Riding in a trunk wasn’t altogether as uncomfortable as Laura might have imagined, though the frequent turns did sometimes force her to brace with her arms and legs. The air was stale too. They seemed to be taking back roads rather than going through anywhere populated, which had quite effectively dashed Laura’s only remaining plan, which had been to bang on the inside of the trunk and scream any time she thought there were people nearby. If Dillon’s men weren’t lazy they could keep to unpopulated roads through almost the entire state if they wanted to.

Laura’s sense of resignation had started to fade a little as the ride began. She felt briefly ashamed at how quickly she had given up, even though she knew that there was no way she could have outrun or outfought any of the wolves, let alone all of them. Still, it wasn’t like her to go down quite so easily, so she began searching the trunk for anything to use as a weapon once she was brought back out. It probably wouldn’t do anything to save her, but smashing somebody with a crowbar would sure feel good at this point.

She was disappointed, however, as the trunk appeared to be entirely clear of debris of any sort. Her hands ran along the sides of the trunk, looking for any tools or items laying in the corners, but again found nothing. She laid there for a few more minutes before another idea flashed through her mind.

Could they have forgotten to…

Laura ran her fingers across the floor, looking for and quickly finding the catch for the spare tire compartment that could be found under most trunks. And what did those compartments also usually have? A tire iron.

It proved fairly tricky to get into the compartment while also laying in the trunk, but she kept at it consistently. First she tried to squeeze in between the hatch handle and the trunk lid, but couldn’t fit without blocking the door she was trying to open. Next, she squeezed herself into the back of the trunk. She could open the hatch now, but was lying behind it, making it awkward to get out anything from within. She snaked an arm around the piece of floor she had pulled up and ran her hand along the area beneath. She felt the spare tire, but there was no tire iron lying across the top. It must be underneath.

Damn.

A sudden turn of the car forced her to brace herself to keep her head from hitting the side of the trunk. She didn’t know how much longer she had, but couldn’t imagine it would be too long. Presumably Dillon’s pack were meeting some of Vascenti’s goons somewhere to turn her over, rather than driving her straight to New York.

She tried to lift the tire out of the compartment, but the angle made it difficult. The best she could do was to weasel her arm underneath it, digging for what she knew must be there.

And then she had it. It took a fair amount of shimmying to get it out from underneath the tire, but before too much longer she had the compartment closed and was cradling her new weapon.

Better to go down swinging.

 

Rick turned onto his driveway, barely slowing the truck enough to make it. He slammed it into park and jumped out, immediately noticing the smell of wolves. It was a lingering scent and nothing more; they had left already.

A quick dash up the steps and he was in the cabin. “Laura?” he shouted.

No answer. The interior showed no signs of a fight, and he didn’t smell any blood. He checked in each room anyways, looking for anything out of place, but there was nothing.

He walked through the backyard, noting the half full coffee cup on the lawn chair Laura liked to sit in. Laura never left coffee to waste. Her scent led into the woods, and also out of the woods around the side of the house. The smell that meant Laura to him was also intermingling with the scent of one or maybe two wolves.

Their scent made his hackles rise, but he had to stay in control. His mind pieced together the likely course of events. She was sitting out back drinking coffee when she heard a vehicle or vehicles pull into the front. After figuring out that they weren’t here to ask for a cup of sugar, she’d dashed off into the forest. She hadn’t really had any chance of escaping even a single shifter, however. She had been caught and led back to the cabin and around to the driveway, where she was put in a vehicle and taken. There was no scent of blood he could detect, so she had been unharmed.

If Dillon lives through today it’s for that reason only he thought, his emotions darkening. He began to feel the more animalistic side of him coming to the fore. He held it back for the time. He still had to drive out to meet Gerald and his mystery friend.

Soon though, very soon.

 

The drive out to the meeting passed in a flash, Rick driving more recklessly than he ever would have been comfortable with before now. His usually patient demeanor began to wear thin. He still couldn’t figure out what this was all about. Why had Dillon snatched up Laura? It didn’t make any sense. Surely he couldn’t be that angry about the tongue lashing she had given him and his pack in the forest. That would be childish, and childishness was a dangerous trait for someone supposed to be protecting the lives and secrecy of his extended family.

So what was it then? Could Vascenti somehow be involved? Dillon was supposedly well connected with the criminal world, so it wasn’t impossible that Vascenti might have contacted him. The more Rick thought about it the more he became sure that was the answer. Nothing else made any sense.

He just had to get to her before the thugs from New York took her. The sense of urgency he felt was eating away at him, his grip on the steering wheel now white-knuckled.

A short time later he pulled into the parking lot of Ernie’s. It was a much larger lot than a small shop like this would normally maintain, but that was because this was a common entry point into the forests for hunters. Ernie made a fair amount of his business selling last minute supplies to those guys, and in exchange he kept a large parking lot that hunters were welcome to use as needed.

