Flint, laughing, leaped into Roxanne’s arms, and then squirmed to get back to Sally.
“Oh, we’re playing that game, are we?” Roxanne held on to him, ruffling his hair. “It’s a genetic mutation,” she said to Sally. “Some of the humans in this town can have children with wolf shifters.”
Then she glanced worriedly at Sally and Thomas’s skinny frames.
“Not my fault!” Isadora said quickly. “They were living at a Hobo camp.”
“Who wants to help me make cookies?” Roxanne asked. She worked as a short order cook in the town’s diner. “Chocolate chip. You can lick the spoons afterwards.”
Sally’s hand shot up in the air. “We do!”
Thomas shrugged, pretending indifference. “I guess I could help.”
Sally turned to Isadora, grabbing her hand. “Come on, come help us.”
“Go on ahead. I’ll be right there,” Isadora said.
“She’s not coming. She’s going to leave us again,” Thomas said to Sally. “We’ll come out and she’ll be gone. It’s okay. We do okay on our own, don’t we?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. I’m coming,” Isadora said, sounding exasperated as she followed them inside. “And just for that, I may make you take two baths tomorrow.”
“No way! Not fair!” Thomas howled.
“It’s a cruel, cruel world we live in,” Isadora said. “A world filled with regular baths, and I forgot to add in brushing of teeth, with a toothbrush and toothpaste, twice a day, every day.”
“What?” Thomas’ voice was outraged as Isadora shut the door behind them.
“So, what’s going on?” Steele asked.
Dash quickly filled him in on what he knew so far. “The problem is, I can’t call Warden Redthorne for help. I’m about 99 percent positive that he’s not collaborating with the humans, but I can’t ignore the fact that after I revealed where Isadora and I were headed, those mercenaries showed up and tried to ambush us.”
“No, you can’t ignore that,” Steele said.
“We’ve already held a town meeting, advising everyone to be on alert,” Mayor Bertelsen told Dash. “The Gunds are aware. We check in with them hourly. None of them are travelling alone now, and they’re armed. They have radios and cell phones. If anyone attacks them, we’ll be all over it.”
Edvin and Axel both nodded. They wore gun holsters with Glock .40 caliber pistols.
Axel looked around, tipped his head back, sniffed at the air.
“What is it?” Edvin asked him, frowning.
“Something…I don’t know. It’s nothing, I guess. I just thought…nothing.”
“You thought what?” Edvin persisted.
Axel shook his head wearily. “Flashbacks. I get them all the time. Like a horrible déjà vu, like I’m back in the laboratory. It’s all right, really, it’s nothing.”
* * *
An hour’s drive from Lonesome Pine, Chief Warden Redthorne and two dozen Wardens and Pride Patrol members were gathered in a wooded area at the end of a dirt road. Redthorne stood by his truck as the assembled shifters checked their weapons and got ready to move out.
Redthorne called Dash’s cell phone number and listened to Dash’s cell phone go straight to voicemail for the dozenth time. “Dash. Call me,” he said curtly, and hung up.
Under other circumstances, he’d have been worried that Dash wasn’t returning his calls, but he didn’t think that Dash had been kidnapped or injured. It was much more likely that Dash and Isadora were laying low somewhere, hiding out from the human mercenaries.
The fact that Dash was disobeying his orders was an issue he’d have to deal with when Dash resurfaced, of course.
He saw Warden Marsh walking towards him. “Are we ready to go?” Marsh asked.
“Yep.” He tucked his cell phone back in his pocket and walked back to rejoin the group.
Marsh and everyone else there thought that they were gathering to pounce on Isadora and take her into custody. They were wrong. Redthorne still had no idea where she was.
However, their manhunt for Isadora was a convenient way to flush out the spy or spies in their midst. The mere thought of that level of treachery filled him with a deep, burning anger.
Was it Isadora herself who’d revealed her and Dash’s whereabouts? He still didn’t know, although if she’d been with Dash continuously, then she would have had no way to phone in her exact location to tip off the humans.
Whatever the case, he meant to find out.
