Alpha's Captive 03 - Flight (4 page)

“Harper, we’re on the run from a killer vampire and an entire multinational criminal organization,” Levi said distinctly.
“You get that, don’t you? And you’re worried about leaving a mess at your cousins’ place?”

“
They’re family, and family’s important,” she said. “Even if I want to kill my stupid sister sometimes. At least clean up the food and tie up the trash. We can’t pack it out, but I’ll apologize in the note, in case they come back before I get a chance to clean up.”

Levi shook his head, wondering if maybe she wasn’t part werewolf, after all.
“I’ll get to it if you pack everything back into your purse. Deal?”

“Deal,” she said, putting action to her words.

Everything disappeared into Harper’s purse again—the reassembled and reloaded guns, the ammo inside zip-top baggies, her wallet and phone and surviving makeup, and everything else that didn’t go into his jacket. He put on his damp motorcycle leathers, then found a plastic tub for the rest of the stew, and at her insistence, he scrubbed the empty pot and dried it.

At his suggestion, the SD
card went into her hip pocket inside its plastic bag and the coin purse. Whatever happened, she’d be staying human-shaped, so that seemed like the safest place for it.

Before they left,
Levi put on his damp pants and jacket and shoved his socks in a pocket. Harper raided the fridge, adding a six pack of Yuengling into her purse.

“Can’t drink the river water,” she said in response to Levi’s raised eyebrow.
“And I already checked for water bottles.”

Oh.
Well, she probably couldn’t.

Levi made sure that Harper left first, then wadded up the note she’d left and tossed it in the trash.
He felt a small pang for tricking her, but Harper and her family were both safer if Mortensen’s men didn’t realize that the fugitives had any relationship to the owners of the trailer when they were tracked there. And Levi didn’t have any illusions that they wouldn’t be.

By the time they stepped into the clearing, the moon was low on the horizon, and the night shadows were long.
Harper immediately stumbled over a fallen branch in the darkness, and Levi shot out and hand and steadied her.

“Don’t tell me,” she said.
“You can actually see in this, even as a human.”

He smiled at her.
“I’m not ever really human, Harper. I just look like one. This way.” He led her down the path toward the river, guiding her with a hand on the shoulder.

For once, she gave no snappy retort, following along in silence.
Any thought that he might have chastened her into silence was dispelled by a look at her face, which was set in concentration. Far more likely was the possibility that she was simply trying not to trip and fall.

The
jon boat was hidden in the trees well above the flood line, turned upside down and raised up on blocks. The trolling motor was covered under a tarp, and Levi loosened the knots in the rope that held the cover fast and pulled it away.

“Step back,” Levi ordered, and he levered it carefully onto his back
so that the hard metal of the rear bench rested across his shoulders.

“Are you sure you can manage it?” Harper asked.

Levi smiled at the concern in her voice. “No problem, babycakes. You just get the oars.” He balanced it on his back as he took the trail the last hundred yards down to the river, his feet sinking into the soft earth. He set it down on its side, raising the motor before rolling it onto its flat bottom.

Harper
stood behind him, oars in hand.

“Get in,” he said.

Wordlessly, she did, stepping from the shore into the boat and settling on the front bench. Levi rolled his pant legs up, gave the boat a push to launch it, and climbed in just as the end cleared the bottom and floated free. He lowered the trolling motor and held his breath as he turned the electric switch on.

It started, and he allowed himself to relax fractionally, pointing the boat downstream as he raised i
t halfway to its maximum speed. The shores slipped by at the speed of a moderate walk. He could go faster as a wolf—but of course, he couldn’t sleep while walking, and he couldn’t carry Harper all day as a wolf without exhausting himself and, most likely, attracting unwanted attention. For all that there were woods on both sides of the river, they were in central Pennsylvania, and there were houses and cabins and farms a no more than a few hundred yards away at all times.

“How long
will the battery last?” he asked.

