Wolver's Rescue (36 page)

“
You almost changed while
you were under. Your friend was about to change, too, the younger
one, not the cripple. I think the cripple might be defective, too.
A three-legged werewolf can’t be of much use. I should have put him
down, but he was useful for the drug trials. You, on the other
hand, seem to be a perfect specimen and those other two taught me a
great deal.”

The drug was wearing off quickly now and
Bull’s mind retained what his eyes saw.

“
Hit him again,” Gantnor
ordered and Bull felt the sting of the electric prod.

This was what they’d done to Tommie, his
mate. This was what they’d done to Samuel, a good wolver condemned
to servitude because he’d had the courage to gnaw off his own paw
to avoid the death that awaited him. This was what they’d done to
Eli that forced him over the edge into feral madness and deprived
his mate and offspring the fullness of life they deserved.

Fury boiled up and overflowed. Bull rolled to
his back and struck out with his feet, slamming them over and over
into the door of the cage. This one was different than the ones at
the clinic. It was older. It had no mortise lock like the clinic’s,
which were easier to snap. This one was secured with a heavy chain
and padlock.

Gantnor was shouting. “Hit him again. Hit him
again. He’s doing it. He’s going. Hit him again.” He had a camera
in his hands. Click, click, click. The doctor snapped picture after
picture, shouting with each click. “Hit him. Again. Again.”

Jolts of fire sizzled through Bull’s body.
His wolf howled with rage. It wanted out. It wanted to be free of
the pain and free to seek its revenge on the thing that caused
it.

The links of the chain were separating. Bull
could see it each time the door banged outward. He could feel it
with each strike of his bare feet against the bars. He was almost
there. With the next jolt of electricity, he fell back, chest
heaving with his efforts. His body was coated with sweat. His heart
was pounding and his head felt ready to explode.

“
Give him a minute and we’ll
start again,” Gantnor said, laying the camera aside. “The fight’s
gone out of him, but look at his eyes. It’s there. It’s going to
happen.”

“
Cunning,” Bull muttered as
he closed his eyes.

His wolf snarled. It understood.

One wing of the gate hanging from the bumper,
Cora brought the bus to a skidding stop. Several security men came
sprinting toward them, all of them shouting words of alarm.

Cora opened the door and the first man to
leap aboard was met by Helen’s fry pan. The crunch of skull was
sickening and at first, Tommie sat stunned by the violence of it.
But then a shot rang out and someone screamed as a bullet tore
through the window of the bus, shattering the glass.

More shots were fired. The women poured out
of the bus. The truck skid up beside them, narrowly missing Sarah
who was last. Chaos ensued. More gunshots, shouts, screeches.

Tommie felt a hand at her back, shoving her
away from the fight and toward the house.

“
Go. Go find Bull. We’ll
follow,” Cora shouted. “Go!” she shouted again when Tommie
hesitated.

The blood spattered face of Bogie appeared in
front of her. He grabbed her arm and started running. Tommie ran
with him. The air between them whistled. A streak of blood appeared
on Bogie’s cheek. Still moving toward the house, he grinned at
her.

“
Missed,” he
said.

When they reached the wide veranda, he shoved
her down behind one of the pillars while he went to the door.
Finding it locked, he pulled a case from his pocket, chose what he
needed and went to work on the lock. He flinched once when the wood
above his head splintered.

Stretch came sprinting across the lawn. He
reached them just as Bogie opened the door. Ducking low, he
sprinted through. Another shot was fired. Tommie heard a grunt and
then Bogie was pulling her through the door.

“
One thing you learn quick
as an omega. Keep your head low,” Stretch told her.

Tommie averted her eyes away from the body on
the floor. One of the men put a gun in her hand. Stretch took it
back, pressed a red button on the side and handed it back.

“
Point and shoot,” he said.
“Easy.”

Easy for who? She’d never shot a gun in her
life.

“
High, low, right, left,”
Bogie ordered and Stretch took off up the staircase to the
right.