He’d announced that he had received a credible tip about Isadora, indicating that she had a rendezvous with a group of humans in a wooded area near Lonesome Pine. He’d kept very careful track of who actually knew the truth – the chief Elder, and his second in command Warden Roderick, who was also his nephew, were among the few who were aware that he was carrying out a sting to flush out the traitors in their midst.
He’d gathered up his Wardens in Timber Valley and they’d flown out to Montana in a private plane. A group of local Wardens had come with him, as well. The location that he’d claimed she would be at was close to the last place that Isadora had been seen.
This time, he’d not only kept careful track of everyone that had been told about their mission, he’d also had his niece in the Warden’s IT department place surveillance devices in their rooms and bugged their phones and computers without their knowledge.
If anyone tried to ambush them today, at the very least he’d confirm that there was a spy, and hopefully they’d be flushed out.
He’d made it very clear how they were going to approach the rendezvous point, along a road that led to an old quarry. He’d told everyone their route, mapped it out deliberately, so that he could control where the mercenaries would lay in ambush for them. Now, he was going to throw a monkey wrench in their scenario.
“Change of plan,” he said to the assembled group. “You’re going to follow me.”
“Which way are we going, sir?” Warden Marsh asked him.
“You’ll see when we get there,” he informed him.
They’d all brought bags to carry their weapons and gear in. They quickly shifted, grabbed their bags in their jaws, and ran through the woods.
Instead of running down to the road, he led them uphill, climbing higher and higher until they reached the top of a ridge overlooking the area where Isadora allegedly would be.
The smell of humans drifted his way. They were about half a mile away, and the scent was getting stronger.
He shifted human form, and everyone else followed suit.
“You smell that?” Marsh growled.
“Hell yes. It stinks of human,” Redthorne said.
At least twenty human soldiers in camouflage gear were headed towards the spot where they thought Isadora would be.
“Do we go after them now, or wait for her to show up?” Marsh said.
“Isadora was never going to show up here. I released that information because I suspected that we had a spy in our midst. It’s clear that someone leaked the information to those humans, who were going to ambush both Isadora and us,” Redthorne said. The information was greeted with a chorus of growls and snarls of anger around him.
“One of us did this? A shifter?” a Pride Patrol bobcat named Bart hissed furiously.
“Wait – they were after us, and also after the lynx shifter? Does that mean that she’s not a traitor?” Warden Roderick asked.
“We won’t know for sure until a Shaman compels her to speak,” Warden Roderick said. “Of course, we’d have to find her first.”
He pulled out his satellite phone and called the Chief Elder to inform him.
“Let’s go find out,” Redthorne said. He gestured everyone to come in close. “New mission. Our goal is to hit them hard, right now.” He looked through his binoculars again. “There are two groups of them, setting up to come at us from two sides. See them? Good. Bart, take the group to the north. Kill as many as you have to, don’t compromise your safety, but try to save at least a couple of them for interrogation. Marsh, everyone else, you come with me.”
They shifted again and raced through the woods, carrying their weapons in their jaws or slung around their necks.
They were right on top of the humans before they were spotted.
Shots rang through the air, followed by screams, and then chaos descended. Redthorne launched himself, flying through the air, and took out a burly human, ripping through his throat and reveling in the taste of his blood. Warden Marsh shifted to human form and, crouched behind a tree, began shooting at the humans, taking out several of them.
Four human soldiers raced through the trees, and sprayed them with bullets. Marsh returned fire, and two of the human soldiers fell.
Then a gunshot cracked through the air, and Marsh gave out a cry and fell to the ground, bleeding from the shoulder. A Pride Patrol mountain lion fell to the ground, dead. His body rippled and shifted back to human form.
“Hands in the air!” A human soldier had his rifle pointed at Loren.
Loren stared at him in, calmly, ignoring the soldier’s command. An Alpha didn’t beg or grovel. “Go ahead and shoot,” he said. He could scent a dozen of his men headed his way. They wouldn’t get there fast enough to save him – but they’d make this soldier pay for declaring war on shifters.