Alpha's Captive 03 - Flight (7 page)
Read Alpha's Captive 03 - Flight Online
Authors: V M Black
“Um,” he said.
He looked her in the eyes, then not very subtly at her cleavage, and then at her eyes again.
Harper cocked her head to the side and tried to look hopeful.
“I love Mini Coopers,” she lied.
“They’re so
cute.
I’ve never been in one before.”
With another look at her chest, he seemed to make a decision.
“Whereabouts in Harrisburg are you going?”
The wolf
was coming up behind the Mini Cooper now, close enough that the couple in the sedan saw him and scrambled back into it before their fuel had finished pumping. The woman pointed frantically as the man hit the lock button on the door, over and over again.
Levi was still shaking his head, looking like a dog with water in his ear
s, and Harper’s eyes watered from the effort of not looking at him.
She
just kept smiling. “Oh, you can drop me off anywhere, Brett. I can call my sister, get her to pick me up, if you can just get me that far. There’s no way that she’d drive all the way out here for me, though.”
“
Sure, then,” he said, smiling back at her finally.
Just in time, because Levi was about three inches behind him.
“Oh, thanks so much! You’re a life saver! Do you like dogs?” She sprang the question on him without pausing for breath.
“Uh…yes?” he
said tentatively.
“Great!” she
said, and she reached over and jerked the driver’s side door open just as Levi wormed under the gas hose between Brett and the pump and slid into the back seat, which he entirely filled with his massive body.
“Holy shit!”
Brett yelped. “That’s a dog? That’s your dog? Look, miss, I didn’t say—”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Harper said brightly.
“He’s perfectly friendly as long as I’m not upset.”
The man opened his mouth, closed it,
opened it again….
And nothing came out.
Harper circled around to the passenger side of the car and sat down, swinging the small plastic bag with the tablet and the reader into the back, along with her purse. She dropped the Subway bags at her feet.
“The nine mil’s in there,” she said under her breath, still smiling at Brett.
“I’m not going to be the one to hold up this poor SOB.”
Brett hung up the gas nozzle and looked into the car for a long moment.
“Do you think he likes me?”
“He loves you,” Harper said firmly.
“You can tell because he’s not growling or anything. Don’t worry. He always growls before he bites.”
Levi made a tiny sound in his throat just in Harper’s ear, too soft for Brett to hear, like the smallest hint of a growl.
Under the guise of petting his massive head, she pinched one of his ears, hard.
You behave.
“If you’re sure….”
He still looked more than a little uneasy.
“Absolutely positive,” Harper said, patting the driver’s seat in invitation.
After another moment’s hesitation, Brett got in.
“See?
He likes you!” Harper chirped.
“Yeah,” he said, trying to look at the pavement in front of him and keep the enormous wolf in view at the same time as he started the car.
As he pulled onto the road, Harper allowed herself to relax fractionally. Brett was committed now. He probably just wanted to get them to Harrisburg as quickly as humanly possible. He drove in a kind of intense silence, pushing the tiny car fast down the highway.
“Thanks again, Brett,” Harper said when they were a couple of miles down the road.
“We really appreciate it.”
“We…?” Brett echoed.
“Yeah, me and…Fido,” Harper said.
Again, the merest hint of a noise.
Brett perked up. “You actually named your dog Fido? That’s kind of cool, because no one actually does that. Like, you know what it means, right? It means ‘I am faithful.’”
“That’s totally what I was thinking when I named him that,” Harper said.
Brett frowned then. “Where’d he go?”
“Who?”
Harper asked with all the innocence she could muster.
“Fido.
He’s not there.”
“He probably decided to lie down on the floor,” she
babbled. “He does that sometimes, you know. Sometimes he likes to hang his head out the window, and sometimes he likes—”
“
What the hell!” Brett yelled, the car jerking to the side.
“Watch out, Brett!”
Harper grabbed for the wheel.
“Naked,
” Brett sputtered. “Naked dude!”
Harper looked back.
Levi had shifted back into human form, and he was grinning with his gun pointed steadily at the driver.
“He’s got a gun,” Harper
said helpfully.
“He’s
naked.”
“I’m not sure why that’
s more upsetting than the gun.”
“Where’s the dog?”
Brett asked.
“What dog?” Harper said automatically.
But Brett’s brain wasn’t connected to his ears anymore. “We’ve got to run,” he urged, his foot pressing ever harder onto the gas. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Um.
