Hollow Back Girl Page 20

  There were, however, distressed, sad, pained, and confused animals all through the section I was exploring. I controlled the crying that wanted to come, though I couldn’t stop all the tears from spurting. Chloe rubbed my back as a sob forced its way through my lips, and I found my empathy reaching for her pity as if it wanted to wrestle it inside me and add to the dystopia of distress and sorrow thrashing about. I fought the urge, walling myself up as best as I was able, and kept moving.

  When several minutes had passed and it was clear I hadn’t found anything useful, Chloe gripped my shoulders, squeezing gently until I opened my eyes.

  “Is it too big for you to feel the whole building?”

  I sniffled, wishing I had a tissue, or at least that I could get to my shirt under my jacket and Kevlar. I swiped my hand over my nose, wiped it on my jeans.

  “No, I can get a sense of the whole thing, unfortunately.”

  “Let’s move a little faster, okay?” Chloe asked, rubbing my shoulder encouragingly. I nodded and started moving again. Owen had his back to us, but he kept up as we moved further along the line. I could still feel the animals at the edge of my empathic range, but it was more bearable in this section. There were no people, no animals and, unfortunately, no Lofriska.

  “Nothing,” I said once we’d reached the spot where we’d started. Chloe nodded, stepping away from the building, checking something on her watch, and then moving further out into the open. I followed, curious what she was looking for, eyeballing the building from a new vantage point. It looked like every other office, boring and bland, with a covered seating area we’d moved through in our initial pass.

  “This is their only location in the area,” Chloe said, shaking her head and pacing away from me, frustration pulsing like a raw wound. “If she lied, I swear—”

  “She didn’t,” I insisted, closing in on her, intending to ease her discomfort. “What if—whoa.” I paused, my empathy picking something up to my right that everything in me hoped mightily was an awful hallucination.

  “You find it?”

  “Maybe,” I mumbled. Staring out into the forest past the edge of the parking lot, I took a step forward. “But it’s not in the building.”

  “Excellent,” Chloe said and I felt a spark of relief in her. “As long as you’re sure it’s what we’re looking for.”

  “It is, but it’s not alone.” Four more steps and I was sure I knew exactly what I was feeling and what a pain in the ass it was going to be. “The Lofriska is in the woods, but there are four—five guards. At least.”

  “We can handle that,” Chloe said. The edges of my empathy charred from proximity and I swore, pulling back.

  “Not all the guards are human.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” I whined. “Do you understand what kind of message this sends to children?” Chloe looked around, made a show of it.

  “What children? We’re all adults here.” She landed her gaze on me, lifted a brow. “Mostly.”

  “You should come up with another plan; it’s freezing out here.”

  “Take off your clothes or I’ll take them off for you.” Chloe reached out, swatted away my attempts to stop her, and unzipped my jacket. “Come on.”

  “You look smug,” I said to Owen, pointing as Chloe shoved my jacket over one shoulder; she’d already rid me of the kevlar. “You come up with better idea?”

  “No, I’m just picturing you both naked while she undresses you.”

  Chloe snorted and I felt a giddy dance of mischief wiggle out of her at his joke. I let her pull my jacket all the way off, hand it back to Owen. As his hand touched the fabric, she wagged her brows at him before she looked back to me.

  “If it makes you feel better, we can both picture him naked, too.”

  I rolled my eyes, but couldn’t resist smiling at the idea. Crappy situation or not, Owen looks pretty good in the buff. Chloe just kept working on my clothes, tugging my shirt up until she couldn’t go any further.

  “Up,” she ordered. I sighed, lifted my arms.

  “Why do I have to be bait? Why do I always have to be bait?”

  “It’s your only skill,” Owen told me, still leaning against a nearby tree, my jacket in hand.

  “Not my only skill,” I said, despite the fact that I couldn’t, in that moment, think of any outside my empathy and the fact that I was a pretty okay driver.

  “Making fun of Mel and eating cakes is not going to help. Distracting the werewolf while we take out the others is.”

