Wild Hunt - Kali Argent Page 0,68

Roux had camped out in the second. It would be their job to remove the trackers from the prisoners’ necks, and somehow, keep them from bleeding out in the process.

Five minutes.

The weight of the gun in his palm felt familiar, comforting. He knew the weapon better than he knew himself. He knew what it could do…and what it couldn’t. He trusted the hunk of cold steel like he trusted the man beside him.

He shifted his weight and slowed his breathing, straining to hear something, anything. It was still too quiet, too still. No sounds in the forest. Nothing from the front of the camp. Something didn’t feel right.

Four minutes.

“Do you hear anything?”

Lynk moved his head to the side, a quick, almost imperceptible action. Cade might have missed it if he hadn’t been watching him so closely. The shifter was worried. It was evident in the roundness of his shoulders and the tenseness of his thighs. He rocked forward on his toes, then fell back on his heels. Dropping his head back, he sniffed at the air.

Something was definitely wrong.

Three minutes.

They’d all known it wouldn’t be easy. Even with the most careful planning, too many things could still go wrong. Intercepting the prisoners and leading them to the vans would take time, but they should have heard something by that point. At the very least, Lynk should have been able to pick up distant footsteps in the trees, or the rumble of an engine on the highway.

Two minutes.

“What the hell is happening?”

“I don’t know,” Lynk answered through clenched teeth. He paused, squinting into the darkness of the forest, then shook his head. “Let’s go.”

Cade followed after him, scrambling down the slope and into the forest beyond. They crept quietly through the trees, weapons at the ready as they looked for any sign of the rest of their team.

One minute until midnight.

“Mendez,” Lynk said, his voice hushed. “Collins. Lockwood. O’Malley. Can anyone here me?”

The supernatural version of a walkie talkie. Cade was five feet away from him, and he had barely caught the words. Hunters certainly wouldn’t be able to detect the sound, but most of the Revenant would hear him loud and clear.

Lynk jerked his head to the left. “This way. Deke has two of the prisoners about a quarter mile out.”

The first gunshot tripped Cade’s pulse into a gallop. The scream that followed made his heart stop. He and Lynk looked at each other, their expressions equally grim.

The Wild Hunt had started.

Hurrying their pace, they tried to make as little noise as possible as they continued to the north. Within minutes, Cade finally heard footsteps, heavy boots crunching over the ground and moving at a fast clip. A few seconds later, Deke came into view, his eyes glowing a bright, eerie blue as he urged two females along ahead of him.

They were both naked and covered in filth, even more emaciated that Mackenna had been when she’d escaped. The smaller of the two couldn’t have stood more than five feet at her crown with big eyes that dominated her face. In the darkness, Cade couldn’t tell what color they were, but when she looked up at him, they reflected the moonlight, making her appear almost mystical.

“Traps,” Deke said as he wiped blood from a gash on his cheek. “The whole fucking forest is rigged with traps. We already lost one.”

“Ours?” Lynk asked.

Deke shook his head. “Thea is coming up behind me with three more, and Rhys has two to the east.”

Another gunshot cracked through the night. This time, however, they all saw the flash from the muzzle high up in the trees. Cowards.

“We’re on it,” Cade told him. “Get these two to the vans.”

“I’ll take out the Hunter.” Lynk started backing toward the direction where they’d seen the flash. “You intercept Mendez.”

Cade still moved quickly, but now, he did so with added caution. Deke hadn’t mentioned what kind of traps they’d encountered in the woods, but he’d heard enough stories from Mackenna to have a pretty good idea. He scanned the forest floor, looking for the gleam of moonlight on metal, a rock that didn’t look quite like a rock, or anything else that seemed out of place.

Another quarter mile from where he’d left Lynk, he spotted his first trap. It didn’t look like anything special, just a small pile of leaves unnaturally heaped together. To a group of frightened prisoners, it would have certainly gone unnoticed.

Taking cover by crouching behind the trunk of a large tree, Cade tossed a