Shifters Gone Alpha (40 page)

CHAPTER TWO

“
Fuck
!” the wolf shouted as he belatedly flinched and ducked down.

His foot was slamming down onto the gas petal before a rain of subsequent bullets began assaulting the passenger side of the truck. The tires shrieked, and they lurched forward, causing Tori to crash face-first into the dashboard. She could taste blood as she tried to right herself, the inside of her lip throbbing where she had likely cut herself on her bottom teeth.

The front bumper came within inches of clipping the rear end of one of the passing eighteen wheeler trailers as he swerved around the truck and into oncoming traffic. For a split-second, Tori had visions of headlights coming straight for them, but maybe the fates decided to cut them a little slack because the oncoming lane of traffic was completely empty.

Cursing nastily, the wolf floored it until he zoomed past all the traffic and swerved back into the proper lane amidst a cacophony of car and big rig horns. He continued on down the access road for another mile before he abruptly slowed down and pulled over into the shoulder.

“A helluva way to prove you weren’t lying,” the wolf snapped, his tone half-growl and half—she couldn’t believe it—amusement. “It’s also going to be a right pain in the ass to explain the bullet holes to my insurance adjuster.” Then just as quickly, his amusement vanished, and he fixed her with a severe gaze. “I got you away, so you can let yourself right on out.”

Tori snorted. “If you think a measly mile or two head start on a lion Retriever, let alone three, is ‘getting away,’ then you must be blissfully ignorant of the particular horror of being stalked by one.”

Once again, a wave of disgust washed over his expression, but this time, there was a considerable amount of anger lurking just behind it. “It’s because I’m not that I
know
I don’t want any more part in the fucked up shit that just happened,” he stated flatly. “We’ve had more than enough trouble with Sniffers, Retrievers,
and
assassins around here lately without adding a
Rogue
to the mix. That’s like adding Napalm to a bonfire—”

“My father is the Alpha of Chicago,” Tori cut in, watching his face intently. She despised having to use her best hand right out of the gate, but given what she had just barely escaped, she simply didn’t have time to beat around the bush. “I have information that I think your clan’s Elders would find is worth more than all the gold in the world.”

If that type of hook didn’t convince him, nothing would, and she would be better off going on her way—probably straight to the border rather than to Riverford as had been her initial goal. If what he was implying with his comments about having trouble with the worst elements of the lion clans, then the hostility for lion shifters in this region was even worse than she had thought. The likelihood of any of them offering her asylum in that type of bad climate would be practically nil. They’d sooner capture and torture the information out of her rather than bargain in good faith.

For one long, tense moment, the wolf just stared at her with an unreadable expression. That bothered her more than she wanted to admit. She had been trained practically since birth to read people as easily as reading a book. That this guy could so easily hide his thoughts from her made her wonder if she hadn’t managed to jump directly into the heart of the fire from the frying pan the moment she had entered his truck.

“I can’t imagine that kind of information would come cheap,” he said finally.

“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed. “For the lion clans anyway. For them, what I can tell their enemies could very well cost them everything.”

He raised an eyebrow. “‘Their enemies’? You talk like you aren’t one of them.”

“I’m a Rogue. I’m clan-less,” she replied matter-of-factly.

He shrugged. “You use that label like it means only one thing. You may have turned your back on your clan, but that in no way guarantees that you’re harmless to all the free clans. Having no loyalties to anyone is a million times more dangerous. It makes you unpredictable.”

“How about this, then,” Tori said, feeling the hands of time around her neck starting to squeeze even tighter but not yet willing to admit defeat. He hadn’t gone for her throat once, and that was a lot more than she could say about the majority of the previous shifter clans she had approached and offered the same deal. “I have no idea where you’re headed, and at this point, it doesn’t matter where as long as it’s far away from here. Give me until the next town to convince you of the worth of my information, and if you still doubt my intentions and want me to get out once we get there, I will without a fuss. Plus, I’ll still give you a piece of information about the inner workings of my old Chicago clan that I guarantee will be worth taking me that far.”

