Wolver's Rescue (21 page)

“
What happened to him?”
Tommie asked.

It was Cora who answered. “He got word of
another small pack up north, much like ours, needin’ new blood and
numbers, and he headed up there to see about merging the two packs
into one. Took his family with him. Said it’d be like a vacation
for the Mate, not havin’ to deal with the likes of us.”

By the way the older woman smiled, Tommie
knew the long-ago Alpha’s remark wasn’t meant as a criticism. Cora
stared into the fire they’d lit to keep away the autumn chill,
seeing memories in the flames, and Tommie knew, too, that the story
didn’t end well.

“
He never came back, did
he?”

“
No, he didn’t. We don’t
think he ever arrived. The Second sent men up there to look, but
they never found hide nor hair of him, nor the pack, neither. All
they found were some abandoned houses that hadn’t been lived in for
quite some time. No sign of wolvers, at least none they could talk
to. It was like one of them ghost stories. All those houses had
clothes in the closets and food in the cupboards. It was like they
just vanished.”

“
Not all of ‘em. A few had
gone wild, lost touch with their human side,” Samuel explained.
“You can recognize ‘em, but you can’t get near ‘em. They’re afraid
of us, as wolf or man, same as they are of full human. Once they go
over like that, they don’t ever come back. They can’t.”

A sharp cry of pain had them all turning to
see Molly, her knuckle between her teeth in a face stricken with
anguish. She turned and ran off into the woods.

“
Damn fool! Now look what
you’ve done.” Cora started to rise, but Tommie stopped her with her
hand.

“
I’ll go,” Tommie offered,
“You’ve done enough today and sometimes it’s easier to cry on a
stranger’s shoulder. She knows you love her and when she hurts, it
hurts you. I’ll go talk to her.”

She had to go quite a ways into the woods
before she found Molly crumpled in a heap beneath the branches of a
towering pine, her face buried in her hands. Tommie sank down
beside the sobbing woman and put a hand on her shoulder.

“
I’m sorry,” she said
softly. “I don’t know what else to say.” She knew how she felt with
Bull gone for a few hours. Eli had been gone for months and now it
looked like he wasn’t ever coming back.

“
Say what the others do,”
the young woman sniffed. “Say I have to accept it. Say I’m young
and have to move on. Say I have to think of Sammy.” She turned to
Tommie, her face ravaged with tears. “And then you tell me how I’m
supposed to do that when my true mate is out there and still alive,
because the others don’t seem to be able to. Tell me what I’m
supposed to tell our son about why his daddy left him to run wild.
Tell me how I’m supposed to give up hope.”

Tommie could almost taste the bitterness in
the woman’s voice and her heart ached with it. Her hand slid over
Molly’s back and rested on her other shoulder.

“
I can’t say or tell you
most of those things because I’m new at being a wolver and I don’t
know enough to make those calls. But you don’t have to know
anything about wolvers to know that you do have to be brave for
Sammy’s sake. And I might be able to help with what to tell
him.”

Tommie knew nothing about wolvers who went
feral, but she did know something about the women and children men
left to follow drugs and alcohol.

“
It doesn’t matter what I
say. He’s going to think his father chose running wild over his
cub.” In spite of her disbelief, Molly relaxed within Tommie’s
light embrace as if the contact gave her comfort. “He’s just turned
four. He won’t understand.”

“
You believe that as man or
wolf, Eli loves his cub, don’t you?”

“
I believe it because it’s
true,” Molly said defensively. “I know it.” She began to pull away,
but Tommie pulled her back.

“
Then that’s what you’ll
tell your son, your pup. You’ll also tell him that even though his
father can’t be with him, you are, and you’re not going anywhere,
because you aren’t.”

“
Macey thinks it’s my
fault,” Molly whispered. “She thinks I’m the one who talked her
daddy into leaving the pack.”

“
And if you hadn’t done
that, Eli wouldn’t have been caught and everything would have been
fine,” Tommie concluded. “You believe that, too,” she added because
she sensed that it was true and when Molly looked at her with pain
filled eyes, Tommie was sure of it. “Would things have been better
if you’d stayed?”

