Page 113 of Blood and Trouble

“I know,” I said, my voice cracking. “But I can’t… I can’t stop. I have to do this.”

“Poe…”

I put the car in drive and slammed on the gas. I took one last look at the carnage. Broken bodies lay strewn on the ground. The Bastards were beat up and exhausted but holding their ground. Just as I turned the corner, another truck arrived with more vampires pouring out of their doors.

I caught one last glimpse of Lycan before a pile of our enemies enveloped him in a writhing mass of destruction.

“What the fuck happened?” Guin said when we got back to the safehouse. Maeve and Sol rushed to Ava, helping her into the living room while I clenched my fists and tried to calm myself.

Fucking Lycan.

Fucking pack hierarchy.

“It was an ambush,” Ava said, choking back sobs. She ran her hands over her face and shook her head. “They descended on us and we…we…” She looked up at me through tear-flooded eyes. “He ordered us to leave.”

“Where are they?” Maeve asked in a shrill tone of terror. Her mate was still out there, and I’d left him, too. I’d left them all. Shame coiled around my heart, squeezing until I couldn’t breathe.

“Can you sense him?” Ava asked, turning to face me. “Can you feel him? Is he okay?”

Sol closed her eyes, and a shimmer of pack energy coursed through my veins. I ignored it, choosing to reach inside myself for that faint thread connecting me to Lycan. It was tiny, but undeniably on fire. It sizzled and throbbed, like touching a live wire with nothing to ground me.

“He’s still alive,” I murmured. “But Gods, he’s fucked up. Bad.”

Squealing tires outside brought my attention back to the front door, where bodies tumbled out of an SUV in various states of disarray. Orion had Bow’s arm slung over his shoulder, an arm around the other shifter’s waist as they ambled forward. Mill, Mick, and Ren were bloody and beat up, but otherwise unharmed. Bridge and Leander held Serpent up between them. A second SUV pulled up behind them, but only one shifter got out. Aquila.

My heart sank, and my jaw clenched.

No Lycan.

“Locust took a bad hit, but I can still feel him in the bonds,” Orion said, practically dragging Bow over the threshold. “She took them. Lycan. Moose. Locust. We couldn’t get to them in time.”

Ava launched up from the sofa, her worried gaze flicking between me and the VP. “Taken? Where? Where are they?”

“We barely made it out ourselves,” Aquila said. “We had to regroup.”

“Fuck,” Serpent groaned as the witch and her warrior sat him on the couch. “That fucker got me.”

“It’s not that bad,” Bridge said. “Take a deep breath. We’ll patch you up.”

“Here, let me see,” Aquila said, dropping in front of him. He wasn’t a full-blown healer yet, but he might be one day. If I wasn’t about to keel over myself, I could have helped him. Instead, I focused on not throwing up in front of everyone.

“Mill, get your laptop,” Orion barked. “We need to figure out where she’s holed up.”

The half-bond to Lycan pulsed, spreading silver through my veins, nearly dropping me to my knees. A wave of nausea rocked my gut, and I doubled over with a deep breath. Fuck, they were poisoning him. They were injecting silver straight into his marrow.

“Poe, what is it?” Ava grabbed my cheeks and held my face up to hers.

“He’s in rough shape,” I whimpered. “We don’t have much time.”

“We know where her holdings are,” Mill said, fingers slamming on the keyboard. “We just need to narrow it down.”

“It’s…fuck, it’s west.” I sensed the general direction of Lycan’s alarm, but because the bond was only one-sided, I couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. If Ava had been the one taken, I would have been able to track her all the way around the fucking world. But like this? Incomplete and barely formed? It would be like trying to find a specific speck of sand in a desert. “Ren?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Northwest. The twin bond is strained, but I can feel him in that direction.”

“Northwest,” Guin said, launching into full planning mode. “What do we know that’s out that way?”

The others talked behind me while I grimaced and tried to get my shit together.