Avenging Autumn (17 page)

Blake forced himself to focus. There was no point lingering in the past. He needed to find his wolf again, and this time he couldn’t let anything distract him.

“Hello?” he called out, his voice hollow and echoey. “I came back. We need to sort this out.”

He listened, hoping to hear his wolf’s lonesome howl once again, but he heard nothing.

Taking more steps farther into the forest, he called out again. “Please, I know you want this, too. We need to work together again. It’s the only way.”

He glanced anxiously back over his shoulder. Between the tree trunks he could just about make out the shape of his body on the ground and his father moving around it. His father’s words echoed in his head—
don’t lose sight of your body
—but he’d always found his way back before. Finding his wolf was more important than worrying.

Movement in the bush—breath panting, claws catching on twigs and dried leaves.

Blake froze and listened. Was it his wolf, or something else? So far he’d not encountered any other spirits, but that didn’t mean there were none.

The movement in the bushes grew more distant. Blake hesitated, then followed. His wolf might be trying to check him out, while remaining unseen.

“Hello?”

The movement scampered away, becoming fainter in the distant. Panic clutched his chest, “Hey, no! Wait up!”

He picked up his pace, marveling at how quickly he was able to move while on two legs—something he’d always taken for granted. If he lost his wolf now, he might never find it again.

He broke into a run. Leaving the trail he’d been following between the trees, he plunged into the undergrowth, pushing his way through the leaves and branches. Up ahead, he caught a glimpse of a flash of silver fur.

He was closer now.

“Please, it’s me. You need to wait. We need to work this out.”

He hated the desperation in his voice, the pleading tone. But he was desperate. His wolf had felt so close, and now they were distant again. Becoming a shifter again was his only hope.

The sounds stopped.

Blake drew to a halt, one hand locked in his hair in dismay. He’d lost his spirit guide again. “Fuck!”

He turned back to head the way he had come.

From out of nowhere, something rocketed out from the bush on his right and smashed straight into him. Unprepared, he found himself rolling in a ball of heat and fur. A growl and a snapping of teeth right beside his ear. Blake barely had time to string a coherent thought together, concentrating only on fighting back, and trying to get a hold on whatever was attacking him. He managed to get hold of a furry leg and then a shoulder. His hand moved upward and he found himself with his hand around his wolf’s throat.

What the hell?

“Quit it!” he managed to yell as he yanked himself in the opposite direction of the snapping jaws. “You can’t kill me.”

His wolf was angry, he realized, angry with him for getting himself injured. Would his wolf have preferred it if he had died? At least then it would have been free to connect to a new shifter, a newborn baby that might have strengths even greater than his own. Was that the reason his guide had been so angry with him? It had been furious he had survived?

“I didn’t do this on purpose! Stop punishing me.”

The wolf growled again, but stopped snapping. Blake’s chest heaved, both hands still wrapped around the animal’s massive neck. The idea of throttling his wolf had never even occurred to him—he’d only had the hold to try to keep the animal’s jaws from his throat.

“Stop punishing me,” he said, again.

He felt the tension go from the wolf’s body, and slowly the animal backed off. Blake was able to push himself to sitting. He brushed off the twigs and dirt stuck to his naked body.

The wolf sat on its haunches, only a couple of yards away. Its amber eyes regarded him with a seriousness Blake had only ever seen in a shifter. Blake wrapped his arms around his shins, and hung his head, catching his breath.

Blake sniffed and lifted his head again to meet his spirit guide’s gaze. “We need to figure this out, you and I. I’m sorry things went wrong, but you’re not helping. If you try to shift, things might start getting better again.”

The animal huffed air in a cloudy bloom from its nostrils.

“What other choice do we have?” Blake continued. “We continue like this? How is that good for either of us? You’re stuck here in this ... empty place ... and I’m left unable to walk. If I can’t heal as a man, that’s fine. I can live with that. But I can’t stand the thought of never being able to run as a wolf again. You must miss it too, the smells of the forest, the taste of blood when we hunted. This place is so ... senseless.”

