Cade (3 page)

So they learnt the hard way and took spares with them. For this, Cade was at least thankful as he pulled off one shirt to replace it with another. He balled up the dirty shirt, took a bottle of water from his bag and poured it onto the cloth, using that to wipe the blood from his hands and face in a feeble attempt to make himself somewhat presentable. The shirt came away dark with blood, although Cade knew that it wasn’t his. He hadn't realised just how much blood had covered him.

Taking what was left of the water in the bottle, he bent over and emptied it onto his head. He preferred to have to explain why his hair was wet rather than why it was covered with blood.

After throwing everything into the boot and closing it, he locked all of the doors and then stood there, just staring into the car. Behind him was the lane. It wound all the way down to the farm on the corner. He couldn’t see as far as the Davies’ house. The lane he was on was well-hidden from the main road. It was missed often, even by those who knew that it was there. Cade, himself, had sailed past it many a time, much to his disgrace and Stephen’s amusement. It was no more than a break in the hedgerow.
Others
weren’t important enough to need roads, so they didn’t get them. They got dirt roads instead. It wasn’t so bad this time of year, but in the spring and autumn, when the rains began, the lane was just a stream of mud, and then, in the winter, it became a path of ice.

Cade closed his eyes and reached into his mind, summoning his
wolf.
When he appeared, he tried to locate the young half-breed. Deep in the hidden recesses of his own mind, he found the young
wolf
lying motionless with his head resting on his front paws. Cautiously, Cade padded over to the fledgling. Sadness hung in the hair, seeming to permeate his very soul. In the way of the wolves, Cade bowed his head and rubbed it along the top of the cub’s, his dominant
wolf
seeking to mollify the young
wolf
. “I’ll be back soon.” The words were spoken between their minds. “Breathe.” His
wolf
licked along the small
wolf’s
head, the act an ultimate expression of parental nurture.

When Cade opened his eyes, sadness still flowed around him, the shroud of darkness threatening to consume him. “I’ll be back,” he whispered, trying to appease his guilt for leaving him for even a second. “I promise. Just hang in.” He took a deep breath and forced himself to walk away from the car. His heart tore at the thought of what the young boy must be going through to emanate such pain.

He walked swiftly but stealthily, not wanting to set the animals off in the fields, although they were probably used to
Others
by now. Still, it wasn’t worth the chance. Gravel, which the farmer had thrown down to help with traction, crunched under Cade’s boots. It must have been a real pain for him, Cade mused, the road being just a mudslide some days. The farm, like Billy’s, was filled with sickly or small animals, but they produced milk and cheese and eggs. It was better than nothing. Mostly,
Others
didn’t like to consume those kinds of foods;
Human
foods. It never really sated the hunger inside. Sort of like drinking a glass of water to make the hunger pangs go away for a moment.

The Davies’ house had a majestic beauty about it, impressive in size, grandiose in its intricate design, it was a display of incontrovertible power. Vast fields and lands, where the Davies family liked to run, made up the backdrop.  The house comprised seven bedrooms, one of which had been converted into a study, and another into a library where all the Society records were held. Another was used for storage—much like some used their attics. Downstairs, the house afforded two lounges, a summer lounge, and a dining room that led off to an office. That was the room Malcolm used the most. It was to the back and out of the way, but it was downstairs and one of the lounges doubled as a meeting room for the Society once a month.

Cade walked across the cobbled driveway and up the small steps to the porch. He didn’t use the front door—that was for the mailman and people who didn’t know the house. Instead, he headed straight for the door to the kitchen … and stopped. He stood there, staring at the brass knocker in the centre of what felt like a giant door suddenly. Never in his life had he hesitated before knocking on the Davies’ door, but tonight he did. .

“They haven’t developed telepathy yet. You have to knock,” said a soft voice behind him.

Cade spun around, his heart lurching as he looked for the owner of voice. The voice that had the power to ignite fires deep inside him.

“Gem?”

She stepped out of the shadows, grinning at him. His breath stopped. God, she was so beautiful. With feline grace and agility, she came to stand in front of him, still grinning. She stood close enough that all he had to do was reach out and he’d be able touch her; close enough that just one step would bring him flush against her, supple curves yielding to the male hardness of his body. Gritting his teeth, he slammed the lid shut on that train of thought. Gemma was out of bounds. This was his best friend’s little sister. He had watched her grow up, for god’s sake. Protected her as if she were his own sister. He shouldn’t be thinking of her in any kind of sexual way at all. What was wrong with him?

“What are you doing out here?” He hated the way his voice came out hoarse. He cleared his throat and tried to regain his composure.

