Big Bad Bite Page 28
Jenna moved the gun over to her right knee as the woman wailed in agony. Her screams became frantic the second before she felt Jenna manipulate her finger to pull the trigger again, causing another short burst of gunshots now in her right knee. When the alley stopped ringing from the burst of gun fire, the only thing that could be heard was the brunette pleading hoarsely in German. Too bad Jenna didn’t care enough to ask what she was saying.
Other voices were talking to Jenna as her Uncle bent over Adam’s still form to check his pulse, but the roar of anger in her ears drowned the voices out. Letting the Corvus female drop to her ruined knees, she kept the woman frozen as she used the majority of that surge of power to lift the shiny BMW that bitch had been so proud to hide behind. The tires cleared a foot of air before the female realized what was happening and started screaming bloody murder.
Of course, it wasn’t bloody murder yet, but it was going to be.
Jenna smacked the brunette forcefully in the face with her own car door that still hovered in front of her, to shut her up. Then, while the woman was stunned stupid, she catapulted the car up in the air, shut the door all the way so she’d have room to maneuver it around in the alley without hitting a wall, and shifted that silver monster of a vehicle until it was hanging in the air over the stupid woman’s head. Clarity returned to the Corvus female’s eyes just in time for her to look above her and open her mouth to scream again, but whatever sound she would have made was cut off when the car landed on top of her.
Jenna wished the thump-thump-thump of her heartbeat in her head would have stopped so she could have heard the sound of death from the brunette when the car snapped all of the bones in her body, and the sharp edge of dangling metal from the front bumper had sliced through her neck to sever her head from her body, but she’d missed out on it. At least she’d gotten to see the end of the female who had possibly taken her mate from her.
Black closed around the edges of her vision as the blood pounding in her ears got louder. She’d thought that sound should have started to dissipate by now, but the numbness in her body and her declining vision trumped out the worry of her loss of hearing. Then she realized there was something hard digging into her shoulder and hip.
She’d fallen down?
When had that happened?
A shadow fell over her hazy darkened sight, but before she could make out what it was, everything went black….
Chapter Seventeen
Eleven hours later in an Other friendly hospital outside of Wilmington, North Carolina…
Beep.
Beep. Beep.
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep.
Somebody stop the fucking beeping! Jenna peeled her eyelids open as far as she could, which apparently wasn’t very far. Hell, she didn’t think she’d actually cracked them open a millimeter, but that was okay because now she realized there were voices in the room. Angry voices that were arguing in hushed whispers.
“If you’d close your trap for a damn second, woman, I could explain what the hell happened! You need to calm down. You’re agitating Adam in case you couldn’t hear the heart monitor speeding up, you infernal pain in the ass.”
That was Uncle Owen, now who was the infernal pain in the ass woman?
“You’ve done enough, Owen Davies! I let my daughter into your keeping for just a couple of bloody days, and she comes home tiptoeing on Death’s doorstep. If she manages to pull through this I’m going tae find the darkest, scariest fecking hole on this planet, and I’m going tae hide her there from your mangy ass, so you never get your paws on her again!”
And that angry Irish tirade was her Mama.
“You just try and take her from Adam.” Her Uncle replied with a confident tone. “He’ll not only find her, but then he’ll hide her so that you never find her. So I suggest you don’t try to separate the two. She may not have a Mark on her neck yet, but I assure you the two of them are as good as mated. The proof of that claim lays there in the hospital bed struggling to live. She landed herself in this condition because she flipped her shit went Adam was severely injured in Germany.”
A feminine huff, then, “You don’t understand, Owen. She didn’t just use her powers; she tapped into her life source of energy and drained that too.” A sniffle. “It’s why I can’t answer your questions as tae if she’s going tae make it. She damn near snuffed out her own spark of life. Between that and her hybrid genetics, I don’t know if she’s going tae bounce back or not. We’re just going tae have tae wait and see.”A strangled sob, “What the feck did she do to drain her body like that?”
“Your daughter crushed the woman who shot Adam with silver bullets with her own car by levitating it above her head and then dropping it on her.”
Strained silence.
Owen’s worried rumble sounded far away, “We barely kept them both alive on the emergency flight back to the States, Kelly. If that nosy ass tiger hadn’t been around with that fancy medically equipped plane of his, and his highly trained extraction team on standby, then we might not have gotten them home alive at all.”
Jenna’s eyelids felt loaded with sandbags. She tried to fight it so that she could tell her Mama she would be okay, but her lips wouldn’t move, and the black was closing in again.
Beep.
As Jenna slipped under, her last conscious thought was that beeping was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. It was the sound of Adam’s heart beating.
*****
Two days later…
His wolf was frantic; rabidly trying to get his attention so that he could do something about that harrowing noise that was pulling him out of his sleep. Was it his alarm? He didn’t remember setting it. No, whatever it was, it was much more dire than his alarm clock, because his wolf was seconds away from breaking those inner cage walls he’d always stayed in to keep them sane to get out for that noise.
