Call of the Wild (4 page)

Doug Donahue took a long look at his daughter. He was still having a hard time understanding this beautiful woman was the same girl who had left his house in a wheelchair only three or so months ago. He walked back and sat down in the chair next to her. Leaning over, his forearms resting on his knees as his hands dangled between them, he hung his head for a moment, saying nothing. Laura could tell he was dealing with some strong emotions, so she sat quietly and let him work through it.

After a minute or two, he looked up and Laura could see the tears he’d barely kept from falling. “Yes, I knew about shifters before coming here. I’ll get to that in a minute.”

He reached out and took her hands in his own. “Your mom and I, all we’ve ever wanted was for our children to be happy. I may give you a hard time about falling in love without my permission, to a man I haven’t personally checked out. At the same time, I will get down on my knees and thank God every day of my life that you’ve been healed. I can live with all the rest because of this one thing.”

Laura pulled her hands away to take a tissue from a box on her desk.

“And that’s what will bring Aaron around. When he cools down enough to think, he’ll remember seeing you walk out in the sun. I know it’s a memory I’ll cherish. As much as I want you to come back home with me, I know you never can. There would be too many questions. Unfortunately, we have a few problems to resolve. As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, many of the problems and simulations I gave you to keep you from getting bored had real life implications.

“Like it or not, you’re an NSA asset. The agency isn’t going to like not knowing where you are at all times. I suggest you put your smart brain on that problem if you haven’t already. What I am saying is, with the way you’ve planned this out, you’ve probably already thought of this, and I’ve been worrying myself over nothing,” he said and Laura grinned and nodded.

“Yep, I’ll tell you about that later. Now I want to hear how you learned about shifters,” she said.

“Okay, long story short. There was a shifter in the Army; one of the men in his unit was killed. He stepped on an IED, an improvised explosive device. Not wanting to lose any more men, he took the rest of his unit into his confidence. If he went on patrol in his shifted form, he could keep them safe because he could smell the explosives. A lot of the clearance teams used war dogs to sniff bombs so it was easy to have him working out in the open without anyone being the wiser. It worked, too. His team had the highest clear rate without casualties. Their clear rate was high enough the enemy took notice. They figured out which war dog in the unit had the super sniffer. He was killed while shifted, saving the lives of his men.

“They burned the body per his request and brought back his dog tags. There was an investigation because of the lack of a body. None of the men in the unit broke their word or ever told his secret. They reported him lost in an explosion and unable to retrieve. The Army doesn’t like to leave a man behind. These men didn’t either. I found out later they saved his ashes and divvied them up in order to smuggle them stateside when they got leave. You know the NSA records all cell phone conversations and all VOIP, voice over internet protocol calls, originating in a war zone.

“It turns out certain keywords caused some calls made by these men to be flagged. They all made plans to see his family and one of the men asked to speak with the pack Alpha. Those two words came up in a keyword search you had put in during one of your simulations that you did for me, so the search results were forwarded to me. You set up those search parameters looking for shifters back then? I thought they were for your games. They weren’t, were they? You found the truth about shifters even before I did. Hell, Laura, you were still a child,” said Doug.

“The literature—and I’m aware it’s all fictional and I was grasping at straws—anyway, the literature often represented shifters being healed from serious injuries. You and Mom and the bros gave up so much to take care of me…”

“Oh, baby, you’re our daughter, we’d do anything for you. For any of our kids,” he said, as he reached out to run a hand over her head and down to her shoulder.

“I was ten when I got my first inklings and was the typical self-centered kid thinking of what was in it for me,” she said, giving him a chagrinned look.

“Anyway, then I discovered the Shayatin and The Society. We didn’t get a chance to go over them in any detail when we had the big reveal earlier. I’ll tell you and the guys about them later. For now, it’s enough to know all of the shifters I found had normal, human lives. I might have left them alone. I don’t know.

“What happened was that I tripped over some human organizations that were aware shifters existed. I monitored them. For about two minutes, I thought it would be cool to share my knowledge with others. Then I discovered these organizations’ main goal was killing shifters. Families, just living their lives were being targeted, hunted, and killed. In some instances, they were tortured. By this time, I was thirteen. I did what you, Mom and the NSA trained me to do. I started gathering intelligence. I knew I’d have to get all the data to the shifters. That’s when I seriously began working on how to contact them.

“Now, you finish the story about how you realized shifters are real,” she said again. She needed to know how many people in the government knew about shifters.

“Well, at first I didn’t do anything with the data collected. I had a lot of other stuff on my plate,” Doug said. “Then after a couple of weeks, another few items got added to the pile; the men in the unit were making travel arrangements. Since your search parameters gave us the lead on the case, and the family was local, I decided to look into it myself. What I found was a family grieving for the loss of a son like many others across the nation. The shifter thing was accidental. One of the children, a younger sibling, was too upset to maintain his form. The lack of reaction from the soldiers is what sealed it for me,” he said.

“What did you do about it?” she asked.

“I didn’t know there were shifters all over the country, hell, the world. As far as I knew, it was only this one family. I looked into the family. Every male member had served with distinction, going back to the Revolutionary War. I didn’t bother going back prior to their emigration to the U.S. It was enough for me. Like you said, they were a normal family, living their lives. They didn’t represent a threat to our nation’s security, and it wasn’t my place to reveal their secrets.”

He sat back in his chair and gave Laura a grin of his own.

“And if I did say something, my superiors would have found a nice padded room for me,” he joked.

Laura had noticed her father hadn’t responded to her comments about him finding love again. She noticed everything. Still, she’d given her family a lot to handle, so she decided to cut him some slack—for a little while.

