Timberman Werebear (Saw Bears Book 3) (11 page)

Son of a bacon sandwich, Danielle’s arm felt like she’d shoved it in a bonfire. That dickhead shot her right square in the shoulder, and now she was bumping and bouncing around in the back of Mr. Reynold’s SUV, pretending to be passed out.

Gritting her teeth, she wiped her bloody hand on her pants and pulled her cell phone from her pocket.
Dear goodness, let it be on silent.
She poked the home screen, and it switched over soundlessly. With a little huff of relief, she tried to call Denison. Three times it went straight to his voicemail without ringing, and she spouted off a string of expletives in her mind for the shitty cell phone reception at the trailer park and up on the job site.

Think, think, think.
Reynolds said he had a team who were after the Ashe Crew, and she hadn’t a guess if they were outnumbered or not. She did think they had guns, though, which would give them an advantage. Reynolds obviously knew what he was dealing with, and she doubted his team would show up unprepared with little puff pistols.

If anything happened to Denison…or Brighton or Brooke and her unborn baby. Or Tagan or Skyler or…

No, she couldn’t think like that. She had to focus, ignore the pain fogging her mind and try to help them.

She didn’t have anyone else’s number in the Crew, not even Brooke’s or Skyler’s. She didn’t have a single werebear number but Denison’s.

And Matt’s.

Grimacing at the pain in her shoulder, she searched for the number that buttface had plugged into her phone that first night at Sammy’s Bar. The idiot had listed himself as Hot Matt.

Matt
, she texted.
I need help.

She held her breath, waiting. The cutoff for her cell phone reception was coming any time now as Reynolds drove toward Asheland Mobile Park.

The cell phone vibrated in her clutched hand, and she closed her eyes in relief before reading the screen.

Who is this?

Danielle. Need your crew’s help. Ashe Crew in trouble.

Are you fucking with me right now?

No! Researchers hunting us. Guns. Up on the job site. I’ve been shot. Please hurry!

If this is a joke, I’m going to kill you.

The bars on her cell phone dropped to zero, and the next text she tried to send came back failed.

The screen was covered in sticky red fingerprints, and she watched numbly as her now useless phone turned off. She’d done all she could do, and it hadn’t been enough. Matt wasn’t going to tell his alpha or show up to help. She’d watched the fierce competitiveness at the Lumberjack Wars. They were three separate crews, each watching out for their own.

She couldn’t move her arm anymore. Couldn’t feel anything below her elbow, really. The corners of her vision shattered inward, and she clung to idea that she had to stay awake to help Denison. She had to do…something. Her vision blurred, then doubled, and she clutched her shoulder through the pain to try and staunch the bleeding. The carpeted floorboard was rough against her skin, and she tried to concentrate on the door handle on the back door—the one she’d tried to open four times now. Everything grew dimmer until she couldn’t see anything at all.

Apparently, Reynolds was very good at trapping things.

****

“Rise and shine, Ms. Clayton. I have big plans for you.”

Danielle cracked open her eyes as something stinging rang across her cheek, but everything in front of her was out of focus, as if she’d taken a shot the size of a fifth of whiskey. Pain burned down her arm and throbbed through her temple as she tried desperately to figure out where she was.

Reynolds was taking off his jacket in front of the opened back door of the SUV she was lying in. Her mouth dry as cotton, she struggled to prop herself up on her good arm.

“Faster, love. We don’t have all day.” Reynolds grabbed her shredded shoulder, blasting agony down her arm as he yanked her from the vehicle.

Her ears rang, and belatedly, she realized that awful screeching sound was her own screaming.

“Danielle!” Denison yelled, pulling her from the loop of confused anguish she’d been stuck in.

