Purr For The Alpha (A Paranormal Romance) (Timber Valley Pack) (15 page)

             
“Shut the hell up, freak!”

             
“She can see the future,” Karen continued. As far as she knew, that wasn’t true, but she wanted to rattle his nerves.

             
“Shut your mouth, or I will fucking kill you,” he shouted, his voice panicked.

             
“Oh, I doubt that,” Karen taunted. “You were paid to bring me and my genetic freak family back somewhere. Kill me, and I think you’d be in big trouble, wouldn’t you?”

             
“I can cripple you, bitch,” he snapped. Then he slammed on the brakes, throwing them all forward.

             
Up ahead, there was another truck blocking the road.

             
The men stopped.  One of them hurriedly slid open the partition, grabbed Karen, and hauled her out of the car at gunpoint.  He wrapped his arm around her throat, the gun pressed against her temple.

             
The air filled with the sound of howling, and growling, and Karen looked out the window. There were hundreds of wolves and wildcats and bears crowding  both sides of the road.  There were also shifters in human form, with guns trained on the humans. There was no way they would let these humans kidnap their children.

             
“Jesus!” one of the men screamed, voice gone high with terror.

             
The men in the other van got out, dragging Leah and a couple of the other campers with them, pressing their guns to their heads.

             
They kicked the door of the van shut, leaving the rest of the campers trapped inside.

             
Leah looked frighteningly calm. The other children were crying in terror.

             
“We’ll kill them all, I swear to God!” the man screamed. “You’ll watch them die! Move the god damned truck and let us go!”

             
Karen’s father climbed out of the van, waving his arms frantically.  “Save us!” he howled.  “They kidnapped us! Save my family!”

             
Karen saw the other van’s door open, and Riley stumbled out, clutching his bleeding head. His lock picking skills had come in handy after all.

             
“Get back in the van, or this bitch dies!” the leader yelled to him. “I’ll blow her head off, I swear!”

             
“No he won’t, because I’m his only leverage!” Karen shouted. “Run for it, Riley, run! Go to the woods!”

             
One of the wolves pacing by the side of the road looked familiar. It was Ty, she realized. He’d come for her.

Suddenly the gun
against Karen’s head began glowing red and smoking. Karen jerked her head away in pain; the man howled and dropped it.

             
The other men holding the guns did the same.  Riley was kneeling, his eyes glowing red. 

             
Karen shifted faster than she’d ever shifted before, and leaped at the man who was near her brother and sister. Her father shifted, and turned and ran for his life, dashing towards the trees.

             
They were swarmed with shifters of every species, dashing from the forest.  There were wolves and bears and mountain lions and pumas, and the humans ran and screamed, but the screaming didn’t last very long.

             
When Karen shifted back to human form, her sister was standing over the body of the leader, still in Lynx form, licking her bloody paw.

             
“You shift back to human form right now, and spit that out!” Karen snapped. Leah obeyed her.

             
“Seriously, I raised you better than that.” Karen was livid. “You don’t eat humans! You have no idea where they’ve been.”

             
Leah looked down at the dead man. “I told you so,” she said to his corpse.

             
Karen realized that two of the humans were still alive, although severely injured. Several shifters were kneeling over each man, treating their wounds.  They weren’t doing it to be merciful, she knew; they were doing it because they wanted the men to survive long enough to be interrogated.

             
Her father, she saw, with a rush of nausea, was sprawled out on the ground by the side of the road with his throat ripped out.

             
Ty rushed over to Karen and threw his arms around her, and she sagged into him, into his comforting strength.

             
The clinic on the Timber Valley pack’s compound was crowded with campers, their panicked and angry parents, doctors, nurses, and members of the sheriff’s department. Vince and Jade and their sons were there, helping organize the chaos.  Several of the Elders were headed there, as were the Wardens, who served as law enforcement for matters that involved all shifters rather than individual packs.

             
Riley would be fine, although he’d suffered a concussion, the doctor had informed Karen. The rest of the campers were being checked over and returned to their parents. Camp was over for the summer.

             
Karen had stepped outside the room where Riley was being treated, to talk to Ty.

“
I thought we were all dead. How did you find us?” she asked him.

“Leah did it
,” Ty said admiringly.  “She apparently really is telepathic. She sent a mental message to her friend Ferdinand, who told his parents, who called up here to Timber Valley.  We’re going to interrogate the two men that we didn’t kill to find out who’s behind this. Maybe we’ll even be able to rescue the missing shifters.”

She nodded, staring off into the distance. “I saw my father…”

“He was a traitor to the shifter race, and he had to die. I’m sorry.”

Hot tears filled her eyes. He’d been a terrible person, and he’d deserved his fate, but he’d still been her father.
She blotted at her tears with the back of her sleeve, and took a deep, shaky breath. She’d always known something like this was going to happen, really. Her father was always making shady deals with the wrong people. One day, it was bound to go south in a big way, and it finally had.

“Now tell me why you left, and why you were so angry at me, Karen. No more games.”

“I wasn’t playing games! I was just really, really hurt and I didn’t want to talk about it.” The tears spilled over now, running down her cheeks.

“When you are really, really hurt by something that I have done, that is exactly when you need to talk about it. How else can I fix it?”

Since he was going to abandon her, what would there have been to fix? she thought resentfully.

“You’re going to North Dakota. You never told me.”