A touch of wariness entered his eyes, but it had come and gone so fast that she would have missed it had she not been scrutinizing every minute detail of his face. And what a face he had. With his dark hair and sun-kissed skin, the blue of his eyes was quite striking, like twin sapphires. She was almost embarrassed at making such a trite, silly comparison, but there really was no better way to describe them. She remembered quite distinctly how they had lit up rather attractively when he had briefly showed a little amusement at the absurdity of the whole situation.

Ruggedly handsome. With his thick, tousled hair, jeans, and plain, black t-shirt, that description seemed tailor-made for him.

Her eyes fixed on his lips. She wondered what he would look like with a genuine smile lighting up that handsome face.

Tori started. What the hell was
wrong
with her? She wasn’t so near her heat cycle that she should be getting distracted by a guy, no matter how hot!

The wolf suddenly turned, instantly pulling her mind out of the gutter it had inexplicable fallen into, and put the truck back into drive. “Anyone who can sit there completely naked after jumping into a strange man’s truck and look so serious must be pretty desperate,” he said, the corners of his lips lifted up slightly as though he was trying to fight a smile.

Tori blinked at him before looking down at herself. Shit! That’s right. She had been so intent on trying not to get thrown out of the truck that she had completely forgotten that she was naked! True, she had a large backpack sitting in her lap mostly covering up her more exciting bits, but still!

Come to think of it, Tori never once saw his eyes stray from her face, so either he was a gentleman that had superhuman self-control, or he had been too upset about having a lioness jump into his front seat and the assholes chasing her doing more than ruining his paint job that the fact her boobs were there for the ogling hadn’t even register beyond that first initial shock.

“Those assholes found me only moments after I had shifted back to my human form,” she grumbled, immediately digging into the pack for her t-shirt dress. “No doubt I gave some late-night diners an eyeful when I dashed across the parking lot.”

“A young woman streaking and a gang-style drive-by—I doubt that boondock town has seen that much excitement ever,” he said dryly.

“I’m truly sorry about what happened,” Tori said quietly after she had finished dressing. “I didn’t think they would be quite that ballsy. Yes, it’s a small town, but nowadays that means little when everyone has a video camera in their pocket and the power to show it to the world literally with the press of a button. I’ve been on the run for a little over three years now, so maybe my father’s really cracking the whip. I can’t think of any other reason for them to get so sloppy as to cause such a serious incident in public.”

He looked at her sideways. “Three years? You don’t look older than twenty or so.”

Tori offered him a small smile. “You have a good eye. I’m twenty-one. I left a couple of weeks after my eighteenth birthday.”

She paused, wondering if she should go on, but then immediately decided that complete honesty with this man right here and now was not only necessary given their tedious agreement, but might later affect his final decision of whether or not he would take her proposition to his Elders.

“There’s a reason I chose that day, and not only because I was finally a legal adult within human society.” She kept her eyes fixed on the side of his head. “Eighteen is the age when assassins are sent out on their first assignments.”

A god-awful, loud grinding noise abruptly filled the air as the truck’s tires veered off towards the shoulder of the interstate and hit the grooves the state purposely had etched into the asphalt in the hopes of waking up drivers who might have suddenly fallen asleep or simply lost their focus for any number of reasons.

“I knew it,” he said through clenched teeth as he righted the truck and threw her a hard look. “There’s always been rumors that…” He shook his head. “Why do I always get myself into these fucked up situations?”

“I’ve never killed anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Tori said quickly. “That’s one of the thousands of reasons I counted the days until I could leave.”

“I’d like to believe that, but…” He trailed off.

Tori could smell the suspicion coming off him but was comforted that she hadn’t once smelled fear on him, not even when the side of his truck was being turned into Swiss cheese. She wondered at the type of life he had lived that not even an unexpected hail of bullets made him fearful.