“Just sitting.” She walked to the small wall of the porch. Perching on it, she stretched out her long legs in front of her, crossing them at the ankles. Cade had to drag his gaze off them. The gypsy style top she had on flowed over the top of her denim shorts, her legs bare all the way to her small tennis shoes. “Some council crap going down. Evie’s in bed.” Evie was her younger sister. “My mum’s faffing in the kitchen, and my father’s trying to make as many calls as possible all at the same time. He’s got Stephen running around like an idiot.”

“Something’s happened?”

She shrugged. “I’m not important enough to know that, am I?” Sarcasm belied the seeming nonchalance of her words. “I was shoved out after some call. Apparently some
Human
got himself chomped on this afternoon.”

Cade’s skin went cold. “Oh?”

“In Preesall. “ Gemma’s eyes narrowed. “You look awfully pale. Are you okay?” When he didn’t reply immediately, she pushed herself from the wall and came towards him, worry playing over her features. Cade backed up a little. He wasn’t sure if it was because she’d find something incriminating on him, or whether he was afraid he’d lose control if she came too close again and do something really stupid—like grab her and kiss her.

“Your hair’s wet.”  She breathed in deeply.  Her eyes widened, flicking up to meet his. “You smell like
Humans
. Cade?  What’s going on? Is this to do with what my father is dealing with?”

He ignored her question. “The Society is coming?”

Gemma nodded. “I’d imagine so. What’s going on?”

“Can you get Stephen for me?”

Gemma’s jaw set in a stubborn line, clearly unhappy about being disregarded and asked to play messenger. “Go in and get him yourself.”

Cade leaned back against the wall. He rubbed his face, tension radiating from him in waves. His head was ready to explode. The Society would be arriving soon. As second-in-command, his father would be here.

“Cade?” Gemma said gently when she got no reply yet again. She touched his arm softly, her fingers warm and delicate. Electricity shot through him at the simple touch, threatening to melt any resistance. He pushed away from the wall, putting a good distance between them. Being this close to her was not a good idea. His hunger raging as it was and the chaos that was just about to break out was a lethal combination.

“Can you just grab Stephen for me?” He sounded desperate now. He couldn’t have her putting her hands on him again. He didn’t trust his control. “Don’t tell your dad I am here.”

He could see that she wanted to ask why, watched her wrestle with it for a moment. “Okay,” she finally whispered, then disappeared into the house.

Stephen was outside moments later, his tall, muscular frame seeming to dwarf Gemma at his side.

“We need to talk,” Cade told him sternly, already walking out of earshot of the house. “Away from the house.”

“You're breaking up with me?” Stephen joked, as they trailed behind him.

Cade stopped walking and turned to face them. Stephen’s cocky grin slowly faded when he saw the expression on his friend’s face. “Something wrong?”

“What’s going on in there?” Cade asked.

“I have no idea. Some kid got himself eaten. They think it’s
Other
.”

“They always think it’s
Other
,” remarked Gemma. “They could see a
Human
do something and still we’d take the shit for it.” Cade had to agree with her there.

“Well, yeah ... but this time it is,” Cade said. “And that
Other
is in my car.”

Both Gemma and Stephen stared at Cade as they took the words in.

“Say that again?” Stephen said after a minute. “The
what
is in your car?”

“It’s a kid. A boy,” Cade frowned. “Maybe like Evie’s age. “

“What’s he doing in your car?”

“I was running. I found him out in Denby Woods. He was out of it.”

Gemma glanced around. “Where’s your car.”

“I parked it down the lane.”

Stephen cocked his head to the side and narrowed his gaze. “What are you not saying?”

Cade met his stare levelly. “He’s a half-breed. He has the hunger.”

Chapter Six

A pin. That was all that needed to drop and it wouldn’t matter where, because the silence that had suddenly filled the air was that thick. That was what came to Cade’s mind—a pin. He watched Gemma and Stephen’s faces, could see the countless thoughts going on behind both sets of green eyes.

“He’s just a kid,” Cade said in defence, holding his hands out to the side with a shrug at the words that hadn't been spoken, but he knew were there. “I couldn’t just leave him. They’d have beaten the shit out of him. Someone already did.”

He ground his teeth and glanced from Stephen to Gemma, willing them to say something. Anything.

No response at all.

“Fine,” he said. “Both of you, standing there and judging me. What would you have done? Left him? I could have dumped him somewhere. I could—and then they could find him and then they’d ...” Cade stopped, took a deep breath. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter. Sorry,” he said after neither of them had said a word for a full two minutes. “Shit. This was a mistake. Forget I came here. Just go back to … whatever it was before.” He turned away, hurt that Stephen didn’t seem to be willing to help, but more than that, it was the disappointed look on Gemma’s face that speared right through him.

He didn’t get very far. Gemma ran after him and caught his arm. “Cade. Wait,” she cried. He shrugged her off and carried on walking, feeling incredibly wounded by the lack of an immediate offer of help. Every step heavy with foreboding—he’d have to deal with this on his own.