Adam took a deep breath and winced at the pain in his chest. Jesus, had he tried to set himself on fire from the inside out? Every muscle he had felt charred somehow. The discomfort quickly dissipated though when he paid closer attention to the noises in the room. There was yelling. Shouted instructions. Something about a defibrillator? Over it all though, was that god awful alarm that wouldn’t shut up.
He opened his eyes and turned his head towards the noise. There were at least six people crowded around a hospital bed on the other side of the room from his.
He was in a hospital?
Those bodies occasionally shifted this way and that way as they worked on the patient, but Adam thought it was a lost cause because he realized that the alarm was the heart monitor. That alarm clearly said the heart had stopped. He wondered who the poor soul was that had just died.
Bodies shifted again. A gap opened up enough for him to see a small pale feminine hand. The small gap of a view closed as bodies shifted again. Panic lanced through his body. He jerked to a sitting position and craned his neck to wait for the opportunity to see the woman’s face. It couldn’t be. Fate couldn’t be that cruel to him to take the one thing for which he wanted to live for the most.
The doctor ordered the nurse at the head of the bed to go get something Adam couldn’t pronounce from the supply closet in the room. As nurse moved away, that gap of vision finally came. His lungs seized in his chest. The air evaporated from the room. There was a roar echoing in his head. When the first set of hands landed on his body to push him down, trying to restrain him, he realized that roar wasn’t in his head.
That was his roar filling the room.
Because that was her on the bed.
That was his sweet tart lying in the bed across the room from him.
That was his Jenna that the heart monitor was saying had no heartbeat.
Crash.
There went those inner cage bars that held his beast.
*****
There were voices arguing again. God, she could not wait until she was back in her own bed where people were not allowed to argue. O
r interrupt her sleep. How the hell was anybody supposed to get any rest if everyone around them was arguing for Christ’s sake? And weren’t hospitals supposed to be peaceful? All Zen like so you could get your healing mojo out of it?
An angry male voice snarled, “We have to try and wake her up! Don’t you get it? HE’S FUCKING GONE! As in G.O.N.E. Missing for three days! If we don’t try to wake her up now that she’s more stable, even if we do find him, it won’t matter. He’ll still think she’s dead. Seeing her alive is the only thing that’s going to get through to him right now.”
Shit. That sounded like there were serious problems around. She wondered who had died, and who had gone apeshit? Cracking open an eyelid, she spied Adam’s beta Clay standing nose to nose with Logan. What the hell was going on around here? They were so wrapped up in trying to give each other death glares that they hadn’t even noticed she’d come to. She opened her mouth and tried to say something, but her throat was so dry that all that came out was a strangled croak. At least the frog like sound had gotten their attention. Two pairs of angry eyes swung her way, but only her brother’s softened when he saw that she was awake.
Taking quick steps, he came to the side of her bed and put a soft hand on her shoulder. “Hey you. No, don’t try to get up. You need to stay down and get more rest.”
Jenna patted his hand affectionately before pushing it away so that she could sit up in the bed. Logan huffed in frustration, seeing that she had absolutely no inclination to do as he asked, and then pushed the button on the hospital beds remote to shift the head of it to a sitting position so that she could rest against it. Just as she was turning her head in Clay’s direction to ask him to explain what was going on, she found him on the other side of her bed, hands balled into fists, jaw clenched so tight it looked as if it could snap in half. There was a struggle of some sort going on there; only she didn’t understand what it was. Was he angry at her? He certainly looked mad enough to wring her neck. Then Clay did something that truly shocked the shit out of her.
He dropped to his knees, averted his eyes to the side, and bared his throat in submission to her.
Jenna forced words through a dry throat and mouth that didn’t want to work, “What are you doing?” She sounded worse than a frog being strangled, but at least she’d asked what needed to be said.
Without changing his posture, Clay answered, “Trusting you to be the kind of Alpha’s mate that the McPhee Pack needs.”
Her confusion compounded. If she were in the kind of groggy state of mind one experienced after waking up, she’d blame it on that. However, that wasn’t the case here. In fact, besides her extremely sore throat, she was starting to feel better every second. Doing a quick internal check of herself, she noticed that it felt like her abilities, the power she drew from to use, were doubling by the minute, and she was on the fast track to at least that aspect of her body being back to normal. Her physical body felt like a different story. Besides her throat, her muscles felt cramped, stiff and sore, which made no sense to her at all. It wasn’t as if she’d been out running the Boston Marathon yesterday. So why did her body feel like it had been put through the perpetual ringer?
Pulling herself out of her musing, she turned her head to ask Logan how long she’d been out but stopped when she saw the look in his eyes. He was trying to stab Clay in the face using nothing but the powers of his mind, and since he didn’t have any actual powers of the mind, this level of concentration and open hostility was kind of vexing to her. She looked back to Clay to see him in the same prostrate position, utterly unmoved by even a muscle. Which just seemed wrong to her on so many levels it wasn’t funny. A wolf as dominant as Clay, a man who would only bow down to his Alpha, who was Adam, or the Pack Master Davies, just did not belong on his knees in front of her. It was similar to forcing the lion to bow in submission to the lamb. Unseemly. And why did it seem as though the wolf was waiting on pins and needles for something? Hell, he was barely breathing as he waited in anticipation for something. Why should he be waiting for anything if it was to come from her? He should be out dogging Adam if he needed something.
