Shards of Hope

Chapter 9

REMI RACED THROUGH the rain, the pads of his paws soundless on the wet mass of leaves and branches under the trees, surefooted over the grassy open area that threatened to turn to mud at any instant. When the rain thundered down again, he growled low in his throat. On the list of his leopard’s least favorite things in the world, icy cold rain rated very high, but that was an easily shrugged-off concern, his mind on the two people who’d been tracking him until he turned the tables on them.

He’d kept his claws sheathed as he slammed into the man, intending only to pin the stranger down so he could figure out if he’d attracted unwelcome attention that could pose a risk to his pack. It was only as he hit the man that he’d caught the acrid scent of wet iron, a scent the wind had hidden from him until that instant.

The woman, he’d realized almost at once, was bleeding badly. Her companion might be conscious, but he wasn’t in much better condition.

Remi had recognized the man’s face a heartbeat after Remi’s paws made contact with his chest. No way to mistake those sharp cheekbones, the intense eyes, the ruler-straight black hair that had become visible when his hood slid off: Aden Kai. The reputed leader of the Arrow Squad, according to the reports Remi had seen on various news platforms.

No one seemed to know too much about the Arrows. Rumors ranged from calling them a death squad to a highly trained black ops team, but everyone had witnessed their actions in the past months. The black-clad men and women had saved Psy, human, and changeling lives across the globe—and they hadn’t stuck around to lap up praise or play to the media.

Arrows apparently did what needed to be done and didn’t bother with the niceties.

Remi could deal with people like that—if he didn’t end up having to kill them. Right now, though, the question of what the fuck two Arrows were doing out in the middle of the Smokies could wait. A woman was dying and Remi would do everything in his power to attempt to save her. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t execute her if she proved a threat to his pack. It just meant he’d do it after she was healthy.

Reaching the spot where he’d parked his rugged all-wheel-drive vehicle after deciding to use the cover provided by the storm to come up here to spy on RainFire’s reclusive neighbors, he shifted into human form and hauled on his jeans. Once in the driver’s seat, he didn’t switch on the headlights. The jet-chopper he’d heard earlier in the night had disappeared, but it was possible it was simply circling above the heavy cloud layer, ready to drop down through any clear patches—and given the fact that the Arrows had headed away from the sound of the chopper, it was a good bet the two had company they wanted to avoid.

Normally he’d have let the two parties fight it out among themselves, keeping his fledgling pack out of it, but every part of him rebelled against such an unfair fight. The Arrows were wounded and on foot, with a tiny knapsack of what he assumed were supplies, while the other side had a jet-chopper and likely ground forces. There was also the fact that his leopard had never liked the scents left behind by the neighbors who owned this tract of land.

Sour sweat and cold metal had been the most prominent elements.

Another growl rumbling in his throat, he drove on. Even with the torrential rain, his night vision and knowledge of the terrain meant he was at no risk of a fatal crash. RainFire might not own this land—yet—but no alpha worth his salt wouldn’t be fully aware of every aspect of the landscape around his pack.

The odd rock scraped the undercarriage, a few branches hit his windows, and he definitely lost a side mirror as he maneuvered through the forested landscape, but the vehicle was whole when he reached the farthest point he could go. Getting out, he ran on bare feet to where he could scent the Arrows. That scent was dull, buried under the rain that pounded his bare upper body and plastered his jeans to his legs, but the wind was on his side this time and those two didn’t belong in this environment.

The leader of the Arrows was down on his knees, but he still held on to his gravely wounded partner, shielding her face from the elements by curving his body over hers. Even as Remi ran to him, Aden attempted to get up. Stubborn fucker. But will alone couldn’t overcome a body that had apparently been through the wars, and Aden was unconscious by the time Remi reached him, his body curled protectively over his partner’s.

Leopard and man both growled in approval.

Psy, especially combat-trained Psy, were meant to be heartless bastards who balanced every action on a cost-reward ratio. Remi had picked up that fact from a couple of Psy he’d worked with on an oil rig back when he was nineteen. The two had been cold enough, but according to them, they were sunshine and roses compared to their more dangerous brethren. In this situation, leaving his partner behind would’ve given Aden a better chance of survival, yet he hadn’t, was still protecting a fallen member of his squad.

