Run (Caged Trilogy Book 1)

by H G Lynch

  “I’m a werewolf,” he said slowly, tilting his head. His eyes narrowed. “But what are you?”

  The question took me by surprise, and I bit my lip. What was I? I called myself a witch, but what did that really mean? There were so many different kinds of witches. Witch was such a broad term, but most witches couldn’t summon demons, and I knew that. No normal witch—no good witch—could summon something from the Underworld, because their power came from the Earth, and the Earth wouldn’t allow them to bring something into her realm that could destroy her creatures, her life. I called myself a witch, because I wasn’t sure what I really was. It seemed like the simplest answer, but I’d read enough textbooks and grimoires to know that if I was a witch, that wasn’t all I was.

  I frowned, tearing my gaze away from Spencer’s, so I could look at my hands folded in my lap. I shrugged. “I...I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it before. I always just accepted my powers are part of me. I spent most of my time just trying to work out who I am.” It wasn’t entirely true.

  I had thought about it many times, I’d just never found an answer that made sense. Honestly, I didn’t think it mattered all that much. I could do what I could do, and knowing why I could do it wouldn’t change anything, except my perception of myself and my parents. I mean, what if I found out I was part demon? What if my dad had had demon blood? That would explain why I could raise creatures from the Underworld. If one of my parents was something from the dark, I didn’t want to know. I wanted to remember them the way I thought of them now; loving, kind, and happy.

  Spencer looked confused. “What do you mean?” he asked quietly, pushing himself into a sitting position mirroring mine. He leaned closer, putting his elbows on his knees, as if what I was saying was fascinating to him.

  I smiled at him a little ruefully. “It’s hard to know who you really are when everyone around you is telling you that you’re just a tool to be used.” I didn’t think he could understand what I meant, since he at least had his dad, however strained things were between them.

  But his expression held both sympathy and understanding. He looked away from me, out over the tops of the trees. “If it’s anything like being told you’re only a part of the pack because you’re bound by blood to the alpha…must suck,” he said.

  His voice was flat, but there was sullenness in the twist of his mouth that made me want to take his hand in comfort. I kept my hands to myself, drawing up my legs and laying my chin on my knees, holding myself together in a protective ball.

  I stared at the stream flowing over the rocks, sunlight shining over the surface, making it shimmer like glass. I wished I could float away on it, drift away to somewhere that the witches would never find me, somewhere quiet and beautiful, far away from there. Far away from them, the Dark Room, the birch cane, the demons, and the nightmares. Anywhere.

  “Spencer?” I whispered.

  “Hmm?” he murmured distractedly.

  “That witch you saved me from? Olivia?”

  He glanced at me, nodding slowly. “She was one of the people who adopted you, wasn’t she?” he asked gently.

  “Yeah,” I sighed.

  He nodded again, his face darkening. “I can see why you ran away.”

  My lips turned up in a sad smile at the corners. Then it faded. “You chased her off. Did you…is she…” I bit my lip, unsure how to ask without sounding evil myself. But I needed to know, I needed to know how much longer I could be safe before they swooped down on me like a hawk on a mouse.

  Spencer grimaced, his lips becoming a flat, angry line. Gold flashed in his eyes. “I didn’t kill her. I would have, but she cast some sort of spell on me. It slowed me down, and then I couldn’t Change back to human form, right up until I got shot…” He shook his head violently. “It was a silver bullet. It broke the spell, but…if you hadn’t been there, I’d probably have been dead by the time the others found me. So thank you.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just stayed quiet for a long moment, and then something occurred to me, and my eyes widened. I turned to Spencer, who was scowling at a spot in the stream as if he was waiting for the water to boil. “Spencer, you said it was a silver bullet? Those actually work on werewolves?” I was familiar with the concept from movies and books, but I’d never put any credence in the idea.

  “Yes, silver bullets work. Silver is poisonous to us. So is wolfs bane, surprisingly enough.”

  I felt a thrill of ice go down my spine, and I whispered, “Why would the hunters be using silver bullets?”

