Midnight Wolf (Shifters Unbound #11)(40)
“Mmm.” Tamsin studied the road ahead of them, other vehicles few and far between now. “I think it’s more than that.”
“Probably.” Angus shifted in his seat, his left hand coming to join his right on the wheel. “My instincts don’t like the idea of going to Kendrick’s. What if Shifter Bureau follows us there? That’s a huge chunk of innocent Shifters to put in danger.”
“But no one is following us,” Tamsin pointed out. They’d seen no signs of pursuit since New Orleans.
“I know—that bugs me too. How did we lose Haider so easily? Why didn’t they have Shifter Bureau people all over the place at the Texas border? Shifters aren’t allowed to cross into other states without permission, so it’s a great place to put a checkpoint.”
Tamsin had been having the same thoughts, but she’d tried to put them aside. She’d learned to worry about the here and now, not possibilities, to be cautious but not paranoid.
“Maybe they’re tracking us, sitting back to see where we go. Is there GPS on this truck? Or was there on Reg’s SUV?”
“Dimitri would have taken out any GPS devices before he lugged the cab out of the junkyard. Reg would know if someone had stuck a tracker on his SUV, and he’d have told me. Wouldn’t have brought us the SUV at all, if that were the case. You can’t surreptitiously track a Shifter vehicle—all Shifters know their cars and trucks and motorcycles inside and out. We have to work on them constantly to keep them running.” Angus huffed a short laugh. “Shiftertowns are great places to learn auto mechanics.”
“Or Haider already knows about this guy Kendrick and will be waiting for us at his compound.”
Angus shook his head. “Kendrick is careful. I’ve never met anyone so careful. Dimitri and Jaycee had to talk a long time before he let me out there a few months ago when they had their sun and moon ceremonies. Kendrick doesn’t trust anyone. I had to swear to keep the location of the compound a deep, dark secret, on pain of death. Which I have.”
“Except now you’ve told me. Maybe that’s what your instincts are warning you about. I could be a spy, leading Shifter Bureau right to your friends.”
“You could be,” Angus said without worry. “But I saw how terrified you were when I took you to Haider. You kept your chin up, but I know you were afraid.”
Tamsin shivered. She’d been arrested before, interrogated by Bureau agents before, but never had she met one with eyes as cold as Haider’s. “I don’t know what’s up with him, but he has pure hatred in him. More than what should come from him believing I killed those agents in Shreveport.”
“Which you said you didn’t do.” Angus glanced at her, the gray of his eyes glinting. “I believe you.”
Tamsin remembered telling him about Dion, right before he’d kissed her. Her lips tingled and she went on hastily. “Yeah? How do you know I wasn’t feeding you a line of bull?”
“Instincts again. They’re pretty good. I can imagine you spitting on Shifter Bureau agents, telling them off, pulling down your pants and mooning them, but I can’t see you going insane and clawing them to death. Anyway, that was done by a larger Shifter, a Feline or Lupine. Your claws aren’t big enough to have made those marks I saw in the photos.”
Tamsin looked at her hand, her pale fingers that never could hold a tan. “No, they’re not.”
“So why is Haider so interested in you?” Angus asked.
“He knows what I am.” Tamsin folded her arms over her stomach, moving uncomfortably. It hadn’t bothered her for Angus to find out her true nature, but it had creeped her out when Haider had showed her the video. “He has footage of me shifting to my fox. He had it on his phone and played it with a big smirk on his face. He wants to dissect me. That’s why I ran, why we’re here right now.”
Angus turned to stare at her, and Tamsin kept her face straight. She suspected that Haider wanted to know not only Tamsin’s secrets but Gavan’s, which Tamsin wanted to keep tucked firmly into her brain.
Angus jerked his attention back to the road. “I’m glad you ran. I’ll dissect Haider if I see him again.”
“You didn’t have to help me. I keep telling you to let me out, and I’ll go off on my own.”
Angus scowled. “I wasn’t going to leave you for Haider to catch again. I’m not that much of a dickhead.”
“But it’s my problem. My whole life is my problem. Nothing to do with you.”
“It became my problem when Haider came into the club and ordered me to find you,” Angus said angrily. “When he took Ciaran from me. When he said you worked with my brother. I decided to make it my problem.”
Tamsin lifted her brows, hiding her nervousness. “I sense a big sibling rivalry here. I mean, more than your mate running off with him, the ungrateful cow. Want to talk about it?”
“No,” Angus said, the word abrupt.
“Struck another nerve, did I? You have a lot of those.”
“Why are you so interested in counseling me? I could ask you—”
The jangling noise of his cell phone cut into his speech. Angus snarled and grabbed the phone from his belt, flipping it open. The good thing about an old-style cell phone was that it didn’t have tracking in it. Tamsin had ditched her smartphone and used burners if she used cell phones at all.