Steele laid a hand on her shoulder. “I want to kill him too, more than you can imagine, and he will die for what he’s done. We need to interrogate him first, though.”
Clara nodded, reluctantly.
She felt a sudden wave of weariness wash over her, and she glanced back at the dark hole in the side of the mountain and shuddered.
A shifter walked up to Patrick, holding a satellite phone. “I’ve got someone who wants to talk to you,” he said, and she heard a delighted chorus of cubs screaming into the phone. “Daddy! Daddy!” They shouted.
Standing there in the open air, she felt the warmth of the late afternoon sun beaming down on her, and the cool breeze blowing away her terrible memories.
* * *
The shifters had been moved to the Lonesome Pine town hall, by bus, to wait for rides back to their home towns.
The sun had set hours ago. The humans in town had cooked up a huge banquet to welcome home Axel Gund and Roxanne and her baby. Shifters were mingling warily with the humans as they waited for their rides.
Roxanne sat in a folding chair by the side of the room, with Steele and Flint.
“I will never let you go again,” Roxanne said to Flint. “I will hold you in my arms forever and – okay, really?” he’d squirmed off her lap and turned into a cub, and pawed at her leg. Then he turned back into a human being again, with a delighted look on his face.
She bent down and picked him up in her arms.
“Is that normal?” she asked Steele.
“Usually our cubs don’t start shifting until they’re about a year old. My boy’s an overachiever,” Steele said proudly. “It’s a big deal when a cub shifts the first time. It’s like when they get their first tooth or take their first step.”
“You look so goofy when you look at him,” Roxanne said, but she was grinning like a fool too. The entire time the shifters were carrying out their raid, she’d had the terrible fear that she’d never see her child again. With Steele and Flint by her side, she literally wanted for nothing. She didn’t care if they lived in a tent, as long as they were with her.
What the shifters had learned so far, by questioning several captured humans, was mostly good news. They’d found out that STAB was a rogue unit, operating completely on its own.
The unit had been formed after they’d stumbled upon that shifter during their training exercise. Colonel Clinton Bradwell, who’d been leading the exercise, had decided to exploit what he’d found. His Brigadier General was having an affair with his male aide, so Bradwell was able to blackmail the man into allowing him and his men to operate entirely on their own, while sending back phony reports about the training missions that they were supposedly carrying out. They’d siphoned off funds to build the secret laboratory inside the mountain, thinking that its remoteness would protect them from discovery.
They’d sent their men around the country seeking to capture shifters. It still wasn’t clear how they’d been able to figure out where shifters lived, and finding that out would be top priority for the Wardens.
Dr. Jonas worked for the Colonel. Their goal was to be able to turn human soldiers into shifters, and harness their superhuman strength. Their ultimate goal was to take the results of their studies and sell them to an arms dealer for billions of dollars. All of the soldiers, the Colonel, and Dr. Jonas would have shared in the profits.
When their experiments failed to turn humans into shifters, they began specially targeting shifters with unique abilities, such as healers. They hoped that because the shifters were genetic mutations, they could figure out the mechanism behind the mutation, and copy it. So far, their experiments had resulted in failure.
Because they’d discovered the original shifter near the town of Lonesome Pine, they recruited the police chief and the doctor into their scheme. They figured that they might be able to use them to locate more shifters in the area.
Dr. Polaris, who’d kidnapped Roxanne, hadn’t been able to provide any useful information to the Gunds when they’d kidnapped him. Chief Fennel had gotten wind of the attack on the STAB facility, and had fled the area. The good news was that they’d managed to wipe out almost all of the men in the STAB squad. The bad news was, the colonel was still free, along with a small squad of men who were now on the run for their lives.
Roxanne spotted Katherine and waved her over. “He can turn into a wolf! That is the coolest thing,” Katherine said happily. She shot a look at Edvin Gund, then sat down next to Roxanne.
“He likes you,” Roxanne informed her.
“No, he doesn’t. He’s never asked me out.”
