Feral Northern Shifters 2

for a lot, Bram thought, her refusing to allow Ethan to consider himself a freak. She apparently hadn’t held a high opinion of education when it came to her son, but maybe for good reason. It was hard for a werewolf to adapt to regular school, and it might have been worse for a lone werecat with dyslexia.
    The phone rang, startling Bram out of his reverie. He stared for a moment, wondering if he should leave it for the answering machine. He didn’t particularly enjoy talking to Trey or Liam or Veronica or whatshisname. As it rang a fourth time, he gave a labored sigh and lifted the handset.
“Hello.”
    “Hi, Bram.” Trey’s voice was grim and he didn’t wait for Bram to return the greeting. “You should know that Doug is gone and his guard is dead.”
He reached for the counter to steady himself and clutched the phone tighter. He choked out the word “How?”
“This happened at most two hours ago so there is no way he is in your neighborhood right now. In fact, I see no way that he can even know where you are. However, to be safe, I think you and Ethan need to move out as soon as possible.
“We’re setting off to find him, but there’s a chance he got in a vehicle which—”
“Will make him impossible to track.”
“That is correct.” Trey paused. “I won’t simply execute people. I had to give him a chance to adapt to his new role. That’s over.”
Over ? Doug was on the run.
“Bram, is Ethan there?”
“He’s at work.”
“I want to talk to him when he gets home.”
“Okay.”
“Bram, I’m sending Liam over to stay with you guys until this gets resolved. He’ll be flying in tonight.”
If this gets resolved. Doug could go into hiding for a while and choose his moment. Liam couldn’t exactly stay here forever. He had a business and a husband and a brother to look after.
“Okay.”
Trey sighed. “Look, obviously you don’t think it’s okay.”
Bram bristled but stopped short of responding.
“Get Ethan to call me.”
“I will.”
They hung up, and Bram immediately called Ethan at work to find out, as he expected since Ethan’s shift was over, that he’d already left. He got a time of departure—twenty minutes ago. Ethan should have been home, unless he stopped for groceries.
Bram paced the house, weighing possibilities, waiting for the gravel to crunch under the sound of Ethan’s tires.
Twenty minutes later he was convinced something was wrong and not only because the stress was driving him nuts. His skin itched and he didn’t want to be human any longer. It wasn’t safe. He’d wait here for Ethan, but not as human. Bram stripped off his clothes, slipped out the back door and jogged to the woods. There, he shifted.
    Ethan wasn’t quite sure how Doug could have managed to arrange for two cars with tinted windows to run him off the road. It didn’t add up. Doug liked to be in charge, do things himself, according to Bram. Doug was also under Trey’s thumb in the Winter compound. Or at least he had been.
    Didn’t matter right this moment. What Ethan had to do was get to Bram and warn him. Ethan had run farther into the woods before shifting. He was a fast shifter, and while he was disoriented upon waking from the change, it hadn’t taken him long to recover and remember that cars had run him off the road. He heard their occupants. The men were on foot, chasing him, but he was cougar and they had no chance. Ethan raced towards the house and Bram, who would be vulnerable and human and waiting for him to come home from work.
He ran for half an hour maybe, aiming straight for the house, racing through brush, past trees, over hills. As he got close, he didn’t slow down, desperate to see Bram safe. He almost missed Bram in his headlong run for that back door. The wolf cut off his approach and Ethan screeched to a halt to stare.
Being wolf could only mean that Bram had had some warning too, hopefully not as dangerous a warning as Ethan’s had been.
Didn’t matter how Bram knew of the danger, they needed to flee. Bram evidently thought the same thing, given that he lifted his head in a gesture that said, Let’s go .
Ethan knew what to do. He’d explored this area carefully the first month he’d lived here when he couldn’t bring himself to trust Trey. There was a cave where they could shelter, the same cave he’d set up as an escape route if the friendly wolves suddenly turned vicious on him. It was about a four-hour run from here. They needed that distance, they needed to