Harper had been watching him silently.
Now she shook her head. “I really don’t know. We’d use it all day, but of course we were mostly just going out and dropping the anchor to fish an hour or so before trying out a new spot.”

He nodded.
It was as good an answer as he was going to get. “Until it runs out, could you take the tiller? I didn’t get much sleep.”

“Sure thing,” she said
her voice perfectly neutral as she moved to the seat beside him.

“Give me a nudge when the battery dies, and I’ll take over,” he said.
The boat seemed to be waterproof, at least so far, so he slid to the bottom, shifting aside her purse.

“No problem,” she said.

Stretched supine on the cold aluminum, Levi closed his eyes and let sleep come.

“
I
t’s dead.”

Those two words penetrated Levi’s consciousness immediately and completely, bringing him awake.
He opened his eyes, wriggled out from under the edge of the bench seat, and sat up.

It was full morning, the sunlight glittering on the surface of the river.
The night’s chill had already burned off, and when he looked over at Harper, there was a faint sheen of sweat on her upper lip beneath his oversized sunglasses. Her hair was completely dry, even the spots she’d slept on the night before, and she’d taken the opportunity to brush it out and apply a layer of gloss to her lips.

He had to admire
her attention to that kind of trivial detail in the face of danger. He looked down at her hands, and sure enough, even her nails were perfectly clean.

“Anyhow, the answer is two and a half hours,” she continued.

“What?”

“Two and a half hours.
That’s how long the battery lasted,” she said, nodding to the trolling motor, which was now still and locked into its raised position. “It’s nearly eight o’clock.”

And if their pursuer
hadn’t figured out that they weren’t dead yet, they would soon enough. With the help of Mortensen’s own loyal werewolves, they’d find the trailer long before noon.

Levi levered himself onto the seat in the bow
, stripped off his jacket, and slotted the oars into their locks. “I guess it’s my turn then,” he said. “If you need to sleep—”

She shook her head.
“Need to? Probably. But I couldn’t. Too wound up. You looked pretty comfortable, though.”

There was a slight bite in her voice.

He flashed her a smile as he dipped the oars in the water and pulled. “It’s a gift. We need to decide where we’re getting out. They’re going to figure out where we’ve gone eventually, and we don’t want to be get caught on the open water. Your phone still got juice?”

She pulled it out.
“I turned it off when I woke up this morning, so half a charge.”

“We need some place close to the river that’s got plenty of cars to choose from.
Even better if we might be able to pick up another SD card reader there and a phone.”

“Going to hijack someone else?
At another Walmart?” she asked. “That might be a tall order, finding a Walmart right next to the river.”

“We’ve already got ammo.
A truck stop or travel plaza will be fine, like Love’s or Flying J or whatever. They’ll have phones for sure and maybe a reader, if we’re lucky.” He grinned. “And of course we’re going to hijack someone. Unless they volunteer to take us.”

“We haven’t been lucky so far,” she muttered, but she tapped at the surface of the phone.
“Okay, yeah, got a travel plaza—it looks like five miles down the river, then a one-mile hike. Can you do that?”

“Sure thing,” he said.

“And let me see what I can do about getting a ride without hijacking anybody,” she added.

“You think you can do that?” he asked
, pulling back on the oars and sending the boat sliding a few more feet forward.

She
shoved the phone back into her purse. “Now that I don’t smell like the bottom of the river, it’s more likely. I used to hitchhike to Philadelphia and back when I was younger and dumber.” She watched him row for a moment, then a small smile began to curve one corner of her mouth, as if despite herself. “I guess I need a parasol or something.”

“What?” Levi asked.
He seemed to be saying that a lot that morning. He shook his head as he realized what she meant—river, boat, rowing man, parasol. “Ha, ha. So very romantic.”

Harper
snagged a beer from her purse and stretched her legs out in front of her, leaning back against the edge of the stern beside the quiescent trolling motor. The action thrust her breasts up—probably not in the least bit accidentally, if he had to guess.

