Just a Rogue

Evan

It works way smoother than I had actually allowed myself to hope. Alpha Kanen stalks behind the creep who is stalking Janine, and I am in the SUV with the lights off on the other side of the street. When the rogue starts reaching out to grab her, I immediately swing the car in a tight u-turn to get onto their side of the street. By the time I pull up to the curb in about two seconds, Kanen has walloped the jerk in the face so hard that he drops instantly to the ground like a slab of beef.

Janine grabs the door handle to yank the back passenger side door open, Kanen physically tosses the dude into the seat and jumps in after him, Janine hops into the front seat next to me, and I am pulling away from the curb.

The entire thing took less than ten seconds, speedy and soundless except for a strangled noise of pain that the rogue emitted when Janine blasted his face with silver.

Woah. Amazing. And almost anticlimactic, after being geared up for a huge battle, to just take the creep out with almost no effort.

As I start driving up the street to leave Arcata and return to the packhouse with our prisoner, Kanen yanks a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket, and cuffs the rogue’s hands behind his back. He leaves him slumped sideways on the seat, ready to pound him back into unconsciousness if he happens to start reviving.

Janine is watching back there happily as I drive. “Well done, guys!” she praises us cheerfully. “That was super easy!”

Kanen growls, thunder in his voice, “He touched your hair! He’s lucky I didn’t knock his ugly head straight off his thick neck!”

She huffs out a little laugh. “Calm down there, Thor,” she tells him, and I bite my tongue to stop myself from laughing too. Thor must be the precisely accurate pet name that she calls him.

I glance back at him in the rearview mirror, and see him glowering at the rogue, probably just daring him to wake up and start anything. He looks like he would like nothing more than to be committing murder right now. I can empathize.

Janine asks, “Will the cuffs hold him?”

Kanen says grimly, “Oh, they’ll hold him. Dark Woods isn’t the only pack that’s been playing with silver. The bands are lined with silver on the inside. He can’t break out of them, or shift as long as they’re on him.”

She nods, and then looks down at her phone when she hears a text notification. “Oh, good, they’ve caught two more of the rogues, just as easily as we did. They’re on the way back to the packhouse too.”

“Good,” Kanen says, “three down, seven to go.”

“Should I tell them to go after the fourth one?” she asks.

“What’s he doing?”

She pauses, texting some more, then says, “Apparently he’s just staying with the car, probably waiting to see if the other rogues bring anybody back.”

He thinks for a moment. “Tell them to just keep watching him with the drone, and the teams can move in if he tries to attack anyone. Otherwise he can go back to Xavier. Let them try to figure out what happened to these three.” Apparently unable to resist, he gives the rogue a light smack, which is met with a muffled groan.

Seth

It’s weirdly quiet, and I feel uneasy. I’ve been sitting here for a couple of hours, waiting with the car, wondering what they’re doing out there. I really didn’t expect them to actually stay out until the rendezvous time of midnight. I figured they’d have gotten into scrapes with pack wolves and need to come rushing back. I even allowed for the possibility that they’d be able to abduct a female and we’d need to speed away with her.

But I didn’t expect to just be idly waiting here with no word. I alternate between sitting in the car and walking down to the end of the alleyway, both sides, back and forth, peeking out into the streets on both ends of the block. Nothing.

Well, it’s almost midnight, everyone should be back in a couple of minutes, and we can head back to the cave. It’s been long enough that Xavier should be finished with Corinne, and everyone should just be sleeping. I grit my teeth, trying not to think about it.

Midnight comes and goes. These assholes are late getting back! I stand leaning against the car, my arms crossed, fuming. This is so aggravating. Blake and Finn are flaky sometimes, I’m not surprised that they haven’t kept track of the time. Wyatt isn’t, though. He’s a huge jerk but he’s completely reliable.

I’d miss my cell phone, but none of them have one anyway, so having it wouldn’t have helped.

It’s getting ridiculously late now. It’s about 12:30, not a peep from any of them, and I’m gonna have to go hunt them down. For all I know Blake and Finn have bedded down in the town square with some of the homeless people that I know live in the area. No idea what is taking Wyatt so long.

I decide to head first in the direction that Blake and Finn went. I follow their scent, vaguely meandering through the town, wandering up one street, turning the corner, down another street, like they couldn’t decide which way to go and weren’t really paying attention. After a few blocks, though, I catch another scent, a pack scent, and the rogue scent follows. Did they get into a confrontation? God, who knows, am I about to find their dead bodies in a back alley, having lost a pack fight?

I’m on alert, following behind the tangle of scents that tells me that they were tracking a pack member, trying to sort out what everything means. It leads me into a very quiet side street, a sort of light industrial area, totally deserted.

And the scent trail ends. Just ends. What the fuck?

I backtrack a little, thinking I must have missed a turn, but no, there the scent trail is, just a few feet away, but when I return it vanishes. Gone. Like they were walking along the street then disappeared.

Well, shit. There’s only one thing this can mean. They must have gotten into a car and driven off with somebody. You can’t really track the scent of someone who is enclosed within a vehicle.

What are they thinking? Did some girls pick them up? Were they hitchhiking? Were they arrested by the police?

I remember what they were talking about in the car all the way down to Arcata, grumbling about how Xavier rarely rewards them with the females. Complaining about having been running as wolves for days only to be sent out on this thankless assignment tonight. They have been very discontent, joining our group only a few months ago, and never seeming fully committed to Xavier’s leadership.

I think the most likely explanation is that they have decided to leave Xavier, and branch off on their own, or together with whoever’s car they just got into.

Well, I shrug, no big loss. They really didn’t contribute very much anyway, were mostly just two extra mouths for Xavier to feed. He’ll be angry, of course, but probably just as glad to see them go.