  Spencer’s jaw clenched so hard, I thought he’d break his teeth. His eyes blazed gold, terrifying to see wolf eyes in a human face, and when he spoke his voice was half-growl. “Because, somehow, they know about us. Someone told them, maybe even hired them to take us out.”

  “It wasn’t me. I swear, I would never…” I rambled, shrinking away in fear of the animal I saw gnawing under the surface of his skin.

  He shook his head again, and when he looked at me, his eyes were back to their normal, cool blue. “I know it wasn’t you. It would make no sense for it to have been you anyway. You saved me. You threw that hunter fifteen feet into a tree. By the way, that was sort of awesome.” He grinned swiftly, but the smile was swallowed by the dark, roiling anger in his eyes. “No, you didn’t do it, but that witch I chased probably did. Her name’s Olivia?” He scoffed, “She’d better not come back here.”

  I shivered, hugging my knees. I wasn’t sure that the threat of one werewolf would keep Olivia away. I wasn’t sure a whole pack of werewolves would keep her from coming after me. If she was hiring hunters to kill the werewolves…I was just as screwed as they were. They were going to die just for helping me, when they didn’t even know what I was. I was going to go back to the Dark Room and demons trying to rip my soul out, all because the witches liked power, and selling demons on the Ghost Market—the supernatural Black Market—was a lucrative business.

  I couldn’t go back to it, I couldn’t, but I didn’t want to kill myself either. Suicide was the lesser of two evils, but in just the short week I’d spent with Dominic, Desmond, Sarah, and little Annie…I’d gotten to know what freedom felt like. What life could be like if I was free, and I didn’t want to give it up.

  “Tilly,” Spencer said softly.

  I glanced at him, realising with a jolt of shock that he’d moved closer to me. Close enough that I could smell his scent—wilder than Dominic’s sunny scent of fresh leaves and shampoo. Spencer smelled like rain in a storm and the smoke from a bonfire.

  He raised his hand hesitantly and touched my face, his fingertips sliding over my jaw, drawing sparks along my skin. I was finding it hard to breathe, hard to think. He was just so close, and my body was prickling as if I was standing next to an open flame, a roaring fire. I thought I could see the stars through the storm in his eyes.

  Almost a whisper, he murmured, “Tilly, you are not just a tool.”

  My breath caught, and my eyes stung, my throat swelling shut under the pressure of tears that I refused to let show. I feigned a smile. “How would you know? You’ve only known me a week, and night time excursions excluded, you’ve barely spoken to me.” My voice came out as a choked whisper, the lump in my throat clogging the words and distorting the tone, so I sounded hurt rather than teasing.

  He sighed, his eyes flicking down, dropping his hand from my face into his own lap. He looked ashamed. Then he shook his head slightly, muttering something under his breath that I didn’t catch, and looked up at me again with bright eyes.

  “I know because you saved my life,” he whispered.

  That night, I tossed and turned in my bed, the day’s events playing over and over in my head. Surprisingly, the thing that stuck in my mind most wasn’t finding out that Spencer and Dominic and everyone else were werewolves; it was the way Spencer had looked at me by the stream when he’d whispered that I’d saved his life. His soft voice was the last thing I thought of before I finally fell into an uneasy,
restless sleep.

  *****

  I dreamed I was running. Running through the trees in my nightgown, my bare feet hitting the dirt. Running away from the evil cackling and hissing voices, the echoes of whispers promising to catch me and punish me, to throw me into the Dark Room for weeks, whip me with the birch cane until my skin flayed off my body.

  The threats breathed from the trees, the ground, and the soulless black sky. All around me, the voices floated from the darkness. The dark pillars of the trees blurred past me as I ran, the branches whipping at my hair and arms. The voices followed me, chasing me. The cold night air rasped in my throat. My leg muscles burned as I leapt over a fallen log, landing on a pinecone. My ankle twisted, spines of the pinecone digging into the tender arch of my foot, and I went down to my knees, scraping them along the ground.

  “Matilda! Matilda! There’s no use running, Matilda! We’ll find you!”

  “Come out, come out, little lamb! We’re going to kill your Big Bad Wolf!”

