Huntress Bound

by Aimee Easterling

  “If it’s my job, then let me do it,” Malachi countered. Taking a single step forward, my cousin paused as a hint of feral wolfishness swept back across his opponent’s features. In response, Malachi flicked his eyes to me before ceding the ground and settling back into a pose that mirrored Troy’s own.

  And this time, the tendril of connection I shared with Malachi tugged at my fingertips while wordless communication flowed between our wolves. Malachi would create a distraction while I’d interject the element of surprise into the occasion. Between the two of us, we just might manage to break the professor free.

  To that end, I sidled into the shelter of a hazelnut bush as slowly as I could force myself to move when go, go, go! was pounding in my ears. The moonless night was now so dark that it wouldn’t take much to shield me from view, especially now that Troy had lost interest in my presence.

  So I crept on near-silent feet past the male who held my mate in an iron grip. Only I wasn’t walking on soft lupine paws, and my human eyes couldn’t see through the darkness. So I’d moved no further than three yards when my foot landed on a dry twig...landed and snapped the stick nearly as loudly as a gunshot’s blast.

  “Troy,” my cousin said at the exact same instant. “You’ll regret this.”

  It was almost as if Malachi had heard the twig before it broke, had felt the moment the sharp wood cut into the underside of my foot. However he managed the feat, my cousin’s words snagged Troy’s attention during that pivotal moment and provided the leeway I needed to finish my peregrination. Breathing out a silent sigh of relief, I accepted the reprieve and continued with my advance...even more carefully this time around.

  Wet spiderwebs draped across my forehead and crushed leaves mingled with my odor. But after a few seconds—or perhaps eternities—I’d found my way to the open spot behind Troy’s back without further mishap. Which was to be expected. After all, I’d begun sliding my feet through the leaf litter like a snake slithering over uneven ground partway through the journey, so there was no way to step on another stick.

  There was one unexpected occurrence however. My big toe lodged painfully against cold metal as I neared my target, the effort nearly kicking the discarded rifle onto Troy’s unprotected heels. Only a quick curl of my foot around the barrel prevented the weapon from skittering away out of reach.

  Lucky chance, my wolf murmured. Together, we reached down through near darkness, lifting the rifle off the forest floor. And, thus armed, I finally tuned back into the conversation that surrounded my mate.

  Malachi might have been talking the entire time I’d spent getting into position for all I knew. To be honest, I’d fallen so deep into the mindset of a hunter that I wasn’t entirely aware what words had flown around me while I crept into place. Now, though, I flinched backwards as Troy’s voice rang out inches away from my nose.

  “You’ve lost your way,” the male said, trying to draw someone he considered a friend back over to his side of the fence through stark lupine logic. “You’re an enforcer. This is your purpose. So help me enforce.”

  Enforcing apparently meant strangling humans without giving them any chance to plead their case. And based on the sympathetic pain pounding rhythmically through my own head, I suspected the time Sebastien had left was rapidly running out. It was now or never, kill or be killed.

  Which is why I found it so easy to heft that rifle like a baseball bat and swing it with all of my might against Troy’s hard head. At which point, all hell broke loose.

  I’D THOUGHT SEBASTIEN was near comatose. But the instant his attacker’s grip loosened, my mate twisted his entire body in a lithe move that would have made the average werewolf jealous. The gesture turned the tables admirably, gathering Troy’s arms together behind his back while exposing the shifter’s face, chest, and throat to view. In less than a second, the big, bad werewolf had been taken down by a clawless human.

  Sebastien didn’t make any further moves, however. Didn’t retaliate against the male who had created a thick red welt around his own swelling throat. Instead, the professor merely eyed my cousin then offered: “Your friend? Your choice.”

  And Troy was Malachi’s friend. Even now, after the other male had threatened both me and the human I called my mate, the connection thrumming between the two males was palpable. So I expected my cousin to find a way to bind the perpetrator in place until Dakota’s pack could sniff him out and carry him away. Or perhaps we’d drag Troy along with us as we fled past the perimeter of the compound that might very shortly explode.

