Rogue Alpha: Wolf Shifter Romance (Wild Lake Wolves Book 1) (13 page)

Chapter Twenty

I stepped gingerly across the room, barely allowing
myself to breathe as I headed for the gun and darts. Even if I managed to get
out of here before he woke, he’d probably figure out the thing was gone. But,
if we were lucky, it wouldn’t matter. We still had hours before sunlight.
Plenty of time to release Luke and start tracking him. Plus, there was a good
chance Flood wouldn’t notice the gun was gone right away. He didn’t use it
every day. In fact, I’d only ever seen him with it once. There was hope and
more than a good shot we’d have a day or more.

I leaned down slowly and grabbed the box of darts,
holding them steady so they wouldn’t rattle. Then, I closed my fingers around
the barrel of the gun and walked back to the door.

Flood stirred. He rolled to his back and his eyes
opened. I froze, pressing myself flat against the wall and into the shadows. He
rubbed a hand over his groin and I saw the telltale tenting of his sheets.
Gross. The guy had a hard on and was dreaming about God knows what. A few
seconds ticked by, and he seemed to settle back down.

I took a deep breath and held it as I made my way back
toward the door. I didn’t want to turn my back on Flood, but I had to turn the
latch and open the door. Slowly, deliberately, I eased my way out. I grimaced
as I stepped through the door and closed it soundlessly behind me.

Red menace stared me in the face when I turned
around.

Mal’s black wolf stood an inch away, his back
arched, his tail up, and his frightening row of deadly teeth bared.

I put a finger to my lips. I waved the dart gun in
front of me. But, in this state, Mal was incapable of human reason. He saw
threat and danger and me in the middle. I put a hand out and laid it flat on
his head. He flinched, but didn’t advance. I pointed to the woods and mouthed,
“Let’s go!”

Mal looked behind me once. I recognized the same
bloodlust clouding his eyes as I’d seen in Luke. But Mal’s was directed at
Flood. Yeah. Time to get us both the hell out of here before he ripped Flood’s
throat out for good. As much as the idea had appeal, I still needed the bastard
if I had any hope of clearing my name.

I tugged a tuft of hair on Mal’s back and started
toward the woods. He growled again but fell into step. He let out a sharp whine
that I knew was meant for me. In wolf-speak, I think he’d just said something
like, “Just wait until I get you home.”

We ran the rest of the way back to the Range Rover.
On the way in, stealth had been the key. On the way out, it was speed. Mal ran
ahead and around me, watching the perimeter. When we got to the vehicle, I
opened the passenger door and climbed in the driver’s side. I expected Mal to
shift and hop in beside me, but he just froze in front of me.

“Get in!” I whispered, still worried our voices
might somehow carry all the way back to the cabins.

Mal pawed the ground but didn’t otherwise move. He
narrowed his eyes and let out a chuff. He bobbed his head up and down toward
the Range Rover. He didn’t speak in words, and yet somehow I understood him
perfectly. He wanted me to drive back to the cabin without him.

I didn’t like it. Not one bit. But, I’d altered the
plan on the fly back at the outpost, so I couldn’t exactly give him shit for
doing it now. I let out a sigh and shut the passenger door. Then, I climbed
into the driver’s seat and started the engine. By the time I looked back up,
Mal had torn off ahead of me. Whatever was going on with him, he clearly wanted
to stay in wolf form. It unsettled me more than a little; it meant he wasn’t
certain we were in the clear yet. I put the car in gear and headed back to
Mal’s cabin, hoping I’d find him there when I arrived.

***

When I pulled up to Mal’s cabin, it was still eerily
quiet. I knew I had to take that as a good sign. I grabbed the dart gun and my
backpack and headed inside. Luke was still out cold in front of the fireplace,
tied up just as we’d left him. For the first time since we’d set out on this
caper, my breath came easier.

Mal hadn’t come back but I knew this part of the
plan was all me anyway. I fired up the laptop and took out one of the microchip
kits. With shaking fingers, I loaded the chip into the syringe, scanned it and
stepped over to Luke.

