Chapter 864 Animal Senses Book 17 - Hope
Animal Senses Book 17 - Hope
For three days, Foster had been driving up and down these roads. The area was so remote that it reminded him of home. Farms, fields, and lakes. Why couldn’t it be in a city where he had something to look at?
He had been to the diner where he was supposed to meet the contact so many hours that they might as well start paying him as an employee. If sitting and eating through half the day counted as a job. The contact hadn’t shown. Of course, if he had a name for this person, he could have asked around, but he didn’t. How did they know they were a contact if they didn’t know who they were? It sounded like some serious spy shit to him that was not in his job description. He was also supposed to meet someone from the surveillance team, but they were all busy currently getting information for other sites the big bad Alliance members were going to take out and clear out.
He could have stayed at the new headquarters longer where it was warm if he’d known he was going to be driving in circles here. How long was this contact going to play hide and seek? He thought of all the boxes he’d carried for Oaklyn and Rory at the new headquarters for the big ‘decorate everything in sight’ operation and decided driving up and down the road was better for his back.
He looked up the long laneway of the farm. Was this the house he was supposed to be learning about? Narrowing the location down to a county was like searching for a specific sunflower seed in a bag full of sunflower seeds. He didn’t stop but wanted to so he could see if it screamed, ‘Shifter captives are here’. Did that Waylon guy live here? He still couldn’t believe Calla had gone undercover and gotten all of this information that turned out to be the mother lode the Alliance needed. She’d gotten crushed, too, he recalled. That part sucked. If Bear hadn’t been with her when the remnants of the Tomas organization had sent someone after her, the world would be a darker place without her in it.
As he approached the next farm, he rolled his head in that direction and looked at it. If they had all of the information, why didn’t they have an exact location? Then he wouldn’t be doing so much of nothing here.
He caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and had just enough time to slam on the brakes before he hit a coyote dashing across the road. The van slid toward the ditch sideways before he managed to get it stopped about a foot from sliding into it. “Shit.” He looked to see the grayish tail disappearing into the deep ditch. “That was almost bad.” He exhaled. Killing a wild version of his kind would have broken his heart.
Dropping his forehead onto the steering wheel, he took a few deep breaths to force his heart out of his throat. Lifting it, he looked at the farm layout. It looked the damn same as the last three he’d checked out.
Pulling the van back over to the right side of the road. He stared in front of it as he crept along. “We need a new plan.” Stabbing his phone, he brought up Jesse’s number. If anyone could get more details, it would be him.
~
Ena darted into the ditch and hunched down behind the end of a culvert tube. She’d been so stuck in her head that she had run out in front of a van. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. She needed to focus, or she was going to end up dead, and then she wouldn’t be any help to anyone.
She’d panicked when Waylon Kamble hadn’t come for lunch the last two days, so she’d run all the way to his farm to check that they hadn’t packed up and moved somewhere else. She didn’t know if what Orson knew was true, and Waylon had some sort of panic alarm at his place, but it wouldn’t surprise her at all. Orson knew a lot of things, and they always turned out to be right. How he learned them, she didn’t know.
She heard the van pull away, stood up, and shook the wet from her coat. She communicated with her animal to get them back to town fast. She couldn’t be late for work or meeting up with the contact the Alliance was sending. She wished she had a name or a description, but even Orson hadn’t known that. All he knew was that they were sending someone to help.
She hoped Orson was still alive. It had been a week since he’d vanished. Part of her hoped he’d taken off like most of her clan, but the heavy feeling in her gut told her that Waylon’s people had gotten to him.
Okay, girl, you drive. I need to figure out a way to reach the Alliance and find out where this person who’s going to rush in and save us is. Maybe later, she’d sneak into Orson’s place and see if he had any information in there. If all of his things were still there. Some of her clan were like scavengers now. It was embarrassing, but she understood that sometimes they had to do things they didn’t like to survive. She just wished they knew what qualified as taking it too far.
For the last week, she’d watched every person who had come into the diner. She figured an Alliance hero would be a big, muscular man who had a stare like they would cut you in half without hesitation. No one like that had shown up yet. Unfortunately, being the only place in the area that had decent food and was near the interstate cut-off, it was high traffic, and the number of strangers that went in and out was too numerous for her to get close to every single one. She was counting on this person to hang around for longer than a coffee so her animal side would be able to tell her when there was another shifter nearby. Sadly, the only thing she knew for certain after three weeks of working there was that the calluses on her feet from serving the masses were multiplying.