There were cameras, of course there were. Keegan whipped in front of Ryder and yipped, the sounds barely audible.
Ryder bared his teeth, but Keegan stood firm.
Keegan shifted again and picked up a handful of rocks. “Learned this from Aidan and Zane,” he said quietly before accurately tossing a rock and knocking one camera aside so it wasn’t going to be viewing them. “One more.” Keegan knocked the second camera away from them. He dropped the rest of the rocks and reverted to his wolf form.
The fence was high but no problem for any of them. They cleared it, with Ryder taking the lead. Marcus and Nathan ran side by side behind him. It still seemed bizarre—and yes, wrong—to be following someone else.
Marcus told himself it was a great lesson in humility. He ignored Nathan’s mental laughter.
Ryder leaped onto the small concrete porch that was probably the help’s entrance. He drew a deep breath through his nose.
Marcus did the same, catching the faint scent of humans. No one was in the immediate room on the other side of the door. There were no suspiciously strong aromas, either. No one was fucking with them.
Yet.
Ryder returned to his human shape and tried the door. “Locked. Of course.”
Keegan loped over and soon stood naked instead of in fur. “I can pick it. I just need something—”
“Fuck that.” Ryder put a palm to the glass pane and pushed. It gave way, slicing his hand as it did so. Ryder ignored that and reached in to unlock the door.
“If they have an alarm, we’re fucked,” Keegan said.
“No. I’m getting Maarten and that root.” Ryder opened the door and entered.
“Marcus, let me go with him,” Keegan began. “Your safety—”
Marcus hadn’t shifted, neither had Nathan. Marcus snapped at Keegan. It was one thing to be the captain of his guards, and another entirely to be overprotective.
Keegan understood him and stepped aside.
Marcus leaped inside with Nathan. They avoided the glass and ran, following Ryder’s scent now that he was out of sight.
That didn’t last long. They caught up with him in the large dining room. Marcus and Nathan skidded under the table with him a second before armed men came running through.
One of them shouted something in Portuguese, Marcus assumed.
Marcus sent up a silent prayer that Keegan and the others would all survive. Keegan was smart and deadly, he reminded himself. Just as Keegan needed to have faith in him, he needed to have faith in Keegan to use his training wisely. When he didn’t immediately hear gunfire, relief washed over him.
Ryder, once again in wolf form, darted out from under the table. Marcus and Nathan were on his tail. It wouldn’t take Butler’s men long to come running back that way, looking for intruders.
For a drug lord—or whatever he was—Butler didn’t have as many armed guards as Marcus would have suspected. He’d watched too many movies, he supposed.
“Or they’re all in the room with Maarten, waiting for us.”
Nathan’s contribution could prove accurate.
Marcus hoped not.
“Surely Maarten would warn Ryder.”
“If he’s awake,”
Nathan tossed out.
“And coherent.”
“I hope Keegan is making sure someone gets that root.”
Marcus leaped halfway up the stairs.
“Should have told him so.”
Nathan assured him that Keegan would think of it.
Marcus wondered if that meant Nathan believed Keegan had more sense than him.
“Stop it. He’s in charge of shit like this!”
Nathan snapped mentally.
“It’s a different thing altogether, plus he wasn’t allowed to come with us. He’ll be useful however he can.”
Marcus decided to quit letting doubts get in his way. He was a good leader, a good person. Sometimes he considered leaving his position as the Alpha Anax of North America, but he wasn’t certain he could ever do it.
Now wasn’t the time for any of his issues. Marcus pulled his attention to the situation he, his mate and friends were in.
Ryder turned a corner and a loud, fierce growl was the warning that people were ahead.
Marcus and Nathan barreled around the corner and saw Ryder charging an armed pair of guards.
Marcus shifted into his human form, and did so noisily, yipping, then cursing. He narrowly avoided being shot, thanks to Ryder taking both guards down by slamming into their legs.
The fight was brief and bloody. Ryder dispatched the first man while Marcus broke the second’s neck. Marcus took both weapons from the dead men. He stayed upright and ran along with Ryder and Nathan in their furry forms.
The next guards he shot—clean, quick kills. Ryder stopped at a door and shifted.
Marcus raised both weapons. He heard the slight whistling sound and shouted, “Duck!” as he proceeded to do just that.
The dart went over his head. Marcus spun and fired several shots down the hall but the man who had held the tranq gun had already scampered into a room and slammed the door.
