Page 59 of Handcuffed to the Bear

He couldn’t help Casey in this form. Jack shifted. Dizziness washed over him and he almost blacked out.

“Jack!”

Casey saying his name got him up and moving. He hauled her to the cabin, half-dragging and half-carrying her, and pushed her ahead of him into the dim interior. He stumbled through behind her and closed the door.

They weren’t entirely safe—bullets could still punch through the bulkheads—but if they stayed away from windows, Rory wouldn’t be able to see them. Now, he needed get the engine started?—

“You,” said a hoarse, rough, horribly familiar voice.

Jack looked up in shock.

The interior of the boat’s cabin resembled the inside of an RV. It had the same cramped quality and space-efficient furnishings. There was a console up a set of shallow steps for driving the boat, a small table with padded chairs, and pull-out beds recessed into the sides of the narrow space.

Someone was sitting up on one of them. Someone covered with bandages. Someone who was looking at Jack and Casey with a level of hatred that, if looks could kill, would have melted them on the spot.

Shit.

He hadn’t realized Derek had survived the fall onto the beaver-cut trees. Damned shifter healing.

“You,” Derek said again, and pushed himself off the bed. Immediately he swayed and fell sideways. He shifted in mid-fall, from a bandaged man to a lion with scraps of bandages peeling off him.

As a lion, the awful extent of his injuries was even more obvious. Wet-looking, new pink skin glistened in hairless swaths along his neck, shoulders, and flanks. He’d broken some of them open when he moved, and fresh blood trickled into his fur.

Somehow Jack didn’t think an apology was going to cut it.

He was also pretty sure that, in his weakened state, shifting back to the bear would kill him.

CHAPTER16

The ocean glitteredbeneath the speeding Sikorsky Jayhawk, a former Coast Guard hand-me-down which was currently the biggest and longest-range helicopter at the SCB’s limited disposal for search and rescue. Eva Kemp had claimed the shotgun seat, next to the pilot. Avery was behind her. He craned out the window, peering down, though there was nothing to see but the ocean. Occasionally he caught intermittent glimpses of the land to their right, hidden behind the storm’s dark curtains.

They were lucky, though: by the time they got this far up the coast, most of the storm had blown inland. They flew in and out of patches of dense clouds and pounding rain. When they weren’t under the storm, the western sky was stained with a gorgeous salmon-colored sunset. Avery barely glanced at it.

Eva keyed her mic. “How close is the island?”

“We’ll be on top of it in just a minute, beautiful.”

Eva made an irritated noise and checked her gun, again.

Avery wasn’t sure whether they’d lucked out or not by getting “Wild Bill” Majewski as their pilot. Bill was a wiry, tough-as-nails little guy, a jackrabbit shifter and former Army pilot, who had a reputation for being willing to fly in even the worst weather. He wasn’t afraid of anything. There were times, especially in law enforcement, when this was exactly what you wanted in a pilot.

As Bill suddenly and without warning banked the helicopter sharply left, tilting it steeply to the side, Avery gripped his seat and reflected that, at most other times, it would be nice to have a pilot with a sense of self-preservation. He glanced at Mila, the elk shifter from Eva’s team who was seated beside him, and shared a brief look of commiseration with her.

They were now flying alongside a jewel-green island rising out of the ruffled sea. The gently curving chain of low mountains was easily recognizable from the map Mila had spread out on her knees, but it was much more striking in reality. The forest spread like ruffled green skirts around the mountains’ gray, rocky peaks.

In the seat behind Mila, her teammate Dev Tripathi had a small pair of binoculars clamped to his eyes, examining the scenery below them as Bill skimmed over it. Eva had a pair, too. Avery hadn’t thought to bring anything of the sort.

His hand, resting on his bad knee, clenched into a fist.

Mila punched Avery lightly in the shoulder. When he looked over at her, the platinum-blond Ukrainian gave him a quick thumbs-up.

We’ll get him back,the gesture seemed to say.

Most of the shifters Avery worked with at the SCB—aside from Eva and her pod—weren’t pack animals in the same way he was. But there was a pack feeling among them, nonetheless. Jack was one of theirs. They were going to find him, and if he was hurt (or, God forbid, worse) they were going to make the people who’d hurt him pay for it.

* * *

The boat bobbed on the waves, rolling unsteadily in its unpowered state. This, plus Derek’s weakened condition, threw off his first lunge. He fell against the side of the cabin, rolling the boat even more wildly.

---