Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed (18 page)

It made her feel like bursting into
tears. She thought for several moments she was going to. She tamped
it with an effort, reminding herself that she’d seen an angel and
he’d promised deliverance.

* * * *

Raphael was still puzzling over what
he’d overheard when he reached Lucien and his men again. “Who the
hell is her father?” he asked as soon as he’d settled.

Lucien blinked at him.
“Laurie’s?”

“
Yeah, Laurie’s,” Raphael
said dryly. “Unless they have two women they’re
holding?”

Lucien looked at the others blankly.
“Her father’s dead,” he responded finally. “According to her file,
anyway.”

“
Apparently not,
mon ami
! I had to wait
to catch her attention. They’ve tied her to a chair that’s right in
the middle of the damned floor and they have three guns on her from
three different areas of the warehouse—besides the man that looks
like he’s in charge. I’m guessing these men are good enough shots
to take her out if anybody tries anything.

“
It gets worse—the fourth
man, the one in charge, is closer and also armed. Don’t act like
somebody used to carrying a gun, though.”

“
Fuck!” Lucien snarled
instead of pointing out to his pack that he’d been right to hold
off when they’d been trying to urge him to go. That wasn’t his
style anyway and he was more worried about the situation than
whether or not he’d been right. “We’re going to have trouble
managing that. There’s only two doors in and out. No windows we can
reach fast without giving ourselves away before we get there.” He
paused, thinking. “What’s this about her old man?”

Raphael shook his head. “Damned if I
know—but he must be pretty damned important. They’re holding her
for some kind of plans—not money.”

Lucien blinked at him. “The plans must
be worth a lot of fucking money if they’re willing to kidnap a
woman being held in protective custody to bait the
trap.”

Raphael’s dark brows rose
almost to his widow’s peak. “How did they manage that,
mon ami
?”

Lucien glanced at the others, feeling
his face heat.

“
Never mind,” Raphael
responded dryly. “I got a good look at her. I think I’ve got the
picture.”

“
Well you don’t fucking
got it!” Kane growled. “If you’re thinking what I think you’re
thinking! We checked that place from one end to the other—scoured
it and every piece of anything we brought in looking for tracking
devices. I still ain’t figured out how they managed to get close
enough to grab her!”

Raphael looked at Lucien
questioningly. “That’s the truth. They must have something we
haven’t seen yet ….” He broke off, his eyes widening as the comment
triggered another thought. “Holy hell! Why didn’t I think of that
before?”

“
What?” Damien demanded
blankly.

“
Connections, gods damn
it! That’s one thing we’ve noticed since we’ve been here, right?
This is a parallel universe. Everything is different but the
people. Laurie’s alter ego was connected to us on the other side.
We thought Laurie must be, too, but we hadn’t figured out how if
that was the case.”

“
Well, I still don’t see
that we have!” Basil snapped.

“
Something different?”
Lucien said pointedly. “It would have to be some kind of
surveillance we aren’t familiar with and who would develop
something like that?”

Kane frowned. “Her father?” he
guessed.

Lucien gave him a sour look. “A
company with a military contract. And a company with a military
contract would be damned interested in the plans for a weapon that
might create a vortex through time and space.”

They were all silent for a time,
considering the implications of Lucien’s theory. “Well, it really
sucks if you’re right,” Raphael said finally. “Because there’s no
way we’re going to get Laurie out of there and still get this to go
down where everybody’s happy. They haven’t bothered covering their
faces and that tells me Laurie isn’t walking out of their alive
whether they get the plans or not. Besides, I don’t think they’re
communicating directly.

“
It’s way too easy to
track a cell phone down to its location and these guys look like
professionals. They wouldn’t do anything that stupid. They’re
sending it to somebody else who could be passing it from two or
three different locations.

“
And that’s assuming they
have some clue of how to contact Laurie’s father. I’m not sure they
do. In fact I’m almost positive the military has him hidden
somewhere and they damned well wouldn’t be allowing him to receive
private messages.

“
So it wouldn’t do us no
good even if we could track these guys back to whoever hired them.
It’s Laurie’s father we need to track down.”

“
Where did you get that
Intel?” Damien demanded.

“
The day we arrived. Amy
told us about the guy that had developed the weapon. Well, the main
brains behind it, but he disappeared before we could get hold of
him.”

“
When the hell did you
plan on letting everybody else know?” Lucien growled.

Raphael glared at him. “I thought we
were all chasing down potential leads and meant to share the info
at the rally,” he growled. “I’m telling you what I’ve got at the
moment—and that’s a lot of ifs and maybes.”

Lucien sucked in a calming breath and
let it out slowly. “We’ll have to discuss this more thoroughly at a
better time. Right now we need to get Laurie out of
there.”

Raphael’s second, Michel,
arrived on the heels of the comment. “I think I might have figured
out how we can carry that off,
mes
amis
,” he volunteered.

Chapter Thirteen

“
I don’t like this worth a
fuck,” Damien growled when the angels had left them to take their
positions.

“
You think I do?” Lucien
snapped. “If you have a better plan now’s the time to cough it
up.”

“
No, but … I’m in
agreement. I’d feel better if
we
were protecting Laurie and
they
were taking out the bastards
with the guns. What if she catches a stray bullet?” Basil said
tightly.

“
I don’t have wings. You
got wings?” Lucien growled.

Basil’s lips tightened. He glanced at
Damien and then Kane, shook his head, and started
stripping.

“
Ok,” Lucien said before
they split up. “Watch for the signal. The
moment
they drop, we go in—not a
second later. Got it?”