Hunting season was still a few weeks away so the lot was mostly empty at the moment. He spotted a beat up old Cadillac at the far end with two men standing near it. One of them was Gerald.

He pulled his truck up beside it and hopped out, striding around to clasp hands with the old shifter. He looked like your typical hippy grandpa, heavily greying hair tied in a ponytail behind him. He was wearing jeans, a grey t-shirt, and a denim vest, and had a headband on with a feather attached to one side. It looked distinctly Native American, though Gerald himself didn’t seem to be a native. Despite his age, he still looked fit and strong, and stood with a straight back.

His companion was a bit harder to peg. He took Rick’s proffered hand but didn’t meet his eyes for long, turning his head away. His hair was long as well, shoulder length, but where Gerald’s was neat and clean, his looked like he had been living rough. He smelled that way too, like a shifter who hadn’t been near a shower for some time. The smell wasn’t offensive to Rick’s nose, as some shifters just preferred to live away from society. It smelled natural. His clothes too were those of a woodsman, a worn flannel shirt over the kind of cotton blend hunting pants that were common among men who spent long periods in the woods. He was large, as well, almost as big as Rick, but he had a dark cast to his features. Something about him shouted that he didn’t want to be here, that he didn’t really want to be anywhere there were people.

Rick didn’t think too much about it. Some shifters eschewed society altogether and lived like animals in the wild. They were the subject of plenty of mockery among others of their kind, but Rick had always felt sorry for them. The few he had met during his life had either had something terrible happen which had led to their withdrawal, or just plain didn’t have the basic social skills needed to get along in a community. So they went into the forest and didn’t look back, eating what they could catch or forage and not asking for anything more.

Gerald saw him take in the other shifter and offered a few words. “This here’s Cody. He owes me a favor so I called it in.”

“And now I owe you that favor,” Rick said back. He would owe them both if they could get Laura out of this mess.

“You sure do,” Gerald piped back, seemingly not at all concerned with their impending conflict. He had this strange aura of cheeriness about him, as if he would be cracking jokes while pulling victims out of a car crash. It was a bit odd, but it made Rick like him even more.

“Thanks for coming guys,” Rick began, already setting off for the path leading into the trees. “I hope you’re both up for a fight, because it looks like we’ll be getting one.”

Cody grunted in a way that Rick took as assent, while Gerald just started humming as he followed Rick out into the trees. He led them about a kilometer into the forest before he felt safe finding a place to dump their clothes. They would go the rest of the way to the bar the wolves had turned into a clubhouse in animal form.

Rick started stripping down and motioned to a hollow beneath a fallen tree. “We can leave our things here and pick them up on the way back.”

Gerald let out a theatrical sigh and rolled his eyes. “You young’ins really need to keep up with the times better.” He took off his backpack and began adjusting the straps.

Not wanting to waste time, Rick didn’t respond and began to strip down. Cody did the same, though he did seem to understand what Gerald was doing. Rather than tossing his clothes into the hollow he left them at his feet. Rick did the same, curious.

He started when he noticed Cody’s body. Large and muscular, though smaller than Rick, Cody’s body was covered in a mass of scars. Hardly any area of his body was untouched. Rick couldn’t imagine what he had gone through to get those. For a shifter to get a noticeable scar the wound would have to be serious. The bullets he had taken a few weeks ago had hardly left a mark at all. For Cody to be covered like that might mean a lot of things, but none of them were good.

Rick realized he had been staring and looked away, a bit embarrassed. Cody didn’t seem to have noticed, but Rick still felt bad about it. He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the man.

Gerald was scooping up their clothes then, depositing them all in his backpack. He put it on in reverse, the storage section hanging in front, and with a little wink he shifted.

It looked like Gerald’s backpack had been modified to fit on a bear. The straps went out much longer than a normal backpacks, and they appeared to be made of a material that stretched a fair amount. He had never thought of something like that, but had to admit it would be pretty useful at times. Though he could guess why Gerald hadn’t been wearing it when he’d met him the first time in the forest. If he stumbled across any hikers or hunters in his travels they would have an awful strange story to tell. Assuming they noticed the backpack at all before they were climbing the nearest tree.

Cody strode over to Gerald and secured a clasp around his back. Then he was a bear too. The two of them looked as different as bears as they had as humans. Gerald looked like an average bear, a fair amount smaller than Cody but with a sheen to his fur that spoke of good health. Cody was the first bear Rick had ever seen that managed to look disheveled. His fur was matted this way and that, and it had none of the shine that Gerald’s did.

Rick wasted no more time and joined them in his bear form, the change as painful as always but over quickly. He gave them a quick nod before setting off towards the bar where he hoped to find Laura. The pace he set was quick, but nothing that a shifter couldn’t keep up for a few hours at least. The journey to the bar where he hoped to get Laura back would only take thirty minutes or so.

