Page 2 of Pack Rage
“Bigger, yeah. Dad said that might happen,” he muttered, poking around in the deerskins. The rogue shifters who’d occupied this place wore a combination of old clothing and tanned hides and furs from game they’d hunted. While I was almost certain there was something Brand could wear in one of the chests, it wasn’t ours to take. I leaned down and picked up a particularly long deer hide, then cut a hole in two places, and pulled it around his waist. He stood still while I fashioned a crude button with a gnawed piece of antler, slid it through the holes, and grinned up at him.
“Nice. Very Tarzan,” I complimented him, pulling my backpack over my shoulders, the hilt of my sword sticking out the top.
“Come on then, Jane,” he teased, picking me up and wrapping my legs around his waist. “We have to go.”
My heart sank, but I knew we had to face the world again. And I did want to find out how everyone was. The last time I’d seen my mama, she’d been stabbed by Torran with a silver blade. “Back into the compound?”
“Yes. We don’t have long.” His strides ate up the cavern floor, and we were stepping into dappled sunlight in less than a minute, Glen right behind us. He held a curtain of kudzu out of the way for Brand and me to walk though.
“Until what?” I asked.
I grabbed tighter to Brand when a low, masculine voice I wasn’t expecting answered. “Yeah, until what, Alpha?”
Brand stopped, an embarrassed grin covering his face as he faced his friend, Dean, who was being held at knife-point by Bo and Leroy.
Well, sort of at knife-point. Bo had one hand on Dean’s wrist, and a knife aimed at his belly button. Leroy, on the other hand,held a sharp stick, his weapon poking pretty close to Dean’s crotch.
Dean didn’t look amused, but he wasn’t scared, either. “Alpha Mate,” he said with a short nod. “Are these your…”
Leroy cut him off. “We’re her guards. Her protectors. Don’t be lookin’ at her, ya hear me? Don’t be talkin’ to her.”
Dean bit his lip, while Glen made a choking sound behind us.
“What do you want with this ‘un, Miss Florida?” Bo snarled. “Want another arrangement? I ain’t afraid to pull out his guts if he’s one of them Council fucks.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Leroy added. “I can turn his tallywhacker into a right nice daisy stem.”
Bo’s shoulders slumped when we all burst into laughter, including Dean. “I told you to stop callin’ it that, Leroy. Call it a dick, or somethin’. Crap on a cracker, you’re dumb.”
“Thank you, boys. I appreciate the offer. But this one’s an ally.” I nodded at Dean, all my humor fleeing. “And we’re going to need as many of those as we can get.”
Chapter 2
Pack Protector
FLOR
Sometime earlier that day, in between bouts of lovemaking, Brand had mentioned he’d left his pack halfway through their vows of allegiance, unable to stay any longer when he felt me panicking here at Southern. He’d said there was a spike that drove him to start the trip.So much had happened, I wasn’t even sure which spike of panic he’d responded to.
After landing, Dean had spent the past few hours tracking Brand through the forest, though he’d sensed in the pack bond that his new Alpha was all right, and waited for us to come out rather than barging in.
I, for one, was glad. We’d needed that time in the cave. Dean was just as glad to hear that Southern was under our command, more or less, and that we could go back and get food, showers, sleep, and set up a place for the rest of the Mountain fighters to join us when they arrived.
On the walk back to the compound, Dean filled me in on exactly what Brand had done to get here, and my heart started racing almost as fast as it had during the battle.
“So I was flying him here, right? And he starts to shift. But he’s gotten bigger, and you’ll have to ask the moon how it works, but he’s heavier, too. I thought the plane was gonna go down. Then, a couple of hours later, you must’ve been going through something pretty dicey, because he started pulling on the pack bonds he did hold. But he forgot that his pilot was one of the first to pledge to the new Alpha, and I almost passed out.”
Brand grumbled, “She doesn’t need to hear everything. We got here, didn’t we?”
“We?” Dean’s lips went tight. “Flor, I haven’t even gotten to the good part.”
I swallowed hard. Brand was still carrying me, but I pushed his arms off me and scrambled down. “Go on.”
“So we get to the dirt road where you and Glen left the truck, right? Of course, I can’t land in the middle of the forest. My flight plan was shot to hell anyway when Brand started having what I thought was a seizure on the plane, flopping all around, fur and teeth sprouting everywhere?—”
Brand grunted. “You try siphoning thousands of pack members’ energy through a metaphysical bond into a mate miles away.”
Dean raised his voice. “And I tell him to hold tight, that I’m gonna circle, look for a field or a deserted road big enough to touch down. Hard as hell to do, as it’s the middle of the damned night, and there’s nothing but a bonfire coming from the center of the compound, which is enemy territory. I’m pretty low, maybe a hundred feet over the canopy, maybe less, with a crazed Alpha next to me, and not nearly enough flight hours under my belt for this shit. So I turn back toward the road into town, looking for lights. And guess what? He didn’t wait.”