Everyone nodded.

They focused on shifting to man beasts
and headed to the areas the angels had indicated as the locations
of the gunmen. The angels, stationed by that time on top of the
building at the broken skylight, directed them with hand motions
until they were positioned directly behind the shooters inside the
building. They were going to have to go in blind. They couldn’t see
the men that were their targets. Lucien just hoped nobody was off
by enough to fuck up the whole plan.

When everyone was situated, Raphael
gave the signal and he and his team dropped through the skylight.
Luck wasn’t exactly on their side. They were spotted almost the
instant they dropped through. Fortunately, the shooters were so
stunned by what they saw that only one reacted instantly and fired
off a round, but he directed it at them—not Laurie—and Raphael
figured it was more of a ‘knee jerk’ reaction since he missed them
by a mile.

It still gave him a bad turn. If
anything happened to Laurie he knew he and his men were liable to
find themselves in a life or death struggle with her men—because it
was easy to see they’d claimed her as a mate. And they weren’t
going to take it well if anything happened to her. Unfortunately,
they weren’t close enough, at that moment, to use their electrical
abilities as a shield to protect Laurie—which was what the plan had
been and was the main reason they were going in first. They landed
a split second before the hell hounds made doors where only solid
metal walls had been a few seconds before, though. Taking up
positions around her, the angels linked electrical shields,
creating an impenetrable barrier all the way around her.

As planned, as soon as they saw that
Lucien and his men had the shooters in the building in hand, they
dropped the shield and took flight, shooting back out the skylight
they’d used to breach the building and raced to prevent the attack
or retreat of the guards stationed in the other
buildings.

The move proved to be premature. None
of them had seen the bastard that had hit Laurie since their
arrival. The only thought any of them had given him was that they
regretted that his henchman had killed him before they could. And
it was an assumption that nearly got Laurie killed.

As Lucien, Damien, Kane,
and Basil burst through the rusted metal walls of the building and
attacked the shooters that had been strategically placed to take
Laurie out if anyone attempted a rescue, the man, apparently drawn
by sounds of attack, staggered out of a back room with a loaded
gun. Dizzy, sick, disoriented from being pistol whipped, he was in
no shape to be intimidated by the beast-men savaging his fellow
thugs. He
was
apparently working on automatic, on the plan that had been
formulated in case someone tried to take their bargaining chip.
Lifting the gun, he walked unsteadily toward Laurie,
firing.

Fortunately, he was too sick with the
concussion he’d gotten to shoot straight, but Lucien knew they
couldn’t count on that saving Laurie once he got close enough to
shoot point blank. Letting out a roar of rage, he ripped the head
off the man he’d been fighting and bounded across the warehouse. He
arrived at the center where Laurie was pinned like a lamb for
sacrifice as the bastard fired his last bullet. It almost seemed
that he flew through the air in slow motion and that the bullet was
going to find its mark before he could intervene. Uttering another
roar, this time of fear, he reached for it. He managed to catch the
bullet in the palm of his hand. The bone, tendons and tissue may
have slowed or diverted it, but the projectile tore through,
leaving a hole big enough he knew it had to be a high caliber.
Laurie screamed. Fearful that she’d caught the bullet after all, he
whipped a look toward her even as he abruptly hit the floor and
skidded past the chair.

Kane, who’d been close enough to see
what Lucien had seen, had dispatched his opponent much as Lucien
had and also raced to intercept, as well. The bullet that went
through Lucien’s hand, went through his torso and kept going, but
Kane was in too much of a rage to feel the pain. He launched
himself at the shooter with a bellow and shredded him.

Covered in blood—both their own and
their victims—the foursome converged on Laurie.

It wasn’t until Lucien strained to
speak that he realized he was still in beast form. “Are you hurt,
baby?” he asked when he’d shifted to man form, fearful of touching
her after the look of horror he’d seen on her face.

She burst into tears, shaking her
head. “I’m ok. You’re the one hurt!”

Lucien looked down at his palm, but
although the shift had slowed the healing process, the hole was
already beginning to close. He gave Laurie a lopsided smile and
shrugged. “I’m not human, baby. It’ll heal.”

Nobody really wanted to approach her,
all things considered, but Basil and Damien finally settled on
either side of the chair and cut the restraints. The moment they
did, Laurie launched herself at Lucien.

He thought for a handful
of seconds that she was trying to fight him—mostly because it
didn’t occur to him that she would allow him to touch her ever
again now that she knew positively and without any doubt what he
was, let alone
initiate
contact! She seemed intent on choking the life
out of him. He merely stood still at first, afraid to touch her
even though she was plastered against him.

“
I was so scared!” she
babbled. “I didn’t think y’all would be able to find me and I
figured I’d have to try to get out of the mess by myself, but I
couldn’t think of anything to do! And then I thought you guys would
get killed trying to rescue me ….”

It dawned on Lucien as she
began pulling away that she’d
hugged
him. She was saying she was
glad they’d come?

Well, there was only one way to be
sure and he wasn’t going to be a coward about it. He wrapped an arm
around her narrow waist, palmed the back of her head with the other
hand to prevent her escape, and kissed her thoroughly. He could
feel the jolt of surprise that went through her when he did. It
made his stomach churn with dismay, but in the next moment she
relaxed.

He thought she might actually have
kissed him back, but Raphael butted in where he wasn’t
wanted!

“
Hate to break things up
when it looks like you’ve got them going good,
mon ami
, but I don’t think we have
time for
amour
right now.”