Wolver's Rescue (35 page)

“
The Alpha’s men aren’t
likely to have given him time to pee before they took him,” Stretch
added.

“
The Alpha’s men ain’t
likely to take him, neither,” Helen pointed out. “They’d have
killed him where he stood.”

Travis winced, but bravely added his two
cents. “They definitely wouldn’t have left the other vehicle
behind.”

“
So,” Samuel drew out the
word with a little warning glare at the others, “That must mean he
and Bull took it.”

“
But where? Where would they
be going at this time of night and why wouldn’t they tell
someone.”

No one knew.

It was another two hours before they found
out. The cubs whistled an all clear and a few minutes later, Bogie
as wolf, literally skid on his chin into camp. The moon set and
Bogie transformed there on the ground.

Chest heaving, he gasped out, “They got
Bull.”

The men were going to find Bull. They would
start their search at Tommie’s house and follow wherever it led
them. It was the best they could do. Even Boris insisted on riding
along. Their plan was simple. Find Bull. Piling into the truck,
they called goodbye with promises not to return until they had Bull
or information about his whereabouts.

Tommie was too numb to cry. She’d insisted on
taking the pack to her house and he had gone to make sure it was
safe. Now he would be in the hands of a monster and it was all her
fault. All she could see was the fear in his eyes when he’d crawled
in that cage to get her.

“
I don’t like it,” Cora
said.

“
Me neither,” Molly agreed.
“We started this together. We fought off the Alpha together. Bull’s
part of us now. He wouldn’t sit here twiddling his thumbs if it was
one of us got taken.”

Tommie agreed, but for different reasons. If
she could talk to Gantnor... The silence around her made her look
up.

“
Don’t know what you’re
thinking, but I can feel what you’re feeling and it ain’t good,”
Cora spoke and the rest of them nodded.

“
Don’t go getting ideas,”
Helen said. “I ain’t going to go risk my life, only to lose it when
Bull finds out we let you do something stupid. I ain’t felt so much
hope since I was a pup. I’m not letting you screw it up.” She shook
her fist at Tommie. “We need you both. Bull for strength and
smarts, and you for, well, I don’t know what. Dreamin’ I guess. All
I know is that if we go, you’d better behave, ‘cause I’ve got no
problem walloping you if you don’t.”

Cora elbowed Tommie in the ribs. “Don’t mind
Helen. That’s her way of saying she likes you. And if she don’t
wallop you, I will.” She turned to the tent where Macey slept.
“Macey! Come on out here. I know you’ve been listening.”

Macey crawled out of the tent and came to
Cora, head bowed and hands folded in front of her as a good omega
should. “Yes, ma’am?”

“
Don’t ma’am me. I ain’t the
queen. You’re in charge of the camp until we get back. You set
those cubs one at a time to watch and you make sure they do it. You
keep watch over those pups and if we don’t show by breakfast, you
see that they’re fed and watered. We’re trusting you on
this.”

“
Yes ma’am. I promise I’ll
take good care of them. All of them.” Macey sniffed back her
tears.

“
Now don’t go getting all
teary eyed. It’s not like I’m crowning you Queen of the May.” Cora
turned to Tommie. “You still have that phone number?”

Tommie ran and got the paper from her tent.
When she handed it to Macey she whispered, “I told you they’d come
around. You know what to do with this?”

Macey nodded. “You can count on me.”

Cora dusted off her hands. “That’s it then.
Everybody on the bus.”

“
Um, Cora?” the quiet Sarah
interrupted. “The men have guns.”

“
Good thinking. Ladies, find
a weapon. Teeth and fists aren’t going to win this
fight.”

Armed with Boris’ precious carving knives, a
small hatchet, along with various frying pans and stout sticks, the
women boarded the school bus.

“
We’re off to save Tommie’s
man and our, well, whatever he is, he’s ours,” Helen shouted,
raising her fry pan in the air.