Assassin or not, Remi decided Aden Kai had at least one redeeming feature.

Taking the woman first, after tugging her from Aden’s tight grip, Remi put her in the backseat, then went back for Aden. The bastard was heavier than he looked, and he woke as Remi was hauling him to his feet, a knife suddenly in his hand. “Stand down,” Remi growled, his claws slicing out of his fingers to prick at Aden’s side. “I have your squadmate in the truck.”

A nod, Aden managing to stay conscious as Remi helped him into the backseat with the other Arrow. As he started to drive down to the pack’s base, he saw Aden check the woman’s vitals. “How far?” the Arrow leader asked.

“Thirty minutes.” He was driving hell for leather.

“She won’t make it. Go faster.” An order from a man used to giving them.

Remi was a predatory changeling alpha—he didn’t take orders from anyone—but his cat didn’t snarl. He could forgive a man trying to protect someone who belonged to him. “Strap in,” he said, waiting only until Aden had put the safety belts around both himself and the other Arrow before he accelerated to a breakneck pace that would’ve equaled certain death for most people.

Remington Denier wasn’t most people. He wasn’t even most alphas; he’d spent five years of his life working on race cars before he decided he didn’t want to roam alone anymore, his hunger to set up a pack of his own a bone-deep pulse in his body. He’d set it up all right, but now he had to hold it together. Today, however, his days testing how cars handled on the track, combined with his night vision and heightened hand-eye coordination, kept them from going over cliffs or slamming into trees.

“Cat.” A faint sound from the back.

“What?”

“Zaira—internal bleeding. Gunshot wound. Abdomen.”

“Got it,” Remi said, knowing the pack’s healer would need every detail he could give him. “What else?”

“Small implants. Embedded in our brains,” Aden ground out between short, rough breaths. “We got them out, but there could be damage.”

Fuck, that did not sound good.

“Zaira’s laser seal needs to be broken, the internal repairs checked.”

“I’ll tell Finn,” Remi said, but when he asked Aden to explain further and received only silence in return, he realized the Arrow leader had lost his battle with consciousness. Just as well—at least Remi didn’t have to worry about revealing the location of RainFire’s central base. He’d taken his cue from the DarkRiver leopards and set up a public HQ, while ensuring the pack’s heart remained protected and off the grid.

However, unlike with DarkRiver, RainFire cats weren’t spread out across their territory. Such closeness could’ve been a source of primal tension since leopards weren’t natural pack animals. It was the human side of changeling felines that made them want to create large extended families; in ordinary circumstances, the cat’s need for space was accommodated by having plenty of land area between packmates.

That wouldn’t work for RainFire. They just didn’t have enough people and resources to function as a united pack while scattered over the territory. One day, that would happen, but for now, their struggle for survival as a pack had trumped the need for space. Not that packmates didn’t go off on their own now and then—he’d convinced a number of loners to join him in setting up RainFire, after all. But they always returned because RainFire was now home, their loyalty sworn and unbreakable.

Screeching to a stop beneath the sprawling network of aeries built in the massive trees in the heart of their territory, permanent bridges connecting aeries and retractable rope ladders going down trunks, he hit the horn in the emergency pulse. Senior packmates boiled out into the rain-lashed dark a heartbeat later, including their healer, Finn.

RainFire had lucked out snagging Finn—at a couple of years past forty in age, he was highly skilled and had full medical qualifications as well as a powerful gift. His birth pack had been sorry to see him go when he joined RainFire as one of the founding members, but had understood his choice; the healer who’d trained Finn had decades more life left in him, as well as another apprentice, and Finn was too strong to be anything but the senior healer in a pack.

As it was, he’d spent his adult life volunteering to assist packs who’d lost their healers and who didn’t have a trainee old enough to step into the position. It had given him an incredible breadth of experience—he’d been to even more places in the world than Remi, mentored countless young healers who needed time to come into their own—but he’d been desperately lonely. Healers needed their own packs to nurture, needed family around them. Remi had never met a healer who was also a loner. It appeared to be an impossible combination.

Having hauled open the back door, Finn went to check Aden.

“No,” Remi said. “He was clear she was the more critical. Internal bleeding, abdomen.”

