Page 19 of Alphas Never Hide (Willow Lake Supernaturals #5)

Chapter Nineteen

HAYDEN

Ryley was distressed. Every part of me ached to comfort him, and he hadn’t even started talking yet.

I jumped up from my chair behind the desk.

“ Van , come sit over here,” I said, yanking him out of the chair I’d brought in for him.

He didn’t fight me, but I could see he had questions. As soon as he was out of the way, I sat in the chair he’d vacated and scooted it closer to Ryley’s . I didn’t relax until my leg touched his.

“ You gonna do that thing with my neck again?” Ryley asked. It sounded like he was teasing, but the look in his eyes told me he was serious.

“ Of course,” I said, and slipped my hand around the back of his neck, just like I’d do with someone from my pack. The tension in his shoulders eased almost immediately. He still didn’t talk.

“ Hey ,” I said. “ Would it help if I started? ”

Ryley’s forehead crinkled. “ What do you mean?”

“ I’ll tell Van what happened today. What we found. Then you can fill him in on everything else.”

“ Yeah , um, okay.” Ryley nodded.

I told Van about how we picked up the trail they’d lost last night, how we found the tunnel, what we’d discovered down there, how Robbie had talked to me, and then about Ryley’s plan to get me out of the cage. Van scribbled notes as I spoke. He asked a few questions, but I’d been with him in interviews enough times that I’d started off by giving him as many details as I could think of as I walked through what’d happened.

Then it was Ryley’s turn.

I thought Van might poke at him to get him to talk, but he waited until the faun was ready. I pushed more of my alpha energy into Ryley , thankful at least that part of my magic was still working.

“ What’s your last name, Ryley ?”

“ Bell . My name is Ryley Bell .” Then he rattled off his address and a bunch of other random details, as if happy to recite all the boring facts of his life if it meant he didn’t have to talk about being captured.

When his words petered out, Van nodded. “ Okay . Why don’t we talk about what you were doing before Robbie found you?”

Ryley sighed, then he swallowed hard. “ It was around the end of July , when I decided I needed a vacation.” He glanced at the old school calendar I had pinned to the wall. “ That was over a month and a half ago. Almost two.”

“ When did you leave your home?”

Ryley checked his phone. Although I didn’t think he really needed to, I could see it gave him something to do with his hands. Something to look at other than Van and me. He gave us a date and continued his story again. “ I’ve never really had a vacation since I started my business about eight years ago, but suddenly I just…” He shook his head. “ That part isn’t important. So , anyway, I decided to tour around for a bit. I thought I’d go home when the snow started to fly. Or maybe not. I’ve never tried skiing, so…” He shook his head again. “ Yeah . You don’t really care about that either.”

“ There is no right or wrong way to do this,” Van said softly. “ Just talk to us. At your own pace. Say whatever you want to say. If I want to know more about something, I’ll ask you some questions. Relax and take your time.”

Ryley reached for his ginger ale with a shaky hand and took a large gulp of it. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He did it again, just how I’d instructed him when we’d been in the woods earlier. Then he closed his eyes. I gripped his neck a little tighter, to remind him he wasn’t alone. Another deep breath in, then out.

“ I don’t know why I’m —” he waved his hand through the air, “—being so weird about this or whatever.”

“ You’re doing great,” I said. “ This is the first time you’re talking about it. The first time you’ve let yourself really think about it, since you escaped. It is going to be raw. And what happened today wouldn’t have helped.”

Ryley leaned into my touch a little more and let out a shuddering breath. “ So , like I was saying, I went on a holiday. I’m self-employed and can pretty much work from anywhere, so I’m not sure it was really a holiday.”

“ What do you do?” Van asked.

“ I design websites for people and do some graphic design work.” He patted his laptop, which he was holding against his chest like a security blanket. “ This is all I need. Anyway , I bought a twenty-year-old convertible on a whim, thinking it’d be cool to drive through the mountains with the top down. I threw what I needed in my backpack, and I hit the road. On my first night, I grabbed a room at a motel off the highway. Nothing special, but it didn’t look like a dive, either.”

“ What was the name of it? Was it close to a town?”

Ryley pushed up his glasses. “ I wasn’t really paying attention. It might have been something like Sleepy Hills Motel .”