He was lucky that the bar itself was right at the edge of the forest, though it was not a surprise considering who owned it. Shifter groups always tried to live in places with easy access to large forested areas, so it would be odd if the clubhouse was located anywhere that didn’t have such access.

Rick snuck a few more glances at Cody as they traveled. He quickly realized that Cody’s matted fur wasn’t a product of poor hygiene. It was angled this way and that because of the scarred flesh beneath. It was still hard to imagine what could have caused that much damage to a shifter.

Before long the mystery that was Cody passed out of Rick’s mind. He had to keep focused on what was important. He had to get Laura back. And make sure the wolves knew better than to ever attack his mate again.

 

Laura was sure they were close to their destination by the way the car had been driven over the past few minutes. The start of the trip had seen them drive for ten or fifteen minutes at a time without slowing for a turn, but now they were driving slower and turning more often.

She had worked out a plan. When they opened the trunk to let her out she would hide the tire iron against the back of the trunk. When she got out she could put a hand on the trunk floor to brace herself, and when she was out that hand could come out swinging a heavy metal tire iron.

She was pretty sure it would be an ineffectual protest in the end, but that was all she could hope for at this point. She was still hoping against hope that Rick could somehow get to her before she was taken away, but it looked like Dillon had planned everything too carefully to allow him the opportunity.

The car slowed to a crawl suddenly, and she felt a bump she associated with the car going over a curb. It continued forward a little bit, and after a moment she once again heard the two motorcycles pull up. They had occasionally traveled with the car, but had fallen back for long stretches. It made sense, the police in Wisconsin tended to look askance at guys who looked like bikers, so they wouldn’t want the car to get whatever suspicion they might draw during the ride.

The car pulled forward again. Now the sound of the engines was magnified, bouncing back at them from what had to be walls. They were inside what must be a large garage.

The gentle vibrations caused by the car engines stopped, as did the sound of the motorcycles. There was some discussion outside as the two delivery men exited the car, but she couldn’t make out the words. The discussion moved towards the front of the car, reducing the volume to a dull whisper.

There had to be a way to hear what they were saying! She tried pressing her ear against the back of the trunk, but the padding of the seats on the other side muffled things even further. Then she tried against the top of the trunk itself. The words were still distant and indistinct, but she could mostly make them out now.

“…told you we could get her,” said a voice that she thought was Dillon’s.

“Yeah yeah, that was pretty quick, I gotta admit.”

“Hand over the payment then, like we agreed.”

“Hold your horses now, we need to see her first, we can’t just take your word for it,” came the thug’s reply.

The sound of keys being thrown and caught, then she could hear footsteps coming towards the car. She took her ear off the trunks lid and pulled herself into the fetal position, trying to make herself look scared instead of furious. It was easier than she would have expected or liked.

She heard the key slide into the lock of the trunk, then it was thrown open. The sudden light was blinding, and she threw up her arm to cover her face. A hand reached in and pulled her arm downwards.

“Yeah, that’s her all right,” said the voice that she had assumed was one of Vascenti’s men.

With that, her arm was released and the trunk was closed. The footsteps once again walked to the front of the car, and Laura began to eavesdrop once more.

“…nice working with you guys, it’s rare to find people that can deliver.”

Dillon’s voice responded. “That’s us, dependable as they come. Now pay up.”

“Ten thousand extra if you throw in the car. Our other guys had to take off, some problem in Chicago I think, and we need a way back to New York.”

“Done.”

Alarm bells rang out in Laura’s head. If they used the same car to take her back to New York they might not even let her out of the trunk. Any slight chance she might have had to get away, or at least to fight back, might have just vanished.

There was a bit more conversation outside, but she had stopped listening. Tears welled up in her eyes. This is how it would end was it? Marched meekly out of a forest and tossed in a trunk like a sack of potatoes to be shipped back to New York.

For what though? Once again she wondered about the reason for all this effort put into finding her. Any chance they had to squeeze her for some part of what Craig had owed had flown once they had pinned his murder on her. She assumed her accounts were frozen, or at least being monitored, and Vascenti’s guys would know that as well, so they had to know she was worth nothing financially. Just to set an example? Craig’s death had done that already.

It wasn’t important right now, so she put it out of her mind. Was there anything else she could do? Her hand rested on the tire iron that had remained unnoticed. A plan slowly worked itself out in her mind. The tears that had started seconds before quickly dried up, and a smile found its way to her lips.

She pressed her ear to the trunk once again.

“…think we should take her out of the trunk and put her in the back?”

She heard a laugh that could only be Dillon. “That one will act as meek as a kitten, but don’t believe it for a second. She’s a fighter.”

“Looks like she’s staying in the trunk.”

Her smile grew wider. She still had a chance.