Shifters Gone Alpha (41 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

“I would have driven you to the border, you know,” Nolan suddenly blurted, “had those damned Sniffers not started following us.”

Tori’s hand froze on the door handle. His roundabout apology was strangely enduring.

“It’s okay, really,” she insisted even though her heart was screaming that, no it wasn’t okay, dammit, and lamented the missed opportunity of spending more time with her reluctant wolf rescuer. Now, once he drove off, she would likely never see him again.

Then, suddenly overcome with an urge to do something utterly crazy, Tori leaned over and kissed him softly, briefly on his lips. Other than starting a bit, he remained completely still and accepted the fleeting caress. A rush of emotions filled her like they had never done before. A simple kiss had never made her feel so alive and weak at the same time.

“Thank you,” she said sincerely as she drew back slightly, hoping he saw the truth of those words in her eyes.

His eyes bored into her own. “Stay safe,” he said gruffly, though by the slight hesitation before he spoke, Tori could tell that he had wanted to say something else. One more thing for her to regret about this parting.

She nodded because at that point, that was all she could do. “One final thing,” she said. “I guess you can consider it a gift to your clan. My father, as do all Alphas, has a master password to get into all the lion clans’ servers around the world. He’s incredibly sloppy—or arrogant—about changing it, so it’s very likely it might still work.”

Then, because she wanted the excuse to touch him, to feel the warmth coming off his body one last time, Tori leaned in, placing a hand delicately on his shoulder, and whispered the password phrase into his ear. She grinned wickedly at both the incredulous look on Nolan’s face and the potential havoc she had just set into motion.

“Use it to give them hell.”

Tori then turned away and climbed out of the truck, glancing back at him with a sad smile, before she shut the door and sprinted away from the truck into the tree-line a few yards away. She didn’t dare look back for fear she would burst into tears, and she hadn’t cried since that time alone in her room after she’d found out about Al’s suicide.

Only when she had run through the trees for a good twenty minutes did she stop and lean heavily, panting, against a tree twice as wide as her torso in order to weigh her options.

Maybe she should go back up to Dallas, hide in the city for a few months before trying for the border. A vision of Nolan’s truck almost immediately flashed through her mind—and as an extension, the friendly kiss she had given him—and for one wistful moment, Tori imagined tracking him down a few days from now and trying to sweet talk him into giving her that one last ride. Then she felt her face instantly heat up when her mind helpfully supplied her with images of an altogether different ride than she had intended.

Tori groaned and tugged on a handful of her hair hard. Now was
so
not the time for her mind to end up in the gutter yet again.

She was a lion. He was a wolf.

The reasons they couldn’t act on any budding attraction were as simple as that. Seeking him out now, no matter how good the reason, would only cause them unnecessary pain. It was best the short time they had spent together remained a pleasant memory relegated to the past. She had already caused him enough trouble.

No, it was definitely better to just start walking south towards the border and away from the temptation of finding out what could be.

A couple of hours later, Tori decided to head back west towards the interstate, wanting to get near enough to see the signs along the road stating the distance to the next town through the trees. She needed to take up Nolan’s suggestion of ‘borrowing’ a car because at the rate she was currently going, it would take her at least a month to even reach the border. By then it would be the heart of summer, and damned if she was going to walk day in and day out in all that broiling heat and humidity.

Once she reached a distance where she could finally see the occasional late-night travelers zooming past, Tori had to walk nearly another mile before the desired sign appeared, signaling she had another twenty miles to go—and ninety to Riverford. Sighing, she resumed walking, resigned to spending the remainder of the night on her feet.

A glint of light about a hundred yards up ahead soon caught her attention, and then Tori saw it, a gut-wrenchingly familiar silver truck completely camouflaged among the branches as though the forest was in the process of devouring it. She immediately froze and then plastered herself behind the thick tree beside her.

She took several, deep draughts of air, tasting. Yes—it was there, the mockingly sweet smell of male lion mixed in with the more earthy smell of a wolf.

Fuck
! And not just any scent. The bastards had deliberately marked the truck with their urine. Their message couldn’t have been clearer if they had left a recording of themselves cackling diabolically through the truck’s speakers like some kind of cheesy movie villains.

Worst of all, beneath all those scents was the coppery, salty smell of blood. The only thing that kept her from throwing her head back and screaming her rage to the heavens was the fact that she couldn’t smell even a hint of death.

