Bloodlines (91 page)

“I’m not joking,” Edwin gritted out. “You’re giving up, so why the hell shouldn’t I? You think I’m an idiot? You don’t want to take the medicine. And if you stop, you’re going to get worse.”

“Guys,” Randall whispered, but Edwin kept going, getting louder, shouting right over Randall’s interjection.

“You don’t get to tell me to
move on
, like you’re some bad thing I need to get over! So stop being so…
stupid
.”

“I
am
going to take the goddamn treatments,” Anthony growled. “And I am going to continue fighting this disease every step of the way, but I’m not going to pretend there’s not a chance it might not work.”

“
Stop saying that
.” Edwin turned and ran, shedding clothes as he went, knocking a glass over in his wake. The next moment there was a flash of blond as Edwin ran into the woods, wolf form blending into the shadows and disappearing completely from sight.

Randall sighed, staring at the table. After a beat he stood, moving to clean up the shattered glass. Anthony cursed under his breath and slumped back down in his chair. Beside Jed, Redford sounded like he had only just started breathing again, and Victor looked flustered, cleaning his glasses.

Then Anthony was up and out of his chair again, moving to the front door. Randall still wasn’t trying to talk, barely even reacting as he carefully swept up the glass, as he mopped up the spilled water. In the distance was a long howl, an anguished noise that seemed to shiver through Jed, some primal reaction to something that wild.

“I’ll go bring him back,” Anthony sighed, shrugging on a heavy jacket that had been hanging by the door.

“Don’t.” Randall’s voice was sharp, his jaw so tight it looked like one good push and he might just shatter apart. “Let him be, Ant. You know he needs to run when he gets like this.”

The way Anthony’s shoulders tensed looked like guilt. “If he’s not back by midnight, I’m going to find him,” he muttered.

“Or you’ll let him be,” Randall repeated, voice low. He took the broken glass into the kitchen to throw away.

Jed glanced around the room, fidgeting in his seat, uncomfortable. This was why he didn’t do family shit. It all just got so… messy. Much better to not deal with it at all. “Do you need help in there?” he asked, starting to stand, to reach for half-empty cups.

“No” was Randall’s firm response. And Jed sank back down again, sighing. There went his exit strategy. Victor, on the other hand, didn’t even ask before he went to help Randall clean up. Randall’s tense body language didn’t ease, but at least he didn’t snap at Victor.

Anthony sank back down into his chair, his hands clenched tightly together on the tabletop to ease the shaking. “I’ll get the guesthouse ready for you guys in a minute,” he told Jed and Redford, but his gaze was fixed out the window, his breaths deeper.

“Don’t worry about it.” Jed practically fell over his chair in an effort to get to the hall closet. “We know where everything is. You just sit there and think calming thoughts. Come on, Red.”

Redford looked just as relieved for something to do as Jed did, and together they piled their arms high with pillows and blankets. After they picked their way across the yard, they made up Victor’s bed first, before retreating into their room and getting the sheets on the mattress. “That was….” Jed shrugged, shaking his head. “Not exactly what I was expecting.”

“Neither,” Redford admitted. He tossed a pillow across the bed at Jed and straightened a corner of the sheets, fussing just to have something to do. “They’ve all seemed happier lately.”

“I get it, though. Hell of a thing to sit there and listen to someone list out what you’re supposed to do when they kick it.” Jed bent over the bed, reaching across to grab the comforter and hauling it onto his side.

“Yeah.” Redford heaved a sigh. But then he looked at the bed they’d just made, then up at Jed, and a quirked a little smile. “I never thought I’d see the day where you made the bed.”

“Hey, come on now.” Jed put a final fluff on the flower-dotted comforter. “This is manly as hell.” Grinning at Redford, waggling his eyebrows up and down, Jed gestured to the mattress. “If you think I’m not getting enough practice, though, we really should mess it up. You know, so I can try again.” The
messing it up
was really what Jed was most interested in.