Finn went clawed and just tore a hole through the woman’s clothing to check her stomach. Swearing hard and low seconds later, he grabbed her in his arms. “Get the male inside!” he said as he began to turn to run to the infirmary. “He’s losing blood from somewhere!”

“Shit.” Remi had thought the scent was all from the woman, that Aden had simply surrendered to exhaustion and cold.

Throwing the Arrow leader over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, as the other man didn’t appear to have gut wounds, he followed Finn to the infirmary—a large open room in a ground-level cabin—and placed Aden on a bed next to the one where Finn was already working on Zaira. Finn’s shirt was plastered to his body and his light brown hair dark from the rain, but Zaira had his unflinching attention.

Finn’s nurse, Hugo, and another member of the pack who had some medical training took over the instant Remi had Aden on the bed, stripping the Arrow leader of his camouflage green jacket and cutting through his sweater in their search for his injuries.

“He said they had some kind of an implant in their heads,” Remi told Finn. “They got it out—fuck knows how—but there could be damage.”

“Jesus.” Having turned Aden onto his side, Hugo hissed out a breath, the long braid in which he wore his black hair falling over his shoulder. “No wonder the back of his sweater is soaked in blood.” A pause as Hugo peeled away a bloody bandage. “Oh, hell, he’s got what looks like an unsealed wound at the back of his head.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Finn muttered, his eyes focused on the woman; her abdomen didn’t look right even to Remi’s untrained eyes, the jagged tear of the bullet that had violently exited her body a further insult.

Finn ran a scanner over her stomach. “This is bad. She should be dead, would be if someone hadn’t sealed the major bleeds.”

“Fix her first,” Remi said, knowing in his gut the Arrow leader would’ve made the same call. He hadn’t missed the fact that Aden had focused totally on her injuries when he’d been losing blood from what, to Remi’s eyes, looked like a seriously bad head wound.

“Finn,” Hugo said, having slit Aden’s pant leg along one side, “he’s got a bullet wound to his upper thigh. Bullet’s still in there, I think.”

As Finn barked out orders, Remi stared at the Arrow who’d walked who knew how long a distance through storm-lashed terrain with a bullet in his thigh and a bleeding head wound, all while supporting his wounded squadmate. The man was a serious threat, but Remi would have a difficult time killing him now. He was starting to like the stubborn Arrow.

Leaving Finn and his people to their work, he walked out into the wide corridor outside the infirmary to find his sentinels gathered around. Lark, Angel, and Theo all had damp hair, had no doubt made sure the all-wheel drive was safely parked and RainFire’s perimeter clear of threats. “Are we on generators?” He’d caught the telltale flicker of the lights a minute before.

“Just switched,” Lark said, her ebony skin flushed from within, as if she’d been running. “Comm lines went down fifteen minutes before the electricity. Best guess is that a lightning strike fried the conduit.”

“Damn.” RainFire was now effectively isolated from the rest of the world. The pack’s territory was in a dead zone as far as current satellites were concerned, which meant that if RainFire wanted satellite comms, they’d have to pay for a satellite of their own. The pack was too young to have that kind of money.

“How long can we run the generators?” Changelings were more resistant to cold than humans or Psy, but RainFire had cubs who wouldn’t last long if the heating went out. Should that be a risk, Remi would find a way to get them to civilization.

“Days,” Theo said, his tanned skin belying the current weather. “That’s why Lark and I blew the budget. We got the green version that we can run with fucking vegetable scraps if that’s all we have.”

“Sometimes,” Remi said, “I remember why I asked you degenerates to join the pack.”

The cousins bumped fists. They’d been roaming alone when Remi first met them, having been on their own since they were teenagers after their tiny pack imploded as a result of a frankly selfish power struggle that had savaged pack bonds, but he’d never met any two who were less suited to being loners.

Big, quiet Theo had a marshmallow heart when it came to the cubs, while competent and outwardly hard-assed Lark was never as happy as when she was poking her nose into packmates’ lives and doing everything she could to smooth over any flare-ups or personality clashes.

Beside them, Angel, much more self-contained and solitary by nature, folded his arms. His “straight-from-a-marble-statue” bone structure, as described by Lark, combined with eyes of deep ultramarine and flawless brown skin, made him a magnet for both men and women—only Angel seemed to prefer to walk alone in every way.

