Red (33 page)

Full dark fell, cloaking me in shadows,
covering the sounds of my movement with night noises. And at last I
saw a faint glow of firelight through the trees. I made my way
closer, picking up the faint murmur of voices.

“
You?
You were the
one who was supposed to take her?” The horrified tone rang out
clear. Nate.

I’d found them.

Creeping nearer, I could see Elodie’s dad
struggling to sit up, his arms wrenched tight behind him and bound
at the wrist. Obviously Patrick had moved on to the hostage portion
of the plan.

Someone shifted to the left side of the
fire. “Well yes. It was all very straight forward. I’d take care of
Rosalind, and afterward, it would have been so easy to make
Elodie’s death look like a case of SIDS. No blood, no mess. An end
to all future generations. Simple. Elegant. And this ridiculous war
would be over and I could get on with my life like a normal
person.”

Jesus Christ,
I thought.
He’s
totally crazy.
The truly scary thing was that he looked like
the same, sane rational guy my dad had been working with for the
last few years. His face was placid and just like at the cabin, it
was only the gun in his hand that ruined the illusion.

“
But it didn’t work. Your
mother—yes Elodie, I know you’re awake; your breathing changed a
few minutes ago—”

Frantically I searched the campsite, looking
for her. There, on the opposite side of the fire. She lay in a
heap, bound like her father, but unmoving. My heart leapt at the
sight of her. I could just see the shallow rise and fall of her
chest. She was alive!

“—
So her suicide was really
easy to fake.”

What?
My brain tuned back in to what
Patrick was saying, too late to catch his meaning.

“
You murdered my
mother.”

Oh.

Elodie’s voice was weak and a little
slurred. Drugged rather than weakened from transition. How long
until it wore off?

I circled around the campsite while Patrick
kept talking. He’d positioned himself well. The ground here was
wide and flat. The creek was several feet to his back, a long drop,
which also meant no way to approach. There were no trees within
twenty yards, no boulders, nothing to use as cover for a closer
approach.

The packs were behind him. He hadn’t made
camp any further than building a fire. No need to make his
prisoners comfortable. One of the packs was open. I could see the
corner of some power bars and the white plastic top of a water
bottle sticking out of a pocket. One mesh pocket held the map,
folded neatly into a square as was his way. The other pocket showed
the hilt of a knife. Elodie’s knife, I realized with jolt. He
must’ve taken it from our packs before he left the cabin.

He was going over how he had tried to test
her, and what the plan was now. That wasn’t good. The bad guy never
tells you that stuff if he has any intention of letting you live.
If I didn’t do something, she was dead. They both were. “It’s a
pity I can’t put you in a lab,” Patrick was saying. “Imagine the
genetic breakthroughs your DNA might hold.”

Elodie didn’t respond to that. But she’d
managed to garner some important information. Patrick was enough of
a scientist to want to watch. That bought us a little more time.
How much, I didn’t know. Hopefully it would be enough that I could
come up with a plan to get us out of here alive.

~*~

Elodie

Even behind my closed eyes, I could feel
Patrick watching me. I'd tried to fake slipping back into
unconsciousness, but either he didn't buy it or he had the
attention span of a starving predator. It was disturbing to begin
with, but as time stretched on, it became freaking creepy. He was
just sitting there on his sleeping bag, gun in hand. Staring at
me.

"You know that saying about a watched pot?"
I said, slitting my eyes so I could see him. "The same is true of a
watched werewolf."

Patrick's lips curved a little, but he
didn't take his eyes off me. My skin crawled. Even if I could
control my shifting, I wouldn't want to do it under that watchful
gaze. He felt like a voyeur. No way in hell did I want to do
something so . . . personal in front of him. No. So I did my best
to keep my breathing even and my body as close to a Zen state as
possible.

The fever came again anyway. It stole over
my body, drawing out a slick sweat in its wake, making me shiver at
its touch. I held still. Or tried to anyway. I'd long since lost
any feeling in my arms and shoulders beyond the occasional,
shooting pain. How long did I have? Hours maybe. But I didn't think
it would take that long. Because that would mean that something
actually went
right,
and absolutely nothing about the last
few days had established a precedent for that.