What the hell was the truck doing this far south? Nolan should have already been contemplating sleep at his friend’s place back in the last town. Had he changed his mind about driving her to the border and come looking for her only to be caught by the bastards?

On closer inspection, Tori noticed that the back two tires were flat, one with its tread completely shredded while the other had a huge, gaping hole in one side, possibly shot out. Yes, he was definitely attacked again.

The retrievers probably assumed she would make a beeline for Riverford or Parker’s Grove, expecting her to stumble across this sick display of their declaration of their dominance over her. But if so, why weren’t they also here waiting for the moment she was distracted with her inspection of the wreckage in order to attack? Their scent was at least an hour old.

Because they’re not sure where Nolan left you, nor which direction you even went after leaving him. Which means they haven’t managed to make him talk.

The thought was both a relief and horrifying. On the one hand, as long as Nolan refused to give her up, they would keep him alive. However, whether or not that was a good thing was debatable once those sadists starting “working” on him. For an utter stranger that forced her way into his life, and a
lion
, no less, it would be stupid for him not to give her up to save himself a lot of agony, even if he knew it wouldn’t save his life. He didn’t owe her a single thing.

But she owed him everything.

This time Tori did growl, shaking as white-hot anger began to consume her. She should have never gotten into his truck. She should have just shifted back into a lioness and fought those bastards to the death. She would have at least died knowing she had fought against her fate with everything in her being. That Nolan was as good as dead, if he wasn’t dead already, was completely on her, because she was just so desperate to live that she so callously disregarded the safety of an innocent. For all she knew, it could have been a family with young kids in there.

She clenched her fists and took a deep breath in order to calm down her out-of-control emotions. She didn’t have time to lose her head here. Nolan needed her, and she damned well was going to find him even if she had to kill every last one of those bastards to do it!

CHAPTER FIVE

A mild gust of wind blew over Tori as she crouched hidden within a thick clump of weeds and sunflowers as tall as her midriff. With the wind came a large whiff of the sweet smell of lion that she would likely associate with pain and death for the rest of her life.

She stilled and concentrated on sniffing the air in every direction around her. After a couple of minutes, she was pretty positive that it was coming from the direction of one of the abandoned, rusted cotton gins in the distance that looked to have been once refurbished into some kind of dance hall according to the large, half-rotted wooden sign with the nearly faded letters still hanging along the side of the building. By the overgrown and wild state of the building’s lot, the dance hall, too, appeared to have been abandoned somewhere in the last decade.

Figuring it was the best place to start, Tori had decided to backtrack to the small town where Nolan and she had parted ways. She had skulked and sniffed around in the dark for over an hour before she had caught her first scent of lion. She had followed it carefully to an alley behind a two-story house, mindful of an ambush, before it simply vanished.

Tori had spent the rest of the night following similar trails to equally infuriating dead ends as the first. It was obvious that the Retrievers had spent a good deal of time driving around from place to place to leave trails of both lion scent and that of a wolf in distress that seemed to start and end with no rhyme or reason to their direction.

The powerful scent of lion in every instance was the very embodiment of arrogance. That she had put herself into a position to be taunted by these assholes really pissed her off.

However, because they had saturated seemingly every nook and cranny of the town with their scent, Tori was having a difficult time differentiating the age of the scents swirling around her. For all she knew, the bastards were watching her right now from somewhere nearby, and even with the wind conveniently blowing from the direction of all the cotton gins towards her, she couldn’t be sure if any of the scents were new—at least in her human form.

Mind made up, Tori slipped out of her backpack, dress, and sandals as quickly as she could manage while staying hidden. After stowing her clothes and shoes away in her pack, she slipped it on again. A few seconds later, her muscles began to ripple and the shape of her body to distort, stretching and pulling until the lioness formed fully. She took a minute to extend her two front paws as far as she could in front of her in order to stretch out the muscles in her back, before stealthily moving through the weeds towards the repurposed cotton gin, the smell of wolf now joining the increasingly strengthening stench of lion.

Hunching down closer to the ground until she was very nearly crawling on her belly, Tori forced herself to slowly circle around the building towards the back, her gaze darting around to focus very briefly on every movement. In the back, she found a gaping hole about the size of a man’s torso in the metal wall that looked to have started out as a weak point caused by decades of rust and then punched through by either kids or vagrants.

