Following the scent down the side of a hill toward a snowmelt stream, she crossed a rocky scree and then dove to the ground, flattening herself behind a fallen tree.
Ahead of her, just rounding a turn, she’d caught a glimpse of a cockatrice. And from the coloration of his feathers and scales, she suspected he was from an Eastern European nest she thought she’d wiped out herself twenty years earlier.
It’d been ridiculously easy to sneak into their house while they were out one day and lace the food and open beverages in the fridge with poison.
Although, in retrospect, she realized they probably blamed Kitty for that incident. The wolf did have a pretty savage rep amongst the cockatrice. Any time European cockatrice met with bad luck of any kind, they tended to blame that particular wolf for it.
Crap.
Mercedes knew maybe she herself was to blame here, if her gut instincts were correct. Perhaps they came after a mate in retribution for that attack.
Stranger things could happen.
That sealed it. She would do whatever it took to get the human mate back safely.
It wouldn’t totally wipe her own slate clean, but it would begin to atone a little for what her brothers had done.
And Marston.
Besides, the man had adopted a mixed-breed shifter baby as his very own. That right there meant he’d earned a place in the itsy-bitsy soft spot in what passed for her heart. Him and Micah Donovan, both.
Even if it weren’t for all of that, a chance to so easily fuck up the cockatrices’ plans was too good to pass up.
She carefully followed the men until they once again veered away from the stream. Silently, she dropped back, tracking them, not wanting them to pick up her scent. Fortunately, she was downwind of them.
They finally stopped where they had made camp in at the bottom of an outcropping, where old-growth trees and several large boulders concealed their campsite from the air.
Overconfident motherfuckers.
She backtracked a little, finding a way up the rocky face where they couldn’t see her. It took her a few minutes to slowly make her way on her belly to the edge and look down the sixty or so feet to the campsite, but the vantage point also gave her unfettered views of the area. It seemed it was just these two cockatrice and their hostage. Four bedrolls, a four-man tent, their hostage now tied up next to the tent with what looked like a pillowcase over his head, and the two men now shifted back into human form.
Easily carried on the breeze to her nose came the stink of the two cockatrice.
No others around, just the human.
Easing back from the edge, she sat up and shrugged the backpack off.
Knife or claws?
She hadn’t smelled gun oil during the tracking. Didn’t mean they didn’t have one or more stashed around somewhere.
She glanced to the west where the sun was quickly sinking down past the mountains. She wouldn’t have much time before she needed to make a decision. Just because the conspirators in the car weren’t here didn’t mean they weren’t on their way.
I guess the question is cockatrice or wolf? There were wolves in the park. Bio wolves, not just the shifter kind. She’d picked up faint traces of them during the day, but nothing overwhelming.
The question was, had the two cockatrice?
She headed back down the rock face to the trail. Her preference would be to come in from the other direction, opposite of the way the men had brought the hostage, but that would put her upwind and more easily scented. Not to mention, there were four bedrolls. Meaning at least one, possibly two more cockatrice lurking around somewhere.
She doubted the fuckers had brought a bedroll for their hostage.
With shadows deepening in the river bed, she shifted back to human form, took off her backpack, and withdrew the knife. After clamping the handle between her teeth, she shifted into cockatrice form.
Full dark would be best. Fortunately, she knew she likely had better night vision due to her wolf genes than the two cockatrice did. Another advantage in addition to surprise. She crept close enough to their encampment that she could hear them talking in low tones, meaning they’d remained in human form. They hadn’t lit a fire, and from the sound of their voices, they were likely sitting close together.
Dumb fucks. No lookout. Cocky fucking attitude.
The same kind of cockiness that had allowed her to easily wipe out a nest by herself without breaking a sweat.
As she waited until full dark fell, she listened and kept checking the sky above her. She didn’t want one of the dragons to swoop down and mistake her for one of the kidnappers.
Finally, one of the men stood up. “I’ve gotta take a dump.”
“Well, go over there somewhere. Don’t do it around here. I don’t want to be smelling it all fucking night.”
Mercedes tensed as she heard the man walking in her direction. She shifted back into human form, taking the knife in her hand. As the man passed her hiding spot and began to unfasten his jeans, she rushed up behind him, slapping her left hand over his mouth as she slit his throat with her right.
Easing him down to the ground, she wiped his blood off the knife on his jacket, moved him off the path behind a boulder, and returned to her hiding spot after quickly frisking him. No gun.
She was working out how to draw the other man away from the prisoner when she heard the sound of someone approaching from the other direction.
“Sam, Dave!” a man called out.
“Here, Bill,” the remaining man answered from the campsite.
Dammit.
She held her breath and tried to slow her racing pulse, barely able to hear their conversation over the blood pounding in her ears.
Longing for a gun, she debated retreating and going back to the overlook for a better vantage point. Unfortunately, if they discovered the dead man first, they might kill their prisoner.
No, she couldn’t risk it.
She crept forward until she could just see the campsite. Feeling around, she found a reasonably sized rock and pitched it, landing it on the far side of the camp.