“A girl could get used to this, being rowed around the river while avoiding killer vampires.
Do we have to avoid killer vampires during the day?” she added.

“Unfortunately, yes, thanks to the modern miracles of sunblock and sunglasses,” Levi said, lifting the oars clear of the water and swinging them back again.
“Probably some werewolves, too, since they’ll have to track us from the water’s edge.”

“Shame,” she said.
“And I thought that vampires and werewolves don’t get along.”

“Vampires and werewolves get along just fine…
just so long as the werewolves do exactly what the vampires want them to,” he said.

She shivered.
“Yeah, I could see how they could make you do that.”

“Actually, you don’t,” Levi said.
“Vampires can turn human brains into pudding. Doesn’t affect us shifters, though.”

Harper frowned.
“So why would a shifter work for them?”

“
You have to realize first why a vampire would want us to work for him. If some other vampire corners a regular human employee, he can turn them into a mind-slave. They’re vulnerable. Always. But we’re not. So the bloodsuckers like to have a few of us around as bodyguards or general muscle. In a hand-to-hand fight, we’re pretty evenly matched with other vampires, see, but expendable to them.” Honesty made him add, “Okay, unarmed, a vampire will probably take one of us out nine times out of ten, but we fight in groups, together.”

She lo
oked at him sideways. “You’re not fighting in a group.”

“Maybe I was doing something that wasn’t exactly approved,” he said.
“But that’s not the point.”

She rolle
d her eyes. “Okay, fine, I’d be helpless against a vampire, but you’re super-duper special. But what if another vampire just offers more money? Or what if you decide you don’t like the vampire you’re working for?”

“That’s the kicker, isn’t it?
Vampires like the idea that
other
vampires can’t control their underlings, but they don’t like the idea that
they
can’t. So traditionally, they controlled non-shifter relatives. Husbands, wives, parents, children who were regular humans. As long as they put the whammy on the rest of the family, they’d keep a hold over the shifters.” Levi kept rowing slowly, rhythmically, betraying none of the welter of emotions that lay behind those bald words.

“Wait.
Blackmail? Really? That’s their strategy to make sure the employees are loyal and stuff?” Harper looked incredulous.

He shrugged.
“There’s an old term for it—the gilded cage. Any werewolf who works for a vampire has a safe and sheltered life, even if it’s interrupted by moments of extreme excitement and danger. And any werewolf who doesn’t work for a vampire—well, bloodsuckers don’t like that very much. We might make their pets uppity, letting them think that they could have lives apart from them. So it’s open season on independent agents.”

Harper blew out a puff of air.
“And you’re an independent agent.”

“Yep.
My family has been for three generations now.” Levi shook his head as the ends of the oars cleared the surface of the water. “Every time a vampire shows up, he’ll start throwing his weight around, trying to get us to do his shit. The more skills you have, the bigger risk you are to your family. So a lot of us keep a low profile, take dead-end jobs or wander from place to place. Or we cut ourselves free from our family. Sometimes take other names, even.”

All those words seemed out of place here, on the open river.
Levi rowed past a short dock that thrust out into the river, where two big-bellied guys in gimme caps and folding lawn chairs sat with an open ice chest at their knees and fishing rods in their hands. A kid, a preschooler from the looks of him, sat between them on the edge of the wooden decking with his feet dangling inches above the water. The men watched Levi row the boat along with incurious eyes.

“And that’s what you did,”
Harper said, pulling his attention back. “Cut yourself loose, I mean. I can’t see you keeping a low profile.”

“I’m still a part of my pack,” he said.
“I keep in touch. And I vote on clan matters, too. But I don’t go by to my siblings’ places to kiss babies, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s kind of sad.
I mean, that’s sort of the point of family, isn’t it? Even when you want to kill them,” she added.

