Page 107 of The Tracker's Dawn: Sunderverse
I had a second, maybe two.
Mekare flinched and took a step back as she blocked Rosalina’s bullets and a magical attack from Damien. Taking advantage of her distraction, I fleeted toward her and clamped my jaws around her ankle before she could turn to smoke.
My teeth sank into flesh. Mekare cried out and aimed a spell at my head.
Anticipating the agony that would follow my memories, I opened the floodgates.
I huddle under a bridge, hugging my shoulders, shivering violently. My toes ache. My fingers and my head, too. I might die tonight.
Damn you! Damn you!
The water running under the bridge stinks of death, the awful smell has become part of me. Rats squeak nearby. They try to get near but I kick at them, and now they wait. Maybe they know my fate, they know Iwilldie tonight.
The sound of tires repeatedly hitting the bridge’s uneven pavement fills my ears. The traffic never stops. The city can never sleep. Neither can I. Closing my eyes, I try to drift away, but my stomach twists with hunger. I hear the shouts and screams of men nearby. None of them my friends. I stare at the dark, flowing water, at the light being absorbed to its depths. It is moonlight and lampglow being consumed by darkness.
It is the glow of Jake’s callous, silver eyes.
My heart twists more violently than my stomach.
There’s only self-loathing and resentment inside it, like foul worms eating at it.
I will die tonight, and I don’t care.
The certainty of death resonated through time, through memory, through resignation.
It’s okay. You’ll be with Jake. It’s okay.
Even as the witch’s magic left her finger, I didn’t let go. Instead, I allowed my alpha tracker skills to combine and push everything I was feeling into the witch.
The cold and the pain it gave. The high-pitched squeak of rats and the fear of their teeth on flesh. The insistent and repugnant thudding of tires. The cloying stench of car exhaust and putrid water. The feel of tears frozen on stiff cheeks. The wavering sights perceived through tired, bloodshot eyes. The reek of human refuse, of dirty clothes, dirty hair, dirty hands that tried to squeeze out the anguish.
I felt it all transfer into the witch like a transfusion of misery. A split second later, I sensed the hybrids inches away from running all of us over like a stampede of wild dogs. I issued an unequivocal alpha command.
“Stop!”
The swarming hybrids froze in place. I saw them out of the corner of my eye and couldn’t believe my hunch had been right. The witch was the hybrids’ leader, their alpha. Except, she wasn’t one, not really, not like me. She had no business leading werewolves, even if they were half vampires. I, on the other hand, was meant to be a pack leader. I could make them do whatever I wanted.
Couldn’t I?
Mekare convulsed as my sensory assault ripped through her.
I clamped my teeth harder around her ankle, grinding at the bone, and—with all my strength and will and desire to save my friends—I unleashed a second sensory attack at the same time that I pushed one overpowering command into the witch.
“Die!”
Energy coursed through me like a mighty river, flowing with single-minded determination and making my skin glow. All the sights, sounds, scents, flavors, textures that I’d seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched in my life came to me with clarity.
There was the smell of grease while Dad and I worked on the Camaro. The taste of Mom’s creamy tortellini. The intense reds of a St. Louis summer sunset. The ring of Rosalina’s voice. And the feel of Jake’s silky hair between my fingers.
In an instant, I knew every single one of those sensations as they passed through me. But I held those good memories back, and for the witch, I focused only on the bad. All the awful things I’d been through in my life poured out. I experienced a total awareness of every sense, every recollection, individually and at once. It was a new awakening of my powers, something I had never imagined possible.
In the end, so many terrible things passed through me, so much pain and dreadful anguish that when it was all gone it felt like the dawn of something different.
The onslaught lanced into the witch like sharp knives. And from her, I willed it with my alpha powers to flow directly into the hybrids’ sheep-like minds.
A host of deafening roars went up into the air as the hybrids clenched their heads in an orchestrated dance.
Doubling down, I pushed harder, giving it my all.
