Page 32 of Hunted Mate
I look down. That’s a mistake. There’s a dead man on the floor, lying in the blood of the other dead man. Justice, but not poetic. There’s very little of poetry in the world. It’s awful. It’s bleak. And I’ve killed someone. And there’s no undoing that. I can feel something changing inside me, a slow, dark, sludgy slip of something. I think I might have ruined my soul.
The other shifters are looking at me. The leader especially is judging me deeply, maybe even harshly. But he’s also interested. He has a little gravitas to him, of the kind that makes him think nothing bad is going to happen to him. He’s not worried. He’s not scared of what’s coming for him, for the death that I represent. He thinks he’s exempt from it somehow.
I always wondered what it felt like to bring death. Not a lot of the time, just a little of the time. Just in the way good people do when bad things happen, or medium people do when they’re mildly inconvenienced. Now I know.
It’s like having the light sucked out of you all at once. Something’s taken, and it’s not ever coming back.
The wolf man looking at me knows what I’ve lost.
“I can see why Gray chose you,” he says. “You’re a beast.”
The way he says it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand erect again. He’s not just calling me a name. He’s acknowledging something inside me. Something he sees, and something I suddenly feel.
“We’re leaving now,” I say again. My voice is sure and steady, and there’s not even a quiver of fear in it because the good thing has been sucked out of me.
I walk out of the cage fearlessly and go to the van we were brought here in. The keys are still in it.
“Get in!” I order sharply. The other two are lost. Sheep, not knowing where the wolf really is. At my order, they obey and get in the van.
“What’s your name, guy?” I ask the man in the camouflage.
“Mark, ma’am,” he stammers.
Molly and Mark. Their names match. As do their expressions. Am I rescuing them, or kidnapping them all over again? They don’t know. I don’t know.
I was going to get Molly to drive, but she’s too busy looking stunned and scared, so I get into the driver’s seat, and I lean my pistol hand out the window and I fire a few shots, not to hit anyone, but to keep them suppressed while I reverse out of the warehouse. I’ve done enough killing for one day.
“Open the doors!” I scream out the window.
They start to open them, but it’s not quite fast enough and the rear of the van catches the lower part of the doors, ripping the metal off at the base.
The property damage is pretty severe.
I guess it doesn’t matter. Because these fuckers don’t matter, and their stuff doesn’t matter.
A few days ago, Gray burned my research down, and now I have killed someone and rescued some others and crashed a van, and kept driving anyway. Like an action movie, except with more concussion for my passengers.
“Are you two okay?”
“We’re alive!” Mark shouts back.
“How did the two of you see them?” I ask the question as I drive at a slightly more sedate pace. “The wolves, I mean, how did you discover their curse?”
“Me and Brent were hunting in the forest,” Mark says. “Tracking wolves, you know, culling the excess. Called Molly in for a good time. Then… just got tangled up in all of it, you know? Heard noises in the night, went to check if anyone was nearby messing with our things, saw some people around a fire…”
He doesn’t need to continue. I know what happened next.
“Why did they bring you back here?”
“We shot and ran,” he says. “Thought we’d gotten away, but they tracked us to a motel and they dragged us out and took us to that warehouse.”
“Right. Okay.” I am trying to make sense of things. The wolves kill people who discover their secrets, but obviously they don’t just kill them. Sometimes they take them prisoner first, if they think they might be useful. I don’t know exactly why people were caged. Maybe they had other uses for them first. The possibilities are awful and barely worth thinking about.
I shudder at the notion of how many people might be held by werewolves, only to die at their monstrous hands, or fangs, whichever comes first.
“You were brave,” Molly says. “I wouldn’t have been that brave. You saved my life.”
“I had a gun,” I remind her. “I had a gun and no choice.”
