Page 86 of Hunted

13

River

I HAD TO GIVE VLAD AND HIS TEAM OF VAMPIRE OPERATIVES CREDIT. Less than fifteen minutes after Hayden was abducted from Kerbey Lane, they’d picked up my mom, Ethan and Cal in Blood Moon and brought them to Austin. I was now staring at a text from Rossi showing a battered and bleeding Ellie beside Hayden and Jori. The bastard had all three of them. We were set up in a staging area in a parking lot half a mile from the hostage site at the Tom Miller Dam west of Austin. Rowan, London and Brody met us there along with Cris and several Tracers Fallon had operating under her command.

“August, reconfirm their locations,” I ordered across the teleconferencing connection Rowan had linked up. “Let’s make sure he’s not setting us up.”

“Already on it.” My brother’s head was down as he typed furiously from his computer base back in Blood Moon. “Affirmative. They’re tracking half a mile west of here. Geo-locators put them directly over the river. Their Wolfguard trackers are live and working. So far, Rossi has made no attempt to cut them out or disable them. He wanted us to track them here.”

“What the hell is taking so long?” Ethan paced the parking lot, raking both hands through his wild, dark hair. His eyes were pure gold, manic with moon energy. I hadn’t seen him this close to losing control in years, not since our father had first forced him to wear a silver cuff to control his wolf’s mad urges. “We need to go in there. Rossi could kill them at any moment. You think August hasn’t shown me the background research you two have done on that freak? Rossi's not right in the head. He could snap at any minute and throw my wife off the side of the dam. I’m not waiting around for that to happen.”

“Yeah, I get it. He has my mate, too.” I stared Ethan down. I was taller than my brother by five inches now as an adult. But Ethan had always been crazy in a fight. “You flying off the handle isn’t helping. I need you to calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down.” He grabbed a water bottle off a crate we had set up and threw it. “And don’t think I’m going to sit here watching the rest of you go in while that bastard has my wife.”

“You know that’s not an option. The second you go in there, Rossi will turn you into one of his drones. You think Hayden wants to watch him kill you in front of her?”

Ethan bared his teeth. “If you think I’m afraid of that arrogant little prick because I was born without powers, try again. I don’t care what he does to me, and I’m not as weak-willed as you think. I’m getting Hayden back. Try and stop me.”

I counted to three, silently cursing myself for ever having let Ethan see the proof of life photo Rossi had sent to my phone with Ellie and Hayden tied up and held at gunpoint.

“Matteo Rossi is a madman who will shred Hayden’s mind the instant you show up. Jori will be next. Then Ellie. They are all expendable to him. He’s done it to countless human victims back in Italy. It’s why his pack forced him to leave. The local authorities were noticing patterns. The number of disappearances was attracting attention the pack didn’t want.”

Ethan blew out a breath, chest heaving. “I hate this.”

“Right there with you. But Rossi wants me to come alone. This is about him wanting to take control of the Tracers. He’s pissed at Guillermo and he has some personal score to settle with me. I have to go in there alone and keep him distracted long enough for the rest of the extraction team to neutralize the other three guards up on the platform where they’re being held.”

“And if he shoots you in the head the moment you show up?”

Because count on Ethan to never pull any punches.

“He won’t.”

“And you’re willing to bet Ellie’s life on that?”

“Ethan,” my mother said sharply from where she was checking all our rifles and ammunition. “That’s enough.”

I closed my eyes. “This is personal for him. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

“Riv’s right.” Cal kept his voice low, his posture non-aggressive, no doubt something he’d perfected after years of experience working with patients in mental health crisis. “He’s been hunting Rossi for months. He knows how he thinks. Let him take the lead on this.”

My mother clicked through the drone images August had captured of the dam. “Other than the four hostiles up on the maintenance walkway, how many others are we looking at?”

“There are snipers positioned on top of the power generation and control building directly southeast of the dam. They’ll take out anyone who tries to materialize to Rossi’s position over the floodgates, and if any of our people other than me come close enough that Rossi senses them, he’ll probably kill the hostages.”

“Then Calgary and I will just have to be faster.” My mother looked to Cal, who nodded. “We can stay out of range until they’re neutralized, and then move in slowly to take Rossi.”

“There’s another complication,” I said. “August, tell them what else you discovered when you were surveying the area.”

We all leaned closer to the computer to hear my brother’s voice. “I compared enhanced imagery we got from the drone with videos of the dam and the flooding that’s been all over the news for the past week. Multiple large metal pipes have been positioned around the control building on the east side of the river.”

“Pipe bombs?” Vlad asked. “They’re going to blow up the dam?”

“Not on our goddamn watch,” Brody growled. “What about the engineers inside the control building?”

“Cal and I have been testing our range,” my mother answered. “I got just close enough to touch their minds, but not Rossi’s. There are two werewolves inside the building with them. We believe the engineers who monitor and control the dam have been taken as hostages, but are still alive.”

“So we have to get them out, too.” I pinched the bridge of my nose.