“Come on, I’ll show you where your room is. You can get unpacked and just let everything settle in. Maggie will let you know when it’s time for dinner,” she said.

“I don’t think you introduced me to anyone named Maggie. Who’s that?” he asked.

“Maggie?” Laura called.

“Hello, my dear. Did you need me?” the soft womanly voice with a light British accent called out through the house speakers.

“Maggie, this is my father, Doug Donahue. Please make a voiceprint and visual image record. You have monitored the other Donahue guests in the house?” Laura asked.

“Yes, dear. Five of the other guests are in their rooms. The sixth has left the premises and is beyond my scanning range.”

“He’ll come back. Please record each of the other guests and assign security level Beta Alpha to each of them,” Laura said.

“Right-oh, Beta Alpha security has been assigned. Will that be all, Laura dear?” Maggie asked.

“For now, thank you, Maggie.”

“You’re welcome. Have a nice evening, Laura. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Donahue,” said Maggie.

“Uh...nice meeting you too, Maggie,” said Doug Donahue in a bemused voice, shaking his head. He was astonished and proud at what his brilliant daughter had accomplished.

“At dinner you’ll have to tell us how you were able to get this amazing house built long distance without any of us finding out about it,” he said as they walked down the hall.

The two of them parted at the door to his room. He went in to unpack and Laura left to find her mate.

Aaron Donahue ran down the path away from his sister’s house as if the hounds of hell were chasing after him. For all he knew, they were. He didn’t care. He needed to get away; he had to get away. Jumping into the truck, he realized he didn’t have the keys. Not wanting to go back to the house, he did what any other highly-trained Delta Force operative would do in his situation…he hot-wired it.

He let his training take over as he drove the truck. In his mind, he’d returned to ten years of age, watching a teenage boy’s head explode from being struck by a bullet. At the time, his brain had suppressed his memories in order for him to be able to cope and function.

Instead, his personality changed. Up until that day, he was like many other young boys, full of energy, always getting into trouble, and perpetuating the contest of which son could tell the grossest fart joke. He had been the king of pranks, pulling silly tricks on his younger brothers and parents. Overnight, he became the serious older brother and protector. It was also when he requested his parents give him kung fu lessons. He let them think it was because of his favorite TV show by the same name. In actuality, he felt a strong need to be able to defend his family. He had been made aware the boogeyman really existed. There was evil in the world.

Now, the dam he’d built to hold back the memories and even more, those feelings of helplessness and fear was destroyed, crumbled bricks at his feet. Snippets and flashes at first and when Laura spoke of her bodyguard’s death, the whole memory played back like a movie in his head. When his sister, his precious sister, told them she also could shift into an animal, it was all he could do to hold it together. There was no way he was going to allow his sister to become a victim of those vicious murderous hunters.

Unable to drive anymore, Aaron pulled over to the side of the road. His chest hurt, he felt he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get any air. It took a couple of tries before he got the door open, then he practically fell out of the truck. With one hand on the door, he bent over at his waist and concentrated on taking deep breaths in and out.

“Oh, God,” he moaned, falling to his knees. Even though he was a grown man, the ten-year-old boy inside him finally had a chance to cry for the boy he couldn’t save. He was so involved in his grief, that he didn’t notice the wolves pouring out of the woods all around him.

In his wild run away from his sister’s house, he’d driven deep into wolf territory. The patrols had heard the truck passing through their territory and when it stopped, they went forward to investigate. All of the land for miles around was shifter-owned. There was no reason for humans to stop unless there was a problem of some kind.

Aaron was so far into his head, that he didn’t see or hear the wolves approaching. When one of them sent up a howl, he didn’t even hear it. In his mind, he wasn’t sitting on a dirt road in the woods of Montana. He was in another place, watching a boy’s death over and over in his mind’s eye.

Marc Hunter, Alpha of the Wolf pack, made his way through the woods following the call from one of his patrols. He knew who the man was. He had been at Laura’s and Alex’s barbeque when her family arrived. He had also been told of the man’s outburst at the National Alpha’s residence, so he approached him cautiously. He had fangs and claws; however, Laura wouldn’t take kindly to him using them on her brother. And, of course, her brother wasn’t an ordinary human male either—he was a highly-trained member of the Army’s Delta Force.

Marc, in his wolf form, walked forward until he was within six feet of Aaron. Several of his pack members surrounded the truck. The wolves sat and waited for Aaron to become aware of them. He was surprised at how long it took before the human lifted his head and looked at them.

Aaron looked around at the wolves all around him before centering his gaze on the huge gray wolf sitting about six feet away, separate from the others.
Must be the Alpha
.
A wolf, like the boy was a wolf, like the little girl...Oh, God, Kylie! Was she even alive?

“How do you stand it?” he got out, his voice hoarse. “Knowing your family is at risk every day. That there is no safe place and your children can be taken from you, hunted, and killed at any time. How do you keep sane?”

Marc tilted his head to the side, listening not only to the words Aaron spoke, but to the emotion behind the words. In his wolf form, he could smell Aaron’s distress. This was more than a reaction to finding out what had happened to his sister. Decision made, Marc shifted. Unashamed of his nudity, he stepped forward and sat in the dirt across from Aaron.

He waved off the other wolves, letting them know to give the two men some privacy. “Tell me what happened,” Marc said.

Those four words opened the flood-gates. Aaron had held on to his promise for over twenty years. Now he wasn’t alone anymore—these men—these wolves, they understood.

“Can you find her? I’d like to know if Kylie is okay,” Aaron said when he finished telling his story.