Just a Rogue

Nova

“Thank you,” I think silently to my inner wolf as soon as I shift back to human. I’ve rejected her for so long, I’ve been so afraid of her, but now I realize that she is the strongest part of me.

“You’re welcome,” she answers. Her voice in my head sounds so kind and confident, and welcome. I feel like I have been ignoring my best friend for years and have finally acknowledged her standing right by my side. “I’m glad you see now. I will always take care of us. You have no reason to be afraid.”

It’s kind of hard to believe that, though, as I follow Lynette over to the huge Alpha wolves, and do everything she does. She lays naked on her back in front of one of the wolves, and so I do it too. She lifts her hands over her head and lays them on the ground behind her, so I do it. She tilts her head back so that her throat is exposed, so I do that. I know this is how to submit, but it feels very strange and awkward and embarrassing. All the pack, both wolves and men, are watching me here, tiny and naked and vulnerable, and I am sure that my cheeks are blazing red.

The huge wolf that I am laying in front of lowers his head, and touches his nose to my bare belly, and I know that if he chose, he could rip me apart right now. But my wolf is not alarmed inside my head, and so I understand what is really happening.

He is accepting my submission.

A sudden movement from behind me attracts the attention of one of the pack wolves, who springs forward, and I can’t help but glance backwards. Ah, of course. Amir, who Lynette had defeated, is still in wolf form and trying to take advantage of the distraction of our submitting to the pack. He has gotten up and is making a run for it, trying to get back into the tunnel that we were protecting.

He doesn’t stand a chance. The pack wolf is on him before he takes more than a few steps, pounces and rolls him onto his back, and claps his jaws around Amir’s throat. I wince, waiting to see Amir’s innards go flying as the wolf tears him apart, but instead there is a pause. They are both frozen in place.

One of the humans from the pack tells Amir, “Shift, now, or die.”

Amir’s not stupid. He shifts at once, and his human form is lying beneath the big pack wolf, cringing. The wolf steps back, and a human comes forward, roughly rolls Amir onto his belly, and handcuffs him.

The man who spoke to Amir tells me and Lynette, “Your submission has been accepted. Get up and get dressed.”

I look at Lynette, and she is already sitting up, so I do the same. We quickly go over to our area and get out some clothes. While we’re doing that, the wolves all shift human, and I think that the other humans must have had clothes in the backpacks they were carrying, because they are all getting dressed too.

We wait at the back of the cave to be told what to do, watching. It seems very crowded in here now, even though nobody is a wolf any more.

I haven’t wanted to look at Andrew and Micah, but I do it anyway. They have shifted human, and are lying on the ground, their naked bodies covered with bloody wounds. “Are they… dead?” I whisper to Lynette. “Did I do that?” I feel my forehead wrinkling. I didn’t mean to kill anybody.

“I did,” my wolf thinks fiercely, and I realize that now that I have accepted her, she’ll be talking more. I’m kind of glad. It’s nice to have a friend. “If a wolf is killed attacking another, they deserve what they get.”

Lynette shrugs. “I don’t know,” she whispers.

We watch as members of the pack approach them, lying limp and bloody on the ground. A man checks Andrew, and tells the others, “This one’s alive.”

Another man checks Micah, and shakes his head. “Alive, but just barely. He won’t last long.”

A huge man, as blond as me, with long hair, who I think is one of the Alphas, says, “Get Dr. Hughes in here.”

The first man who spoke to us, a big black man, steps back over to us. He nods his head at Amir, who is lying on his side, staring at the men moving around the cave, his hands trapped behind his back and looking completely miserable. “Can you get him some pants and help him put them on?”

“Of course,” Lynette says, getting up immediately and going over to Amir’s place. I come with her. She whispers to me, “We’re doing everything they ask. It’s the best way for us to stay safe.”

I nod. Of course we are. We submitted, didn’t we? Besides, even though they are all completely scary, not one of them has done anything to hurt us yet. If we are obedient, maybe they won’t?

Amir doesn’t seem to have any clothes at his place, but there are spares for the rogues, and we find a pair of sweatpants that should fit him. When we get back to him, he is glaring at us, but with his hands cuffed behind his back I know he can’t hurt us. I’ll bet he could shift if he wanted, though, and get back out of them, and I wonder if he is just waiting for his chance to do it and escape.

“He can’t shift,” my wolf tells me, and I’m already starting to get used to her following along with my thoughts and chatting with me about them. “Those handcuffs are lined with silver. It’s like when Lynette had the silver collar on. They keep him human and control him.”

Oh! No wonder he looks so miserable. Well, good thing we submitted, or I suppose we’d have them on too.

Lynette pulls him up to a sitting position, and I drag the pant legs up him, and we scootch him off the ground a little to get them all the way up. Good, I don’t like seeing a man’s dick out like that. That looks better.

