16
When Archer awoke, it was in a state of confusion every bit as acute as the one Eloise experienced in the camper, before she realized she was being taken away. Just as hers had done, his mind struggled to break away from sleep, struggled to come back fully to itself. This effect was only magnified by the fact that the full moon and the hunt had taken place the night before.
He was always gripped with a sense of unreality the morning after a full moon and this was no exception. That being said, there was something about this waking that was unlike the others. There was something about it that felt wrong, and when he sat up he began to get the first inkling of why.
“What the devil?” he muttered to himself, one hand rising instinctively to the back of his head as he looked around in confusion. He should have been in his trailer, sprawled out across his bed with Eloise curled up beside him. He should have awoken to the warmth of her body bleeding into his own and the clean lavender scent of her hair wafting up every time he took a breath in.
What he found around him instead was the woods, rough and unforgiving. He had been lying on the ground in the woods, carpeted with leaves, and he had been doing so completely naked. He struggled to remember the events of the night before and why this should be so, but the circumstances around him coming to be in the place that he was, remained a mystery to him.
“The hunt was over,” he muttered to himself, “the hunt was over and we returned to the outskirts of the camp.”
Hadn’t they? He was almost positive that they had done so, just as they had every time before. It was their custom to build a fire on the outskirts of camp after a hunt, to drink more than they should have and regale each other with exaggerated tales of their abilities before returning half drunk (or very drunk, for some of them) to their beds.
Archer could remember the fire, could still taste the stale aftermath of whiskey on his breath, but after that everything had gone black. But he hadn’t had enough to drink to have blacked out, nor had he consumed nearly enough to explain the splitting pain radiating from the back of his head. His hand, the one that had moved so automatically to his skull, began to explore the terrain there and then pulled away as he cried out in pain.
When his fingers took up their position again, he found the edges of a very large lump on the back of his head. He pulled his hand down and looked at it, surprised to find that his fingertips were covered in blood. Something, or someone, had clobbered him. That was why he was not in his bed and why his memory had deserted him.
What he didn’t yet understand was why. He didn’t understand, but he did have the beginning of a sinking feeling in his gut that told him something was very wrong. He did his best to ignore it, told himself it was just the shock of waking up in such an unusual way, but it did nothing to calm his rising fear and by the time he made it into the actual camp itself, his insides felt twisted with nerves and the beginnings of rage.
The few people who were already up with the early morning light stopped what they were doing to stare. Even in a camp full of werewolves, seeing a bloody, naked man striding through the middle of camp was not something seen every day. Archer cared not at all, paid absolutely zero attention to anything aside from getting back to his own camper and making sure that Eloise was alright.
As was natural, his feelings of unease had all come to rest on the subject of her. Once he knew that she was still sleeping (which she was, he told himself savagely, of course she was, what else would she be?) and sleeping safely, he would figure out the rest. The rest of it hardly even mattered, just so long as his love was alright.
By the time he got to the door of the trailer, however, he was almost sure that she was not alright. For starters, every step he took towards his little home he felt his sense of unease inside of him grow until it was an almost all consuming thing. Then there was the fact that the screen door was standing open.
The primary door was still shut and that was alright, but the screen door standing open was not a good sign. That door was never left open, not by him nor by Eloise, either. Perhaps this was just the one time she had forgotten and left it that way, in which case he wouldn’t mind a bit, but Archer didn’t think that was what had happened. He didn’t think that was what had happened at all. He opened the main door carefully, slowly, ready to shift back into his wolf form at the first sign of trouble.
“Mhmmm! Gahhhmm!”
He almost did shift, the strange noise startled him so badly, and he flung the door behind him closed, determined to keep whatever had broken into his home trapped inside. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light of his camper, however, he saw that the source of the noise was no kind of threat. He dropped to his knees, heedless of the fact that he was still stark naked, and began to go to work.
“Carmella,” he spoke in urgent, clipped tones, working quickly to free her from her bindings. “Carmella, what the hell happened here?”
“Roman,” she gasped the moment the gag was out of her mouth, then sobbed with relief as her arms and legs were finally freed. “Roman happened. He took me up while I was returning to the camp, knocked me on the back of my head so that I couldn’t fight him and tied me up. When I woke up, I was here.”
“Where’s Eloise, Carmella? Where is she?”
“He took her,” she sobbed again, her eyes wide and very close to panic. “That was what he put me in here for. He told her that if she tried to scream, if she tried to do anything but exactly what he said, he was going to kill me. She didn’t want to let that happen and so she went with him. I wanted to tell her not to do it but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t speak to her, Archer! I couldn’t speak!”
She began to sob then and while Archer felt real sorrow for her grief and for her pain, he could not take the time to comfort her. Instead, he began tearing through his trailer, throwing on the first clothing he found before returning to Carmella’s side.
“It’s alright, sweetheart,” he said in as gentle a voice as he could muster up given the circumstances. “It’s going to be alright.”