“Cade … please stop.” Gemma begged him. “You saved him?”

Cade stopped, his back to her. “I thought that’s what I was doing.” Underlying frustration coated every word. “I couldn’t just leave him there.”

“He’s killed a
Human
?” said Stephen, who had come to stand with them. Cade turned to face him. “Because that’s what’s going on with them in there,” he continued, pointing back in the direction of his house.

“I think so. I saw the body. It was pretty torn up, but it’s … it’s just …” Cade tried to find the right words. “This kid’s face … he … someone knocked ten bells of shit out of him. Maybe he was just defending himself.”

“His hunger has started?” asked Gemma.

“It has. I gave him rabbit. And I calmed him down.” He lowered his voice. “I had to reach him to do it.”

Stephen’s face said it all in that instant—shock, horror and a mixture of bloody hell to add to it for good measure. “You joined his mind? You went in and joined?”

No reply.

Gemma tugged at Cade’s arm so he would look at her. She looked him straight in the eyes, searching for answers before she asked the question. “You’re bound to him, aren’t you?” she whispered in shock.

“You went and
bound
yourself?” Stephen’s voice was thick with disbelief.

“He needed to calm down. There wasn’t any time for anything else.”

“Shit,” he finally breathed. “Fucking shit. You couldn’t find another way?”

“I couldn’t leave the kid there. They brought Urobachs in. They torched the entire woods. All of it gone.”

“They’ve torched all the ones around it, too,” Stephen added. “It’s a whole shit storm going on for one dead
Human
. That’s what my dad is dealing with right now. He’s going insane in there.”

“If you’d have got caught, too,” Gemma said softly, “they’d have killed you.”

Cade shrugged. “Probably.” He glanced at Stephen, who had started to pace up and down. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come here with this. I just … they’ve blocked the roads off and I thought … Hell, I don’t know what I thought. I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have got either of you involved. This is my mess.” He turned to stride off, regretting that he might have just put his friends in a very dangerous position.

“We’re not letting you do this alone,” Gemma shouted, running to catch up to him.

“You really think you’re going to have all the fun without me?” Stephen drawled on the other side of him.

Relief swamped Cade. He knew he should refuse their help, deal with it on his own and protect his friends from getting into any trouble. But he didn’t. He
needed
their help. He had no idea how to get the boy to safety as fast as possible. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely, looking from one to the other.

Gemma reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, her luscious breasts pressing against his chest. He went completely motionless, his mind threatening to blank. He was already in the balance, trying to hold onto the boy mentally, trying to hold his own hunger down, and then trying to fight this crazy attraction to Gemma. She invaded his senses, his mind, making the
wolf
inside pace in restless urgency as it demanded to be given what it wanted. But he couldn’t. There were so many reasons why what he wanted was wrong. His arms came around her as if of their own volition, holding onto her a bit too tightly. He took a deep breath and made himself back away, putting a safe distance between them both before his mind was lost to it all.

He didn’t know what had come over him lately. He didn’t know what it was or what to do with it. He’d known Gemma since she was a child. She was practically his sister. But when she was near him, it was as if his
wolf
couldn’t see that she was a
tiger
, or that it simply didn’t care. The need inside him rose high and demanded that he grab hold of her and never let go. The
wolf
wanted to make her his in every way possible.

“I’ll meet you at the car,” Stephen said. “I’m just going to tell the parents that we’re going out. You go ahead.”

“Malcolm isn’t going to let you leave.”

“That’s why I’ll be telling my mother,” Stephen winked and then ran off in the direction of the house.

The first thing Cade did when they got to the car was check to see if the boy was still out of it—that he wasn’t raging and ready to leap and rip out their throats as soon as he opened the door.

“If the
Humans
get the boy, you’re going to die, too,” Gemma said softly from behind him, her voice trembling. “You’re bound to him. He’s going to take you down with him.”

Cade faced her once more, wishing he trusted himself enough to take her in his arms and soothe her fears. “He’s a half-breed.” He smiled reassuringly and reached out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear, risking that small measure of contact because, quite simply, he just needed it. “Maybe it doesn’t work that way.”

Cade hoped to hell that was true. He had never bound himself to anyone before. He knew that people could die from it if one of the dyad died, especially if the bond was strong. But would it be strong with something that wasn’t pure? The boy certainly couldn’t bind himself back. Perhaps if anything happened, Cade could sever the link? He hoped he could, but even more than that, he hoped nothing happened to the boy.

They waited by the car for Stephen to come back. Cade was reluctant to open the door while it was just him and Gemma. He knew the boy wouldn’t hurt them—not on purpose but he wasn’t confident that the boy could be anywhere near rational if his hunger struck again.

“He’s in there?” Stephen asked as he approached them.

“Yes,” said Cade. “He’s calm. I fed him before.”

