by T. S. Joyce
“Let her go,” Dalton said low, eyes over her shoulder on Vega.
“I saw you,” Vega gritted out. “I saw you bite her tonight from that window.” Beside her, Vega’s finger jammed at the picture window over their bed. “I sat in these woods hoping Kate could still be saved, but you sank your teeth into her back and ruined any chance she had of surviving me. Filthy, fucking, dirty whore!” he yelled so loud against her hear, her head rang and spun. “You fucking werewolves couldn’t stay quiet, could you? Do you want a history lesson, Kate?” He gripped the back of her neck so tightly she hunched at the excruciating pain. “In the old days, we annihilated evil in a civilized manner. We were revered. Feared. Held on a pedestal by the humans who were afraid that you would come in the night and make off with their children. Dawson.” He spat the name like a curse. “Do you know what your ancestors did to us, Dalton? All they had to do was die. Hang and burn. Instead, they annihilated our last remaining faction. Jeremiah Dawson. Luke Dawson. Those are names in our history books because they ended what we had held sacred for centuries. But you couldn’t stay quiet, could you? You couldn’t stop fucking up, hurting people, killing innocents. I don’t blame you. That’s just what monsters do.”
“The McCalls drew the attention,” Dalton said, struggling against the two cloaked men who held him in place. “We haven’t done anything.”
Vega laughed harshly. “Are you serious? You haven’t done anything? You’ve evolved, Dalton. You don’t poison people with your bite anymore. You can blend in better and make it harder for us to hunt you. And now Clayton’s little pet fox shifter made a fucking cure not only for the McCall line, but for female offspring. Fina Clotila McCall will be your queen. That infant will grow up to rally you all, and she’s only the first. Do you really think we can let that happen? Do you think we can allow you to keep twice the amount of offspring you bore before? Do you think we can let you keep female breeders that will strengthen your line, make you more numerous, make you braver? No!”
A sickening look of realization had taken Dalton’s face as Vega had talked. “Kate, look at me,” Dalton said, chest heaving as he struggled violently against his restraints. “I didn’t know what he was. Don’t go in the house. Don’t let them take you in the house, Kate. Do you hear me?” he yelled as Vega dragged her backward. “Run!”
Harlan was limping badly but was pouring something onto the house. Her throat clogged with fear as she smelled it. Gasoline. They were going to burn her alive, and they were making Dalton watch.
“Vega, you missed the war. You missed it,” Dalton pleaded. “We killed the McCalls who drew attention. There’s a cure for the rest of us!”
“The only cure for the devil inside of you is death,” Vega said, dragging Kate inside, inch by inch.
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed, clinging onto the doorframe.
Vega yanked her in and slammed her onto the ground right beside the couch. “Because.” He glared down at her with the fire of hatred in his dark eyes. “I’m a Hell Hunter.”
The long note of a lone wolf sounded outside, lifting with the breeze. Vega froze and shot a shocked look at the window. Shaking his head slowly back and forth, he murmured, “No. Clayton told Dalton to hunt me alone. He told him.”
“My wolves don’t answer to Clayton,” Link said, boots echoing hollowly over the fox tunnel and root cellar he’d come through. His eyes burned bright white, and his face was the terrifying mask of a death bringer. “They answer to me.”
The roar of a bear out in the woods rattled the house, and another answered from farther away.
“We knew Clayton answered to someone,” Link snarled, “and now we know who. The last of the Hell Hunters. Pity he isn’t here to watch you Turn.”
“Y-you can’t Turn me,” Vega whispered. “You can’t.”
“Mmm,” Link said with a noncommittal shrug. “Not a werewolf, perhaps. But I have this friend who is a bitey little thing. It’ll be full circle, Vega. You were part of the machine that had her Turned against her will.”
Outside, men were screaming, but through the noise, a soft snarl rattled from the open doorway. Vera’s fox stood there, legs splayed, teeth bared. Scrambling from the floor, Kate bolted for the rifle on the wall and aimed it at Vega who was trapped between Link’s murderous eyes and Vera’s snapping teeth.
“Vera’s a clever little fox,” Link said. “When Clayton asked for vials of the cure, she did, in fact, give him a cure. Just the wrong one.”