Molly shook her head. “No. One way, I lose
Eli, the other I lose Macey. Either way, I lose.”

She repeated the story, touching on a few
more details than Cora. Tommie let the woman talk, but she didn’t
need the repetition. She’d heard the story before, too many times
to count; how the girls that came before didn’t matter, how this
time it was real, how she was the one above all others...until the
next girl came along. And that’s when Tommie usually heard the
story, while the young woman was sitting in the chair on the other
side of her desk, typically with a baby on her lap.

“
So which sacrifice would
Eli rather have you make, him or his daughter?”

“
Eli would die for
Macey.”

“
Then there’s your answer.
It doesn’t matter whose idea it was. You both agreed that this was
best for Macey. Mission accomplished. What happened to Eli is not
your fault. Macey probably won’t see it that way now, but give her
time. As for what happened to Eli, Macey is an adult,” she
began.

“
But she isn’t, not really,”
the girl’s mother objected.

Tommie smiled sadly. “I know that and you
know that, but Macey doesn’t. Whether she’s gone over the moon or
not, she sees herself as an adult and you need to talk to her like
one. She may not want to listen, but she needs to hear the
truth.

“
She’s old enough to
understand. You tell her that Eli has a sickness brought on by the
choices he’s made. Don’t let your wolf rule your human. That’s
Primal Law, right? Eli broke the Law and now he’s paying the price
by losing what he loved most.”

“
He didn’t choose to be
locked in that cage,” Molly said angrily.

“
No, he didn’t, but you said
yourself that he didn’t always come home after the full moon. And
yes, the Alpha could have done something about it and that’s on
him, but the choice was Eli’s. Macey needs to know that because as
painful as it is, it’s the truth and somewhere inside, she probably
knows it. If you lie, if you try to candy coat it, she’ll know, and
she’ll never trust another word you say.”

Molly sniffed and nodded. “So you’re asking
me to give up hope.”

“
Oh, no, definitely not. I’d
be the last one to tell you to give up hope. Look at me. I hoped
for years that I would find a cure for my craziness.”

“
Have you found it yet?”
Molly asked innocently.

Tommie choked on a laugh. “Yes, I replaced it
with another form of insanity and passed the old one on to
Bull.”

Molly’s faint smile lingered. “You love him,
don’t you? I can see it in your eyes.”

There was no use denying it, so Tommie didn’t
try. Her heart and body certainly said she did, but it was way too
soon to know if it was real. What she did know was that her wolf
was happier when Bull was around and restless when he was gone.
What she didn’t know was how much she should listen to what the
animal had to say. Just how far did ‘Don’t let your wolf rule your
human’ go? And how was she supposed to trust this creature that
she’d essentially just met?

“
So? How was the
sex?”

Good God! These wolvers didn’t beat around
the bush, did they? Well, in for a penny, in for a pound as her
mother always said. Trust couldn’t be built on lies and Molly had
probably heard it from Cora anyway.

“
I felt like I was on my way
to heaven.”

That earned her another faint smile. “And how
did your wolf feel about that?”

“
I think I rode there on her
back.”

Molly’s smile was gone. “Then you know how it
is for Eli and me. There is no moving on for me. Eli’s my true
mate. There is no future for me without him and it doesn’t matter
if he’s man or wolf. All I’ve got is the hope that his heart
remembers where its home is and he finds his way back to me.”

The woman spoke the truth. Her wolf saw it
and Tommie could feel it in her heart.

“
You know Eli’s heart better
than anyone on earth, so if you believe it, I’ll try to believe it,
too.” She stood and held out her hand to Molly. “Now come on, let’s
get back to the group, the pack,” she laughed, “before they send
out a search party.”

Molly took her hand and stood, giving her
eyes one last swipe with her sleeve. “I’m glad you’re here. You
make me think our luck might be changing.”

Tommie laughed. “Don’t count on me for luck.
How does that saying go? If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no
luck at all.”

