Page 69 of Sweethearts and Savages
“Have you ever noticed your family seems to fall in love with Alphas starting with the letter B? Their names even sound almost exactly the same. I wonder if that has some kind of Freudian-style reasoning?”
Enit, Raine and Carmen all turned to stare at me. “What?”
Carmen shook her head, pointing a finger at me. “One, ew. Two, you aren’t allowed to mention Freud in this house because it sets Nico off on an epic tangent that will go for literal days about pulp-psychology.”
I tilted my head. That conversation actually sounded interesting, but I got the impression I was the only one who would think so, so I kept my mouth shut.
Brody waded into the mass of fur and blood, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that there were shifted paws and fangs
“Enough!”
Even I felt the Alpha power in the word, resisting the urge to drop. Both the brawling Alphas ceased, though they continued to glare at one another.
Enit looked between them, and then back up to her mother. “I guess this isn’t the time to tell everyone that I accidentally mated Kell Arborson when he abducted me, right?”
There wasn’t a sound in the entire backyard until Carmen stepped closer, wrapping an arm around Enit’s shoulder.
“Well, fuck.”
35
Kell
For all intents and purposes, I was in Australia. I checked into my flight, boarded the plane, and alighted in Sydney.
Except I wasn’t in Sydney, I was in Mexico. Sitting in a bar with patchy wifi, trawling through months of message boards and chat groups designed for anonymity. There were mentions of Eden, but they were almost in past tense, like they thought The Hounds had killed them all off.
As usual, the dark web made me want to throw up in my mouth. You had to dig through the refuse to find what you needed, and that wasn’t always easy to find. There was a lot of sad, depressing shit on there.
Every hour, I seemed to oscillate about what I was meant to do. Should I just let Eden fall to The Hounds? Even if they weren’t really as bad as I thought, they still were monsters. Plus, they’d lived a long time without my interference. From what I knew, The Hounds had money to throw at someone forever. There'd probably been a mole in there for decades. Though, that couldn’t be true. Why wouldn’t they have attacked before now?
A kid sat down opposite me, passing me another beer and sighing. “You the guy?”
I nodded, because there was a good chance I was indeed The Guy. She flopped a passport and driver’s license down in front of me, not even trying to hide the fact we were doing something shady as fuck. It was just the way of it in this town. “Everything you’ll need.”
I finished my beer in one gulp. “You sure you wanna do this?”
The kid nodded. “I have to get out of here. I can’t stay, but can’t leave without your help.”
About three weeks into my vampire-imposed vanishing, I’d started searching for answers. Not about Eden, but for other people like Enit. She’d spoken about Eden like they’d been saviors, like the world was a shitty place for preternaturals. I mean, I wasn’t an idiot. I got it. On the whole, humans were shit and destroyed anything different with extreme prejudice.
However, the more I searched, the more I found. The dark web had been filled with videos of supernaturals being forced into every evil, vile situation you could think of. Dog fights, except the dogs were really people in chains. Snuff films. Skin trading. If you could think of something sick and twisted that humanity could do to itself, it did ten times worse to the vulnerable supes out there. And up until a few months ago, I had been that person, hunting them down like they were animals. Even if I didn’t do the shit that was filmed and flaunted on the dark web, I’d intended to torture and murder to get what I wanted. To satisfy the dying wish of a bitter fucking old man who’d made my life hell. I made myself sick.
These weren’t monsters. Sure, there were probably some bad ones in the bunch, but I knew firsthand that twisted people were twisted, regardless of their religion, race or species.
So I searched the other side. I went looking for people in situations like Enit had been when she was a child. People desperate for help, for an escape.
Like this girl—I didn’t know her name, and I really didn’t want to know. I didn’t know what she was, only that she was a supernatural. But she was an expert at forgeries, and she needed to get across the border, while I needed a plausible fake passport.
A quick message later, and we had a deal. What would drive a girl, who couldn’t be more than nineteen, to need an escape so desperately that she’d risk trusting a stranger on the dark web? I didn’t ask. She was an adult and wanted to get out of this shithole. So be it.
She hesitated. “I just have to get one more thing and then I’m ready.”
I nodded. “I’ll meet you back here in an hour. I gotta tell you, it won’t be super comfortable.”
She gave me a dead-eyed look. “It can’t be worse than staying.”
An hour later, I’d picked up the reasonably nice old Chevy that I’d bought for a steal, as well as some fake plates. She didn’t need to last long, just enough to get well into California. It was almost a shame to slit open the bucket seat and clip out the springs. Still, I got to work. I had places to be, and none of them were a backwater, corrupt as fuck cartel town in Mexico. I cleaned the edges up around the piping, stuck in some stiff cardboard and voila, I had my own temporary stowaway compartment. It would be tight, but it would work. Once we were far enough over the border, she could sit up front until I got her to wherever she needed to go. Luckily, the girl was tiny. I knew why she couldn’t just leave by herself. She had that wild, desperate look which told me that this wasn’t her first plan, but a pretty girl, that young? Trying to leave? It was going to raise eyebrows.