“But how is it going to be alright?” she half-cried, half-yelled. “Roman took her away, and what do you suppose he did that for?”
“I’m not sure yet, but you can trust that I’m going to find out. I’m going to find her, Carmella. I’m going to find her and bring her back.”
Without waiting for a reply, he grabbed the keys to the motorcycle he always had strapped to the back of his camper and strode outside. It was what he used to get around in order to find the odd jobs he worked to help keep the camp afloat and it was what he intended to use to track down Roman and Eloise. He had no idea how long it had been since the two of them had left, but he could see that Roman’s shitty old car was missing, which was a good thing.
That car had been around for as long as Archer and Roman had and it was a scent that he had long ago learned to track. It had been a mistake, whisking her away in that car, and it was a mistake Roman was going to live to regret.
He swung one leg over the body of his motorcycle, his thoughts clinging to this bit of good fortune with the desperation of a dying man, and was so focused in on his task that he almost didn’t see his grandmother sprinting towards him with as much speed as her cracked, aged body would allow.
“Wait!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, waving her arms up over her head in a gesture that made her look well on her way to crazy. “Archer, stop!”
He did, of course, having no intention of running his grandmother down, but he had to clutch his handlebars so tightly that all of the blood left his hands to keep himself from just taking off. When Gram finally reached him, she was wheezing and gasping to catch her breath and her face was full of a fear he had never seen there before. He hadn’t seen the fear, but he had an idea of what it could mean.
“You’ve seen something,” he said in a lifeless voice, not wanting to know what her vision had been and fully aware that there was no way he could not know at the same time, a vision.”
“Yes,” she gasped, gripping his arm fiercely, “yes and no.”
“I don’t know what that means and I don’t have time to guess.”
“I know where he’s taken her. I saw it in my mind’s eye. He’s taken her back to her father, back to that big house full of death.”
“Perfect!” he shouted, then laughed half-crazed. “That’s exactly where I need to go, then! Perfect, you’ve been a great help. Now move aside, Gram. I’m going and I don’t want to hurt you when I do.”
“No, you can’t!”
“Can’t? Tell me, what wouldn’t you do to save someone you loved?”
“But this is different, Archer, you don’t understand!”
“Why?” Archer spat out in disdain, never in his life having harbored more unpleasant feelings for his grandmother than he did in that moment. “Because she’s a lion shifter and not one of us? I thought we were past this.”
“We are!”
“It would appear that we aren’t. If that’s the case, I feel sorry for you. I’ll not be returning to stay in a place where she isn’t wanted.”
He revved his engine, turning his handlebars and preparing to take off. Gram could either let go or get dragged along for all he cared. He was going to save Eloise and no amount of his people’s prejudice was going to stop him, even if it was coming from somebody he loved and respected.
His bike jerked forward and his grandmother let out a wail of heartbreak so terrible Archer almost spilled himself off of his bike completely. He stopped, turned to look at her in dismay and anger mingled together as one.
“Why can’t you just let me do this? Why can’t you let me when you know she’s my destiny!”
“Because! He’ll kill you! Just like he killed them!”
“Who? Who are you talking about, Gram?”
Archer heard his voice as if he were speaking from miles below water and his grandmother hung her head sorrowfully, her dry, thick hair falling in curtains in front of her face. Whatever fight she had left inside of her, it was gone. She was only a very old woman now, an old woman with too many sorrow for one person to bear.
“It was her father, Archer. It was that Mr. Wright that done your folks in. He’s the one who killed ‘em, did it in one of his warehouses with some of his buddies looking on.”
“Explain yourself,” Archer answered in a low, measured voice, the amount of concentration it was taking to keep himself together astounding.
“It was the last time we were around that deadly city, that New Orleans. It’s why we ain’t been back for so long. That’s where your parents were murdered, Archer, and for what? They tried to orchestrate a peace, that’s what. They went to that man, only a little older than you at the time and his daughter not even a glint in his eye, and tried to make peace between their kind and ours.
He agreed to it, too. He told them to meet him in his warehouse so they could speak to some of the others of the lion shifters and they would work it out so that there was no more bad blood between the lions and the wolves.”
“And when they got there?”
“They were ambushed. They were strung up and left to die like mongrel dogs. If you go after Eloise he’ll do it to you, too. He’ll kill you, and that’ll just about kill me, too. I can’t lose another one of my family, Archer. I can’t.”
She dropped her face into her hands then and wept. Archer wanted to comfort her, to put his arm around her and whisper little reassurances until she understood that things would go differently this time. He wanted to do those things, but time was now more pressing for him than even he could have imagined and every second he remained put was another second Eloise might not survive.
He revved his engine again, making his grandmother look up from her sobs. When her eyes locked with his, her crying stopped and as he drove away she sounded calm. He told himself it was because she knew. He told himself that she had stopped her crying because she could see the fire in his eyes. It was the fire that told her that things were going to go differently this time. Somebody was going to die, that much was true, but it wasn’t going to be him.