chapter Five
Maria peered into the darkness, straining to see Olaf. She’d taken two steps into the chilly culvert into which he’d disappeared before she’d frozen, unable to move.
The press of the concrete walls, the cold dampness, the dank smell, very like that in the basement of the warehouse in which she’d been kept, triggered memories too powerful to stop. Her heart constricted, her throat working while she fought down the screams.
Only Olaf’s little growls—telling her he’d shifted into his polar bear cub—kept her from running out, back into the sunshine, back to Shiftertown.
“Olaf, please come back.” Her voice was shaking, but she knew her pleas would have little impact. Olaf would have decided by now that Maria wouldn’t come in there after him.
She heard footsteps behind her, heavy ones, made by the firm strides of Shifters.
In her state, Maria’s mind told her they were Miguel’s Shifters, come to find her. She clamped her mouth closed over her cries of panic and fled into the tunnel.
“Maria!”
The sound of the warm voice made Maria stop, her breath hurting her. Even with his worry, he kept the Texas drawl.
Ellison. An anchor, shelter from the cold. Maria turned back, something heating in her when she saw his tall silhouette at the tunnel’s opening, his big cowboy hat a comforting sight.
She took a few running steps toward Ellison, then stopped again as two other Shifters appeared behind him. One was Broderick—what was he doing here? The other was the Tiger man who lived in Liam’s house. Maria wasn’t afraid of him exactly—Tiger had never paid her much attention—but his bulk was frightening in the darkness of the culvert.
Ellison didn’t wait. He came into the tunnel, his long legs bringing him to her in a few strides. “Maria, honey, you all right?”
He slid his arm around her waist. He did it without thought, the most natural thing in the world.
Maria managed a nod. “It’s Olaf. He’s gone exploring and won’t come out.”
Ellison was like a rock. His arm steadied her, and his warmth at her side quieted her fears. His hat touched her hair, and then she felt his lips on the top of her head.
“Stay put,” he said. “I’ll get him. Tiger—look after Maria.”
“I’ll watch her,” Broderick said, too quickly.
“No. You’ll come with me.”
“Chase bears yourself, Rowe,” Broderick said with a growl. “I’ll take Maria home.”
His arrogance snapped something inside Maria. The fiery temper she’d been ashamed of before her abduction reared up. “You get in there and find Olaf,” she said to Broderick, pointing her finger down the tunnel. “If he doesn’t come out, or one hair on his pelt is hurt, you can explain to Ronan why you didn’t go in after him.”
Ellison chuckled, more heat. “I know who my money’s on.”
Broderick growled again. “You’re going to leave her with the crazy?”
Tiger said absolutely nothing, but when his yellow eyes flicked to Broderick, Broderick swallowed.
Maria took a step closer to Tiger. “I’ll be fine. Get Olaf.”
Broderick made another snarling noise but took off down the tunnel.
“Be right back,” Ellison said. He touched his hat brim, gave Maria his big smile, and jogged down the tunnel after Broderick.
***
The wolf in Ellison didn’t like the tunnel of the culvert. Wolves preferred wide meadows, where they could run, or the quiet of woods that flowed for miles. Wild wolves did hole up in dens, but those were shallow caves, not deep tunnels.
The dislike of caves came from racial memory, maybe. The Fae had liked caves, not to live in, but as a place in which to keep their slaves. Slaves meant Shifters; that is, until the Shifters had told the Fae to go f*ck themselves and had fought a long, bloody war for their freedom.
Ellison’s Lupine Shifter ancestors had been thrilled to be free of the underground, to run in the wild, where they belonged.
Bears, on the other hand . . .
“Why does he want to explore down here?” Broderick asked, a shudder in his voice.
“Bears. Damn things like caves.”
“But he’s a polar bear.”
“So maybe he likes ice caves.”
“Let’s find the shit and get him out of here,” Broderick said. “It’ll make the woman happy.”
The woman. That was how he talked about Maria, the beautiful lady Broderick said he wanted to mate-claim. Dickhead.
Ellison had drunk in the beauty of her, even as he’d worried for Olaf. She wore form-hugging jeans today and a tight-fitting shirt, a black elbow-sleeved T with spangled red and blue flowers on the front, two small buttons holding it closed at the very top. She was a delicious package. Ellison wanted to find Olaf quickly so he could return and enjoy it.
“Olaf!” Ellison called, his voice falling against the dead air of the tunnel. “Where are you?”
If they lost Olaf, it wasn’t only Maria he’d have to face. Ronan loved the kid. Olaf was an orphan of unknown clan who’d needed a home, and Ronan had volunteered his. Ronan was always doing things like that, the big, giant softie.
