“What?” Clinton yelled from inside. Even though she’d spent a lot of time here, it hadn’t softened him much.
“Something’s wrong. Bash needs help.”
Without waiting on an answer, she sprinted to Mason’s trailer and did the same. Audrey was jogging down the porch stairs of Harrison’s trailer, and Kirk was already headed to the trail in the woods where Bash had disappeared.
Audrey let off a pained yell. She hunched into herself, then fell to her knees on the gravel. Emerson ran to help her, but her friend’s body blurred and broke, and Audrey’s tiger snarled its way out of her in a matter of moments.
Emerson skidded to a stop in the gravel, but Audrey bolted, her giant paws flattening on the road as she ran after Kirk. Audrey looked over her shoulder and slowed down with a short roar.
Okay, she was in this now. Emerson sprinted after Audrey and tried to keep up as the massive white, striped cat weaved this way and that through dark wilderness she could obviously see much better than Emerson could. Come on, moon. Give me something.
She blinked hard to try and force her eyes to adjust as Audrey led her deeper and deeper into the Boarlander woods. She could hear it now—voices, just over the sound of Bear Trap Falls. And through the trees, she saw something that made no sense until she hit the edge of the tree line.
A woman and a man, dressed in black with thick bulletproof vests, stood legs locked, handguns pulled, and facing off with the two grizzlies. Harrison paced back and forth from the bank to the tree line since Bash’s black grizzly was cutting him off from getting to the intruders.
The man was tall and lanky, his face red to match his shorn hair. He was yelling, “Back the fuck off. We don’t want to shoot, but we will!”
The woman was shorter, thin, and one of her arms was covered in an intricate tattoo that stretched to her elbow on one arm. Her hair was short, chin-length, and bleached blond, and as Audrey skidded to a stop on the beach sand in front of her, another woman’s voice shouted, “Drop your weapons. Now!”
Emerson stumbled forward and stopped beside Audrey, who crouched and hissed, as if she was about to attack. Without thinking, Emerson clenched the scruff of her neck and said, “No, Audrey. They’ll open fire.”
Adrenaline had dumped into her system, and her heart was beating so hard her chest hurt. This was her nightmare, seeing the people she’d come to love threatened like this. Behind her, a quick drumming sound echoed through the woods, and now Kirk was here, a massive silverback gorilla walking slowly from the darkness, eyes on the two intruders and his lips curled back to expose impossibly long canines.
There was a woman holding a weapon trained on the couple that Emerson hadn’t seen until she cleared the trees. She was curvy, and her sandy-colored hair was wild with curls like her own, but when the woman ghosted her a glance and ordered, “Stay back,” her eyes glowed like a demon’s. Shifter.
“I’m Georgia of the Gray Backs, ranger and protector of these mountains, and you are trespassing,” she gritted out. She cocked her gun and aimed for the woman’s head. “Drop your fucking weapons, or you won’t live until your next breath.”
“I’m Officer Allison Holman and this is my partner Finn Brackeen. We are part of a task force here to extract a human you are holding against her will.” She flashed a badge on her hip and aimed her gun at Georgia. “You put your gun down,”—Holman jerked her chin toward Emerson—“and let her go.”
Bash roared a furious, deafening sound and turned on the woman, but Emerson bolted and put her hands up in front of him. “No, Bash!” She rounded on the woman and pleaded, “Don’t shoot him. Don’t shoot any of them. They’re my people!”
Holman’s face faltered. “Your people?”
“Tell me you aren’t here because of Damon,” Clinton said from where he leaned against a tree, his eyes glowing silver.
“We’re here to extract—”
“Bullshit!” Clinton’s voice cracked across the mountains, and he pushed off the tree. “Emerson, tell them what you are really doing here.”
“I’m Bash’s mate. I belong with him. With them. I love him,” she said, pushing the words desperately past her tightening vocal cords. “I love all of them. I’m not here against my will. Please don’t take them away from me. I just found them.”
The woman shook her head over and over, confusion washing over her face. “That’s not what we’ve been told.”
“By who?” Emerson asked.
“Your friend, Rachel Mallory, turned in a missing person’s report this morning. She said you were taken from your home in distress by Sebastian Kane.”