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Turning onto Chicago Avenue, I tried to focus on my immediate concern—getting lost and not being found. I saw the entrance post for the subway’s red line. I knew I’d find a similar entrance to the brown line a few blocks down. If I took the brown line north, I would hit Merchandise Mart, Clark and Lake, and then Washington Wells. My mother and I hadn’t used the metro on our last shopping trip, but she had wanted to stop at some gourmet grocery store, the route taking us past the clearly marked entrances to the metro stops and across yet another branch of the Chicago River.
I smiled at how she’d been very bossy with the driver. Her status as an alpha and the wife of the leap’s leader let her get away with it. But I’d been almost as fed up as the cheetah with her telling him again and again that the traffic would be bad on X, so he had to take Y.
Then she’d barely bought anything at the frou-frou food palace.
Never get off a train at the station…
That was it! My mother wasn’t talking about the metro or railway passenger trains. How could I have been so stupid? That drive, including which streets to take, was preparing me for today. She must have felt something building within Henric, must have somehow foreseen this.
Swerving at the last minute, I pulled into a fifteen minute parking spot near the entrance to the brown line. At the Clark and Lake station, I could take the green line and get off at the Clinton station, which was spitting distance from the freight train yard.
I grabbed my bag with all the cash and made a show of “obliviously” dropping the car’s fob on the seat as I searched through the bag's outer pocket. With any luck, some unsavory fellow would see me drop the fob and the car would be stolen. If Henric was tracking it, he’d be looking for me in the wrong place.
Down the stairs I went, stopping at a self-serve kiosk and feeding money from my pocket instead of the stash in the bag to buy a metro card. Doors were closing, but I managed to slide through, a few strands of hair getting yanked as they trailed behind me.
Lunchtime commuters filled every seat. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t budging from the doors.
A dozen questions zipped through my mind in the short time it took to reach the stop at Clark and Lake. Would my mother have risked having anything already in the bag telling me where I should go? Just how much was in the bag? Did Henric know about the bag? Was there a hidden camera or microphone in the office she and I shared?
She at least suspected a microphone—that’s why she had slapped her hand over my mouth when I started to read off my new fake name. At one point, she had also cast a nervous glance at the wall above her desk.
I could see the chain of events leading up to today. It started with the video, which had likely circulated first among the Champaign wolves as some kind of warning from the group sheltering Onyx Parry. Henric, as the leader of the nearest group of cat shifters outside Champaign had gotten a copy of the video, either leaked as a warning from Constantine in Champaign or in a direct attempt to gain assistance going to war with the motley group of shifters that had made the video. Henric must have recognized the wolf my mother insisted was my father. That was when he decided to play whatever game I suddenly found myself in.
But for how long had my mother been stashing the money, and when did she get a fake driver's license with a new name for me?
The doors opened to an empty platform. Stepping out, I felt like I had run into a brick wall. I didn’t know where Onyx had found refuge. But it was a safe assumption that my real father was still there. Of course, the video may not have worked, there might have been a battle, and I could be trying to find a town that had turned into a graveyard.
I wanted to release my own roar, but I would have looked crazy—and sounded pitiful.
So I settled for first things first. I had to find a spot where I could take stock of what I had and pick up a very small amount of supplies for my boxcar adventures. The steps I had taken so far had bought me a little time, especially if someone had seen me drop the key fob and walk away without locking the car.
Well, maybe. I couldn’t guarantee that the person who saw me wasn’t one of Henric’s men. Still, I had to assume that at least some of the smart moves I was trying to make had worked. Somewhere, a street urchin was driving around in my mother’s sixty-thousand dollar sedan and being tracked by my father’s team. Barring that, I had gotten to the subway ahead of them, where they would have lost my scent. A team member would have to get off at each stop and walk the platform to try to catch my scent, but without knowing if I’d hopped right back on.
I needed to stick with my plan. First, find a bathroom, lock myself in a stall, swap out my identification for what my mother had given me and look at the money. Maybe there was something written on it or something sewn into the bag. If not, I’d still have a ballpark idea of what resources were at hand.
Another twenty minutes later, sipping on an iced caramel macchiato while wearing an outfit I’d just purchased at a thrift store, I studied the back of a hundred dollar bill taken from the bag. In her precise script in faint green ink, my mother had given me a destination.
Night Falls, Wisconsin.
CHAPTER7
JUSTINE
The metal cagefit me like a coffin. I had been in one like it many times during childhood and then as a wife. For a time, after Mosa was born, she was the only prison necessary.
Beautiful Mosa, soft and round, with eyes that matched mine and toasted brown skin that fell between the midnight black that cloaked me and the toasted white of her father.
The slightest threat of harm to her was all that was necessary for Henric to bring me to heel. But as she grew, she turned rebellious against the constant mundane malice that seethed within the man she thought was her father.
She was four the first time he put her in the cage. It lasted an hour before I found her. I would have killed Henric that first time, should have killed him before. But he was smart enough to surround himself with guards each time, and always one with a long, thin blade poised over Mosa’s cage.
And so began a pattern in which I seemed forever destined to spend my life in one box or another.
Emotions I had suppressed daily since Mosa’s birth squeezed at my larynx. My lover was long gone—a man I had thought dead until Henric planted that damn thumb drive in the files yesterday. My daughter was gone, too. Hopefully free, her clever mind recalling the meager escape plan I had offered via veiled observations on our last trip to Chicago, and her relentless soul turning over every last bill in the stash I had given her until she found the only location that might possibly offer sanctuary.
Of course I had known about Night Falls. Minor rumblings had been moving through the shifter world for the last decade, rumblings about a community of packless wolves, bears without a sleuth, the odd solitary cougar coming down from its mountain or some other big cat without a leap, a pride, or a claw. It would be more inconceivable if a place like Night Falls didn’t exist.
But not once had I thought a dead man walked among them.
