Silence of the Wolf (12 page)

“Darien!” Tom called out.

Everyone came, his brothers and their mates, all looking anxious. He pointed at the man in the photo. “Wasn't he the one seated on the chairlift behind Elizabeth? The one she thinks pushed her down the expert slope?”

***

Elizabeth felt awful for leaving Tom behind without saying good-bye. She hadn't wanted to stay after her strange call to North. She had no intention of dragging Tom and his family and pack into her troubles. She'd tried twice more to get hold of North before she took off on the plane, but she only got his voice mail. She wouldn't leave any messages.

She'd finally found a safe haven away from her family. If they knew she lived in Texas, no one seemed to care. Staying in Silver Town would be a dangerous thing to do if her uncle knew she was there and decided he wanted her dead, again.

She didn't need to screw up her life by getting involved with a gray wolf, even as sweet as he was, who didn't know her past history. Making her uncle pay for his crimes seemed to be only a dream. She prayed North hadn't been hurt in the process.

Once she arrived home, she'd dropped her camera off to be repaired. Even though Jake was a pro with cameras, maybe the camera shop could do what he hadn't been able to. Then Elizabeth immersed herself in her job. She wrote the article for her paper about the Silver Town Ski Resort, making sure to mention their great ski patrollers and staff, and turned the story in.

After that, she started an article about red wolves. Her research showed that two theories existed: one that red wolves were a special species separate from gray wolves, and the other that red wolves were descended from gray wolves mixing with coyotes. She slanted the article toward the latter.

Carol had said that gray wolves weren't mixing with coyotes in the States, but Elizabeth found that Virginia coyotes
had
mated with Great Lakes gray wolves, and she found further articles stating that coyotes from other locations had a percentage of gray wolf DNA.

It made sense to her. Coyotes hunt in packs just as wolves do. They're also both predators, eating rodents that cause plagues. Both species are bound to their families and take care of their young as a group. The Native Americans thought coyotes were clever and savvy because of their ability to adapt everywhere. Elizabeth couldn't understand why some people were so strongly against them. Why was it so bad to recognize that red wolves are just coyotes with a heavy dose of gray wolf DNA?

Intending to call her editor about the new article, Elizabeth realized she hadn't turned her phone back on since she flew home. She slipped it out of her bag and turned it on.

Twenty-two messages.

Surprised, she stared at the number before she clicked on it to see who had called her, hoping North might have tried to get in touch with her and was all right. She never got that many calls to her cell phone, and no one except her editor knew she was back in town.

She felt a pang of guilt, hoping Tom hadn't called some of those times. She hesitated for a minute, then clicked on the messages.

Tom had phoned her seventeen times, but he hadn't left her any messages. She closed her eyes. She had hoped he would figure out that nothing could be gained by the two of them speaking further. He needed someone who was local and all wolf, rather than someone like her.

Two of the calls were from Lelandi and the rest from Darien. Their messages were brief and just asked her to call them back. Maybe they'd caught the guy who pushed her down the slope. No calls from North. She should phone Darien or Lelandi, since they were the pack leaders. She shouldn't get in touch with Tom, knowing full well he'd be upset with her. She didn't want to explain what a mess her life had already been and why she was best being on her own.

So what did she do? She called Tom.

The phone rang several times. He didn't pick up. She reached his voice mail but didn't leave a message. He'd see that she'd called anyway. If he wanted to call her back, he could. This time she'd have her phone turned on. She tried getting hold of North again. Voice mail again.

She punched in the number for her editor, Ed Bloomington, and when he picked up, she could hear the smile in his voice, welcoming her home. But it wasn't home. Not for her. A shifter without family. She realized just how much she had been fooling herself ever to think so.

She put on her business persona, swallowed the emotions welling up inside, and said, “I just sent you the story about the ski resort, and I've got a great idea for another one that I got from… a friend in Colorado. It's a story about gray wolves not having mates, finding coyotes to love, and their pairings resulting in red wolves. Some call the offspring a coywolf. But evidence exists that's how red wolves came to be. What do you think?”

“Sounds great. Send it to me.”

