* * * *
James rode with Mick, his beta, in his piece-of-shit truck. He was pushing the pedal down as far as it would go, and so were the trucks behind him, all filled with angry alphas and one gun-toting human.
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If a cop tried stopping them for speeding, only James would get stopped because he was the one in the front of the line. One highway cop couldn’t stop that many trucks on his own. It was a good way to make sure the others made it to that little town as quickly as possible to get John and his new mate before the hunters got to them, and so far, no one had stopped them.
“We’re making it in record time,” Mick remarked, his hand up and on the latch on the roof.
James nodded. That they were. “I’m still getting a bad feeling about all this,” he said.
As they approached the town sign that said Welcome to Brockview! Population 1,100, James started to slow down his truck, the others behind him doing the same with their vehicles. A man could get away with going crazy speeds on the highway, but not in an actual town, no matter how few people lived in it.
He was forced to slam on the brakes with full force when a bloody cougar walked out from behind the upcoming sign and sat right in the middle of the two-lane highway.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Mick yelled when the truck finally came to a screeching halt just in front of the animal. By then it had fishtailed and made brand-new black tire marks on the road.
James looked behind him to the other trucks, and the same could pretty much be said for all of them.
Mick shoved open the door and stepped outside, his face completely pissed off as he marched to the cougar. He almost looked like he was going to pick a fight with another driver over some road rage or something, not for sitting in the middle of the road.
All things considered, it was enough to give anyone some road rage.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The shifter changed, revealing the one-eyed stranger James had briefly seen after Morgan had been kidnapped by hunters before Christmas. His eye patch was gone, revealing the mess that was Hunted and on the Run
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hidden beneath it, made more hideous by the blood and small wounds that covered his face and chest. It reminded James of the shotgun blast he’d gotten to the side of his face when he’d tried to charge a hunter full on.
Though he was suspicious, especially since John had yet to appear and this was apparently his mate, James did his best to not stare at the scarred eye.
“You’re Storm?” James asked.
Storm nodded. “Yeah.”
James was about to ask him if he wanted any clothes to wear.
Standing naked and bleeding in the middle of the road, and all the cars blocking any possible traffic from coming or going, wasn’t exactly a good thing. Storm spoke first, however, and quickly, falling to his knees in front of James.
“Hunters came for us at the motel we were staying at. They took John and left me for dead. I don’t know where they are. Please help.”
The man’s voice shook with the emotion he spoke with. It was as though he was scared that James would simply order his pack to turn around and go home without John now that he’d been taken.
He looked behind him to the rest of his alphas. Markus, usually one to joke around and have fun, was also staring at James with a little fear on his face.
It seemed the panic Storm felt was rubbing off on the others.
Mark had been particularly close to Eric before he had been killed. John was also a friend, and even though Eric did come back once in a while to join in on some of their hunts by possessing his medium boyfriend, James knew it wasn’t exactly the same.
Markus didn’t want another friend to die on him.
James would never consider letting those hunters hurt one of his own. His only prayer was that the lot of them could find John before he’d been tortured so much that James would be forced to put him out of his misery.
“All right, everyone get your trucks off the road and park them 108
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somewhere hidden. We wolf out and go hunting for one of our own.
Let’s find him and bring him home.”
Everyone did as they were told with the speed and effectiveness of soldiers who followed orders in battle.
James looked down at Storm. “Are you too injured to help us search for him?”
Storm shook his head.
“Good. Shift into your other form and take us to where you last saw John. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick up his scent and figure out which direction they’ve gone in.”
“And if we find out you had anything to do with his kidnapping, and this is all some kind of trick,” Mick said, his fingers turning into claws as he spoke and his eyes becoming gold, “I swear to God I’m going to do to you whatever those hunters do to that kid.”
James thought that might’ve been a little excessive, considering the shape the guy was in. He doubted Storm was involved, but if he was wrong…well, he might’ve said the very same thing.
Storm just nodded and got to his feet. “Understood.”
* * * *
John wasn’t sure how he’d managed to do it, maybe it was the sight of the knife that one guy was about to bring down on his eye, but he’d managed to break through the strips of bedsheets that were