  But I was wrong. Instead of mercy, my cousin chose attack. Bending ever so slightly, a knife snicked free of its boot sheathe with a glimmer of steel in starlight. Then dark liquid was streaming to the ground before me, Malachi’s movement so fast I couldn’t at first tell who he’d chosen to wound.

  “No!” I cried, leaping forward to shield my mate from further attack. But it wasn’t Sebastien who crumble down to his knees before falling onto his face. Instead, it was Malachi’s clan member, his friend, his fellow enforcer. Troy would never again be pack. Not when he lay bleeding out on the leaf litter, seconds away from the finality of death.

  THIRTY SECONDS, my wolf whispered as I dropped down by Troy’s side and attempted to stem the flow of squirting blood. My inner beast was unfazed by murder, was instead intent upon our own escape. Us or him, she reminded me before returning to her count. Twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-six....

  “Here,” Sebastien said, lifting the rifle out of my unyielding grasp and pulling me back to my feet in the process. Then turning toward my cousin, he cocked his head. “Lead the way.”

  Skin-on-skin contact with my mate extinguished my indecision at last, and I ran flat out behind my friends until the effort of maintaining my breath cut into my ability to think or grieve. So it wasn’t until we reached our destination that I managed to gasp out the question I should have considered much sooner. “Do we have any way to test the fence?”

  Because while it had been easy for my wolf to wriggle through the gap on my way in, Sebastien’s human form would be a significantly tighter fit now. I wasn’t willing to risk my mate if the fence was active and ready to cook the first human who dared to touch its metallic rungs....

  Rather than answering, Malachi merely stripped off the dark clothing that had made him blend so easily into the night. “My vehicle’s hidden two miles to the southwest,” he said, speaking easily despite our recent run and the preceding altercation. “The key’s behind the left rear tire. If we get separated, take the SUV and go. It’s untraceable. No one will find you unless you slip up and return home to Haven. Be smart and be safe and you’ll be alright.”

  The words sounded terrifyingly close to a goodbye. “Malachi,” I panted, brow wrinkling. “What...?”

  But my cousin didn’t quibble. Just fell into the form of his wolf as easily as if he’d made no other shifts that night. His animal half was larger than mine, beefier around the shoulders and longer from head to tail. Still, he could easily have slid through the gully with no danger from the potentially electrified wires.

  Instead, my cousin paused halfway through, rubbing up against the metal like a cat begging for a pat. I caught my breath, waiting for sparks and the sizzle of cooking meat.

  Nothing. Releasing a long sigh of relief, I realized that the fence was indeed powered off.

  “You next,” I told Sebastien after passing Malachi’s clothing through the gully to their owner. My cousin accepted the bundle in strong lupine jaws, his moist nose pressing against my skin a millisecond longer than was truly necessary before he broke the connection and backed away.

  Then Sebastien was taking his place at the head of the gully. The professor pushed the rifle through first then slid his wide shoulders into the narrow space, ripping his shirt as wires pressed up against sensitive skin. If the fence had been powered up....

  But it wasn’t, and the time on the clock had nearly ticked down to zero. So, ignoring all what-ifs, I scrambled t
hrough after my mate. At long last, we three were standing together before a forest that appeared empty and quiet to our searching eyes.

  Soon, my wolf whispered, reminding me that the base would disappear off the face of the earth within seconds. It would be safer to take cover under the trees.

  But I didn’t rush us into the darkness. Instead, I turned back around, peering through the night at a facility that had been created to study werewolves then had hosted the first shifter-human battle in recorded history. If only SHRITA had been willing to leave well-enough alone, could all of the blood shed this night have been avoided?

  Which is when I saw the greater danger we’d nearly missed. The glint of light off a reflective telephoto lens. A hunched shape atop the nearest building, the familiar scent drifting toward me along a vagrant breeze.

  Mr. Shepard hadn’t evacuated along with the other humans. He hadn’t perished upon the fangs of Dakota’s waiting pack either. Instead, the government mastermind was waiting, watching...recording Malachi’s current transformation in the first solid documentation of our existence that had ever fallen into unfriendly human hands.

