Dark Wolf (Shadow Pack Book 1) (7 page)

A bumblebee-colored Humvee outfitted with a substantial lift kit and huge knobby tires sat beside a gleaming Harley Davidson in the middle of the black-painted concrete floor of the garage. Despite the circumstances, David had a typical male’s grin of appreciation on his face at the sight of the vehicles. Their footsteps rang out into the cavernous space. Several red toolboxes and benches filled with electronic equipment were pushed tidily up against the wall. A metal staircase ran up the side of the brick building to the loft apartment that was Frank’s usual home, except when his other nature took over fully and he headed for a secret spot in the mountains to hibernate for a few days. Katie knew her uncle did not need to sleep all winter, but as with most were-bears, he did enjoy his sleep, especially if he could do it in a den.

Katie stepped into Frank’s garage, trying hard not to look back at the man who followed her so closely. She’d managed to twist herself out of his grasp, but the feral look on his face told her escape was an illusion. She was sure the heat of his gaze was going to burn two holes into her coat at any moment.

Despite everything, she wanted David badly. It was getting worse by the moment. The hot moisture between her legs was doing nothing to soothe the aching muscles in her body that kept bearing down, wanting to be filled by David Finn.

∙•∙

David ripped his gaze from her to stare in silence at his surroundings. A metal locker that resembled the weapons cabinet he had raided in his own home earlier stood off to one side. He wasn’t surprised at the battle-ready surroundings. One of the drawbacks to being a Were was the misunderstanding, fear, and jealousy of regular human beings. Superstitious humans had hunted Weres for generations, so much so that Weres had been close to extinction at several points in history.

Humans not only suffered from ignorance when it came to David’s kind, but were also prey to a black jealousy of the Weres’ power and longevity. It wasn’t surprising to David that Ambrose wanted those abilities and lifespan for his heirs.

He suddenly remembered the painting in Frank’s office of the sailing ship
The Laughing Bear
. His eyes narrowed. “Frank, how old are you?”

Frank was wedging his bulk behind the wheel of his Humvee. He looked dangerously close to pulling the flimsy driver’s side door off the hinges with his enormous paw. The big man’s eyes took on a wicked glint, and he clutched one hand to his chest in a gesture of mocking indignation. “What a personal question, young man!”

David heard Katie choke back a giggle. He was amazed she could feel the ghost of laughter at this moment, but if there was anyone who could make someone laugh at any time, it probably was Frank.

From her perch in the back seat of the Humvee, she offered her godfather a nugget of comfort. “You don’t look a day over fifty, Uncle Frank.”

“That’s good, since I hit one hundred and fifty-five last year, my sweet girl. Now, can we go before my lifespan gets shortened by your power-mad stepfather?”

David climbed into the passenger seat and clipped on high tech seat belts, specially installed for harsh off-roading. The worn cattle guards on the front of the Hummer told him Frank had a more than passing experience with driving the machine aggressively. He placed one of his guns in his lap and took a deep breath.

“How do we know they’re not right outside the door, Frank?” Katie asked. He could almost feel her gaze burning through the back of his head. That was as close as they were going to get at this moment, although he had begun to hope he could satisfy his need to touch her by inhaling her flowery scent, marked with enough of the musk of a wolf to make him slightly chagrined that he hadn’t realized what she was earlier this morning.
It’s a good thing our wolf natures hadn’t made the decision we were fated immediately, or we’d still be at her house fucking each other’s brains out.
Once again the picture of himself on top of her ready body, slowly sinking into her, almost sent him over the edge. He had an urge to smack himself in the head to obliterate the image. Katie must have caught the tendrils of the thought because the smallest hint of a growl emerged from the backseat.

“Oh, I would say they’re all out there waiting, but that idiot Ambrose wants you alive and hates getting too much attention, so they won’t try to take us down until we leave town. Here, would you please hold my travel mug for me, my dear?” Frank started the Humvee, and the huge non-stock engine roared to life, betraying the vehicle as something that was much more than met the eye.