The big, giant softie had foot-long claws, and teeth that could rip a tree in half.
A trickle of water sounded up ahead, the tunnel built to carry runoff from creeks when they overflowed. Ellison always found it fascinating that Austin was crisscrossed by creeks and wetlands, while other parts of the vast state, not very far from here even, were bone-dry. Texas and its amazing diversity went on forever.
Ellison heard Olaf growl. A long, low growl, from a baby animal throat, at something that had the cub surprised and worried. Olaf was a fairly fearless little guy, so anything that worried him worried Ellison.
Ellison stripped off his boots, ready to let his wolf come out.
Shifting wasn’t always instantaneous. Ellison’s body fought it today, both human and wolf wanting to hurry and find Olaf and take him out. He willed himself to be wolf—easier to track, easier to fight in that form.
He shucked his jeans as his legs started to bend to the wolf’s, fur swiftly erasing his human flesh. Once Ellison’s four wolf feet hit the ground, the struggle ceased, and the wolf took over.
He pinpointed Broderick’s rank smell right away and ran past it, Broderick a smudge in the darkness. Up ahead, Olaf was still growling, throwing off agitated bear cub smell.
Ellison also scented Tiger and Maria behind him. Tiger was the musky male at the top of his strength. Maria was the gentler of the two, like the cinnamon and honey she put on her buñuelos. She smelled of home and things of light, a beacon in the darkness.
Ellison knew she’d hesitated following Olaf because the underground reminded her too much of her captivity. Ellison and she shared that hatred of the close darkness, which represented to both of them imprisonment, slavery, and terror.
Another odor assaulted Ellison’s nose and had Broderick growling. Humans. Human men not as afraid of confronting a polar bear Shifter as they should be.
They weren’t afraid yet. Ellison sped up and charged around a corner into a second culvert.
Three human men stood inside the tunnel, blocking the way to daylight behind them. LED lanterns threw pale shadows on the ceiling and over the polar bear cub who stood defiantly before them. One man had a tranquilizer rifle, pointed at Olaf, and the other two held a large net between them.
Ellison took this in with rapid calculation before he gave in to his wolf’s rage. He charged, his Collar sparking hard.
The scent from the men changed to panic. Facing a full-grown Shifter wolf was a different thing from facing a bear cub, though they’d have found Olaf a handful. But the gunman still had the tranq rifle, and he raised it to point it at Ellison.
Ellison let his body hit the ground, under the rifle’s aim. He slammed himself at the gunman, sweeping him from his feet. The man yelped as Ellison ran into him, and dropped the rifle, which went off as it spun around, the tranq dart flying. The dart hit nothing, clattering to the floor to be lost in the darkness.
In the next moment, Broderick came running in, in the form of his timber wolf. He hurtled toward the men with the net, his Collar snapping sparks, but Broderick didn’t let the Collar slow him down. The net men spun with quick reflexes, ready to snare him.
They’d done this before, Ellison realized. The three men worked as a well-practiced team, the rifleman rolling to pick up the rifle and reload it while the men with the net regrouped. In a second, they’d have the thing over Broderick.
Ellison went for the gunman again. His heavy wolf body crushed the man into the nearest wall, making him drop the rifle once more, and Ellison heard a bone snap.
Sparks zapped Ellison hard, and pain ran like fire through every nerve. F*cking Collar. Ellison could control the Collar when he fought in the rings at the Shifter fight club, because his brain knew then that he didn’t really want to kill the Shifter against him.
But these humans had threatened a cub, and Ellison wanted them dead. The Collar sensed his need to kill and went to work trying to stop him. The Collars evened the odds, in spite of the gunman’s broken wrist, and the net had started to tangle Broderick.
Olaf ran back and forth between the men, growling up a storm, grabbing legs and heels, biting.
“Shoot him!” One of the net men yelled. “Grab that damned bear, and let’s get out of here.”
“He broke my arm!” the gunman shouted back.
“Sixteen million! Think about sixteen million.”
Sixteen million dollars? Did they mean for Olaf?
Screw the Collar. Ellison slammed his body into the human’s again, letting his Collar’s sparks strike the man’s flesh. The man screamed, another bone or two definitely breaking.
Broderick fought and writhed, but the net, which appeared to be barbed in places, had closed around him. One of the men dropped his end of the net and dove for the rifle, coming up with it and the dart full of tranquilizer before Ellison could stop him.
And then the tunnel filled with noise, a roaring sound with death in it. The man who’d grabbed the gun executed a practiced roll, got to his feet, and shot the tranquilizer dart straight at the giant tiger that hurtled in from the darkness end of the tunnel.
