The vampire raised his chin and closed his eyes, a sign of the trust he had that the wolves would not attack while he left himself vulnerable—or that he thought he could defend himself without watching his foe. Maybe some combination of the two. Though he didn’t need to, the vampire took a deep breath.

When he opened his eyes, he met Adam’s gaze with a bleak expression. “No,” he said. “I can’t feel her at all.”

“Do you know who took her?” Adam asked.

Stefan shook his head. “Vampires, but they weren’t anyone I’ve seen before. Not local.”

“What kind of vehicle did they drive?” asked Darryl.

“They had a helicopter,” Stefan said.

The wolf remembered hearing a helicopter, though Adam hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Helicopters had become less notable the past few months because the cherry farmers employed them during and after rainstorms to help dry the cherries before the rain caused the fruit to swell and split. Cherry season was just over, and in a month or two, he’d have noticed a helicopter.

“I heard it,” said Warren, who had taken his own look around the wreck. “But I only caught a glimpse of it while I was running here. They were flying without lights, boss. They were headed south, but they didn’t land before the sound of the helicopter was too faint for me to hear.”

No telling where the helicopter had been going, then. It could be five miles away or a hundred. The semi was probably stolen, but a helicopter and a team of professionals meant that someone had paid a lot of money to take his mate.

A wolf howled from the twenty-acre field on the other side of a wall of desiccated arborvitae.

“Sent them out looking for where the chopper was waiting,” Darryl said.

Ben ran up, breathless and in his human form. There were maybe four or five of Adam’s pack who hadn’t shifted to wolf.

“Looks like it had taken up a f—” Ben glanced behind Adam to Jesse and Aiden, who were huddled quietly where they weren’t in the way but could still hear everything, and cleaned up his language. “—a freaking home base. There’s a low spot behind a rise that would have kept anyone from seeing it. That chopper has been parked there often enough to leave a bare spot. More than a day or two. They’ve been waiting for a chance at Mercy for a while.”

“Might have used magic to keep people away,” Darryl suggested.

“A look-away would have done it,” said Stefan. “Most of us can cast something like that.”

“We can follow up on the semi,” said Darryl. “And I have a friend who flies out of the Richland airport. He might know something about a strange helicopter.”

It would take hours if not days to run down Mercy’s kidnappers that way. The wolf was very unhappy with hours—and Adam wasn’t cheery about it, either.

“She went to the store,” Adam said abruptly. He hopped back on his SUV and stepped through the broken windshield to pull the receipt off the seat.