“I’m just surprised you even know
how
to make a bed,” Redford mused. Clothes and all, he crawled onto it and tugged Jed down with him, manhandling Jed around until Redford had him in a comfortable position. After ending up on his back, with Redford half lying on his side, Jed curved an arm around Redford’s shoulders. “Did you learn that in the army and just haven’t employed that knowledge since?”

Jed ran his fingers along Redford’s arm, flashing a half smile. He could lie. It’d be easy to say yes, to roll them over and kiss Redford, to let the subject die. There wasn’t any
reason
to talk about this, or to let Redford in any further.

“My mom.”

But, for some reason, Jed was just full of the Care Bears today. He couldn’t seem to help himself. “My mom made my sisters and I make our beds every morning, before school. If we didn’t, we had to go to bed an hour earlier that night. It was a big deal, for whatever reason. Army just taught me how to do hospital corners.”

“Yeah?” Redford sounded pleased, inching up so he could put his head on the pillow next to Jed’s. “That sounds nice.” Redford always got those dumb puppy-dog eyes whenever Jed mentioned his past. Like Jed was giving him a
gift
by talking about freaking bed making.

“It was annoying,” Jed grunted. “Why make your bed
every day
? You are literally just going to mess it up twelve hours later. It makes no sense at all.”

Redford gave a quiet laugh against his shoulder. “You make it because it looks pretty. And because it feels good to get into a bed that doesn’t have the sheets hanging off the edge.”

“I like my sheets hanging off the edge.” Grumbling, Jed turned them so he was hovering over Redford, so he could drop a kiss onto the bridge of his nose and smile at the way Redford blinked, trying to bring him into focus. “I like you on my bed most of all. And that
really
tends to mess things up.”

Redford rolled them again so he could use Jed as a mattress, bonelessly sprawling over him. “I think we should make the bed more often,” he said. “It’s nice, doing things that aren’t blowing things up.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a good explosion,” Jed mumbled, hop-skipping kisses against Redford’s neck, hands sliding up and down Redford’s back. “That’s way more fun than bed making.”

Redford caught Jed in a kiss. There was no hurry to it, no edge to either of their movements, just a leisurely connection. “And what if I disagree?”

A slow little smirk curled Jed’s lips. “I’ll have to change your mind.” Slipping his hands up under Redford’s shirt, he deepened their kiss, taking his time, a soft moan caught between them. He gently pulled off Redford’s clothes, pants getting pushed away, his own jeans lost over the edge of the bed. They took their time, rolling together in exhales and grasping touches, the sheets bunching under Jed’s back as Redford moved above him, the brilliant orange of the fading sun painting Redford’s skin on fire.

And when they finally did collapse, when the slow pace turned urgent, Redford’s gasps became quiet moans, and Jed grinned into the dark as he slid kisses along his skin. “See?” he whispered as they lay together, legs and sheets tangled all at once. “Explosions.”

They fell asleep in a messy sprawl, Jed using Redford’s bicep as a pillow, Redford’s breaths evening out into a relaxing rhythm that Jed listened to until sleep claimed him.

They woke with the sound of gunshots splitting the air.

Jed jerked upright, heart pounding, a cold sweat making him shiver. At first there was nothing, the throb of his heartbeat in his ears, the sick sour stench of his own fear. A dream, maybe. A nightmare. He had those. But then a third shot rang out, followed by the high-pitched yelp of a wolf in pain. Jed was tumbling out of bed before he had time to realize he was moving, grabbing his jeans, shoving his boots on, tugging on a shirt even as he ran out the door.

“Get my bag from the Jeep!” he hollered to Redford, grabbing his Glock from the holster he’d left by the door and thundering down the stairs, out onto the lawn.

Another drawn-out howl, this one cut short by the staccato bursts of a semiautomatic. And then there really was nothing but silence.

Shit
.

Redford

R
EDFORD
CAUGHT
up with Jed just as Anthony and Randall did. He didn’t waste time speaking. He threw the bag to Jed and ran by his side, the four of them sprinting in the direction the noise had come from. Redford’s eyesight wasn’t good in the darkness when he was still on two legs, but he had no time to shift, so he endured the thin branches whipping at his shoulders and face and ignored the sting of rocks coming up hard against his feet.

