had said, these guys must have been the ones who had burned up and destroyed our stuff. What a peachy keen development.
“Hold her hands out,” the guy with the Mohawk said. “Do you want to tie her ankles up, too? Or just her wrists?”
“Nah,” Seth replied, looking back the way we’d come. He scratched at a reddened patch on his neck where a silver necklace lay; dumb shit was trying to look tough, I suppose. “Just the wrists. She has legs, she can walk.”
“Yeah, but she might run.”
“Let her try.”
I didn’t like the dark amusement behind those words. Though I pulled against their grip, the boys were too strong. Between the guy who was holding me pinned against his chest and the one who held my wrists so the third could twine the rope around them, I didn’t have a prayer of escape.
Quick, businesslike, as though they’d done this a thousand times before, the guy who’d waited for us tightly bound my wrists and pulled off a strip of duct tape. I twisted away to scream when the guy holding me moved his hand, but the other covered my mouth with the tape before I got out much more than a squeak. The big guy who was holding me shifted his grip to my upper left arm, tight enough to hurt. I glared into his dull brown eyes and kicked his shin, making him wince and shake me.
“Stop that, you stupid bitch!”
“Shut up, Gabe,” Seth hissed out. “We’re still too close. Someone might hear you. Let’s go.”
Once again, I found myself moving, though whenever I dug in my heels, the guy—Gabe—just dragged me along. I felt like a three-year-old having a fit about leaving the toy store, and my fighting was about as effective against his strength, but I did everything I could to slow our progress down.
Finally, I managed to hook one foot under a root, forcing him to stumble as I locked my leg and pulled him up short. Growling low obscenities under his breath, making the others chuckle, he stopped and hefted me over his shoulder. His shoulder was a little bony, but his grip was like iron, the heat radiating from under his creased leather jacket and the strong scent of musk marking him as close to shifting. Irritated, I hit his back with my bound hands as he started walking again. I jerked away when one of the others reached out to brush his fingers through my trailing hair.
“What a pain in the ass. Are you sure he’ll come after her?”
“Yeah. Ethan will keep him busy for another hour or two with all the bane I put in that herbal shit they were feeding him. Once it wears off, it shouldn’t take too long for someone to figure out she’s missing.”
Oh, that was just great. They were purposely making Ethan’s transition harder on him to distract Chaz and take me? Clever. Far more clever a plan than I would’ve given the little shit credit for thinking up.
We continued in silence for a while, and I could tell we were going down the mountainside by the incline and how Gabe continually shifted his stance to balance and account for my weight. I picked at the tape over my mouth, but every time I reached for it, he jostled me until I stopped. The birds singing in the trees quieted as we passed, and small, unseen animals rushed off into the underbrush. The four guys turned their heads sometimes to follow things I couldn’t see or sniff the air to take in scents too subtle for my poor human senses, but for the most part we kept to what I could now see was an old, mostly overgrown, deer run.
What felt like hours passed, though the sun was still well up in the sky when we came to a halt by a sheer granite cleft in the side of the mountain, overgrown with vines and eaten away by wind and water. Lichen crept up the stone and covered the trunks of nearby trees. Jagged pieces of stone were scattered along the ground or sticking out of the mulch where time and water had broken them off of the rock face. There were standing pools of runoff here and there, bugs idly buzzing over the still surfaces. It was a gloomy, spooky place, one nobody in his or her right mind would use to make camp.
Gabe set me down none too gently, and I ended up landing on