The tiger was so big that he broke off pieces off the wall as he charged. The dart hit Tiger in the chest . . .
. . . and didn’t slow him a step. The rage in Tiger’s eyes escalated to madness as he kept on coming.
The man trying to contain Broderick dropped the net and fled. The first gunman squirmed out from behind Ellison and ran up the tunnel toward daylight, staggering and cradling his broken arm.
The man who’d shot the tranq at Tiger stood frozen in stark terror. Tiger was going to kill him.
Tiger had killed once before, Ellison knew, though the Shifters were keeping it quiet. Not Tiger’s fault, Liam had said. Human scientists had created Tiger to be a killing machine, and Tiger didn’t yet know how not to be.
But if Tiger were arrested for killing a human, the Shifter Bureau might find out who Tiger was and what he was, and take him away. Back to a lab, or maybe they’d just outright slaughter him. And Liam and the rest of Shiftertown would pay for harboring him.
Ellison morphed back to his human self, landing panting, upright on his feet. “Run, you idiot,” he said to the remaining man. “I can’t stop him.”
The human remained rooted in place, staring in horrified wonder as Tiger unfolded from the giant Bengal and became a giant human, his eyes still yellow with fury. The dart stuck out of Tiger’s muscled chest, and Tiger contemptuously yanked it out.
“Leave. The cub. Alone.” The words were guttural, harsh, inhuman.
The man blinked, gulped a breath, and finally turned to flee. Ellison grabbed the tranq rifle out of the man’s hands as he ran by. Ellison raced after him but stopped inside the shadows of the culvert while the man sprinted after his friends into the bright light of morning.
Ellison watched him scramble into a waiting high-end SUV, a cage obvious in the back. The vehicle squealed away, leaving the faint bite of exhaust in the warm spring breeze.
Tiger ran a few steps past Ellison and stopped, not bothering to keep his large, naked body out of the sunlight. “You let them go.” He turned back and bent his angry gaze on Ellison. “They were going to hurt the cub.”
“No, they were going to steal the cub,” Ellison said. He leaned against the cool tunnel wall to catch his breath. “I don’t know what that’s about.”
“I would have killed them first.”
“I know.” Ellison gathered his courage and reached to place his hand on Tiger’s formidable bicep. “If you’d killed any of them, hell would rain down on Shifters, and you’d be captured, and possibly killed and dissected. Connor’s trusting me to keep you out of trouble, remember?”
Tiger jerked away from Ellison’s touch. “They can’t hurt the cubs.”
Tiger was ferociously protective of all cubs—he’d lost the only one of his own, the humans wrenching it away from him before he could properly know it or say good-bye. Liam speculated that he transferred that grief into being crazily protective of the cubs in Shiftertown.
Ellison shared that obsessive protectiveness—most Shifters had it—but Tiger took it over the top.
“Trust me, big guy, there are other ways,” Ellison said. “We have their equipment, and I got a good look at them and their SUV. We’ll find them and persuade them it’s a bad idea to mess with us. Kidnapping Shifters is against human law too, and Kim knows cops who are sympathetic to Shifters. We’ll get them.”
Tiger looked unconvinced. But at least he turned away and went back into the tunnel.
Broderick was just finishing fighting his way out of the net. “Bastards, f*cking bastards. Why didn’t you kill them?”
Ellison didn’t bother explaining a second time. “Where’s Maria?”
Olaf, still a bear, was dancing around, growling and beating the air, doing a little victory hop as though he’d chased off the bad guys single-handedly. The joys of being a cub.
“Maria is safe,” Tiger said.
As soon as the words left his mouth, Maria’s voice came up the tunnel. “Olaf? Is Olaf all right? What is happening?”
Maria followed her voice, her words dying as she ran into the light of the LED lanterns and found herself facing three large, naked Shifters and one cavorting polar bear cub.
Ellison watched her expression turn from concern for Olaf to shock at the three tall Shifters with animal rage in their eyes, and then dissolve to stark, remembered terror. He’d seen the same look on Deni’s face last night when she hadn’t recognized Ellison, her own brother. Maria was reliving a moment of her captivity.
She shook it off in the next second, grabbed Olaf by the scruff, and started dragging him back down the tunnel the way she’d come. The little bear dug in his feet in and wailed in protest, but Maria was relentless.
The heightened senses of Ellison’s wolf felt her grief and fear, her fight for sanity. He wanted to find the Shifters who’d hurt Maria and grind them to powder.
He motioned for the other two to stay back, and ran down the tunnel after her.