The blond man shook his head and sneered back at the dark-haired driver.
"Just a thought," he whined.
"Stop thinking. You're not good at it."
Julia squinted her eyes and breathed deeply. The crash. That's right. Damien. And Kyle—
"Where am I?" she asked.
The SUV pulled off of the highway and swerved hard onto a dirt road. Julia held her head in her hands as they bounced over the potholes in the road. Every bump in the road turned into blinding pain in her head. She'd hit the windshield. Yes. Blood covered her hand now as she pressed it to her head.
"I need help," she said, her voice trembling. "I need to go to a hospital."
"We'll take care of you just fine," the driver said, not turning back at all.
"Yeah, you'll be fine," the blond man said.
The thought made its way fuzzily through Julia's brain: these men are kidnapping me. She reached for the door handle, but it was locked from the outside.
"Tsk, tsk," the driver said. "So anxious? You can get out when we get there."
"Get where?" Julia looked around, her heart beating faster as she regained awareness of the situation. These had been the men in the car behind her. They had run her off of the road. She had to get out.
"Silly girl," the driver said. He looked in the mirror now, and Julia's breath stopped as she saw his face. His eyes glowed blood red, and he was smiling. He was a shifter. They must be working with Kyle. Damien had warned her. He'd warned her, but the men had still gotten to her. The shifter's next words crawled through her nerves and made her shiver in terror.
"We're taking you home."
CHAPTER TEN
Damien and Jordan listened intently to Dee. He'd taken her for a simple old woman, a human whose only interest was her relation to Julia. Now, though, he realized that she was something more. They kept the windows cracked open to make sure they didn't miss a scent, and the night air rushed past his ears as she told their history. Clearing her throat, Dee settled back and spoke in a sonorous voice that reminded Damien of the storytellers of his old pack. The lilting rhythm of her words lulled him into a calmer state, despite his fear for Julia.
"A long time ago, I was part of a pack that lived north of here. They were a fierce pack, and proud, and they did as much as they could to expand their territory. Wars were fought, and many wolves died. Julia—Julia's parents— fought in the battle of Karawka. My daughter died alongside her husband in that fight, and I was left to raise Julia with my Charles.
"She's a special child, in more ways than one. The genes she inherited from me through my daughter are recessive, and quite rare. My hair turned white a long time ago, but it used to be as red as hers. Red like fire, oh yes. And we are able to shift well into our old age, until death.”
"It is a pure shift, you understand? That is why you can't scent us. When Julia is human, she is human. Not a hybrid, not stalled, half-wolf and half-man, like the vast majority of shifters. Our pack leader was purebred, and so were two others in the pack. All male, all except my daughter. And Julia."
Dee's voice quavered at this last sentence.
"We were the very last of the pure shifters, and Julia herself was the last of these in her generation. Her parents never conceived another child, and when they died, only Julia and I were left with the female half of the gene. The pack leader came to me after her parents had died and told me that he was going to take her.
"'Take her where?' I asked.
"'Take her for myself,' the alpha said. 'Take her for the rest of the purebred.'
"I knew then that he meant to violate the Calling. Julia was still a pup at the time, and had no idea of her true mate. The pack leader told me that she would be a fine mother, that she could have litters with all of the other purebred males in the pack. To create a master pack. An invincible army of purebred shifters."
Dee shuddered, her voice breaking. Jordan and Damien waited in silence until she was ready to continue.
"Charles and I took her and ran. It meant leaving our pack, our home, all of our friends and family. We didn't have to go far. All we had to do was find a small town, and we knew the pack would never find us as long as we stayed low, out of sight. They couldn't scent us, after all. We simply had to stay in human form for good. And so we did. From one of the contacts we kept, we received news that they were looking for us, that they had rendezvous points set up across the territory. Whenever they would pass close by, we would make sure to stay hidden, and, eventually, they stopped looking. Charles passed away some years ago, and I thought Julia would marry a human man. It would have ended the recessive line, but that was a small price to pay for her safety."
Dee sighed. "So many old memories. I never thought I would have to revisit them. My daughter..." Her voice trailed off, and Damien could tell she was holding back her tears.
"If Julia is a shifter," Damien said carefully, "wouldn't she know? Wouldn't she shift?"
"Before we left, we visited a medical sage. I don't know what she did to Julia—some sort of hypnosis—but it left her permanently human."
"She can't shift back? Ever?" Jordan asked.
"Not as far as I know," Dee said. "We've never tested it, for obvious reasons. If Julia knew what she was, it would be more dangerous for her. She would be tempted to shift. I couldn't risk that."
"Then she can't defend herself," Damien growled. "She can't shift, she can't fight. She has no chance."
"What would you have had me do?" Dee cried in anger, her words piercingly sharp. "She needed to be protected! If there had been any other way, any way at all, do you think I would have done this?"