She barely breathed as she emailed Ed the story and he read through it. “All right. Top-notch story. Love the angle, Elizabeth. I'll print it first,” Ed said after a few agonizing minutes on Elizabeth's end. “I'll print the other story at the end of the week. Damned glad to have you home. Got to run to a family birthday get-together. I'm surprised you came home so early, though.”

“I missed home,” she said, even though Ed's mention of attending a family birthday party made her feel isolated and alone. She shrugged the notion off, not wanting to deal with it. Not wanting to think of Tom and his close-knit family. Not wishing to think of how she would have loved to have a family like that growing up. “I'll see you when I finish my leave.” Even though she'd come home early, she was still using her vacation time, and she would attempt to enjoy it.

“All right. Talk to you later.”

Later that week when her article about the wolves came out, she received an unbelievable number of hateful responses. She hadn't expected that. She'd only reported what scientists believed.

She was damned tired of burying her feelings. If gray wolves didn't have a mate and they found one in a coyote, what was the big deal? They were pack animals at heart. They deserved to find mates who would love them back.

But to get death threats?

Five emails, six phone calls.
Really?
The people who responded to her article in the paper were wolf lovers, maybe even red wolf shifters. They didn't ID themselves. Of course, she got some irate calls from farmers and ranchers who said any of them—wolves, coyotes, and any mix of the two—should be shot on sight.

How would they feel if shifters felt that way about humans?

The phone rang again, with caller ID showing Caller Unknown. “Hello?”

“How dare you say the red wolves are part coyote,” a man's voice said, though it was muffled and she couldn't identify him.

Her half brother Sefton? Uncle Quinton?

“How does it feel to know you're just like me?” she asked, chills running up her spine at the thought that they had her cell number, if one of them was calling her. Then again, if one of them had answered North's phone, that's how he got it.

She didn't know if the caller was really one of them. If he wasn't, the man had to have thought she was nuts.

The phone clicked dead and she felt shaky, as if she had just come face to face with her uncle. Goose bumps erupted on her skin.

The phone rang again. Another unknown caller. “Damned stupid article, if you ask me. Are you one of those animal activists? One of those vegetable eaters? Red wolves are beautiful and rare predators, while coyotes are sneaky scavengers. Damn coyotes are not part gray wolf.”

Elizabeth ground her teeth, irritated that people were so hateful about the wolves and coyotes.

The caller hung up the phone. She guessed he didn't have anything more to say.

Elizabeth thought again about Tom. Every call gave her heart a little start. Every call might be from him.

She hadn't heard back since she'd phoned him a few days ago. He must have given up on her, which was for the best. So why did she miss him and his pack and Silver Town so much? Despite the misadventure at the ski resort, she loved how the pack members on the slopes had treated her, loved Tom's bossiness about taking care of her.

She would have given just about anything to eat more of Bertha's cinnamon rolls while talking to her about gardening. Elizabeth would have shared more with Carol. She wanted to know what had happened to Lelandi while she was with the red pack. She would have loved to go to the grand opening of Silva's Victorian Tea Shop, and even see Silva and Sam get together as mates. She wanted to learn more about Peter's brother and if he was causing trouble for the sheriff during his visit.

Most of all, she wanted to see Tom again, feel his touch, experience his kisses, and so much more.

She'd never felt that way about any other wolves she'd met, never had any others act as if they'd already made her part of the family and she'd accepted the role. She had to quit thinking like that.

Uncle Quinton was still in the area. If she returned to Silver Town, he'd try to eliminate her. If she did and his pack leader was agreeable to hearing Elizabeth out, Quinton would be a dead wolf. He couldn't trust her to leave well enough alone.

When the sun began to set, she ran through Palo Duro Canyon State Park in her furry form. She scattered the two longhorn cattle living there, chased a cottontail rabbit, startled a white-tailed deer, and snagged her fur on the thorny mesquite. She ran and ran, trying to quit thinking about the article and Tom and what had happened to North.

She had nearly reached home when she spied a coyote.

That made her stop dead in her tracks.