I needed more time. But time for what? It's
not like Patrick was gonna get bored with this. Whether it was in
the next five minutes or the next five days, he was going to be
there to see me on the other side and put a bullet in my brain. No
amount of pleading or logic was going to change that. I was
completely at his mercy as long as I was bound.

Which meant I needed to get unbound.
Somehow. The rope was tight and looped several times around my
wrists. Climbing rope, I thought. I tried wriggling my hands
against my bonds, but they were stiff and uncooperative.

Come on, you're a freaking werewolf. You
should have the strength to break through even this.

I inhaled a slow breath in preparation for
the strain. And saw Patrick lift the gun and level it.

"Not thinking of trying to escape, are you?"
he asked, making a tsking sound.

"I was trying to get some feeling back in my
arms, actually."

There was no way I could shift and get free
in time to kill him before he could fire that gun. Not as long as
he was looking at me. I needed some kind of distraction. But what
the hell could I manage like this? Trussed up like a freaking
Christmas turkey. There was no way I could communicate with Dad, no
way I could do anything without giving myself away.

The cramp began in my calf, the kind of
Charlie horse I used to think was awful until I experienced the
full body version. I flexed my foot trying to stretch it out.

Focus on the breath
. I could almost
hear Sawyer's voice in my mind, coaching me through this and had to
bite back a cry. My mouth filled with the taste of blood from my
bitten cheek.

So not helping the situation
, I
thought, swallowing the warm taste of copper.

In and out. Slow and steady. The cramp moved
up my leg. Inhale. Exhale through the pain. I tried to focus on the
scents around me as a distraction. Sweat hung sour in the air.
Mine. My father's. Our kidnapper's. It mixed with wisps of smoke on
the bare breeze. I wondered if I'd ever smell smoke again and not
be afraid, after this. Or if I'd ever smell smoke again,
period.

The cramp started in my other foot, harder
now. I wanted to scream, to scramble up and force the muscle flat.
But I held as still as I could and I breathed.

There were green, growing things around us.
Old leaves decaying from last fall. Damp earth. And Sawyer.

My legs flailed and my breath exploded in an
exhale. I hurriedly sucked in another breath and found the scent
again.

No. Impossible. It was the fever. I was
hallucinating. Conjuring the one thing that could comfort me in the
middle of this nightmare. But it woke my wolf. She shoved at my
mind, at the edges of my body. My legs jackknifed again, coming
perilously close to the edge of the fire.

The fire.

It was the only thing within reach. If I
could manage to knock the burning logs into something else, it
might be just the distraction I needed. Of course, that meant I had
to get control over my limbs.

Focus. Focus.

My wolf snarled and strained in return.

Give me control, damn it. I have a plan.

My body jolted again, my shoulder slamming
into the ground with bruising force that let me know what my wolf
thought of that plan. Then there was no more thought to the fire,
no more thought to distraction. There was only the pain as I began
to buck and writhe. I flipped to my stomach and curled in on myself
as my body betrayed me and my wolf tried to pursue a ghost.

Mate.

I could still smell the phantom scent. But
it was no longer comfort. Rage sizzled through me, a worthy
accompaniment to agony as my back cracked and my ribs expanded. I
grabbed for it, tried to latch on to the emotion because fury was
better than pain. But it slipped away as I spasmed again, my head
flying back. Dimly I could hear my father shouting something, but I
was too focused on the pain to make out the words. With a loud
crack, my hips broke and realigned. My mouth opened in a wailing
howl as my legs reshaped, my joints shifting into canine
hindquarters.

Someone was . . . laughing.

What the hell?

It was Patrick. Through the red haze of
agony I could see him, delighted in the spectacle before him.

The rage returned, and with it, my shoulders
cracked, slipping out of alignment. Gritting my teeth to hold in
another scream, I rotated my dislocated shoulders forward until my
bound wrists lay in front of me

And then . . . everything seemed to stop.
Suspended in a moment of exquisite suffering where I was caught
between forms. Again.

