Wolf Hunt (Book 2) (8 page)

"You've got to be..." he began, before everything went dark.

* * *

"If we die it's all your fault," said Ally, tugging her arm to make George move faster.

"You know what? Fuck you, kid. I'm still your elder."

"Elder doesn't mean wiser."

"We were forced to do all of this. Lou and I didn't wake up and decide to kidnap you. We don't mess with children. It's one of our rules."

"Flexible rule though, huh?"

"You're not helping anything. Didn't you ever watch any TV shows that taught you about cooperation?"

"I guess I missed the episode where Grover was a kidnapper."

"You're a precocious little shit. We'd be in much better shape if you'd drop the attitude and work with me."

"Yeah, I'll get right on that."

"I'll make you a deal. You transform back into a wolf, and you can do whatever you want. You can scamper off through the wilderness with all of your animal friends."

"Screw you."

George decided to let her have the last word. If she'd cheerfully gone along with him, he'd be wondering what the hell was wrong with her, so he had to respect her disdain for him.

"Hey, George!" somebody shouted from behind them. It wasn't the guy who'd been shouting before.

George didn't shout anything back. Not all of his recent decisions had been top-notch, but he wasn't about to start foolishly giving away his location.

"I know you can hear me. We've got Lou. Turn yourselves in and we'll let the three of you live. Otherwise, your friend gets shot in the head."

Damn it. It could be a trick, but the shouting did sound like it was coming from where they'd left Lou. And Lou hadn't helpfully announced that no, he was perfectly fine, it was all just a clever ruse, no need for concern.

"We're not going back, are we?" asked Ally.

"We might."

"I'm not."

"If I don't hear anything in ten seconds, he's dead!" the man shouted.

George chewed on his lower lip for eight of those ten seconds. "Okay!" he finally called back. "We're on our way!"

"Are you insane?" Ally asked.

"By now, yes."

"I'm not going with you."

"Yes, you are. I've got a plan. You like guns?"

CHAPTER TWELVE

Plan F

In instances where George was forced to come up with a desperate plan, they usually involved an element that would hopefully cause the person being planned against to say, "What the hell?"

That was the key component of this one. If he could get a moment of "What the hell?" out of the guy or guys who had Lou, he might be able to use that second of surprise to shoot him or them in the face or faces. Plans like this were usually better when you knew how many people you were up against, but George didn't have this luxury.

The part of the plan that sucked was that it required him to trust that Ally, when given a revolver, would not immediately use it against him. Handing his gun over to Ally could be construed as extremely dumb, since she hadn't expressed any real desire to
not
jump at the opportunity to escape from him, but hopefully he could convince her that this plan was a better one than shooting him and running away.

George popped open the cylinder and spun it. "You see that the gun is loaded, right? I'm not trying to fool you."

"Okay."

Actually, he was trying to fool her, a little. He'd rotated the cylinder so that her first couple of shots would be on an empty chamber. That way, if she did try to blow his head off, he'd have the opportunity to try to wrestle the gun away from her.

This also meant that he'd have to squeeze the trigger a couple of extra times before he could take out Lou's captors, but there was no way around that unless Ally suddenly developed a convenient case of Stockholm Syndrome.

"I really need you to trust me on this," said George. "If you run, they
will
find you, and it
will
be horrible. Work with me on this, and Lou and I will drop you off somewhere safe, I promise." George decided that, for now, he was telling the truth.

Then he handed her the gun.

The plan, in its entirety, was that they would walk back and pretend that Ally was holding George at gunpoint. This sight would both surprise and amuse the other criminals, and during their moment of "What the hell?" Ally would quickly return the gun to George, who would then start shooting.

That was it.

Given time, he could probably come up with something better that did not involve a fourteen-year-old werewolf pointing a gun at his head, but right now, this was the best he could do.

"Act like you hate me," said George, as they walked down the path back toward the van, truck, dead bodies, reinforcements, and Lou.

Ally didn't say anything, even though he'd given her an excellent opportunity to make a smart-ass comment like, "No problem."

