Wolver's Rescue (5 page)

He snorted a laugh. “Fuck me? I don’t think
so, honey. I like my women a little sweeter smelling.”

Tommie curled her lip.

He grabbed her raised hand. She resisted.
With a snorted laugh, he pulled her up, and the next thing Tommie
knew, she was over his shoulder and he was striding down the
street.

“
Put me down!” she shouted
as loud as she could in her unused voice. The involuntary flinch
that followed her outburst fueled her anger. Like an animal, she’d
been conditioned to expect a shock as punishment for her
behavior.

“
Wake the neighbors why
don’t you,” he said, referring to the row of ranch style houses
lined up on the opposite side of the road. Most of them showed the
flickering light of televisions in their windows.

“
I will if you don’t put me
down.”

He did. Right next to an old, beat up truck.
He opened the door and pointed to the seat. “Get in.”

“
Why?” She planted her feet
and folded her arms across her chest as if her stubbornness could
defeat his strength. It was a useless gesture, since he picked her
up and threw her into the seat.

A twinge of guilt pinched at her insides.
“Fine,” she silently answered the cause of the feeling. “He didn’t
throw me exactly. It was more of a toss.” The next twinge of guilt
hurt! “Damn it. He gently settled me on the seat. Happy now?”

The thing inside her grinned.

Two blocks behind them, the sky lit up with
flood lights from the clinic compound. Their escape had been
discovered.

He raised his eyebrows. “And there’s the
answer to your why. Because they’ll have security out checking
these streets in two minutes and the cops will be there in
ten.”

“
I’m not the one who killed
those men,” she said nastily.

“
No, you’re the one who
zapped hell out of that nurse and rolled her in shit. You think
they’ll let you walk free after that?”

“
They caged me. They
tortured me. She was one of them,” she argued, “All the cops have
to do is look at me.”

He closed the door on her statement, but
answered her argument as soon as he climbed in and started the
truck.

“
They won’t want to look at
you. You’re just another deeply disturbed patient suffering from
paranoid delusions who refuses to wash or eat,” he stated,
confirming what she already knew but didn’t want to face. He
shrugged. “The terms they’ll use will be a lot more impressive than
mine and they’ll probably take three pages to say it, but it would
amount to the same thing. You’re no different than half the
patients in that place. You’re a whack job whose word can’t be
trusted.”

He was right and she hated him for it. She
kept her arms folded across her chest and refused to look at him.
Unfortunately, that gave her time to think of things she’d rather
not.

Raymond Gantnor had been her family’s doctor
from as far back as she could remember, long before he’d opened the
Gantnor Clinic and hung out his sign as a psychiatrist. As a child,
she’d loved him and called him Uncle Ray. He’d laughed when she
talked about her imaginary ‘friend’ and assured her parents
everything was as it should be. As a young teenager, when her
‘friend’ became more outspoken, he’d become her confidant and
therapist. His assurance that everything was fine was transferred
from her parents to her. He encouraged her to “explore the
experience” and “embrace this inner beast that plagues you”. That
was when the trouble started.

“
Why are you driving in
circles?” she asked, suddenly alert as they took another turn. He’d
already done it twice, turning down side streets, taking rights and
lefts, but always ending up back on his original route.

“
Precaution.” He never took
his eyes from the windshield, but a few minutes later glanced at
her with a sly upturn at the corner of his mouth. “I’ve always
loved that.”

“
What?”

“
That unerring sense of
direction. Knowing you’re never lost.”

Tommie understood what he was saying. She’d
always had a sense of where she was and where she’d come from and
how the two connected. She never understood what people meant when
they said they got ‘turned around’ or lost their way.

As a little girl, she’d been baffled by a
news report of a child lost in the woods. Lost? How could she be
lost? When asked, her mother used the story to caution Tommie about
what happened to little girls who wandered away from their parents.
Tommie’d thought the warning was silly, stupid really, but knew it
was impolite to say so. A few years later, she realized the lost
child was normal. It was she who was not. She’d never mentioned the
ability to anyone, not even Dr. Gantnor, so how did this guy know?
Did he mean it when he said he had it, too? She was about to ask
when he continued.

“
The other thing I’ve always
loved is my ability to track, so don’t think you can use that sense
of direction to get away. You have information I need and I aim to
get it.”

“
So you’re saying I’ve only
traded one prison for another.” Her new captor was no better than
Gantnor, just better looking.

“
No, I’m saying that as soon
as you tell me where I can find Thomas Bane, you can be on your
way.”

Tommie forced her clenched jaw to relax to
hide what she was thinking. Did this guy really believe he could
throw her a bone and she’d wag her tail and follow him
anywhere?

The sad fact was that in the not too distant
past, she might have. She’d skated through life believing in
goodness and trusting that those around her only wanted what was
best. Her time with Dr. Gantnor proved how wrong she was.

She eyed the man sitting next to her. He was
big and powerful. She couldn’t fight him. She was too weak to
outrun him. She’d have to find a way to outsmart him.

And the voice inside her
that regularly spoke without words, asked, “
Why
?”

“
Nothing to say?”

She growled, deep in her throat, so low it
was almost a purr. If she wasn’t ninety pounds of skin and bone,
not to mention rank with the smell of rotting meat and shit, that
growl might have made his wolf sit up and take notice.

As it was, his wolf was pacing, nervously
aware of the creature staring out the passenger window. If Bull
didn’t know better, he’d think his big brown wolf was afraid of the
skinny little thing and Bull couldn’t figure out why.

She didn’t look like she’d be a threat to
anyone. Bull caught the thought and snickered at it. Not a threat
unless you were that nurse she laid out in the cage. Watching the
little wolver drag that woman across the floor had been a sight to
behold and there was a sense of justice to it, he had to admire. He
would have liked to have been there when the bitch woke up and
found the tables turned.

