Werewolf in Alaska

Chapter 23

Ann and Bruce had come armed with packing boxes and offered to tackle that job. Jake hadn’t moved in years, so he gladly turned the chore over to them. He was about to call a local real estate agent about selling the cabin when he had the strangest feeling, as if his contact with Rachel had been abruptly cut off.

Although she hadn’t sent him any more messages after her last one, he’d still sensed a connection humming between them. Now there was nothing, as if the line had gone dead.

Well, maybe that’s the way she wanted it. Because her dramatic exit had meant they’d left important words unsaid, he’d sent them to her telepathically. When she’d returned his message, his heartache had eased a little.

Hers might have, too. If so, she’d probably retreated to gather her forces. Maybe she’d gone out to her shop and immersed herself in her work. He could picture her doing that.

If plunging back into normal life helped her, then he didn’t want to interfere with that. In fact, he might as well do the same. He made his call to the real estate agent, who arranged to come right out with the necessary papers.

Considering how long Jake had lived in Polecat, he was surprised at how quickly his connection to the community could be severed. A couple of phone calls to the utilities took care of that. Once the real estate agent arrived and he’d signed the listing papers, he’d be cut loose from his former home.

The way Ann and Bruce were working, they’d have him packed up in no time. They’d convinced him to leave everything except his clothes and his food. They’d even talked him out of taking any of his books.

While both of them were busy in the kitchen sorting through the cupboards, he glanced over the books and decided they were right about leaving them. He’d read all the paperbacks and didn’t plan to read them again. He wouldn’t need Alaskan hiking-trail information anymore.

And now was the time to jettison Alaskan Artisans of Today. He should take Rachel’s note out, though. He didn’t want some stranger to find it and sell it on eBay. But the note wasn’t there. He riffled through the pages, thinking he might have tucked it in a different section.

Finally he turned the book upside down and shook it. No note. Okay, that was strange. Or . . . maybe not. He thought of all the snooping Rachel had done prior to his coming home from San Francisco. She’d probably noticed this book. If she’d opened it and found her note, she might have taken it out, planning to ask him about it eventually.

With all they’d had going on, it was no wonder she’d forgotten the note. Come to think of it, she still had his favorite T-shirt, too. He’d noticed it draped over one of her dining chairs this morning and had meant to stuff it in the plastic bag with the other dirty clothes. But their discussion during breakfast had become awkward and she’d been eager to get him out of there. He hadn’t remembered to grab the shirt.

“If you’re considering taking that book, I would advise against it.”

Jake glanced up to discover Bruce gazing at him from the kitchen doorway. “It’s an expensive book.” Jake hadn’t planned to take it, but he didn’t care for Bruce’s commanding tone. “Besides that, it would be a good souvenir of my life here.”

“It has Rachel Miller in it. You’d be better off leaving it here.”

That might be a true statement, but something about it bothered Jake. Finally he figured out what it was. “How do you know Rachel’s in here?”

Bruce’s gaze shifted. Not much, but enough to give him away. “It was a good guess, judging from the title.”

“I don’t think you were guessing, Bruce.”

The older Were shrugged. “Okay, I looked at it.”

“When?” Although Jake had been on the phone for the past half hour, he’d been right here in the living room. Until a few minutes ago he’d thought Rachel’s note was still in the book. Because of that note, he certainly would have noticed if Bruce had pulled the book off the shelf.

Bruce waved his hand dismissively. “I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I looked at it and saw she was in it. If you take it with you, that’s waving a red flag. Don’t do it. Anyway, Ann wants to throw away all the meat in the freezer. She sent me out to make sure you’re okay with that.”

“I don’t care about the meat in the freezer,” Jake said quietly. “But I do care that you and Ann came in and went through my stuff when I wasn’t home.”

Bruce flushed. “Don’t make accusations without proof, Jake. Your parents taught you better than that.”

“Oh, but I have proof.” Jake hefted the book in both hands. “This book is special to me. If you’d picked it up while I was here, I would have been very aware that you had looked at it.” Now Jake wondered if Bruce had taken the note, but it wasn’t the main issue.

No, there was something else going on, something that worried him far more than knowing the Hunters had searched his cabin. They would have had multiple opportunities to do that, because once again, he hadn’t bothered to lock up. He just wasn’t in the habit.

