Feral Northern Shifters 2

and fear. He reached up a hand and brushed hair off of Ethan’s forehead.
Ethan smiled and he tried to make it reassuring. “Sleep. We need it. In the morning, we’ll figure things out.”
Bram acquiesced, his eyelids fluttered shut, and he was out in less than a minute. Ethan lasted long enough to pull a blanket over both of them, but the events of the day overwhelmed him, and he too fell asleep.
    The motor entered his dreams slowly, as if from far, far away. Ethan the cat wondered why a car had driven off the highway, down that hill and still chased him. Hadn’t he escaped? Hadn’t he jumped out of that window and run and run and run? They couldn’t catch the cougar.
    But he was human.
Abruptly Ethan was fully awake, staring into the pitch black of the cave. He lay there, curled around Bram who continued to sleep. The forest was quiet except for insect and small-animal noises. And the sound of a motor in the far distance. Not a car, exactly, but something.
Ethan slipped away from Bram and went to the edge of the cave to listen carefully. After ten minutes he was sure the motor was getting closer. To him. To Bram.
How the fuck could they be found at night in the wilderness in a cave? In that moment, Ethan became convinced this was not Doug out there chasing down Bram.
Someone else was chasing down Ethan. Somehow. He shivered as a memory of Trey in Robert’s kitchen surfaced. There are very sophisticated tracking devices. But he’d avoided that fate, hadn’t he? Doug hadn’t managed to pass him over to the people who could have tagged him.
He glanced back at the wolf, his wolf, who slept on, who had thought to leave him in order to save Ethan from Doug’s wrath. Doug may have wanted to hunt Bram down, but Bram wasn’t being hunted now. Ethan knew what a hunt felt like and this was it.
There was one way to find out who was the real target. Ethan crept away from the cave. There he shifted, one last time, he told himself, for if he was right, he wasn’t going to be human for a while, perhaps a very long while.
Then he ran, putting distance between himself and Bram. When he stopped he again listened carefully to the motor and where it was now headed. He’d positioned himself so that they formed a triangle: he, Bram and the vehicle. It no longer aimed for Bram. It had changed direction so that it headed towards Ethan and away from the cave.
Ethan turned and ran farther. The most important thing was that Bram didn’t get caught in whatever net was closing in on Ethan.
It wasn’t the longest run of his life, but it was the grimmest, because Ethan knew how it would end. It took them seven hours and three ATVs, but the tranq gun eventually hit its mark and Ethan, exhausted, went down.
He didn’t want to wake, so he didn’t fight going under.

Chapter Twenty-Four
    Bram woke cold, hungry and alone.
He’d overslept and Ethan had gone to work.
No . Bram jack-knifed to sitting. He was in a strange cave, one he and Ethan had fled to yesterday, and
Ethan was long gone.
    Bram shoved his panic down. No time for that. He had to figure out what the hell had happened. Ethan wouldn’t have just left him. Had they somehow abducted Ethan from the cave without Bram waking?
Impossible. Besides, the only scents here were of Ethan and himself.
     
Bram chugged down as much energy drink and nutrition bars as he could, and as quickly as he could.
    The calories would carry him for some time, even after a shift.
Then he lay down and his world faded out as he turned to wolf.
He shook off the shift immediately. With his heightened wolf senses, it didn’t take him long to
determine that Ethan had left the cave under his own steam, first as human, then shifting to cat, then running.
    Why Ethan would do this Bram couldn’t fathom, but he would follow that trail. Bram had always thought he was a source of danger to Ethan, bringing Doug’s vengeance down on them both. But despite Trey’s phone call, it had not been Bram driven off the road on his way home from work.
    Someone had gone after Ethan. But why?
It took hours, but at some point Bram came upon the scene that made his blood run cold. It was only an hour or two old. Here, Ethan had stopped, his trail ended. At that same spot were the scents of eight different men. None of them shifters.
The scenario didn’t make sense. Ethan should never have had a problem evading humans. Cougars knew how to be elusive. Something had gone seriously wrong and there was only one person Bram