Alphas Unleashed 4 (3 page)

Fiona was standing off to the side, trembling slightly, eyes wide, not saying anything.

"Fiona," I said in my best commanding voice, "this isn't funny. You have to take this off of me right now!"

But she still didn't move, and I was beginning to get worried now. I didn't understand what was going on.

"Get up," Fiona said.

I got up, and tried to pull the leash loose from her grip, but she had the heavy leather wrapped around her small little hand, and she wasn't letting it go.

"Whatever you think you're doing," I said, "it's wrong. This isn't how we treat each other."

"Start walking," Fiona said.

She still looked nervous, like she couldn't really believe what was happening anymore than I could, but there was some will, some strength in her voice that hadn't ever been there before.

So I started walking back towards the house, but Fiona jerked on the collar, making me stop in a hurry before one of the metal spikes gouged me.

"Not there," she said, "start walking towards the woods."

What in the world was she playing at? "No," I said. I just crossed my arms and stood there. Whatever game or power play or weird demonstration was happening, I wasn't going to play along. I wasn't okay with it anymore.

"Do as I say," Fiona hissed, and from behind her back, in her other hand, she produced a long metal baton of some kind. It flashed up in her hand and she poked me with it, and pain and muscle spasms erupted where the end of it touched my skin.

"Hey!" I said, jumping back and swatting the end of the baton away. It was some sort of cattle prod. Or something like that.

"Walk," Fiona hissed again.

I hesitated, and then started to shout Marcus' name, realizing that whatever was happening, it was getting out of hand and I needed his help. But Fiona, quicker than I had thought her capable of, stuck me again with the cattle prod and the shout in my throat turned to a yelp of pain. I was fairly sure Marcus couldn't hear us anyway. The mansion was well built, and not a lot of noise from the outside world penetrated those walls. Plus, Marcus' room was on the front of the mansion, at the far end. We were at the opposite corner. Which I was suddenly pretty sure wasn't just a coincidence.

Now I was getting really worried. "Fiona what's going on here?"