It didn't take long to reach the spot where they'd left Lou behind. He was sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree, unconscious.
Hopefully
unconscious. George didn't see any blood.

Two men were there in facemasks and white snowsuits that each had what appeared to be bullet holes on the torso. Thanks to the facemasks, George couldn't read their expressions, which was going to make it more difficult to capitalize on any "What the hell?" moments.

Of course, they both had guns pointed at him.

"Don't shoot," said George.

The man who had a hole in his chest instead of his stomach tilted his head a bit. "What's the deal?"

"What does it look like?" asked George. This was worse than that stupid plan to just snatch Ally outside of her home.

"You let her get your gun?"

"Stop talking, everyone!" said Ally. "Don't make me kill him!"

One of the many, many flaws in this plan was the complete lack of motivation for Ally to have brought George back at gunpoint. The plan wasn't supposed to last long enough for the men to question it, but George had anticipated something with a more natural moment to get the gun back from Ally, not something where two men just stared at him with their guns drawn.

"This is some sort of plan, isn't it?" asked the man with the bullet hole in his stomach.

George and Ally neither confirmed nor denied this.

"Drop the gun. Seriously."

"All right," said George, even though he was not the one holding the gun.

He braced himself for the
click, click
of Ally unsuccessfully trying to shoot him in the back of the skull, but didn't hear it. Ally lowered the gun.

"That was a lousy plan," said the man with the bullet hole in his chest.

"I know," George admitted.

"I won't tell anyone about it."

"Thank you."

"Little girl? Drop the gun."

Ally dropped the gun.

"Kick it away."

"Who?" George asked. "Me or her?"

"Doesn't matter. You."

George kicked the gun away. It wasn't easy to do in the snow but he managed.

"Get on your knees and put your hands on your head."

George and Ally both did so.

"Is there another part to your plan that I don't know about? Because if you try anything, I will not hesitate to shoot you."

"There's nothing else."

"Really? That's all you had?"

"Yep."

"That's sad."

"I'm very much aware of that. Can you just take us away now?"

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Back in a Van

Ally thought she was doing an incredible job of not acting like she was terrified out of her mind. She'd only succumbed to tears once during this nightmare, even though she wanted to cry and scream and beg them not to hurt her. She didn't care if any of these assholes saw her cry, but she needed to stay in control of herself.

Werewolf...

She'd had dreams about being a shape-shifter. But she'd also had dreams about flying, aliens, standing in front of the entire school in her underwear, and a talking fish, and none of those were going to come true.

Werewolf...

She remembered everything that happened. She couldn't control any of it, yet there was no dreamlike haze to it: she remembered the pain of the change, excruciating but over quickly. She remembered the delicious smell of George's blood and how much she wanted to taste it, let it pour over her tongue. She remembered wanting to kill him.

Kill Lou.

Kill anybody else who was nearby.

That last part was what scared her the most. Of course she wanted to kill her kidnappers, but when she'd leapt out of the van, she'd really wanted to go after one of the onlookers. Rip them apart.

Only a sense of self-preservation, which she was aware of even though she couldn't control it, made her run into the woods instead of toward a juicy victim.

She would have murdered somebody.

Gleefully.

Ripped a thick, meaty strip right off their arm and gobbled it down. Loving the sound of their screams as she did it. Loving the smell of their fear almost as much as the taste of their bloody flesh.

She fought with her mother at least once a week, and she despised her gym teacher, but Ally had never in her life wanted to actually kill somebody.

Werewolf...

Or drugs. Maybe they'd given her drugs. Ally had absolutely no interest in drugs or alcohol, even when Lisa and Maddie had made fun of her for refusing to take a bite of a pot brownie. She liked boys but wasn't going to take the chance of one getting her pregnant. Nothing like that was going to ruin
her
life.

Except, apparently, for something she couldn't control.

Was Mom a werewolf?

Was Dad?

Were they both?

She knew for a fact that a wolf hadn't bitten her, so it had to be inherited, right? Was that why her parents got divorced? Supposedly it was because Dad was cheating on Mom, but what if that wasn't really the reason? What if she'd divorced a werewolf?

