Ride the Wicked Woodsman (A Night Falls Alpha Werebear Shapeshifter Romance) (2 page)

What I was presuming was Mrs. Ned tried to elbow him again, but he dodged the attempt.

"You leave my ribs alone, Edna!"

A chuckle bubbled inside me, but the accompanying pain killed my amusement.

"I wouldn't send any woman alone on that trail at night," Edna said, frowning at her husband before turning a smile on me. "Let alone such a pretty young thing."

My mouth twitched at "pretty," but I didn't correct her.

"I'm sure I won't take the trail," I said, not really certain but wanting to appease the worry growing in her clear gaze.

More than an hour round trip travel didn't sound very appealing. If Ned could do it in a brisk walk at twenty minutes in his youth, I could do it with a brisk run in ten, get the supplies and wolf down a nice thick steak before walking back at a more leisurely pace.

"Starts behind cabin four if you change your mind," Ned offered -- right before Edna nailed him with another sharp elbow to his side.

I left the office with a pained smile as the old man complained how it was hard enough to breathe at seventy-eight without a bruised ribcage, let alone with the damage she had just done.

********************

Out of the arguing couple's field of view, I ducked behind cabin four to get a sense of the trail. It started out wide, but as dark as it already had become, I couldn't see more than fifty yards ahead. The almost full moon Ned had talked about wasn't up yet, either.

My eyes were no longer designed to hunt at night, not like before the accident. But between my still enhanced vision over humans and an excellent sense of smell, I could probably stay on the trail without the moon being out. I could buy a flashlight for the trip back.

Or I could use my damn head and drive to the truck stop.

Yeah, I'd had enough derring-fucking-do for the last forty-eight hours, I decided.

I would drive.

Following along the back of the cabins, I came to number eight. A car's motor was running on the other side. I had heard the vehicle pull in, its tires crunching over the gravel parking lot, while I was trying to stare through the darkness of the trail.

I hesitated right before my feet would have left the soft cushioning of the pine needles across the ground and stepped onto the small pebbles and sand that surrounded the front half of each cabin.

Something wasn't right with how long the car had been idling and the lack of any discernible movement around the cabin next to mine.

A radio crackled, the sound a static-laden Midwestern voice broadcasting in monotone without music or other adornment. Frozen on that last bit of soft green ground, I waited and strained to hear whether the sound coming from the idling car was some almost out of range talk radio or a problem brewing.

Unit 3-15, what's your location, over?

Fuck! Exactly what I didn't want nosing around the cabin after I'd stolen almost two thousand dollars from my dad.

Metal clinked against fiberglass and I imagined the cop leaning in to grab the handset on his radio and respond to dispatch. But instead of answering the location request, he turned the sound off.

Weird, maybe it wasn't a cop. Maybe it was just someone listening to a police scanner while they finished a cigarette and went into their cabin.

My budding hope was quickly shattered as a masculine voice began reading a set of numbers and letters, the sequence one I knew by heart. But he wasn't reading my license plate off to dispatch. There was no squelching acknowledgement, no repetition by the operator on the other end or a response that the vehicle was licensed to Onyx Parry out of Champaign, Illinois.

Until the cop outside my cabin spoke again, there was only silence.

"I'll check with the couple that runs the place," he said. "What's she look like?"

Hearing him get in his vehicle and back it over the gravel in the direction of the office, I turned toward the woods, my feet falling swift and silent in the direction of the trail despite the lingering pain in my stomach.

Hearing the bells jingle on Ned and Edna's office door, I picked up my pace. Any second now they would tell him I had just been in asking about supplies. They'd tell him about the trail and the truck stop and the long drive to the closest Wal-Mart. With my car still in front of the cabin, it would be clear to him that I'd taken the trail.

A hundred yards into the forest, I stopped and listened. Maybe I was making a mistake. Maybe I needed to get off the trail, go back to the tree line behind the motel and wait for him to drive off or start his own way up and over the mountain on foot. Then I could get in my car and leave.

