Huntsman - Morgan Brice Page 0,57
going to rescue him.”
“Seriously?” Armel rumbled. “Because I am not going to carry you out if you fall flat on your face. Is that clear?”
“Crystal,” Russ snapped. Armel was a good guy and a fair sheriff, but his bear shifter side tended to try to roll right over people when he got his dander up.
Russ realized Jeffries had been texting. “You hear something from Liam?”
Jeffries shook his head. “No. I activated the tracker app Liam sent me. It should work—as long as we’re close enough.”
Russ gave him a skeptical look, sure he had seen the professor typing, but let it go. “Come on. We’ve got people to save.”
He managed to make it out of his room without help, gathering his will and stubbornly refusing to give in to the remaining soreness. When they walked out of the hospital’s front doors, Russ was not prepared for the sight that awaited them.
At least fifteen people—all shifters—had turned out, dressed for a hike and armed with shotguns, rifles, and handguns. Weapons weren’t unusual in the forest since wild animal attacks did occur from time to time, but Russ wasn’t used to seeing his neighbors packing heat.
“What’s all this?” Sheriff Armel’s voice boomed.
“We’re here to find Liam and those hikers,” Sherri answered, giving her cousin a defiant look that dared him to argue. “We all are.”
Everyone in the crowd nodded. “We want to save Liam,” Maddi added, and Linda nodded. Russ looked around and saw Brandon and Ty, as well as some of the other guys from the firehouse. Even Woody from the diner stood with the others, looking pale, scared, and resolute.
“This isn’t a lark,” the sheriff warned. “We believe the person who may have taken Liam and the hikers is a professional criminal. He’s armed and very dangerous.”
“We don’t have to engage,” Sherri countered. “We can surround, harry, and track. Linda’s the best damn tracking dog in the county.”
Linda nodded. “My nose is as good as ever, even if the muzzle is a little gray.” Russ thought he recalled that the library volunteer was a beagle shifter.
Armel looked to Saunders, as if for support. The fire chief shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone deputized a posse to hunt down a poacher.”
Sheriff Armel growled deep in his throat, but he seemed to know a lost cause when he saw it. Russ figured that if they didn’t organize the crowd, their neighbors would just follow on their own.
“All right,” the sheriff grumbled. “You can come along. But listen up. We’ll go in the department’s SUVs, and you can leave your clothing and weapons in the vehicles. Shift when we get there. We have coordinates of the place where Liam planned to go. He might have a GPS tracker on him, but it’s got limited range, so noses to the ground will be more help at the beginning.”
“If this is the same person who’s been burning things down, can we bite—a little—if we bring him down?” Ty asked, with a feral smile that reminded Russ of his friend’s inner bobcat.
“Only as necessary to subdue the suspect,” Armel warned. A disappointed murmur spread through the crowd. They were ready for blood to punish someone who had hurt one of their own, and Russ realized that was just another reason he loved this town.
Russ and Drew got into one of the SUVs at the police station, along with Linda, Maddi, Woody, and a few other folks Russ knew from town. Ty’s mom was at the hospital with Justin, but Ty’s dad had turned out, as had the Thompson brothers from The Lone Coyote.
“You don’t look so good,” Drew said under his breath.
“I’ll be a lot better when we have Liam back safe and sound.”
Jeffries rode in the front SUV with Armel, although he had shared the tracker app with someone in each group. Since the psychic couldn’t shift, he had offered to stay with the cars and coordinate the clairvoyants from the Institute who had volunteered to turn their focus on the missing men. The three SUVs formed a convoy, heading to the parking lot of the trailhead where the hikers went missing.
No one spoke on the ride. Russ’s worries about Liam consumed his thoughts, and he guessed that Drew was equally concerned about the way he had checked himself out AMA. Russ knew he wasn’t at a hundred percent, even though his shifter metabolism was working hard to heal. But Liam was missing, as were two other men. Russ had pushed himself beyond his limits