"Walk!" she said, and gestured the cattle prod at me, and after thinking about it for a second I did as she kept insisting on, and started walking, slowly, towards the woods. Whatever game she was playing, whatever she thought she was doing, there was nothing out there in those woods, and I knew that Marcus and Connor would be able to follow our scent trail. If I couldn't talk Fiona down from whatever craziness she was dragging me in to, then my two alphas would come rescue me once they realized Fiona and I were missing. They would move heaven and earth to get me back. I trusted in that.

~~~

I was taking my time walking, partly because I wanted to travel as little distance as possible, and partly because I was wearing cheap flip flop sandals, which were the last thing to wear when trudging through the dense rain forest.

"Fiona you have to tell me what's going on." I said. "I know you know this is wrong, what you're doing."

There was no response.

"Where did you get this collar from?" I said, trying a different angle. I had been thinking about the strange design, with the spikes turned inwards, pointed at my neck, and I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that I knew what it was for. It was to keep me from shifting. Because when I shifted my neck became larger, much larger, and would expand in to the metal spikes. If I tried to shift I would die.

And it wasn't as if Fiona had made the collar after Connor had found her, and had told her that we could shift at will. She must have already had the collar with her when he found her. Or maybe it had been her that had found him.

It all made me think that she had a plan, that she had thought all of it through. And if that was true, she must have a plan for this part too, for getting away with me as a captive. Which meant I couldn't rely on Connor and Marcus tracking us down.

In one swift motion I reached behind me and tugged on the leash, using it against Fiona, jerking her towards me. She stumbled and fell at my feet, and I lunged for the cattle prod with both hands. Fiona's one hand was firmly attached to the leash, there was no way she could keep the cattle prod from me.

But before I had managed to lay hands on the pain inducing device, Fiona jerked hard on the leash, digging the spikes of the collar in to my skin, and I learned just how sharp they were. I screamed in pain and collapsed on the ground, my quest for the cattle prod forgotten, both my hands going for my neck, trying desperately to dig the spikes of the collar out of my skin.

Fiona scrambled to her feet. She looked angry, but terrified too.

"Please," I said, desperation leaking in to my voice as I felt to make sure the holes in my neck weren't too deep, "just tell me what you're doing to me."

She didn't say anything though, just reached in to her bag of tricks one more time and I actually shied away a little, afraid of what might be next, but it was just a cellphone. She turned it on, and then dialed a number. She looked afraid, worried.

"It's me," she said, "I have her."

So whatever she was doing to me, she wasn't doing it alone.

"In the woods to the north," Fiona said, "just like you told me."

There was a moment of pause.

"How long?" Fiona glanced at me and saw me listening and turned her back a little and stepped away, as far away as the leash would allow. "Okay," I just barely heard her say, and then she turned the phone off and threw it back in to her bag.

"Whatever the person on the other end of that phone is making you do Fiona, you still have a choice, you don't have to do this. We can still go back to the mansion, we can just pretend like this never happened." Which wasn't true, not even remotely true, but I felt like I needed to try anyway.

"Get up," Fiona said, motioning with her cattle prod, and reluctantly I got to my feet.

"Keep going," she said from behind me, and so we started walking through the woods again, and I desperately thought of everything I might say to try and get through to Fiona, to convince her that she still had a choice to do the right thing.

"Whoever these people are that you're delivering me to, their not going to stop with just me. Whatever they do to me you can bet they'll do to you too. Because you and I are no different, we're both female werewolves."

"No I cant get pregnant. But if I bring them someone that can get pregnant they'll set me free."

A few of the puzzle pieces fell in to place when she said that. The curiosity she had shown regarding my mating heat being the big one. And the way she had distanced herself from the three of us. She hadn't been afraid of us or avoiding us, she just didn't want to get to know the people that she was about to destroy the lives of.

That give me a sliver of hope though. It told me she was a good person, that she knew what she was doing was wrong, and felt bad about it. Maybe I could talk my way out of this after all.

"I know you're a good person Fiona," I said over my shoulder, "I know you feel bad about what you're doing here. So why not just stop? Marcus and Connor will protect you from whoever is making you do this. You'll have your freedom and a pack that cares about you and will keep you safe. Isn't that a better deal than trading me for your freedom?"

It seemed like an obvious choice to me, one that I would make in a heartbeat.

"Have you figured out where you know me from yet?"

I glanced back at her, confused at where she was going with that. "No," I said. In truth I hadn't been giving it any thought. I had just assumed it was my mind playing tricks on me.

"I cant believe you don't remember," Fiona muttered. "Well I remember you. It was three, almost four years ago. I found you. It was down in Austin, Texas."

I gasped and turned around, the memory coming back to me. I wouldn't ever forget what had happened, even if I had apparently forgotten her face. "The little girl," I said.