Then again, it might not have mattered if he’d locked the doors or not. If they were determined enough, they would have found a way to get in. Jake had never worried about tight security in this cabin.

He gazed at Bruce. “Maybe you should have a seat. In fact, I think Ann needs to come in here and sit down, too.”

The Were’s blue eyes narrowed and his tone turned icy. “How dare you give me orders?”

“I’ve been asked to be your alpha, Bruce, and life doesn’t go well for those who lie to the alpha.”

“I haven’t lied to you!”

“Okay, you aren’t telling me the whole truth, which is pretty much the same thing. Unless you intend to overpower me and drag me to Idaho, which I can assure you isn’t going to happen, I’m staying put until you tell me what’s going on.”

Bruce turned his head. “Ann! We have a problem. You’d better come on in here so we can straighten it out.”

Ann walked out of the kitchen, a paper towel in her hand. “What’s the matter?”

“I’d like you and Bruce to sit down.” Jake gestured to the sofa. “We need to talk.”

“He says we’re not telling him everything,” Bruce said.

“Oh.” Ann walked over to the sofa and settled down with a calm expression on her aristocratic features, but she balled the paper towel into a tight wad the size of a golf ball. “What do you want to know, Jake?”

Jake waited for Bruce to take a seat next to his mate. At last he did, although he frowned at Jake as he did so. Jake moved to the easy chair, sat down, and looked at these two Weres who had been family friends for longer than he’d been alive. Yet he couldn’t shake the idea they’d betrayed him.

He took a deep breath. “Let’s start with the alpha position. Is there one after all?”

“Yes.” Ann tightened her grip on the balled-up paper towel. “Keegan really wants to step down.”

“But there must be other candidates who are already living in Idaho. Why come all the way to Alaska to get me?”

“The Hunter pack has been impressed with your efforts with WARM,” Bruce said. “We admire the leadership qualities you’ve displayed. You’re intelligent and even tempered. At least, that’s what I thought until five minutes ago, when you started acting crazy and throwing accusations around.”

Jake sighed. He should have known the setup was too good to be true. “But somebody’s mighty worried about my relationship with Rachel Miller, aren’t they?”

Ann swallowed. “There have been some . . . concerns. Her signature wolf looks exactly like you, Jake.”

“No, it looks exactly like my father, but that’s neither here nor there.” He decided to make a guess and see how they reacted. “How long has the Hunter pack had me under surveillance?”

“It’s not just the Hunter pack,” Ann said. Then she gasped and looked at Bruce. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, but he was going to find out, anyway.” Bruce looked at Jake. “No matter which wolf Rachel Miller has been carving over and over, you can’t deny that you’ve acted with increasing recklessness when it comes to her.”

“No, I can’t deny it.” Some of Jake’s righteous indignation seeped away. “So this is a rescue mission, then?”

Bruce nodded. “We need a pack alpha, and the . . . Consortium thinks you should leave the area. You’ve made excellent progress with WARM, but you’re putting those efforts in jeopardy. We need you in Idaho, and you’d be out of harm’s way. It’s a nice little two-for-one deal.”

It was a long speech, but Jake latched on to one particular word in it. “Consortium?”

“A like-minded group of Weres that keep an eye on potential breaches of security and quietly take care of any we find.”

“Breaches?” The word sent icicles of fear into Jake’s heart. “What makes you think there’s been a security breach?”

Bruce gazed at him. “The Consortium is thorough, Jake. We have documentation.”

Shit. Suddenly Rachel’s worst-case scenario didn’t look so paranoid. “But the Were Council knows about this Consortium, right? You’re acting under its direction.”

“Well, no, Jake, because they would want to regulate us and tie our hands. We’re far more effective operating under the radar.”

A chill went down Jake’s spine. “Sorry, but I can’t go along with that. I’m no big fan of the Were Council or WOW, but at least they operate out in the open.”

Bruce eyed him with irritating smugness. “Doesn’t matter whether you approve of us or not. You won’t report us to the council or anyone.”

“Watch me.” Jake stood and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He still had Howard Wallace in his list of contacts.

“Jake, that’s a really bad idea,” Ann said.

“Don’t think I care about the Hunter alpha position. I don’t give a rip about that anymore. I have bigger fish to fry. This Consortium is dangerous and I intend to see that it’s exposed.”