“ You didn’t plan your route on one of those, what do they call them…? Apps or whatever?” I asked. He seemed way too techy not to have used a program to plot his route.

His cheeks darkened. “ Normally I would have, yes. But I’d had the bizarre impulse to see where I ended up. I took it as a sign the Eternal Magic was trying to tell me something, like she had when I left my herd. But then, when I was jumped leaving my room to get ice my first night, I wondered if some other magic was messing with me. That’s a ridiculous idea, isn’t it? Bad things happen to people all the time. It doesn’t mean magic is involved. But that compulsion to get in my car and drive right to the spot where someone was waiting to abduct me, I wondered if something else was at work, you know?”

Van and I exchanged a look. That didn’t sound good. I didn’t know of a magic that could do that, but magic could be twisted to do a lot of things. What happened between Simon and Ogden was just one example. But how would Robbie get his hands on something like that?

“ You know what? Never mind about that whole magic thing. I’m being paranoid or letting my brain think it was a big conspiracy because I’m horrified at how unprepared I was.”

“ We’ve seen magic twisted and manipulated into doing a lot of strange things this summer. Anything is possible,” I told him.

“ And you’ve been with those wolves ever since?” Van asked, steering Ryley back on topic.

“ Yeah .” He shivered, and I wished I could pull him into my lap and hold him. “ My mind is blank from the point when I stepped into the hallway to waking up in a cage in that bunker.”

A low growl rumbled through me. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t try. Thinking about Robbie and his pals attacking random supes—no, not any random supe, but this supe in particular—made me want to stop them. Permanently .

I’d been hunting Robbie all summer, but I’d never considered killing him before. I always imagined turning him over to Van . Getting him help. But suddenly my plans turned a hell of a lot darker. But could I do that? Kill my own brother? The last family I had?

Yes . I thought I could. For Ryley .

How fucked up was that? I’d known the guy for less than twenty-four hours and I was thinking of killing for him. What was going on with me? First , my magic was acting up and now this ?

The chair creaked when Van leaned forward in it. “ Did you see who grabbed you?”

“ I think they must have drugged me. I didn’t see a thing.” Ryley shook his head, and his shoulders drooped.

“ That’s okay. From what we understand, they’ve been doing this for several months at least. Enough times to get good at it. Once they targeted you, there probably wasn’t much you could have done,” Van said. “ Now , how about when you were in the bunker? Did you see anyone while you were down there? Any guards? Any other prisoners?”

“ Three wolves. All of them were guards, I guess. No one else.” He pushed up his glasses again. “ Wait . I think I heard someone crying one night. The wolves always talked about leaving the bunker at night and sleeping in a bed, so I don’t think it was one of them I heard. I might have imagined it. It got spookily quiet down there. It made you hear things that weren’t there. Anyway , Hayden and I didn’t find any beds when we looked through the tunnels today, so Robbie and his guys must have been living somewhere else.”

That was important. Because if Robbie and the others weren’t sleeping in that tunnel, where did they go? And where was that other prisoner who’d been crying? Robbie had said something about other pets too, hadn’t he? Were those the shadows Ryley mentioned when we’d first stepped into the tunnel? Where had they gone? Van and I shared a look that told me he was thinking the same thing.

“ Okay , Ryley ,” Van said. “ That’s good.”

Van asked a bunch more questions. A lot of them were variations of the same thing, trying to get as many details from Ryley as he could, including Ryley’s observations about what’d happened when he’d gone back down in those tunnels with me. When their interview finally ended, I decided I had a few of my own questions.

I turned to Van . “ We need to get back to that tunnel. Have you called Birch Avery yet? When can we get out there?”

“ Birch will be here in a few days.” Van held up his hand when I opened my mouth to protest about the delay. “ He knows this is important, but the SC has him checking the Fardale Prison . A team of independent mages go through the place every six months to make sure the Eternal Magic isn’t undermining our efforts to keep all those bastards off the streets. Birch is on the team this time around.”

Van made it sound like the Eternal Magic herself was breaking criminals out of prison, like a scene from an action and adventure movie, but we both knew it wasn’t like that.

A supe was blessed with magic when they were born. I’d heard of occasions when the Eternal Magic would bestow additional blessings as a person aged, but I’d never heard of her removing magic from someone. Once a supe, always a supe. And that made it tricky for prisons, because magic didn’t like to be trapped. It had nothing to do with the Eternal Magic going out of her way to help criminals; it was just a fact of supernatural life.