The scene before her would haunt her for the rest of her life, however short that might be. The machinery of the Ashe Crew’s jobsite hadn’t even been turned off, and it rumbled, drowning out any wood song from the forest beyond. A bear lay motionless except for the ragged rise and fall of his stomach in front of the processor. Denison and the others had been lined up along the edge of the landing with men dressed in black uniforms holding guns against the backs of their heads as they knelt in the dirt. Skyler was nowhere to be seen, but Brooke was crouched on her knees at the end with a bleeding gash across her temple. Tagan wouldn’t look at Danielle, but something was wrong with his face. A constant stream of blood flowed from his chin. Kellen was beside him, eyes on his alpha as if awaiting an order Tagan didn’t seem able to give.

And Denison… Half of his face was covered in red, and his jeans were stained dark on one leg. When he laid eyes on Reynolds, who was shoving Danielle toward them from behind, he went white as a sheet, and his pupils dilated to pinpoints. From here, his eyes looked completely silver. When he turned to Brighton, who was kneeling beside him, his brother wore a similar expression of horror and recognition.

Danielle wanted to kill Reynolds. She wanted him to pay for what he’d done to her bears. She burned to avenge them. Her anger mixed with the pain in her shoulder as he jerked her to a halt.

She struggled against him, yanking her ruined arm from his grasp, but cold metal pressed against her temple, and the crack of a gun cocking was deafening so close to her ear.

She bit her lip hard to stifle the oncoming tears and dragged her gaze to Denison’s. He shook his head slightly in a silent order to stop fighting.

“So this is about revenge,” Denison said, blinking slowly and bringing his hate-filled gaze to land over her shoulder on Reynolds.

“Oh, it’s more than revenge. It’s the end of a long, satisfying hunt. I was happy to drag it on. To let you feel like you were safe up here in these mountains surrounded by people you thought could protect you from your fate, but I’m afraid my timetable has changed in recent months. I’m sick, you see. My disease is chronic and debilitating, and my doctor says I have only a few months to live. I need your bite, so killing you wouldn’t reward me. It would doom me. And I’d like to think I’m a much savvier hunter than that. I studied the tissue samples we took from you and from Brighton. The regenerative properties were astounding. You baffled my team, and that’s not an easy feat. We tried to sicken your tissue with every disease known to man, and nothing weakened it. So,” Reynolds ground out, shoving the gun harder against Danielle’s head as his fingers wrapped around her throat. “Who wants to do the honors?”

Danielle shook her head at Denison. “Don’t. Don’t give him a bear. He doesn’t deserve one.”

Reynold’s grip tightened, cutting off her air completely, and she scrabbled against his hands with her fingertips.

“How about I count to three. I’d really like Denison or Brighton to do it, for old time’s sake. You’ll all die for what Denison did to my wife, but if you are good little animals and give me what I want, I’ll let this one go.”

“He won’t!” she gasped out. She was going to pass out again soon, but she’d be damned if the last thing Denison did was give this man what he wanted. Not for her. Reynolds had taken way too much from him already.

“One,” Reynolds said.

Denison looked at his brother, and Brighton’s shoulders sagged in defeat. His eyes had gone dead as he looked off into the woods behind them.

“Two.”

Denison struggled to his feet, favoring his bloodied leg.

“Don’t,” she pleaded, struggling to drag air molecules to her suffocating lungs.

“Let her go first,” Denison said in a tired tone that said he’d already made up his mind. “At least act like you won’t chase her down the minute you kill us.”

Reynolds chuckled, and she cringed away from the sound so close to her ear. He shoved her forward, releasing his strangle hold on her neck and said, “Deal.”

Denison caught her before she fell. “Run,” he murmured against her ear as he settled her on her feet.

Her face crumpled as tears streamed down her cheeks. She knew what she could and couldn’t do, and she couldn’t walk away from her people. Not knowing what was about to happen to them. “I can’t leave you like this.”

“Badger,” he gritted out. His voice dipped to a barely audible whisper. “I need you out of the way.”

In the distance, an animal roared, and then another, the noise lifting the fine hairs on Danielle’s arms. The woods filled with bellowing grizzly battle cries.