This was lunacy. Six wolver women in a forty
year old school bus, armed with kitchen utensils, riding to the
rescue of an alpha male, was ludicrous. They didn’t know where they
were going or if they had enough gas to get there, but they were
going anyway. They were all crazy.

Tommie had never been so proud or loved any
five women more. Then again, she had been crazy for most of her
life.

They never made it to Tommie’s house. About
ten miles out of town, they saw the old pickup truck at a cross
roads. Stretch was on the outside standing on the running board and
hanging onto Shorty’s window.

“
They must have taken the
SUV,” Louise shouted excitedly. “Stretch has the best nose. He’s
got the scent.”

As the truck came to a stop, Stretch jumped
down and began to run along the road, body bent, head turning from
side to side.

Samuel stormed over to the bus. “What the
hell do you think you’re doing, woman?” he shouted at Cora’s open
window.

“
I’m following the man I
love into the battle,” she replied. “I told you at the beginning, I
won’t take a back seat and I’m not starting now. I fought by your
side against the Alpha’s men. I’m fighting by your side now. You
were the one that said we’re in this together, you old buzzard.
Wither thou goest and all that crap. Now get back in the truck or
get on the bus. We’re wasting time. Stretch is pointing the way and
Bull is waiting on us to come and get him.”

“
I love you, too, you old
witch,” Samuel yelled at her, “Still trying to figure out why.” He
stomped back to the truck with his hands in the air.

“
He always was a romantic,”
she cackled and closed the window.

At each crossroad, Stretch leapt down and
checked the pavement. When they turned left, Tommie jumped from her
seat.

“
I know where we are. I know
where we are,” she shouted. “There’s a farm up ahead with a big red
well out in front of the house. I used to beg my parents to stop
and let me make a wish. It had a roof over it and a bucket hanging
from a rope, just like in the picture books.” She was talking a
mile-a-minute, rambling about nonsense, but she knew where she was.
She’d been down this road dozens of times. But knowing where they
were wasn’t enough. They needed to know where they were going. Why
hadn’t she thought of it before?

“
I know where he is. Cora,
catch up to the truck. Tell them to follow us. I know where Bull
is!”

Uncle Ray called it the farm and it was where
he spent his weekends. She loved to visit him there when she was a
child. It wasn’t a farm. It was a small gated estate, but Tommie
didn’t know that then. There weren’t any chickens, but he had
peacocks. Their cry’s would sometimes awaken and frighten her.

What she remembered most, though, were the
rabbits. Gantnor would release one and urge her to chase it. She
thought it was fun until the day she caught one and he urged her to
kill it. That was the day she stopped asking to visit the farm. She
still went, but she spent her time walking over the grounds and
refused to go near the rabbit hutch. As a teenager, she finally
refused to go at all.

The wishing well was gone and the landscape
had changed with the passage of time, but Tommie’s conviction never
wavered. She was a wolver. She never got lost. She’d been there
before, she could find it again.

The property was surrounded by a wall
shrouded by a thick hedgerow of brambles and briars and coniferous
trees. The inner side of the wall was the same. The iron gates, she
was sure, would be closed and locked.

Tommie leaned around the driver’s seat to
speak more privately with Cora. “Around the next curve, you’ll see
the gates straight ahead. We need to stop, Cora. We need a plan. We
need to figure out how we’re going to get in.”

“
The hell we do,” the old
woman said as she rounded the curve.

She was going too fast and Tommie would have
sworn the old bus tilted up on two wheels. It bounced when it
righted. Cora shifted and they picked up more speed.

“
Hang on!” she shouted when
the gates came into view.

“
Slow down, Cora. There’s
another curve,” Tommie warned.

Cora wasn’t listening. Tommie sat back in her
seat and hung on.

One of the women screamed as bus barreled
through the gates.

~*~

Bull opened his eyes to find metal bars,
about six inches from his nose. They were vertically spaced about
six inches apart. The cement was cold beneath his body. The bright
lights of the room almost blinded him. He tasted the scent of his
own blood, but felt no pain. He was naked and bleeding and caged; a
nightmare come true.