So , it took a tremendous effort to keep supes imprisoned. That’s why, in the past, hellhounds were tasked with executing the worst criminals. It made things simpler. And I was beginning to see the benefits of the old system.

And once an alpha, always an alpha , a little voice inside me whispered. I ignored it, because it wasn’t the same. It just… It wasn’t.

I clenched my teeth. “ Fine . So when can he get here?”

“ Two days at the earliest. If they find a problem, it could take longer.”

That was too damn long.

“ I know,” Van said, agreeing with me even though I hadn’t said a word. My growling, which had grown louder, must have clued him in on what I was thinking. “ But I haven’t found another available earth mage who can come any faster.”

I didn’t like it, but what could I do? “ Let me know when he’s here.”

“ Yeah . Whatever . You can talk to him when he gets here. He’ll be staying at the Willow Lake Inn . Jake’s offered him a free room, as a thank you for what he did with that tunnel at the beginning of summer.”

“ They already have rooms ready?” After Robbie and his asshole buddies had detonated bombs at the inn during the summer, Jake and Gage had been renovating and fixing the place up with plans of it becoming a sanctuary, but I hadn’t heard they’d finished already. “ I thought they were still working on the dining room.”

“ They are.” Van nodded. “ But Jake also wanted to get a few rooms done, at least the ones that needed less work. After replacing the windows, Gage said most of the second-floor rooms only needed cosmetic upgrades. You’d know this if you’d been to the inn recently. Anyway , Gage said there are a few rooms that are ready. At least three, I guess, since he said there were rooms for Ash’s brother, one for Ryley , and one for you too. ”

“ I don’t need a room.” I’d almost said, “ We don’t need a room,” but Ryley would probably benefit from being somewhere with a decent shower and a bed that wasn’t created from a table, lumpy cushions, and a couple of musty sleeping bags.

“ Yes ,” Van said. “ You do. Because the doc said you need a keeper. You should have heard him when I told him you’d gone out to the hills today.”

I rubbed my eyes. “ Why did you have to tell him that?”

“ I didn’t go tattling on you. He came to the office this morning after discovering you hadn’t gone to work. He was at the garage to check up on you. When you weren’t there, he wanted me to do a damn wellness check. He thought you might have dropped into a coma.”

“ Oh .” That was unfortunate.

“ He came with me to your place in case you needed medical assistance.”

I guessed that answered one of my questions. Van knew where I lived, and now Xander did too.

“ Here . I can tell you exactly what he said because he made me write it down.” Van flipped back a couple of pages in his notebook before glancing at me to make sure I was paying attention. “ He said, and I quote, ‘ If he refuses to stay with me, he is going to stay at the Willow Lake Inn where there will be lots of people around to make sure his stubborn ass’—his words, not mine—’doesn’t sneak out again like an impulsive teenager with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.’ He also said, ‘ If he refuses, lock his stubborn alpha ass’—once again, these are his words not mine—’in a cell at the police station, for his own damn health.’” Van looked at me. “ Listen , I don’t know what all is going on with you, but the doctor has the authority to intervene if he feels someone’s health is at risk. You know that as well as I do. Supes don’t normally get sick, but if they do, they need to be monitored because of the weird way magic affects an ailing body. You could become a danger to yourself or others. So don’t doubt me when I say I will lock you up if he tells me to. Is that what you want?”

I shuddered. If Xander told Van to lock me up, the bastard would do it too. I wasn’t going back in another cage.

“ Ryley can stay with me.”

Van snorted and looked at Ryley . “ Right . Like that worked out so well this morning.”

“ Well , I stopped him from going out in the middle of the night,” Ryley said. “ But , yeah, after he slept and stuff, I didn’t think it’d be a problem. I didn’t know I was supposed to keep him home indefinitely.”

“ Well , Xander says you need two days of nothing but rest and lots of protein.” Van’s gaze held mine. “ After that, he’ll reassess and see how you are.”

“ So , it looks like we’re going to the inn,” Ryley said.

“ Yep ,” Van said.

After the scare with my shift to my wolf not working earlier today, I couldn’t even argue. If I tried to convince them I was fine, Van would hear the lie. So I said the only thing that came to mind. “ Fuck .”