Pawn Among Wolves Ch. 13

Well, if all he's going to do is vandalise the house a little, good, she thought to herself. He has to ease a little of the tension somehow.

Gemma's heart ached with worry as her hot, dry eyes traced over her exhausted mate. She sat silent, watching, her own plate forgotten.

He had changed so much in such a short time. Just five days: the morning after the chase was the last moment of peace he had had, and the relaxation from that short break had long since dissipated.

His cheekbones looked sharp under his grey skin, and his beautiful hair was a lank, lifeless mop. The bloodshot eyes glaring unseeing at the tabletop were pained, dull black, she hadn't seen the green sparkle in days. He tried, but he was so tired, tense, the calls were unrelenting. And he barely got any sleep. His pale skin was trembling lightly, the shiver of intense weariness, but each night, soon after he closed his eyes, either his over-tired brain started shocking pulses through his limbs, or his betrothed cried out under torture.

It was a raw cycle: the sun rose on the Whites, bombarding him with their cries for help, for Mac to help rescue mates, cubs, natal and natali and friends; the demands had spiralled exponentially as the circle of the new pack expanded. Moreover, Grey had recently increased his collection schedule also, as his enslaved workforce expanded, so there were dozens more despairing ex-Grey wolves who needed to be intercepted.

As the day wore on and her mate tore around trying to free more and more of the wolves being recalled, the Mackelds awoke. Often under attack, at dawn. Someone was sneaking into Mackeld range using guerrilla warfare, vicious stealth attacks on small groups of travellers or the outlying homesteads. The Tzo were ostensibly withdrawing from the borders. But the attacks were increasing.

And at night, invariably, Natasha was tortured by Grey.

Mac's strained face was testimony to the relentless, painful circle of burdens. Gemma's eyes clenched closed. If only she could do something.

You've done enough, she told herself bitterly. You're the one who made him go and start rescuing the Whites in the first place.

Her depressed thoughts were spiralling, and she ached as her eyes traced the harsh lines of sad exhaustion scoring deeper day by day into her mate's face.

You're the one who separated him from the Mackelds, she berated herself further, so that he has to burn himself out, guiding them at this distance.

Bizarrely, Mac had found that the strength built from the new ties with the Whites gave him enough reach to be able to battle meld with the Mackelds, even half-way across the continent. It was more exhausting, but possible.

It would have helped further if, as a true Alfamme would, Gemma was able to bind with him to lend him her own strength also. Mates apparently shared strength, as well as burdens. But, useless mate that she was, she looped into insanity at even a hint of the cloying pack meld. And that he could do without.

Gemma drooped as she watched the flickers of strain wrenching the drawn, gaunt face of her mate, her eyes burning with dry tears. She carefully scooped out a spoonful of extra meat sauce to add to his plate.

Wow, such a help you are.

His focus miles away, Mac picked up the crispy potato crust and bit into it, tearing off a large piece to chew down on autopilot. Gemma sat silent, heart echoing in the ache, shuddering at the look of him. He looked worse every day. Worse than she had ever seen him - even poisoned; even shot and blood-mottled and torn to shreds by Grey. He was withering with exhaustion, being sucked dry by the different calls from them all.

Mac's head lifted; his blazing eyes focussed, meeting hers for an instant, an unreadable message flickering through the black depths before the blank distance swamped over his vision again.

Just before someone rang the doorbell.

Gemma lifted her head, startled. All the Whites would have left by now. She looked doubtfully at her mate.

He was back in the battle inside his head, whatever it was. But he had evidently noted the arrival. And left it to her. He was back to staring into the distance, wincing occasionally in twitches, claws drawing blood as they bit into his scalp.

The bell rang again, insistently.

No reaction from her mate.

Silently, Gemma rose and drifted past him to open the door to the corridor, then padded swiftly down toward the large, white-painted front door.

She rose on tiptoe to peer through the spy-eye, heart thundering. After a second or two, confused by the smart grey suit jacket over a smart cream shirt, she gasped in recognition and dropped back onto her heels while she clicked back the lock.

"Will!" she cried as she swung the door wide.

The Mackeld wolf physician stood unmoving on the doorstep, looking down at her, eyes cold.

"May I come in?" he asked.