We can’t because you’re driving, and he’s in the car with us,” Harper pointed out.
“Oh, my God,” he said.
“Oh, my God, ohmyGod, omigod, omigod—”
“Pull over,” said Levi.
“Slow down first!” she squealed, grabbing the wheel again as Brett jerked it to the side at ninety miles per hour.
Bret
t’s foot shifted from gas to brake, hitting it hard enough that Levi grunted as he was shoved against the back of the front seats.
“Now
pull over,” Harper suggested as the needle dropped below thirty.
“It’s a man.
A dude. A dog or a wolf or a—werewolf.” Brett all but gasped the last word.
“I knew you’d figure it out,” she said encouragingly.
“A naked werewolf. It’s a full moon. A werewolf.”
“Not right now, but it probably will be
tonight, from the looks of it. You’re a pretty observant guy, Brett,” she said as the car rolled to a stop. “Still on about the naked, though. Werewolves don’t eat people all that often these days, but I’d hurry up and get out anyway. But take off your shoes first and leave them here.”
“My shoes?”
Brett repeated stupidly. He tore his eyes away from Levi for the first time since he changed to stare at Harper.
“Your shoes.
Take them off,” she said. When he didn’t move, she invented madly. “Werewolves only eat people with shoes on.”
Brett threw
the car into park. His hands shaking, he pulled his shoes off, first one and then the other. And then, for no apparent reason, he tossed his knitted cap down, too.
“Good job,” Harper said.
“You can go now. We’ll try not to total your car, but after what happened last time, well, no promises.”
Brett didn’t seem to be processing what she said as he
scrabbled for the door handle and tumbled out.
“
You’d better get out of there,” he pleaded. “Or he’s going to eat you, instead.”
“He already has
,” said Harper, scooting into his seat and mashing the brake as she shifted the car into drive.
Brett was standing on the side of the road and shaking, his hair sticking up in all directions from the knit cap.
“You’re crazy. You’re all crazy.”
“Maybe,” she agreed.
“But I’m not the one who’s hallucinating werewolves.”
She reached over and slammed the door closed as Brett tumbled free of it, accelerating out hard enough that the wheels spun.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Levi remarked. He already had the box with the tablet open and was tearing open the SD card reader.
“Stealing his car?
That was your idea,” Harper said.
“No, I meant trying to convince him he was crazy.”
“I thought it might buy u
s a few more minutes,” she said. “And maybe the police will think he’s high when he files his report.”
“A Mini Cooper?” he said then.
“Really, Harper? That was the best you could do?”
“You’re t
he one who wanted the big shoes,” she said. “Hijackers can’t be choosers.”
Levi got the reader free and slotted it into the tablet.
“Card now,” he ordered.
Harper pulled it out of her
pocket and handed it over. “Sorry. There weren’t any prepaid smart phones. If you can get the data off that, we’ll have to pull in near a McDonald’s or something to use their WiFi to send it off.”
“We can deal with that,” he said.
He slotted the card into place, then tapped around.
After a
long moment in which Harper hardly dared to breathe, Levi broke the silence.
“Damn.”
It was such a casual word, said almost carelessly, that for a moment the full significance didn’t hit her.
And then it did, and her heart almost stopped.
“It didn’t work,” Levi said. “There are files on the SD card, all right. But I can’t get to them through the reader.”
“It didn’t work,” Harper repeated, her hands tightening on the steering wheel.
The words sounded like a death sentence.
The story continues in…
Aethereal
Bonds
On Sale July 2014
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Harper and Levi are on the run from the vampire mafia, who will do anything to get back the files they’ve stolen. All they have to do to be free is make copies of the data, which is proving to be far more difficult than they’d expected.
T
heir first attempt failed, so they run the gauntlet to reach someone who can help. But with the vampire hot on their heels, their chances of success—and survival—are quickly shrinking. And so is the wall that Harper has put around her heart.
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Author’s Note
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The Alpha’s Captive is a novelette serial that comes out on the first
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I’m currently working exclusively in the
Aethereal Bonds world, which I’ve mapped out to be big enough to let me tell all the different kinds of stories I want to share with readers. It’s got vampires, demons, weres, faes and more—all sorts of creatures that are great fun to play with.
I live near Washington, D.C., with my family. A proud geek, I love fantasy, romance, science fiction, and historical fiction.