His breathing was shallow but steady. A red patch
stained the center of the bandages we’d changed before we left, but it wasn’t
getting any wider. It looked like the bleeding had finally stopped. I grabbed
the loose skin at the scruff of his neck and positioned the needle.

The front door flew open Mal stood there, wearing
the pair of jeans he’d put in the Range Rover and a fearsome stare.

“Not now,” I said, popping the plastic cap off the
syringe with my teeth. He looked ready to rip my head off.

Mal came to my side and put a hand on Luke’s back as
I plunged the needle into his skin and ejected the chip. I pulled the needle
out and smoothed back the hair over the puncture wound I made.

“How long before it starts to transmit?” Mal’s tone was
ominous.

“Pretty much now if we’re lucky. I need to fire up
the laptop and launch the software. Once that’s up and running, we’re good to
go.”

“Good,” Mal said, his voice flat and devoid of
emotion. It unsettled me. I knew he was mad about my stunt at the cabin, but he
was going to have to see the necessity of it sooner or later.

“Get that thing running,” he said, gesturing to the
laptop. “I’m taking him out of here.”

Before I could question it, Mal scooped Luke’s limp
form up in his arms. God, he was so strong. Even sick as he was, Luke the wolf
wasn’t a lightweight. Mal picked him up as if he were a feather.

“I’ll be back. Luke’s going to remember where this
cabin is, but I’m going to lay him down where he attacked you. Hopefully, he’ll
be disoriented enough to give us some time.”

Time for what, I wanted to ask, but the stony
expression in Mal’s eyes quieted my questions. God, he seemed really mad at me.
I nodded and started firing up the laptop. Without another word, Mal carried
Luke out of the cabin and disappeared from sight.

I set the laptop on one of the chairs and sat cross-legged
in front of it, waiting for the software to boot. We had a few hours until
daylight. If things were business as usual at the outpost, Flood would start logging
his data at daybreak. I wanted to get as much info as I could before he figured
out there was an extra tracker running.

It took only a few seconds for the GPS map to load.
It filled the screen in deep green and blue, marking the dense forest, rivers,
and lakes throughout the Manistee National Park.

“Come on!” I gently tapped the side of the screen,
knowing full well that would do nothing other than make me feel better. As the
minutes ticked by, the small red dots marking our specimens started to populate
the map. I was looking for Tag 16: That would be Luke.

The screen hung up twice. This far out in the woods,
the cell signal from the old air card we used would cut out. For a moment, I
thought I’d never get a clear signal. Finally, though, a fast moving red dot
flashed across the screen.

“There you are!”

I went into settings and changed the dot from red to
orange so we could distinguish it faster from the fawns Flood tracked. It would
only show up that way on this laptop, so there was no risk of Flood picking it
out.

“God, he’s so fast.” With Mal carrying him, the dot
was moving at more than twenty miles an hour on foot. I checked the settings
twice to make sure I was reading that right. Then, abruptly, the orange dot
stopped moving. I checked the coordinates. Sure enough, Mal had him roughly in
the area where Luke had come after me, about a mile north of the ranger
station.

A few more seconds ticked by. The orange dot pulsed strong
but didn’t move. Luke was bedded down, probably still unconscious. The longer
he was, the better. Mal needed time to get out of there and back to me. The
moment I thought it, my heart fluttered. Mal was out there. Exposed. With a
pack of four strong werewolves hunting him and wanting him dead.

Though he hadn’t told me the plan, I knew we’d need
to be on the move, and quickly. We couldn’t risk the chance that Luke would be
able to lead Asher and the pack straight back here when he woke. I started
packing up what I could. If we were out in the open, Mal could hunt for
himself, but I’d need to eat. I stuffed my backpack with energy bars and filled
three large canteens with water from the well. I took the tranquilizer darts
out of the box and found plastic bags to seal them in case we had to travel
through water again. I did the same for the 12 gauge shells. I packed everything
into the back of the Range Rover and waited for Mal to come back to me, my
heart pounding with anticipation the entire time.