  “No,” I breathed.

  And, my cousin, following my gaze, did the unthinkable. Ignoring the fact that the bomb would take out Mr. Shepard before the latter could share his stolen evidence with the world, ignoring the long-range rifle that could have solved the problem from a distance, Malachi sidestepped my smaller body and slipped through the gap between ground and fence. Then he sprinted back into the heart of the compound as if a horde of werewolves was hot on his trail.

  Chapter 31

  “Malachi!”

  I dove for the gully with no plan beyond saving my cousin from imminent destruction. Meanwhile, my wolf was still counting down the seconds, our leeway now reaching its bitter end. Three, she told me. Two, one....

  “Malachi, come back!” I yelled, even as my belly hit the dirt and my hips began wriggling beneath the fence after him.

  Only I was moving in the wrong direction, not forward but rather back. My head thunked against the wires as I emerged on the same side from which I’d started, Sebastien’s hands clamped down around my bare ankles.

  Then the world exploded all around us.

  From within my mate’s protective embrace, I could barely make out the rain of sharp-edged shrapnel that cascaded toward the fence, most falling harmlessly back into the devastated compound but some ending up hammering into Sebastien’s back, legs, and arms. He grunted, but didn’t move, merely cradling me tighter as he pressed us both down into the protective earth.

  Which is when the true explosion began. What came before had been a mere ripple compared to the tidal wave that tore through the base now, its energy so powerful I could feel the vibration thrumming through the earth beneath my chin. And this time around the world grew almost unbearably bright, illuminating the surroundings sufficiently for me to make out images that would never fade entirely from my traumatized brain.

  A rooftop where Mr. Shepard had recently stood, now empty and bare. The street that Malachi had been racing down, gone as if it never existed.

  And, on the wind, the sharp scent of blood and meat, as if an entire werewolf had been passed through a garbage-disposal unit and come out on the other side as a spray of flesh and fluids and infinitesimal particles of bone.

  Deep in my chest, something broke at that moment. The thin thread of connection I’d rebuilt between myself and my cousin, my only tether to family and pack, snapped short. And the result was a floating sensation that would have been heady if it hadn’t felt so much like I was rising into the stratosphere with no way to get back down to planet earth.

  My cousin was gone. He’d come here to help, had rejected his own friendships in order to follow me into the heart of danger. And now Malachi was dead and unable to help anyone ever again. I might as well have killed him with my own two hands.

  I retched into the earth, tears and vomit overshadowing the flavor of atomized cousin on my tongue. And I think I might have lain there forever, just waiting for Dakota to find me and rip me into similarly tiny pieces, if Sebastien hadn’t pulled me to my feet and pressed me up against the long, hard length of his entirely human body.

  My mate was warm. That much I could feel even if the frigidity of my heart threatened to turn the rest of my body to ice. And I could smell him, too—protective granite overshadowed by that strangely shifteresque aroma of aggressive fur.

  On the other hand, I couldn’t see a thing, and I doubted Sebastien could either. Instead, the afterglow of the explosion left shadows flickering across my internal landscape. Images I never wanted to see again—Malachi taking his final steps, the ground surging upward beneath his feet, the explosion of light and sound and debris....

  I fought down the bile that threatened to flow back up my throat then blinked furiously until uninvited images fled. And as darkness returned, I realized that the world was no longer midnight black. In addition to the glow of fires within what was left of the government compound, dawn was just barely beginning to lighten the eastern horizon. My stolen time here in a territory not my own was rapidly running out.

  “Ember, we need to get out of here,” Sebastien said, his words mimicking the thoughts that my body refused to act upon. The professor’s fingers brushed across my face, and I fully expected him to recoil away from the filth. Instead, he paused for only a second before a soft handkerchief was wiping its way across my cheek and forehead, leaving me nearly as clean as when we’d begun our initial attempt at escape.