Was it a shifter? Or a plain old coyote? Could he be family on her mother's side? Couldn't be. They lived in the Oklahoma Panhandle.

The coyote was a bigger male. He watched her, scenting the air to learn anything he could about her and what she felt. In this case, apprehension. Her heart rate had already kicked up a notch.

She didn't see any others, so he might be a loner.

What if he was a shifter? Maybe he was worried about what she was. He might be wary of her because she smelled like a wolf, too. That usually kept any coyote shifters away from her.

A shot rang out, the bang sending a shriek of panic through her. She dove for the ground and watched to see where the rifle had fired from. The coyote ran off.

She waited for a long time, not moving, hoping that whoever had fired the round had given up trying to shoot the coyotes. If he came for her, thinking she had been shot, she wasn't sure what she would do. Shift before he could see her, so he'd find an uninjured, naked woman? Then what? She just hoped he'd go off looking to shoot something else, like a rattlesnake—though at this time of year, they'd be curled up in a den.

She thought of shifting and running as a human to her home, but the ground could be hazardous to her bare feet with its cactus, thorny senna, and rocky terrain, and it was only thirty-six degrees out today. Purple and pink stripes streaked across the sky as the sun began to set, but snow clouds quickly amassed.

She took a chance and raced through the juniper and scrub oak. Half an hour later, she plowed through her wolf door out back and entered the safety of the house. She panted, staring at the terra-cotta tile floor, barely feeling relief when someone knocked on the front door. Her heart skipped a beat. Now what?

She raced into the bedroom, shifted, and threw on some clothes. Peering out through the peephole of her front door, she saw no one. Wrong house?

A black sedan sat farther down the dead-end street. All of the houses backed up on ten-acre lots, with a half acre between homes, so they had a lot of privacy. She couldn't see if anyone sat in the vehicle, and she didn't recognize the car.

To be on the safe side, she went into the kitchen and locked her wolf door so no one could get in when she least expected it. The coyote she'd seen would know where she lived once he tracked her scent.

Expecting a snowstorm to hit by nightfall, Elizabeth needed some groceries to tide her over. The clouds had rolled in, white, voluminous, and filled with snow. She'd seen the weather reports, felt the change in the air pressure, and could smell the coming snow in the wind currents. If what she predicted would happen, they'd be in a whiteout by nightfall.

On the way to the grocery store, she spied a big sale sign in the window at a small butcher shop that she'd never visited before: Rib-eye steaks 20 percent off!

When she walked into the butcher shop, the strange scent of cat threw her. The odor bothered her because her first thought was that the butcher had supplemented his meat products with cat. Then she realized the smell was that of a couple of live cats. Feral. She would have sworn they were big cats, as in the predator-in-the-mountains type. The butcher couldn't have had house cats or any other variety in the store, though, not when he sold food.

After buying the meat, she was still puzzling over the cat-scent mystery and didn't fully notice the people entering the shop behind her. She'd heard their footsteps, but their arrival hadn't registered as anything sinister. Until they quickly moved in close to her. Three men. Getting in her space. The distinctive smells of testosterone, cologne, and aggression surrounded her all at once.

Before she could object to their close proximity, one of the men quickly wrapped his arm around her shoulder and poked a gun against her ribs. “Don't make a sound,” he whispered in her ear, as if pretending to be her lover, to her chagrin.

The butcher smiled. She had to have looked highly annoyed. Even wolfishly dangerous, if anyone had known what she was.

“You got the sale steaks, I see, honey,” the man holding the gun against her side said, more to the butcher than to her. “I was afraid you hadn't gotten my message.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but he quickly tightened his grip around her shoulder, warning her not to say a word. He nodded to the butcher and added, “Thanks.”

Now
what was she to do?

The article she'd written came to mind in a flash, but she couldn't imagine anyone kidnapping or killing her over it. Then she wondered if Uncle Quinton had found her that fast. Why go after her at a butcher shop? Why not when she was in her home? Alone?

The three men escorted her outside to a black vehicle with dark-tinted windows—the same car she'd seen near her home. The man acting as her lover attempted to force her into the backseat.

