Page 18 of Branches of the Willow (The Ancients #3)

17

The Locks

M y father and Asi both went at the hunter for three days straight. They grilled him, hurt him, played nice with him, and even called Serena to watch the proceedings and give her two cents on what was happening. The man would not talk. Clarissa and Annabelle were useless and had to be kept separate from one another. Annabelle blamed Clarissa for running off with her mate, and him ultimately dying. Clarissa thought she was just being loyal to the true king. It was like turning on Lifetime and Spike Television all at once, and letting the networks’ shows duke it out. Drama, action, drama, and more action. They were exhausting.

“I’ve had enough. It’s time to take the women to the locks, at the very least.” I looked up at my weary father, who wasn’t getting near enough sleep. My best friend’s mate wasn’t fairing much better. I had heard enough complaints from Ashley about Asi not making it to their bed with any energy to spare, and I was tired of our people being bound up by this mess. “In a way, I feel like this was their plan ‘B’ all along. The joke is on us, because they’re making us all miserable, and a little crazier than normal.”

“I second that motion.” My mother said, prompting some chuckles from around the table.

“Beyond our little prison, drama-fest, we have seventeen former captives of the King to still deal with, and that needs to be taken care of soon, or the meeting hall is never going to smell right again.”

“That is no joke! We should burn it down and start fresh. Some of those ladies are rank!” Ashley wrinkled up her nose. She looked around the table when no one spoke up. “Oh fine! I volunteer. You all owe me, so I’m collecting my debt now. I need Evan to stay behind with me to help out with transitioning the women.”

“Why do I need to stay behind and help out with women things, exactly?” Evan piped up.

Ashley rolled her eyes and held up one finger. “Number one, your little lover girl in there will be devastated if I try to move her, and you aren’t there to hold her hand.” Evan huffed, Asi and Mikael laughed, and Ashley continued. “Number 2,” she held up another finger. “I don’t speak Romanian, Czech, Polish, or whatever the hell else you guys have to translate in there. I need someone in there who I trust to do that for me.” She held up one more finger. “Three, Evan is their hero for rescuing them in the first place, and he’s the only male they trust around here.” She smiled at him. “And four, I’m not doing this shit alone, and I know Jess is going to want to make the trip to the locks, which means Mikael’s going to go. Asi’s going to go, because Jameson is going to order him to, so that leaves you!”

I smiled at Ashley, and then looked at Evan. “Okay, so, that’s settled. Sierra is all set to help too. I had a talk with her, and she has been going over and working with the women, trying to figure out what they want to do from here. Some are still in their mating prime and will likely want to go to packs as part of the Immersion Program. I don’t think it matters if they’re Ancients or Lessers, either way it introduces new blood into the mix.

“When we get back from taking the prisoners to the locks, Mikael and I will escort Brian and Nicholai to the Daniels Clan.” I looked around the table at all the watchful eyes of my family and friends. “When all that is said and done, I am taking a damn vacation, and putting my feet up somewhere. I don’t care if it’s just on the couch at home.” Mikael’s head shot up from across the table, and he was beaming at me. That was all I wanted. He hadn’t been smiling a whole lot lately, and with everything going on, the most that we would see each other during the day was when we had these meetings and sat around the table to discuss what was happening. I missed him, and it was evident that he missed being with me just as much.

“Make sure Avery knows that those two guys you’re taking to him served us well. Brian and Nicholai both did a fantastic job when we skirmished with John and his second. Nicholai is the one who took John Freedman down. It will go far in endearing that man to Avery, and I have a feeling he’s going to need all the help he can get.” My father chuckled. We all knew that Nicholai had an ego that was bigger than he was. He rivaled the DéLune Brothers when I first met each of them. That was saying something.

“What are we going to do with the hunter?” Mikael asked, glancing back and forth between me and my father.

“We haven’t been able to get anything out of him. Even with the witch’s help, we are sitting dead in the water, so I say we cut our losses there.” My father spoke candidly.

“Are you talking death sentence or Locks?”

“I’m willing to go with either, so long as he is gone.”

“We’re already making a trip to the Locks. We might as well pack him in there too,” I suggested.

“That might turn out to be a crueler fate than death. I’m not sure how the others inside the Locks will deal with a hunter being tossed in among them.”

“I don’t know. Can we put some sort of tracker on him, so we can see what happens?”

“Jess?” Mikael sounded almost disgusted. “The chance that this guy is going to be torn apart is far greater than anything else, and you want to watch that?”

