Cry Wolf (Wolves of Angels Rest #7)(30)

That sounded bad. Very bad.

As the strobe light in her vision started to go black, she thought of what Diesel had said about getting into trouble.

It seemed she had stumbled into his secret war.





Chapter 11

Awareness came back to her in waves. She was cold. She could hear. And then she could smell.

Ugh! The acrid stench seemed to cloud her sinuses and her clearing mind like psychic vomit.

The smell of fear.

She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. And it wasn’t just her own. Old layers of the reeking miasma sent her pulse racing, threatening to drag her back under, but she struggled to stay alert.

She took slow breaths, waiting for sensation to return to her extremities. Meanwhile, she cursed every rom-com she’d watched when she could’ve been studying thrillers or action-adventure. Or horror movies.

No, this was all a mistake. They had her mistaken for… Oh god, why had they called her it?

How was she going to get out of this? No one knew where she was. Her band thought she was out of reach for a couple weeks, and at the earliest, Betsy wouldn’t find her note until tomorrow some time. Even then, no one would know where to look for her.

She was on her own.

A shiver wracked her, cracking the ice holding her muscles hostage. Biting back a groan, she forced her eyelids to part, though it felt as if someone had glued her lashes together with her industrial-strength hairspray.

She blinked hard, clearing the haze from her vision.

The last thing she remembered—the parallel lines of dark legs marching toward her—had been replaced by the thinner, equally dark, and totally unmoving steel bars of a cage.

A cage.

A draught of cold air snaked across her, and she shivered again helplessly. She was lying on her side on the floor of the cage, the bars bruising her from below, the concrete underneath leaching what little heat she had in her body.

She’d been stripped down to her tank top and underwear.

Fighting the effects of the cold and whatever drug they’d shot into her, she pushed herself upright. The metal bars ground on her tail bone, and this time she couldn’t hold back a whimper.

Something clanged next to her and hissed.

Choking on another cry, she dragged herself to the middle of the cage, away from the threatening noise.

A single, harsh floodlight beaming through the bars made a confusion of glare and shadow, but when she forced herself to focus on the sound, she realized she was looking at another cage just out of reach of hers.

Something moved in there, something with glittering yellow eyes.

It paced sideways, still staring at her. It was huge, easily a few hundred pounds. Bristling, dark brown hair covered its hunched spine, though it moved almost upright. Humanoid hands grasped at the bars between them.

But long, sharp claws ticked ominously across the steel.

In her horror, Willow held her breath, and after a long moment, the thing turned away.

She felt the rage billowing off it, though it held no warmth, just more icy fury. But it didn’t attack.

Because it knew. It knew it couldn’t get to her, and it didn’t want to attract attention either. Somehow it wasn’t a beast, or not entirely.

It, it, it. That’s what they had called her.

Who where they? What was this thing?

Why did they think she was one of them?

Slowly and silently, so as not to attract the thing’s attention again, she swiveled to look at the rest of the place.

She’d played enough early crappy gigs to recognize the smell of an old warehouse: rust and dirt and bird shit. The floodlight indifferently illuminated a row of cages. She was at one end, and the hairy monster was next to her. She couldn’t see past the next few before the steel bars and shadows became too entangled, but at least some of them held more large, dark, motionless bulks.

What the hell was she—a spangled country western singer—doing in the middle of these monsters?

She wanted to scream, but she didn’t want to rouse the creatures. Or alert her captors. Not until she had some sort of plan.

A plan? A frantic wash of despair mixed with smothered hysterical laughter churned in her gut. Who did she think she was?

Forcing herself to calm, she asked herself, what would Diesel do?

She searched every square inch of her cage and the short distance she could reach between the bars. Her neighbor turned to watch her, yellow eyes gleaming behind a fanged snout, but made no other noise even when she reached tentatively between their two cages.

She found nothing except dust wedged against the bars on the floor.

None of the bars seemed flawed, and none of the joints were loose. The hinges on the door were reinforced, and the lock was fancier than the one on her suite back in Vegas—oh god, why had she ever left that cage when at least it had been gilded?—but seemed to require a similar security card since her questing fingertips found neither keyhole nor punch pad.

Trapped.

She started her search again. This time, the beast in the nearest cage did make a noise.

And it sounded like a mocking laugh.

Maybe she was going crazy, but she flipped it off, and it turned away with another low snort.

She froze as the floodlight beamed across it. Through the ragged hair on its disturbingly humanoid upper body, a tattoo marked its shoulder.

A stylized sun.

Not unlike the crescent moon on Diesel’s belly.