“Where the fuck am I?” She whispered this time, but I heard her.
There were bigger questions going through my head than that one. I stuck out my hand in a gesture for her to wait, then turned around and strode to the cabin. In one of the drawers under the kitchen counter I found the pad of paper and pencil I always kept there. I wrote three sentences:Hello, my name is Kane Baird. I’m not going to hurt you. What is your name and how did you get here?
I tore the top sheet off the pad, folded it, and slid it into my back pocket along with the pencil. Then I fixed one coffee with creamer and sugar and left the other black.
When I stepped outside, both coffees in hand, my eyes went right to her. She’d walked to the end of the dock and sat on the edge, her knees pulled into her chest, her arms wrapped around her shins—a protective posture. She still wore my jacket, and it made her look like a ball of red flannel topped with a halo of blonde. The serene scene—calm water with loons swimming along the lake’s edge behind this strange, beautiful woman—was postcard perfect.
Hesitating, I almost went back inside. It looked like she wanted to be alone. But the helplessness, the desperation on her face when she’d yelled at the sky, kept my feet firmly planted. I stared at the two coffees, the steam wisping white in the chilly air. Hot coffee was always better than cold coffee. If she told me to fuck off, I’d leave. Decision made, I walked toward her.
As soon as I stepped onto the dock, her shoulders stiffened; her spine straightened. My weight made the wood creak loudly in the quiet of the morning. She didn’t lift her gaze until I stopped beside her. Tears wet her cheeks. She glanced away, swiping furiously at her eyes with the too-long sleeves of the jacket.
When she looked at me again, her tawny eyes focused on the coffees in my hands. Her lips parted. After a second, she scooted over to make room for me. I’d thought she was going to tell me to bugger off, and the sharp relief I felt because she hadn’t surprised me. I sank down beside her, crossing my legs, and held out both coffees to her.
Staring at the mugs a long moment, she finally took the one with cream and sugar. “Thank you,” she murmured, then stared across the water, clutching the mug like a lifeline.
The water drew my eyes too. There wasn’t a lot of wind, and the surface was smooth, only rippling once in a while. Black flies danced along the edge of the dock, then flew closer for a sniff. Since it was spring, they weren’t bad. But later in the summer, they could get so thick it would be hard to breathe without inhaling one.
“I don’t know where I am,” she said, breaking the silence, her mug cradled tight. “None of this looks or feels familiar.” She shook her head. “I mean, the trees, the terrain.”
The husky quality of her voice made me shiver. I ignored the sensation and reached into my back pocket to pull out the paper, then passed it to her.
She stared a moment before taking it. After reading, her gaze bounced to the scars on my neck, then back to my eyes. “You can’t talk?”
I shook my head and sipped my coffee. I’d tried over the years to make sounds, but my vocal cords had been so damaged as a teen that all that came out were strangled, inhuman noises. The results made me stop trying. I’d learned ASL, but most people didn’t know it. And out here, I’d been alone, not needing it. With most of my vocal cords ripped out, all that was left was my growl.
Breaking my gaze, she looked back at the water. “My name is Brooke. I’m from Detroit. That’s where I was last night, Detroit. And now I’m…” She flicked one hand towards the lake. “Here. Wherever here is,” she said quietly, almost to herself.
Detroit?That was so far away but explained her slight accent. Why the hell would someone from Detroit end up here? If my cousin was involved like her collar suggested, then I assumed she would have come from Vancouver. Had she been on her way there instead?
When I extended my hand for the paper, she gave it to me. I took the pencil out of my back pocket and wrote another sentence under the first using the hard surface of the dock.You’re in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. Tell me how you got here.
Brooke read the words, then looked away. “I’ve never been to Canada before,” she murmured.
The expression on her face told me she was figuring out how much to trust me. I waited, allowing her to sort through her thoughts. It took a while, the sounds of the trees rustling in the wind and a duck making its presence known farther along the lake. Peaceful, but now changed. Besides John and the occasional trapper, no one else visited here.
After taking a slow sip of her coffee, she said, “My sister and I were abducted. She called them hunters.” Her voice came out strained, her knuckles on the mug turning white from her tight grip. “I woke up on a plane. They’d put these collars on us.” Her fingers lifted to touch the metal around her neck.
A growl rumbled in my chest, threatening to emerge. Hunters? People who were after shifters, specifically? As far as I knew, we hadn’t been hunted for a long, long, time. Our secrecy protected us. And Landon wouldn’t have anything to do with hunting.
But I knew my cousin owned a private jet. I gripped my mug until the handle was in danger of breaking. He could have picked up the pair of them in Detroit to fly them back to Vancouver, but flying over northern Saskatchewan was going far out of the way. It made no sense.
I closed my eyes, trying to picture a flight path that would connect Detroit with where we now were. They could have been heading to a bunch of different places: Alberta, BC, Yukon, or even Alaska. Any of them could have been her intended destination. But Vancouver? Not likely.
My eyes went to her collar. It didn’t matter. Even if Vancouver wasn’t her end destination, Landon was involved somehow. The urge to physically harm him for selling me out made the red haze dance around my peripheral vision. But there was nothing I could do about it now, no reason to get worked up when I couldn’t follow through. Trusting my cousin was a mistake. One I wouldn’t repeat.
“We weren’t alone on the plane,” she said quietly, her gaze fixed in the distance. “There were other animals, regular ones, like a monkey and a wolf. And a bunch of crates.”
Other animals?I rubbed the growing ache between my brows. Then she hadn’t been flying on my cousin’s private jet. That was a passenger plane, not a cargo plane. And Landon didn’t have anything to do with animals. His company was dedicated to technology, mostly hardware, but some software, as well. Why would he be keeping animals and shifters in cages? None of this made any sense.
“My sister and I managed to get out of the cages,” she went on, oblivious to my rage-laced confusion, “and Sabrina got me into a parachute, but then we were attacked. I was the only one to get free.” Her voice broke and she looked at me. “I need your help, but you said you wouldn’t.” Her tawny eyes pleaded with me.
I shook my head. I hadn’t said I wouldn’t help. Bracing the paper against the dock, I wrote some more.There is no car here. No phone. No Internet. No towns close by.
She stared at those words, her cheeks flushing red. Turning away slightly, she swiped at the moisture in the corner of her eye. “Someone else came out of that plane after me. It was either my sister or one of the people who abducted us, maybe a cougar shifter.”
I was on my feet before she finished speaking, the pencil snapping between my fingers. She startled back at the movement, but I didn’t pay attention to her as I scanned the area around the cabin and across the lake. If it was her sister, then I needed to find her.
If it was a cougar shifter…