“He has to be taken care of, or else we’re likely to find ourselves darted at the worst possible time,” Marcus whispered.
“Like there would be a good time for that? Ever?” someone asked through the door. “Really, I doubt that would be the case. You are aware you are preventing this man in here from getting the medical care he needs? What a shame.”
Ryder shouted and Marcus knew the man they were hunting had to be a shifter. He shouldn’t have been able to hear Marcus whispering otherwise, not even with listening devices.
Ryder rammed the door with his shoulder. “Open this fucking door!”
“I think…not,” the man who had to be Robert Butler replied. “Seems a good way to get myself killed.”
“Argh!” Ryder hit the door again. It held.
“It’s not going anywhere,” Butler taunted. “I have these great metal bars across it, and the door itself is steel, except of course for this little opening here.”
Butler must have been talking about the slit about five and a half feet up.
“This is all very simple,” Butler was saying. “You took my drug runners away from me. I want them back. Since I suspect they’re dead, that means you, Ryder, can take over where Dirk was once my right hand man. Of course, I can’t simply trust you like I did your predecessor. Did you kill him, Ryder?”
“No,” Marcus said firmly. “That would be me, Butler. What kind of shifter are you?”
“Figured that out, did you?” Butler chuckled. “My… I see I went after the wrong wolf to control. Is the little red-headed man yours?”
“Fuck. You. Asshole,” Nathan snarled. “Step out here and say that to my face.”
“Ah ah, I’m not stupid, just blunt. You
are
short.”
Nathan canted his head. “I can kill him. I won’t feel guilty.”
Marcus knew better. “What do you really want, Butler?”
“Control,” Butler answered. “As I had with Dirk. Perhaps I want this man in here with me, too. Would that require the death of Ryder?”
Marcus grabbed at Ryder when he went for the door again. “Stop. That’s doing no good at all.”
Ryder slapped the door. “You stupid bastard. If you kill me—”
Marcus gave a sharp shake of his head. Knowledge was power, and Butler had no knowledge of many things that existed for the wolf shifters.
“Maarten would never have you,” Ryder finished with.
“If he even survives. I suppose I should admit that the brugmansia was a mistake. I didn’t think it’d do anything. Wolfsbane, really? How clichéd.”
Marcus guessed the brugmansia was a form of datura, or related to it somehow. He’d have to educate himself on it, that was for certain.
And he was done with this talking through the door shit.
Marcus stepped back and pulled Ryder with him. He gestured with his head and hoped Ryder got it.
“What is that I’m feeling?” Butler asked. “Like a wave of electricity or energy. Or—well fuck me, I’m about to find out.”
Marcus charged not the door, but the wall, with Ryder hitting it beside him. Plaster and drywall were easier to break through than steel.
“Ah! Shit!” Butler shouted. “Stop or I’ll—”
Whatever else he intended to say was drowned out by the rending of the wall. Even the two by fours bracing it snapped. Pieces from the ceiling rained down on their heads. Marcus and Ryder shoved through it all.
“Maarten!” Ryder cried out.
Marcus saw Maarten on the floor, curled into a smaller ball than should have been possible.
He also caught a glimpse of a black jaguar leaping out of the window. “Son of a bitch!”
Marcus reached the window in time to see Butler disappear around the side of the house. “Jaguar shifters are apparently bad news.”
“That’s what he is?” Nathan nodded. “Oh. He is. Why doesn’t he reek like the one that took Dallas?”
“There’s something here muffling his natural scent.” Marcus sniffed. “Pheromones. And I bet the vents have some kind of odor neutralizer coming through them.”
“He’s not the same jaguar that took Dallas, right?”
Marcus turned and found Keegan standing on the other side of the torn out wall.
“I heard y’all talking,” Keegan offered by way of explanation. He glanced to his left. “Right through here, Zoe, Olin. They have the root and the guy who knows what to do with it.”
Ryder looked up from Maarten, whom he was cradling partially in his arms. “Hurry them the fuck up!”
In short order, an older, white-haired man who was thin as a rail and not more than five feet tall shuffled in. He said something that Marcus didn’t understand.
But Ryder did. “I don’t care who ordered it. If it will undo what’s been given to my ma—Maarten, then give it to him!”
