Elgin frowned. "She's waking."
No shit.
And she was waking fast. Again she squirmed, struggling to get free, as if she didn't like being confined by him. She hadn't opened her eyes yet and appeared to be sleeping still.
Fergus drew closer. "Want me to hold her muzzle so she doesn't try to bite you?"
Before Leidolf could respond, Cassie shape-shifted. Right in his arms. She barely gave any warning, just growled low and jerked her head up as if she was going to bite him. She didn't bare her canines, but her green eyes narrowed as she looked up at him, a strange flicker of recognition, and then... she shape-shifted...
... into a soft, naked, beautiful woman.
"Holy cow," Fergus said, jerking off his coat.
Elgin was shedding his, too, and quickly draped it over her nude body. He lifted his brows and his lips slightly. "Hot damn, she truly is the woman I saw running through the woods yesterday. No wonder you danced with her until way past closing this morning."
Leidolf ducked his head underneath a tree branch and hid a smile. His look would have been pure wickedness had he allowed his pack members to see it as he tightened his hold on the curvaceous woman. One hot, red lupus garou in the flesh. He took a deep breath of her sweet, sexy scent, all woman and wolf, and enjoyed the softness of her body, her heat pressing against him.
"Everyone said she pulled you onto the dance floor and wouldn't let go until the wee hours of the morning. And you did say she approached you yesterday at the lake, right? And she acted real interested in you?" Elgin continued, a twinkle in his eye.
It was the first time Leidolf had seen this side of Elgin, more at ease, the conversation more lighthearted.
His expression neutral, Fergus watched Leidolf to see his reaction. Leidolf refused to react in front of his men.
"Since she hung around you when you were drugged until we arrived, I'd say there's something there." Elgin seemed coolly amused. "We'll have to ensure she sticks around this time and doesn't run off again."
"I'll do whatever I can to help," Fergus said, serious-like, but Leidolf noted a slight lift to his lips.
Tightening his hold on her, Leidolf didn't reply. Hell, this was his business, not pack business. He took a deep breath of her scent. He was more than ready to win over the little red wolf who seemed more interested in real wolves than her own kind.
He meant to win.
Following the wounded wolf's trail, Alex paused when he heard men's voices. Then they faded. He continued looking for signs of the wolf until he shoved aside a pine branch and stopped dead. Two hunters lay deathly still on the ground, blood soaking the leaves beside them.
He hurried to the two men, hoping he'd find them still alive. That's when he spied the dart in the buttocks of the one man. Tranquilizers? What the hell?
Alex crouched over the smaller of the two men and grasped his wrist. A tired pulse. He checked the other man and found the same result. Relieved they weren't dead, he examined their rifles, outfitted with tranquilizer darts also. One recently fired. At each other? But only one had been fired.
Before he checked for identification, Alex searched the area, looking for signs of where the wounded wolf had managed to limp off to, assuming that the blood was hers. All he found were snapped twigs, men-sized boot imprints in the muddier areas from the recent rain, men's tracks leading to the scene from several directions, and men's footprints leading away from the scene all in one direction. And wolves' tracks. Two sets of wolves' paw prints running beside the men's boot treads.
Staring at the trail left behind, Alex rubbed his stubbly chin. It appeared other men had shot the now sleeping men with tranquilizers and taken off with the wolves. Probably the same men he'd just overheard talking. From the distance they'd been from him, he hadn't heard their conversation. Thank God, he hadn't arrived at the scene a few minutes earlier, or he imagined he would have been sleeping beside these men.
Again, he considered the wolf paw prints. The wounded female wolf and one other that hadn't been shot appeared to have moved through the area. He examined the muddy soil further. No. Two wolves had come in from a different direction than the one the wounded female had traversed, as evidenced from the trail of blood she'd left behind. So one of the men was carrying the wounded female?
Animal rights activists?
Alex walked in the direction they had taken for several yards and discovered patches of guard hairs. The wolves were still wearing heavy winter coats, and they were also red wolves, not grays. Three red wolves together in a pack? In Oregon? My God, what a find!
If the tracks had been of one woman's smaller-sized prints, he would have sworn Cassie had hooked up with a wolf pack and had herself carried the red female off to safety. She couldn't have lifted a female and carried her any distance, and there were no signs of her tracks at all.
Which was more than bizarre since he'd pursued her tracks for hours headed away from her pickup and then lost them. To wolf tracks. And those led him to the one female red wolf. At least the shooter who had wounded her didn't seem to be venturing in this direction. Probably afraid he'd be facing hunters with bullets. Still, he worried about Cassie and where she'd disappeared to. And that the men who had shot the wolf might run across Cassie and shoot her also.
Alex searched through the men's pockets and found the bigger man's driver's license. Henry Lee Thompson of Portland. And the other, Joe Smith, also of Portland. And ID cards for the Oregon Zoo. Hunters, but the kind who put wild animals in a zoo.
Alex leaned over and tried to wake the men. "Henry," he called out, shaking the bigger man's shoulder. "Henry Lee Thompson." No success. Then he tried with Joe, first attempting to pull him to a sitting position and then shaking him a little, but the guy's head fell back, his mouth dropped open, and his eyes remained closed. "Joe, wake up."
Having no luck with either of the men, Alex pulled out his cell phone to call 911.
But what the hell was he supposed to say? Two men down, tranquilized. One wounded red wolf missing. Two more wolves--red wolves, of all things--running through the area with a pack of men. One female biologist had vanished. Two murderers on the loose, one in bad shape, maybe suffering a concussion. And a woman's body was somewhere out in this location, maybe hauled off by a cougar? Or some very abbreviated version.
Alex knew one thing. His report wouldn't include his name.
Chapter 10
Snapping her eyes shut, Cassie groaned, feeling like crap. Her shoulder hurt like the blazes, and Leidolf'scarrying her was jarring her way too much to be appreciated. The tranquilizer was still making her brain fuzzy, and her thoughts drifted from memories of studying Arctic wolves in the frozen Canadian Arctic to checking out the red wolves in hot, muggy Florida. And then a flicker of memory that she'd so longed to suppress--her home and her uncles' homes all ablaze, choking smoke filling the air, as she hid in the woods nearby, unable to save them, unable to do anything but save herself. And the horrible guilt she always felt that she'd lived and they'd died.
She blinked away tears and closed her eyes again, the drug making her feel loopy, out of control. She breathed in the masculinity of the virile lupus garou carrying her. She had to know where she stood with this pack and how much trouble she would have with having invaded their territory.
Yet it was their own damned fault. No one had been in the area in eons. No one had left scent markings to claim these particular woods. That much she remembered. Why was she running through the woods as a wolf during the day? Too dangerous: it wasn't like her.