Four hours went by before he came back. He’d tell me
later that he zig-zagged and circled back several times to throw off any trail
Luke or the others might pick up. It would buy us time, but we couldn’t stay at
the cabin anymore. Mal was strangely quiet as he helped me pack the rest of our
necessities. Finally, after about an hour of the silent treatment, I couldn’t
take another second.

“What’s the matter with you?” I stood with my hands
on my hips at the back of the car. Mal had just finished packing a tent and
shoved in on top of the rest of the supplies.

He looked at me, eyes glowering, but didn’t answer.
I stepped forward and put my hands on his chest. “Talk to me! You’ve been
acting like an asshole ever since we got back from Flood’s camp. What the hell
is the matter with you?”

A muscle in his neck jumped while every other muscle
in his body went rigid. He put his hands up and gripped me by the shoulders.

“You put yourself at risk. You disobeyed me.”

I reared back as if he’d slapped me. “I what?”

“You went into . . .
his
. . . cabin. You put
yourself close to him. God. I can still smell him on you.”

“Again . . . what? Mal. Think. We need the dart gun.
There’s no place else to get one like that in a hurry. We’ve got a pack of
wolves after us and you want to bring four of them back alive.”

“I can’t shoot a gun if I’m a wolf, Laura.”

I literally sputtered for a second at that. “Yeah.
But I can, Mal. I’ve told you before and you’ve seen the evidence. I’m a good
shot. I grew up hunting with five brothers.”

Mal’s grip on my arms tightened and he shook me hard
enough to make my teeth rattle. “You think I’m letting you get anywhere near
that pack? Near Asher? You’re going to show me how the trackers work, and then
you’re going to get in that car and head for Wild Lake and wait for me. That’s
what’s happening.”

I was thunderstruck finally hearing his plan. He
wanted to send me away. He planned to take on Asher’s pack all by himself.
First, rage boiled through me. We were in this together. Mal’s fate was my
fate. He’d been telling me that from the beginning and I knew it was true in my
gut. But, as I looked at him, standing with his legs slightly apart, fire
raging behind his eyes, I sensed something else too. In addition to whatever
macho, testosterone-fueled, Alpha wolf reasoning he had for trying to bench me,
I could feel the desperate fear coiled deep inside him. I stepped back and he
loosened his grip on my arms. His chest heaved with his hot breath.

“Mal,” I said, my voice cracking. “You need me.”

His nostrils flared and he curled his right hand
into a fist then smashed it against the door of the Range Rover, making a
circular dent. He pointed a finger at me, his words came out slow. “I will not
risk you. I will not lose you.”

The emotion behind his words tore at my heart as
something clicked into place. Mal had already lost everything. His pack. His
home. Everything. He’d been on his own for months suffering from a different
kind of torture than Luke, but it had to be torture just the same. Wolves
weren’t meant to live alone.
My
wolf wasn’t meant to live alone.

I stepped forward, placing trembling fingers on his
chest. His muscles tensed beneath my touch, but he didn’t pull away. Instead,
he closed his fingers around my wrist and encircled my waist with his other
arm.

“I will not lose you, Laura.”

I swallowed hard and looked up at him. The fire in
his eyes masked the desolation he’d had to live with for so long. “I can’t lose
you either, Mal. Not now. But you’re
not
alone anymore. And I can help
you. If you try to take on Asher’s pack by yourself, you’re going to die.
Strong as you are, you’re outnumbered five to one. I don’t know what happened
to you back at Wild Lake, but you’ve been sent on an impossible mission. You
can’t take out Asher alone. Not with the rest of the pack under his control.”

“Nothing matters except keeping you safe. Do you
understand? I don’t have to survive, but you do.”

“I don’t accept that!” My voice rose an octave, my
tone bordering on hysteria. “You stand there telling me how you can’t live
without me. Well, I can’t live without you anymore either. You knew what would
happen when you marked me. I don’t want to go to Wild Lake. Not unless you’re
by my side.”