Page 33 of Twice Bitten
“I can follow them,” Jack said. “Through the bond with Brent. It’s a lot weaker right now, for—um. For whatever reason.” Because he’d given me his blood and gotten some of mine in his mouth—which I believed he must have, or this wouldn’t be such an issue—and then fucked and knotted me. “But I can still use it. I ought to be able to determine which direction they’re going in. And I can’t let Brent get eaten by fucking magical scorpions.”
I fucking could. I turned at last, hurt and angry and—dammit, I knew Jack was still Brent’s mate, but hefeltlike mine, and he acted like nothing at all had happened, and…and then I looked up and met his eyes.
Bleak, icy blue looked back at me out of a hard, set face. My anger quailed before that expressionless devastation.
“If he used magic on Jake, I have to find out what it was,” he said. “Or there may not be any chance of counteracting it. That means he needs to be alive.” He grimaced. “And I can’t let him…I can’t, Angelo. We’re still bonded.”
Fine. I turned away, anything I could have or wanted to say sticking in my throat like glue and making it tighten up to the point of pain.
“Let’s go, then,” I told the Armitages.
Nate complained the whole way, keeping up a whiny litany of observations on the weather (cold, damp, the sun going down too quickly and leaching what little warmth the day had left), the circumstances (“so fucking annoying, like, what the fuck did I do wrong in a past life to be chasing these assholes around in the woods—but I guess you guys are paying me, and it better be a lot”), and the way his jeans chafed.
That one had my fangs dropping and my fingers itching to wrap around his neck. Yes, his jeans did chafe. I was wearing a pair, and I would know. And he’d been the one to buy them!
Jack paced beside me, as silent as Nate was loud and annoying, winding his way through the stands of pine and fallen logs and heaps of detritus with his usual grace and staying gratifyingly close to me.
He only had to catch me once when I tripped, and he didn’t say a goddamn word. I pulled my arm away as quickly as possible.
Ian stayed just as close to Nate, occasionally murmuring something to him that got him either punched in the arm or kissed, depending, and Arik paced off a little ways to our left by himself, looking into the distance with that eerie stare shamans got sometimes when they were focusing. Monitoring his magical scorpions? Who knew. I didn’t want to know.
We made good time and were approaching the territory boundary when we had maybe twenty minutes of daylight left, I estimated. Suddenly, Jack growled, lifting his head and scenting at the air, and then a bloodcurdling scream sliced through the forest, echoing in the chill air and startling a flock of crows, who took off from the treetops with a flurry of caws.
“Brent,” Jack said, and took off running at a speed no one but an alpha werewolf could match, giving up on grace in favor of crashing through the forest like a man possessed.
We all gave chase, me cursing and stumbling but not far behind, Ian shooting ahead and keeping pace with Jack, and Nate and Arik a bit behind, Arik urging Nate to hurry and getting a gasped series of complaints in return.
More screams and shouts carried out of the woods ahead of us. I rounded a final stand of pines and skidded to a stop, unable to parse what I was looking at for a second.
Jack had stopped too, half-shifted with his claws and fangs out and gleaming in the last of the twilight, facing off with…well, with a giant magical attack scorpion. It stood a head shorter than Jack at the—shoulders? Did arthropods have shoulders? Probably not, but the part of it that would’ve been shoulders on a mammal—but the presumably venomous tip of its massive, wickedly curved tail had to be ten feet up in the air. The thing made a horrid, spine-shivering noise as it moved, the tail waving menacingly.
Brent screamed again and I zeroed in on him: he’d clawed out and climbed partway up a tree, where he clung to the trunk a few feet above the reach of the scorpion’s tail. The new screaming came not from the danger Jack found himself in, as far as I could tell, but from the fact that Brent’s grip had started to slip.
Fucking coward. I’d started to move toward Jack, thinking I could divide the scorpion’s attention while our warlock and shaman backup caught up to us, but Ian started shouting, and I spun to get a look at what the fuck was going on over there.
“Nate, Arik, get your asses over here!” Ian stood about twenty feet away, half-screened by more trees, but my supernatural vision compensated.
What the fuckturned out to be two more scorpions—only they were ignoring Ian completely, probably because he was part of the pack, and advancing in a pincer sort of formation on…Hendler, who stood frozen in what looked like abject terror between a huge fallen pine and a boulder.
“Screw him!” I shouted back. “Get them to call off the one that’s going for Jack!”
“No worries, we’re on it,” came a breathless call from behind me. Nate’s voice, but Arik came pelting up first, making a beeline for Jack.
I could almost feel the power of Arik’s magic, like static electricity in the air during a thunderstorm. Jack backed away slowly and the scorpion lunged, but Arik reached it before it could get to him, laying a hand casually on its side and holding still for a moment.
And the scorpion turned around and sauntered off through the woods, disappearing behind some trees, a flash of terrifying white.
I let out a long breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding, Jack visibly relaxed, and Brent started to yell and scream for help.
Yeah, fuck him. He could get down on his own.
Over Brent’s screeching, Ian called out, “Uh, Arik? Dude, they’re gonna—oh, fuck that’s got to hurt—yeah, too late.” A horrible gut-wrenching groan echoed through the trees, and I spun yet again, only to see Hendler on his knees, face a rictus, with one of the scorpions’ tails embedded in his chest. Blood and venom spurted everywhere.
It ranked in the top five most disgusting things I’d ever seen. Well, couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Nate panted to a stop beside me. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Gross! That’s like the worst shish kebab I’ve ever seen. You guys need his body for anything? Getting him away from the scorpions would be such a fucking pain in my ass.”
“Nope.” I felt perfectly comfortable making an executive decision on this particular issue. Far be it from me to get between two giant white scorpions and their evening meal.Reallyfar. “The scorpions can have him.”