Of all the people who had agreed to help Remi set up RainFire, it was Angel’s agreement that had most surprised him.

“We’ve got plenty of supplies,” the other man said. “We can wait this out, though it might take a few days. Last comm transmission I caught before lines went down said the meteorologists were calling this a once-in-two-hundred-years storm.”

“Yeah.” Lark’s elfin face twisted into a scowl. “Damn mountains seem to have forgotten it’s spring.”

Weather was always changeable in the Smokies during this part of the year, but the sentinels were right: it was never usually this bad. While RainFire had only been in the area approximately two and a half years, Remi had kept a sharp eye on the region over the past five years, ever since he’d targeted the land for the pack he wanted to build, and not once had the mountains turned this dark and wet and cold in spring.

“Our position on a rise should protect us from any mudslides,” he said. “Theo, I want you to take a team and make sure there’s nothing to worry about around us regardless—be careful, but check to see if the ground shows signs of becoming unstable.”

“Will do.” Theo rubbed at his jaw, as if his stubble itched. “I think we should be good. These trees have roots so deep nothing but the earth cracking open’s going to shake them.”

That was why Remi had chosen this place for the pack’s heart. These “aerie trees” had been planted over three hundred years before by a small pack named RainStone. Then had come the Territorial Wars; RainStone had been decimated in the ensuing fighting, their land passing into the trust created after the wars to hold pack lands that no longer had a living pulse.

Remi and the other founding members of RainFire had flat-out bought a great big chunk of land around this section for their new pack and they had certain changeling rights to areas in public ownership, but the heart piece, they’d had to request from the trust. The trust’s founding document decreed that the entrusted pack lands could never be sold, only be given—to new or old changeling packs that needed it.

As a result, the testing process for those who applied for a land grant was stringent. For an inexperienced alpha who wanted to set up a brand-new pack, it was brutal. That process was overseen by the ten most powerful alphas in the country at any given time. Remi had had to show those tough men and women not only that he had enough committed people and resources to set up a pack and hold the land against outside threats, but also that he had the strength to keep his new pack safe.

Not every changeling with the dominance to be alpha has the heart for it.

It was Lucas Hunter, alpha of DarkRiver, who’d said that to Remi at the start of the three-month period in which he’d acted as Remi’s mentor—a condition of the land grant. His task had been to give Remi a crash course in what it meant to be alpha of a vibrant, growing pack, and assess if Remi had the goods to be entrusted with the task.

Lucas had gone on to add, “You have to create bonds so strong that your packmates know you’ll always have their backs.”

“That’s not even a question.” Remi would fight to the death for his people. “It might’ve taken time for my alpha nature to assert itself, but it’s fucking wide awake now. All I want is my own pack, my own sprawling family to protect.”

Lucas’s green eyes had glinted in approval. “Never forget that—your pack is the heart. The alphas who fuck up are the ones who start to think they’re the most important element of a pack.” A shake of his head, his hair gleaming blue-black in the sunlight, the savage clawlike lines that marked one side of his face clearly delineated. “We’re just the lucky bastards who have the honor of protecting the heart.”

Remi would allow nothing to harm that heart. He intended for RainFire to put down roots as deep and as strong and as unshakable as those of the trees in which they’d made their homes. “Cubs?” he asked, his mind on the most vulnerable of their packmates.

Theo was the one who answered. “All accounted for and where they should be.” His smile reached the warm brown of his eyes. “I did have to chase a couple who thought we were playing hide-and-seek.”

Lark pointed her chin toward the infirmary, her pixie cap of hair standing up in all directions after she ran her fingers through it. “What’s the story with those two?”

Remi gave the three sentinels a rundown of everything he knew to date. With the comm lines down, he couldn’t touch base with Lucas, find out if the more experienced alpha—who also had direct contacts among the Psy—knew what the hell was going on. It looked like he’d simply have to wait for the Arrows to wake up.

If they woke up.

Because right now, from the grim look on Finn’s face, he knew that wasn’t a guaranteed outcome. “How bad?” he asked the healer when Finn paused to gulp down some water.

Wiping off his mouth, Finn just shook his head.