If she threw up, motion sickness wouldn’t likely be the reason. She nodded. “Go ahead.”
She was swept off her feet, one of his thick arms bracing her back, the other under her knees. And then he was bounding, loping, and around her everything blurred. She barely kept hold of the kitten. Rhett leaped off the porch and kept running.
Less than a minute later he jogged up the steps of the neighboring cabin, inside, down a hall into a bedroom, then set her down on the bed. Flannery hissed, leaped from April’s numb hands, and scampered under the bed.
Rhett drew a black-spined hardcover book from the sparse nightstand collection and opened the cover.
It wasn’t a book. It was a keypad. He tapped a series of four numbers, and in the far corner of the room, the floor began to swing downward. April jumped. The trapdoor’s seams were invisible. Rhett motioned April toward it.
“You’ll find a keypad like this one on the wall down there. Enter zero-three-one-seven, and the door will swing back up. More of the pack will join you shortly.”
She thought he would dash off after his instructions, but instead he stayed to watch her reach safety. She hurried to the square hole in the floor and lowered herself toward the ladder that descended into the darkness. Her feet found the top rungs.
Crack, crack crack, crack.
Rifle shots.
Her body felt as though it were shrinking around her soul. The terror that had barely begun to ebb from her system re-flooded it for a whole different reason. “Forget me! Go back him up!”
She didn’t expect him to listen to her, but he did.
April continued down the ladder. At the bottom in the dark, the keypad glowed blue from the wall to her left. She pressed 0317, and above her the door swung upward, eclipsing the scant moonlight an inch at a time until she stood in blackness so total her eyes couldn’t adjust to it. From outside, all sound ceased.
She tried to find a light switch for a few minutes, but the darkness didn’t bother her much. Nothing mattered now but those rifle shots. However powerful he was, Malachi couldn’t dodge bullets. She began to shake. Her teeth chattered. Why was she suddenly so cold?
“Malachi,” she whimpered into the blackness.
She had to go up to see he was all right. She had to. No, she had to wait. He would want her to wait.
Maybe five minutes later, the door began to move. Instant chaos met her ears. Voices, growls, a wailing toddler. April leaped onto the ladder and climbed up in half the time she’d climbed down. When she poked her head up past the floor, she nearly got kicked in the face. Only Jeremy’s wolf reflexes spared her as he jolted back.
“Jeremy, what’s happening?” she said.
He didn’t answer. His eyes were glazed.
Was he hurt? Did he know she was down here; had he opened the door to ask for help? The thoughts flashed one after another and just as fast were discarded. Lucy stood here too, holding their twins, while Zane and Callie stood behind her, along with Ember.
“Get up here, April,” Ember said.
She gripped with her elbows, pulled herself over the edge onto the carpet, and stood up. As she followed Ember from the room, Jeremy jumped onto the ladder with the easy balance of the wolf, and Lucy handed their pups down to him.
With a hand on her back, Ember propelled April down a hall, then stopped and took her by the shoulders. “April.”
“Malachi,” April said.
“He’s been shot. Aaron’s working on him now.”
“Shot—badly?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“In the dining room, but Aaron doesn’t want—”
April broke away from her and ran from the hallway into a living room crowded with people. She passed them all by, headed for the next room, and halted at the sight of a massive oak table…
…where Malachi lay on his back. Motionless. In the bright overhead lights, his skin was gray and sweating. His entire shirt and one leg of his pants were soaked, the material too dark for the blood to show brightly, but nonetheless it was obviously blood. So. Much. Blood. It was running into the wood of the table. April had never known a person could lose so much blood and yet live.