“What about your precious WARM?” Bruce’s tone was mild, but his eyes glittered with malice. “You not only had a sexual relationship with a human—you created a security breach in the process. If that gets out, WARM will be finished. Duncan MacDowell will dance on its grave.”

Jake longed to punch Bruce in the face, but the Were had him by the short hairs. They exchanged malevolent stares. “You’re a real bastard,” Jake said.

“And you’re a real traitor to the cause. Tell me, are you prepared for the entire Were community to know how you’ve betrayed them with Rachel Miller?”

Jake’s stomach churned. Duncan MacDowell would dance on WARM’s grave if that came out. All that Jake had worked for would be down the drain. Once he was branded a hypocrite, anyone on the fence probably would go over to MacDowell’s camp. At least Duncan stuck to his beliefs.

By giving in to his desire for Rachel, Jake had paved the way for others to do the same, assuming Bruce made good on his promise to reveal the relationship. But Bruce had something to lose, too. “You won’t expose me,” Jake said. “If I go down, that weakens your campaign to keep Weres and humans apart. We both lose.”

“I’m counting on your intelligence and dedication to the cause, Jake. Work with me. Work with the Consortium. WARM will be the public face of the movement and the Consortium will be the private enforcer.”

“Sounds like a bargain with the devil, to me.”

“Do you have a choice?”

Jake looked into his cold blue eyes. “Oh, yeah, I always have a choice.” He couldn’t work with Bruce. He knew that, and yet the alternative made him sick. He had to get out of here, away from these toxic Weres. “I’m going for a drive around the lake.”

“I’d advise you not to go over to Rachel’s,” Bruce said.

Jake gazed at him. “Yeah? Well, Bruce, you can take that advice and shove it where the sun don’t shine. One more visit to Rachel isn’t going to make this any worse than it already is, and she happens to help me think straight. Besides, I need to satisfy myself that she’s okay. Because something about your tone of voice makes me wonder.” Reaching into his pocket for his truck keys, he walked out the door.

All the way around the lake, he realized he was running to a human to help him solve what was essentially a werewolf problem. That wasn’t logical, and yet he trusted Rachel and wanted to make sure she was okay. He no longer trusted Ann and Bruce Hunter to guarantee that. And he definitely didn’t trust this Consortium they’d hooked up with.

He’d assured Rachel that the Hunters weren’t activists, and apparently they weren’t in the normal sense. They didn’t join organizations like WARM, or HOWL, the one Kate Stillman had founded as an acronym for Honoring Our Werewolf Legacy.

No, the Hunters had decided to go underground and create some shadow group that didn’t answer to anyone but itself. The concept made Jake shudder. He shouldn’t be surprised that the debate over human and Were interaction would spawn a fringe group like this. The climate was ripe for it.

And he’d fallen right into their hands. They’d probably been monitoring his movements for at least a year or more, soon after Rachel’s carvings became world-famous. Jake had known some Weres had suspicions about his potential involvement with Rachel, but he’d never dreamed that an ultraconservative group was spying on him to gather evidence of a breach.

If so, they had all the ammunition they needed to bring him to his knees. They’d probably recorded his nightly runs over to her cabin. They’d have the bear attack on tape, and once he’d entered her house as a wolf, the plan to remove him from Alaska must have begun.

He’d been naive enough to think that the Hunters’ request was simple—the pack needed a new alpha and he was a good candidate. He’d been flattered and unwilling to look a gift horse in the mouth. But now he could see that hauling his ass all the way from Alaska was an extreme solution to their alpha issue. There had been more to it—much more.

When he pulled into the parking area beside the path to Rachel’s cabin, the presence of both Rachel’s and Lionel’s trucks calmed him. These were sincere, good people. Yes, Lionel had put a bullet in his shoulder, but he’d done it out of loyalty to Rachel. The kid would lay down his life for her, and Jake treasured that, even if it had caused him pain.

Because he expected them both to be working, he headed straight for the workshop. But instead of an atmosphere of creativity and good cheer, he found Lionel sitting alone on a stool, staring into space. Rachel was nowhere around. Maybe she’d gone to the cabin for a cup of coffee.

Lionel looked startled when Jake walked through the door. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk to Rachel. There’s been a . . . problem. I wanted to talk to her about it.”