All hell had broken loose outside with snarling, the scream of a panther, and the roaring of the bears, but just above the chaotic noise, a throatier snarl sounded from the doorway behind Vera. Kate’s shoulders sagged with relief as Dalton’s black wolf stepped inside of the house. He was alive.
Link canted his head. “You see, Vera figured out a cure for our painfully slow shifts. You didn’t stifle Dalton’s wolf when you injected him, Vega.” Link smiled slowly, baring his teeth, and his cheek twitched with barely concealed fury. “You made it easier for him to Change.”
Vera scrabbled toward Vega, nails cutting into the wood floors, and in a flash, she was on the other side, standing near Link, her gold eyes narrowed on Vega as he lifted his hand in shock. Trickles of blood seeped from a puncture wound at the base of his thumb.
“Does it burn?” Link asked. “Vera said it burned like fire in her veins when she was bitten. That’s the poison. That’s your animal growing inside of you. And now you’ll die a monster, just like the ones you hunt.”
“No,” he said, eyes wide on his hand. “This isn’t happening. I was careful. Clayton obeys my orders. Only mine!” he yelled in a booming voice as he clutched his bleeding hand to his middle.
He rushed toward Kate, but she pumped the shotgun in her hands and rested her finger on the trigger with a warning shake of her head. Vega skidded to a stop, dark eyes wide with realization. He’s lost. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and outside, his men had gone silent.
Link clicked his tongue behind his teeth. “Making shifters watch you burn their innocent families before you hang them? Centuries of wrong-doing, and you tote what you are like a badge of honor.” The alpha twitched his head, his snow-colored eyes hard on Vega. “Dalton, your mate smells like blood, and your den reeks of gasoline. Vengeance is yours to take. Let the Dawson line end the Hell Hunters once again.”
In an instant, Vega fell forward and was dragged clawing and scrabbling against the cabin floor until he was outside.
And then all was quiet.
Chapter Nineteen
“They were going to hang him,” Kate whispered, sagging to her knees. The shotgun was too heavy to keep aimed anymore, so she lowered it. “Link, they were going to hang Dalton and burn me alive.”
“No, we wouldn’t have let them.” Link knelt in front of her and lifted her chin, then winced at her face. “Kate, you’re hurt.”
“I know him. Vega. Or…I knew him,” she corrected with a frown. “He worked with me for years, and he was going to kill me. Torture me.”
Link swallowed hard and shot a worried glance at the door. “Kate,” he whispered, “before Dalton comes back in here, you have to be okay.”
Was she even touching the ground anymore? Or was she floating. She must be in shock. “Because Dalton’s a man-eater now.”
“Vega wasn’t a man,” Vera said in a shaky voice from her hands and knees behind Link. She stumbled to her feet and wiped red off her mouth. “He died a shifter, and none of those men outside were human either. Dalton will have one less technicality to deal with.”
“They knew you,” Kate murmured, a tear fleeing her eye and streaming down her cheek. “Those men were on Perl Island with you. They were shifters hunting shifters, Vera. Shifters hunting shifters,” she repeated.
Link plucked the gun gently from her grasp and unloaded it, then set it back on the pegs where it belonged. Vera pulled Kate up into a tight embrace.
Outside, the murmur of men’s voice
s carried through the open door.
“You did good,” Vera said, squeezing her tighter. “Do you hear me? We saw you fighting, saw you stalling while Link was headed into the house through that tunnel. Brave little human. You bought us all time to get into position so that none of us would get hurt.”
Kate’s face crumpled with a sob as she hugged Vera tightly. “Everyone’s okay?”
“Yeah. Well, Tobias probably has a face full of wereporcupine quills because of Harlan the beef-jerky-smelling traitor, and Chance and the Silvers might be clawed up a little. But Elyse, Lena, and Nicole are holed up with the babies, safe and sound. We’re all okay because you called in the pack. It was smart of you and Dalton to be suspicious of Clayton. I’ve watched him play too many sides to ever really trust him. And oooh, his boys are going to bleed him for this one.”
“What about Dalton. Will he be okay?”