“It’s okay,” she said with a self-deprecating smile. “The lion clan has never given
anyone
a reason to think differently. I, myself, was appalled at a really young age of what my family, my clan, expected of me, to become one of our lineage’s assassins along with my brothers and sisters, tasked with snuffing out anyone who dared threaten the objectives, no matter how small, of all the lion clans, not just ours. There were fourteen of us in all. Only the two oldest brothers and sisters are treated like royalty. The rest of us were treated as nothing more than some particularly useful tools. Over the years, I watched how living an assassin’s life ripped apart the soul of one of my older brothers whom I’d always been really close with, worried over him, until he finally broke over the guilt and killed himself. I vowed not to let that be my fate.

“So when my Alpha sent me out on my first assassination, a runner with potentially damaging information on one of our clan’s companies that happened to have fled to Pennsylvania, I just kept right on going through the state to the next after tipping him off about the hit and never went back home. It was supposed to be a fairly easy, straightforward job—we knew exactly where the guy was hiding out. Those kinds of easy jobs went to the newbies, so we could ‘practice.’ How sick is that? That’s why I imagine the Alpha realized I had gone rogue after only a couple of days of me leaving Chicago, and I hadn’t reported in even once.”

“What happened to the man you tipped off?” The wolf suddenly asked.

“I don’t know, but I think he’s probably dead. Sooner or later, the Retrievers always find their targets, and an assassin ends up delivering them one final message. Even I, who was trained by the best of them, only managed to evade them for a measly three years. Thank you, by the way. If they had caught me back there and brought me to my father…”

Tori couldn’t help the full-body shudder of dread that suddenly inundated her. “The most I can say about that is it would’ve been kinder for you to run me over several times with your truck than the things the Alpha would have done to me. He’s had
years
to plan my punishment for betraying him. The sick bastard’s arrogant as all fuck, and the fact of the matter is that I embarrassed him badly in the eyes of the other clan Alphas. People, whether humans or shifters, are nothing more than worms to him. That’s the kind of creature you saved me from by getting me the hell away from the clan’s lackeys. That’s why I can never thank you enough, but until we reach the next town, I’m sure as hell going to try.”

CHAPTER THREE

“What’s your name?” her wolf companion asked abruptly, breaking the slightly uncomfortable silence they had fallen into after that last proclamation.

From the way his brow had been furrowed, Tori could tell he was seriously mulling over everything she had just revealed. She was pretty sure that the fact that the Alphas used their own children as the clans’ assassins wasn’t known at all. Knowing that alone was a big weapon to add to the free clans’ arsenal—the knowledge of exactly what faces to keep an eye out for—and he was probably for the first time seriously considering her offer.

“Tori.” She made a disgusted face. “It’s short for ‘Victoria.’”

When he didn’t offer his name in return and once again fell silent, she added, hoping to engage him again, “I’ve always hated the name. It’s the name I imagine a proper British nanny would have. It’s like the universe—or more likely, my mother—was mocking me every time someone called me that because the killer I was being trained as was as far from a nanny as you could get. Some of the people I was expected to kill were
children
, for God’s sake!”

This time when his eyes flickered over to look at her, they were filled with a different emotion other than the usual suspicion or even the expected disgust. No, they were swimming with one that was many times worse than either of those—pity. She looked away and fisted her hands in her lap to stop the surge of anger that was threatening to burst free in its tracks.

Who was she kidding? Until she left that clan of sadists, she
had
been pretty pathetic.

His gaze turned back to the road. “I was named ‘Nolan’ by my dad,” he said. “He and my grandfather were nuts about baseball, you see, and they worshiped the player, Nolan Ryan. He
cried
when Ryan retired, that’s how much of a man-crush he had on the guy.” He chuckled. “He wanted my older brother’s first and middle names to be ‘Nolan Ryan,’ but my mom put her foot down. They compromised with naming him Ryan and me Nolan.”

Tori found herself smiling, his totally charming story lifting the heavy cloud of gloom that had settled on her. “Just be glad he liked a player with a normal, decent name. If he had idolized a much older player, you and your brother could’ve been ‘Babe’ and ‘Ruth.’”

