“Stands for long-range acoustic device. We are vulnerable to sonic weapons.”
“So we’ll be safe underground?”
“Not from a sonic weapon, but we could hide you.” She grabbed Rachel’s arm. “We’ll need to take the tunnel instead of the elevator.”
“What about ear plugs?” asked Rachel as she kept pace with Cricket.
Cricket opened her mouth to speak, but fell to her knees covering her ears. Not alone, every single lycan fell to the ground, in obvious pain, then dead to the world.
Rachel flinched at the sound of a high-pitched whistle. Painful, but not bad enough to knock out a human. Her heartbeat drummed as she heard a helicopter coming in. The whistle hurt, but she knelt and took Cricket’s pulse. Alive, but unconscious. “Cricket, wake up.” Nothing.
Her nerves screamed, Run! Where? The barn. If she made it through the secret underground entrance, there might be a place to lock herself in and hide. Howard might know. How would she navigate without a flashlight?
She patted her pocket. Her phone would light the path. Once safe, she’d call Lev.
Rachel sprung outside. She turned as an Osprey helicopter, like ones she saw in Africa, landed on the pasture between the ranch house and the barn where her escape route lay. Shit. Had the U.S. military found out about the secret werewolf society? Her adrenaline spiked. Or was it the rogue pack?
The bearded man she’d seen in Nepal stepped out, not bothering to wait for the blades to stop. He barked orders. “We have twenty minutes. Go underground if need be and find Rachel.”
They must know the layout of the compound. The whistle stopped, or was it because being human the high frequency sound no longer bothered her? Did he mean in twenty minutes the high frequency sound would stop? Or was it how long they would remain unconscious?
That could give her time to outrun them. She ran out the back door, her head hurting, not as bad as before but bad enough to slow her. A spasm of pain stabbed her lower back. She flinched and stiffened.
A man grabbed her from behind. “Got her.”
“Not.” She stomped her heel on his foot.
He grunted, but held her with a gun to her throat. “Don’t move, bitch.”
Rachel lifted her hands. “Okay, okay.”
He patted her down, looking for weapons. Instead, he found her phone. “You won’t need this.” He tossed the mobile toward the fence, and then shoved her toward the helicopter while another man called back the other three men. He hauled her into the helicopter. Within moments, they were airborne and flew away.
The bearded man sat next to her. “Dr. Rachel Becker.”
She glared. “And you are?”
He shouted over the din of the helicopter as it rose. “I’m Andres Calopus.”
“Kind of sounds like a species name.”
“Most perceptive.”
A man in front of her seat toyed with a circular device. That must be the sonic weapon. She’d seen something similar used by police during a protest riot, although it had not been effective.
Her concern returned to Cricket and the other Lycans. “Will that frequency kill them?”
“No. We turned it off. Your friends will wake in twenty to sixty minutes, confused and slowly regain their hearing. If they pursue us, our sonic weapon has a 500-mile radius. Trust me, the last thing I want to do is kill our lycan brethren. Someday, we will rule all the packs, under my leadership, but until then they can continue as always.”
Apparently, he’d hadn’t read the lycan status rules book. “How could you, a human, rule over all the packs?”
“I am the new wolf mage. A warlock. I will continue Stallo’s legacy.”
“I thought your name sounded warlock-like,” she quipped.
“My name was Andrew Joki, until I took Stallo’s oath.”
Would she be the nut-bag’s bride? “Hence, we are on our way to Stallo’s island.”