Still, she was growling by the time she reached the house. Jackson hadn’t been scheduled to work today, but Will now gave Deni a good-bye hug and went off to the warehouse.
“You all right, Mom?” Jackson said, peering at Deni after they waved off Will.
Jackson looked so much like his father, his hair dark instead of light like hers and Ellison’s, his eyes a lighter shade of gray. Deni pulled him into a hug, feeling a flood of love for him. But she remembered when her mate had been dying, how the mate bond had pulled at her and sickened her . . . as it was doing now.
A reaction to Jace leaving so abruptly, she told herself. Nothing is wrong . . .
“I’m fine,” she said.
“It’s just that you look at little bit, you know . . .” Jackson frowned in worry. “Like you do when you start to go feral . . .”
He trailed off, and nausea bit Deni, the world spinning. She gripped Jackson’s shoulder. “No, don’t let me . . .” Forget who everyone is, try to attack my own children. Goddess, please!
She smelled a strong, male smell, one different enough from other Shifters to make her wolf’s hackles rise. Deni growled and spun around, instinctively stepping in front of Jackson, protecting.
Tiger stood at the edge of the yard, having suddenly appeared as he usually did. Deni took a deep breath, willing herself to calm.
“You let him go,” Tiger said.
Deni shook her head, the nausea still churning. “I didn’t have a choice.”
He waited until she came to him, not violating Ellison’s territory. Deni felt herself drawn to him, though, as though she needed to go to him. Unnerving.
Tiger let his hand hover a few inches from her chest, as he’d done last night. “Something is wrong.”
Fear washed cold through her. “How do you know?”
“The mate bond.” Tiger closed his fingers over empty air. “It’s telling you.”
The logical Deni wanted to argue, to deny. The feral beast inside Deni knew. Jace was in danger.
Tiger pinned her with his yellow stare, then turned around and walked away. Deni’s heart beat faster, and she almost snarled when she felt Jackson’s warmth suddenly behind her.
She blinked, Jackson’s worried face coming back into focus. “I’m all right,” she said to him, drawing a deep breath. “I need to make a phone call.” She hurried into the house, found her cell phone, and rushed across the street after Tiger to ask for the phone number of Eric Warden and his son, Jace.
* * *
The snow leopard choked on the black smoke, paws scrabbling at the hole in the fuselage to find air, any air. He burned himself on the hot metal and snarled, but he needed to get his nose out of the plane and breathe.
More scrambling, using Shifter wildcat strength and huge claws to tear into the metal. His cat brain reflected that having someone like Ronan the Kodiak bear around would be very useful right now, then he went back to the task at hand. Human thought fled, and animal ones took over.
Hole wider. Heave from back legs, wriggle spine, pull with shoulders, scramble out. Jace landed on top of the wreckage—on the side of the plane that had tipped over—and tried to take a deep breath. Too much smoke. He had to get away.
The engine was burning merrily, and Jace’s cat nose smelled fuel. He needed to run, now.
A groan made him turn back, his claws raking against metal. A human lay in the wreckage, a lean man with a scraggly beard who was a little bit smelly. Marlo, his brain reminded him.
Jace was Shifter. He didn’t need a human slowing him down and returning him to captivity. Now was his chance to run, to be free, to find a place where humans would never hunt him down. He’d get word to his mate somehow, she’d come to him, and they’d live in blissful solitude forever.
Another groan. Jace’s ears went flat on his head, his cat instincts telling him to run and not stop. But he turned and lowered his body back into the wreck.
He found Marlo trapped under a pile of metal and junk, barely alive. Jace shoved at the debris, trying to reach him. Something in Jace’s brain told him to shift back to human so he could lift Marlo, but his body wouldn’t obey. Being animal was the best way to survive, so animal he stayed.
Fire flared high, and the temperature in the wreck doubled. The smoke thickened. Jace couldn’t breathe, couldn’t cough, could no longer see. He put his mouth around the back of Marlo’s neck and heaved.
The trouble with humans was they had no scruff. If Jace bit down too hard, he’d sever the man’s spine and kill him. Not enough, and he wouldn’t be able to carry him.
Jace finally got a decent hold on Marlo’s neck and shirt, and dragged him out from under the debris. With the last breath in his lungs, Jace clawed his way up through the hole again, weighted down by the extra body. He dropped Marlo on top of the plane, seeing that he’d cut gashes into the man’s neck.
Out here Jace could get his breath, but it was still tainted with the heavy smoke. Marlo lay unmoving, and Jace couldn’t tell whether he was breathing.
He got his jaws around the man’s shirt and neck again and scrambled off the wreckage to the ground. Once he felt the dirt under his feet, he ran, loping almost sideways as he dragged Marlo with him. Marlo’s feet bump-bumped over the dry Texas grasses.
When they were about fifty feet from the plane, the fire caught the fuel’s fumes and exploded. Fire washed over Jace, who threw himself on top of Marlo. Jace smelled his fur burning and drew in a lungful of volcanic air. Burning metal rained around them, sparking on the dry grass, which obligingly caught fire.
Jace hauled himself up, knowing he was on fire, and dragged Marlo down into the sparse rocks that lined a shallow wash. The wash was dry, no water under the blank blue sky, but it might protect them from the flames.
Jace dropped Marlo and rolled over the rocks, writhing desperately to grind out the fire in his fur. Marlo lay unmoving, bloody and burned, but he didn’t smell dead.
Now that he wasn’t burning alive and could breathe, Jace noticed all the hurts in his body, cuts from crawling out of the plane, abrasions and rawness from shielding Marlo. His left paw hurt like hell, a stinging pain that meant he’d cut himself deeply.
Jace rose stiffly from his crouch in the wash and looked around. The plane burned by itself in the middle of nothing. West Texas sprawled around them, empty as far as Jace’s leopard eyes could see. Someone likely owned this land, maybe it was part of a gigantic ranch, but out here, entire counties might have only a handful of houses in them.