Levi
shrugged. “It’s better for them that I’m not around. Most of them are hiding out in West Virginia, anyway. All but off the grid—they probably would be if they didn’t need the power for the surveillance systems. I don’t like to hide, though, just because I’m a shifter.”

“So it’s hiding or give up your family.
And you hope this will change things?” Harper patted her hip pocket where the card was.

“As long as we’ve got a sword hanging over Mortensen’s head, and as long as the bastard stays in power, we should be good,” he sa
id. “My clan, at least. He’s got enough pull to make us untouchable to just about every bloodsucker on the East Coast. Then we won’t have to jump from job to job or hang out in the backwoods just to stay off the radar.”

“Is that who did…whatever it is to you?” Harper asked softly.
“Mortensen?”

He knew what she meant.
His scars. They were pretty hard to miss.

“No.
That was someone else, from a time in my life that I’d rather not talk about,” Levi said flatly.

“Su
re. Fine. Whatever,” she snapped.

Which meant that it was anything but fine.
He didn’t care, though, he told himself. There was nothing between them that made him owe her answers.

Nothing at all.

She turned away from him, sipping her beer as she stared at the shore where the trees crowded down to the waterline in a wall of deep, undifferentiated green. A bright red canoe was nestled along one shore, a woman with a paperback facing a man with a double oar, going upstream. The rower freed one hand and waved at Levi, and he nodded back.

Finally, Harper turned back to him
.

“So, anyways, human relatives
, you said?” she asked, switching tactics. He suppressed the urge to smile at her tenacity. “How does this werewolf thing work, anyway? Is it like a contagious disease?”

He snorted.
“Vampires will tell you that they created the shifters. That’s why there are several different kinds, pretty much one for whatever big-ass predator lives in a region. And of course, there’s the foxes, too.”

“Were-foxes?” she asked, looking amused.

“Fox spirits, they’re called. Mostly used for espionage, in case you’re wondering, and for, uh, honey traps.”

“Honey
traps,” she repeated. “Not as actual foxes, right?”

“Of course not,” he said.

Harper looked out over the river as she took a last, long drink of the beer.

“So is it true?
” she asked, dropping the empty can on the bottom. “Did vampires make shifters somehow?”

Levi shook his head.
“I don’t think so. At least, not directly. Vampires don’t make much of anything. They’ll hire humans to make stuff for them, or even elves or fae—”

“Wait, what?” she demanded
, straightening. “All right, I’ll follow you as far as vampires, but elves? Seriously? You think I’m going to believe that you hang out with Legolas?”

“Believe it or not, I don’t really care
what you believe. They’re real enough. They’re just…lower profile. Most of them left a while ago, and the ones that are left are mostly those that couldn’t go because they’re blood’s contaminated. Mixed. They keep trying to breed themselves pure enough to leave, too.”

She shook her head.
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“Anyway, the other story about shifters that keeps cropping up is that it’s a curse from some deity.
There are stories about Greek gods and Indian spirits and Egyptian and African gods. Some people even think that Nebuchadnezzar’s madness is a werewolf story. Of course, that was only temporary, so it’s not really the same thing,” he added.

“Do you think it’s a curse?” she asked.

“First, you have to ask if I believe in a pantheon of gods,” he said dryly. “And the answer to that is no. I don’t think Zeus ever struck anyone down. But a curse, in a non-supernatural sense? Sure thing.”

She shook her head, tossing her hair back over her shoulder.
Levi wondered if she had any idea how hot she looked like that.

Yeah, probably.

“How is shifting and magical healing and all the rest not supernatural?” she asked.

“It’s just not.
You can talk to my friend Beane about it if you meet him—though I hope you don’t, because if you ever get the chance, it means that something’s gone wrong. He can explain it better, something about trans-dimensional mass and shadow bodies and all the rest,” he said. “All I know is that I could mix herbs and chant spells or will power or whatever all day, and in the end, I’d only end up with a soupy mess and a headache.”