Tori carefully stuck her nose near the edge of the hole and drew in a deep breath. Yes, the smell of wolf was fairly strong within, though surprisingly, she didn’t smell the large amount of blood she had feared, only the barest of hints. She’d smelled worse from a kid with a bloody nose. The smell of more than one lion was also, of course, present, but right now, it wasn’t as potent in the air.

Could she really be that lucky? Surely at least one of them had stayed behind in case she showed?

She stuck her face a little farther into the hole and narrowed her eyes as they adjusted to the difference in light. For the most part, the interior was empty sans the empty beer bottles and a decade’s worth of food bags and other debris strewn across a concrete floor. There was no sign of either Nolan or the Retrievers.

Then just as she was about to pull back, her ears twitched and Tori froze as she suddenly heard a violent
clang
of metal against metal somewhere to the left within the building. She pulled her head away from the hole and crouched down in the weeds completely onto her belly and merely listened for a long moment, her eyes watchful for any signs of movement in the weeds not caused by the wind. When she heard the same sound again, only this time three times successively and louder, she knew the first one hadn’t been a fluke.

Tori cautiously climbed through the hole, taking a second to scan the interior, before turning to scrutinize the left wall. There was a thin, rusted metal door with only a hole where the knob used to be. She had assumed that the building would just be one large space, but she hadn’t taken into account the renovations done later. The door was so rusty and caked with several dark substances that her nose told her included large amounts of both human feces and urine that she didn’t even want to go near it.

Then she heard another loud
clang
that was without a doubt coming from within, and baring her teeth, she forced herself closer to the door and peered through the small hole.

What she saw within had her rearing back with a snarl. There was a rusty, metal frame of an old bed placed in the center of the space, and within it, naked and tied to it spread eagled by his wrists and ankles with what looked like plastic zip ties was Nolan. His face was red with anger and exertion and shockingly, with only a split lip and swelling eye to complete the picture.

He was trying to break the ties on his wrists with sheer force. The clanging of metal she had been hearing was the bed being jostled against the pile of thin metal pipes lying next to it every time he tried to break the ties.

However, at the sound of her snarl, Nolan stopped his futile attempt to break the zip ties and glared daggers at the door.

“What, you wanted a peep show now, you sick bastards?” Nolan spat, his voice dripping with so much rage and hate that it sounded a full octave lower. “I should start charging fucking admission!”

Tori quickly shifted back into her human form. Without bothering to dress, she held her breath and forced herself to put one hand inside the filthy door hole in order to tug it open.

“How about a peep show
and
a rescue?” she quipped cheekily as she stepped fully inside.

“Tori!” Nolan exclaimed, his rage melting into probably the stupidest expression of utter astonishment and relief she had ever seen on a grown man’s face.

Not bothering to cover up her nudity, Tori hurried over to him and squatted down just behind his head. “How long ago did they leave you here by yourself?” she demanded urgently.

He scowled. “Maybe about an hour—what the
hell
are you even doing here? How the hell did you even find me?”

“I’ve been trained practically since birth to be a killer, remember?” Tori replied wryly as she began shrugging out of her backpack again. “I can track a person’s scent over long distances practically in my sleep. Now, save the questions for later. I’ve got bolt cutters.”

She pulled out the aforementioned tool and had him free within a few minutes. The scent of fresh blood filled the air as the deep cuts he had sliced into his wrists trying to free himself began to bleed freely.

“You must be the luckiest bastard in the world,” Tori said as she helped him stagger to his feet. “I’ve seen prisoners go
into
an interrogation with Retrievers more beat up than you look right now.”

Nolan grimaced as the circulation began rapidly flooding back into his numbed hands and feet. “Yeah. Nothing but a fat lip and a sore eye. I think they opted for the psychological torture this time. The big one kept threating to break my arms and legs with those metal rods down there if I didn’t tell them exactly where I’d dropped you off and where you were going. The black guy wanted to start cutting off my fingers one by one.”

He laughed nastily. “Needless to say, I started blabbing right away, telling them that as soon as I thought it was safe to stop, I kicked you out of the truck and got the hell away from there. They spent a lot of time arguing about whether nor not I was telling them the truth. Of course, they could clearly hear how much I hated lions every time they ungagged me to speak, so I think they believed me in the end.”

