Page 12 of Captive Wilderness
I swallowed around the emotions clogging my throat, and asked, “Why not?”
A pad of paper lay next to him, beside it, the broken pencil I’d place there when I’d returned to the cabin. He didn’t write anything immediately, just stared at me, then the paper, then me, like he was figuring out what to say.
When he finally scrawled words across the page, he stared at it long and hard before passing me the pad. I almost didn’t want to look, but I spun it toward me and read.It’s armed. I don’t want your head to explode.
“What?” I shot to my feet, adrenaline masking the pain in my foot and obliterating the fatigue in my legs. My hands flew to the collar, wanting to rip it off. Panic swam up through my chest. The crackers became a lead weight in my stomach.
After everything, finding out my head could explode was too much. My fingers paused as soon as they made contact with the cold metal.Don’t touch it.That’s what my sister had told me. Like she’d known something bad could happen to me if I tried to get it off. They could make Sabrina’s head explode?
A sob shuddered through me. The urge to escape overwhelmed everything else. I searched the tiny cabin, looking for a way out of this mess. A collar kept me captive, my injured foot kept me captive, the wilderness kept me captive.
A whimper escaped my lips and I pressed them together, embarrassed by the sound. I didn’t want to lose my shit, but after the night I’d had, my emotions felt like a pot ready to boil over. The urge to scream overwhelmed me. I wanted to punch something.
None of this was fair.
When I’d gotten ready to go out to the bar the evening before, the only problem I’d had on my mind was which guy I’d pick for a night or two of fun. Now I had no money, no clothes, no phone, and no way to get home. On top of that, I needed to worry about my head exploding? About my sister’s exploding? But that cowboy had shouted to keep us alive. If it hadn’t been for that, I might believe she was already dead.
I pressed a hand to my chest. It hurt. Everything hurt. I was crawling out of my skin with worry and had no way to stop it. I wanted to slink into the bed behind me, hide under the covers, and wish every problem away like none of it had happened.
Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and tried to regain control of my thoughts. There were always solutions to every problem. I wasn’t going to be stuck here for the rest of my life.
When I opened my eyes again, Kane was in the same place with the same concerned expression on his face. I cleared my throat and leveled him a stare. “You have apples. You’ve got to get your supplies from somewhere.” I gestured to the whiteboard with its short grocery list.
He nodded once, then stood, moving to a calendar on the wall beside the kitchen cupboards. I limped toward him. It showed May, and he pointed at Friday the 27th, circled in pencil.
I lifted my eyes to his. “That’s when you go for supplies?”
He shook his head and pointed out to the lake.
“I don’t understand.” Defeat made my voice come out weak.
With a frustrated breath, he took the two steps to the table and picked up the pad and pencil. After he wrote a few words, he passed it to me. Ignoring the sentence he’d previously written because it made my hands shake, I read:Airplane drops off supplies every month or so.
“And there’s no way to contact the pilot to get them to come earlier?”
He shook his head.
“But I could get a ride back with them when they come?”
He nodded once.
I let out a long breath. Two weeks. That’s all I had to wait before I could get back to civilization.
Two weeks.
It seemed like a lifetime. Would my sister be okay on her own for that long? I didn’t know where that airplane we’d been on had been headed, so how would I be able to help? If I could somehow be magically transported home right now, who would I call? Who would I ask for help? My mom could already be taken. If she wasn’t, then asking her for help might put her in danger, but not warning her could do the same thing.
Since I lived on my own, there was no one to call into missing persons when I didn’t come home. My best friend Corey wouldn’t have any clue as to how to help. She didn’t know I was a shifter, but I guess that wouldn’t matter if she thought I was in trouble. But she’d never been great in a crisis. Her last big drama involved wearing the same dress as someone else at the bar. She hadn’t handled it well.
I could call the police and report our abduction. But I couldn’t tell them the people who’d abducted us were shifters, or that we were, and I had no idea where they’d been taking us. Whether we were shifters or not, people had kidnapped us. It was still a crime. I just didn’t know if telling the human police would result in our discovery as a race. The threat was there. My instincts told me to fix this problem among my own kind. Maybe our kidnappers counted on that.
I thought of my colleagues at work, the dermatologists’ clinic where I was an esthetician. The clinic was renowned for its services, and I’d beat out fifty other applicants for that job.I’m going to get fired. I’d worked so hard to get there. They wouldn’t hesitate to cut me loose if I didn’t show up. I was already walking a fine line with them because I’d come to work hungover one Monday. Even if I asked any of them for help, they would tell me to call the police.
Swallowing, I rubbed at my forehead, trying to think. I’d need to call Sabrina’s work, the forest rangers at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park. They might know something. And there was Sabrina’s friend, Frank, our old neighbor who’d gotten her interested in becoming a forest ranger in the first place. He wasn’t a shifter, and didn’t know we were bobcats, but he always seemed resourceful. Maybe he would have connections to help us. It was dangerous to ask humans for help with this in case our race was discovered, but it didn’t look like I had many options.
The idea gave me a sense of purpose but there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. Stuck here at this cabin, what were my other options? I didn’t have any.
Defeated, I set the pad of paper on the kitchen counter and turned away from Kane’s worried expression. Him wanting to help but not able to do anything significant was messing with my emotions. Two weeks here, then I could figure everything out. Two weeks of no clothes, no phone, no anything.