  “You can run but you can’t hide from us, Matilda!”

  The cruel laughter bounced off the trees and rose shrilly into the night sky, morphing into the howling of wolves unseen. Twigs snapped behind me, and suddenly, there was hot breath on the back of my legs. A breathless scream caught in my throat as the strong, ferocious jaws of a wolf clamped down on my leg. I threw out my arms, pain shooting up my leg, as the sharp teeth dug into my calf, tearing at the muscle.

  I fell forever, never hitting the ground. Just falling, falling, falling into blackness.

  Chapter Ten

  ** Spencer **

  If there was anything Spencer hated more than being dragged out of his bed, it was being dragged out of his bed by his father. But that’s exactly what happened that morning, and he’d worn a scowl perpetually since he’d been shaken awake to find Frank’s bearded face looking down at him disapprovingly.

  All Frank had said was, “Get up, boy. You’re coming with me and Dominic. Move it.”

  There hadn’t been a whole lot of choice about it, so Spencer had grudgingly rolled out of bed, gotten dressed, and resisted the urge to point out—for the hundredth time—that he loathed being called boy, seeing as he was nineteen and no longer a kid.

  Still scowling, he stood at the entrance to the Buck and Bullet—the local pub where hunters particularly liked to hang out—with Frank and Dominic. He’d told his father that the hunter who’d shot him had used a silver bullet, and the alpha had come to the same conclusion as Spencer had—someone was hiring hunters to kill the wolves.

  Thankfully, there were two things that his father always believed him on. One was pack safety issues, and that he would never challenge the man to become the alpha. Spencer was certain that if Frank had had even the slightest inkling that Spencer might want to be alpha, the boy would have been out of the pack in a heartbeat. Spencer couldn’t imagine wanting to be alpha. He’d much rather be a lone wolf.

  Dominic sighed, looking up at the big, wooden sign over the door to the bar. The pub’s name was engraved into the faded, rotting wood and painted blood red. There was a depiction of a buck’s head between two crossed shotguns, the bar’s emblem, on the large, stained glass window to the right of the door. Through the doorway, Spencer could see it was dim inside the bar. Wooden booths were lined with greasy brown pleather, and tall stools sat at the long bar at the far end of the room, behind which were rows and rows of bottles of alcohol. There weren’t many people in the Buck and Bullet, except a couple of guys in orange caps up at the bar.

  “I hate hunter pubs,” Dominic muttered, tugging on one of his auburn curls.

  Frowning, Spencer silently agreed with him, but if they wanted to find out who had hired the men to hunt wolves, they had to talk to some of the hunters. It would be easier to do when the bar was quieter, before everyone got too drunk to form coherent sentences.

  Frank grunted. “Hate them if you like, but we’ve got work to do. Both of you, let me do the talking and keep an eye out. You know how it goes.”

  Spencer noted that the man’s steely eyes rested particularly on him, though he’d said both of you. It was always like that. Spencer didn’t bother to point out that he rarely spoke when he didn’t have to anyway, because Frank already knew it.

  Dominic just nodded, gave a final tug on his curls, and settled on his serious face—the one he used when they were doing something important or when his wolf was close to the surface.

  Spencer was still scowling, so he just stuck with that, knowing full well that the only reason Frank had brought him along was because he trusted Spencer’s instinct. Well, that and his ability to be intimidating, even to men twice his age. Dominic was there because he was Frank’s son.

  They walked into the Buck and Bullet, Frank first and Spencer last, and went straight to the bar. Dominic wrinkled his nose for a second, but smoothed out his expression quickly. With his bright curls and lanky build, he looked far too young to be in a bar, but his eyes were sharp, scanning the place for threats.

  Spencer couldn’t blame the kid for wrinkling his nose. The pub stank of sweat, beer, blood and gunpowder. It was choking to wolf senses, even when they were in human form. Just one of the many reasons Spencer rarely went to bars and pubs. He preferred to lose his troubles in the pounding of his paws on the dirt and the wind whipping through his fur as he ran, than to drown them in a cold bottle of Bud.

