Page 123 of Shadow City: Silver Wolf

"They want me to send her out back to take out the garbage around seven in the morning so they can kidnap her before the campus gets busy." Carter took a deep breath. "If they don’t get her, my brother loses a hand."

"Well, at least he has another one," Griffin rasped.

"Stop it." I smacked his arm. "He will not, because they’re going to capture me."

Griffin’s nostrils flared. "Like hell they are."

"If they don’t, we won’t find out who they are." I wasn’t sure what else to do so he would get on board with this. "And they’re going to keep attacking. This is the one time we have a heads up on their plan. They take me, and you all will be prepared to follow."

"I can be nearby in a tree." Rosemary nodded and rubbed her fingers together. "I can stay high enough that they won’t see me, and I won’t lose her." She looked at Griffin. "There will be absolutely no risk of me losing her."

"And you two can be in the parking lot in the car. Hell, we can even rent a car so they won’t know it’s yours." We had a whole day to plan. We could get a rental car tonight and already have it parked on campus. "You follow us, and worse case, if you can’t keep up, Rosemary can text you the location when they stop."

"You expect me to be okay with you being used as bait?" Griffin asked as his forehead wrinkled and his mouth dropped open. He looked completely flabbergasted. "There’s nowaythis is going to happen. Tell her, Killian."

Killian lifted a hand. "I’m not thrilled about it, but Dove has a point. This may be the only chance we have the upper hand. We’re clueless, and this could lead us straight to the organizer."

I placed a hand on Griffin’s chest and turned toward him. "I’m not asking for permission. Iwillbe doing this because it’s the best plan we have and may be the only time we’ll have this kind of advantage. They’ve been one step ahead of us the whole way. They’ll be arrogant and not expect it."

"So, that’s the plan." Rosemary nodded. "I promise, Griffin, I won’t lose her—and I’ll be watching over her so nothing bad happens."

Akaksounded, still far away, but my blood ran cold. That was the sound of a falcon.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The scent hadn’t hit,and the noise was at least several miles away. Luckily, the falcon couldn’t hear us—as birds didn’t have exceptional hearing like wolves and angels—but their vision was better.

"We need to get out of here before that falcon finds us." Granted, the bird might not be working for our enemy—but we couldn’t risk it. "Rosemary, when you get back to Griffin’s, we can make more concrete plans. It’s probably better if Carter doesn’t know the details in case anyone comes poking around ahead of time."

"True," Rosemary agreed and picked up Carter, throwing him over her shoulder as her black wings sprouted from her back.

"What the—" he gasped, and she placed a hand over his mouth as his eyes grew wide. She took flight, using the trees as cover, flying in the opposite direction from the bird. She flapped her wings hard and disappeared from our sights within seconds.

Killian chuckled. "That was one way of handling it."

"At least she knew to stay hidden, but we better change the subject." I walked back toward the Navigator.

"Shouldn’t we stay out here for a little while?" Killian asked as he glanced at the sky. "Not that I want to."

Ideally, we would go deeper into the woods for a hike to keep up our pretenses. "The bird could be leading others over to attack us. Maybe they caught on that Carter was alerting us to their plans and this was the true strategy." Too much was at risk to stay, including the memories that haunted Killian.

"You’re right." Killian nodded.

Let me take the lead. You’re the one they’re after, so please let me lead with Killian following you.Griffin moved in front, not bothering to wait for my answer.

I wanted to argue, because he’d only pretended to run that by me, but we didn’t have time to spare. All it would potentially do was put us in more danger, and I cared too much about these two to let pride get in my way. I swallowed the hurt feelings, even though the lump in my throat refused to go down. Being an alpha wolf myself, I didn’t like people taking decisions away from me.

I stayed between the two men, focusing on getting back to the car. We moved at a much quicker pace than we had when entering the woods, so if the bird caught up to us, we’d be safely around others.

The nextkaksounded much closer because he did have the advantage of traveling through the sky, but he wasn’t gaining as much on us as he might expect. The three of us were comfortable in nature, and even in unfamiliar territory, we could cover a lot of ground quickly.

Water splashing could be heard, which meant that we were nearing the lake with the bears and the vampires. Right now, they’d be a welcome sight…even with the vampires’ hateful expressions.

When the trees began to thin, my heart returned to a normal rhythm. We would definitely make it back before anyone could attack.

Sprinting even faster, we reached the tree line in minutes. Griffin slowed down before the other supernaturals could see us. They’d probably heard our approach, but that shouldn’t seem odd due to the kind of supernaturals we were. The only thing that might seem strange was the short amount of time we’d been gone; wolves tended to enjoy running for a while, not minutes.

As expected, the vampires looked at us with varying puzzled expressions. One was visibly upset, stroking his short beard while watching us the entire way to the vehicle.

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