“He was shot, but it looked like it went clean through his shoulder. His shifter healing will fix it in a few days.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Kate whispered. “Will his wolf be okay?”
Vera eased her back to arm’s length and leveled her with a stony, serious look. “He’s a Dawson, not a McCall. He’ll be fine. But maybe let’s get you cleaned up to make it easier on him, okay?”
“My face has a pulse,” Kate muttered, touching her cheek gently as Vera pulled her by the hand toward the bathroom. “And by the way, I’m getting black-out curtains for that window behind our bed because Vega definitely said he watched Dalton bite me, which means he saw a whole lot of other mortifying stuff.” Chills rippled against her skin in waves. She felt so violated by everything that had happened.
The soft shush-shush sound of water hitting the house sounded.
When Kate froze to listen, Vera explained, “Sounds like the boys are washing off the gasoline.”
Those awful Hell Hunters had tried to burn the house. Tried to burn her home while Dalton was supposed to watch her blaze into ashes right along with it. Another wave of anger rippled across her skin, flushing her with heat as she gripped the edges of the bathroom sink. There was a small, seeping cut on her cheek that wouldn’t need more than butterfly bandages and some discoloring that said she was going to have one epic black eye over the next couple of days, but other than that, she just looked pale and muddy and pissed. The shock was wearing off now, leaving more and more room for fury.
She scooped water from the trickling faucet and scrubbed her face clean of Harlan’s mistreatment, and when the last of the mud from her face and arms had trickled down the drain, she changed her clothes and pulled her damp hair into a messy bun. Gathering her courage, she lifted her chin primly and sauntered out to the living room where Tobias sat at the table while Vera plucked enormous porcupine quills from his shoulder with needle-nose pliers. Kate would’ve offered her nursing skills, but when she opened her mouth to do so, Vera rested her forehead against Tobias’s temple and whispered something low as she laid her hand gently on his bare chest. He closed his too-bright eyes and sighed. Such a tender moment shouldn’t be interrupted, and Vera looked like she knew what she was doing.
Link paced the kitchen, talking on the phone. The air in here felt heavy and suffocating. “If you ever even talk to one of my wolves again, Clayton, I’ll rip your fucking head off your shoulders.” He ended the call and threw the phone against the wall. Plastic pieces shattered, skittering across the floorboards. Eyes blazing, he growled out, “Vega has been feeding money, intel, and the kill orders to the king asshole himself. Clayton has been answering to a damned Hell Hunter this entire time. He said Vega promised not to go after his sons, or me, if Clayton did his bidding. Vega gave the kill order on Dalton after he saw Dalton bite Kate. He went nuts and threatened to hunt us all if Clayton didn’t give them Dalton.”
Vera plucked another quill from Tobias’s arm and pressed a rag onto his skin to staunch the bleeding. “I knew Clayton was playing too many sides of something. I could feel it but I couldn’t figure out who he was dealing with. When he asked for the cure a few days ago, I smelled a rat. I just got this sick feeling he was going to take some poor sucker’s animal away. He was going to render someone helpless, so I gave him a serum to speed up the Change instead. I thought it would give whoever he was hunting a chance to defend themselves, you know? Make it a fair fight and all. I can’t believe it was for Dalton.” She shook her head and looked disgusted. “How could Clayton answer to those assholes? How could he try to sacrifice one of your wolves to protect you? Link, it wouldn’t protect you at all. Losing pack members could destroy your wolf, even after the McCall Reset.”
Link shook his head and stared out the front window with a faraway look. “He said he was trying to keep the casualties to a minimum until he could figure out how to end the growing problem. Keep your enemies closer and all that.”
“I don’t give a shit what his excuses are,” Tobias said in an empty voice. “He’s done. Ian and Jenner will back me. He’s cut off from our family. He pulls us in and shares fractions of the truth, then does something despicable again. His moral compass is broken. That was his last chance to be a decent person.” He dragged his gaze to Kate. “I’m sorry for what’s happened, and I’m sorry for my father’s part in it.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
Ian and Jenner were nowhere to be seen, but Chance sat in a chair against the wall, watching his alpha. He wore jeans, but a long claw mark and several puncture wounds were seeping red across his ribs.
