Hidden Crimes (29 page)

Can you help me?
she asked whatever
deity ruled the place.

She certainly needed help. Stumbling onto
this little lakeshore left her with nowhere else to run.

A quiet thrashing from the ferns behind her
warned her Nate’s wolf had arrived. In spite of everything, when
she spun around to face him, she found him beautiful.

His beast froze where it was, perhaps fifteen
feet from her. It seemed wary, maybe waiting to verify how worn out
she’d become. She was on two feet, and that made her taller. Height
intimidated tigers. In the wild, they usually only attacked humans
who were bent over or crouching. She didn’t know if the same held
true for wolves.

She had the knife Nate had forced on her.
She’d tucked it, jeweled hilt down, in the back pocket of her
now-filthy khaki pants. Left with little choice, she pulled it out
and showed the blade to him.

“I can hurt you with this,” she said as
steadily as she could. “It’s sharper than teeth, and it’s electrum.
You won’t like the feel of it.”

Nate’s wolf cocked its head to the side as if
wondering what to make of her strange noises. Reminding herself to
show no fear, Evina took a step forward.

Nate’s wolf skittered exactly one step
back.

With that small reaction, everything clicked
for her.

She was alpha to him. Even exhausted, even
unable to change into tiger form, her will had the power to master
his. Both sides of her nature knew how to dominate, not just the
furry one.

The ability was what had driven Paul away,
and likely other men in her past as well. She’d learned to soften
it, to keep her superiority under wraps unless she needed it for
her job. Right then, she didn’t have the luxury of pretending to be
one iota less than she was.

She stepped toward Nate again.

This time his wolf growled at her, hunkering
down on its forelegs. She locked her eyes on the beast’s, pushing
her resolve at it. Nate’s wolf wriggled as if it were going to
spring.

“Stay,” she said, low and hard.

The wolf snarled out a protest but obeyed,
its dark gray hackles puffed up around its neck. Drawing her
confidence together, Evina kept the knife up in front of her. This
was her claw. She’d cut him with it if she had to. Perhaps Nate’s
wolf sensed her seriousness. It whimpered and laid down on its
belly.

Evina continued stalking toward it, and it
continued cowering. Though her heart thumped in her throat at its
more-than-natural wolf size, when she reached it, she put her
sneaker on top of its neck and pushed.

She didn’t do this gently. She shoved the
wolf’s head into the bracken with all her weight and strength. It
tried to move, but she wouldn’t let it escape her pin.

“You’re
my
wolf,” she said, the words
coming out as harsh as any she’d ever spoken. “You follow
my
lead, and you do what I say.”

The wolf rolled one worried gold eye at her.
It would fight her if she gave it an opening, and it had the
strength to win. Nate had proved willing to switch roles in bed,
but that was play, and his human had been in charge. Even as a
human, Nate had issues about other people exerting authority over
him. Would his wolf recognize her as someone worthy of dominating
him?

She thrust her doubts from her awareness,
ignoring the possible cost of succeeding. Doing this was the only
option for both of them.

“Change,” she ordered, channeling everything
within her that had been born to lead. “Walk on two feet
again.”

Her will rushed out of her like a sold thing.
She felt it shake her stomach, felt it shoot down her arms . .
.

He shuddered.

And then he changed the way shifters should.
A ring of radiant light rolled down him from nose to tail, like a
magician’s hoop being waved over him. Nate was back, folded up on
the ground with his face hidden on his outstretched arms. His naked
skin shone with perspiration, his ribs going up and down with hard
breathing. Evina removed her foot from his neck.

“Nate?” she said, because he wasn’t getting
up.

He moaned, a soft, lost sound she didn’t know
how to interpret. She knelt beside him and laid her hand gently on
his spine. Scratches and stains covered her fingers, but all that
marked him was sweat. The contrast between her dirt and his
cleanliness couldn’t have been plainer.

“Nate,” she said, bending to kiss his
shoulder blade. “Please tell me you’re all right.”

His laugh sounded dangerously like a sob.
“Please tell you
I’m
all right. Evina, I was hunting you. My
wolf wanted to eat you.”

She hadn’t been certain he’d remember. “You
didn’t let it,” she said, rubbing his hunched-over back. “You let
me control you.”

This seemed a better way to phrase it than
saying she’d forced him to submit.

Nate sighed and sat up slowly. His face was
his face, his eyes returned to their normal black coffee brown.
They were guarded, but she supposed that was to be expected. He
touched her cheek with his fingertips, dragging them gently to her
jaw. Her hair had to be holding a few birds’ nests worth of leaves.
By this point, it was more clumped than it was braided. Nate’s
mouth curved sardonically. “Christophe will be happy to hear you’ve
learned to make shifters change.”

Evina supposed this was true. At the moment,
she was more concerned with whether Nate was okay with it.

“We should probably try to find our way back
to civilization. Iseult still has Paul and Malik. Your alpha will
help us if we ask, won’t he?”

Nate dropped his hand. “Yes, I . . . I think
I can retrace our path. We’ll find a phone and call for
backup.”

She flung her arms around him. She didn’t
know if he wanted a hug right then, but she couldn’t help herself.
After a couple seconds, he held her back as tightly. She didn’t
have words for how good that felt.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said against
her tangled hair.

He was shaking, but she didn’t say a word
about that.

WITH seriously uncomfortable emotions, Nate
retraced the path along which he’d hunted Evina. His wolf had been
in charge, obviously, but he was inside there too, helplessly
observing everything his beast thought and did.

Wolves were intelligent predators. Evina had
been unnervingly interesting for his to chase. If she hadn’t
thought to use her alpha power at the end, he knew what it would
have done. His wolf had been strategizing which part of her to eat
first—and this was
after
she’d said she loved him.