No. Mom would've told her.

Honey, there's something I've got to tell you. You know that one character in Twilight who changes into a wolf? Edward?

No, Mom. Edward's the vampire.

Jason?

Jacob.

Jacob. That's right. Well, you're just like him. Sorry.

Maybe Mom was waiting for just the right time, and she'd gotten the right time wrong.

Uh-uh. No. Mom started talking about menstruation long before Ally wanted to hear anything about it, so she wouldn't have kept this a secret. Especially if it was a change that made Ally want to kill people.

So Dad.

Dad didn't talk to her much. Called her once a week. Brought her to Minneapolis for the weekend once a month, usually. He'd moved there two years ago, after the divorce, to be with his skank girlfriend Robyn. To be fair to Dad, he was still with the skank, even though Mom had told him, Ally, and everybody who would listen that it wouldn't last.

Dad got angry a lot, but that didn't make him a werewolf.

If anything, it meant that he probably wasn't one. Ally had been furious when she changed.

Well, she'd also been scared. Maybe it was the fear that did it, not the anger.

Or maybe Dad had learned to control himself better.

Oh well. It didn't matter. She was just trying to think about things besides how much danger she was in.

"Ally?"

She looked up at George. "What?"

"You okay?"

"Do you think I'm okay?"

"Sorry. You looked like you were drifting off for a bit."

She and George were seated in the back of a black van. This one did not have windows on the sides. Their hands and feet were bound together by those plastic straps that police used now instead of metal handcuffs. Their hands were behind their backs, and Ally's arms were almost completely numb. Lou was also bound up, though he was flopped over on his side, sleeping. They couldn't use the plastic straps on his hands, since he only had one, so his wrist was cuffed to the rear door handle with regular handcuffs. They'd taken George's phone away.

Ally doubted that the plastic straps would hold her if she changed. Unfortunately, she'd been trying to change back pretty much ever since she'd woken up from the drugged dart, and it wasn't working.

The men who captured them knew that, of course. When they tossed her into the back of the van, one of them had made a point of showing her the tranquilizer dart gun he was holding, and he'd also told her that his regular gun had silver bullets.

"Then let me drift," Ally said to George.

George nodded. "Fair enough."

"What are they going to do to us?"

George looked sort of like Dad did when she'd demanded to know why he cheated on Mom. He didn't look away like Dad, but he seemed to be trying to think up a convincing answer on the spot. Finally he just said, "I don't know."

"Are they going to kill us?"

"Want the truth?"

"Yes."

"Gun to my head, if I had to say what I thought would happen, I'd say that Lou and I are toast. But they'll let you go. Even these psychos don't want the heat that would come from killing you."

"Sorry to eavesdrop," said the man in the passenger seat (George couldn't see if he was the one who'd been shot in the chest or the stomach), turning around to face them, "but do you mind if I put in my two cents?"

"Please do."

"They're not letting her go. Not a chance."

"Mind cutting my hands free? I'd like to give you the finger."

The man chuckled and turned back around.

"He's just trying to scare you," George told Ally.

"He did."

"Don't let him. These guys are a bunch of sadists."

"And you're not?"

"No. I'm not. I don't want anything bad to happen to you."

Ally let out an incredulous laugh. Had he really just said that?

"What?" George asked.

"You're a piece of shit, George. You're a child-abducting piece of shit. Don't act like you're some kind of...I don't know, holy warrior or something."

"I never said that I was a holy warrior or something. Listen, you're not going to say anything about me that's worse than what I say about myself—"

"Your nose is ugly."

"—so why not stop the verbal abuse, okay?"

"What, the big bad gangster can't handle some insults from a tiny little girl? Did I hurt your feelings?"

"My feelings are fine. I just think that there are more productive ways we could be spending our time."

"Our time trapped in the back of a van."

"Yes. That time. We could be using this opportunity to repair our relationship. Right now we need to stick together. Why be a bitchy teenager?"

