Twin Wolf Trouble (Shifter Squad Six 2) (3 page)

“Means we might have the whole ride home together, hmm?” Thatch noted mildly, leaning back and giving her a long look as he moved on his seat a bit, closer to her.

Suddenly, she felt very much like a deer caught in the headlights. Her stomach twisted and she felt an odd tingling sensation in her fingers and toes. Her ears might have been humming a little as she looked from Tex to Thatch and then back again, goose bumps prickling on her skin.

Okay. You can’t make this up. They’re hitting on you. You! Freckles and yesterday’s hairdo and everything.

It wasn’t that she had anything against her own looks—hell no. She was tall and curvy and had inherited her mama’s wide hips, so she knew she made a certain kind of man look after her in a long, ponderous kind of way. But there were never two of them. And they never looked like…
that.

Gulp
.

The ground seemed to rumble under her and for a second, Madeline wondered if it really took that little to shake her world. By the way that Thatch and Tex jumped up and into action immediately along with it told her that it wasn’t just her feeling the earthquake.

“Shit,” Tex commented matter-of-factly, throwing off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.

Both of them pulled the duffels up on the seat and unzipped them almost in unison. Madeline yelped and pressed herself against the seat as they pulled out matching assault rifles and ammo belts, hooking the belts around themselves and checking the contents of them.

“Don’t worry, sugar, we’re the good guys,” Tex said, grinning like someone had given him a shot of endorphins.

“I don’t know about that. But for the sake of this conversation, let’s assume that we are. At least this time,” Thatch commented with a smirk.

“The hell’s going on? Who are you?!” Madeline gasped, her mind racing far faster than the train.

“Your knights in shining armor,” Tex said, stepping closer to her and taking her hand.

He kept his green eyes trained on her grays as he raised her hand to his lips and kissed the top of it. Her heart literally skipped a beat. It was ridiculous. His touch made a whole new kind of heat rush through her at supersonic speeds.

“Come on, Prince Charming, let’s save the world and
then
flirt, okay?” Thatch growled, yanking Tex toward the door by his collar. “But I’m expecting to see you later, Miss Madeline. Don’t go too far,” Thatch said, giving her a quick salute and then disappearing out of the door along with his brother.

Madeline was left sitting there, dumbfounded, her damn physics book still in her lap.

“What the hell!” she said out loud, just when another loud bang shook the train.

It was only then that it dawned on her—those were explosions. And the view outside her window was muddled by thick black smoke coming somewhere from the front of the train.

Was it a good time to panic now?
 

CHAPTER THREE

Thatch

“It’ll be a fast trip! Just standing around, nothing will actually happen!” Tex hissed, running down the train cars. “I told you we should have taken the midnight one and skipped the work. I could be flirting with that hot piece of ass right now instead of saving the world all over again.”

“Can we skip the dramatics for now and argue later? We took the job, now we got to see it through,” Thatch growled, his hands locked around his rifle.

People were screaming around them, but he wasn’t entirely sure if it was because of the black smoke that licked at the sides of the passenger cars or if it was because of him and Tex. They cut an odd picture, partially dressed in their black suits from Connor’s wedding, plowing down the corridors with assault rifles in their hands.

For a second, Thatch wondered what the hot chick in the sitting room had thought when she saw them pulling out their guns and swinging into action like a couple of action movie Rambos. He made a mental note to track her down later when this nonsense was put to rest. You know, to make sure she was
okay
. A redhead, especially one with a nice set of legs on her, always got his blood pumping as hard as any mission could.

“Sure,” Tex grumbled, slamming a door open with his foot and sliding in with seasoned ease. “We can get home and then pretend like this is normal dinner table talk. Mama will love it.”

Rolling his eyes slightly, Thatch took up a flanking position as they drew nearer to the front of the train. Tex had always been the melodramatic one out of the two of them. In fact, he had also always been the one getting them into trouble, so the fact that now it was Thatch that was getting them muddled up in other people’s business was an unwelcome surprise.

“Our fathers are generals. I’m pretty sure she’s used to this crap,” Thatch growled under his breath, his shoulders slouching forward as he had to squeeze through one of those narrow corridors that hooked up a service car to a passenger one.

The smoke was getting thicker now, seeping in through half-opened windows and the couplings between the cars. It was getting harder to breathe. Counting his blessings, Thatch noted that there weren’t that many people on the train. No wonder.

There were far more comfortable ways of getting to Louisiana these days than taking the forty-eight hour train ride. Even he and Tex usually flew, to save time and their sanity, but this time Thatch had insisted on the train.

You had your reasons,
he reminded himself.

Barely noticing that he had a snarl on his lips, Thatch already knew things weren’t good. The job they’d taken on the train was supposed to be an easy one. Even though his team, Squad Six, was officially out of commission because of their leader’s honeymoon, that didn’t mean they couldn’t work. And while most of the others chose not to, Thatch had insisted that he and Tex try and make some cash off of their trip down to see the pack.

Tex would have preferred to just get drunk in the dining car, but he was never one to back away from a fight, and so the explosives expert of Squad Six was pretty easy to convince. Especially when Thatch personally promised that
nothing
would happen anyway.

