*Maddox*
“Where does this pipe go?”
Bill Bixby is standing near me, staring at the pipe, wearing a robe over his pajamas, his hair disheveled, and is eyes barely focusing.
“This is the drain pipe,” he says. “It lets the unusable water back out into the river.”
I stare at him for a moment. “So this doesn’t reach the spring where the water that’s used for the bottling comes from?” I have to clarify.
“No, no, no,” he says. “We can turn this pipe in reverse to make the water flow the other direction. We do that from time to time to bring in more water to run the machinery and keep it cool, but for the most part, this pipe flows into the river, not the other way around.”
“Where does the water come into the plant?” I ask.
“Over there.” He points into the distance where I can see a large pipe that actually goes into the ground. “The spring isn’t under the river. It’s under the ground there, and it flows into the location of the river through an underground tributary. So we catch the spring water before it goes out into the river. It makes it easier to clean. Drinking river water is possible, but the cleaning is a lot more difficult.”
What he is saying makes a lot of sense to me. But I am still confused. “Is it possible to get into the pipe that goes into the spring to pull the water out?”
He shakes his head. “No, not without pulling the pipe out of the ground, which would take a lot of work. And the water would have to be shut off to do that, too. We never shut the water off, not through that pipe.”
I nod. “Okay, so… what is she up to?”
“I’m not sure,” he admits. But then, he’s obviously tired and not thinking straight. I need to sort this out….
“Alpha Maddox?” I hear a familiar female voice in my head.
My forehead scrunches as my heart begins to race a bit. Why is Poppy mind-linking me? She should be asleep. I immediately assume that something is wrong with Isla. “What’s the matter?” I ask her. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes, yes, everything is okay,” she says. “It’s just… Isla just had a strange dream, and she wanted me to tell you about it. She is a little shook up and didn’t want to try to mind-link at the moment.”
My pulse doesn’t slow. I haven’t even thought about mind-linking Isla, now that she’s within range of me again, because I was hoping she was asleep. To hear that she’s shaken up again makes me unsettled. “What is it?”
“Well, she said that she had a dream where she was underwater, and she walked into a long pipe. It was red and said, ‘Great Wolf,’ on the side of it. She thinks maybe Private Wylie went into a pipe to poison the water supply.”
I am not sure what to say at first as I stare at the giant red pipe in front of me. Why would Private Wylie go up this way?
Maybe because it’s the only pipe he can access?
“All right, Poppy, tell her thank you, and I’ll look into it.”
“She’s trying to go back to sleep, but she’s worried about you and everything that has to do with this situation,” Poppy continues.
“Right. Tell her I’m fine, and I’ll be home soon.” I have to cut the mind-link then because Poppy will just keep talking. I turn to Bixby. “Is it possible to get into the facility through this pipe?”
His eyes widen. “I mean… there’s a grate on either end. And the person would be swimming against the current if the water is on.”
“Is the water on?” It seems like an obvious question.
“Well, no, not at the moment,” he admits.
I remember something he said earlier about the water also running in the other direction.
“What would happen if a person was inside of that pipe when you turn the water on in the other direction?” I ask him.
A ghastly expression hits his face as he scrunches his face up. “The force of the water rushing through the pipe would crush a person against the grate in the building where the water comes into the machines.”
“Is it possible to get through that grate, into the machine, and out into the facility?” I ask him.
“It would be difficult. If one could get the grate off, then yes, they could get into the vat and then swim to the top,” he tells me.
I weigh that information against everything else I know. “Do you have workers in the plant right now?”
“A few,” he says. “We have a small night crew that works on bottling and labels, but we don’t clean the water at night. I have some security guards. They said that you had sent some soldiers in there, too, Alpha.”
I nod at him. That’s true. I did. Captain Thomas’s people should be in there if someone shows up. But they might not see them until it’s too late.
Without another thought, I tell Bixby what we need to do. “Have them through the switch to run the water backward in this pipe, so that it’s sucking water into the facility.”
His eyes widen. “Are you sure, sir?”
I nod. “Yeah, if there’s anyone in that pipe, I wanna know.” Then, I rush off toward the facility.