∙•∙

She sighed and took the silver travel mug filled with Frank’s choicest gourmet mix and placed it securely in the cup holder by the backseat after making sure the mug’s lid was tightly sealed. She would miss the glorious taste of the Laughing Bear’s coffee. Once more on the run, her dream of a home and hearth would be left in the dust. Katie sighed in resignation. “Then I guess you’d better open the door and let them come.”

“My sweetheart, I said nothing about opening the door for them, now did I? I think it best to surprise the little buggers.” With an inhuman growl, Frank hit the gas and plowed straight for the worn metal doors of the garage, tearing out a large section of the door in a blinding swirl of metal and sparks. They hit the street with a clap of thunder and tore sideways down the alley in the opposite direction of the vehicle David had left blocking the road. Amazingly, Frank managed to not scrape one speck of yellow paint from the Humvee onto the walls of the alleyway. Caught by surprise, their followers gaped at the Humvee as it skittered out of the alley and up the snow-covered street. Four Suburbans immediately took off in random skids behind them, the fifth chase vehicle impotently blocked behind David’s Humvee in the alley.

Not quite midday, the streets of the little town had not yet filled with locals and tourists out for their morning constitutionals. The stillness was punctuated every few minutes by the chug of a car loaded down with tourists in search of breakfast. When the screech of metal scraping asphalt broke the spell, everyone within earshot cringed. The black and yellow Humvee appeared and flew past the tiny police station. It was still dragging the remnants of the garage door on the front grille, throwing sparks in every direction.

Deputy Floyd Taylor had had a long night. Out on Shadow Mountain, a few of the weekend residents had gotten a glimpse of an animal and had instantly assumed that it was the Devil-wolf. The usually amicable man, who had the misfortune to look exactly like Opie from the old
Andy Griffith
show, had therefore spent a good part of the night searching for a mountain myth, and he wasn’t happy about it.

He had just seated himself at his desk to write up the reports when he heard the racing of car engines outside. The buzz was not the sound of a vehicle ambling through town at the posted speed of twenty-five miles an hour. These vehicles had to be going at least eighty. He made it out the door in time to see the yellow flash of Frank’s truck pass by. The menacing black trucks of the pursuers followed and nearly ran him down.

»»•««

Katie held David’s headrest with a death grip in spite of her seatbelt and was amazed to find that her blood was still heated to a boiling point from the sexual need for David that flowed through her body. After one particularly hard jolt, his head jerked back and made contact with her hand, making her skin flame. She jerked her hands back and tried to hold on to the handgrips instead. The first bullet whizzed past her head. It easily ripped through the thin metal of the Humvee and exited through the windshield.

“They must be really pissed to fire shots in my direction!” she yelled for Frank and David’s benefit. “Ambrose will kill them for hurting his baby machine.”

David winced visibly at her words as he twisted backward in his seat to get a better look at their pursuers.

She dug along the side of Frank’s seat for his shotgun. Without bothering to try to open the back window, she twisted around, shouldered the gun, blasted a hole straight through it, and hit the truck behind them on the left side of its windshield. She couldn’t tell if she had hit anyone and grimly took aim again.

“Are you shooting
through
my back window? Oh, that’s my girl!” Frank roared as they careened wildly down the highway. “Give the bastards a mouthful of buckshot!”

David looked dazed, like he was trying to get his ears to work again after being partially deafened by the blast of the shotgun.

“Can you use those guns, or do you just carry them to impress the girls?”

David’s eyes flashed at her as he hit the switch to open the window and fired a shot in the direction of the first chase vehicle. As was typical with Weres, his reflexes were faster than those of a human and his aim deadly in its accuracy. The first black truck immediately lost a right front tire. The next shot took out the windshield, causing the driver to completely lose control of the vehicle.

The metallic burnt scent of the shots stung Katie’s nose and made her eyes water as she watched the Suburban and its passengers’ demise. The Suburban cartwheeled off the road, turning into several thousand pounds of scrap metal in the process. It disappeared over one of the many picturesque drop offs outside of the town. An explosion shook the road after it was lost from sight, and Katie resisted the urge to huddle back down in her seat and lay the shotgun down. How many more lives would be sacrificed in the name of her stepfather’s desire for power?

