Night Runner, page 10
“We don’t know.”
I was quiet for a long moment. Even as I tried to keep the rush of emotions at arm’s length, a sudden fury surged through me. I’d finally met my dad and now he was lost in the bayou where I had been attacked and dead bodies kept showing up.
“Are you okay, Maury?”
“No, I’m not okay. I told you I should have gone. I shouldn’t have been here, Anthony. Doing nothing. Being useless.” I gestured between us and accidentally struck him. My eyes widened, but I didn’t stop my rant.
“I doubt very much you were useless.”
“I should have gone. Instead, I’ve been stuck here. When you left, I wanted to go after you, but Laura didn’t let me. How dare you tell Laura to keep me here. I should have—”
“I didn’t tell Laura to keep you here,” he countered.
I snarled at him. “Then it would have been okay if I went. Why would she tell me otherwise?”
“Well, no… she inferred what I wanted based on what she knows about me, I’m sure, but I didn’t actually tell her to keep you here.”
“Don’t play word games with me, Anthony Holder.”
Anthony raised his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me. I shouldn’t have listened to you, Now Ty is… is… captured or hurt or whatever…” My gestures got wider with each word, and at the end, I stomped my foot.
Anthony glared at me and caught my arms, bringing them down. “Please keep your voice down. I haven’t told Shannon yet, Maury.”
Oh, shit! Shannon! Shannon was Ty’s wife, and it hit me all over again. “Why haven’t you told her?” I hissed at him. “You should have told her first, not me. She’s his wife while I’m basically a stranger.”
Anthony pulled me close. “No, Maury, this is exactly why I wanted you here.”
“What are you talking about?” I tried to free myself from his grasp, but nothing happened.
He kept his arms clamped tight. “You are untrained. You would have been a liability to all of those out there. Instead of only Ty, it might have been all of them. As it is, it’s only some of them.”
“Some of them?” I rasped. “How many are lost?”
Anthony’s mouth pressed into a tight line before he whispered. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” I whisper-yelled.
“No, but I do, Maury, if I could have a moment.” Kobie’s voice washed over me, breaking into my panicked fury.
Anthony still held me tightly.
I took a breath. More stress-babbly. Why did Anthony do that to me? Shit. Stepping back, I inclined my head toward my lover.
Anthony silently met my gaze.
“Help yourself, Kobie. Have at him.” My words came out with more venom than I’d meant them, but I didn’t care.
Kobie stepped aside and waited for Anthony to follow him.
However, Anthony didn’t release me. “You can tell us both. I don’t have anything to hide from my mate.”
Kobie’s eyebrows twitched. “All have been accounted for,” he said. Anthony looked smug until Kobie added, “Except Ty.”
“What about the rest of the pride?” I snapped. “Did you check for everyone else? Not just the people in the apartments?”
Kobie nodded. “We went over the lists. Everyone is accounted for except some of those who are working out of our territory, like those who are on assignment in the UAE.”
I scowled at the random information. “UAE? United Arab Emirates? Why would our shifters be in the UAE?” There was clearly a lot about what Anthony did that I needed to learn.
“That’s right,” Anthony said. “They’re over there as consultants in the energy sector. Our shifters don’t all stay here and work on pride business.”
None of it had to do with a missing Ty or getting to Darius, so I didn’t answer.
Anthony stroked his chin while he held on to me. “Good. Then I can update the building. Prep for an announcement.”
“Will do.” Kobie hurried away toward the small room.
I shifted in his arm, tucked against him. “What are you going to tell them?”
“You’ll see.” Then he took a step away from me, but something brought him back. “Earlier,” he said. “Were you thinking about me licking your legs?”
My cheeks warmed, and the heat spread down my neck and over my skin. “Oh, uhm, something like that.”
He came close to me again and arched his eyebrow. “Did you know I hear you in my head, and I can sense your pheromones in the air?”
I crossed my legs. “What?”
“Remember that, kitten,” he growled in my ear, the low rumble nearly vibrating my chest. “Next time you want to be furious at me, and that’s the last in your head, I’ll drag you away and do everything you put in my mind.”
I raised my hand to gesture and babble.
However, Anthony caught my wrist before I could. I made a fist, but he unfurled my fingers and pressed multiple kisses in my palms. He lifted his head then and released me. “We’ll find Ty, and we’ll train you, Maury, so you’ll be the strongest shifter in our pride. As a fated mate, it’s within your reach.” He took another step away.
My mind whirled from the sensations of Anthony’s tongue on my skin, and my chest heaved. “Where are you going now?”
“To make an announcement I need to make.” He hurried toward the small room, the headquarters of sorts, as best as I could tell. “You can come if you want.”
I followed him into the small room where Kobie waited with a microphone and a radio. Anthony leaned close to Kobie when we arrived in the room and whispered something.
Five minutes later, Anthony’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “The safe room is now open to all our shifters in the territory, please follow appropriate protocols. We don’t want a repeat of the viper incident.” He flipped the switch on the mic. “I’m going to make final preparations,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll be here a little while.”