Hearing booted steps at the start of the trail and seeing the faint sweep of a flashlight over the ground, I started running again. There was still enough wolf left in me that I could run faster and more quietly than him, my ears sensitive enough that even with all the sounds around me, I would hear his footsteps separate from my own.

Nearing the top of the saddle, I stopped to catch my breath. My nose, filled with the scent of weekend trekkers, confirmed I was still on the trail. I moved off to one side. I didn't hear anything that sounded like human movement on the path. No boots cracking twigs in two, no short outburst of swear words as the low hanging branches that had snagged at me earlier grabbed at a fresh victim.

I was either far ahead of him or he had turned back, maybe never even started onto the trail, just swung his flashlight around to see if he could spot me.

Damn it! I sat down on the ground, my muscles slow to recover from the burst of speed I had sustained for more than five minutes. I shouldn't have been winded. My stomach shouldn't have been hurting again and the marks Eric had made in my skin should have been healed already instead of itching and stinging as sweat trickled down the back of my neck.

I rubbed at my face, then slapped one cheek hard as panic threatened. I needed to hold everything together and figure out my immediate situation. I was too old to report as a runaway. And my dad would not have reported the theft. No way in hell would he allow human cops into the house to investigate. The pack solved its legal problems on its own, especially when the offender wasn't human.

So the cop was just being nosy? Maybe he ran the plates on all of the vehicles that stopped at that little shit hole of a motel?

But then why had he asked what I looked like and why had he bothered checking with Ned and Edna? I wasn't wanted for anything. Nothing about my car or me should have aroused his suspicion. And it wasn't dispatch he'd been talking to. That was the one thing of which I was certain. He had turned the radio down or off first. There was no reply that I could hear, but he had. He'd been using his phone.

Minutes passed as I sat there, no longer actively listening for the sound of the cop coming toward me on the trail. The moon was finally climbing in the sky, turning the forest around me from black to nuanced shades of gray.

I could have stayed like that, my body and thoughts weighed down by indecision, for hours. But sounds I couldn't ignore filtered past all the questions buzzing through my head.

Howls pierced the forest. A cold chill iced along my spine then spread outward. The cries weren't those of an animal -- not in the everyday human sense. Real wolves wouldn't have immediately scared the shit out of me.

These were shifters -- three of them as best as I could tell from the overlapping but distinct vocalizations.

Worse yet, they knew I was there.

Jumping to my feet, I listened hard for their location and approximate distance. As much as running had caused me to sweat, that was a drop in a bucket compared to the perspiration that suddenly coated me everywhere from the combination of fear and concentration.

Three wolves, three locations, and, as best as I could tell, they had spread out so that I was in the middle of a triangle before they had announced their presence.

They wanted to make a game of it.

Out of the frying pan and into the fucking furnace!

I growled, low under my breath, and swiped at the sweat dotting my forehead. I still had the trail ahead of me open -- unless the trio was really a quartet and a fourth waited in ambush.

The night had been full of choices, all of them uninformed. I would have to move on instinct, stop thinking and react at a gut level. I started running up the trail, my gaze on the moonlit path in front of me, feet moving swift and silent to pick out the small pockets of ground where there weren't dried pine needles to crush or small branches to break.

Cresting the low point of the saddle, I could look down both halves of the trail. A caravan of three sedans motored pass the motel. On the other side, I could see the lights of the truck stop and dozens of semis parked in its lot.

Ned had neglected to mention that the downside of the trail was steeper and cut through rock rather than the well worn path I had just raced along. Still, I had at least one shifter on the path behind me, two at my sides, and leading them down the smoother path to the sleepy motel could turn into a bloodbath.

The truck stop was a safer destination with all of its vehicles, maybe some dash cameras running and the security cameras around the building's exterior. No shifter that I knew of would risk that kind of exposure to the human world.