It was that more than anything else that
proved she wasn’t as close to turning feral as he first suspected.
That and the bat-in-a-bag. A crazed and starving feral would have
killed the nurse and eaten the bat. Though he still hadn’t figured
out how in hell bat spelled friend.

“
Home sweet home,” he said
aloud as he turned into the no-tell-motel where he’d taken a
room.

The neon vacancy sign was missing half its
letters and the ‘No’ at the front of ‘Vacancy’ probably hadn’t been
lighted in years. The working girls who rented the rooms toward the
front didn’t seem to mind the seedy look of the place. Their johns
didn’t either. Bull parked in front of the end unit that he’d paid
for two weeks in advance. In cash.

No one would be looking for the truck. As far
as his coworkers knew, he didn’t own a vehicle, but took the bus
each day. They had his picture, though, for his security badge and
he was counting on the fact that the guy at the motel’s front desk
would rather watch sitcoms than news. It also wouldn’t hurt that he
slipped the guy a fifty for the key to the last room.

The girl didn’t say a word when he helped her
down from her seat. She looked neither right nor left as he led her
to the door. Once inside, she sat on the corner of the bed, blank
faced and waiting. She’d gone from spitfire to unresponsive in
minutes.

This wasn’t good.

Bull turned on the TV and flipped through the
local channels.

“
A double killing at the
neighborhood nut house ought to get some play, yeah?”

They watched for a few minutes, but the girl
showed no reaction to the programming or the commercial
announcement of a shooting at Sixth and Main, stay tuned to Channel
six for the latest reports.

He watched her from the corner of his eye.
He’d seen that blank look before in ferals who knew their time had
come.

The first Primal Law of the wolver species
was never let your wolf rule your human. Living with two beings,
human and wolf, inside you was tough. The two were often at odds
with each other and it took early training and discipline to strike
a balance between human and beast. This balance was harder for
males because they had more and regular contact with the primordial
release that came with running free each full moon.

Going over the moon was more than shifting
from man to wolf. It meant letting go of all the worldly
responsibilities that humanity imposed. As a wolf, time and money
meant nothing. There were no mortgage payments, no schedules to
keep, no bosses to please doing work you hated but needed to
survive. As a wolf, you ate, slept, and played as the mood struck
you. Your heightened senses became infinitely attuned to the
natural world. You became a part of the wind and weather, the
scent, sounds, and tastes of nature. You took your position in the
natural order of things.

As a wolf, you held a place at the top of the
food chain. To hunt and kill without guilt or remorse brought with
it a thrilling sense of power most humans never found in daily
life. Most wolvers were content to leave all that behind when they
came home to their dominant human lives.

That’s why they called the shift to human
coming home. It was where you were meant to be.

There were always a few who came home in
body, but not in mind. Minor problems were taken care of by the
Alpha who had the power of life and death over each and every
member of his pack.

A few of those problem wolvers went rogue.
The thrill of the kill became part of their human psyches. As
wolves, they killed indiscriminately. As humans, they became
psychopathic murderers; serial killers who got off on the kill.
Their existence left the wolver species in danger of exposure.
These were the wolvers Bull hunted. They were dangerous and the
only cure was to put them down. This, he sometimes thought, made
him a serial killer too.

There were others who simply didn’t have the
psychological stamina to maintain two diverse creatures in one
body. It drove them insane. The problem manifested itself in the
display of wolf behavior while in human form. They bared their
teeth, made low guttural noises when displeased, and occasionally
became violent with the need to enforce pack hierarchy outside the
pack. These behaviors were common displays within the company of
other wolvers, but absolutely taboo in front of the fully human. If
left unchecked, these wolvers could eventually devolve into
killers, too.

Bull hunted them, as well. As long as they
hadn’t developed a taste for killing people, he eliminated the
problem by removing all humanity from the wolver and forcing them
into a permanent wolf state. Bull’s ability to do this was the same
power as any pack Alpha’s. Releasing them into the wild carried its
own risk, but that risk applied only to the newly made wolf and not
the whole species. The feral would adapt and survive, or die. Based
on past experience, Bull figured the odds for survival were against
them, but the alternative was no chance at all.

According to Eugene Begley, Thomas Bane fell
into the second category and it was important Bull find him before
he had a chance to move up to the first.

The wolver female sitting on the edge of the
bed knew something about Bane; where he was, or what had happened
to him. The first page of Begley’s info packet, which was all Bull
ever read, was marked ‘origins unknown’, so there was no place to
begin his search. The woman was the only lead he had. He couldn’t
decide what to do with her until he had the information on
Bane.

She was in a fragile state and her sudden
withdrawal could be a sign of shock. To escape one hell hole only
to find yourself in another was one shitty way to spend the day. He
got that, but it couldn’t be helped. Not only did she hold clues to
Bane’s whereabouts, but she posed other questions that needed to be
answered. Like what the hell he was supposed to do with her.

The conditions he’d found her in worried him.
Why was she in that place to begin with? What was the purpose of
that cage? Who was the doctor in charge? How much did he know and
what did he want?

If she were a male, he could threaten to beat
the answers out of her. He was big and bulky enough so the threat
was usually enough, but he’d never minded following through on the
threat if he had to. Unfortunately, she wasn’t a male. In the
twenty years he’d worked for Eugene Begley, he’d never had to track
a feral or close-to-feral female. He didn’t know where to
begin.

Primal Law protected her, and while he didn’t
mind bending the rules, he didn’t break them, so beating the shit
out of her was a no-go. Which left him with a fucking blank. How
the hell do you coerce a woman into cooperating without shouting or
raising your hand? He didn’t have a clue. For the first time ever,
he wished he had a little more experience with the silly creatures
outside of the bedroom.