She stepped back in shock, a little chill running through her, dumbfounded, his harsh scent blasting at her. Will had always been so nice to her. The tall, lean wolf took that as permission and stepped into the hallway, striding swiftly past her down to the kitchen doorway and turning in, unerringly sure of where he was going.

Gemma was running along in his wake, and she caught the burst of fury in Mac's eyes as he looked up and semi-focussed on his brother-in-law, wild-eyed, snarling a deep furious roll as he flashed to lycan and surged from his chair.

What?

Will leapt blurringly fast across the space, also changing form mid-air, and slammed his hands down on Mac's shoulders, shoving him unceremoniously back into his seat, an equal, answering snarl echoing above Mac's.

The pair struggled, power battering against each other, flashing through the air to burn every hair on Gemma's skin and scalp alert as she gaped from the doorway, open-mouthed. Her mind wavered. She should help. But the wolf within her was cringing at the idea - this was an Alpha face-off. Stay out of it.

"You're too tired to win, cunyanido," the doctor barked harshly, words rasped between heaving breaths in the fierce struggle to hold the tawny lycan in his seat. "Let it go." Mac wrenched again at Will's grip, eyes aflame, but couldn't twist free of the fingers clenched to his shoulders, and suddenly his eyes cleared, rushing back to fully here-and-now, and he howled in anguish and slumped suddenly face-down to the table in exhaustion. The tawny Alpha trembled in his seat, almost fainting under a sudden rush to his head, then his head snapped back up to his opponent's, black eyes flashing.

"He can have it for now. But he can't deal with it all," Mac growled angrily at his brother-in-law, propping his elbows on the table and picking up his tumbler to gulp some of the golden liquid.

"Nor can you," bit back the wolf physician sharply, and pulled out Gemma's seat for himself. "You have no choice in this."

"You want it?" Mac said viciously. "After all this time?"

"You know what I want," Will snapped back. Then he sighed, and added on a softer, pained note, "What Rebecca wants. We all want."

There was a short, pungent silence. Then Mac sighed slowly in release and pushed his half-empty glass along the table-top to his brother-in-law. Will took a deep swallow, relaxing in turn with a sigh. The two Alphas sat together in an echoing, seething silence for a moment.

Then Mac's sighed for a second time, sounding very tired, and his eyes were dull, opaque pools again when they lifted and landed on the shocked, uncomprehending face of his mate, standing wavering in the doorway.

"Could you give us a bit of privacy, Gemma?" he asked softly, rubbing a tired palm across his forehead.

William Bancroft had unearthed a small glass tube from one of the pockets of the once smart jacket, now split across his broad, furry shoulders and hanging askew around his torso. He unscrewed the small cap and deftly tilted the open end against the tip of one index finger, then the other, so that a round, golden drop of glutinous liquid quivered on each. He carefully lifted them to massage the ointment gently into his Alpha's temples.

Eyes closed tight and shoulders shuddering with jolts of releasing tension, Mac sighed a third long, deep sigh of release.

"Sure," whispered Gemma, heart aching in fiery pain. "Whatever you need."

And she stepped back and paced quietly off toward the stairs down to her basement, heart sinking, and also surging in anger.

Will could help him.

Her lips twitched, the anger smothered briefly under the rich irony. Typical.

A wereem finally manages to synthesize a very complex drug, keyed to her mate, so that he can hopefully order her to do whatever he wishes without her going insane (temporarily at least), and what does he say? Go away.

HAH!

Her lips were smiling, humour rising over the tingle of anger humming through her. And triumph.

She had no choice about walking out of earshot, it was like an order, but less irritating. The control drug was working.

Gemma tripped tiredly down to the lab, and turned on the radio, looking up at the clock to work out how much longer the drug was likely to have an effect. It must be about at the limit of its duration by this time anyway, her head was already clearing of the stuffy fuzziness, the bonds with her pack reaffirming in her mind. That had been unnerving, when she'd nervously injected herself in the bathroom while he approached up the road. By the time he had made it to the kitchen, it had felt as though she was wearing a weird, muffling set of earplugs, blocking out the sense of the Whites who had sworn to her. But intensifying the sense of Mac.

He could have ordered her to do anything.

Bit of an anti-climax.

Her stomach was doing little somersaults, however.