Shame didn’t cover what that memory stirred
in him. Left to himself, he wasn’t certain he’d ever change into
his wolf again.

He took grim satisfaction in Evina trailing
more than one stride behind him. If he’d been her, he wouldn’t have
felt safe with him at her back.

“Nate,” she said as he waded across the
stream where she’d tried to confuse her scent. “You can’t beat
yourself up about this. I’m a predator myself. I knew what
instincts I’d trigger when I ran. I couldn’t think how else to buy
time.”

“Don’t—”
try to make me feel better
,
he began to say, but under the circumstances, that seemed churlish.
He stopped in the brook to look back at her. Her worried face
struck him like a blow: the exotic beauty no amount of exhaustion
or dirt could dim.

“Don’t what?” she asked.

He put his hand on her shoulder. “Nothing.”
His throat was thick. “Am I going too fast for you?”

She shook her head. “I just can’t smell
right. Losing that claw screwed me up. Other than that, I feel a
lot better. I’m glad we’re together.”

He was too, crazy as that sounded. He rubbed
her shoulder, about to say he didn’t think they had much farther to
go. Before he could, a different scent caught his nose.

“They came this way,” he said.

“Iseult’s crew?”

“Yes, but they weren’t moving toward the
parking lot.” He stepped out of the brook to get a better whiff.
Iseult’s people had crossed the stream directly, rather than
walking along it. “They went south and east, toward the cabins some
wolves rent to stay overnight for the moon.”

Evina stopped at his side, her arm brushing
his warmly. “Do you think, maybe, they’re keeping Malik there?”

He and Evina looked at each other. “We’ve
only got a few more miles. I know there’s a pay phone near the park
gate.”

“What if Malik can’t wait for us to contact
your squad? Iseult spent a lot of power back in that clearing. What
if she . . . uses him to recharge?”

Us
, she’d said. Nate fought against
that sounding sweeter than sunshine. “You could go on without me
and make the call.”

Evina smiled, sly and small. “Can’t. My
sniffer is wonky. Nate, I really am better, even if I can’t
change.” Her smile twisted into a rueful shape. “I think channeling
my inner alpha gave me a second wind.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “And I’ll follow your
lead, I swear.”

His brow wrinkled at the way she said this,
but now wasn’t the time to probe.

“All right,” he said and turned to guide her
down the new trail of smells.

They’d loped along for about ten minutes when
they came across the remnants of Paul’s carrying crate. The steel
looked like the Hulk had ripped it apart. Even the electrum grill
was twisted out of shape.

Evina gasped, then crouched to examine the
pieces. “No blood,” she said quietly. “Paul must have changed
inside the box.”

Her ex could have crushed his tiger
attempting this, but as far as getting free went, the risk paid
off. Nate’s head came up. An odd crackling noise tore the air, like
a really big transformer spitting electricity. It sounded like it
came from where Nate thought the cabins were.

He and Evina broke into a run, their hands
reaching naturally for each other. To Nate’s surprise, the clasp
didn’t slow them down. They leaped obstacles together, suddenly as
nimble as if this were the start of their day. They reached the
edge of the cabins quickly, dropping as one behind a dry
woodpile.

To their amazement, Paul—in his tiger
form—was doing a fair job of holding off Iseult’s contingent by
himself.

Nate whistled in his head at the tiger’s
size. Ten feet long and easily six hundred pounds, the striped
orange beast was making his stand before the open door to one of
the half dozen log cabins. The arcing sound they’d heard was Iseult
throwing lightning balls at him.

She resembled a vengeful goddess, her fair
hair blown back, her eyes glowing with grief and rage. Blue and
Brone lay on the gravel drive to either side of her, the savaged
state of their intestines telling a gory tale.

Nate didn’t know if they’d truly been her
cousins, but he guessed she’d been fond of them.

The rest of her people huddled behind a light
blue pickup, probably thanks to Paul’s fear-inducing weretiger
roars. Of course, they also might have wanted to stay out of
Iseult’s way. Beaumont and the bank teller—clearly the coolest
heads in the bunch—were firing semiautomatic pistols, their hands
and wrists braced on the pickup’s hood. Thankfully, neither was a
sharpshooter. Iseult appeared to have done most of the damage to
the furious tiger.

Why he was furious soon became apparent.

A small blond head poked into the doorway
behind him—Paul’s two-year-old son Malik, Nate assumed. The
youngster’s head jerked back when Iseult’s next crackling electric
orb singed his father’s rear left paw.

“Oh my God,” Evina breathed in a wondering
tone.

Nate thought she must have spotted Malik, but
she pointed toward what she wanted him to see. Nate’s heart nearly
turned inside out. A chubby baby in a onesie was crawling toward
the threshold, apparently curious to see what the noise was about.
A second baby joined the first a moment later, this one wearing
only a diaper. With a practicality that would have been amusing if
the danger hadn’t been so great, two-year-old Malik darted out,
grabbed each infant by one ankle, and dragged it back into the
cabin.

Holy shit
, Nate thought. Iseult’s gang
must not have killed all their fake adoptees yet. Special Crimes
had taken over the search for them, but the best anyone had hoped
for was to find identifiable pieces. They should have been more
optimistic, or maybe realized that the best way to preserve magical
material was to store it alive.

The surviving babies didn’t like Malik’s
tactics much. They set up a wail that spurred Paul’s tiger into
action. He crouched and sprang, his powerful shifter’s hind legs
launching him toward Iseult. He would have gotten past another
lightning ball, but she was too smart for that. She said a word,
threw up her hands, and a shimmering shield of force appeared in
midair. Paul crashed off it and fell back, lying stunned for a few
seconds. When he shook himself and got up, he was limping. Nate
thought he might have broken his shoulder.