Branded by Fire

CHAPTER 50

Mercy had intended to spend the morning discussing their untenable situation with Riley in the hopes of finding some kind of an “out,” but he got roused from bed three hours before dawn. “What?” she said, barely lifting her lids as he answered his cell phone.

His claws shot out. Realizing something was very wrong, she sat up and put a hand on his lower back as he finished the call.

His eyes were wolf when he glanced at her. “Three young men from the pack didn’t come home last night.”

Fully aware how wild the young ones could be, Mercy knew there had to be something more. “No question it’s foul play?”

A nod as he got up and began to dress. “Hawke called all three on their cells—those boys are over twenty and in training. No matter what they were up to, they’d answer.”

Mercy pulled on her own clothes. “We’ll mobilize our resources, help you look for them. Last known location?”

“A club in the city. It’s—” His head jerked to Mercy’s phone as it trilled an emergency code.

Grabbing it, Mercy answered. “Vaughn, what is it?”

“Get to the city. We’re missing Nicki, Cory, Mia, and I’m sorry, Merce, but Grey’s missing, too. They went out to dinner, never came home.”

Grey. If someone had hurt her sneaky, funny, youngest brother . . . Stomach tight with a raw mix of fear and rage, she had to struggle to find the breath to tell Vaughn about the SnowDancer kids. He swore. “Start driving. Indigo was already down here for a night shift—I’ll coordinate with her so everyone goes out in teams of one leopard, one wolf.”

Hanging up, Mercy told Riley what had happened. Her voice broke when she got to Grey’s name.

Riley gave her a crushingly tight hug. “We’ll find them. Your brother struck me as someone who knows how to take care of himself and those around him.”

She nodded. “He’s tough. He fools everyone with that musical genius facade, but he can put Sage and Bas in the dirt when he’s in the mood.” Finding comfort in that, she drew away. “Let’s go.”

Riley looked at her. “How’re your hands?”

Startled, she held them out. “Rock steady. Why?”

“Because I think this situation calls for your style of driving.”

Mercy put her foot on the accelerator and made it to the city in half the usual time. They’d got a message to converge at Union Square, where search grids were being assigned, so she double-parked and they ran to the spot.

“Anyone think to check on Bowen’s group?” she asked Vaughn. Her leopard hadn’t sensed deceit in Bowen. Power, yes. A determination that could make a man do many things, yes. But not deceit. However, the leopard wasn’t infallible.

Her fellow sentinel nodded. “They’re clean—they’re helping us look for the missing in their section of the city. Stupid not to use a crack team when we’ve got them sitting there.”

Mercy glanced at Riley to see how he was taking this. He raised an eyebrow. “I guess the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Quiet tone, but the wolf was in his eyes—she knew the anger was directed at the bastards who’d dared harm those under their care.

Feeling that same sense of violation, she slid her hand into his before returning her attention to Vaughn. “Are you sure the missing are still in the city?”

“No,” the jaguar said, making her stomach sink. “Dorian’s working airport and highway surveillance; SnowDancer’s checking satellite footage; Faith’s running telepathic scans. We’ll leave no stone unturned, Mercy.”

She swallowed, nodded. “What do you need from us?”

“We want you two visiting all known Alliance sites. I’ve already sent people through but you know their movements better than anyone else.”

“What makes you think this is connected to the Alliance?” Riley asked.

Vaughn shoved a hand through his unbound hair. “One of the Rats was partying Above and he’s almost certain he saw Grey get into a van with a human. But the Rat was more than a little tipsy, so I’m covering all our other bases, too—Sascha even woke up Nikita to ask if this was a Psy op. Nikita says no.”

“She’s not exactly trustworthy,” Mercy muttered, “but this has the smell of the Alliance. Psy teams don’t like to attract attention.”

Riley nodded in agreement as they headed off, deciding to take the car since they had a lot of ground to cover and others were already working the streets. They came up blank at the Embarcadero warehouse, and in the Tenderloin, though they got out and traversed the entire suspect section on foot. All other known sites yielded the same result.

Panic threatened to twist Mercy’s heart into a knot. It was all she could do to keep it together. “Where else?! God damn it!”

Sweating despite the cold air as they stood beside the car, Riley tried to think. That was his strength when it came to chaotic situations. Right now, the mating dance was playing havoc with his mind, but with Mercy beside him—even a distraught Mercy—he found a measure of control. “Let’s go back to the basic facts,” he said. “Our grid covers the Alliance. So we work on the assumption that the Alliance did this. No ifs, no buts.”