It had worked.

Gemma sat chewing her lip as she pondered how to get it to work properly, long term. Upping the dose didn't make it last longer, or become more intense, it just made her vomit - she'd tried the muffling drug without the key of Mac's pheromones many times before combining the two.

In some ways she was glad it was wearing off now, before Mac noticed. Telling Mr Overprotective that she'd been testing drugs on herself - well, that might have become a bit of a tricky conversation. Which is why she hadn't told anyone else either, you couldn't trust the Whites to keep a secret from their Alpha. They were all such sycophantic Mac worshipers around here. Including herself.

A little smile was playing over her lips.

Her brain twitched to a new thought.

More important than finding how to synthesise it properly, she should now just concentrate on working out a way of switching it off, so that he wouldn't have to exhaust himself quite so much intercepting and fighting to a standstill all of the ex-Greys. One small injection and they'd be able to think freely for themselves again, at least for a little while.

Despite the internal grump, and the worry about what Will had come for, the wereem had a bubble of suffocating pride lodged in her chest. But dammit, she couldn't tell Mac without also incriminating herself. It would have been so nice to have had her turn being smug.

*

Gemma's thoughts were still making her turn restlessly in the wide bed that night, half-awake. She always found it hard to sleep without her mate beside her, although with her guards in the house she was safe enough. Mac had left on retrieval somewhere straight after Will had departed; one of the White koiru had picked up a trail of a former packmate. Her mate hadn't mentioned what Will had come for.

Drowsy with sleep, her ears twitched to a low buzzing noise close beside her. Gemma's skin shocked tight with fear and she twisted over frantically, claws extended, pouncing before the sleep fully left her. She speared the bedside cabinet with her claws, one a millimetre from her mate's vibrating phone, and smothered an embarrassed laugh. Good job he hadn't seen that one.

Her heart twisted in sadness. He must've been exhausted to have forgotten it.

The light of the screen flashed again with an incoming call, and the phone buzzed as it tried to vibrate out of the cage of her fingers. Gemma was just about to sleepily switch it off when the name caught her eye and a flash of electricity shot through her, jolting her fully awake, sitting upright. She yanked her claws out of the wood, and stared at the handset, heart thundering.

This could be a trap too. She felt her hackles rise slightly, wolf quivering closer to the surface.

Hakan, she called silently, while she picked up the phone.

The door was already silently swinging open, frame silhouetting the bulk of the large wolf, when she pressed the answer button and hissed out angrily, quietly, "Nicolas Grey?"

"Gem? No, it's me - oh my god, thank god," Bethan's voice sobbed down the line.

Gemma felt her eyes flash lycan, the fur lengthening along her limbs. Bastard Grey - what the hell was he planning now, tormenting her with his hostages? Her voice was rasping hoarse with anger as she asked her human friend sharply, heart thundering, "Where are you?"

Bethan drew a shuddering breath, choked, and said, "I don't know." Gemma drooped, she hadn't really expected anything else, but the fire in her head grew. Then it was swamped in a feeling of astonished hope as her friend continued breathlessly, "Kate's driving - like a maniac. Away from that maniac. We have no idea where we are." Bethan choked on a second sob, drawing another deep, shaky breath, while Gemma demanded incredulously, "What happened?"

Had they escaped Grey?

"I don't know!" Bethan almost shouted at her, then drew another uneven breath and half-sobbed words began to tumble from her rapidly, "He - he said his name was Nicholas Grey, and you had something of his, that he wants back. He just - took us. From home. Drove endlessly around in this huge silent car of his, with us packed in the trunk, stopping only in the middle of nowhere - no-one ever heard us, and he would - torment us, if we made a sound, shut in." Bethan paused, the silence only broken by her hoarse, tearful breaths, then she added quietly, ashamed, "We stopped trying. Too afraid to."

"Oh, Bethan," Gemma murmured, her heart clenching in guilt and sorrow. Yes. She knew how scary Grey could be. Wished that Bethan and Kate had never found out. Her hackles rose further, anger heating along her skin.

"We were locked in that damn trunk nearly all the time, treated like cattle - sometimes he'd give us some water and bread, exercise us, sometimes he'd stop in some woods and let us pee. Once Kate tried to fight him, hit him with a branch, but it just broke, and he laughed, and slapped her so hard she fell over."