When Chance inhaled harshly and looked up at her, his eyes were such a light, icy green, it almost hurt to look at them. Without a word, he stood and hugged her tightly, then clapped her on the back too roughly. He cleared his throat and hooked his hands on his hips, gaze on the floor. “If anything would’ve happened to you…” Chance glanced at the open doorway, then back at her, looking tortured. “I know what April First cost Dalton. I was there for all of it, and I was scared he... I’m just really glad you’re okay.”
Kate squeezed his shoulder and rested her cheek on it for a moment. “I’m okay, are you?”
“I’ll mend. Don’t worry about me.”
“Where is he?”
Chance twitched his head. “Outside.” As she strode for the door, he asked, “Kate?”
She pressed her palm against the frame and turned. “Yeah?”
“I’m glad Dalton chose you.” Chance’s voice cracked on the last word.
Heart too big for her chest, she nodded. “Me, too.”
Offering him a half smile, she made her way out onto the porch. She expected carnage, but the ground was clear and the bodies were gone. That was probably where Ian and Jenner were. Their time as enforcers would’ve taught them how to dispose of bodies, especially after kill orders. There was a long smear of red along the porch boards where Vega had been dragged. Kate swallowed hard and stepped over the streak carefully.
Just outside of the porch light, Dalton worked to cut his hanging noose down from the ancient spruce tree on the edge of the yard. He wore low-slung jeans, but his back was bare, and the phoenix tattoo was stark against his pale skin. Vera had been right. The shot looked like it had gone straight through his shoulder, and though red painted his back like a canvas, he wasn’t favoring it as he sawed at the thick rope with the knife Harlan had wrenched from her hand.
“You shouldn’t be cutting your own rope,” Kate said, her throat closing around the words as she ran her hand up his back just beside his spine.
One last cut, and Dalton yanked the rope out of the branches above. He didn’t turn around, didn’t look at her.
Her voice pitched low, she murmured, “I thought they were going to hang you.”
Dalton turned slowly under her touch, his eyes hard as he lifted his chin to expose his neck. “They did.”
Kate gripped her middle and barely avoided doubling over at the sight of the deeply etched, bloody rope burn around his throat. “Oh, Dalton.”
He blinked
rapidly, his gaze full of so many things. Despair. Worry. Pain. “It’ll scar, and you’ll always look at it and remember tonight. I can cut down the hanging tree, but I can’t undo the hanging scar.”
She took the last step toward him, closing the space between them, needing to feel his warm skin against her to convince herself he was still here and not some ghost or figment of her imagination. Dalton angled his shoulder away, though, and countered her step-for-step, warning in his gaze.
Hurt by his intentional distance, she stopped her advance. “H-how did you get away?”
“Apparently Vega didn’t study how Hell Hunters did hangings in the old days. They dropped me from two low, and the rope is new. It had too much stretch to break my neck. I nearly suffocated instead before my wolf pushed out of me and slipped the noose. I thought whoever shot me had injected me with the cure to put my animal to sleep, but my wolf was there, right under the surface, ready for me to reach him. The Change was instant, and the rope didn’t hold me. And before that, Chance’s wolf was under me, trying to prop me up, exposing his back to a fucking panther to try to keep me breathing. They were shifters, Kate.” Dalton stabbed his knife deep into the tree trunk, then bent down, plucked the rope from the mud and began looping coils from his palm to elbow to his palm again. “I always thought it would be humans to come after us, but it was our own damned people.” Dalton lifted his golden gaze to her throbbing cheek, then down to the forest floor. In a tortured voice, he murmured, “You wouldn’t have been hurt if I’d been strong enough to stay away from you.”
“And I would’ve been hurt worse if you did. This,” she said, gesturing to her cheek, “is nothing compared to the pain I was in before I met you. The loneliness, the fear. Nightmares, sleeplessness, restlessness, helplessness, never feeling like enough. You changed all of that.”
“And now how will you feel, Kate?” he asked. “How can you feel safe now? I pledged my body to protect you, and you got hurt. You were attacked. Our home was doused in gasoline with you in it. You were hit by a man, and I was hung. How will you ever look at my face, at the scar on my neck, and feel safe again?”