The old man took out a knife and began carving up the root. He peeked away the dirt and dark outer layer to expose a bright white pulp beneath. Then he waved the thing at Maarten and Ryder took it from him.
“If this makes him worse…” Ryder didn’t have to say anything else. His meaning was quiet clear.
The old man didn’t seem scared. He babbled and made ‘hurry up’ gestures with his hands.
Ryder rubbed the exposed root over Maarten’s lips. When Maarten parted them, Ryder slid the tip of the root in. “Suck,” he ordered.
At first nothing happened. Maarten didn’t even appear to be doing what Ryder had told him.
“Come on, honey,” Ryder urged. “Come on. For both of us.”
It was the impetus Maarten needed. He wouldn’t want his mate to suffer and die, which was exactly what would happen to Ryder if Maarten didn’t survive.
Maarten closed his mouth around the root. A squeaky sucking noise followed.
“Yeah, keep at it.” Ryder slipped more of the root in.
The old man cackled and clapped.
And Maarten shook so hard his back popped. He uncurled himself from the fetal position he’d been in. His eyes opened and he gasped as he spat the root out—or tried to. With Ryder holding him in place, Maarten had to turn his head as he coughed and hacked, after which he vomited for half a minute.
“God. That has to have cleaned him out,” Olin muttered. “Ew.”
Maarten swiped at his mouth and chin. “Get me out of here.”
Ryder loosed something very close to a sob. “I am. Gods, honey, don’t you ever scare me like that again!”
“We should leave,” Keegan suggested. “I don’t know how many guards might still be here.”
“You didn’t kill them all?” Marcus asked, surprised.
Keegan pursed his lips for a second. “We killed all of them we saw. Doesn’t mean someone might not have called for backup.”
“Good point.” Marcus found the old man staring at him. “Yes?”
After a round of speaking so quickly Marcus couldn’t even decide if it was gibberish or actual words, the man stood on his toes and touched the tips of his fingers to Marcus’ brow.
“Says he’s blessing you because you’re the one,” Ryder interpreted.
Olin snickered. “Now we’re all going to call you Neo like Keanu Reeves in
The Matrix
.”
But Marcus felt the warm, sure flow of power from the old man’s fingertips. It wasn’t a dark magic being granted him. It was, as Ryder had said, a blessing.
Marcus had no idea what the whole ‘one’ thing was. Probably had to do with him being the first gay Alpha Anax.
“Thank you,” he told the old man when he was done. He shook his hand and gestured to Zoe. “Can you and someone else escort him out. Make sure he doesn’t get hurt?”
“Sure thing.” Zoe called out for assistance. A second later she was leading him away.
“That was odd,” Keegan said, staring at Marcus’ brow. “He didn’t do anything that hurt?”
“No, actually, I feel better than ever.” Marcus’ forehead tingled. He touched it. The skin seemed warmer and softer where the old man’s fingertips had rested. “He wasn’t doing anything bad.”
“I could feel it, too.” Ryder got to his feet, assisting Maarten up as he did so. “It was like a healing or… Well, a blessing. Nothing negative to it.”
“What was he saying?” Marcus asked. “Besides the part about me being the one?”
Ryder shook his head. “I didn’t listen to all of it. I was concentrating on Maarten. You’re the one, and you’ll know what you have to do, but it’s not soon. I might have half or all of that wrong, mind you.”
Marcus decided to let it drop. “Let’s get out of here. We still need to find Butler. Maybe if we get Dallas back, his jaguar stalker will come for him. We can get some answers from that cat. Surely he will know of other jaguar shifters here.”
They quickly exited the house as Marcus mulled over the situation with Dallas.
He’d try not to challenge the one that had taken Dallas, though he couldn’t promise himself that he wouldn’t. Despite what Guillermo had said about the sounds he’d heard coming from the cave where Dallas had been kept, for all anyone knew, what had happened wasn’t consensual—or it had been coerced, with Dallas fearing for his life if he didn’t give in.
Dallas was a pleaser, which was something else Marcus had to remember. If he could make a man happy or feel better about himself with sex, then Dallas was open to it. Not a bad quality and it didn’t make Dallas a slut like some others had whispered. No one should be judging Dallas—the man had a good heart.
Also a cautious one, using sex as a buffer to keep a distance between him and others. It hadn’t escaped Marcus’ notice that, while Dallas had many sexual encounters, he’d had no long-term relationships.