Frank gave a satisfied grunt and adjusted the gears again. “Two down, three to go, my children. When we get to Blair Mountain, we are going to leave the Humvee behind and go to ground for a little run.” He caught the revulsion on Katie’s face in the rearview mirror. “Katie, I am sorry, but you’ve got to get over this fear. If you want to live, you will have to go through the Change when I tell you to. It is the only way.”

Instantly, Katie felt a jolt of nausea and dread. She couldn’t do it. She had avoided the hated “other” part of herself for years. She would have preferred to drive off the side of the mountain rather than face the Change.

“They either aren’t very good, or they’re screwing with us,” David muttered to Frank as he hunkered down in his seat when more bullets began to whiz past the Humvee.

Katie peeked over the backseat at their pursuers and felt someone grab a handful of her hair to pull her head down out of view.

“Just because they aren’t actually trying to kill us doesn’t mean that they won’t get unlucky and hit you!” David snarled.

She resisted the urge to growl back at him, instead dislodging his large callused hand from her head with a slap. Forgetting her sickness over the upcoming Change, she wedged her body down in the jarring floorboard behind Frank’s seat with a glare of fury upward in David’s direction. He looked back and met her eyes unhesitatingly with his own brown ones. Electric current flowed between them once again as they were jerked in every direction by Frank’s driving. Wetness and flame flared anew in the center of her being as she felt his eyes run over her body. His nostrils flared, and if he had been in his wolf form, she knew his ears would be standing erect and the fur on his neck would stand at attention. At that moment they both knew that Destiny had her hands firmly wrapped around their necks.

They were shaken out of the sexual spell when Frank gave a whoop and swerved the yellow Humvee into the huge black SUV that had managed to catch up with them and now crept up on their right hand side. “There are way too many hormones flying about in this car. Can you two put a cork in it for ten more minutes?” he yelled merrily, jerking the wheel.

Katie pulled herself back in her seat and buckled her seatbelt. It was looking like a choice between getting shot or dying when her stepfather finally rolled the vehicle off of a cliff. The truck lurched again. She could finally see what was going on but really wished she couldn’t. She screamed and watched in horror as Frank engaged in a demolition derby at sixty miles per hour on a winding, snow-packed mountain road.

“Are you nuts?” David yelled. The driver of the Suburban never suspected the Humvee’s driver was crazy enough to try to ram him and was completely taken by surprise.

As the Suburban did a
Dukes of Hazzard
jump off the fortuitously placed escarpment, the were-bear excitedly yelled, “I wonder if they yelled ‘Yee-haw!’ when they went over?”

The shots began again, and one
thunk
made her heart stand still. David groaned. “Shit, that’s twice these idiots have made me bleed!”

He started to dab at the back of his shoulder, which had a gaping hole in it. Katie struggled to undo her seatbelt. He growled slightly in her direction and held up his good arm.

“Stay strapped in, Katie. I’m fine. It’ll heal before nightfall. Don’t you know how much punishment we can take?”

Katie was too busy trying to control her heart rate to answer, and David turned back toward the window and began to shoot at the next pursuer. Another person hurt because of her. She suddenly felt the urge to howl in frustration. The first thing she was going to do when she was alone was meditate these dangerous feelings away for this man. She didn’t know how else to deal with the emotions warring within her. The wolf part of her soul wanted to be loosed. Badly.

Frank took an abrupt turn onto a dirt road that went upward at an unbelievable angle. The other vehicles did not have the same ground clearance as the jacked-up Humvee with its huge nubbed tires. The Humvee plowed up the snow-filled mountainside at a fast pace while its pursuers bounced and slid along only a few feet behind. The Suburbans became bogged down in the snow and finally stopped. Katie peeked down the hill to see the passengers of one of the stranded vehicles pouring out of the doors like a well-trained swarm, armed to the teeth. The men in the other vehicle got out to push their ride out of the snow and start it back down the hill, presumably to get reinforcements. They began to put on snowshoes, while the yellow and black Humvee had quickly left them behind.