“I had you working on the contract. I thought it would be obvious.”

“Oh,” she said, startled. “I thought that contract came to me by mistake. I assumed you wanted to keep it a secret.”

“You assumed?” His eyebrow shot up in astonishment. “All that misery because you assumed?”

“Well, I…you’re leaving,” she said.

“We. All of us. I understand how hard it is for you and your family here, with your family history weighing you down and so many people ready to sling false accusations at you guys.  There’s an investor in North Dakota who heard about what I did with The Zoo, and he wants me to open up a nightclub up there.   You could still work for my family; you can read the contracts while we’re in North Dakota just as well as you could here.”

“Oh.
You wanted us to come with you?” She blinked hard.

“I told you all along that I wanted you to be with me, forever. Did you think that I was lying to you?”

“That’s pretty much what I grew up with,” Karen said. “I just don’t trust people that easily. It was easier to believe that somebody would lie to me than it was that…that somebody would love me.” She realized she was shaking.

Ty
pulled her into his arms and crushed her in his embrace. “I do. I love you. I will always be there for you, I will always protect you, but you have to let me in. This can never happen again. If I do something that upsets you, or even something that you don’t understand, than just ask me.”

She buried her face in his neck.  “
I love you too, which is why it broke my heart when I thought you were sneaking off and dumping me.”

“I would never do that.”

“So…North Dakota?”

“Only if you want to go.
” His warmth flowed into her, and she pressed herself up against him, drinking him in. This past day of keeping him at arm’s length had been torture. She craved his touch and his smell and his strong arms around her.  “I thought after you read over the contract, we could talk about it. See if you think that it’s right for you and your family. Otherwise, we can stay here and I will personally kick the ass of anyone who gives you guys crap because of your family history.”

“I’ll talk to Leah and Riley, but I think it would be okay.
I’d feel much better having them grow up in a place where our father’s misdeeds aren’t pretty much tattooed on our foreheads. Riley kind of likes that girl Kimberly, but he’s fourteen. He can keep in touch with her, and if it’s meant to be, he can always figure something out when he’s eighteen.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“I was kind of stupid, I guess.” Her voice was trembling. She felt relief flood through her, as tears ran down her face. He really did want to be with her.  Her, Karen Padfoot. Ty Battle wanted to be with her forever.

“Full on dumbass,” he said. “But you’re my dumbass.  You know, I’m going to ask you to marry me.”

“You are?”

“Yes. And we’ll have little lynxes and wolf cubs.”

“They might be mutants like me.”

“God, I hope so. Those are some great self defense mutations your brother and sister have. If my kids could set things on fire with their mind, I’d be thrilled.”

“How did those men know that all of those campers were mutations, by the way? They must have had someone on the inside to tell them that, to betray us.”

             
His eyes met hers, and they both spoke at the same time. “Evangeline.”

* * *

There was a slight chill in the September air, but it felt delicious and crisp.  Karen was looking forward to the North Dakota fall, and then winter. She loved shifting and running through the snow. The big cobblestone house they’d moved into had a roaring fireplace, and she couldn’t wait until it was cold enough for them to pile up logs in there and start a blazing fire.

She talked to Isadora just about every day. Isadora missed her, but agreed with Karen that a fresh start was the best thing for her family. Isadora was still refusing to admit that she and Dash might be well suited for each other.
She’d never ended up dating Pierce; they’d hung out a couple of times, but had never really clicked. For once, she was staying single, which actually made Karen nervous. Isadora with too much time on her paws could be a dangerous thing. Karen had promised to come and bail her out whenever she needed it.

Riley and Leah were settling
in, and they’d made friends with the locals. They were finding that there weren’t as many mutations here as there had been in Timber Valley, so they were definitely different, but nobody here seemed to mind.  Riley and Leah were looked on as unique and fascinating, rather than as freaks.

             
Although all was well for the moment, shifters across the country were on high alert. Thanks to the bold attack of the men on their summer camp, they’d learned the truth: somewhere, a group of armed humans knew about the existence of shifters.  They were targeting shifters with special mutations, and nobody knew for what purpose.  The two men who’d been interrogated were mercenaries, who had only been told to bring the shifters to a rendezvous point. They didn’t know why. 

             
When the Wardens had interrogated the humans, they had learned one thing about the mysterious group who was targeting them, and it sent a chill through Karen’s heart: the initials “STAB” stood for Shifter Tracking and Apprehension Bureau. What kind of bureau? Government or private? Nobody yet knew.

Evangeline and her family had escaped, and were on the run.  Every shifter of every species in the country had the same order: capture
and hold them for interrogation, and then execution. They were doomed to a short, miserable life of hiding deep in the wilderness and avoiding all contact with their own kind.

             
Apparently, the Wardens had discovered through their investigation, Karen’s father had been approached by the humans, and then he had introduced them to Evangeline. They’d fed information to the humans about which shifters had special abilities, and where they would be.  Evangeline had even told the humans about Noscentium, which they’d used to disguise their scent from the shifters so they could sneak on to their property and get close enough to kidnap the shifters without being detected.

             
“Dinner’s on the grill, babe!” Ty’s voice drifted through the air, and she turned and smiled at him, and walked towards their house.   She had no control over what was to come, but she could enjoy what she had right now: the love of the best man that she’d ever met, and the happiness of her family.

THE END

             
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