No!

I lay there, panting, waiting for my wolf to
rouse, to continue to push. But she was in as much pain as I, all
but blind with it. And exhausted from the effort to change
forms.

"Well now, that was a disappointment," said
Patrick.

I was beyond human speech, so the only
response I could muster was a whine.

"Ah well. That was enough. Even I have
enough heart to put a suffering beast out of its misery," he
said.

"No!" shouted Dad. He was struggling to his
knees. He lurched toward Patrick, coming through the fire, his
clothes catching, burning.

No
.
Oh dear God, no.

He fell before he could reach Patrick,
rolling on the ground to put out the flames.

The gun that had shifted toward my dad for a
moment moved back to me, pointed directly at my head.

It was over. As I had always promised, it
would end with me.

Chapter 15

Elodie

A
roar rent the air, a vicious sound,
somewhere between a growl and a scream. My eyes flew open to see
Patrick jerking the gun toward a new target. He was barely turned
before something crashed into him. He went down hard on his back
and the gun went off.

The world went to molasses as the sound
tried to catapult me back to the cabin, to the blood. I fought to
stay present, to stay in the now. And in that long, slow moment, it
was Sawyer’s face I saw shifting, his half-formed muzzle snapping,
nearly grazing Patrick’s throat as they fell.

Hope and disbelief rammed into me like a
Mack truck. It wasn’t possible, wasn’t real. Sawyer was dead. I’d
seen it happen.

With a rubber band snap, time sped up to
normal again and the scene before me played out in a rush. Sawyer
missed. Momentum carried him too far and he hit the ground hard,
one of his paws turning beneath him. His leg buckled. He rolled
with it, and came up fast, snarling and favoring his leg.

He was here. He was
alive!
My brain
just froze as I stared, searching for wounds that simply…weren’t
there. For long moments, I forgot the pain, forgot to breathe. My
mate had survived. And he had found his way back me.

A sob ripped free of my throat, buoyed by a
fierce joy that eclipsed the pain and the danger. Sawyer was alive.
With a wrenching shudder that was probably all in my head, my world
tipped back to its proper axis.

Sawyer stalked Patrick, who had gained his
feet and was moving slowly backward. Patrick’s eyes were everywhere
at once, looking for the gun but trying not to take his eyes off
his opponent.

Where the hell is the gun?

The question froze the blood in my veins as
I, too, started looking frantically around the campsite. Sawyer was
hurt, intent on Patrick, moving forward, but limping. He couldn’t
possibly be fully healed from being shot, and if Patrick got to the
gun first it would happen all over again. And this time he wouldn’t
have the strength left to survive it.

The terror of that wrecked me, hurt me more
than the next spasm of pain from my incomplete transition.
No.
No, no, no.
I tried to scream, but the words were all in my
head. What came out of my mouth was something horrible, something
between a snarl and a sob. Something neither canine and nor human.
I clawed the ground, willing myself to change, willing my wolf to
rise and finish this. All of this.

I dug my claws into the dirt and pulled
myself forward on my belly. It didn’t matter that I was caught
between forms, that every motion was agony. I just had to get
there. I concentrated on the action of throwing out my deformed
limbs, digging my claws into the dirt, pulling forward toward the
fighting. I was not going to lose Sawyer. Not again.

I could see the moment Patrick’s eyes found
the gun in the way his body tensed. Sawyer saw it too. He was
already leaping as Patrick flipped over in a dive for the pile of
gear and Sawyer’s jaws snapped on empty air as Patrick’s hand
closed around the barrel of the gun where it had come to rest
against one of the packs. Sawyer turned, coming back for another
strike as Patrick swung the gun around.

I tried to scream a warning. A mistake. My
strangled howl drew Sawyer’s attention to me and Patrick smashed
the butt of the gun into Sawyer’s head, sending him staggering
sideways. His injured leg buckled. He recovered, but Patrick was
already on his feet again, leveling the gun on Sawyer.