Bethan was crying. "He liked it, made her get up so that he could do it again. And again." She heaved another breath, before her hysterical gasps quietened.

Gemma bit her lip viciously to keep back the growl which rolled through her body, urging her furious internal wolf to just listen.

"Today he made us get out - stand on a bridge; a narrow old bridge over a big river. We were standing there for hours, freezing, not daring to say anything, call his attention because - he likes hurting people, Gemma, he - well, we knew. Sometimes he would just - examine us. Like we were cattle. Sexual cattle. Terrifying. He got off on our fear."

Gemma's skin was crawling, remembering her own terrified stasis while Nick had examined her, slowly undressing her beside her bed, and she fought to keep her simmering blood from boiling over.

Listen, she snarled the reminder at her internal wolf. They need us to work out a plan, to help. Not just fight. Wait.

Bethan gulped, and her voice began to rise again, terror deepening. The fear in her friend's voice cut through the muffling anger growing in the wereem's head and the simmering wolf within her subsided, quivering in tension.

"He was making hundreds of calls by the bridge, tracking something, ignoring us, ignoring us like we were nothing - and he'd got in and turned the engine back on to charge his phone when suddenly a man appeared, out for a run down toward the crossing. A big man. When he got closer, he slowed down, but Grey got out of the car and straightened up. The runner had started to turn away when Grey dragged us forward by the hair, stalking like he was some jungle cat and shouted, "I'll give you an exchange.""

Bethan was sobbing now, deeply, her voice a pained whine, "It was Gus. He - he recognised us just before we recognised him, and something seeming to flash in his eyes. He just came sprinting: unbelievable; so, so fast and -." She gulped on a sob, "The bastard waited then - just drew a gun and shot him." A shaky, gasped inhalation. "Four times." Another. "Point blank."

Gemma's skin ran cold, mind burning with fire, blood a sharp tang in her mouth when her teeth ground together through her bottom lip. Rage flooded her brain, but if Gus was gone - she knew how much Bethan needed her support, and she fired the reminder through the raging wolf within, forcing it to subside so that she could catch the soft, continuing words of her friend.

"Shot him dead," the choked voice gasped. "Gus sort of - bounced in the air, crumpled. I couldn't believe it - I just, it was so fast. I was just - choked up, staring."

"But not Kate," she added.

Through the bitter sobs, Bethan managed to whisper, "The bastard had let us go to fire, and he then stalked carefully towards the body, keeping the gun on it; I think he'd forgotten we were even there, we were so insignificant to him. He bent over and pulled some damn package from Gus's pocket - your packet that used to sit in our fridge, still sealed."

Bethan's voice had a little tinge of awed glee when she added, "And Kate rammed him with his own damn car." She giggled hysterically. "He'd left the motor running. Probably the kind of chauvinistic idiot who believes women can't drive. I wouldn't have dared."

Gemma couldn't help but choke her own broken gulp of laughter at the pride in Bethan's voice, glee rising above the fear and strain and sorrow, while she licked sealed her bottom lip.

"Yup, the bastard was knocked flying and dropped the damn package he'd killed Gus for, whatever he'd kidnapped us for, is after you for. Kate threw open the door for me and I grabbed the packet as I jumped in. She hit him a second time while we drove past him, he clung on to my door for a while, it was terrifying, looked like he was going to rip the car in two but Kate was awesome - she scraped him against a tree and we shook him off and now -."

Bethan giggled in desperate mirth again, then added on a frantic shriek, "What the hell is going on, Gem?"

Gemma became aware of the alert Alpha in her head as he pushed her silently to ask a damn insensitive question; she snapped back that she wanted to know how they were, more than where, but he cut her short, insisting that unless they could get that car on a highway, and up the speed, Grey would catch up.

Her spine tingling in sudden dread, Gemma withdrew all objections and meekly relayed the staccato volley of questions as they appeared in her head:

"Which side of the bridge are you on? Gus's side or the other?"

Startled at the suddenly brisk tone, Bethan said, "Gus's."

"Have you passed a crossroads?" Gemma could feel the meld on the edge of her mind - Mac was linked with someone outside, possibly several someones, while he directed her questions.