The howls sounded again. I doubled over and choked on the need to puke from all the adrenaline pumping through me.

You're in our woods, she-wolf.

Shit, shit, shit! I had one ahead of me now, his location intersecting somewhere on the darkened path through the trees. The one at my back and the other to my right had also drawn closer.

Instinct, I reminded myself. What could I hear beyond their howls? What could I smell and see.

Water, to my left, the sound a soft trickling babble of hope. Stench to that side as well, the stink I had missed earlier overwhelming as the night wind picked up and changed directions to blow at me.

Skunk cabbage! I knew that horrible carrion-like smell but hadn't expected to encounter it on the mountain trail any more than I had expected to find even one shifter so far out from the city.

I ran into the woods on my left, letting my nose lead me to the large patch of the stinky weed. Tripping over a tree root, I landed face first in the muck and was instantly covered with the scent of dead meat.

Gaining my feet, I wiped at my eyes. The water I had heard had to be very close by, otherwise there would be none of the marsh-loving cabbage around. I let my ears guide me between the baying calls of the three shifters.

They had lost me for the moment, nothing but the smell of the surrounding plants carried to them on the wind.

The ground sucking at my feet, I made my way across the patch. With the wind at my face, my nose could finally detect the mossy banks of a stream. I picked up speed. The slimy muck clinging to my shoes threatened to send me in a roll down the mountainside.

Reaching the water, my feet slipped out from under me. I landed center of the stream, my tailbone hitting a rock slightly sharper than the one I banged my head against.

I wanted to yelp and yowl with the three bastards chasing me through the woods. The water was cold and the front of my clothes were already saturated with the swamp-like mud I had fallen into just a few minutes before.

Rolling onto my stomach. I crawled upstream. I had intended to go down to the truck stop but instinct told me my legs wouldn't last that long. The shifters playing with me could see better, move faster, and had four sure-footed legs to keep them from falling as I had twice done.

Before that last trip to the ground, I had seen something -- another light, this one on the mountain, just a little higher up and to the east of where I was.

I crawled more quickly through the stream, shivers from the cold water rushing over me to yank my body forward.

What if the light is theirs?

There was nothing to do but dismiss the possibility and force myself to continue moving in the direction my instincts were leading me. If the light was coming from some cabin or camp belonging to the shifters, I was trapped either way. If it wasn't, it was my best shot at escape. Any human lodging this remotely came with equipped with at least one rifle or shotgun.

Fresh howls told me my pursuers had tracked my scent to the patch of foul smelling weeds. They were angry, growling and baying as they skirted the plants' perimeter for where I had departed.

Closing in, she-wolf. Stop now and we'll play nice...for a time.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

I fought my way up the opposite side of the bank. The wind had changed direction again. With it at my back, I could smell both the skunk cabbage and the three males chasing after me.

They were young, their pheromones lacking that last bit of flavor that signaled a fully adult male shifter. And they weren't alpha, which explained why they were running after me on all fours instead of terrorizing me in that middle state of transformation that only alphas could hold beyond a few seconds.

So young and stupid and playing with me like I was a damned rabbit!

With a final burst of strength, I ran all out in the direction in which I had seen the flicker of light. My lungs and legs burned. My arms flapped like the clipped wings of a bird. I stumbled but didn't fall then stumbled again, catching myself with one hand, the gravel of a clearing cutting at my palm.

I could not only see the light now, but the dwelling as well -- a log cabin.

"Help!" I screamed the word but it came out hoarse and weak.

"Help! Wolves!" I screamed again, my voice only a little louder than the wind still at my back.

I was fucked if the occupant had the TV on at all or was showering or already sound asleep and snoring.

I screamed again in hoarse desperation.

The shifters howled in reply. As ineffective as my cries had been in rousing the cabin's occupants, my pursuers had heard me and now they knew my final direction.

The cabin door flew open. A giant of a man lumbered onto the porch. He had one ear cocked toward the wind and didn't seem to have noticed me.