The corner of Denison’s lip turned up. “You clever girl,” he whispered.

“What the fuck was that?” Reynolds asked a pair of men with semi-automatic weapons trained on the forest behind them. “I told you to subdue all of them.”

A giant falcon screeched from above them as she rode the air currents over the landing. Skyler.

Denison lunged at Reynolds as he brought the gun up toward the bird and wrenched his wrist until the clean
snap
of his bone could be heard.

“Now!” Tagan roared, his face morphing into something horrifying as the alpha spun and jerked the weapon out of his assailant’s hands. Chaos and gunfire erupted. One by one, bears ripped out of her friends in blonds and browns, blacks and reds.

But not Denison and not Brighton. They fought human.

Denison hooked his fingers around Reynold’s throat and slammed him down onto the ground with a sickening thud.

“Run!” he yelled, casting her a blazing look that dumped adrenaline into her system and got her legs moving.

Disoriented, she ran low, afraid of the zinging bullets as she made her escape. Ahead, a line of giant grizzlies was charging the clearing. A scream clogged her throat as they thundered past her without a single glance. Their gazes were murderous and intent as they joined the battle behind her.

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” she murmured, as she skidded to a halt near the Bronco and watched her friends fight for their lives.

The gunfire had ceased, and men’s screaming echoed down the mountainside. Fur and Teflon blurred until she couldn’t make out anything in the pandemonium. She searched for Denny, and her heart faltered as she saw him dragging Reynolds out of the fray. Her mate was holding an ax and wore a deadly expression as he slammed the man who’d tortured him and his brother against a tree.

Brighton followed behind, and Denny didn’t even look at him as he turned and tossed his twin the ax. Brighton caught it with one hand, and in a motion as smooth as river water, he pulled it back, rotated his hips, and slammed the blade toward Reynold’s neck.

With a yelp, Danielle covered her ears and turned away before she could see the rest. That evil man had earned his death, but she didn’t have to watch it.

When she dared to look back at the landing, it was all over. Bears were turning back to humans, and the team that had planned on annihilating the entire Ashe Crew lay scattered about the piles of logs and rumbling machinery.

Matt and his Gray Back Crew had come through, and when she counted heads, she realized the Boarlanders were here, too.

She sagged to her knees in disbelief that this had all happened. She’d been pulled from the SUV to find the Ashe Crew on their knees, but they hadn’t been cowering to the men who had come for them. Their fearsome faces had said they were biding their time. They’d had a plan, she just hadn’t known it. Pride surged through her that the crews had taken their territory back and fought together. They might’ve been competitors in the Lumberjack Wars, but when it came to real danger to others of their kind, they’d come running, no matter the physical danger to themselves.

Denison was crouched beside his brother near the tree line. Brighton was on his hands and knees. He had his fists clenched and was leaning hard on them, his teeth gritted as if he was in pain. Denison talked to him as he gripped his brother’s shoulder, then rubbed his back, then gripped his shoulder again.

Brighton’s pain gutted her. Twins had a special bond, and she’d seen the connection between them. That ability to say a hundred things without saying a word. They would share this pain together. Brighton rocked back on his heels and stood, embraced Denison hard, and clapped him on the back. Then Brighton pushed away and stalked off into the woods.

Denny watched him go, hands on his hips and throat moving as he swallowed. He twitched his head, wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt, then lifted his agonized gaze to her. He looked so vulnerable for just a second before he sighed and gave her a ghost of a smile.

A giant flapping of wings sounded, and a falcon bigger than any wild bird Danielle had ever seen stretched its curved talons out. As her feet hit the ground, her feathers disappeared and were replaced by human skin.

“No losses,” Skyler said. “Drew took the worst of it before we were subdued, but he’s already healing. We all are.” She stretched her head to the side and flicked her dark locks out of the way to expose a long gash across her collar bone.

Good God, Danielle wished she could heal like that. If anything, her injury felt like it was getting worse.