  “But why do I have to be naked? Why can’t I just sashay up, jiggle my boobs and go, ‘Hey Sailor?’ That works in movies.”

  “No it doesn’t,” Chloe argued, dropping down to untie my sneakers.

  “Whoa!” I said. “I don’t get to keep my shoes?”

  “You can’t take your jeans off with shoes on.”

  “Oh,” I relented with a nod.

  “But, no, you can’t keep your shoes. No one will believe you’ve been held captive and beaten up if you’re wearing sneakers.”

  “Dammit,” I grumbled. “Okay, stop. Wait. One more thing, why can’t you guys just pull out some sniper rifle and drug them all from thirty paces?”

  “I left my rifle in my other pants,” Owen said, looking around idly as if keeping watch, but just for, like, interloper bunnies or something that couldn’t actually hurt us.

  “The guards are spread out far enough—most of them, two are having a smoke and chatting, which probably wouldn’t get them fired if we weren’t about to steal what they’re supposed to protect—that we could probably knock them out without them hearing what was going on, but the werewolf’s gonna know. He’d—”

  “So take him out first,” I suggested, sure I had her.

  “He’d hear us coming,” she said, before pressing on. Dammit. “If we start with the others, he’d still hear the shots or the struggle, then he’d call to the others or, worse, call backup from inside. Those naked zombies you were worried about? What if they have a whole army just slavering over the idea of eating a pretty empath brain?”

  “Zombies don’t have ideas,” I grumbled, though I couldn’t argue with the rest of her logic. Guns were out and none of us were willing to just outright kill anyone, so that left only me in my skivvies, fooling a werewolf into being so distracted he couldn’t do his job.

  Sighing dramatically, I yanked off my shirt, procrastinating in the chilly air by bitching some more.

  “I’m not happy about this, I’d like that on record.”

  “What record?” Chloe asked.

  “Shh. I’d just like to say … to karma or the world or … whatever is out there listening, that I’m not happy to strip down and prance around the frozen woods to save a tree.”

  “You’re doing it to save the town.”

  I unzipped my pants, hopped and grumbled as I took them off.

  “I still don’t see why you can’t do this,” I said to Chloe as I fought with my aching limbs, which refused to bend enough for me to get proper hold of my sock. “You’re probably a much better actress.”

  “Two reasons,” Chloe said and poked my side just hard enough that I grunted. “One, you come with bruises pre-installed. Two, you can’t take out a guard using just your wits and thumbs.”

  “You can do that?” I asked, momentarily forgetting the icy air. Chloe laughed, dropped down to pull off my sock and toss it back at Owen.

  “I guess you’ll never know, will you?” Chloe asked, before standing tall again and tapping the side of my breast. “Now hoist’em up, make yourself look pathetic and sexy.”

  “Like the hottest victim in a horror movie,” Owen offered, making me wish I still had a shoe on to kick him with.

  I’d been instructed to circle the guards and come up behind the werewolf. Supposedly, freezing my pretty ass off would help convince the werewolf that I’d been kidnapped—not completely a lie, considering the day before—and held hostage. He
wasn’t mated, so he’d be more than happy to take me in his manful arms, offering comforting words, and then be distracted by my boobs until Chloe could conk him on the head or jab him with a needle.

  Come to think of it, she was much too good at knocking people unconscious; maybe I needed to watch out.

  I felt like an idiot, hobbling in nothing but my underthings, trying not to cut my feet open—or off—on twigs and rocks as I traversed the dark terrain of the forest. I sensed no otherworldly life except the werewolf and the Lofriska, which was locked in an impressive metal cage in the middle of a large clearing. It seemed the corporation had assumed that she could live just fine if she had access to the outdoors. It was clear from her hunched posture that being able to root into the bare ground was not going to outweigh the fact that she was being held hostage and probably experimented upon.

  I kept a bead on them as I moved, making sure I stayed far enough away that they wouldn’t know I was there without expressly looking for me, and fought the urge to mumble to myself about how moronic this was.