A woman comes into the cave, and goes over to Micah and Andrew who are lying there still and bleeding. She has someone else with her, carrying a bag. The wolves wait while she examines the men.

Is this the doctor that the Alpha called for? A woman? Huh.

She looks at the Alpha. “They are critically injured, and should not be moved. You can’t put silver cuffs on them or they’ll die. They need their wolf healing.

“Can you treat them here?” he asks.

“I can try,” she says. “I’ll know more in a few hours, after they get the chance to heal a little.

I’m so confused. The pack is going to let them heal? Aren’t they all just going to be executed anyway? Me and Lynette can still be executed as well. I’ve been taught that being in a pack’s territory is a killing offense for rogues, that’s why we couldn’t stay in their marked caves.

“It’s possible the pack intends to show them justice, not simply kill them immediately,” my wolf points out. What a concept!

The Alpha starts making orders, telling some people to stay with the doctor, and other people to get ready to go. My ears perk up when I hear him mention Xavier’s name, and I guess that they are going to go look for him. But me and Lynette, and the rogue men, are apparently getting taken someplace. My heart starts pounding, worried about where we have to go.

Seeing the pack here inside the cave, in familiar surroundings, is scary enough. But once we get taken back with them, into their own territory, who knows what will happen to us. I had to run away from my own pack because of how horrible they were to me. Then Xavier was horrible to me. But now, after the fall of this rogue group, I have to get used to something new, maybe something awful. How horrible is this pack going to be?

Lynette says very softly, “I think it’ll be all right, Nova. Remember Corinne told us to trust them, and to do what they say? I think if we do that, we might end up in a much better place.”

Trust? I’m not sure I know how to do that. But my wolf says, “I think you can trust them. I think we both can.”

Theo

All four of us, me and Amelia and both Lunas, burst out with involuntary shrieks of alarm when we watch the drone feed showing us the rogues wrestling with each other at the top of the cliff, then falling straight over the edge as soon as the she-wolf tries to get involved.

They immediately drop out of the range of the drone’s camera, plummeting to the foot of the cliff where we can no longer see them. The camera is still focused at the top of the cliff, and we see our pack members running up, and at least Evan is able to grab hold of Corinne before she gets too close to the edge and falls after them.

I see Dom and the others get a little closer, look over, and then start looking around for a way to climb down. I’ve been in that area, they’ll need to go around to a path, there’s no way straight down from where they are.

It was more convenient from the command center’s perspective when Dom was running the drone, because Amelia was able to coordinate through their special mate mind-link to get the view in the right place. It takes Pam a few seconds to adjust, probably to check her phone for the text messages instructing her to take the drone lower and try to find the rogues at the bottom of the cliff.

I almost hate to watch as the camera finally starts moving lower, and lower, until it gets to the bottom of the cliff. We’re just going to see dead bodies down there.

We don’t, though. I can’t see anything but the waves crashing against the rocks. At high tide like this, the ocean is right up against the cliff, rushing back and forth, smacking the rocks, spray spurting ten feet in the air, a violent display of nature. The rogues might have fallen into the water, or the water might have pulled them off of the rocks, but none of us can see any people down there.

“Dom and the others are almost there,” Amelia tells us as we cluster around the drone feed, and I suppose that he’s keeping her updated.

In another couple of minutes we see our people come into the drone video view, and start climbing along the dangerous and slippery rocks at the foot of the cliff. The drone must be hovering over them, Pam is following their movements rather than searching futilely on her own, and we all anxiously watch, hoping that they don’t get injured while looking for people who almost certainly have not survived.

Janine says, “We have the River Moon private ambulance company responding too, for transportation.” Good, hopefully we can clear the site before the human emergency response teams are summoned and start showing up. We’ve had to deal with them before, trying to smooth the way for them to overlook our activities, but it can be complicated to try to do it without revealing too much about our true nature. Keeping humans in the dark about the werewolves among them is always a high priority.

I hear Amelia gasp, and in another few seconds the drone has focused on what Dom is doing. Apparently he has found something. He and the others start diving down into the roughly churning water, risking the crashing waves and sharp rocks to bring something up from underneath the surface.

Amelia is holding her hands over her mouth, staring with wide eyes, but I also feel like she is staring within, following along with whatever Dom is telling her. I watch the video on the screen as our team comes up to the surface, holding first one person, then another, and starts making their way back away from the jagged rocks towards the beach.

The Lunas are staring at her, waiting for an update. The drone follows along as they manage to get the people up onto the sand and drop them there, to wait for the ambulance teams to arrive. Half of our people wait with the bodies on the sand, and the other half go back towards the rocks to keep searching.

“It’s Xavier and Seth,” she whispers. Then she shakes her head, sadly. “They haven't found Grace.”

“Are they alive?” Darlene asks.

“Dom says that Seth is still breathing,” she says, “barely. But they say Xavier is already dead.”