Like most wolves, water makes me curl my lip, but I’m faster as a wolf, so I shift.
On the other side of the creek, I spot a few drops of blood heading toward the mountains. Not much, but if Kat is bleeding, then she’s still breathing.
I leave my enforcers behind. They’ll catch up.
Head down and my nose full of the strange shifter’s scent, I follow it until it stops near tire tracks on a dusty road heading into the mountains. We’re in rural northern Montana, so there isn’t much around, and it’ll be miles before we reach the next town.
I run for hours.
The faint light in the distance signals the start of a new day when a large, brown wolf suddenly jumps in front of me. I skid to a stop so I don’t run into him.
My pace must have been slowing for Emilio to dart forward like that, and even though my lungs burn with exhaustion, I snap at him to back off.
Breathing heavily, Emilio shifts back to his human form. Sweat beads on his forehead as his chest heaves from exertion. “We have to stop, Aren.”
Shifting back is tough. Multiple shifts and hours on my feet have worn me out. But someone took Kat. I would go to the ends of the earth to save her. “Would you feel the same if someone took Joy?"
He looks distressed at the idea of someone taking his pregnant mate. “No, but we don’t even know if he took Kat this way.”
“He’s right,” Finan says, having shifted while I was talking to Emilio.
Cruz is nodding, sweat covering his chest as he peers back the way we came. “We’ve been running down this road for hours. They might not have stayed on it.”
I take in my surroundings for the first time since I put my head down and started running.
We’re close to the old Douglas foreclosed farm that’s been sitting empty for the past ten years. That’s not all there is around here.
I curse. “The old mines.”
Finan scratches his brown hair. “This entire area is littered with them. He might have pulled off the road and hidden in one."
Cruz speaks slowly, carefully sorting through his thoughts. “He waited until the party when everyone was inside. Then hewatched, looking for the right moment. Whatever he did to hurt Kat was silent. None of us heard a thing.”
He couldn’t have stabbed her. She would have seen him before he got close. Maybe he leaped at her from the water?
I shake my head. No, she’d have seen him on the other side of the creek. Some guns have silent attachments, but it can’t be easy to get one of those.
“He carried her across the creek so we couldn’t track them off our territory or hear a car approaching the house,” Emilio adds.
“And he had a car waiting, which means he must have had a place to take her.” I try not to think about whoever took her stamping his foot on the gas and driving Kat straight out of Montana.
Iwillfind her. But he could be anywhere.
“We shouldn’t have stopped,” I growl, my wolf snarling at me to keep going. “Maybe she got away from him. She could be bleeding out somewhere.”
Finan watches me closely. “He was killing every guy who got close to her back at her old college. He’s not going to let her die if he was trying to get her alone all this time. He’ll have stopped somewhere, if only to tend to her wounds.”
She lost a lot of blood. Shewillheal, but the bigger the hurt, the longer it takes for a shifter to heal.
“Which is why we need to keep going,” I snarl.
Finan squeezes my shoulder. “That’s why we need to return to the house, map out all the old mines where he could have hidden her, and come back with a car and ideally more people to cover this area.”
I start to complain.
He continues, “She’s your mate, and she is pack. Wewillget her back, but we need to re-group, Aren. We could have run past their hiding place hours ago.”
Finan has always been the voice of reason. The one who can reach past my rage to get me to think when I’m ready to tear something apart.
