Hard As Steele (A BBW Paranormal Romance) (Timber Valley Pack) (16 page)

             
He glanced at Roxanne. “Your father was a distant relative of ours.”

             
“You’re the Gunds, aren’t you? I think I remember my father telling me that.” Roxanne frowned, still looking bewildered.

“This is a first for our kind,” Steele said.  “
Humans and shifters have had sexual encounters, despite our best efforts to keep to our own kind, but we always thought it was impossible for such a union to result in children.   There has never, in recorded history going back a thousand years, been an instance of humans and shifters being able to have children together. Your family must be a special genetic strain that is able to successfully breed with wolves.”

Steele saw that Katherine and the blond shifter who’d shown up on his doorstep were standing next to each other.

              “So, you two are together?” he said.

             
“Oh, no,” Katherine said hastily, and the young man moved away from her. “We’re just friends.” She glanced after him.  The look on her face said that she’d like more. Maybe the young man didn’t share her interest, or maybe he felt that he couldn’t. It was hard to tell.

“
Sir, with all due respect, you’re revealing too much about us,” Dash said, biting the words out. “The Wardens will not be pleased.”

             
“Dash. They’re shifters, the same as us,” Steele said. “We need to welcome them into our community and offer them protection, and the chance to meet others of their own kind.”

             
“How can that be, when half of them are human?” Dash shook his head.

             
Steele had to admit that it was a serious dilemma, but the Council of Elders were just going to have to figure it out. It wasn’t fair to leave these people hiding in the woods, isolated forever.

             
“You call yourself shifters,” Peter observed.

             
“Yes. The term werewolf was invented by humans, and it comes with a number of inaccuracies. We don’t need the full moon to change form, for instance, although we often do feel compelled when the moon is full.  Silver doesn’t affect us.  We live longer than humans do, but we’re not immortal.”

             
Sven gestured at Isadora. “You smell different, not human, but not wolf either. You are also a were – I mean, a shifter?”

             
“Don’t answer that,” Dash said quickly.

             
Isadora raked him with a look of disgust.

             
“I turn into a lynx,” she said to Sven.

             
“That’s fascinating!” Sven’s eyes lit up. “So people can turn into other animals!”

             
“Oh, gosh, all kinds,” Isadora said, settling down onto a spot on one of the picnic benches. “Hyenas, jackals, wolves, bears, lynxes, mountain lions, bobcats.  I hear in New Orleans they have gator shifters, although we’ve never met them. Our climate’s too cold in Colorado.”  Dash was giving her dirty looks, but she ignored him.

             
The redheaded man walked over to Steele and extended his hand. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Raymond Bertelsen, Katherine’s father. I’m also the mayor of Lonesome Pine.”

             
“Katherine says that she thinks that your police chief was involved in Roxanne’s kidnapping,” Steele said. “And Roxanne thinks that the town’s doctor had something to do with it. Is that true?”

             
“We believe she’s correct,” Mayor Bertelsen said. “Some of the Gunds have picked up the doctor and they’re…questioning him.  We’re holding off on approaching Chief Fennell just yet. He never goes anywhere without a couple of his officers by his side these days, and we want to be sure of ourselves before we make so bold a move as to grab a police officer off the street.”

             
A half dozen cars pulled into the parking lot.  Steele saw them quickly park near where they all were sitting.

             
Steele tensed and moved in front of Roxanne.

             
The Gunds had all leaped to their feet, wary and watchful.

             
“Who are they? Do you know them?” Sven asked Steele.

“The Wardens are here,” he said.

             
Steele, Roxanne, Isadora, Katherine, Mayor Bertelsen, and half a dozen of the Gunds were crowded into a small motel room just north of the border in Montana, along with Chief Elder Jordan Fleetfoot, several other Elders, a dozen wardens, and Cody.  The Gunds, Isadora, and the Bertelsens were all on one side of the room, and the Wardens and Elders were on the other side.

             
Wardens and shifters from all over the region were standing by, waiting for Cody to find out what he could from Katherine.  Once they knew where the shifters were, they would stage an all-out attack. They were determined to get their kidnapped shifters back, and shut down the military operation once and for all.

Loren
stood back, watching the proceedings with deep frown lines set in his forehead. He and the Wardens consulted with each other in low tones, frequently glancing at Steele, Roxanne, and the Gunds.

             
The Wardens had been shocked to learn about the Gund family’s strange mutation, and the fact that apparently half the town of Lonesome Pine knew of their existence.  It presented them with a dilemma of a type they’d never faced before.

             
Cody had been picked up at the airport as soon as he returned from Europe, and flown in a small private plane to meet up with them, so he could get to work on retrieving Roxanne’s memories as quickly as possible. 

Steele
sat on the edge of one of the room’s two beds, closer to the Wardens, although he really didn’t know where he should be sitting right now. He’d turned his back on his whole world, and now he was a man without a job, or a home, or a way to care for the woman he loved. Already, he was keenly feeling the loss of his pack, but he would have made the same decision all over again if he’d had to. Roxanne was his. He was meant to be with her, and meant to take care of her.

He struggled
to swallow his anxiety as Cody gently smoothed out the tangles in Roxanne’s mind.  Anxiety and fear were foreign emotions to Steele, but watching Roxanne’s face turn pale as she relieved her trauma made his gut tighten.  He could only pray that Cody could undo the damage that had been done to her.