  Frank took a seat at the bar, a couple stools down from the hunters in the orange caps, and Dominic sat down on his right, away from the hunters. With an internal sigh, Spencer hooked a stool down from Dominic and leaned his elbows on the bar. Ignoring Frank and Dominic, the bartender—a buxom woman most likely in her early thirties with dyed black hair and a lined face—looked up from arranging glasses under the bar and came to him first. She smiled at Spencer, showing a missing incisor, and he didn’t smile back.

  “What can I get you, honey?” she asked, drumming her long, painted nails on the polished wood.

  Spencer opened his mouth to reject the offer, but then he thought that might look suspicious. With a smirk, he said, “Scotch, if you please.” He felt Frank glaring at him down the bar, and he ignored it.

  “Coming right up, sweetie” The bartender dropped him a wink and moved off to grab a bottle of scotch. She poured his drink and slid it in front of him. He began to reach into his pocket for cash, but the woman shook her head at him. “This one’s on the house, so long’s you promise to come back. We don’t see a lot of younger lads in here.” She gave him another toothy grin before sauntering down the bar to Frank, leaning forward to give him a good view of her considerable cleavage. To his credit, Frank didn’t even glance at her chest as he ordered a bottle of beer.

  Spencer snorted, lifted his drink, and caught Dominic glaring at him. He raised an eyebrow.

  “What?”

  Dominic shook his head, making his curls bounce. “I hate you sometimes, you know that?” he said, but his lips quirked into a grin.

  Spencer doubted his statement, simply because he doubted Dominic was capable of hating anyone—though, if he were to hate someone, his half-brother would probably be a likely candidate.

  With a shrug, Spencer said, “You’ve only got another year, and then you can drink as much as you want.”

  The younger boy frowned.

  Their attention was redirected when they heard Frank speaking to one of the orange cap wearing hunters.

  “…heard there was a wolf going about those woods. Dunno if I believe it, though. I mean, it’s been decades since there’ve been wolves around here.”

  The hunter, a grizzled man with greying brown hair peering out from under his ugly fluorescent cap, was frowning as he tipped the neck of a brown bottle to his lips. Frank had his hand curled lightly around his own bottle, looking deceptively calm and indifferent. Only Dominic and Spencer knew how much he wanted to Change and rip the hunter’s throat out with his teeth. They knew, because they wanted to do the same thing. Well, Spencer di
d anyway. It was hard to imagine Dominic killing anyone, but the tension in his shoulders and back was definitely of a violent nature.

  The hunter Frank was speaking to put down his bottle and shook his head. “There are wolves in there alright. I’ve seen them,” he said. He had the rough, gravelly voice of a chain smoker.

  Frank’s fingers coiled more tightly around his beer bottle, but his voice and posture remained the same—casual, disinterested, non-threatening. “Them? There’s more than one? You’re talking bull,” he scoffed, lifting his beer bottle to his mouth.

  Spencer saw a muscle tick in the alpha’s cheek.

  “Nah,” The other hunter at the bar leaned forward, joining the conversation. “He’s telling the truth. I’ve seen the wolves too. There was a couple broads who came in here the other night saying they’d pay good money to anyone who’d go out shooting the wolves who’ve been prowling ‘round their manor house. Me and a few other blokes took them up on it, went out the next day with shotguns. The women, they give you the ammo for it, too.” Hunter number two grinned, adjusting his cap.“‘Course, I’d have shot the damn beasts for nothing if it meant getting to know those women a bit better, if you get what I mean.” He chuckled, and his friend chortled.

  Frank did a good job of making a snarl look like a grin. Under his breath, Dominic made a disgusted noise, and Spencer just took another sip of his drink.

  And we’re the beasts, Spencer thought with a frown. They kill animals for sport, money, and an attractive woman. Wolves kill for food, not for pleasure.

  “So who’re these fine women, then?” Frank asked, his fingers deceptively loose on his brown bottle.

  Hunter number one shrugged. “Dunno exactly. Just know they were good looking, and they live in some fancy ass house on the edge of town. Didn’t ask too many questions. But they said they’d be back here at the end of the week to pay anyone who could prove they’d shot a wolf.”