“No. I’m betting his skills and instincts will keep him alive a lot longer than you think. I want him to have a horrible time of it though, and then I want to have a way to track and locate him, so we can haul his ass out of there if we need to. Plus, it might be helpful to know if hunters can be transitioned into werewolves. That was a question even Serena couldn’t answer when I asked because it had never been attempted before since they’re supposed to be on the same team to guard witches from the dark ones.”

“I guess we can try it.” My dad shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not something we’ve ever even thought about. Honestly, it might give us some insight into how many people we still have down in the Locks to begin with. Hell, it’s been three years since we’ve put anyone in there.”

With that settled we got the three prisoners ready for transfer to the Locks and took the two-hour journey to get there. It wasn’t at all what you would think when imagining a prison. The Locks were built with supernatural beings in mind. An old missile silo was the basis for the Locks closest to us. The Silo itself was built to a depth of 180 feet underground. The Locks were retrofitted with a slide shoot that dropped the prisoners in at a level around 125 feet below the surface. The rest of the silo’s upper levels were closed off under poured concrete over rebar, and each level on the way up was infused with silver. The shoot itself was also lined with silver, making the 125-foot drop into the abyss below a painful one for those beings affected by it. Since the locks were built for our kind, in specific, it made sense.

The prisoners were knocked out during transport. As karma would have it, we used the same drug cocktail on them that they had dosed me with when I was taken to Sophia and Zach. While the hunter was still under, we tagged his clothing with several cameras, and implanted a tracking device in his right thigh. I suddenly felt like I was stuck in a spy movie where werewolves were working to save all of mankind. It was a ridiculous notion, but there you have it. It was the best idea we had, and our only chance at appeasing our curiosity about what happened once a prisoner entered the Locks.

As each of them woke up, we put them in the shoot, and let the bottom drop out. They literally rode the tube down to the safety floor. It was the top level available to the prisoners. The food and supplies were delivered three floors below that, so whoever was still left down there, most likely hung out around that area. Prior to dropping the prisoners down, we made a supply drop. It was our way of giving the newbies a head start to find a safe place to hide.

Asi brought a remote viewing unit with us, so we could watch the video feed while we were on location. As soon as we dropped the hunter, the video showed him shooting through the tube at a rapid pace, slowing only at the end when the shoot turned and shot back up one floor to spit the prisoner’s out after slowing them down a bit. When I first heard about the shoot in the locks, as a little girl, I had asked my dad if I could go ride it. Of course, I didn’t realize it was lined in silver, or that there could be a mob of murderous, scary-crazy shifters down there waiting to feast on my bones and do worse things before that too. Zach had told me about that later. His uncle hadn’t spared him those horrible details, and Zach, shared them with our entire class. We were eight years old at the time.

We watched the quick descent that the hunter made. It really did look like a fun ride for him. Apparently, silver had zero effect on hunters. It did spit him out quickly at the end. We watched him fly up into the air, and then land with an umph on a mattress. He shook his head to clear his brain of the drug-induced fog he was no doubt still under, and then he got up and started looking around. It didn’t take long for him to find the door that would lead him to the lower levels, but once he moved beyond the door, the level of metals in the walls made it impossible for us to keep a signal open. The video feed cut out just as we saw him approaching two men, and then the signal on his tracker was lost as well.

“Damn.” I shouted out my disappointment. “I guess the walls are too thick down there. Why didn’t someone wire this bad boy up before it was used as a prison?”

My father laughed at me. “We didn’t have that capability back then, and I don’t think anyone thought to make a sport of watching the inhabitants.

“Well, it was worth the shot. At least we know that they’ve made a comfortable landing spot for those coming down, because the mattresses weren’t in any plans I saw of the place. We also know there’s at least two other men down there,” Asi stated.

“Right, but it would have helped to know what they’re up to down there all the time. You never know when they might decide to attempt an escape.” Everyone turned to me then, and I just shrugged my shoulders. “You never know.” I pointed down there. “He’s not affected by silver, what’s to stop him from climbing his way back up the shoot?”

“You think he could climb up 125 feet of slick surface?” It was my father who questioned me.

“I don’t know what hunters are capable of. Do you?”

“Even if he could, none of the others would be able to, so it doesn’t matter,” my father shot back.

“Are we ready for these two? They’re grogginess is fading.” Mikael moved both women forward toward the tube, effectively cutting off my musings.

Clarissa started moaning as realization set in. “No, please, don’t do this to us.” Mikael didn’t waste a minute, he put her straight into the tube, closed the lid over her, and pulled the lever that dropped the bottom out, and opened the shoot up on each level for her to pass through. We could hear her screams echoing back up the tube as she went. The silver was burning her, and like a dumbass, she was letting it get the best of her. It would alert the others below that a female was being sent down if the hunter hadn’t already informed them of that. It would probably make for an easy initial get-away for him to announce that two women would be following him.

