Still in her wolf form, she dashed off. The river trick could work again.
Omigod, Aimee thought as she caught sight of the scrawny red wolf moving her pups into a new den. Her fur-covered skin clung to her ribs, and she was way too gaunt to be able to nurse her pups well. Aimee had heard her howl and knew it wasn't Cassie's, but she'd lost Cassie some hours ago, if she was the woman in the safari outfit she'd tried to track. And the howl probably meant the female was in trouble. Aimee wanted to help her. But a real wolf? I mean, Aimee was a real wolf, too, at the moment, but this one was an honest-to-God lupus-only kind of wolf. The pups began crying.
Aimee quickly went in search of food. Was this what her cousin was trying to do? Take care of the female wolf? Sounded like something Cassie would get involved in.
Aimee had heard the other wolves howling but didn't believe they were part of this wolf's pack, or they would have been here with her now. Which meant?
She shuddered. Irving and Tynan, her would-be murderers, could be the ones calling to each other.
Chapter 7
As soon as Alex Wellington spied Cassie Roux's green pickup parked in the Mount Hood National Forest, twenty miles east of Portland and the northern Willamette Valley, he thought the area was just her kind of place.
With sixty square miles of forest and numerous streams, creeks, several lakes, more than a million acres of land, and a thousand-plus hiking trails, the national forest was perfect for a pack of wolves. He figured Cassie must have come across wolves somewhere out here or she wouldn't have been in the small town lecturing about them.
Wedging his pickup behind hers, Alex effectively blocked her truck between the oaks and Douglas firs so she couldn't steal away if she returned before he located her. Before meeting her, work had been just that... work, a job. But not with Cassie in the picture. She made it a game. Something fun.
Glad that the rain had died down to a thick mist, Alex grabbed his backpack, locked his door, and circled around her truck, searching for where her tracks would lead. She was a damned good wolf biologist; he had to give her that. And he wanted to know what made her so damned good. Well, more than that. He wanted them to be good together, a wolf biologist team. The perfect scenario. If that rich rancher hadn't kept him from visiting with her socially after her lecture...
He frowned and jerked his backpack straps over his shoulders, then looked around at the woods for a footpath she might have taken. Spying one, he started down it, the spongy ground cushioning his every step, while green leafy branches and ferns stretched out to the foot-and-a-half-wide trail and brushed the sides of his boots from time to time.
A mosaic of leaves and pine needles shed the previous autumn covered the earth, masking the ground and the tracks of anyone who'd walked this way recently. Eyes to the ground, Alex continued down the path, searching for an elusive hiking-boot tread, Cassie's small size-six footprint, or any other indication that she'd headed in this direction. No broken twigs, no crushed ferns off the main trail.
He knew she wasn't bound to manmade trails like the average Joe. Even when she hiked through pristine forests, she left the wilds of nature undisturbed as if she were a woodland fairy who melted into the scenery. He'd always admired her for that, but it meant tracking her was all the more time-consuming and difficult. As much as it was for him when he was tracking wolf packs.
He paused and looked back at her truck, which merged with the greenery. She always seemed to find the packs as if she had a divining rod for wolves. Hell, he could go months before he finally spotted one. And even then, getting to know them took a meticulously long time.
But Cassie Roux could blend in with a pack and form attachments, as if she had been one of the gang forever, within such a short time that it was unnatural. He swore she had to have been a wolf in a former life. When he'd said so to her once after she'd given a lecture at UCLA, she'd given him a quick smile and his stomach had flip-flopped, and in that instant, he'd fallen hard for the woman.
His step less sure, he backtracked down the path to return to her truck. When he reached her pickup, he peered inside. Spotlessly clean as usual. No sign of anything left behind so that anyone who might be tempted to break into her vehicle to steal possessions, like they did at trailheads sometimes, wouldn't be bothered.
Finally spying the faint tread mark of one of her hiking boots where she had slipped off the leaves from autumns past and made several small cuts in the muddy earth in between two grand oaks, he smiled.
"Got you."
But after four hours of hiking up and down hillsides through dense forest, he observed a set of boot prints. He measured his foot against them. Size ten like he wore. And they were following Cassie's.
Had she hooked up with another man? Another wolf biologist? His heart sank with the notion, but then a fresh worry plagued him. Was someone stalking her?
Then a set of wolf prints caught his attention, and he elatedly knelt down to examine them. Glancing around, he noted several more, crisscrossing the area as if frantically searching for something. And another wolf's prints, the tracks indicating a longer gait, the prints a little larger.
Another concern overshadowed his excitement at finding the wolf prints, though. Perplexed, he glanced around the area and studied the soil closer.
The wolves' prints were all over the place, but the trail of Cassie's boot prints and the man's tread markings had abruptly ended.
"Since he shifted, we've already poured two pots of coffee--full caffeine strength--into Leidolf," Laney said to someone in the great room down the hall at Leidolf's ranch house while he reclined in his bed, the tranquilizer the hunter shot him with still stirring in his bloodstream. "And you've already brought Quincy and Pierce home. Sarge... well, Satros said he'd find him and make him return to the ranch, Elgin. We need to find the woman Leidolf was with before she gets hurt. If she's not already."
Leidolf sat up in bed, so groggy that all he knew was he had to pee really badly, and he had to get to the forest as soon as humanly possible to rescue Cassie.
"He keeps rambling about her being in danger," Laney added, her words couched in concern, her voice lowered but not low enough that Leidolf couldn't hear her.
Alone in the bedroom, Leidolf growled to himself, "I do not ramble."
"We already have two men on it. And I've talked to him about more of us going back for her, but he says no, that he has to be the one to rescue her. He's not making any sense. He can't go anywhere in the shape he's in. If she needs our help, we need to give it to her," Elgin said, agreeing with his mate wholeheartedly in the great room.
"Nothing is wrong with the shape I'm in," Leidolf groused in a mumble.
"Well, go do it, Elgin. You and Fergus. Go get her and bring her back to him. Don't listen to him. He's too drugged to make any sense. You're both great trackers and his sub-leaders, which means if he's incapable of leading the pack, the two of you run it."
"No!" Leidolf shouted.
Damn if he could barely remember what had happened except that hunters had shot him when he was trying to track Cassie down, and then she had attempted to rouse him. Roughly at some point, tenderly at another. And with neither working, she resorted to the words he wanted to hear. Hmm, the big, bad wolf isn't so big and bad anymore, rumbled around in his brain, the minx mouthing the words so sweetly even now in his half-tranquilized state, he was becoming aroused. And then? She had called him a lazy lout.