“You've mistaken me for someone else,” she said to the man wielding the gun. She grabbed the car frame, not about to let him shove her inside. That could be the end of her.

And that's when she got her first look at the men.

None had shielded their faces from her view, so she could identify every one of them. Somehow they all looked familiar… Where had she seen them before?

Oh… my… God!

“You're the men who made a scene back at the Silver Town Tavern!” Elizabeth exclaimed, staring at the blond, bearded man in the group. She recognized his cold eyes glowering at her. He was the man from the chairlift.

“You bastard.” She lunged forward to knee him in the crotch, but the dark-haired gunman jerked her back. She'd almost forgotten he still held her arm tight, but she recognized him as the spokesman of the group at the tavern. Since he was wielding the gun, she had a feeling he had also pushed her down the slope.

Instinctively, she tried to identify their scents. Nothing—as far as a wolf scent. They had to have applied hunter's spray and then cologne over that to make sure she couldn't detect them as wolves. Then everything clicked into place. She thought she hadn't been able to identify the blond man's scent on the chairlift because the wind blew it away from her. But she and Tom hadn't picked up any scents after her room had been broken into, either. The men had to have been using hunter's spray then, too. There was no other explanation.

She was certain they were wolves. They wouldn't have any other need to use hunter's spray in a nonhunting environment. Her heart thundered in her ears.

If these were the guys who'd stolen her stuff back at Silver Town, they had to know exactly who she was. She
was
the one they wanted for whatever sinister purpose. She was certain it all had to do with her uncle.

The gunman tried to force her into the vehicle again. He jerked her from the car frame and shoved her inside the car. She fell forward, landing on her stomach on the backseat. Before she could turn and defend herself, he jabbed her in the buttock with a long needle, pissing her off. She lashed out with a kick of her boot to his right shin. He yelped in pain, shoved her legs aside, climbed in, and slammed the door shut.

“Drive,” he growled to the blond man.

Her vision blurred. The driver and the other man, a redhead, looked back at him with smug smiles. “He warned us she'd be a wolf,” the driver said, amusement coating his words.

Her heartbeat was slowing from the drug, but it did a little kick at his mention of “wolf.”

“Uncle Quinton,” she slurred.

“You sure you have enough hours under your belt to serve as copilot?” the redhead said to the driver.

Copilot?

“Hell, yeah,” the driver said. “How do you think we managed to fly into Mexico so frequently? This will be a piece of cake.”

Mexico?

“Hell,” the redhead said, “you should have asked her where the deed was before you drugged her.”

Elizabeth felt a stab of panic through the haze of the drug. Did they know she had been planning to trade the deed to her parents' property to North for the evidence he had against her uncle?

She had meant to return the deed to the safe in her home, but she hadn't gotten around to taking it out of the breast pocket of her ski jacket… that she was still wearing. She knew she shouldn't have procrastinated about it, but she had wanted to send her editor the stories first thing after getting home, and then the threat of the snowstorm and the necessity of buying groceries had distracted her.

The gunman pulled Elizabeth around onto her back and searched her unceremoniously. She tried to muster a look of extreme disgust and indignation as he unzipped her jacket and patted her down a little too friskily. “We'll search her place if…” The gunman slapped the deed in his hand. “Not necessary. Got it right here.”

***

The small plane soared high above snow-covered mountains, the flakes swirling around the windows and wings in such profusion that the sky and ground were no longer visible in the whiteout. God only knew where Elizabeth was as she shook off the effect of the drug her captor had given her. How could the pilot see where he was going? Or the copilot figure out where to take them?

“Damn it, Canton,” the pilot growled. “You said there was a gap between the storm cells. You said we'd clear them before they hit us.”

“If the damn cells hadn't moved as fast as they did, we would have,” the dark-haired man said.

Where were they? Flying over Palo Duro Canyon? She didn't know how long she'd been out of it, but she couldn't see anything in the blanket of white.

She shifted in her seat and realized she sat in the tail of the plane, seat belted and handcuffed.