Annabelle was next, and she pinned me with a murderous stare as Mikael shut her into the tube. “No matter what we did to you, it couldn’t compare to what you do to me when you pull that lever.” She spat out.

“Only because Sophia’s spell failed, and I escaped. You earned your place in the Locks. You had a choice. You chose wrong.” I nodded my head, and Mikael pulled the lever. We listened as she screamed on the way down, until the depth of the building swallowed her up along with her screams. “Let’s secure the place and get the hell out of here. We still have an hour drive to get to Avery’s lands to drop Nicholai and Brian off.”

We had originally planned on taking them to Avery’s the following day, but the two men were excited to go take their place in a pack structure again, and Avery’s place was only an hour from the Locks, the two of them tagged along for the ride. They had been made to wait outside with the guards while we handled the prisoners inside.

An hour later we were pulling up to Avery’s and I was tired of sitting in a car. My cell phone rang as we pulled down the main road of the little town that the Daniels Clan inhabited. “Hello?” I answered.

“Jess, how long before you’re going to be back here?” It was Ashley and she sounded a bit frantic.

“It’s going to take us two hours by car to get back, why?”

“You might want to get started then. We have a baby on the way over here. I figured you would want to be here for the action. It’s not every day a new pup is birthed, and well, you know this one has complications.”

“Yeah, I know.” I sighed into the phone. “We’ll do what we can.”

“Can I help you?” Avery’s tall, blond, no-nonsense daughter greeted the car as we rolled up. When she saw it was Mikael behind the wheel of the car, she plastered on a mega-watt smile, and changed her attitude. “Oh, hi! I didn’t realize they were sending you. Did you finally get tired of the great white wolf playing damsel in distress?” Mikael quirked up his eyebrow in question and tried miserably to contain the smirk that started at the corner of his mouth.

“Where is your father?” I questioned without bothering to duck down so she could see who was speaking.

“I don’t know who you think you are, but you don’t come on our lands and order our people around. And you really don’t order me…” She had squatted a bit to be able to look me in the eye as she reamed me out for my disrespect. She ended up biting her tongue and the rest of her diatribe the minute she saw who was seated next to Mikael.

“You were saying?” I questioned.

“Mee-oow!” Nicholai snickered from the back and extended his fingers out in front of him like claws. “Please, don’t stop. I love a good cat fight, especially between two beautiful creatures such as yourselves.”

“Shut up!” I snapped at him.

“Big mistake.” Tessa growled at him at the same time.

“Well, now the world can end. The two of you found common ground. An equal loathing of Nicholai just happened to do the trick. How will we ever deal with all the peace?” Mikael teased as he slid his hand over to my leg. I attempted to glare at him, but I ended up laughing instead, because he was just too damn adorable to ignore.

“Whatever…” I finally managed. “We really need to see your dad, now. We have a pup being born back home, and the mom doesn’t want him.”

Disgust crept into Tessa’s face. “That’s a damn shame. He’s a bit tied up with my sister’s problems at the moment. I can slide these guys over to the guards and get them settled until Avery can meet with them.”

“I’m sure my father already sent word, but they were instrumental in helping us recently. Smart ass there even did the world a favor by ridding it of John Freedman.”

“Oh?” Tessa bent down to look in the back of the car again, reappraising the man with the shit-eating grin. “Too bad about that ego he’s lugging around.” She commented deadpan.

“That’s the damn truth.” I agreed.

She opened the back door, and stood out of the way, allowing for the men to get out, and stretch. Nicholai didn’t miss a beat. He put a little extra effort into his stretching, allowing for a healthy amount of his abs to peek out from beneath his shirt as it rode up with the movement of his arms.

If he thought Tessa Daniels was going to be an easy mark, he had another thing coming. That girl was tough as nails and didn’t take shit from anyone. She glanced in his direction, and feigned aloofness on the spot. “Grab your bags and follow me.” She spun on her heel and started walking off without waiting for the men. “It was good seeing you again, Mikael.” She called out over her shoulder, then added, “Jess,” at the end like it was a chore to include me.

Mikael waved at her and laughed. “Man, she really doesn’t like you.”

“Whatever. Let’s get back. I’m so damn tired. Is it bad that I am praying to every God ever known to man or beast right now that Tatianna has the quickest labor in the history of labors?”

“Funny, I was just thinking the same thing. I could use a nap.” Mikael topped that sentiment off with a yawn as we took off, heading back home.