Tommie had no idea what Bogie meant until he
shoved her toward the staircase that rose to the left. They were
checking the house from top to bottom, right to left.

Tommie did as she was told and found what she
expected. Nothing. She was backing from the next to the last room,
when a familiar voice behind her spoke.

“
Drop the gun and turn
around.”

Tommie did as she was told. The nurse from
the clinic, the one she’d rolled through the muck in the cage, was
standing at the top of the stairs, pointing a gun at Tommie’s
chest. Her voice was steady and her hand didn’t waver. She knew
what she was doing with the weapon and with the few feet that
separated them, the woman couldn’t miss.

Buster and Stu, she was sure, knew nothing of
the real reason for her incarceration, nor did they care. She was a
plaything for the sadistic doctor, something they understood, and a
means to their freedom from the wards. The nurse was different.
She’d never been sure how much the woman knew. She only knew the
woman hated her.

“
Won’t Raymond be happy to
have his little bitch back. He doesn’t think much of you anymore,
though. He has something better now. Maybe he can start a breeding
program. He never wanted you, you know. It was your sire he wanted,
but someone fucked up and he ended up with you. He’s wasted years
on you.”

Over the balcony rail that ran along the
upstairs hall, Tommie could see Helen coming through the front
door.

Helen looked up and shouted, “Hey!”

The nurse turned and the gun swung around
with her.

~*~

“
Up the voltage and hit him
again, Jenkins.”

Bull kept his eyes closed and allowed his
wolf to tell him when to move. His eyes opened, his hand shot out.
He grabbed the prod and yanked the startled Jenkins up against the
bars. His other hand shot through the bars and into the man’s
throat.

Gantnor shouted. Bull ignored him. He let
Jenkins fall and fell back into position to kick the door. Once,
twice, and the chain broke. Something bounced off his shoulder. He
grabbed the dart from the floor, rolled forward, and emerged from
the cage.

The doctor was fumbling with the pistol
trying to load another dart. Bull grabbed the gun from him and
tossed it aside.

Hands in the air, Raymond Gantnor pleaded
with him. “You don’t understand. This could be one of the greatest
scientific discoveries of all time. You could share in it. You’d be
famous. Proof that werewolves exist. That’s all I wanted.
Proof.”

“
Is that all you wanted?”
Bull leaned forward into Gantnor’s space and took the camera from
the counter. He smiled, letting his wolf show when the man shrank
back from his nearness. “I’m a wolver, Dr. Gantnor, not a werewolf.
That’s something else you don’t want to meet. I’m part man, part
wolf, a simple creature who’s not interested in scientific
discoveries or fame.” He pulled the card from the
camera.

“
All I understand is that
you tortured the woman who is to be my mate and two men I call
packmates. Mates and packmates mean everything to us. Hurt one and
you hurt us all, and when we’re hurt, we bite, though we don’t
always use our teeth. Here’s your proof of that little scientific
tidbit.”

Bull plunged the dart into Raymond Gantnor’s
chest.

A gunshot sounded overhead and he heard
Tommie’s scream. His wolf howled and Bull ran, leaving Gantnor to
die alone.

~*~

Tommie didn’t think. She leapt. The boom of
the gun going off echoed through the two story entrance hall as she
and the nurse tumbled down the stairs. One of them screamed and
Tommie wasn’t sure if it was her or the nurse. She was at the top
of the stairs and then she was at the bottom. It was all over in
seconds.

Helen plucked her up with one hand from where
she landed atop the nurse. The beefy woman still held her frying
pan in the other.

The nurse, whose name Tommie never knew, lay
at the foot of the stairs, her neck bent at an odd angle.

“
Are you crazy?” Helen
hollered at Tommie, “You could have been killed.”

Tommie’s whole body was shaking, but she
patted Helen’s cheek and tried to smile. “Yes, Helen, I’m pretty
sure I am and you’re welcome.”

“
Tommie!” A naked Bull,
carrying a bundle of clothes, tore across the hall. He looked at
the woman’s body at the foot of the stairs and then at
Tommie.