A surprised laugh burst from his throat. The last thing he had probably expected her to do was joke. After all, what use would a would-be killing machine have for humor?

Then just as suddenly, the laughter died from his eyes as something in the darkness up ahead caught his eye. “We’re ten miles out from Grand,” he announced. “Now that the moment of truth is barreling towards us, do you mind telling me what you’re doing in this neck of the woods and if it has anything to do with the type of deal or offer you’d like to make to my Elders for your information? Considering you have no idea where I’m even from, I figure it must be pretty broad since you haven’t tried even once to get me to reveal the name of my city or town.”

“That’s because the city’s not important, but the size and strength of its shifter clans
are
,” Tori replied earnestly. “See, last year I tried to seek asylum with at least one of Florida’s largest free clans, but they all couldn’t get past my lion heritage and their suspicion. I figured I’d try one last time here in Texas to find asylum with either the clans in Riverford or Parker Grove, whichever looked more promising. If that didn’t pan out, then I planned to make my way into Mexico and then continue on south. I hoped to get in with some of the cat clans of Central or South America. They’ve been virtually untouched by the lion clans, and thus, might be a lot more welcoming.”

Nolan sighed. “I can already tell you that you would probably have better luck in South America than with any shifter clans here in Texas. You
might
—and that’s a very big
might
—be able to barter your information for a temporary stay, but a permanent stay might not be very doable considering how many Sniffers are suspected to be in both the cities you’re targeting.”

“Um—I hate to break it to you,” Tori said slowly, “but there are Sniffers spying and brokering deals in every major city in the US, Canada, and Europe. If I want to stay in the States, then that’s just a reality I’ll have to live with. That’s why I prefer to make a deal with a large clan in a large city where it’s easier to disappear and the Sniffers would be more leery of blowing their cover to come after me directly like the Retrievers just did back in that small town.” She looked down at her hands. “I’m tired of running.”

“I can understand that,” he said sympathetically, “especially if what you just said about the Sniffers is true. Being one lion always among a sea of hostile people can’t be easy, but I think here in this state, you would find the clans even less tolerant of a lion in their midst given some very disturbing recent events involving the lion clans. Had you come to us even a few months ago, and your information is as valuable as you say it is, you might have convinced them to overlook your heritage, but now…”

He shook his head. “You’re better off trying the Central or South American clans,” he repeated.

A heavy silence fell between them, but Tori wasn’t really surprised. There was nothing more to say, really. Nolan had made his decision. She supposed she should be grateful that he had delivered the rejection in such a kind manner, that he had told her what’s what without stringing her along in the hopes she would reveal more information.

A true gentleman, as she thought.

She glanced at his profile, at the eyes that he was studiously keeping on the road. It was obvious that he felt bad. His shoulders were now stiffer than they had been the entire time she had been in the truck.

Despite how much another failure hurt, Tori felt a genuine smile stretch her lips as she studied the lines of his face. He really was handsome. This was the first time in a very long while that she’d looked at another man just for the sake of appreciation and not to analyze him for signs of a threat. It had been even longer still, not since her big brother, Al, was still alive, that she’d had such a candid conversation.

They were about a couple of minutes from Grand. She suddenly found herself wishing rather strongly that their time together wasn’t about end, that she could have at least seen him once in his shifted form.

Disturbed by the strength of those wistful thoughts, Tori turned away and bent down in order to rummage in her backpack that she had placed at her feet after slipping on her dress. She wasn’t sure what kind of expression she was showing and didn’t like the idea of him seeing just how off-balance she was now feeling.

“Looks like we have a tail,” Nolan abruptly said, his voice laced with tension and a hint of a growl, “a black SUV that just screams ‘Sniffer.’ Not too surprising given those Retriever bastards might as well’ve painted a big, neon-orange bulls-eye on the side when they showered the truck with bullets. They likely called in their buddies in the area to keep an eye out for my truck.”