“He grew up with a tiny group of people, hardly ever coming to town, and he probably doesn’t even know how to ask a girl out. He came all the way to Colorado with you to get me, didn’t he? Go talk to him.”
“And say what? I can’t. That’s just not me,” Katherine shook her head vigorously. “I’m not that brave.”
“You think that’s not you, but you snuck into the woods to spy on Chief Fennell and then drove 15 hours to rescue me, and you shot Steele when you thought he was a threat to me,” Roxanne pointed out. “Don’t do that again, by the way, but thank you for coming to save me. My point is, you always think of yourself as such a chicken, but you’re the bravest person that I know. You went out into the woods by yourself to spy on the chief. That took some serious cojones.”
“I was desperate,” Katherine protested. “This is different.”
“You want to hear desperate?” Roxanne looked her in the eye. “You have already met every single eligible male in Lonesome Pine, and if you don’t ask Edvin out, you will either have to marry one of them, or die single. Also, I saw a girl checking Edvin out, and I think she’s about to go talk to him.”
“What? Where?” Katherine leaped to her feet and quickly walked over to Edvin.
“There was no girl checking him out. You just lied about that, didn’t you?” Steele asked Roxanne with a grin.
“Who, me? Heck yeah.” She watched them talking. After a minute, she saw Katherine break out in a smile. Then her and Edvin walked over to the buffet table and he poured Katherine a drink. Katherine turned around and gave her the thumbs up signal, and Roxanne returned it with an approving grin.
She saw the man that Jordan referred to as the Chief Elder, Jordan Fleetfoot, looking at Steele from across the room. He was talking to a group of Wardens and several of the Elders as he stared at them, and abruptly he began walking towards Steele and Roxanne.
Sven Gund, a group of his family members, and Mayor Bertelsen saw them moving towards Steele, and they quickly walked over to stand by Steele’s side. Katherine and Edvin hurried over, quickly.
“We need to talk to you alone,” Jordan said to Steele, shooting an annoyed look at the Gunds. Roxanne tensed, and Flint began whimpering and clung to her.
“You can talk to me right here,” Steele said evenly, with just a hint of a low growl.
“Fine. Your relationship with a human, and your taking her out of our territory before her memory was properly erased, constitutes treason.” Jordan and the other Elders were grim-faced, their eyes glowing with anger.
“He saved Roxanne’s child, and Axel Gund’s life,” Mayor Bertelsen said. “If you attempt to take him, you’ll have to go through us.”
“All of us,” Sven Gund added.
Jordan looked around the big room. There were hundreds of shifters there, but there were also hundreds of human townspeople. The situation was out of his control, and he clearly didn’t like it.
He scowled, and turned back to Sven. “You may think our ways are harsh, but you have seen what happens when people discover the existence of our kind,” he said to him.
“We’re not proposing that you announce to the world that werewolves, I mean shifters, exist,” Mayor Bertelsen said. “Steele’s meeting up with Roxanne was a special set of circumstances, and you know it.”
“We do not bend our rules or make exceptions. Ever.” Jordan’s tone was harsh, and the other Elders agreed with him with a chorus of low growls. “He is no longer one of us. I would be within my rights to order him put to death on the spot.”
Roxanne gasped, and the Gunds let out angry growls and snarls.
“I suggest that you don’t try it,” Mayor Bertelsen said, with a hint of anger in his voice. “He is the father of Roxanne’s child, and we consider him one of us now.”
He looked at Steele. “We happen to have a job opening for a police chief. I understand you have some experience in that area.”
“Oh, my God. That would be so perfect!” Roxanne’s face lit up, and she felt a weight fall away from her. She’d been privately wondering what they would do, where they would go. She knew that the community of Timber Valley would never welcome her, and that Steele’s people would never forgive him for being with her.
“You would hire a shifter to work for you?” Jordan asked skeptically.
“You just heard me offer him the job,” Mayor Bertelsen said. “We’re not all prejudiced.” He shot Jordan a look, and Jordan let out a displeased growl at the disrespect.
Jordan glanced at the other Elders and the Wardens, and they nodded grimly. He turned to Steele Battle.