She nodded, eyes full of fire.

“Then, the next question becomes—why would the Alliance take them in the first place?” he said. “It’s very deliberate—three SnowDancers and four leopards.”

“Either a declaration of war,” Mercy muttered, kicking at a tire, “or a big fat ‘fuck-you.’ ”

He considered that.

“Riley, the killings—there have been two confirmed cases in Tahoe. What if—?”

“Damn.” He reached out to brush sweat-damp strands of red off her face. “I forgot to tell you in the mess yesterday—one of the comm techs forwarded me a bulletin. Seems the two victims were lovers. Enforcement’s charged the husband.”

The sheer banality of the crimes seemed to shock Mercy out of her burgeoning panic. “Oh.” A quick nod, a jerky breath. “Okay, okay.” She shoved her hands through her hair and he could almost see her pulling her sentinel skin around herself.

“If we can’t answer the why, let’s try the how.” She placed a hand against the hood. “I can see how your three boys might’ve been taken—pretty girl distracts them, another spikes their drinks, then the girls ‘helpfully’ lead them out. Everyone thinks they’re drunk boyfriends, nothing sinister. But our kids were out having dinner, not in a club.”

Riley nodded. “If it was me, and I had to get four sober people to do what I wanted, I’d grab one while he or she was separated from the group, then force the others to follow by threatening the one I had.”

“The thing is, you know about how loyal we are—would the Alliance?”

“They’ve proven to be smart. They study the enemy before striking.”

“So your scenario is a possibility.” Mercy’s claws were out, though she didn’t seem to realize it. “But unless there were a lot of attackers, it’d be hard to control that many changelings, especially once you had them in a van or truck.”

“Unless you use the threat of death against one to force the others to behave”—his brain made a cognitive leap—“or to dose themselves with a tranquilizer.” Every single captured changeling would’ve tried to find an escape hatch, but if someone was holding a gun to the head of a friend, they wouldn’t have dared risk an action that didn’t promise a hundred percent chance of success. Packmates did not sacrifice one to save many. The Psy called that a weakness. Riley thought it their greatest strength. “But even if they’re all knocked out, what then?”

“Exactly.” Mercy began to pace up and down the street, both of them deliberately ignoring the fact that the tranq doses in their scenario could’ve been fatal. “If it’s a message, we need to receive it. Otherwise, we don’t know who did it, and they don’t get credit. And the Alliance likes to make a splash.”

“We need to factor in another thing—the kidnappers need time to get away after delivering the message.” The wolf in him saw a hint of possibility. “We need to be searching isolated places where the missing wouldn’t immediately be found, but where they wouldn’t not be found in a reasonable amount of time.”

Mercy apparently located a hair tie in her pocket because she began to pull the flowing strands of her hair into a messy ponytail. “They’re not totally familiar with this city, so they won’t go far from their ‘circle’ of movement.”

“We need to dumb the search down.” Riley straightened, seeing the truth. “We’ve been searching in places they probably have no clue how to even find.”

Mercy’s eyes turned night-glow. “There were reports of possible Alliance movements in the streets leading up to the Palace of Fine Arts. It fits. It’s not so isolated that the missing wouldn’t be found, but it’s isolated enough that likely no one will pass through it at this time of the morning.” The clock had just ticked over five thirty.

They were already moving as she finished speaking. Adopting Mercy’s hell-on-wheels driving technique, Riley had them on the Palace grounds five minutes later.

Magnificent in daylight, the huge pillars that curved out from the rotunda were ominous in darkness. Mercy deliberately avoided looking at the glassy surface of the lake to her right. No going there until necessary.

Using her night vision to negotiate around the pillars, she kept her body low to the ground, trying to pick up a scent. What she found instead was a jagged claw mark in the grass. “Riley.” This had been made by a wolf.

He was beside her in a second. “Scent’s dissipated, but it’s fresh.”

They all but crawled on the ground, alert to any other hint that the mark might’ve been made by one of their lost packmates. Riley found the next bread crumb—an earring with dangling glass beads.

Mercy’s heart jumped into her throat. “Mia. She’s learning to work with glass—she’s so crazy-proud of those earrings, she’d never have dropped one accidentally. Not if she was conscious.”

A few feet later, she saw a worn, handmade button. “Grey.” He loved that blue shirt despite the fact it was all but threadbare. Sage had made the buttons in one of his fits of creativity, and their mother had cut out and sewn the shirt itself. “They left us a trail. Maybe they weren’t knocked out.”