Lionel stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “She’s not with you?”

“No, of course not. We agreed that I’d go to Idaho to be with my . . . extended family, and she’d stay here.”

“That’s not what her note says.”

“What note?”

“This one.” Lionel picked it up from the workbench and handed it to Jake. “I’ve read it about a hundred times, and I still don’t believe it. She wouldn’t leave without seeing me.”

Jake scanned the note.

Dear Lionel,

I’ve decided to leave with Jake when he heads to Idaho to be with his family. I’m starting a new life there, so I’ve decided to be wild and crazy and leave everything here instead of going through the hassle of packing.

I know this will shock you, but I want to leave the house, the workshop, and all the tools to you. The sky’s the limit! Walk in my footsteps, dear friend.

Warmly,

Rachel

Jake reread the note as he tried to figure out what the hell was going on. “But she’s not going to Idaho,” he said. “That was never the plan.”

“But it’s her handwriting,” Lionel said. “I’ve seen it a bunch of times, and she wrote that. I’d swear to it.”

“All I can tell you, Lionel, is that she wasn’t planning to go to Idaho with me. And it’s not like she showed up over at my place and announced she was doing that. She wouldn’t have. Not considering everything.”

“You know that better than I do, Mr. Hunter. But she’s not here.”

“So you’ve been all through the house?” In his desperation, Jake prayed that she was still inside her cabin, maybe in the bathroom. Lionel wouldn’t have opened that door to check on her.

“I’ve searched everywhere,” Lionel said. “Even the bathroom.”

That killed Jake’s hope that she was in there.

“It’s like she said.” Lionel gestured around the shop. “She left without taking anything.” He turned to something lying in a heap on the workbench. “She left dirty dishes in the sink, and this draped over a chair.” He held up Jake’s wolf T-shirt.

A sense of dread settled in the pit of Jake’s stomach. “Something’s very wrong about this.”

“Well, duh, I know that. But what about her note? Why did she write something like that?”

Jake studied the note. After three years of looking at Rachel’s thank-you note to him, he knew her handwriting well. At first glance, this looked exactly like it. But there were subtle differences. The loops weren’t quite as open, and the pressure on the paper wasn’t quite as deliberate. Rachel wrote with an artist’s flourish, and this handwriting was more controlled, more tentative.

The longer Jake looked at this note, the more he became certain that someone, probably whoever had swiped her note out of his coffee-table book, had forged her handwriting. His money was on the Hunters, or someone connected to this Consortium they’d hooked up with.

He gazed at Lionel. “This note makes no sense because she didn’t write it. The handwriting’s slightly different, and besides, she signed it Rachel. If she’d written it, she would have signed it Miss M.”

“You’re right!” Lionel sucked in a breath. “Then who did write it?”

“The same creeps who have made her disappear.”

“Oh, God. You think she’s been kidnapped? Or . . .”

“Kidnapped.” Jake wouldn’t let himself think of the alternative. Although his heart pounded frantically, he had to keep his mind clear, for Rachel’s sake. “Yes, I think she’s been kidnapped.”

“Then I’m calling the cops.” Lionel pulled out his cell phone.

“Wait.” Jake had a good idea who had taken her, and calling the human police might do no good whatsoever. He laid a hand on Lionel’s arm. “Let me try something else first.”

“What?”

“Don’t laugh, but Rachel and I have a psychic connection.”

“I’m not laughing. I believe in psychic connections, Mr. Hunter. Can you tune her in?”

“I’m going to try.” Dear God, please let it work. Then he remembered how the connection between them had seemed to go dead about an hour ago and his blood ran cold. If anything had happened to her, he would have no reason to live. No, that wasn’t true. He’d have a reason—finding those who’d harmed her and making them pay.

“If you get a bead on her, we’re going after her,” Lionel said. “You and me.”

“Absolutely, Lionel.” Panic clawed at Jake’s insides, but he refused to give in to it. She was alive. She had to be. And her fate could well depend on his ability to handle this.

He briefly thought of going back and forcing the Hunters to tell him what they knew. But they might not have details of the plan and he’d only waste valuable time trying to get the information out of them.

Connecting directly to Rachel would be faster. If he couldn’t do that, then he’d confront Ann and Bruce. But either way, he would find her. She was everything to him, and he finally knew that.