Black Wolf's Revenge by Tera Shanley

complete darkness.
    Her eyes took time to adjust. A small pinpoint of light danced to her right and she walked slowly toward it. Her feet dragged across soiled earth and her arms hung limply at her sides. She was so tired, growing weaker by the moment, and the light seemed to be getting smaller and farther away. She halted. All she had to do was give in to the sleep that was dragging on her arms and legs and it would all be over. The light took pity on her burdened body and grew bigger and then bigger still. Blinding light washed over her as she shielded her eyes with the back of her hand. When she could see again, she rubbed watering eyes. A man stood at the edge of a forest with his back to her. She knew him.
    “Grey?”
    He turned slowly until she could see his face. His golden eyes stayed the same while his face constantly shifted from man to wolf and back again. His features shifted so readily it became a blur. Only his eyes stayed focused, staring at her.
    “Hang on Morgan. I’m coming to get you.”
    * * * *
    Morgan jolted awake to a still darkness that gave her the sense of falling. The silence was deafening as she strained her ears for the slightest hint of sound. She was alone. The darkness swallowed her like a black hole, and she bit her lip to stifle an echoing scream. The stink of urine assaulted her nose. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and tried to concentrate on moving her arms. A tingling hummed uncomfortably through her fingers, but she couldn’t move yet. The bastards who’d done this had drugged her.
    Faint voices were muddled and far away, and she strained her ears at what they were saying. Two men were talking, voices low, but not too low for a werewolf to hear
    “We’ve already called them ten times.” The voice was scratchy and dry. “That fuckin’ demon wolf killed them all. They would have made contact by now, don’t you think?”
    “Yes, but he was one wolf against four of ours,” a man with a British accent said impatiently. “Just one wolf!”
    “John, you didn’t see him. Trey and I watched him get out of his truck, and he was huge. I mean, bigger than you’d think possible, eyes blazing like he had come straight from the fires of hell. I watched him tear Trey up with his bare hands, and he had changed back to human by the time I was shoving that broad in the trunk. I don’t doubt her mate is dead. I saw what Trey did to him. But that mutant took everyone with him.”
    Grey. They must think he’s her mate. Did they mean he was dead? A burst of adrenaline hit her and her finger twitched against the dirt beneath her. She was breathing hard and sweating. Two deep, slow breaths settled her a little. They couldn’t hear she was awake. Not until she had time to think.
    Those men couldn’t mean Grey was dead. She would somehow know if he was no longer of the world. Surely she would have felt a break in the invisible string that held their souls tethered together. But then again, she couldn’t feel the heart-wrenching tension that constantly thrummed when she made herself stay away from him. Her breathing picked up again. Had he died while she was drugged? Had she missed it? Oh God, oh God, not Grey. She couldn’t afford to go to pieces, but her skin tingled all over in an uncomfortable sensation. She tried fiercely to scratch her skin but was still unable to do more than slide her arm slowly across the filthy ground she lay on.
    “Well, keep trying,” the man with the accent barked out, command coming from his words with an electric crack. An alpha.
    One of them walked off with echoing footsteps up a flight of creaky stairs, and a door slammed somewhere above. A sigh came from the man on the other side of a windowless door. He sat on something that groaned and gave under his weight. With a small, victorious turn of her head, she raked her adjusting gaze over her prison.
    On the wall by the door there were four old and rotting empty crates in different stages of disrepair. The