Now Cody was walking Roxanne through what had happened during her kidnapping, starting at the very beginning.

              “When I was talking to the doctor, I told him that as far as I knew I was a virgin, and I didn’t understand how I could be pregnant,” Roxanne said to Cody.   “That was why I ignored those missed periods for so long.  I’d gained some weight, but not a lot.  When I told him that the only man I’d been with had been imaginary, and that I knew I’d dreamed the man up because I’d seen him turn into a wolf, he suddenly got very interested. He started asking me all kinds of questions.”

             
A look of pain crossed her face.   Cody closed his eyes and his lips moved silently.  He was using the power of his mind to enter Roxanne’s head and help her.

Steele started forward,
wanting to comfort Roxanne, but Loren grabbed his arm. 

             
“Don’t interfere,” Loren growled.

             
Steele forced himself to settle down. He knew Loren was right. Loren didn’t care about Roxanne’s welfare, of course, but he did care about Cody’s successfully helping Roxanne regain her memory.

             
What Cody was doing was a delicate process, and Steele didn’t dare interfere. All that he could do was stand there and watch as Cody carefully guided Roxanne through the process of recovery.

“I don’t remember much else, but h
e jabbed me with a needle, and I passed out. I woke up in this laboratory, strapped down to a table. There was a girl there too, Clara Winter.  She started explaining things to me and then a guard screamed at her to shut up and hit her with his rifle butt.” Tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks.  “I gave birth a few weeks later.  They kept doing all these blood tests on both of us, but they let him stay with me and breastfeed.  They kept waiting to see if he would change into a cub, but he never did.  A few days ago, they took him away from me and said they weren’t bringing him back…” she gulped back a sob. “I was screaming and begging them to let me keep him, but they took him. My God. What are they doing to him right now?”

             
At that, Steele let out a howl of rage, and started to shift.  Loren and several other Wardens jumped on him and pinned him down.

             
“Control yourself!” Dash shouted at him.  Steele swallowed hard, and drew on every last bit of his strength, and then forced himself to turn human again.

             
“I’m fine,” he muttered.  He was far from fine; it was taking every bit of strength to stay human. He could feel his bones shifting underneath his skin, and his fangs itched under his gums.

             
He’d make those bastards pay.

             
“I think that they would want to keep him alive and study him,” Cody said. Roxanne’s face went even paler, but she nodded.

             
“I hope you’re right. You have to be right,” she said, anguish lacing her words.

             
“How did you get out?” Cody asked.

             
“After they took Flint away, I was in the lab, and there was another shifter there, an older man named Bertrand. He shifted into wolf form and killed a few of the guards. They didn’t have me strapped down, because they weren’t afraid of me.  When Bertrand shifted, I grabbed a surgical knife and stabbed one of the guards in the throat, and Bertrand took the keys from one of the guards and opened the laboratory door. We ran down a bunch of tunnels. Apparently, one of the shifters they had there was from an old mining family, and he actually knew the way out and had told Bertrand. Bertrand told me all the shifters were communicating with each other by howling and roaring to each other.”

             
One of the women grabbed Sven’s arm. “That must have been Axel! That means he’s still alive!” she said eagerly.

             
“Yes, he must be.” Sven put his hand on her arm and squeezed her hand. 

             
“Go on,” Cody said to Roxanne.

             
“Bertrand had a stash of dynamite; the shifter had told him where to find it.  Guards were following us, and Bertrand said that he would blow up the tunnel so that they would think we’d both been killed, and that way the guards wouldn’t search for me when I got out.” She wiped tears from her face with the back of her arm. 

             
Steele shuddered with rage and frustration. He wanted to kill something more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.

             
“I was supposed to bring back help right away,” she choked, her voice husky. “The next thing I remember, I’d hitched a ride to Lonesome Pines, and I got to my apartment and I literally couldn’t remember why I was there, or why everything was so dusty.  All I knew was that I need to find him-” she glanced at Steele – “and get help.”

             
Sven moved swiftly, standing next to Roxanne. “This is very important,” he said. “I need you to describe the directions my grandson gave to get you out, and what it looked like when you walked out of that mine. Any landmarks that you saw, any old signs or equipment, anything.”

             
He listened carefully as Roxanne described the tunnels and where they’d been held, and the entrance, as carefully as she could. Then he looked up at the Wardens and nodded with satisfaction.

             
“I know where that is,” he said. “I know what part of the mountain they’re in, and I know about a back way in. My ancestors dug those tunnels. I can get us in there.” 

             
He described the exact location to the Wardens.

             
“We’ve got hundreds of shifters standing by,” Loren said. “We’re ready to make our move.”

             
“As soon as we’ve shut this facility down, we’re going to have to call a meeting of all the Elders to decide what to do about the fact that a large group of humans are aware of our existence,” Jordan said to Mason Criswell, one of the other Elders.

             
Sven turned to glare at him.  “Try and come near my family,” he snarled, and suddenly his face went hairy.

             
“You don’t have a say in this,” Jordan growled back at him. He was used to being treated with extreme deference; any sign of disrespect set him bristling. “We have to serve the greater good. If the Elders decide-”