“Wait, Anthony. I have a question.”
“What’s that?”
“When are you going to tell Shannon?”
“Soon.”
“Soon, when?”
“When Kobie brings her back here and Laura’s here to help.”
“Is that why you’re trying to get rid of me?”
He tipped his head back and forth. “Possibly.”
I laid my hand on the back of his shoulder. “Then I only have one more question.”
Reluctantly, Anthony turned to face me. “Yes?”
“Doesn’t locking down here turn us into sitting ducks?”
Laura stepped into the room then.
Kobie nodded toward her. “No, it doesn’t, and I’ll let Laura explain to you why after we’ve talked to Shannon. Now I’m going to let Shannon know and help Kobie with some additional prep work.”
Laura tugged on my elbow. “Let him go. I’ll be along shortly.”
I stepped out of the small room as Shannon went in, and I leaned on the exterior wall to wait.
When Laura stepped out, her eyes were red-ringed. “Hey.”
“Are you okay?”
She smoothed her hands over her hair. “It never gets easier.”
“Why doesn’t he tell me things, Laura? Why didn’t he let me help? I wanted to help.”
She gave me a sad smile. “He doesn’t think you’re ready, Maury.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I couldn’t answer honestly if I wanted to. You haven’t been here long, and you’ve had too many changes in the last weeks, and you still have to catch up to all of them.”
“You have a point.” My shoulders drooped as a wave of exhaustion washed over me, and all the fight went out of me. “So, tell me how being locked in here doesn’t make us sitting ducks.”
“Well, the whole building is warded with magic from top to bottom. Both buildings are, but the safe room has some of the best wardings. The protection spells took years to perfect, but it would take a tank to get through these doors down here, once they’re locked and closed.”
Shifters started pouring into the safe room, and Shannon made her way out of the small room with a pained look on her face. She kept her gaze on the ground, and I didn’t go after her.
“Will she be okay?” I whispered.
Laura gave me a half-hug. “Listen, this isn’t the first time Ty has been missing while on duty. She knows the drill, and we have counselors on standby.”
“It sounds like you have it all under control.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Maybe I owed Anthony an apology for my attitude. Instead, I returned to my questions. “So, everything down here is protected by magic?”
“Yep. Only gets deeper and stronger as you go deeper in the compound. That’s why we have a tube slide from the top level. Since the warding is least strong on the uppermost level, we get the kids into the safe room as quickly as possible.”
“Is that part of why Darius was able to get into Anthony’s penthouse and attack us? Since it was on the top level of the other building?”
“That’s my guess, but I don’t know much about the magic Darius has going on or the spells he’s using.”
“Do you think Darius will be able to get in down here?”
“It would take a tank,” Laura reiterated.
“You said that already.”
“It’s the only answer I have.”
I gave her a grim smile. Maybe the warding down here would be enough to keep us safe, but Darius didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would let things go.
No matter how many wardings he had to get through to reach us all.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
anthony
When I followed Kobie into the command room, I hadn’t had a plan, and I hadn’t been ready to discuss my lack of plan with Maury when she followed me into the room. It’d been an hour, and I wasn’t any closer to having a plan that was anything different than wandering around the bayou until we bumped into the rogue asshole.
Telling Shannon her husband was missing twisted up my stomach, and in my head, the girl on the funeral prep table became Maury all over again. Both happened because I hadn’t had the strength to beat Darius when he’d dared to attack us in our home.
“Hand me that map of the bayou and the parish,” I said to Kobie.
He pulled the rolled map out of one of the shelves and handed it to me.
I spread it over my desk. Splaying my hand over the map, I placed a mark where the creepy shack had been. My ass didn’t like the small folding chair I’d tucked beneath my desk inside the little headquarters room, and I didn’t like doing nothing.
Time was wasting.
Now I still didn’t have a plan, but I wondered if leaving Maury out there had been the correct move for us as a couple. Right now, I couldn’t think clearly with her around, so it had probably been the right move as the alpha, for the pride.
However, I could feel the tension in her, at a distance but faintly there. The fated mates connection had to be getting stronger, even though we hadn’t completed the fated mate ritual yet. Would it continue to increase, driving us until we finally linked? Would completing the ritual become a necessity at some point? Or would it happen on its own? I should have asked the historian about these details when I had him in my office. Since fated mates hadn’t been a part of pride life for so long, I knew little about them.
Nearby, Kobie worked through emails and texts on his phone and then switched to a laptop. He hadn’t gotten anymore updates about Ty since he’d gone missing. We knew the rest of the shifters were safe, but that was all we knew.
“Has anything popped up on any of the game cameras we put out there?” I asked.
“No, nothing but game,” Kobie answered without looking up from his work.
“Did you have the coordinates of the dead bodies listed somewhere?”
Kobie sighed. “There’s a lot of them, boss.”
“I know, but we have to get started on mapping. It might give us a better handle on where their headquarters are.”