Guess I was fucking wrong about that last bit, though,
he noted to himself, slamming against the half-rigid walls of one of the corridors while Tex took the other, hearing noises from farther down the train.

They paused for only a moment before moving onward. No one was running in their direction anymore; the front of the train had either been cleared out or there had been no one there to begin with. Either option seemed questionable to Thatch.

These trains weren’t usually full, but this one was eerily empty. He had to wonder if it was by design, if whoever had put up the freelance gig had made sure that most passengers would pick another time for their trip through the wild South.

“I don’t hear anything anymore,” Thatch said, sneaking a look at Tex. “That’s either great for us or horrible for everyone else.”

“Why not both?” his brother commented, peeling himself off their position and running down the last car at full speed.

All the locks were essentially blown off and the route to the engine was open before them. Thatch could barely see two feet in front of him with the thick smoke surrounding them, making it fucking impossible to breathe. He moved forward thanks to his hearing, listening to Tex’s steps and following in his footsteps. A gust of fresh air just about smacked him in the face when they got through the service car, kept as a place for the engineer and some supplies that were occasionally needed in the freight engine.

Thatch usually would have expected to see an engineer lounging somewhere, but currently it was deafeningly quiet, except for the high-pitched whine coming from the engine that definitely didn’t sound normal.

“It’s locked,” Tex said, fumbling for something in his pockets. “And not just locked. I think they’ve fused the doors shut.”

“Shit,” Thatch said, his jaw set rigidly as he tried to see through the small slits in the door into the engine room.

All he could see was thick, suffocating smoke.

Not a small mission.

“What are they supposed to be carrying in this thing?” Tex asked, slapping some gray putty on the links of the door that seemed to hold the hardest.

“Never specified, like I said. I was told that the clients would feel better if they knew there was some extra security during the trip. With those Marines we saw before, this couldn’t be entirely civilian, though,” Thatch mused, knowing to duck back when Tex did his magic.

The sound of the explosion that threw the doors open was nothing compared to the loud, wailing cracks that had previously shaken the entire train. Tex dove in first, always the foolhardy one, and Thatch followed. Their level of training was the kind that was ingrained deep in their DNA. There was no need to think, just act. Everything was muscle memory, leaving them plenty of time to recalibrate and recalculate if the situation warranted it.

Tex coughed, fumbling through the narrow freight car in front of Thatch. It was one long, massive engine block when it came down to it and the engine room itself was small and cramped even for a train’s standards. When Thatch’s foot hit something soft and solid, he closed his eyes for a moment. Of course.

“Found the engineer,” he commented shallowly, dropping down to feel the man’s pulse.

His hand came away sticky with blood. He was still warm to the touch, but there was nothing that Thatch could do for the man.

“Think I found the brakeman too,” Tex said. “Dead as a doornail.”

“Yup.”

“Well, that’s good,” Tex commented wryly and Thatch shrugged past him toward the windows.

Slamming them shut to keep at least some of the smoke out, he tried to look out and see where the smoke was coming from. It seemed like the whole damn engine was trying to go up in flames, though he couldn’t actually see any threatening yellow or orange licks of fire yet. Frowning, he searched through the console, looking for the communications station. When he found it and rolled through the frequencies, he heard nothing but silence. The comms were busted.

“Comms are down,” he said, snaking his cellphone out of his pocket. “And there’s no reception here.”

He dialed the emergency number anyway, raising it to his ear.

“Nothing. Someone’s jamming radio and cell reception here. Whatever’s going on, this isn’t some little trainjacking.”

“Yeah? What tipped you off? The fact that no one’s in the engine room and the whole fucking thing is smoking like it’s a steam engine, or did the two dead bodies really nail that one in?” Tex snorted, inhaling deeply with his nose scrunching as he must have caught a whiff of something. “That isn’t just burning, you know. Someone’s sabotaged that engine with a liquid explosive.”

“Guess we better find the brakes on this fucker, then,” Thatch said, cursing their collective luck.

Jumping at the job now seemed like a really shitty choice. But he needed the money. That had been his reason to pick up a number of distasteful missions lately, all the way down to volunteering as the comms guy for other teams. He knew he was the best that The Firm had to offer, so any rapid response team was happy to have him. But it was starting to slowly weigh on his body and mind, and this was another hit in the gut, one of many.

Thatch went through the controls methodically and Tex stood guard at the door. Between the two of them, they made a dangerous combination, as most werewolf Alpha twins did. Trained to win and to succeed from when they were pups, losing was never an option. Whether it was in life, war, or who could down the most shots, the Crawley brothers had always been fiercely competitive. They fit in well with the rest of their team in that sense, all shifters and ex-SEALs.

He found the hard levers that were supposed to control the brakes. Pulling on them, he expected resistance, but the levers slid back easily and then flipped back to the original position when he let go of them. His stomach dropped.

“Shit, is it me or is this thing speeding up?” Tex asked, scuffing a hand through his brown hair.

Thatch looked out and saw the countryside rolling by at increasing speeds. He’d been on plenty of trains in his time and this one as well when he was younger, and it was going far faster than it was supposed to be. Checking the speed gauge, Thatch groaned as he saw it steadily climbing past seventy-five already. It was supposed to go at around a steady forty-four at best.