"I hadn't shifted more than five or six times. I was living on the street. But I recognized your werewolf scent, and I came to you and I asked you to help me. I was so lost, and afraid, but you were the same as me, you knew what to do, how to survive. But you left me that same night. It was the first real night of sleep I had had in months, because I finally felt safe, and when I woke up you were gone."

"I remember," I said, nodding my head emphatically, "I was so afraid, and I was too young, too young to take care of you, or--"

Fiona interrupted me, "a few months later vampires found me, and I've been a prisoner ever since. Still, I wasn't going to do this," Fiona shook the leash, "because despite everything they've done to me you're right, I'm still a good person, and no werewolf deserves to be taken prisoner. Or at least that was what I thought. But when they showed me your picture I knew that
you
deserved this."

She was right. I hated to admit it but she was justified trading her own freedom in exchange for my captivity. I had had the chance to save her and I hadn't done it. I had done something terrible to her and now she was just returning the favor. But I wasn't going to stop trying to save myself. "I could fill buckets with the amount of tears I've cried over leaving you like I did," I said, looking Fiona in the eye as I did so. It was the truth, and I wanted her to look in to my eyes as I said it and see it for the truth. "I may not have recognized your face, but I remember that night like it was yesterday. The thing is... I wasn't able to protect myself, or keep myself safe. I knew that you needed my help, I wasn't blind to that, but I couldn't protect you. I just couldn't."

Fiona seemed to be struggling with that. Likely she had thought of me as the bad guy for so long, she wasn't prepared to hear my side of the story. She didn't want to know that I wasn't the monster that she had always thought, just another scared female werewolf looking for a safe place to hide. The truth didn't line up with her version of reality.

"Keep walking," Fiona said in a small voice.

"I'm sorry for what I did to you," I said, pleading, "but I can do the right thing now. This time I can save you, I can protect you, so please let me help you."

"It doesn't matter!" Fiona shouted, tears glistening in her eyes, "it's all shit. This whole life. You're not safe in that mansion by the way. You think you are but you're not. Drago, the vampire who owns me, who runs Seattle, he's obsessed with finding it. He would have eventually, even without my help. There's no where to run to. We're all as good as dead. You, me, Connor and Marcus, we all had death sentences the moment we were born. So just turn around and keep walking, because none of it matters anyway."

But I didn't turn around, because I knew then what I needed to tell her. "What if I knew about a place that was safe? A place where no vampire had ever set foot, and would never set foot?"

And that did make Fiona stop, and look at me, but only for a second. "No," she shook her head, "you're lying to me. If that place existed you would be there already."

I almost laughed at that. I wanted so badly to be there, in Alaska with Amelia, away from all the violence and tragedy. It was strange but after all the time I had spent daydreaming about going up there I felt like I knew Amelia. "I want to go, but Marcus and Connor don't. They refuse to leave for all sorts of reasons. But I can convince them, I know I can."

Fiona seemed doubtful.

"And even if I cant," I said hurriedly, "I'll go. With you. Just the two of us. But if you turn me over to those vampires that you called you'll never know where this safe place is."

Fiona seemed to be considering.

"If Drago really does give you your freedom, and that's a big if," I said, continuing to build my case, "then what will you do? Where will you go? How long until some other vampires find you and take you prisoner? Please just let me help you Fiona."

Her shoulders slumped and she sat down on a log. "It's too late, they're on their way."

I was elated. Beyond elated. I wanted to do a happy dance right there. "We can run back to the mansion."

But Fiona shook her head. "The vampires were waiting at the highway. Four of them. They started coming when I called, they'll be here in minutes. We'll never make it back."

"Then take this collar off," I said, my voice urgent. "I'll shift and scare them off."

"I don't have the key. And they know you can shift whenever you want. And these are Drago's best soldiers. You would have to kill them all."

I frantically racked my mind for some way out of this. It couldn't end like this. I had found a pack, the men of my dreams. A real life so close, within reach. I refused to believe that it would end right there, in the forest, wearing crappy flip-flops. And then I knew.

"The phone," I said, my outheld hand shaking with frantic energy.

Fiona hesitated, then dug the phone out of the bag and handed it to me.

I turned it on, cursing every second I had to wait for it to come alive. Every single second counted. Finally I got to the dialing pad. I tried to remember Marcus' phone number but I couldn't. I thought I might know it but I couldn't be sure, and I didn't want to waste time trying numbers, so I called Connor instead, praying that he wasn't driving, that he would pick up.

The phone rang twice, three times, and then finally I heard Connor's voice on the other end of the phone. "Hello?"

"It's Sara!" I blurted out. "Fiona and I are in the woods north of the mansion. There are vampires. Four of them. You have to hurry!" I didn't waste time with explanations or anything like that, I just said everything that he needed to know as quickly as possible.

"I'm coming," he said in a low growl, and the line went dead.

I looked at the phone, wondering if I should call Marcus too. Connor wasn't foolish enough to try and take on four vampires by himself. I hoped. He would get Marcus. But maybe I should call, I told myself, just in case. I started dialing what I hoped was Marcus' phone number when my fingers froze on the touchscreen, and the phone slipped from my grasp.