Both men jumped up, alert.
“What was that?” Sam asked.
“I probably dislodged a rock on my way in,” the newcomer said. Then he laughed. “Or it’s a critter. Why, are you afraid of animals now?”
“Only the two-legged kind,” Sam groused. “How long till Cameron gets here?”
“Not long. He’s on his way. He had to go all the way up past Mammoth to ditch the car and pick up his own. The fucking wolves were only minutes behind him in their vehicles.” Bill laughed. “But last he told me on the phone before I hiked in, he said they were scouring every inch of the area looking for this guy.” He kicked Jim in the thigh, making the man moan.
She suppressed the urge to growl.
“Good thing we laid all those false scent tracks around there yesterday,” Bill said. “Smart thinking on Cameron’s part.”
“That’s why people bring him in and pay him decent money to do what he does.”
After a couple of moments of silence, Sam glanced her way. “Dave!” Sam called out. “Everything coming out okay?” The men laughed like it was the funniest joke in the world.
When their dead companion didn’t respond, Sam called out for him again.
That focused both men’s attention her direction. Fortunately, the boulder she hid behind concealed her for now.
Shit.
She couldn’t throw another rock to distract them without them seeing her do it.
“I fucking told you two to stay together,” Bill said. “What the hell’s he doing going off alone?”
“He had to take a crap.”
“You stupid fucks. There’s grizzlies in this part of the park.” He stood and headed in the direction Dave had gone.
Right towards her.
She shifted the knife to her left hand. With her right, she grabbed another rock. She could do this if she timed it just right.
Maybe.
/>
Sam still stood back at the campsite. She didn’t see a gun in his hands, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one.
She held her breath and waited while Bill moved past her. As hard as she could, she pitched the rock at the back of his skull and immediately switched the knife into her right hand.
Bill went down with an oomf. She whirled around and threw the knife, hitting Sam squarely in the chest with it. He dropped to his knees, hands outstretched and staring down at the knife, until he fell face-forward onto the ground.
Shifting into cockatrice form, she fell onto Bill as he tried to get up, slicing and ripping at his throat with her claws and beak until she finally struck his throat, ripping it out.
Jumping off him, she waited while he stumbled, eventually crashing into the ground.
Everything inside her wanted to let out a scream of victory, shriek it to the crystalline spray of stars strewn across the purple-black sky above her.
Then reality set in. She didn’t know how far away Cameron was. She also didn’t know if there were other conspirators in the park.
She shifted back into human form and raced down to get her pack after rinsing the man’s blood off of her in the stream. Stopping to retrieve her knife from Sam’s chest, she saw he wasn’t dead yet, but based on the noises he was making, it wouldn’t be long. She hurried over to Jim.
“It’s okay,” she told him as she knelt beside him. “I’m with your wolves.”
The man perked up, flinching a little as she pulled the pillowcase off his head. She carefully peeled the duct tape from his mouth.
“BettLynn?” he gasped almost before she had him freed.
She smiled. “She’s fine. I’m the one who found her. She’s with her mother.”
He let out a ragged cry of relief she did her best to ignore while she untied his wrists. “Thank you,” he said, emotion turning his voice gravelly. “Thank you for saving her. And me.”
“Hey, we wolves got to stick together.” She started pulling on her clothes while he untied his ankles. “Did they hurt you?”
He slowly shook his head. “Well, it feels like they hit me with a goddamned rock.” He gingerly felt at his head. “I—”
“Shh!” She heard a light scrabble, like someone sliding in scree. “We have to go, now,” she whispered. Grabbing his hand, she quickly led him back the way they’d come, practically dragging him behind her. She didn’t know if that was Cameron she’d heard, or an animal, but she didn’t want to be anywhere around the campsite when he got there.
“Did you—”
She turned and put her finger to her lips to silence him. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to be distracted from listening for other sounds, for anyone following them.
She had no idea what time it was when she finally stopped to take a break, allowing Jim to get a drink from the stream bed. They’d be breaking away from it soon, and she hadn’t brought any water with her.
“How’d you track me?” he whispered.
“I’m a wolf.”
“But how did you know to look for me this direction? I heard them say they’d laid a lot of false trails.”
“This wasn’t my first cockatrice hunt, you might say.” That, at least, wasn’t a lie. “I suspected they might have doubled-back and used the car as a decoy.”
“Where’s everyone else?”
“I didn’t have time to find them. They’d all headed after the car.”
“Oh.” He sat there, staring at the ground.
“We really need to get moving.”
“They were going to kill me anyway,” he whispered. “I heard them. They were talking about it as they carried me. They were going to ambush Kitty and anyone else with her, and then kill me, too.”
“I know,” Mercedes said. “That’s their MO. They’re soulless fucks.” It pained her to admit that, out loud—to a human no less—after all the years she’d held Edgar and Lenny on a pedestal and believed they were better than their counterparts. That they were special.
That they had their own form of ethics and morals.