Which lead her to her next thought; where was the man he should be kneeling in front of? Jenna was anxious to see Adam. There were vague flashes of memory she knew were from this hospital room where she’d heard his heart monitor beating, so she knew he was alive, but he wasn’t here with her. Why? He needed to be here. She had things that she wanted to say. Apologies to give him for putting him through hell, by asking him to wait to claim her as his mate. Promises to make by telling him that she knew, without a doubt, that she wanted his Mark more than she wanted her next breath. So where was her mate?
She lifted her nose slightly up to scent the air, but what little remained of Adam’s unique scent was so old that she knew he hadn’t been in this room for quite a while. Hadn’t he stayed with her after he’d woken up? Why would he leave her and not come back to visit?
She turned back to Clay and growled, “Where is Adam?”
He sighed in relief. It was the only movement his body made as he still held himself in rigid formality on his knees. Apparently that was what he’d been waiting for. “He disappeared three days ago.”
“WHAT?”
Before Clay could continue, Logan laid a hand on her shoulder to get her attention, “Stay calm. We’ll find him, Jenna.”
She was frantic. “Why has he disappeared, Logan?” Her mind was reeling. She felt like a boxer who’d taken one too many hits in the ring. Looking back and forth between her brother and Clay she asked, “How long has he been gone and why did he go? He didn’t want to stay here with me?”
Clay cut off Logan’s attempt to answer, “Three days ago your body gave out and you flat lined. Adam woke up while the doctors and nurses where trying to revive you. When he realized it was you in the bed, he snapped. The staff tried to restrain him, but we’re sure he’s slipped into a feral rage. He half shifted right there on the bed, threw the doctor and two nurses who were trying to hold him down against the walls,” Clay pointed to the body sized dents in two different walls, “and then tore out of here howling like a banshee. We tracked him to different sections of the forest along the edge of the Pack’s land, but we’ve been unable to corner him, or pinpoint his location at any given time. The only reason we know he’s still alive is because we can hear his agonized howls every so often.”
Jenna was moving before Clay had finished his speech. Logan tried to keep her on the bed, loudly vocalizing his protests that she wasn’t strong enough to leave but Jenna shoved his hands away, snarling at him, and started lifting random items around the room where he could see them to make a point. Her brother flung his hands up in a pose of surrender and stepped back from the bed. Clay held out a hand to help her down off the bed, but she refused to take it, trying to make a point to them both that she was indeed strong enough to go looking for her missing mate. When her feet touched the floor she wobbled a bit because of her unsteady legs, but once she didn’t feel as if she was going to topple over face first, she demanded clothes.
Walking out against doctor’s orders and family protests was one thing. Walking out with her ass hanging out the back of a hospital gown was another. Wilmington had already seen her in on the front of a newspaper in a sports bra; she’d like to at least keep what her tush looked like to herself. And well, Adam could see it once she found him, but that’s where she drew the line, damn it. Generic gray sweatpants, a black men’s t-shirt, and a pair of cheap flip-flops were handed to her. Pointing a finger to the door, she cocked an eyebrow at both of the men and the room, sending the silent directive.
Get the fuck out.
She was getting dressed without supervision. Once the door had clicked shut, she pulled the clothes on as quickly as she could manage, and then slipped her feet into the flip-flops. There was no time to lose. A pissed off wolf was half shifted and running around in the woods like a mad man with no telling if his human half had checked out altogether or not.
If she was going to find him, and bring him back to the land where the sane people dwelled, she had to haul ass. Because if she didn’t, then there was a good chance that a hunting party would be gathered soon to track down and kill the only man she’d ever loved.
This shit was ridiculous. She couldn’t believe that she was standing here arguing when she had to go. On the edge of the woods behind Adam’s house in the McPhee Pack territory stood a wall of people trying to stop her from heading out into the woods. Her Uncle, her Mama, her brother, and her Uncle Rick were all looking at her as if she had marbles rolling around loose in her head for brains, and refusing to let her leave. Behind her stood Amy, Clay, and six other unknown faces from Adam’s Pack. All to back her up so that she could go search for their missing Alpha before some truly tragic shit happened. Like someone going out there and taking his head off because they thought there was no hope in hell of saving him.
That would happen over her dead body.
So here they stood wasting precious time. Her fuse was about to burn down, and then BOOM! She was going to blow up and go postal all over there asses. They were just damn lucky she didn’t have one of her guns on her, because if she did, she’d be making them do some old fashioned fancy cowboy footwork as she let off multiple shots near their feet to get their pain-in-the-butts moving out of her way. Unfortunately, no one seemed to have any firearms with them. Very inconvenient.
Crossing her arms over her chest she huffed, “Look. I get that you’re trying to look out for my welfare and that you’re worried about me since I just got out of the hospital, but you need to move out of my way. I need to find him. Not next week. Not even tomorrow. Today. I need to find Adam now. The longer we wait, the further he slips into a feral rage, the more likely it is that we lose him for good. I can’t risk that. I won’t risk him. Don’t ask me to.”