Deceived By the Others - By Jess Haines Page 0,53

back. Staying low, I crept out from behind the desk, scanning the dimly lit room and hallways for any sign of company. Without taking the time to stretch out my cramped muscles, I rushed to the doors and ran out into the night, fleeing to my cabin.

Chapter 16

On my way back to the cabin, shortly after I crossed the bridge, something growled at me from the bushes.

The tendons in my neck creaked as I caught movement, and twisted to see what it was. My blood turned to ice water as what I’d taken to be a tree trunk shifted—against the wind. It was too dark to really see the shape of the thing, other than that it was big. Very big. Bigger than Chaz when he was Were. It was growling at me, a lone human in the dark with no weapon and no hope of outrunning a predator this big.

My knees trembled as I backed away, slowly so as not to invite it—whatever it was—to charge. The thing growled again, deeper this time, and I froze in panic.

My gaze shifted upward to focus on the source of the low rumbling. Large yellow eyes gleamed out of the shadows briefly before that great, huge something moved. At first, I thought it was coming after me, and rapidly backpedalled, slipping in the mud. The thing wasn’t after me, though; it pulled away, disappearing between the trees.

Knees weak with relief, I stumbled along until I reached my cabin. My hands shook as I worked the lock, dropping the key in my haste to get inside. Cursing, I scattered dirt and wood chips as I searched for it by feel. Once I found the damned thing, it took longer than it should have for me to get inside, as I kept twisting around and flattening against the door at every rustling bush or crackling of a tree branch behind me.

Once I wrestled the lock open, I slammed and locked the door behind me.

Coffee and paranoia were my companions for the rest of the evening. I dead-bolted the cabin door and stuck a chair under the knob. It wouldn’t do much to stop a determined, rampaging Were, but it should give me enough time and warning to slip out a window or grab a makeshift weapon. I found myself wishing for a power cable or something to get the laptop up and running; this place was horribly claustrophobic without a phone or computer to connect to the outside world. If you needed to make a call, they had a bank of antiquated pay phones in the lobby of the lodge. Being cut off from technology was supposed to be part of the charm of the place. With my luck, I should’ve known better.

The caffeine infusions I took to stay alert helped, but also made me jittery and didn’t make it any easier to concentrate on the notes I was scribbling down of what I knew about our enemies thus far.

The Cassidy family was involved somehow. I wouldn’t approach them without the Sunstrikers at my back. Mr. Cassidy was a Were of some kind; some of the others in his household could be Were, too. Despite the location of his home, he might belong to a pack, which meant other shifters could be hiding somewhere in the town or elsewhere on the property. If they were in on whatever was planned to hurt Chaz, they could have made an attempt on his life before now—if they had the numbers to stand up against the rest of the pack. I was guessing they didn’t, or they would’ve been more open about their attacks. Whatever had growled at me out there hadn’t been part of the Sunstriker pack, lending credence to my suspicions that while there might be other shifters on the property backing the Cassidys and whoever George had been talking to, there weren’t enough of them to make a concerted effort against the Sunstrikers.

That, or they only wanted Chaz.

Everything Mr. Cassidy had said now came into question. It was possible he was covering for whoever had trashed our first cabin, and shot Chaz, and that he was deliberately covering for whoever this Howard Thomas person was. Keeping track of all the possible connections and consequences (or maybe the caffeine overdose) was making my head hurt.

I watched through a gap in the curtains as the first rays of the sun crested over the mountaintops, chasing away some of the mist creeping along the path between the

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