arms that rose suddenly as the lights went out again. She felt a sharp prick on the back of her neck, like the sting of a wasp, and then the world began to close in around her.
Katherine reached out to grab the sink but her fingers didn’t respond properly and she watched as the linoleum floor rushed to meet her. The lights blinked on again for a moment and she saw was a dark shoe print on the floor by her face. Her brain recognized that it was too big to be a woman’s print right before her eyes fogged over and her eyesight started closing in on her.
“Shit.” The words sounded grainy to her ears as her tongue and lips went numb from the drugs.
Bastard shot me.
Then there was darkness.
Chapter Nineteen
The pressure behind her lids eventually woke her.
Katherine opened her eyes slowly and then closed them again when a sharp pain rocked her brain. She hissed and squeezed them shut until the jagged hurt subsided a bit, enough for her to lift her heavy lids and look around.
The light that shone through the dirty window was fading, meaning that the majority of the day had passed since she’d done a swan dive into the ground. The memory of being shot by a tranquilizer gun was clear in her mind. The drugs and the fall hadn’t totally cut her off from logical thinking, a fact for which she was grateful.
Her entire face felt as though someone had run over it with a Jeep and her temples pulsated to the beat of her frantic heartbeat as she furtively glanced around out of the corners of her now heavily watering eyes. Her arms were tied behind her with rope, tight enough to break the skin and send drops of blood running down her wrists to pool in her hands.
Katherine tested the rope, not expecting much, and knew that there was no hope of breaking free. She had tied up her brothers while playing too many times to not recognize an unmovable knot.
Her legs lay outstretched before her, also securely bound by rope. For some reason her feet were bare and a little on the blue side, thanks to the lack of circulation from the bonds.
Oh shit. Where the hell am I? Who did this to me?
Questions filled Katherine’s mind, tossing sanity aside for a brief moment before she fought back and pushed them down. The pain wouldn’t help her get out of this mess, wouldn’t help her figure out where she was or who had shot her.
There were two obvious culprits for her abduction, both of whom were extremely dangerous. Katherine didn’t want to jump to any conclusions until she had proof but there was a part of her that hoped she was wrong and that she hadn’t just been completely fucked over by either the hunter or that sadistic bastard Raphael.
She cleared her mind and looked around for clues.
The room lay in darkness, lit only by the flames of a small fire in the middle of the large barn and the quickly dying rays of light that managed to get through the grime on the window.
Katherine breathed deeply, taking in all the scents around her, then immediately regretted it. The rancid smell of old hay combined with the ancient residue of animal sweat hit her senses like a brick to the head. She gagged and tried to breathe through her mouth. It didn’t help. The taste of the place filled her mouth with an oily coating and made her stomach heave. She struggled to keep herself from throwing up.
There was a petrifying familiarity to the disgusting scent that was overwhelming her sense of smell and taste, which pulled the muscles in her stomach tight and set her heart to pounding.
She’d scented it once before, in the airport when she’d arrived from Vancouver.
Raphael.
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A wave of utter panic flowed over her and made all of her muscles seize up. She lay still for a minute, unable to do anything but gasp for air and pray for help. The futility of her situation washed her in a sense of dread that made her stomach contract. Unable to control her body anymore, Katherine turned her head to the left and threw up the contents of her stomach onto the floor next to her repeatedly until there was nothing left and her body was wracked with dry heaves.
Exhausted, she turned her head away from the stench and let the tears slip from her eyes.
Bull shit.
The two words echoed inside her head loud enough to scare the shit out of her. She gasped aloud and looked around wildly, expecting to find Raphael watching her misery and degradation from the shadows.
There was no one there but her.
The scare had been enough to stop her tears and get her body ready to fight. Her muscles were tensed to the point of pain but she couldn’t feel it. Her hands were pulled into fists so tight that the dull edges of her clipped fingernails dug deeply into her palms.
Sweat dripped down into her left eye, stinging it. She blinked a few times but the steady stream of sweat refused to drop anywhere else.
Bull shit.
The words that filled her mind again didn’t frighten her this time. This time, she was filled with a feeling of peace, unlike anything she’d ever felt before. The voice was her mother’s and the words were borrowed from a chick flick they’d once watched together.
She smiled.
Katherine lowered her head to her chest and closed her eyes, taking in deep breath after deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth, she silently chanted in mantra while she used the breathing techniques years of martial arts training had instilled in her.
She sat like that for a few minutes before anything tangible happened. Slowly, the pounding in her head quieted and the tenseness in her muscles relaxed until she sat in the darkness and felt no pain.
Clearing her mind, she mentally placed the nearly overwhelming scents that surrounded her into a closet in the back of her mind and took in a deep breath to determine if Raphael were near. The unmistakable scent that was him was faded somewhat as though he had been gone for somewhere near an hour. Ready now, she seized the opportunity and took action.
Moving any part of her body caused spasms throughout her back and legs. She tested the strength of the ropes tied around her hands and feet again and found them still unmovable.
Fury replaced the calm and gave her a surge of strength. There was no way, pain or not, that she was going to sit around all trussed up like a turkey and wait for that sadistic bastard to come back and find her defenseless.