Immediately alert, Tori dropped the sandals she had been pulling out of her pack in preparation of her imminent departure and started to lift her head up, but Nolan quickly reached out a hand to the back of her head and pressed it back down until it remained at a level below the dash and window.

“Keep your head down and stay down until I say so,” he commanded, the growl in his tone even more prominent now.

“Why?” she demanded a bit indignantly “What are you planning on—”

“Just do it!” he snarled. “I’ll explain later!”

Rather than argue, Tori did as he asked, grumbling about “pushy assholes” under her breath.

Nolan hit the gas, and the truck lurched forward until they were doing ninety. He drove in stony silence for a few minutes, his body wired up as tense as a bowstring, before he spoke again.

“Your body was out of their line-of-sight when we passed their SUV while it was parked along the shoulder, so they might think I dumped you somewhere between that first town and Grand. I have friends in the next town past Grand. I’m going to let you out a couple of miles on the other side then double back along some obscure roads to lay low with them. It’ll give you the chance to either hide out in the forest for a couple of days until they’ve moved on from the area, or to immediately double back, yourself, and I don’t know, ‘borrow’ a car or something, and continue on to the border. Hopefully by then those Retrievers and any Sniffers they call to action will have been so busy trying to find my truck that they’ll have lost the scent.”

Tori swallowed thickly against the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat. Rather than argue the point, she decided to accept his additional help as the gift it was.

“Then—let me fulfill my promise to you now. Although I’ve never seen it—I’ve just heard my father talk about it on occasion—there’s a certain ranch that the lion clans secretly own in the middle of nowhere just a few miles west of Amarillo—”

“Yes, we know,” Nolan interrupted, his hands suddenly tightening on the steering wheel even as his eyes went black with rage for a few seconds.

“You—you
know
?” Tori was flabbergasted. The way her father had talked about it, you would think that he had been hiding a second Fort Knox down there. “But—the Alphas were extremely careful to keep every aspect of it from being traceable back to them.”

“Not
everything
apparently,” he said rather smugly before he fixed intense eyes on her that still smoldered with the rage she had glimpsed earlier. “I don’t suppose you know exactly why they were treating my clansmen and women as lab rats do you?”

She reluctantly shook her head. “Only the Alphas and the scientists working there knew. The only reason why I know about it was because every single one of them were my potential targets from the moment they signed on. I always assumed it was because they were trying to develop some kind of bio-weapon. Sorry, but that’s all I know about it.”

“We burned that hellhole to the ground, so at the very least, we threw a big wrench into their plans. That can only be a good thing. It’ll gives us a chance to find out what they were up to before they can try to set up shop again, as well as recognize the signs if shifters start turning up missing again.”

Tori was once again staggered. “The southern clans are
a lot
stronger and resourceful than I ever thought.”
They just might be able to pull it off, if I just…

“Like I said earlier, if you had just come to us a few months ago, that little tidbit would have had our jaws dropping to the floor,” Nolan said, interrupting her thoughts.

“Then here’s something else that may just have your Elders’ jaws dropping, yet. Maybe yours, too. One of my old clan’s Polyshifter spies is currently serving on the Texas state senate with his eye on the Governor’s mantle. His name is William Banks.”

Nolan started, the truck threatening for a couple of seconds to veer into the shoulder again. “You know, I’ve actually heard of the guy. I couldn’t tell you the name of any of the others who serve on the senate with him, but I remember him because of the big stink they made about him being only twenty-six and beating a very popular incumbent who had sat in the same seat for over twenty years.”

“I’m sure the lion clans and their money had a lot to do with that upset,” Tori remarked dryly. “Over the last few years, he’s gathered quite a powerful following among the humans. I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of the rarer abilities a Polyshifter has is to suppress their shifter halves until even a wolf shifter such as yourself will think they smell one hundred percent human. It’s through Austin that the lions plan on conquering Texas, using the area as a launch pad to conquering the rest of the South. The Texas clans will need to do something soon, before he, and as an extension, the lion clans become too powerful and influential among the powerhouses of this state to stop.”