“You make him sound like a pet.”

“A hungry
were
is a dangerous
were
,” replied Cade with a frown.

“He isn’t a
were
,” shot Stephen. “He isn’t one of us.”

“Don’t be a jerk. That’s just semantics. Whatever you want to call him, he is one of us now. He has the blood of the wolf surging through his veins. You of all people know what the hunger is like when you haven’t fed.”

Stephen glared at him and Cade knew he had hit
that
nerve. But he needed to. Arguing about what the boy was now, wasn’t going to help them. Stephen had suffered the hunger. It was a cheap shot, and maybe Cade would regret the hurtful words later. The best punishment the Society ever came up with was ‘the cage.’ A cage where they put
Others
who needed to be punished. They stayed there through the full moon. The full moon theory was true—kind of. A
were
could resist, but it would take everything they had not to answer the call of the Luna cycle. In the cage, the hunger would rise in them, but they couldn’t shift. The cage was entwined with silver. As the full moon rose in the sky, like a mother calling its child home, the child could only whimper and cry like a baby gull in the wind, and no one would answer. No one could last in the cage.
Weres
had gone mad in there. Some had died. Some literally clawed their own skin from their bodies in a bid to free the animal inside—but it wouldn’t matter. All they had done was free themselves from their lives.

Stephen had gone into the cage once. Once was enough. He had screamed and yelled for his father to let him out. But Malcolm had told him that he was teaching him respect. Stephen had undermined his father’s authority in front of the Preternatural Council. Disobedience like that could have meant death, but being son of the alpha had saved him. Any
were
who had been in the cage, knew to respect it and to fear it. However, Stephen had got out. No one knew how, and he wouldn’t say, but they had found him days later. Something inside him had changed. The boy, who had been locked in the cage, was not the same man who had come out. Cade had tried to ask once. How he got out and what had happened. Stephen had walked away and refused to talk about it. Later, he had told Cade never to mention it again. But this time it was different. This time, Cade needed to make Stephen see what this boy was going through and not cast him aside as everyone else would.

He watched as Stephen exhaled heavily, and then, just like that, relaxed and bent to the car to peer in through the glass as if nothing had been said. “He’s young,” Stephen remarked.

“Yes,” Cade agreed with a sigh, “but I don’t know how young. His
wolf
is young.”

“You saw his
wolf
when you bound with him?”

“Yes.”

“Did you claim it?”

Cade thought back to the moment he had leant into the boy—to when he had comforted him with touch. It was what
wolves
needed. They needed the touch and the closeness. Stephen would not understand that. He was
tiger
. They did not have the same need for touch.

“I was just doing what felt right,” he said. “I couldn’t just leave him.”

They all froze at the sound of a vehicle. Cade’s heart jumped into his throat as he waited. But whatever it was drove past the end of the lane.

“We need to move him. Before they come and before my dad brings the Society here.” Stephen was already moving, looking around as if the answer to their problem lay somewhere there.

“What are you thinking?” asked Gemma.

“”I haven’t a fucking clue,” he said, shaking his head. “Fly? Teleport? It seems about the only thing we can do.”

“All the roads are blocked,” Cade said. “We can't get past the Thatched … they have a blockade there.

“They’ll have roadblocks everywhere.” Stephen stared up at the dark sky and you could almost see his mind working. “We can't go back into the woods. It’s all gone.”

“They’ll have it all swept and contained by now.” Cade knew that they would be doing it like someone popping a bubble and hoping the boy would erupt from the pinch point.

“We could go around the Shovels,” Gemma suggested. “I know it’s a
Human
place, but they’re …”

“Too stupid to block that off,” Stephen finished off for her. “Because they think we’d not go there.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“It’s a risk, though,” said Cade. “If there are
Humans
there.”

“We can go down the side, through the car park. It’s too dark and cold for their precious little arses. We can get to the estuary. Get over that and then to your place.”

“You’re talking about swimming over?” Cade had to admit it wasn’t such a bad plan as long as the tide wasn’t in. They’d be screwed if it was high. “How do we get the boy over?”

“You make him,” said Stephen. “You go in his mind and you make him shift, and then you take control and get his arse over to the other bank with you.”

“That means binding deeper?” Gemma’s features were etched with worry.

He could bind to the boy more. Would it matter so much? He couldn’t turn him over to the
Humans
now. They were already tied. But if he bound more, his life would hang in the boy’s hands. Cade knew they’d be connected for life if he went in too deeply. “What if I bind and he doesn’t make it through his first shift?”

“You're son of an alpha, Cade. The most that will happen is that you get sick for a while. You have pure blood in your veins. You can take it. We’ll be right here with you.”

“And if I can't?”

“Then you’re gonna haunt my arse for a while.”

“There isn’t another way?” Gemma asked. “We have to risk his life?”