Damien clamped his mouth shut. It was not his place to judge, he knew that, but the thought of Julia being forced to remain human was abhorrent. To never know the feeling of running free, to never know the true smell of the world, was a cruelty he could not imagine.
"So what now?" Jordan said quietly.
"Now we go to the closest rendezvous point," Dee said. "We hope they haven't changed locations since the last time I made contact with the pack."
"And then?" Damien asked.
"And then," Dee said, the hint of a snarl touching her words, "we fight."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Julia slid back in her seat, her breath coming fast.
"Where's Damien?" she asked. Her hand moved slowly towards her seatbelt buckle. It was dark, nearly black, inside the car, but she couldn't afford to attract the attention of the blond shifter. Fortunately, he seemed to be easily distracted. "Where's Kyle?"
"Oh, you know Kyle?" the blond wolf said. "I knew him back when he was a pup. Sorry to see him leave the pack, but, well, survival of the fittest."
Julia listened with one ear as her fingers touched the seatbelt release. The car bumped along the road.
"You mean he's not fit."
"You've seen him, haven't you?" the blond man said.
"His limp? It didn't seem that bad," Julia said. "He could walk."
The blond man laughed, a harsh, grating noise.
"You need to do more than walk to keep up with Trax and the rest of the wolves." He grinned meanly. "Kyle couldn't cut it."
"That's a shame," Julia said, every muscle of hers tensed in anticipation. The SUV pulled forward up a steep hill through the woods. She waited. She would only get one chance to act.
"Eh." He shrugged. "No skin off my pads. He's better off as a loner anyway. No pack would want him."
"I suppose you're right," Julia said, not wanting to give away any information they didn't already know. She wondered why Kyle had told them he was alone.
The SUV turned through a curve and headed back downhill, picking up speed.
"There we are," the blond man said, pointing just ahead to where a small cabin lay at the end of the dirt road. A large bonfire illuminated the front of the cabin, flickering shadows behind it onto the dark trees. Above them Julia could just make out the stars in the night sky.
"You think I can't see it?" the driver asked, swatting the hand down from in front of him as they sped toward the cabin. Now. Julia had to act now, or it was all over.
Taking a deep breath, she unbuckled her seatbelt and leapt forward in one movement to the steering wheel. Leaning over onto the driver, she jammed her feet forward on top of the driver's like a child sitting on an adult and pretending to drive. She pressed the gas pedal to the floor while trying to keep the shifter's other foot off of the brake.
"OW!"
"Get off of him!"
The engine whined as the SUV picked up speed. The blond man had his hands on her, pulling, and she held tightly to the steering wheel for dear life as the car accelerated toward the cabin. She knew in one more second they would have control again, but perhaps it was enough. The driver yanked the steering wheel to the right, and Julia clung on, pulling back the other way and aiming directly for the small cabin in front of them. The SUV lurched onto two wheels, then dropped back down with a thud that shot lightning bolts of pain through Julia's head. The shock knocked the blond man into the dashboard and he lost his hold on her. The driver had his foot on the brake now and the whine from the engine pierced her bones, but the car still skidded straight ahead.
Julia clenched her teeth and braced for impact, but the driver jerked the wheel so that the SUV clipped the side of the cabin and slid sideways into a roll. Julia hit the roof of the car and heard the crack before she felt the sharp stabbing pain lance through her arm. The SUV, still upside down, skidded to a stop. One headlight flickered into the forest.
Her head spinning, Julia crawled with one arm out of the broken window and onto the forest floor, her hands sinking into the soft layer of leaves. The blond man had been thrown from the window when the SUV rolled and was lying motionless under a tree not far away, the dim light of the bonfire casting an eerie red glow over his body. She was almost out of the car when a hand grabbed her ankle and she kicked back, turning to see the driver holding onto her leg through the window.
"Get... off of me!" she said, using her other foot to kick his arm into the broken glass.
"Ahh!" The glass sliced his arm, leaving him bleeding rapidly.
The shifter let go and fumbled at his seatbelt, and she shoved herself back out of his grasp, struggling to get up on two feet. Gasping for air and holding her broken arm, she stumbled backwards and into something hard.
"Hello, Julia," a voice said. Julia shrieked as she spun around to see what she'd run into. A huge man stood in front of her, his arms crossed over the muscled chest bulging against the fabric of his shirt. She lifted her eyes to his face. He had dark red hair haloed by the light of the bonfire, and his eyes glittered like emeralds.
"Welcome home."
Julia turned to run into the darkness of the woods, but she had only taken one step before his hand reached out and grabbed her by the hair. She'd had her braids pulled in kindergarten by the boys, but this was a thousand times more painful. She screamed as he lifted her onto her tiptoes by her hair. Desperate, she clutched his arm with one hand and felt her broken arm drag down along her side. In the corner of her eye she could see the driver of the SUV clamber out and vomit on the ground.