Fear seized him and he closed his eyes. He
slowed his breathing and tried to steady the pounding beat of his
heart. His mind, still foggy from whatever drug they’d used, wasn’t
strong enough to block the images of those other cages from his
past. There were six, but he only cared about one.

“
Mama. Come.
Free.”

But he couldn’t get her out. He needed
fingers to work the latch and he was a wolf.

She was lying on her belly, her head on her
paws. Her eyes were sad and clouded over with grief at the loss of
her mate. She was bleeding from several wounds. Her fur was matted
with her blood. When he pressed his nose through the bars, she
rallied enough to kiss it with her tongue.

“
Go,” she whispered in his
mind. “Go before they catch you.”

“
No!”

“
Go. The pups.”

He didn’t want to think about his siblings.
They were in the cabin in the woods where he was born, huddled
before a wood stove that had long since gone out. He couldn’t tell
his mother that. He was new at this mind talk and had trouble
forming the words. He did his best to relieve her worry.

“
Pups. Good.”

For three days he came to her. One of the
caged wolvers, another female, died the first night. He could smell
no injury on her. She just laid her head down and died. Another, a
male, died the second night. From far away, he could hear the male
howling and snarling with rage as he battered himself against the
bars. And then it stopped. When he came to his mother, the other
wolver was dead.

The other three wolvers all sat, staring at
nothing. Unlike him, they could shift back to man with the next
moon, but they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t give the secret away.

On the third night, his mother couldn’t lift
her head enough to kiss his nose. Her whimper was soft and
constant. He pressed his head between the bars until it hurt. He
stretched his tongue as far as it would go to give her one last
kiss.

“
Love you,” she said, her
voice a barely discernable whisper in his mind. “Take care of my
pups.” Her eyes remained open as the last breath left
her.

His long howl of grief was interrupted by
the shouts of men. He ran and never looked back.

Sharp pain did what his befuddled brain could
not. He was fully awake, but with the residual memory of the wolf
still with him, he snarled and snapped at the electric prod that
poked his stomach.

“
Perfect! I knew you were
the one as soon as they brought you in.”

There were two men in the room. One held the
prod. It was the other who spoke.

Of medium height and athletic build, Raymond
Gantnor was the movie version of the perfect doctor. His tanned and
marginally lined face was topped by thick, dark hair, greying at
the temples. His smile was warm and reassuring, and showed off two
even rows of pearly white teeth. His slacks were pressed with a
sharp crease. His blue oxford shirt, open at the neck, looked
starched. Looking at him, no one would suspect that under the
pristine lab coat with his name embroidered on the pocket, lay a
monster.

“
It’s the full moon, isn’t
it? I should have paid more attention to the werewolf mythology.
Look at him, Jenkins. You can see it in his eyes. I saw that look
in her eyes a few times. Animal eyes. I tried everything I could to
make her change, but she wouldn’t. I wonder now if she could. I’d
like to know the answer to that. Is it only the males that change
or is she defective in some way?”

“
Defective. All females are.
They can’t change,” Bull answered. Until he figured a way out,
Tommie at least, might be protected.

He saw the room through wolf’s eyes, but he
could do nothing to change them. They burned with dryness. His wolf
was close to the surface, snarling and growling with its panicked
need to be released. It was confused. Images of their surroundings
bounced in and out of its consciousness. Instinct called to it to
be aware of the minute details of its surroundings, but the images
faded as soon as the animal shifted its eyes. Confusion led to
anger and anger to rage.

Bull fought to control it, to use it when the
time was right and not before.

He shook his head as if his clearing mind was
still confused. “What did you give me?”

“
A simple combination of
animal anesthetics. It took me a while to get the dosages right. I
never had live test subjects before, non-human ones I mean. Tommie
was my first subject in the drug department. I perfected it with
the males. The dosage would kill a man, but you aren’t a man are
you?