  I felt it when the werewolf got a whiff of me. Confusion, a bit of worry, and a heavy dose of arousal swamped his brain, making me uncomfortable and slightly dizzy, even from my position. Taking a deep breath, I dropped my shoulders, did my best to look beaten and depressed. I stumbled against a tree, which was an accident but it helped the act anyway, and fought my first instinct to cry out several rude words.

  I let my pain out in a low groan, took a few more anguished steps toward the wolf. I heard underbrush being crunched, the beep of a radio and then a light flashed into my eyes, making me cry out again. I threw my arm up, stumbled back.

  “Stand by,” said an unexpectedly high, male voice. I whimpered, trying to see him through the light.

  “Help,” I whispered, stumbling a step forward. “Can you help me?”

  “Stop where you are, ma—” He cleared his throat, embarrassed excitement crackling through him, though the typical werewolf hungers were still there too. The whole cocktail made me want to peel off my skin. “Miss? Stop right there.”

  “Please?” I asked, still trying to get an eyeful of him through the glare; I couldn’t see anything except blinding white. “I was kidnapped. I escaped. Please.”

  The radio beeped again, a voice crackled through. “Report.”

  “It’s a woman. She’s nak—er, she’s hurt pretty bad.”

  “Bring her in.”

  “Roger.” A hand covered the light, dulling the brightness to a peach hue. I squinted watery eyes at him, moved another step forward, my arm still held out.

  “Can you help me?”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Please,” I let my voice hitch, felt my skin jump and twitch in reaction to his emotions. The only good part of being so close to him was that my brain no longer perceived the cold air. My goosebumps had settled, but my skin was jerking like I was shoving every individual nerve ending directly into a light socket. It was exhausting in a way that even being around Mel hadn’t ever been. Dizziness swamped me and, before I knew it, the pathetic act became a tumbling reality as I began to topple forward.

  Immediately his feelings—all six hundred thousand of them, it seemed—warped into a sticky flood of pity, worry floating along the surface like an oil spill. The light lowered, aimed at the ground and I heard him dive to catch me. I craned my neck, expecting to look up into piercing eyes and a strong jaw. I hadn’t met many werewolves, but they’d all been pretty fucking fantastic to look at.

  My eyes met with the top of a mop of unruly, curly hair lit partly by the crooked flashlight. I lowered my gaze to his face and had to stop myself from asking what the hell was going on and who was playing a joke on me.

  “Miss?” he asked. I continued to stare, too shocked to answer, draped bonelessly over his arm like every fainting leading lady from the nineteen-forties. He waved pudgy fingers in front of my face, pulled back to look me over once more. “You’re hurt—” His voice cracked and he cleared his throat, embarrassment berating me stabbily once again. I hated this man and I’d only known him ninety seconds.

  “You’re injured,” he repeated, doing his best to make his voice sound manly and impressive; it was like listening to a fifteen-year-old try to fool a bartender into selling him a beer. “Are you bleeding?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I said, not really sure. It wouldn’t have surprised me if his emotions were so desperate that they’d managed to actually slice me open. All I could feel in his presence was pain and heat, which wasn’t conducive to being able to tell if my own blood was leaking from my inside to my outside.

  “I’m going to pick you up, is that okay?” Cupping an arm behind my knees, he pressed his angry flesh directly against me, making me whimper. The sound made him tense, his gaze darting to my legs as if he was worried he’d badly mangled me with the contact. “Miss?”

  I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t stop staring at his face.

  He wasn’t really ugly; there wasn’t anything specifically wrong with his features. He was just … unfortunate. His forehead was too big, his nose too short. Chubby of neck and round of cheeks, he kind of reminded me of that last pumpkin in the patch in which no one can quite envision a design. Maybe someone would see something in him one day or take him home out of pity.

  Maybe he was really fucking charming and I was just being a shallow asshole because I’d expected to find Mel and I’d run across Paul Giamatti instead.