Ally had a million sarcastic responses to that...but he was right. She hadn't believed him when he said that he'd let her go, and she knew that he was putting his own survival ahead of hers, yet still, she
did
believe that he'd been forced into this whole thing. He wasn't doing it for money or some disgusting pleasure. If nothing else, he was more on her side than the people she'd be meeting soon.

Time to stop being antagonistic.

Oh, she still planned to see him and Lou dead or in prison, but for now, she'd play nice.

"Fine," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Thanks."

"So you've seen a werewolf before?"

George nodded. "Yeah. It was a job down in Florida. Lots of dead bodies before we took him out. Lou and I went into hiding, so I don't know for sure how the media covered it, but we don't seem to be in a brand new world that believes in the existence of werewolves, so I assume there was a cover-up."

"I saw stuff about it on Facebook. It wasn't all covered up, at least. People just didn't believe the whole story."

"What did they think happened?"

Ally shrugged. "I don't remember everything. Insane guy in a wolf mask, I think."

George would have buried his face in his hands if they weren't locked behind his back. "Insane guy in a wolf mask. Jesus Christ."

"Makes more sense than the real story."

"Still..."

"I bet if you checked there are probably like eight billion conspiracy theory sites about it. I think his body disappeared from a Chuck E. Cheese or something before the police got there."

"It was a bowling alley."

"Oh."

"His body disappeared?"

"Yeah."

Weird. "So, any idea how this happened to you? Are you any relation to Ivan Spinner?"

"No."

"Uncle? Cousin?"

"I know my uncles and cousins."

"I meant second uncles or second cousins. I don't know the full names of all
my
relatives. There could be some connection."

"I have no idea how it happened," said Ally. "Maybe I got bit but I didn't notice because I was too busy texting."

George smiled. "Could be. You kids today."

Ally sighed. "Mom won't even let me have a cell phone. I'm going to die without my own cell phone."

The van stopped. George peeked up front, and for a split second he looked extremely worried. Then, as if noticing that Ally was watching him, he smiled again.

"What?" Ally asked.

"Nothing."

"No, what?"

"This is where they gave Lou and I the assignment in the first place."

"Is that bad?"

"All of the scenarios are bad, unless the driver is a double agent and is secretly on our side." George raised his voice, addressing the driver. "Hey, are you a double agent who's secretly on our side?"

"Nope."

"Didn't think so." He looked back at Ally. "This warehouse is where I talked to both Mr. Dewey and Mr. Reith. I was kind of hoping we'd only have to mess with one of them."

"Oh."

"It's okay, though. Stay calm. We'll be fine."

Ally tried to stay calm. The van pulled forward, then turned and stopped. The driver turned off the engine. Both of the men got out.

"Is there anything else I should know?" asked Ally. Her whole body, and her voice, was quivering.

"Just be polite."

The rear door of the van opened.

"They're all yours," said the driver, stepping out of the way.

A very old man, the oldest man Ally had ever seen in real life, was standing there. He looked as if he were going to topple over, despite his cane.

"Hello, Mr. Reith," said George.

"Hello, George," said the old man. There was no trace of amusement in his voice. Not only was he the oldest person Ally had ever seen, but she'd never seen anybody who was so filled with rage. He looked like his withered skin might split apart, releasing streams of lava.

"I know we ended on bad terms."

"Do not speak, George," said Mr. Reith. "Do not say a single word. If you do, I will have you immediately killed. Not one word."

George apparently believed him. He kept his mouth closed and just gave a small nod.

Another man stepped into view. He was significantly younger than Mr. Reith, though still older than Ally's dad. He looked more relieved than angry to see them.

"Good to see you again, George. Don't greet me—I wouldn't want you to die just to be polite." The man looked directly at Ally and broke into a huge, scary grin. "And you're Ally."

"Yes, sir."

"We're going to be very good friends, Ally. I'm Mr. Dewey." He winked at her. "Like the decimal system."

Ally had no idea what he was talking about, but she didn't say anything.

Mr. Dewey gestured to the two men in snowsuits. "Chain her up. We're going to start right away. Drag Lou in there too, in case we need to feed her something."

"Got it," said the driver. "And George...?"

"We'll let George see his future. Put him in the room with Eugene."