She ignored the waves of spasms that racked her muscles and threw her body to the right. She lay there for a few seconds, breathing away her pain and then began slowly inching her way toward the fire like a sideways worm towards the water.
If I can get close enough I can burn these ropes off.
The rough boards that lined the barn floor beneath her sent splinters into her already tender skin and left her bleeding from a multitude of small wounds. The small tears in her skin healed almost immediately but not quick enough to stop the blood that welled from dripping onto the floor boards as proof of her task. The drops of blood sank into the wood, staining it deep red in small blotches and giving off her scent in alarming concentration.
Katherine breathed in the smell of her own unique sanguine scent and knew that Raphael would come running if he so much as caught a whiff of her blood on the stale air. She needed to move faster.
The fire was only six and a half feet away, roughly the height of Quinn, when her nose twitched and her stomach dropped. Her ears picked up the sound of a twig snapping beneath heavy feet.
Desperation filled her with renewed strength. There was no fucking way she would do nothing and just give up when she was so close. She gasped a breath in and threw herself forward as fast as she could and managed to get so close that the flames of the fire scorched the skin of her hands and she could hear the rope start to sizzle along with her flesh.
Then he was there, smelling of rotten flesh and disease, hauling her roughly away from salvation and throwing her with alarming strength against a half rotten wall.
He moved to her with the deadly determination of the crazed and kneeled before her crumpled body. He leaned in close and put his mouth to her ear. The rancid smell of his breath made her stomach rebel again but there was nothing left to throw up.
She waited for him to kill her.
His hand brushed the hair back from her filthy face and rubbed against the crown of her head repeatedly. He murmured something in a low voice over and over again as he stroked her, his voice almost a hum.
Katherine couldn’t make sense of the sounds he made at first but she forced herself to stay still and let him stroke her head while she listened in horror.
“Mother, Mother, Mother…”
She cringed away from his hand and he stopped, then rose and looked down at her for a moment before he turned and walked across the barn to squat next to the fire with his back to her.
Oh God, he’s crazy. I have to get the hell out of here. Quinn, where are you?
Quinn! Maybe she could contact him with her mind if she focused hard enough. For one exhilarating moment, she surged with renewed hope that came crashing down around her when she realized that there was only a static inside her mind. Somehow Raphael was keeping her from reaching out and feeling her family, feeling any wolf.
The only thing that saved her from crying again was the hatred that surged through her mind, soul, and body for the man that stood before her. She would kill Raphael and then she would dance on his grave.
She lay silently on the floor, curled into a fetal position, mentally reviewing methods and routes of escape until exhaustion overtook her and she closed her eyes just for a moment.
♀♀♀
It was well past midnight when she opened her eyes again.
Shadows danced across the walls of the barn and drew her attention as soon as she focused enough to be able to see the area before her.
Raphael was moving briskly about the room, around the fire that had been built up higher while she’d been asleep. The fact that she’d slept through it all worried Katherine, she hoped that she hadn’t gotten a concussion from Raphael’s rough handling but doubted very much that her hopes had anything to do with the reality of her situation. More than likely her physical confusion and weakness were symptoms of a concussion combined with the strong drugs that were slowly leaving her body.
She flexed her muscles one by one to test their response and found that her body was recovering already, thanks to her wolf metabolism. Raphael was no idiot, though, disgusting as he may be. He’d used good drugs in quantities large enough to tamp down her metabolism. A small part of her brain nagged that she should be a lot worse off than she really was at this point, a lot weaker and less responsive. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, though, Katherine ignored her errant thought and focused her mind on freedom.
The floor beneath her was cold enough to create a small amount of fog as it touched the rising heat from her awakening body.
Raphael was still circling the fire muttering and cursing randomly and didn’t seem to notice that she’d woken up and became aware of her surroundings. Katherine forced her body to remain still and let her mind whir into action.
When Raphael had thrown her earlier he’d accidently brought her closer to one of the half covered windows. Through half closed eyes she stared at the patch of the night sky that was visible and noticed the distinctive stars that formed Cassiopeia, one of her favorite constellations.
She knew from many summers of star gazing from the lawns of Wild River as a young girl that Cassiopeia should be located slightly more to the west than it was now. Silently thanking her parents for their obsessive rules about education, she easily realized that her present location had to be somewhere northeast o
f her family home.
The distance was obviously a little harder to figure out but since she’d awakened here as the sun was fading and had been tranqed just before 11:00 am, she figured that her location could be anywhere from 100 to 700 km from where she’d been taken. It really depended on Raphael’s confidence in his hideaway but she doubted that they would be within easy reach of Wild River. Her father would have everyone out looking for her, by land and air.
Finding her way home would be the easy part, unlike the part that involved freeing her arm and legs from the ropes that bound her and escaping Raphael before he went straight to hell with his craziness and killed her.
Still peering out between her eyelashes, Katherine watched Raphael, trying to figure him out. If she could find a pattern to his actions maybe she could find a way to trick him and escape. It was obvious that he was physically stronger than her and had none of the respect for her that might have given her an upper edge. He would hurt her without compunction and kill her if he felt like it. She remembered Quinn saying that Raphael was intelligent but fatally obsessed with revenge and power. She would have to use that flaw to her advantage.