Molly’s head rose up and she cocked her head
to the side, listening. “They’re here,” she said and by the way she
said it, Tommie knew it wasn’t good. “I hope they know what they’re
doing. Come on. Let’s go.”

Then she heard it, too. A sharp whistle
sounded through the trees

“
What is it?” she started to
ask, but Molly had already begun to run in the direction of the
camp.

Molly wasn’t the only one alerted by the
sound. By the time they got back to the cluster of tents, half the
camp’s occupants had disappeared. The pups were missing and so were
most of the men. A boy of twelve or thirteen stood by the tall
woodpile with an armload of evenly cut logs. He made no move to put
them down. Another boy hurried in with another load of wood, a
messy tangle of long branches, but instead of carrying it to the
woodpile, he took his load behind the bus.

“
Macey,” Molly said behind
Tommie’s shoulder and Tommie saw Samuel nod.

Samuel was sitting in his lawn chair by the
front of the bus. Cora and another woman were behind the table
where Boris laid out their meals. There was meat and bread on the
table even though lunch was over and it was too early for supper.
Another woman, laundry basket filled with dirty sheets and blankets
was halfway out of Molly’s tent door. What was she doing in Molly’s
tent and why was she frozen in place like the boys?

Tommie had attended a fundraiser once where
volunteers had created tableaus depicting famous paintings using
real people as the painted subjects. What she saw now reminded her
of that fundraiser. The camp had become an eerie picture frozen in
time. Something was going on here that she didn’t understand, but
she could feel the vibrations of fear coursing through the women.
Where were the men?

“
You should be with Sarah,
not me. Too late now.”

Tommie felt Molly’s tension as she tugged the
back of her borrowed coat and Tommie stepped back, watching and
waiting with the rest, not understanding what was going on.

Two SUV’s, moving faster than they should,
pulled in. Men got out. The camp wolvers had already begun to move.
It was as if the SUV’s arrival had triggered a switch. Suddenly,
the camp looked as it should, though something still felt very
wrong.

Samuel stood and waited for the strangers to
enter the camp. He didn’t go to meet them or greet them.

Of the strangers, one stepped forward while
the five others formed a semicircle behind him. The lead man seemed
to grow larger and waves of power rolled off of him. Tommie had
seen Bull do this and wondered how it was done.

She saw Samuel’s head bow and struggle
against the submissive gesture. Cora and the woman with her looked
terror stricken. Behind her, she heard Molly stiffen and whimper,
and then Tommie felt it too, or rather, her wolf did. The creature
wanted her to bow before this guy.

The pull was strong, but Tommie was stronger.
If she didn’t bow to Bull’s show of power, she’d be damned if she
bowed to this clown.

“
What? No greeting for your
Alpha?” the leader asked and then for Tommie, the pieces of the
puzzle slid together.

This was the wolver they’d run from. This was
the Alpha of their former pack.

Samuel’s voice was meek and he sounded as if
he was asking rather than telling. “We’ve chosen to go rogue,
Alpha. You don’t need the likes of us anyway. You’ve said it
yourself. We’re omegas and we eat more than we’re worth. We’ll stay
out of your way. Nothing we do will take away from the pack.”

The Alpha laughed as if Samuel had said
something funny. “You don’t get a choice or decide what’s in my way
and what isn’t. I do. Your income, meager as it is, is a loss and
the pack suffers for it, so you’ve already hurt the pack.”

They couldn’t be suffering too badly. The
SUVs were fairly new and top of the line. Tommie ought to know.
There was one much like them sitting in her garage at home. It had
belonged to her father and now it was hers, though she rarely drove
it. Parked on the street near Harbor House, it would most likely be
stolen by someone like the guy standing in the middle of camp or
more likely, by one of the thugs-in-black that surrounded him. This
guy didn’t need the money. The bastard was just flexing his muscle
and making Samuel squirm.

“
Where are the others,” he
suddenly demanded.

Samuel jumped and began to stutter. “S-six of
them t-took off on us last week. I thought they were heading b-back
to the pack. The rest have gone to t-town to pick up supplies.”
Samuel’s whole body was quaking by the time he finished delivering
the news.