“
You didn’t,” he
said.

“
She did,” Helen
said.

“
We came to rescue you,”
Tommie said.

Bull pulled her into his arms. “You’re
crazy.”

“
Already told her
that.”

“
I meant all of you,” Bull
laughed.

“
Yeah, listen to the naked
guy.” Stretch walked over to the group and put his arm around
Helen. “Don’t know if I like you eyeing another man’s
jewels.”

Helen’s face turned pink and she leaned into
Stretch. “You got the only jewels I need.”

Tommie started to laugh. She laughed until it
turned to tears and she sobbed into Bull’s bare chest. “I don’t
think I can do this anymore, Bull. I just don’t think I can do
it.”

“
You won’t have to, baby. I
swear it. None of you will ever have to do something like this
again.”

The Alpha was dead and so was Gantnor. They’d
won, but no one was in the mood to celebrate. They were leaving
this camp and the past behind and that was enough.

Tommie was one of the first to say goodnight.
She was exhausted and numb. She told herself that the nurse was as
much a monster as Gantnor and her death was not intentional. She’d
only meant to stop the woman from shooting Helen. But a life was a
life, and she had taken it.

She was exhausted, but she couldn’t sleep.
She cried silently and prayed for forgiveness for what she had
done, for drawing Bull into the Gantnor mess, and for laying her
burden on the others when they had troubles of their own. She loved
them and felt that it was her job to take care of them, not the
other way around.

She heard someone scratch on the door of the
tent, the camper’s way of knocking. It was Cora, dressed in flannel
pajamas with little yellow ducks dancing across the yoke. She, too,
had gone to bed early and evidently she, too, had been unable to
sleep. Tommie moved over to give her room to sit on the edge of the
makeshift bed.

Cora didn’t sit. She lay down beside Tommie
and slipped her arm beneath Tommie’s head. With her other hand, she
stroked Tommie’s hair like a mother would a child.

“
You were so quiet on the
ride home,” she began, “I knew you were feeling low. The other
women feel it, too. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something
special about you, Tommie. You make us dream and you make us
remember to feel bad when bad things are done, even when they need
to be done,” she chided gently. “If you do enough bad things in
life, you tend to stop feeling bad about them and that’s not good.
That’s us. What you end up with is like what our Macey was
becoming, a selfish little bitch who thought of herself before she
thought of others. You saved her from that when we couldn’t,
because we were just saying the words. We weren’t living them. What
we did tonight? It was for you and Bull, but it was for all of us,
too. You two stood for us when we needed you and tonight, we stood
for you. That’s what pack is and that’s a good feeling we haven’t
had in a long, long time. I know I’m not saying it like it should
be said, but I thought it might give you some comfort to know
what’s in my heart.”

Cora kissed her brow and eased away. “I’ll
say goodnight now. I’ll bet Bull is anxious to seek his bed and I’m
interfering.”

“
Thank you, Cora, for taking
me in and for giving me the comfort of your heart.”

“
You see? That’s what pack
is and in the end, it’s everything.”

Bull crawled through the door as she was
drying her eyes yet again.

“
Are you okay,
Tommie?”

“
I think I am, or at least
I’m getting there.”

She watched him strip off his clothes and
slide in beside her. She waited until he saw the chocolate bar on
his pillow.

“
That’s for you,” she said.
“It should probably be a bottle of good whiskey or something like
that, but it’s all I’ve got. It’s to say I’m sorry about earlier.
When you said you were going to take care of Eli, you meant it. I
had no right to say what I did.”

Bull leaned over to kiss her nose and then
lay back staring at the ceiling of the tent. “Thank you, but I
don’t deserve it. I could have taken the time to explain.”

“
It has to do with the
things you can’t talk about, doesn’t it?

“
It does,” he said quietly.
“I tell myself it happened a long time ago, that it’s the past and
I should forget it. I thought I’d trained myself not to think about
it, but the truth is that I built my whole life around thinking
about what I lost. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I had
instead of what I lost. Doesn’t seem like a big difference, does
it?”