“Where are you going, sir?” he shouts after me.
“To see if we catch anything.”
I make the run to the water treatment facility in my human form, even though it would be faster to shift. But I don’t want to try to lead this team naked, so I just do it as a human.
When I get to the facility, I mentally shout at Thomas to send someone to let me in, which he did.
I run through the door, shouting at them to tell me where the vat Bixby had told me about was located. I thought the business owner was on his way, but he hasn’t arrived yet. I assume I am much faster than him, and he’s barely awake.
“It’s that way,” a man dressed in a custodian’s uniform tells me as he points down the hall.
I run in that direction and listen for the whirring of machinery. I can hear it in the distance. Since Bixby told me they don’t bottle water at night, it has to be the machine I’ve asked him to flip on.
I hear shouting as I reach a large room full of machinery. Soldiers near a large metal vat are yelling at workers who are rushing to a control panel across the room.
“Turn it off! Turn it off!” I hear, and then, one of the men leaps over the side of the vat with a pair of bolt cutters in his hand. I have no idea where those came from at first, but then I see a row of tools on the wall with a sign over it that reads, “Safety Utensils,” above it.
A few moments later, as I reach the edge of the vat, the soldier who leaped over the edge emerges, bolt cutters in one hand, and in the other, a limp, bloodied body.
It’s Private Wylie
“We need a healer!” the soldier shouts.
“No, we don’t,” I tell him.
He stares at me for a moment, like he thinks he might need to talk some sense into me, but I’m not bringing a healer for this scumbag, not after what he did to Isla.
“Get him out,” I say, and the soldiers, who have suddenly realized who I am, act quickly to yank the bastard out of the water.
They deposit him on the ground, and I can see that he’s not breathing. He’s bloodied and battered, his face bruised and mangled. I have no idea how forcefully he hit that grate, but I can see the imprint of it on his face.
He’s wearing a wet suit with a small oxygen tank that’s half off him. Zabrina put a lot of thought into this plan. She had to have in order to have oxygen available.
It made me wonder—did the rest of them use similar tanks to cross under the river? If so, they could be anywhere by now.
The oxygen tank is not the only thing Wylie has, though. He has a waterproof backpack as well.
I unzip it and look inside.
It’s the two missing medications.
At least we have those now, even if we don’t have Zabrina.
I pick up the two plastic jars and see that they haven’t cracked or broken, and they look to be full, so she didn’t divide them into different containers, and she probably didn’t use any of it since they’re full.
The soldier who had risked his life to try to save Wylie kneels beside him now and starts doing CPR, breathing into his mangled mouth and pressing on his chest. Another comes to help. They can knock themselves out trying to save the asshole, but I’m not going to do anything to help the man who tricked the woman I love and kidnapped her.
He was trying to kill Isla, so fuck him if he dies.
It does cross my mind that bringing him back could allow us to torture him enough to tell us where the hell Zabrina is, but I figure he probably has damage to his brain from being out of oxygen for so long. It seems pretty clear that the mouthpiece wasn’t in his face when it hit that grate.
“Nice plan, Zabrina, you stupid bitch,” I mumble as I walk back the way that I came.
I run into Bixby, who is panting slightly from the strain of making it to the factory. “What happened, sir?” he asks.
“We caught a gopher,” I tell him. “An aquatic gopher.”
He stares at me for a moment. “Is he alive?”
“Nope,” I tell him. “But they’re working on it.” I walk past him and then tell him, “You probably need to wash the blood out of your vat.” I’m not sure I’ll be drinking any bottled water for a while.
I run into Thomas on my way out. “We’re still looking for Zabrina and Alpha Jordan,” I tell him.
He nods. “Yes, sir.” He makes the sign of respect.
I head out to my car, using the mind-link to tell Beta Seth what’s going on.
Zabrina still needs to be found, and while I can say I won’t mentally rest until she is found, I am going to rest.
I’m going to go home and lay down with my Isla, hold her against my chest, and make sure she knows she’s safe.
And then, tomorrow, I’ll resume my search for the Alpha’s daughter.
In the meantime, I have another mystery to solve.
How the hell did Isla know where Wylie was?