She had gotten into plenty of scrapes over the years as a wolf-coyote mix without a pack, and she'd always managed to get herself out of them. But this time…

Maybe she should have made more of a fuss in the butcher shop. Maybe she wouldn't be here now, but she had been afraid the men would kill the butcher—and her—and she hadn't wanted that.

The blond man, the one with the cold eyes, was half dozing in a seat across from her. When he realized she was watching him, he narrowed his gaze at her. What? Did he think she'd let the inner wolf loose again? That was when she noticed something… an unfamiliar scent. The scent of male red wolves. Their hunter's spray must have worn off by now.

She settled back against the seat of the small aircraft, glowering at the gunman wearing a blue-gray parka and a crooked smile—the one named Canton. She tried to appear more at ease than she felt.

His greasy dark hair swept his shoulders as he shook his head at her, that stupid smile firmly plastered on his face. His sharp eyes remained fixed on her gaze while he slid his gun into his holster like he'd probably done a thousand times before—smoothly, like a gunman in an old Western. Same jeans, only the cowboy boots were grimy sneakers, and the dirty parka replaced the vest and old-time Western shirt.

She glanced out the window. She didn't like to fly, and given the choice, she'd never set foot in a plane, ever. Certainly not in the middle of a snowstorm. She briefly wondered what they had done with her deed.

Canton chuckled, drawing her attention back to him and the fix she was in.

“Who ordered you to pick me up?” she asked, not that she expected him to tell her the truth.

Canton shrugged, then hollered to the red-haired pilot, “Hey, Huckster, when will we get there?”

Never. If Elizabeth had
her
way.

“Another half hour, but in this blizzard, it may take longer.” The pilot sounded like he was trying to hide the anxiety in his voice.

That had her even more worried. If the pilot didn't think they would make it, what chance did they have?

She twisted her wrists again, wishing she had a hairpin or, better yet, her lockpicks to unlock the fool thing. She always carried lockpicks because her father said they had saved his butt a time or two, but the men had already patted her down and found the picks. That was part of the reason she had begun to wake up. Their hands on her, probing and searching, had brought her to a groggy state of consciousness.

Canton again turned to smile at her. “You're real pretty. Too bad. They didn't like that you got mixed up with the wrong people.”

In the turbulent downdrafts, the airplane dropped again, her heart with it. She grabbed the seat back in front of her. Her stomach grew queasy. Neither wolves nor coyotes were meant to fly. At least not this one.

“Who?” she asked.

He shrugged. “We don't ask those kinds of questions. Besides, you think they'd give us their real names?”

Either he was lying or these three weren't with her father's pack. Rogue wolves for hire?

“Why did you knock me down the ski slope?”

“Nothing personal. Just getting paid for a job. The guy who wants you—and the deed—now that's personal.”

Her uncle. And he must know North had evidence to prove he killed her parents.

The plane dove again, and she held her stomach.

“Getting seasick?” Canton chuckled. “Guess I should say airsick. We're just taking you to a nice little hideaway in the mountains so you don't think of slipping away from us until we can turn you over to the men who are paying for you.”

Men. Plural. Her half brother had to be in on it.

If only she could shape-shift… She squirmed against the handcuffs again. If she could slip her hands through them… She wriggled and twisted. The skin around her wrists burned with the effort as the metal scraped the skin. No success. She growled under her breath. Then she nixed the idea of turning anyway. They could shift, too, into larger male wolves. And even if she miraculously got the upper hand in a fight, what could she do? Kill them? She didn't want to contemplate that, but even if she did, what then? She couldn't fly a plane.

An engine sputtered. Her heart thudding, she listened to the sounds of a plane in trouble and smelled the stench of fear that cloaked the man closest to her. The plane abruptly angled hard right. One wing tipped down.

She fell from her seat into the aisle, smacking her left elbow hard against the unforgiving floor. Canton landed between the seats next to her while the others cursed up front.

She considered disarming Canton while he was off balance. If she could reach his gun—Then she heard metal ripping, and she lost all sense of direction as she suddenly became weightless in a field of white.

Screams—
hers
—issued before she could stop the sound of panic and then silence. Everything—the wind, the cold, the snow blinding her—faded into oblivion.