Anthony and Randall got there faster than he and Jed did.

“I smell blood,” Redford gasped out, skidding to a stop. Anthony was circling a tree, his ears back in the universal wolf body language for anger. “Not enough for a kill shot, though.”

Fumbling through the bag in the darkness, Jed found the flashlight and switched it on, frowning as he swept the light over the area. He crouched down, illuminating the trunk of the tree and the matted grass before letting the flashlight slide along a trail. “He got hit here,” Jed muttered to himself. “Blood against the tree trunk, a slug there, so probably a through and through. But then he was dragged.” Rubbing a hand across his mouth, Jed nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, they took him.”

There was a far off noise of someone crashing through the forest with as much finesse as a herd of stampeding elephants—Victor, from the cursing Redford could hear. Anthony shifted back, though his eyes still blazed yellow in the dim light. “Jed, if you have explosives in that bag, I want to borrow them,” Anthony said flatly. “I’m going to track these bastards.”

“Explosions come with me,” Jed returned. “It’s a two for one deal. But yeah, I’ve got ’em. You, me, and Red, we’ll go after them now. I can keep up.”

Randall, still shifted, growled under his breath, fur at the nape of his neck standing up. Anthony held out his hand. “Give me the explosives,” he said. “Will they kill the hunters if I put them close enough?”

“I’m not handing over a bunch of C-4 to a guy looking for revenge.” Jed took a step back, gaze going between Anthony and Randall. “And yeah. You put a big boom-boom next to squishy things and you’ll be in a whole world of red rain.
Including
yourself, because you don’t fucking know what you’re doing. Now listen. You aren’t a goddamn killer. We don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m not going to lead another untrained wolf into a slaughterhouse just because. How do you even know they’re not a bunch of idiot kids who shot a wolf and have no damn clue?”

The growl that came from Anthony made Redford wince. Jed was lying, that was obvious enough to Redford—that gunfire had been from a semiautomatic, and idiot kids didn’t wander around in dark forests with semiautomatics. And even if they did, they wouldn’t drag a live wolf away.

Anthony didn’t seem to be thinking that clearly.

“I don’t care who they are; they took my brother,” Anthony barked. “If you’re not coming, you’re welcome to stay here. Get some sleep.”

Grabbing Anthony’s arm, Jed didn’t back down from the warning growl. “Fine.
Fine
, okay. I’m coming with you. And if you say we go in for the kill, we will. But I am handling the explosives. Okay?”

Victor chose that moment to burst into the clearing, bending over to brace his hands on his knees once he came to a stop. “What,” he wheezed, “happened?”

Redford didn’t want to interrupt Anthony and Jed, so he leaned over and whispered to Victor, “Edwin got taken.” Just the thought of it made
him
want to tear into the woods after the hunters too. O’Malley had promised he would call off his operation, and they’d all thought they’d be safe. But now there were hunters on the Lewises’ property. This might have just gotten far more personal.

Anthony’s anger seemed to dissipate some. “Okay,” he said, taking a moment to breathe deeply, getting himself focused. “You’re right. You know more about this kind of thing than I do. But we’re going
now
. If you tell me to wait until morning, I’ll remind you of the time you tried to blow up that hunter camp because Redford got a tiny bullet graze on his arm.”

“Yeah, well.” Jed pulled his shotgun from the duffel bag, ratcheting off the safety. “You talked me out of it. I’m a cold-blooded killer. You’re a nice guy who likes to fish. There’s a world of difference between what I do and what you can live with.” There wasn’t time for this. For a big drawn-out heart-to-heart. And Jed seemed to feel that just as much as the rest of them. He met Anthony’s eyes, holding his gaze, brilliant human green against feral wolf yellow. “You told me once that you weren’t animals, that you didn’t kill without reason. Was that true? Or only when you didn’t have skin in the game?”