That doesn’t explain why Wyatt hasn’t shown up, though. He’s always seemed pretty committed to the hierarchy under Xavier.

I walk back to the car and try again, in the opposite direction, following Wyatt’s scent. He has been far more methodical than Blake and Finn were. They meandered, but he is tracing out the lines of a grid. I can tell he was planning to survey the area carefully, keep track of places where the pack has been. I assume he wanted to provide a thorough report to Xavier.

The pattern changes about half a mile away from the car, his scent veering around a corner, and I realize why. A pack scent, different from the scent that Blake and Finn were following. The same thing, though. Wyatt was clearly following a pack member. I imagine it must have been a female, or a solitary smaller male, somebody that would be easy prey for him.

I concentrate on the trail, trying to let the scent tell the story, when bam. Same thing. It disappears.

Wyatt apparently got into a car too.

Was he coordinating with Blake and Finn? That must be why he wanted to split up from me. They hadn’t told me anything about it, probably since I’m Xavier’s second in command, they couldn’t risk including me in their plan.

Well, shit. Now Xavier is going to be furious. Blake and Finn leaving will be no big loss, but Wyatt is valuable. Huge in both his wolf and human forms, fierce, vicious, crafty. His loss will sting.

Fuck them for leaving me in this position, having to be the one to go back and tell Xavier of their betrayal.

I sigh heavily, stand still for a moment, then walk back to the car. At this point, I’m half tempted to just steal it, and leave myself, never going back.

But that’s impossible now that Corinne has returned. She’s there, with Xavier. She and my baby.

I’m going back.

I get in the car and start driving.

Beta Malcolm

Our team is waiting at the driveway next to the basement staircase behind the packhouse. We don’t know how much fighting is going to be required to wrestle the rogues down the stairs into the jail cells in the basement. So a lot of us are waiting out here, just in case.

We know that all three of them have had a good dose of silver dust right in their faces, and furthermore are wearing handcuffs with silver lining, so they won’t be able to shift, or hopefully put up too much of a fight. We’ll see.

The first car to arrive is the one with Alpha Kanen and Luna Janine. As soon as they stop, our team gets the door open and pulls out the rogue. He’s huge, as big as me, but I don’t think he is even aware of what is going on. If he’s conscious, it is just barely.

One man holding his arms on each side, he is bundled down the stairway, past the residential hallway, and into the jail wing of the basement. A cell door is standing open, ready to receive him. It has three block walls, and a barred wall with a door on the outside, a toilet/sink prison combo, and a low bed with a pillow and blanket. We aren’t savages, it isn’t a torture dungeon.

There is, however, a sturdy chain bolted to the wall. The men thrust him into the cell, and drop him onto the bed. They look to me for further instructions. “Switch the cuffs to the front,” I tell them, “but make sure to keep one in contact with his skin while you’re changing it.” As long as one of his wrists is touching the silver he can’t suddenly come to and shift.

I want his hands in front of him so he can use the toilet. The last thing we need is to be cleaning up some rogue’s mess. While they are pulling one of his hands out of the cuff and around to the front to refasten it, his eyes open groggily, and he looks around in alarm, but they hold him down so that they get the second cuff locked around his wrist before he can do anything about it.

“Add the chain,” I instruct, and they comply, linking the chain to the loop at the top of the handcuffs. He is secured to the wall, held by silver cuffs, and when they leave the cell and lock the door behind him, he is trapped behind sturdy bars.

He’s not going anywhere.

“Come on,” I tell the men, and they follow me back down the hall towards the stairs.

The rogue has apparently come to, and I hear the chain rattling, and him yelling “Hey!” in a furious voice, as we are closing the door behind us. Let him stew in there alone. He’ll have company soon enough.

Amelia

It’s nearly midnight. Our teams have brought back three of the rogues, and they are all trapped downstairs in the jail cells, wearing silver handcuffs, chained to the wall, locked behind bars. They are completely secured.

And monitored, of course. We have added screens to the conference room table, our command center growing all the time. The webcams in front of each cell show a clear view of each prisoner, and we watched as they were brought in, looking half dead, and left there in their confinement. We observed as they realized what was happening, and spent some time bellowing and raging about it. Then they began talking to each other, fearfully wondering what is happening, if they’ll be executed, if Xavier will find a way to come and rescue them.

Ha. As if.

Xavier’s going to have much bigger problems soon.

Dom has been here with me since the trailhead drone team came back, and he’s been monitoring the Arcata drone feed on a screen next to me. The Alphas are here, and have been watching the feeds with us.

It’s starting to look like the one rogue remaining in Arcata isn’t planning to attack anyone. I think the action for the night might be over, and I suddenly start feeling a deep fatigue. It’s been a long day. I’m not even sure whether this sense of tiredness is mine, or if it’s coming from Dom. Probably both.

Several people start coming through the door. Ah, the graveyard shift has arrived.

Kanen looks up from the screen he’s been staring at.

“All right, everyone who’s been here all day, you’re relieved. Go to bed, get some rest. We’ll have another busy day tomorrow,” he says.

As much as I would love to keep watching what is happening, I know he’s right. I’ll be able to see a transcript in the morning of anything that happens overnight.

Dom meets my eyes, and I suddenly want nothing more than to be cuddled up in his arms in bed.

“Me too,” he thinks to me, and we quietly say goodnight and go down the stairs together to my room.

I know that all day long we’ve been sending dirty images to each other, and I expected that we’d be boinking as soon as we get to bed, but we’re both so exhausted that we just curl up together, and hold each other quietly while we wait for sleep to take us.

I figure that we’ll take a shower together in the morning.

“Yes please,” he murmurs, and it’s the last thing I hear before I fall asleep with his arms wrapped around me.