  “Please, answer me,” he begged, his hand moving from my knees to his radio again, as if he might need to call for help because he didn’t know how to deal with the deranged, half-naked mute who’d dropped literally into his arms.

  God, he was sort of adorable in all his horny, awkward discomfort. I wanted to pat him on the head and shove him down a flight of stairs all at the same time. Even though I knew it was probably going to be physically painful—I really should have been used to that by now—I grabbed his hand before he could call for help and blow the whole operation.

  “I hurt,” I moaned, not really sure what else to say. It was the truth, at least.

  “Oh!” he said, surprise and relief flooding out. “I was worried you were in shock. Yes, I—” He made a terrified squeaking sound, tried to make his voice impressive once again. “I’ll carry you.”

  He was a perfect gentleman, finally lifting me under my legs, pressing his plump forearm to my back and turning to carry me back toward the office building. His eyes drifted to my boobs as he walked and, awkwardness aside, I wasn’t really surprised. I’d worn a boring bra meant for comfort rather than temptation, but he was squeezing me against him pretty tight and they were sort of on display.

  Owen stepped out from behind a tree, a gun pointing at the both of us.

  “I see you found my girl,” Owen said, barely visible in the shadows. The wolf’s arms tightened, bravado lighting him up even brighter than before. I whimpered desperately, which he took entirely the wrong way.

  “Don’t worry, miss, I won’t let him have you.”

  “What about me?” Chloe asked from behind, drawing my gaze to her. She’d pressed a knife against the wolf’s neck just hard enough to let him know that, unlike most blades, this one was meant specifically to cut werewolf skin. “Set the girl down carefully, and we can talk.”

  “I’m not alone out here,” the wolf asserted, and I could feel something dangerous growing.

  “Chloe,” I squeaked, not really sure what his emotions were building toward, but recognizing them from the few times I’d seen Mel about to pull out some crazy feat of strength. She only sighed, shifting slightly behind the wolf just before he yelped, pushing briefly up to his tiptoes, and then dropped me unceremoniously on my ass in the dirt.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  As I yanked my shoe on and then pulled my leg in to tie the laces, I stared up at the werewolf, trying to ignore the pulsing, jagged anger shooting out from his psyche. He was glaring at Chloe, who seemed oblivious t
o his rage. Owen was standing off to the side keeping an eye on the cage in the center of the clearing.

  The Lofriska was a heap of brown leaves and bare branches. It was hunched over, hollow back looking scarred in the faint moonlight. I could feel its despair from where I was, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the werewolf’s rage.

  “Hold tight, Romeo,” Chloe said, glancing over at him when he jerked against the thin silver chain she’d used to bind him to the tree. “We’re just here for the tree and then we’ll be on our way.”

  He grunted, tried once again to get free.

  “You don’t think he’ll just rip out of there and tear our throats out?” I asked as I pushed to my feet. Chloe shook her head.

  “Nah, that chain’s unbreakable. Little fairy gift I got from an old friend.”

  “That looks like the one Kincade has,” I said, before reassessing wondering if they were one in the same. “Had?”

  “Come on,” Chloe said, rather than answer one way or another. Taking my arm, she led me down the little slope into the clearing, stopping outside the cage. I attempted to push forward further, but Chloe grabbed my arm, exasperation and panic arcing within her.

  “They might have booby traps around. We have to make sure we can get through without getting a leg snapped off in a bear trap.”

  “Your plan for that?”

  “A big stick,” Owen said. I turned, lifted a brow at him.

  “You have a very high opinion of yourself, don’t you?”

  Chloe snorted but Owen just gave me a look of mild admonishment and then moved to grab a giant branch he’d apparently set out when I’d been getting dressed. He tossed it forward, turned his head to the side slightly as if he expected repercussions. The Lofriska lifted her head to look us over. Her face was desiccated, the left half torn away so that the wide-open hole that might have been her mouth formed more of a backward C. I felt hope try to spring up within her but she didn’t have the energy.