The wolf chuffed again, and Blake felt like it was agreeing with him.

“So will you try?” he asked. “It’s all I’m asking of you, just to try. If it doesn’t work, I’ll let you go, and we’ll have to figure out a way to continue as we are.”

The wolf whined and then dropped its stomach and chest to the ground. It put its head on its paws, and looked up at him with mournful, golden eyes.

Blake risked a smile. “Does that mean you’ll try?”

The wolf exhaled hot air through its nose, and Blake took that as a yes. He dared to reach out, his fingers making contact with the wolf’s head. He risked scratching the animal’s head, and the wolf’s eyes slipped shut, its tail beating the ground in pleasure. Blake’s heart swelled, his soul lifting. He couldn’t ask for any more than this. If his wolf still couldn’t shift after Blake had made it back to his body, then there were other reasons in play.

The thought of his body made him look around. He’d completely forgotten his father’s rule not to lose sight of his body—or perhaps, not forgotten, but had deliberately put it to the back of his mind—but now the time had come where he needed to think about returning, and he wasn’t even sure which direction he’d come from. The rough and tumble he’d had with his wolf had disoriented him even further, and each clump of trees and bushes looked exactly the same.

Blake glanced up into the sky, but there was no sun to use for tracking, or even moon and stars. The space was just a gray expanse of nothingness.

Shit.

His wolf must have noticed something was wrong, as Blake had stopped his head rub. The animal’s eyes were open and it lifted itself back onto its haunches, its hackles raised.

“Any idea which direction I came from?” Blake asked.

The wolf glanced around and then sneezed.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

He got to his feet and put his hands on his hips. He took a couple of steps in one direction, and stopped, and then turned and walked in the other. A rising build of panic started low in his stomach and crept upward, through his chest to slowly crawl up his throat. He had absolutely no idea what direction he needed to head in.

Blake held his breath, hoping to pick up the sound of his father’s low singing, but all he heard was the panting of his wolf, and the increasing thud of his own heartbeat.

“I need your help,” he said, addressing his wolf. He hated having to ask again, but had no choice. “Can you take me back to where I left my body?”

The animal whined, its ears flattening to its head. Perhaps his spirit guide was as lost here as he was. Perhaps only Blake’s call from the outside world when he needed to shift, or wanted help, gave it direction.

But then he remembered how his wolf was able to view the real world, relay the images back to him when he was in the form of a man, and he realized that the place they’d found themselves in wasn’t where his wolf normally resided. This strange, halfway place was a ghost in itself, and they both needed to get out.

“Let’s start moving. We’re bound to come across something we recognize—a tree or a path or ... something. We’re not going to get anywhere standing around here.”

He didn’t wait for the wolf to answer. Choosing right, he strode between the trees. Movement came from behind him. His wolf was following, belly low to the ground, slinking along as if it didn’t want to be seen.

Blake started at a powerful stride, but as he walked and walked, and nothing seemed to change, and nothing looked any different, his walk broke into a jog which quickly morphed into a run.

Several times, he convinced himself he recognized something—a low hanging branch, or a certain boulder, and said, “I’m close, my body is right around the corner. I know this place, I’m sure I do. I’ve been here before.” But each time, his body wasn’t revealed and he changed direction sporadically, dashing from one spot to another, certain he was in the right place this time and that he’d find his father walking around his body.

Finally, out of breath and covered in sweat, he forced himself to stop. He needed to admit the truth to himself. He’d lost sight of his body, and his way of getting back again.

He was lost.

Beside him, his wolf lifted its head and howled.

––––––––

A
UTUMN SAT IN the interview room of the Brown County Sheriff’s Office, trying to stop her heart beating too hard, and her palms from sweating.