  And, suddenly, I began laughing uproariously. My mate had survived government agents, unfriendly werewolves, and a motherfucking tremendous bomb...yet he still possessed a handkerchief with which to wipe away my tears. Was this what human males were like?

  I only realized shock had set in when my gut began aching with the violence of the humor attack. “Slap me,” my wolf said between human chuckles. But, instead of feeling a sting of fingers against skin, our joint ears took in the crinkle of a plastic wrapper. Then Sebastien was forcing a tidbit of chocolate between my quivering lips.

  “Sugar will help,” our mate countered. One strong hand settled on the back of my skull, pulling my head down to rest against his chest even as I allowed the candy to melt atop my tongue.

  Despite everything, chocolate tasted like hearth and home. Like pack and family and support and love. Meanwhile, the sweetness also sent a shiver racing down my spine as I remembered Malachi’s quip that his favorite flavor and mine made a fine pairing.

  I’d been so wrong about my cousin’s fondness for vanilla. Had been unforgivably misguided about Malachi himself. Vanilla didn’t represent a dangerously chameleon changeability. Instead, the flavor was steadfast and true...and denoted my cousin’s unerring willingness to risk his own life for the sake of someone he loved.

  So I guessed I’d better make Malachi’s sacrifice matter. Forcing myself away from the safety of Sebastien’s arms, I took my bearings against the fading stars above our heads. Then, linking my hand once again with that of my mate, we set off through the trees toward the southwest.

  MY COUSIN’S SHOES WERE too large for my feet and the trail was unblazed as we searched for one hidden SUV in a very large woods. All told, it would have been nearly impossible to retrace Malachi’s footsteps through the apparently untouched forest if the sun hadn’t begun pushing its way up through the trees.

  “Lucky,” Sebastien murmured as tree trunks gradually materialized out of the gloom. He squeezed my hand for emphasis, evidently expecting a reply. And I tried to answer, really I did. But I’d blown right past coherence several minutes ago, had lost all ability beyond placing one foot in front of the other and ensuring my mate wasn’t swallowed up by any lingering wolves.

  Not that we’d heard a peep out of the latter since the explosion blew our world apart. I envisioned Dakota and her pack dragging human corpses into the smoking remnants of the SHRITA compound, piling up furniture and fabric then pour
ing gasoline on top and watching the slaughtered soldiers burn like so much unwanted meat. The female enforcer couldn’t afford to risk any pesky biological evidence remaining behind when the outside world finally came to call. And that meant the deceased would at least enjoy a funeral pyre.

  But did humans even believe in burning their dead?

  “Sometimes,” Sebastien answered, his words as carefully placed as his feet. “Cremation is an option for people who’d rather not be buried.”

  I cocked my head to one side, pretty sure I hadn’t spoken the preceding question aloud. Or, actually, I wasn’t sure of anything at the moment. Because for a split second I glanced over and saw Malachi’s dark skin superimposed atop my mate’s paler face. Obviously, sleep deprivation and the gut-wrenching effects of the last twenty-four hours were catching up with me at last.

  Our cousin came this way, my wolf interjected, turning our feet a little to the right and leaving the deer trail we’d been following behind. My human half was dubious, unable to settle upon any evidence outside the ordinary, but I allowed the change of flight path nonetheless. Perhaps my wolf had latched onto a lingering aroma that had outlived its owner? Or maybe she was just responding to a broken twig. Either way, I pulled our mate in the direction my wolf bade, holding back a supple branch so it wouldn’t slap Sebastien in the face as we picked our way down the side of a steep ravine.

  And then the big, black SUV I’d first seen yesterday evening materialized out of the forest...or at least its hiding place did. Malachi had concealed the vehicle well, driving up a dry creek bed to prevent tire tracks from making the location obvious from the road. He’d parked beneath a dense grove of rhododendrons then added to the cover with carefully arranged limbs that shielded all metallic surfaces from view. But even though my cousin’s subterfuge was masterful, I’d grown up building forts with him in a ravine very much like this one. As such, the cut branches encircling the vehicle were as obvious as a neon sign proclaiming, “Malachi was here.”