“I don’t know how that’ll help,” Kobie answered, sniffing and then grabbing a tissue from a dispenser on the corner of the desk. He dabbed at his nose.
“It’s the information we have, so it’s what we’ll work with. Won’t hurt to look. The pattern might become obvious.”
“Got it.” Kobie went through several keystrokes on the laptop he’d been working on and pulled up a list, several pages long. He brought the list of locations he had. It wasn’t every single body, but it was most of them.
Together, we worked as quickly as we could, and by the end, we had a starfield of dead bodies throughout the bayou, but no immediately obvious pattern. Nothing stood out to me, but puzzles required time, so I settled in to stare at the information.
Mine and Kobie’s phones buzzed at the same time, and I drew mine from my back pocket. A black and white image showed on my screen. A trio of enforcers was headed into the building.
I frowned. “What’re they doing here?”
Kobie sent a text and a moment later, he answered. “They say they’re coming in to restock on supplies, and then they’re heading back out to search.”
The chair creaked as I stood. “I think I’m going to tag along with them when they head back out.”
Kobie halted mid-text and peered at me over his cell. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?”
“You’re distracted, disjointed, and I’m not sure you should be out there in that condition.”
My eyebrows shot up. That was something Laura would say, not easy-going Kobie. “Say that again?”
He frowned at me. “I’m just not sure you’re in the best frame of mind to be going out in the bayou and looking for the rogue or for Ty. The thing with Maury has you on edge.”
“She’s my mate.” I emphasized the last word to let him know I meant fated mate, but I still wasn’t comfortable using the words around the pride. None of them knew yet.
“I get that. But this is new territory for all of us.”
“You have a point.”
He arched an eyebrow. “But?”
“Nevertheless, I’m going out there.”
Kobie chuckled. “Now who do you sound like?”
“What are you talking about?” I dared him to mention Maury. When he didn’t, I added, “I’ll head out when they do. Let them know.”
“I’ll tell them.” Then he joined me in the middle of the room. “And I’m going with you.”
“You don’t have to. I’m distracted after all. It might not be safe.”
Maybe it was a low blow from me, but I was pissed at a rogue we couldn’t locate and spoiling for a fight. When we found Darius, I planned to rip him into a dozen pieces and fly them from a flagpole as a warning for anyone who threatened Maury.
Kobie ignored the barb I’d tossed. “Oh, letting you go alone was never a question. If you’re going, I’m going with you, Anthony. You had to know that much. You’ll figure out the rest of it.”
An hour later, we were at the edge of the bayou with the three enforcers, dressed in black fatigues, and dark face paint to keep the moonlight from reflecting on our faces. The first moment we shifted, we’d lose all the clothes, but Kobie had stuffed our pockets with supplies. The supplies would stick around no matter what, and that had been the point of the multi-pocketed pants.
But I could feel Maury back in the safe room, and she pulled at me. It felt like I’d lost a part of me, preoccupied with the place she took up in my mind, like half my senses were tied behind my back, and I wasn’t sure how to function as a whole alpha while she was back there.
Maybe Kobie had been right to question the sense of my making a trip out here. I stared at the dark of the bayou, taking a deep breath of the brackish water and swampy puddles. Dozens of creatures scurried from one place to another, and still Maury was there, pulling at me, drawing me to her while I had to head away from her.
Her words played in my mind, the way her voice sounded when she called my name, just before she crashed over the edge of her orgasms, and the images she’d had in her head of me eating her out.
Kobie elbowed me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t, not really, but I wanted Maury. I wanted her by my side, and I despised this asshole rogue who had made it fucking impossible for her to be safe anywhere except the warded rooms in the pride headquarter buildings.
“Over here,” one of the others called from a clearing a dozen yards ahead. The trio crouched around a collection of prints.
I touched the largest portion of the pawprint and raised my fingers to my nose. Darius had made that print or been there when it had been made. Fucker.
“What do you think?” Kobie asked.
“That way.” I waved to the south, and the trio started off. Something jumped in my head, something with Maury, and I tripped on nothing and destroyed the leftover print. “Fucking hell.”
Kobie caught my elbow before I went down into the mud. “You good?”
“Fine.” I paused. “Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.”
The other enforcers shifted and started out across the bayou.
I hung back, studying the muddle of prints in the clearing.
Kobie waited with me. “Missing Maury?”
“Yeah, but it’s something different now, stronger. It’s not as simple as missing her.”
“How so?”
“It’s got something to do with the fated mates.”
We started after the other enforcers, but we hadn’t gone one hundred yards when I stopped to turn back toward the city. Kobie nuzzled me, and I turned back toward the direction we needed to go.
Kobie kept me on task while Maury kept pulling me back toward the city. Over and over. So, I let the other enforcers take the lead while we remained in our human forms, trailing after the others.
Several hours later, my cell phone chimed, and I tugged it from one of the pockets in my cargo pants.
Kobie studied me. “I’m surprised that works out here. Normally, we don’t have much reception in the bayou.”
