That was crap. Bosse growled. “She found her friend here and spoke to the mate we’re hunting.”
Adrian didn’t hide his surprise. “You did?”
Giving him a quick nod, Alifair said, “Yes. Krol put Magdelina in a room I’d been cleaning and told me to attend to whatever she needed. Unlike how he treated other women, he wanted her to be cared for. I think he needed her in good health.” When Alifair paused, Bosse could tell he wasn’t going to like what she had to say.
Taking a deep breath, Alifair told him, “I can’t fault Adrian’s strategic thinking. I feel he’s right to make his decisions based on what he trusts. He’s not insulting me.”
Bosse had come to realize through some of her comments that she was used to being looked at as a faulty piece of magical equipment. That irritated him with everyone.
Adrian said, “Thank you for understanding, Alifair. Okay, I’m leaving Vic here to oversee the castle. We need to head toward the first place the guard told us about.”
Bosse could not go along with that plan. “You go there. I will take Alifair and follow her information.”
“I don’t want you two out there with no backup,” Adrian argued.
Justin added, “It’s safer to stay in one group.”
Not someone to easily fall into line when he felt he had better plans, Bosse asked, “Would you not want us to check both places? What if Alifair’s dream is correct and we fail to find the mate because we did not split up?” His gaze swept over the faces of his friends. “I am hard to kill after two years of daily battles in this hellhole. I can protect my, uhm, us, but I have no way of letting you know if or when we find the women.”
Adrian and Justin exchanged a look. Then grumbling under his breath, Adrian said, “Shit fire, I don’t have a satellite phone to give you to reach us.”
Bosse sighed at yet another unfamiliar thing to him. “Does not matter. I don’t know about satellites.”
Vic snapped his fingers. “Hang on.” He pulled his backpack off and dug into it, fishing out a small orange device with an unlit bulb. “We were going to put this on a transport vehicle if we had to follow one. It’s like an EPIRB that works off satellites.”
Alifair watched Bosse, no doubt waiting to see if he understood any of this, which he didn’t.
Instead of repeating what he’d just said, Bosse quirked an eyebrow at Vic. It wasn’t as if he’d been educated on electronics.
Adrian held his hand out to Vic, who placed the device on his palm. Holding it up to Bosse, Adrian explained, “Basically, if you find the mate, you activate the unit by pulling this small antenna free and pressing this button. It will send a signal to us so that we can locate exactly where you’re standing.”
Now that was something. Bosse took the trinket from Adrian. There were so many things he needed to learn about. He handed the little orange thing to Alifair. “Put this in a pocket. If I have to shift immediately, I might destroy it.” He added, “Please.”
That seemed to work. Alifair put the device away and informed him, “I know what this is.”
Of course, she did. He admired the way she’d kept herself together and still had sass. He didn’t like not knowing if he could trust what he felt for her.
“Thank you both for doing this,” Adrian said. “Don’t get captured or killed. I do not want to go home and admit I left you on your own.”
Bosse snorted. “Your Guardian is a scary shifter.”
Adrian scowled. “Shit fire, I can deal with him. I don’t want to face Jaz.”
Justin burst out laughing.
Adrian glowered at him. “Don’t be so quick to laugh. You’ll be in the soup with me.”
That soured Justin’s mood.
Bosse wanted to get moving. “That big shifter called Beast is a rhino-type animal. I don’t think he’s a natural rhino shifter, but something altered. I’ve never seen him entirely in human form in the year he was caged next to me. You need to watch your back if you run into him. I have no idea where he’ll go, but I don’t trust him not to hunt us.”
Vic had trouble wrapping his head around Beast. “Ayear?”
Bosse shouldn’t care about what happened to the others, but Alifair had brought out a side of him he was starting to recognize. He wanted to be a better person than the one who had faced killing every day for so long.
That had to be the reason his mind jumped to the shifters still here. “What will happen to the rest of the shifters in cages?”
Justin spoke up. “We have to leave them in cages until Vic’s backup arrives. That team will figure out how to deal with each shifter. If they have families and a home to go to, one of our people will escort them home to confirm they have a support group. If they’re dangerous, we’ll transport them to our country where our Guardian will decide if they’re safe and then find them a sanctuary.”
