“That’s no age for a Shifter,” Rae said. “Shifters shouldn’t leave each other. We’re close. Family is everything.”

Not that Rae had ever known hers. Rage shook her at the thought of a mother deliberately abandoning her cub. Her own mother had tried to stay with Rae until her dying breath, so Eoin had told her. A mother walking away from her family made her seriously angry.

“Can you get us out of this place?” she asked Miles impatiently.

Miles twitched his fingers on the wheel. The boat was moving dead slow, the white fog pressing around them. Rae could no longer see the outline of Zander’s fishing boat.

“Probably not,” Miles said. “I told Carson that when we came in here. The gasses are messing with my sense of smell.”

“Mine too. Bring Zander up here. He’ll know how to navigate through.”

Miles shook his head. “Don’t think so. Too dangerous. The big man stays in a cage until we get to Shifter Bureau in Anchorage.”

“We won’t make it anywhere near Shifter Bureau if we are stuck in here,” Rae pointed out.

Miles hesitated. Rae read that he knew the truth of her words but he was afraid of Zander. Or maybe he was afraid of Carson, his cold-eyed partner.

“Damn it,” Miles whispered. He picked up a handheld radio and let it crackle to life. Rae almost dove for it, worried he was about to betray her, when he said, “Carson, get that Russian up here. He needs to help me.”

A few seconds of silence, then a crackle in return. “Copy that.”

Miles went back to trying to pilot the boat. Looking at him now, Rae saw the Shifter in him—his movements were almost graceful as he danced his fingers over the controls, his balance perfect.

A fox? Rae had never heard of such a thing. How such a large man morphed into something as small and delicate as a fox . . . She was going to have to see it to believe it.

The door swung open, letting in chill air, fog, smell, and the rumble of engines. Carson, his pistol out, marched Piotr inside, his hand full of the back of Piotr’s flannel jacket.

“By the way,” Piotr was saying. “I’m an American citizen.”

“You’re harboring Shifters,” Carson said with curt derision. “Which makes you a criminal.”

So, he was in as sweet a mood as ever.

Piotr shot Rae a glance. She gave him a nod to show she was all right.

Carson shoved Piotr toward Miles. Rae stepped out of the way, trying to fade into the background. She’d learned to be good at that in a houseful of alpha males. Not that Rae had been exactly submissive to them—she’d simply stood back and watched them bluster, then slid around them to do exactly what she wanted.

Carson seemed to have the failing of many human men in believing that females were weaker and less intelligent than males. Shifters rarely shared that idiocy . . . well, except when it came to who could be Guardians.

Carson paid little attention to Rae. As she stood back, she studied the controls and the readouts on Miles’s computer. She didn’t know what all the lines and squiggles meant but she was sure the solid clumps of red were bad.

“You think I can navigate out of the Graveyard?” Piotr was saying, spluttering. “I cannot work miracles.”

“Do it,” Carson said. “If we go down, you go down with us.”

“Oh, hey, no pressure on me,” Piotr said.

He bent over the controls with Miles. Miles gave a nervous sideways look at Rae, as though fearing she’d blurt to Carson that he was part Shifter. But Rae would keep his secret. To paraphrase what Carson had just said—if Miles went down, she went down too.

“What is that?” Miles asked sharply.

He pointed to something that blipped on the computer screen. At the same time, Rae heard a curious popping sound even over the rumble of engines.

Piotr jerked his head up. “Hard about! Hard about! Now!”

Miles, understanding Piotr’s alarm, cranked the wheel. The boat listed hard to port as he turned away from the wall of ice that had been running parallel to them. As they rushed into denser, yellower fog, an immense chunk of white and black mountain descended vertically into the sea.

The impact sent a huge wave across the water, shoving the boat sideways. Rae watched black water rise through the fog and blot out all view from the port windows. They were going to turn over—she knew it.

She rushed at Carson. “Get Zander and Ezra. Let them out. They’ll die!”

The lurching boat had Rae ramming straight into him. Carson grabbed Rae’s shoulders to right her, but not before Rae’s hand landed on the man’s large bunch of keys. She yanked them free and was heading out the door before Carson’s shout left his mouth.

“Stop her!”

Wherever Carson’s men were, there was no sight of them on deck. The deck was almost perpendicular anyway, but the gunwale was still above water, if barely. The men were probably staying put below or maybe already in the lifeboat.

Rae clung to railings and ropes on the cabin’s outside walls, there for just this reason, and hauled herself to the stern door. It opened easily, letting her into a narrow hallway that stank of diesel and brine.

The doors along the pitching corridor weren’t locked, showing her an office, and a couple of bedrooms, one painfully neat, the other a bit more cluttered. No Shifters, not even a sign of them.

They must be on a deck below this one, though Rae wasn’t sure how to get there. She refused to listen to the anguish in her heart that maybe they’d simply thrown Ezra and Zander over the side.

A door with ventilation slats at the end of the hall was locked. Rae took up the keys she’d stolen, trying to still her shaking hands as she chose a likely one and slid it into the lock.

The key fit but wouldn’t turn. She jerked it out, marked its place on the ring with her thumb, and went to the next one. This one wouldn’t even go in. Next one again fit but wouldn’t turn.

“Come on,” she breathed. She’d have to change to her in-between beast and rip the door out of the wall. No time for anything else.

The next key fit. Rae turned it and opened the door.

Two men came rushing up the stairs beyond the door, weapons drawn. At the same time Carson burst into the hallway behind her. Rae was caught—no way around them. Carson drew his pistol and aimed it at Rae, right between her eyes.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Rae felt her wolf come. No way it couldn’t. Her Collar sparked once under her jacket, the tearing pain making her yelp.