A Shock to Your System (Dangerous Creatures #2) (13 page)

He shivered.

"Wait, I want to change your bandages,"
Jamie insisted, but Ethan shrugged him off. "Don't worry about it.
We need to get out of here first. Take your first aid kid,
though."

Jamie hated being put off. Ethan needed to
have his wounds checked, but he was already dressing.

“
I guess arguing with you
will only slow things down?”

“
Yes,” Ethan
said.

Jamie packed up his few meager belongings.
He watched in fascination as Ethan quickly and professionally put
all three hunters into their own spelled cuffs. Because they didn't
have any powers, the spells that were carved into the metal
wouldn't work, but the shackles themselves still made for amazing
handcuffs. They wouldn’t be going anywhere.

Ethan not only shackled the lot of them, but
he also ripped the white pillowcases into strips and used them to
gag the hunters as well. Jamie wouldn’t have thought to do
something like that, and Ethan’s efficiency was both impressive and
worrisome.

He kept expecting the man to pull out
another pair of shackles and turn them onto him. And not in the fun
time way he’d been teasing about when they were in bed.

Ethan didn’t turn on Jamie. He frowned as he
worked, a frown of concentration and deep thought as he quickly and
neatly removed all of their weapons, knives, phones, anything and
everything that might help them to escape.

"We're just going to leave them like that?"
Jamie asked. He wasn't too comfortable with that, and now he wasn't
altogether sure if he should be afraid of Ethan.

"They're hunters. They're trained to get
themselves out of those cuffs when they need to. It'll buy us a
couple of minutes more after they wake up."

"O-okay," Jamie said. He watched Ethan strap
himself up with all of the weapons from the three hunters. He took
their holsters, their guns, knives, all of it. And there actually
was an extra pair of shackles—of course.

He just looked
so…
official
. He
looked just as he did when Jamie first realized he was a hunter.
His legs itched to run now, both away from Ethan, and toward
him.

There was something sexy about Ethan in all
that now that Jamie wasn’t one hundred percent terrified the man
would turn him in. Ethan strapped up in weapons and leather, a
serious expression on his face, was a badass and sexy Ethan.

“
What
the
?” Jamie jumped back and away from
Ethan when the man put his hand on his shoulder. Jamie hadn't been
paying attention and didn't even notice when Ethan walked up to
him.

If Ethan thought Jamie's reaction to be
strange, he didn't mention it. "We need to get going."

"R-right," Jamie said, grabbing his
stuff.

They went to the door. “You said the kid at
the front counter didn't see you bring me in, right?" Ethan
asked.

"No," Jamie said, shaking his head. "Though
I don't know why that matters now since these guys
definitely—Hey!"

Jamie stopped talking and started struggling
when Ethan pushed him, grabbed his wrists and yanked them behind
his back. Jamie was in a pair of spelled cuffs before he could even
summon enough electricity to give Ethan static shock.

"What the
hell
are you doing?" he
yelled, panicked, betrayed and totally pissed off, but mostly in a
panic. "Get me the fuck out of these things!
Right—
Mmph
!"

Jamie was cut off when Ethan abruptly put
his large hand over his mouth. He didn’t stop struggling, even
though it did him no good. Ethan was by far stronger than Jamie
was, even after a fight that left him bleeding.

Without meaning to, a choked noise left him
beneath Ethan’s hand, and he stared up at the man, partly glaring
and partly begging with his eyes.

Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.

“
Stop, stop, stop," Ethan
said, his voice way too calm for Jamie's liking after being tricked
into a set of spelled cuffs. "I need you to keep quiet. They have
leather bags, and I'm going to put one of them over your head. Not
for long," Ethan promised when Jamie tried to lunge away from him
again. "It's so the kid downstairs can see one of the hunters
taking away the big bad paranormal, got it? I've got their IDs,
I'll get into the van and we’ll drive out of here, and it'll be at
least fifteen minutes before the kid thinks to come up here and
look for the others. We can go north together, but you have to
trust me on this, all right?"