She’d been put through processing by a sheriff’s officer. Paperwork had been filled in while she’d been given a pat-down to make sure she wasn’t carrying any other weapons or drugs. Once this had been done, she’d been escorted into a secure part of the Sherriff’s Office, and been forced to a humiliating strip search, while the officer once again searched for weapons, drugs, and also checked her over for any kind of injury. The sheriff’s officer had commented on the number of cuts and bruises that littered her body, but she’d told the other woman that she didn’t have any injuries bad enough to require medical attention, so she’d been allowed to dress in the standard jail garb. At least the handcuffs had been removed.

She still hadn’t been told exactly the reason why she’d been brought in, but she could hazard a good guess. She hoped the couple of shifters that had been caught with her were cooperating, and being treated fairly.

A click came, and the door swung open. The sheriff strolled in, his deputy—the woman who had been at her arrest—following close behind.

“My name is Sherriff Joe Petterson, and this is my deputy, Elaine Young.”

The younger woman gave Autumn a nod of acknowledgement.

“Are you going to tell me what this is about?” she demanded.

He raised thick, bushy white eyebrows. “Don’t you want to wait for a lawyer before you speak?”

“I don’t have one.”

“We can appoint you one through the state.”

“I thought I’d only need a lawyer if I’ve done something wrong.”

Those eyebrows bobbed again. “And you’re claiming you haven’t? We’re already running the serial number on that gun we found you in possession of. I’m pretty sure it’s going to come back that it’s not registered to you.”

“It’s not,” she admitted. “I took it from a friend. She doesn’t even know I have it.”

“So you’re admitting possession of an illegal weapon?”

“Yes.” She leaned forward, stomach pressing against the edge of the table. “Charge me for it, and let me go.”

“It’s not that simple. That’s not the reason you were arrested.” The man took his cell phone from his pocket, and swiped the screen a couple of times. “Recognize this?”

He slid the phone across the table toward her. For the briefest of seconds, she expected to be faced with the footage of her father having his throat cut again, but then she focused in on the scene actually playing. The person videoing the scene swept across a group of people from behind. They were all huddled together, the weaker ones, women and children, in the middle. Then the film maker scanned outward, revealing a line of trees. It took Autumn a moment to realize the huge creatures emerging from between the trees were her shifters—Peter, Mia, Tocho, Sahale, and the shifters from the Company of Tooth and Claw. The wolves from Tooth and Claw immediately pounced on the civilians, and cries of terror could be heard from the device. But instead of filming the attack, the camera focused on a tall figure, standing among the remaining shifters. The figure appeared strong and commanding, a determined set to the person’s shoulders, a slim, almost severe face, and cold blue eyes.

With a shock that felt like someone had punched her in the stomach, it hit her that she was looking at herself.

On screen her hand lifted, and she clearly brought it down in the direction of the people—the signal to the shifters to attack. Of course, she’d been asking the other shifters to break up the fight, but it didn’t look that way from the footage.

Chaos ensued, and Autumn had to glance away. The position the camera was filming from made everything appear brutal. There was no sign of the guns that had been present, as the bodies of the people sheltered them from the view of the camera. Instead, it simply looked as though huge, terrifying animals emerged from the forest, and she’d given the order to attack a group of defenseless civilians.

A voice on camera made her gaze flick back to the cell. The camera was no longer trained on her, but on Ollie Pritchard. Though it only took in the top half of him, his chest bare after he’d shifted back from his animal guide, Autumn remembered how he’d been completely naked.

Ollie’s voice shouted out, “We are The Company of Tooth and Claw, and we are here to prove that shifters are superior to people. We will rule you with violence and fear, if we have to, but we will rule you. If you don’t submit to us, this will be your punishment.”

She remembered him saying the words perfectly and she knew how the whole clip had made her appear. It gave the impression that Ollie was just her little bitch, and that she was the one running the show.

Exactly as Vivian had wanted it to look.

“This ...” she stuttered, gesturing at the small screen. “This isn’t how it looks.”

“What? Like you ordered the attack on a group of innocent people in order to make your own political gains?”

“Those aren’t my political gains! I didn’t even know The Company of Tooth and Claw until a few days ago, and that was only by hearing the name. I’m not the person who runs it, the guy you saw talking just then is!”