Black guy… “So you saw all three here?” Tori said grimly.

The youngest son of the Alpha of the LA lion clan, the third Retriever was famous for his ability to extract information, the
correct
information, from his targets within moments of meeting. Forget lucky, a damned miracle had happened here that the worst injuries Nolan had were self-inflicted.

“There were actually five when I was first brought here,” Nolan replied. “Two of them were probably Sniffers. They looked a little scared of the Retrievers.”

“Then they’re pretty smart.” Tori picked up her pack and began putting it on again. “Let’s get out of here before the sickos—“

The sound of a door screeching open rang out from the front part of the building, and both of them cursed virtually in unison.

“There’s a hole in the back wall of the building,” Tori hissed. “Shift and follow me.”

She had purposely left the filthy door open in case of this very scenario. She was still completing the shift as she bounded out the door and towards the hole, hoping that Nolan had recovered the use of his limbs enough to make a run for it once they were outside. She’d rather avoid any death matches if at all possible.

Shouts rang out, and Tori could hear the pounding of shoes on the concrete, but she dared not waste even a second to turn around. She prayed that they wouldn’t start shooting.

Tori could feel Nolan’s hot breath on her hindquarters as she slipped through the hole. Another beat and he was also out, and for the first time, she saw a red wolf up close.

His wolf was just as beautiful as his human face was handsome.

She then mentally berated herself at that totally inappropriate thought at such a dangerous time as she led Nolan across the weeds. Suddenly, what felt like a freaking brick wall hit her from the side, and she went tumbling with a roar of both shock and rage. She didn’t need to see the mane scraping over one of her eyes to know what had hit her was one of the Retrievers, and wouldn’t you know it, it was the biggest one.

Tori immediately snapped her jaws closed hard around all that mane draping over and against her muzzle, as lightning fast as any alligator, and began to violently shake her head in an effort to both rip some of it out and to get him to back away enough for her to get her hind legs under and pressed against his belly for a throw. She had maybe only a minute or two to get the brute off her before the other two Retrievers joined the fray.

Then suddenly she Nolan’s tawny red fur filled her vision, and a split-second later, the Retriever let out a sound that was half-roar and half-gurgle. He began to kick all of his limbs wildly, slashing uselessly at the air with his claws, and continued to gurgle as if he was drowning.

A coppery scent filled her nose as Tori struggled beneath him for another few seconds before she finally was able to wiggle out and away from that crushing mass of muscle and fur.

As she rolled back onto all fours and turned around, she got an eyeful of a rather rare scene of a wolf’s teeth attached to the neck of a lion maybe twice his size and weight, slowly choking the life out of the bigger predator as the lion thrashed and slowly started to bleed out.

Tori roared and bumped Nolan hard with her head. Another lion was coming through the hole. They didn’t have time for him to finish this match!

Nolan growled angrily and snapped at her, his muzzle dripping with crimson, before his eyes focused and then widened when he realized what he had just done to her. Tori gestured towards the second attacking lion and then turned to bound off through the weeds in the opposite direction, hoping that Nolan had recovered enough from his bloodlust to take the hint and follow. It was times like these that Tori wished shifters could talk in their animal forms, no matter how ridiculous the idea.

The wind suddenly gusted over her, bringing the smell of blood and wolf, as well as two distinct lion scents. Tori chanced a glance over her shoulder, and Nolan was only a couple of strides behind her, running in a strange, wobbly gait, but also showing no signs of slowing down. They kept their brutal pace up all the way south across the railroad tracks and knowing there was no way they could lose them in such a small town, out of the city limits until the surrounding forest loomed only a football field away, and the pace was no longer sustainable.

The two Retrievers giving chase didn’t miss a beat, staying only a few dozen strides behind them. Tori knew that they would likely chase them down until they or Nolan and she collapsed out of exhaustion.

Not wanting to find out who would win that contest, at the last minute, Tori decided to change course, cutting a sharp right just at the tree line and running once again at top speed towards the hum of the interstate. If she timed it right, Nolan and she could dart across the road between the traffic, and that would hopefully mess up the rhythm of their pursuers enough to put the distance needed in eventually losing them.

Without warning, the sound of gunfire erupted behind her, and Tori tripped and went down hard into an uncontrolled tumble when her left thigh erupted into fire.