Jamie's heart pounded so damned fast he
could barely think straight. He could hardly breathe either, but
what choice did he have? Ethan could be lying through his teeth as
a way of making good with the hunters again. That fight, and
watching Jamie take out one of those men with electricity might've
just scared him into wanting to get back to his former employer and
fast.

Part of Jamie didn't think that. He still
believed Ethan, but the other part of him screamed that it would be
stupid to willingly let himself get bagged up and tossed into a
hunter van. The other part of him was just terrified of having one
of those bags over his head. The shackles alone were making his
heart thump like crazy, and he was starting to sweat.

Jamie nodded. He wanted to trust Ethan, so
he was going to give him the benefit of the doubt for now. Ethan
removed his hand from his mouth. Jamie muttered, “Just to let you
know, if you're tricking me, I will never forgive you."

Ethan sighed. "Not a trick, but I get why
you'd say that," he said, and Jamie started to tremble as he
watched Ethan pull out one of the black leather bags he'd taken
from the three hunters.

“
I put the cuffs on you
without your permission because I knew you would never let me do
this—“

“
You’re damned
right.”

“
But it’s the only way,”
Ethan said. “Try not to be scared. This is only for a few
minutes."

"Have you ever had your head in one of
those?" Jamie asked.

Ethan shook his head, looking down at the
bag in his hands. "No. I haven't."

"Then don't tell me to calm down," Jamie
said. He swore he was seconds away from pissing himself in fear,
and the only thing he could do was bite down on his bottom lip and
suck it up as the bag went over his face, and everything became
dark, dull, and muted.

****

Ethan didn't like watching Jamie shake like
that. The younger man always seemed so confident and quirky, to the
point that it was annoying sometimes. Now, he was clearly
terrified, and Ethan rubbed his shoulders to calm him, trying to
soothe him.

“
Okay, you’re okay,” he
whispered. The bag was pretty thick. Could Jamie hear him in that?
Probably not well. Could he breathe in it? Probably not that well
either. It would be worse if he panicked and started to
hyperventilate, which had been known to happen quite often. He’d
have to get it off of him soon.

Ethan quickly leaned down, grabbing Jamie's
small bag of supplies before the man could realize Ethan’s position
and knee him in the face or something, but Jamie didn’t move. Not
really. The tremors didn’t stop, though.

Ethan sighed, rubbed Jamie’s shoulders one
more time, and wished it didn’t have to be like this. The kid at
the front desk wouldn’t recognize Ethan, thanks to Jamie’s good
work, and he needed to see a hunter leading a paranormal out of
here in cuffs.

Ethan shut the broken motel door to the best
of his ability before scanning the parking lot.

He could see his truck, out in the open
where Jamie had left it. He should have told him to hide it right
away instead of waiting, because now he had to abandon the
thing.

Calm and professional was Ethan's mantra. He
walked tall, keeping his head held high, imagining that he was
proud of his latest capture.

When he reached one of the vans with the
hawk logo on it, the kid at the front desk finally noticed him and
jumped out from behind his little desk.

"Hey, you're back! You got him!"

"That we did," Ethan said, gripping Jamie's
wrists tight enough that he actually let out a small muffled sound
of pain beneath the bag.

Sorry. Sorry.

Ethan supposed he should be glad. So long as
he could tell the kid a story of some kind, then he didn't have to
worry about him immediately going up to check on the room.

"My friends are upstairs going over the
room. They're going to clean it out, checking for hairs, signs that
he'd had other paranormals with him, that sort of thing. It might
be a couple of hours, but they'll come down to you when they're
done."

The kid's eyes widened and
he looked so damned excited. Ethan could never understand what the
excitement was about. There were times when he'd had to physically
push people away who'd tried to walk right up to him and lash out
at whichever bound paranormal he'd held at the time. Sometimes
people lashed out at Ethan. Paranormal supporters never made his
job easy, even though he tried to make sure that most of the people
he brought in actually
deserved
it.