But no, they hadn’t been any better than the fuckers she’d just killed. Maybe worse, considering what they’d planned to do.
“If they’d hurt BettLynn—”
“But they didn’t,” she said. “Lucky for you, she was shifted when they grabbed you or they might have.”
“Yeah.” He made no motions like he was going to move.
“Look, I’m not unsympathetic to the emotional shit you’re going through right now, but it’s cold and it’s late and I’m hungry. Not to mention, I’m not convinced we aren’t being followed. I’d really like to get you back safe and sound. The cockatrice had at least one other guy working with them, and he’s going to be really pissed off when he finds his three buddies turned into grizzly lo mein. I’d rather not be out here in the woods without a gun or backup when that discovery happens.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll carry your pack for you if you’d like to shift.”
Well, it would be warmer doing this as a wolf. The shorts weren’t giving her any warmth, and being barefoot wasn’t helping. She unshouldered her pack and quickly stripped. After zipping the pack closed, she stood there, holding it out to him.
He slowly dragged himself to his feet and took the pack from her. She shifted into wolf form, the woods taking on an unearthly glow as her natural night vision kicked in. Smells and sounds amplified without her even having to concentrate.
She softly chuffed at him before heading up the scent trail toward the Old Faithful area. He fell into step behind her, and she realized she had to slow down so he could keep up. After about a half hour or so, she couldn’t shake the feeling they were being followed.
Shifting back into human form so she could talk to him, she said, “Wait here.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just stay here. I need to run back the way we came and see if we’re being followed.”
“Please don’t leave me out here!”
“Look, I’m not leaving you. Just don’t move. Yell if something happens. I’ll be right back.” She shifted before he could object again. Running full bore through the night felt great, except she had to keep in mind her purpose.
When she reached the top of a ridge and looked down the way they’d come and, sure enough, she spotted something moving in the distance and heading their way. It was too dark for her to see for sure, but it looked like a person, following the trail they’d just traveled.
Fuck!
Chapter Thirty-One
Cameron swore when he reached their designated meeting spot. It didn’t take him long to find the still-cooling bodies of his three partners.
The prisoner, gone.
It took every ounce he had to hold back the scream of rage and grief he wanted to unleash into the cold night air.
His brother and two cousins, dead. He knew his mate was safe in Cody, having called once she escaped to there by another car after leaving the note in the lodge.
He sniffed around, freezing at what couldn’t be, yet was. Faint, but still there.
The scent of a cockatrice.
Another cockatrice, barely detectible, definitely female, but…her scent smelled really weird, off somehow. He wasn’t sure why it smelled so strongly overlaid with wolf, unless…
He straightened. Could it be?
He’d heard rumors, decades ago, but had assumed they were just that with no truth to them.
Maybe they weren’t just rumors after all.
He didn’t know how much of a head start she and the prisoner had on him, but he would do his damnedest to track her and their prisoner down. He couldn’t shift, but he had a nose nearly as good as a shifter. He picked up the scent trail and started off. He would catch up to them.
And kill that fucking traitorous bitch.
* * * *
Mercedes wheeled around, flying low across the ground as she ran back to the human. She shifted mid-stride, coming to a stop on t
wo feet in front of him. “We need to move fucking fast. There’s one after us. You have got to run or you’re going to die because I don’t know if I can take him down now that he knows what’s going on. I caught the others by surprise.”
He nodded. She shifted again and started off at a lope, the human able to keep up with her. She worried he might be too loud since he was exhausted, but fear seemed to have kicked a decent dose of adrenaline into his system. He kept up with her, not making too much noise, ducking around most of the branches and following her path.
She considered veering off the scent trail and taking a different way, maybe making it a little harder for the cockatrice since he already knew how to get to Old Faithful. Then she ditched that idea. She needed the fastest way possible back to Old Faithful and lots of backup.
On they ran, Mercedes praying they’d make it and increasingly unsure they would, when she skidded to a stop in the middle of the trail. A huge, dark, furry blob rose up on two feet and let out a growl.
Fuck! Fuckfuckfuck!
She yelped, backing up, her haunches bumping into the human. She hoped he was smart enough to back up, too.
Then, the bear was suddenly a huge, naked man she recognized as Kitty Blackestone’s mate. “Jesus Christ! Are you two all right?”
She practically howled with relief. She’d been too busy worried about the cockatrice behind them to think to check if this guy was a shifter.
She shifted back. “Yeah, but there’s one of the fuckers on our trail,” she said as she pointed back the way they’d come. “Human form, but he’s one of them.”
The bear looked as ferocious in two-legged mode as he did in four-legged mode. “He is, is he? You know how to get back?”
“I’m following a scent trail.”
“Prob’ly the same one I followed to find you. Get moving. I’ll be right behind you.” He shifted back into bear form and let out several loud, bellowing cries that seemed to shake the entire forest.
She looked at Jim. “Keep up.”
Wide-eyed, he nodded, and when she shifted and started running again, he was right on her tail.