Page 50 of Hayden's Haven
“You coming?” Frank asked.
Hayden glanced to see Tess had let them in. When he faced Mila he almost called out to her, but this wasn’t the time or place, and she didn’t look as if she wanted to speak to him. Hayden entered the house and was about to turn back when Tess closed the door behind him and gave him a big hug. It was nice to see someone had missed him, but this was not the woman he wanted wrapping her arms around him. His Mila. . . What had he done to her?
“Welcome back, guys,” Tess said as she headed into the kitchen. One whiff and Hayden recoiled.
“Smells like she’s cooking dirty laundry in there,” Frank whispered at his side.
“I heard that!” Tess shouted form the kitchen.
Hayden chuckled. “You forgot she has her shifter abilities back.”
“I liked you better when you were human, Tess,” Frank shot back.
“I so want to swear at you right now,” she said.
“Then do it,” Frank said. “Holding in those emotion doesn’t help anyone.”
“Please, don’t encourage her,” Damien said, coming down the stairs.
“To swear or to cook?” Hayden asked.
Damien quickly glanced to make sure Tess wasn’t watching, then mouthed the word ‘either’.
“You don’t need to be here for this, Frank,” Damien said, taking a seat.
“Not staying. Just letting you know we scented several males on our way in. Sector 15E. Heading south apparently. We lost the trail.”
Damien leaned forward. “Damn. One of the patrols picked up a group of four in 13G. Let Callen know to get the other patrol to 15E and determine if it’s the same scent at least. I’m hoping it’s one small group passing through and nothing more. Then get some rest. You’re looking a bit weary.”
After Frank left, Hayden briefed Damien on the government officials he had met and what they had said.
“They actually threatened to torch the whole area?” Damien thrust his hands through his hair.
“The humans are scared, and they have every right to be. Only a handful survived the first attack.”
“First?” Damien asked as his frown deepened.
Hayden had left out the worst part, still unsure how to tell Damien that Drake had released the virus into another small town, this one closer to Boulder. “Farview, Colorado. A small town of two thousand. Gone. Already contained. No survivors and no news reports either. The government’s keep a lid on this to prevent wide-scale panic.”
“Hell.” Damien sat back and drank for a minute, staring off toward the kitchen, but not focused on anything, not even Tess, where his eyes tended to wander. “I never thought Drake would go this far.”
Telling Damien, just as he had told Mr. Sloan from the Department of Shifter Affairs, that his brother and Ravirez were behind HEV, the Human Eradication Virus as Drake called it, had been surprisingly hard. Too many lives depended on him being honest with the government and hoping they’d believe him enough to work with Damien and not officially— or even unofficially— label all shifters as enemies of the state.
Though it hadn’t always been an amicable relationship, shifters and humans in the U.S. had managed to co-exist for two hundred years. The majority of shifters isolating themselves in the woods away from human population centers helped, but mostly no one had the stomach for a civil war that would decimate entire towns. The U.S. Government had no real way of knowing who was a shifter and who wasn’t. Only shifters could tell the difference, through smell, and sometimes eye color that changed at night or with emotions, like with Callen and often Damien. At night, his own eyes sometimes mimicked the color of the person he was with.
“I told Sloan about Drake. The government’s giving us one shot to save ourselves, Damien. We give them Drake, or they send troops in and kill everyone they find in the woods west of Boulder for a hundred miles. On top of that, they’ll make it not only legal but a civic duty for humans to kill shifters on sight, not just here but everywhere in the country.
“We have no choice but to go in and get him,” Damien said.
“If we invade, we’re going to start a shifter war that we can’t win. And Drake will still manage to escape.”
“Not if we do it right.”
“You’re fooling yourself. It doesn’t matter how we approach this, if we go in after Drake with dozens of wolves, it will end badly, for everyone.”
“We get Liam involved. I don’t care how much he’s sworn he’s staying out of this, he’ll have no choice. His pack will be wiped out, too. With both of our pack joining forces, we’ll decimate Drake.”
Damien was mad, worse than Hayden had seen him in a long time. And Hayden understood his anger, shared it even. Once the government moved in, wolf shifters everywhere would be up against thousands of troops. Assault from the air. Crop dusters sprinkling SEV like they were dousing a forest fire.