Ethan remained on alert just in case this
kid thought he was going to be cool and put his hands on Jamie or
something so he could tell his friends about how he’d touched a
super dangerous paranormal.

"Okay, man, no problem. Take your time, but
aren't you going to be helping them?"

"I am," Ethan replied, walking past the kid
and unlocking the van door. He was lucky when, on his first try
with the first key, he opened the door as easily as if it was his
own vehicle. All he had to do now was get to the front, swipe the
ID card and press the ignition button and he was good to go. "I'm
taking this one back to Head Office for processing."

The kid’s lips moved, silently speaking the
words: “The Head Office for Paranormal Containment and Study.”

He said it with a glazed but happy sort of
look in his eyes. The kid was actually a fan.

Ethan snapped his fingers in his face. “Get
ahold of yourself. This is serious work.”

“
Right,” said the kid,
standing straight.

Ethan might be able to use
this. He softened his tone. “Look kid, if you really want to help,
then do me a favor and make sure no one goes near that room. My
friends need complete concentration to do what they do. You got
that? This is
very
important.”

The kid’s fishbowl eyes widened as he turned
toward the motel, then back at Ethan. “Right. I got it. The
cleaning lady’s due to make her rounds. I’ll make sure no one
bothers them.”

Ethan slapped the kid’s shoulder chummily.
“Good work.”

The pimple faced brat beamed, all proud of
himself.

Ethan really needed to get out of here. He
pushed Jamie into the back a bit rougher than he'd intended to
before he shut the back doors and walked around to the driver's
side. "Great, and thanks for the help, kid."

"Any time!"

The kid was too damned proud of himself. It
wasn't occurring to him at all that the man in the back with a bag
over his head might be innocent, or scared.

How scared had Jamie been when it was Ethan
who was chasing him down? They were going to have a little talk
later, about his sister, once they were a safe distance away from
here.

Chapter Nine

Jamie trembled on the cold, hard floor of
the back of the van. There wasn’t even a mat back here, leaving him
to freeze against the rumbling metal of the van, feeling every tiny
crack in the pavement with his body. Either the shaking was because
of the cold, or the insane amount of anxiety that only seemed to
intensify with every second his head remained inside of this
fucking suffocating black bag. It took all kinds of willpower he
didn’t even know he had to hold still. If he tried to move and
struggle, he logically knew he’d make himself panic.

Panicking meant running out of air. That was
not an option.

All of that only got about a thousand times
worse when he felt the van take a sharp turn.

He couldn’t help it. Jamie struggled against
the cuffs, even though Ethan had promised to remove them. About ten
minutes after the van started, Jamie began kicking his feet,
searching for the limits his body could move to. When his feet
found what had to be the side of the van, or maybe even the back
door, he started kicking it in.

Running out of air. He was running out of
air.

The bag was getting too hot over his face,
and Ethan hadn't pulled over to get this shit off of him yet. He
couldn't breathe and he was panicking, his heart thumping in his
chest being the only noise he could hear.

Ethan made a sharp turn that had to be to
get off the main road and go somewhere more hidden. So why the hell
wasn’t he stopping the van yet? Where was he? Jamie was going to
suffocate!

After several kicks that were loud, even to
Jamie's ears within the bag, the van turned again, slowed, and the
rumbling quieted down. The van had stopped and Ethan was finally
coming. He was coming to take the bag off.

Jamie tried to sit up, but he couldn’t find
any seats to brace himself on, which meant he had to push himself
against the side of the van as Ethan walked around to the back.
Jamie couldn’t hear his footsteps, but he’d felt the dip in the van
when the man got out and heard the door close. He was coming. He
had to be coming.

Now that he had that knowledge to cling to,
some of the panic simmered down.

Was he going to keep his promise and let
Jamie out? Jamie was going to die wearing this bag if it turned out
Ethan was being the meanest asshole on the face of the planet and
was actually tricking him.