“Or the drug began to wear off.”

It was tempting to speed things up now that they knew the missing had come through here, but they stuck to the trail. This was a large area—better to be a little slow than miss them altogether. It was as well that they fought the instinct to chase blindly . . . because four minutes later, they found both the cats and the wolves. All were propped around a pillar shaded by overgrown greenery, and so deep in shadow Mercy and Riley could’ve easily passed them by. All seven had also been doused in a light perfume that would’ve played havoc with changeling noses.

They appeared dead.

“No.” Dropping to her knees, Mercy began to check pulses. Her relief when she felt the first sluggish beat threatened to stop her own heart. “Alive, all of them.” Her hand lingered on her brother’s face. “God, I love you, brat.”

Riley relayed their find by phone and both Tamsyn and Lara, the SnowDancer healer, arrived what felt like seconds later. All seven young men and women were on the way to the hospital within a span of minutes. Lucas rode with the healers, while Hawke remained behind to see if they could get anything more from the scene.

Mercy had been planning to go with Grey but decided to stay at the Palace when her parents called to say they were almost at the hospital. She wanted to find the bastards who’d dared this. Returning to Riley’s side after the others had left, she found him talking to Hawke.

“The messages pinned to their chests were all the same,” Riley was saying. “ ‘Stay out of Alliance business, or next time, they won’t be breathing.’ ”

“Nice of them to leave a calling card,” Hawke said, clearly furious. “We sure it was the Alliance?”

“Techs are still working on it, but initial word is the prints on the notes match those we found at the warehouse.”

Hawke shook his head. “Everything points to a power play, but the timing makes me think something big’s happening soon and they want us distracted.”

“Could be both,” Riley murmured, his beautiful hair turning bronze in the quiet dawn light. “A very deliberate demonstration of power, and a smoke screen.”

“They failed with the assassination attempts on the Councilors,” Mercy said. “Which leaves Bowen and his group as the most likely targets.”

Riley was thinking along the same lines. “We need to warn them.”

“And get the bomb squad out there.” Mercy pulled out her cell phone.

“After you do that,” Hawke said, “I need both of you to head up to the Glade.”

Riley felt Mercy bristle. “You’re not my alpha.”

“Technicality,” Hawke said with his customary arrogance. “It’s for the meeting with WindHaven.”

Riley decided he’d have to punch Hawke—several times—when Mercy turned to him after the other man left to talk to someone else, and bit out, “I don’t care what we have to do, I’m not leaving my pack even if we mate.”

“Even if?” He grabbed her arm, pulled her toward him. “You are not doing this to me. We’re as good as mated.” If she took back everything that had happened between them, if she said it hadn’t mattered, it would fucking break him.

“I’m still not a wolf.” A baring of teeth. Then, to his surprise, she kissed him with all the firestorm intensity of her nature. “And I’ll never call that asshole my alpha.”

Riley didn’t even consider defending Hawke. “There has to be some way to leave you connected to DarkRiver.”

“I can’t think how.” She sounded frustrated, angry, at the end of her rope. “If I lose that . . . if the blood bond snaps . . . God, Riley, what will I do?”

He closed his arms around her, understanding exactly how she felt. Being a lieutenant wasn’t a position, it was part of who he was. “Mercy, I—” What the hell could he say? There was no way to fix this. One of them would have their blood bond to their alpha broken. And if it was tied to dominance, as it most likely was, then there was a high chance it would be Mercy. “I wish I could fix it so I’d be the one who’d have to leave my pack.”

Her body tensed. “You’d hate giving up your blood link to SnowDancer.”

“Not as much as I hate being helpless while you’re hurting.” He held her tight. He was her mate, her protector. And yet he knew that if they became one, he’d hurt her as no one had ever before hurt her. That was unacceptable.

“Maybe we can manipulate the dominance somehow,” he said, seeing possibilities, “fix it so it’s me who shifts packs.” It would rip out a massive chunk of his heart, but if it was the only way to protect his mate, he’d do it a hundred times over. “Dominance is fluid, capable of change. All we have to do is find the right trigger.”

“Riley—”

“Shh. Just let me hold you. Just for a second.”

She softened in his arms, showing a courage he wasn’t sure even he possessed. “Kitty cat, we’ll figure out a way.” Because he never wanted Mercy to feel less, feel broken. He’d savage himself before he’d allow that.