by Christa Wick
That section of ground was covered with the stink of hyenas. They had come back in larger numbers in search of a female in heat. It was the first I had detected of them since entering the woods, so they had missed where we exited the water.
They didn’t follow our trail to the mint or to Apache Drive.
Somehow, they had found Clover anyway.
Shaking off the question of how they had tracked her down, I followed the mix of scents to where the attack had occurred. Stopping, I walked the perimeter where the short battle had played out and checked my phone. The tracking app hadn’t changed, but Paisley had sent another message.
More checkpoints. Finding new route into town.
After the explosion, I wasn’t surprised. The cops would be busy for a few hours making sure there were no secondary devices, then the crime lab would be scrutinizing every inch of the scorched earth I had left behind.
A cold thickness filled my chest. We couldn’t turn to the humans for help and the necessary burning of the sedan to keep our DNA out from under a microscope in a human lab had created more problems in rescuing Clover. My pack would lose additional time entering the woods because they couldn’t park half a dozen bikes next to the Jeep at the dead end of a commercial street without drawing suspicion.
I slammed a fist against my chest, breaking the hard ice that threatened to paralyze me. Finding Clover was the first obstacle, support came second.
My slow walk of the perimeter told me the hyenas had all entered the area from one location—the same location in which the original three had retreated.
Like me, they could have merely retraced their paths to where they knew Clover’s scent would be. My prayer was that they had retreated the first time in the direction of their den and re-entered at the same point.
I ran at a slower pace, ears alert to the natural sounds of the woods. I covered a mile, then two. Another half a mile on, I stumbled to a stop in front of a scarred tree.
Hundreds upon hundreds of claw marks ripped through the bark.
Urine soaked its base.
It had been a long time since I had come upon marks like these—years before I found Night Falls and finally belonged to a pack. I was definitely in the hyenas’ territory. They felt safe here, their numbers adding security.
I walked around the tree, stomach churning as I sifted through the stench, identifying eight individual scent signatures. The difference between each hyena was nebulous, the variations in their body odor so faint they were little more than imaginary.
It took another trip around the tree before I realized why.
The pack was inbred.
That certainly explained the reckless kidnapping of a human with witnesses.
I followed the trail up a hill to its crest then got on my belly, vision blurry as my gaze slowly filtered across the small valley. The scouting party had been overconfident moving through the woods. They had picked the easiest path from the site of the attack to a falling down house in a small clearing of trees.
Around the structure were three beat-to-hell travel trailers, dented with the sides rusting out. The largest of the three had a blue tarp across a third of its roof, the plastic canvas sagging with rainwater where there were undoubtedly holes. Two football fields to the east stood the last remains of a barn next to pens filled with nervous, bleating goats and squealing pigs.
Slowly, I made my way east, my route toward the livestock changing with the wind. Over the sound of the goats, I heard the snarls of male shifters engaged in combat. If Clover was down there, she was gagged, unconscious or holding in her screams.
Nausea whipped through me at the thought of my mate among the pack of feral shifters. I stopped and let the sick waves settle, using the few motionless seconds to send my GPS location to Paisley and Braeden.
Den location. Inbreds. D/k if C/M here.
I reached the goat pen as a death cry shredded the air. A victorious yodeling filled the silence that followed.
They were shredding one another.
In competition for Clover?
I buried the question and tucked both guns in the pockets of Joker’s jacket then crawled through the mud filled with goat and pig shit. I rolled, soaked every foul molecule of the surrounding earth into my clothes, onto my hair. Whatever flesh was exposed, I painted it brown before shifting to my alpha state. The jeans Hex had picked up at the store for me split at the outer seams along my thighs and again where my calves were thickest. Joker’s jacket strained to stay together. My claws scratched and pushed at the toe of my new boots.
When the transformation was complete, I rolled around until I had my fur completely saturated and the strong scent of my alpha state was buried beneath the waste and mud.
Rising up into a crouch, I felt the first hint of a smile on my face since receiving Clover’s call. I knew where the males who had taken her were. I could smell them, but they wouldn’t be able to smell more than the excrement of their livestock until I was upon them.
And they were doing half my job for me—maiming and killing one another in some bizarre courtship.
With the 9mm in my left hand and the Bodyguard in my right, I snuck through the trees separating the barn from the house and trailers. Together, the living quarters and two dark SUVs formed a loose circle.
The circle itself had turned into a fighting pit.
Even covered in pig shit, I could smell the entrails of a male hyena who had been disemboweled, his carcass removed to one side. Assaulted by the scent of death and attempted dominance, I couldn’t find Clover or the old wolf with my nose.
I eased closer to the trailer with the blue tarp. Someone was inside huffing and snarling. Maybe two were inside, I couldn’t tell. And then I knew it was two as the vibrations of a short, rhythmic bumping traveled through the thin aluminum shell, the implications squeezing at my chest.
My grip on the pistols tightened, both guns awkward in my alpha state. The bumping stopped and then the door on the trailer was thrown open and the alpha male from the first attack on Clover stepped out. With him came a female alpha.
With the pack’s attention focused on the two alphas, I moved to the cover of the next trailer.
The male dropped to all fours, gnashing and snapping at the lesser hyenas surrounding him. When his trip around the circle stopped, it left him in front of Clover and Mallory. Snarling, he sniffed his way up her body, from her shoes, over the cargo pants and blouse, to snorting his stinking breath all over her face.
She glared and snarled, the rest of her immobilized by a series of chains that staked her legs to the ground and her arms against the base of a tree trunk.
Around her throat was a spiked collar.
The spikes faced inward, her neck spotted with blood. I couldn’t see any spikes on the other bonds, but there was blood along her ankles and wrists. The restraint around her throat made it impossible for her to shift without the spikes puncturing big enough veins that she would bleed out before she could heal.
Mallory, miraculously, was still alive, but he was in a bad way. They hadn’t used chains on him. He was laid out on the ground like Christ on the Cross, the same kind of collar around his throat as Clover, but a fat railroad spike through each hand, both biceps, his shoulders and his thighs.
Even as an alpha, he should have been dead already. That or the hyenas had intentionally missed every major artery the spikes were positioned near.
The woman followed along behind the alpha male. I hadn’t detected her on the trail. She was older than the rest of the pack but part of the same bloodline from the smell of her.
I swallowed down the bile that wanted to spew against the side of the trailer as I thought about all that huffing and bumping. She had been calming him down, preparing the strongest of her bloodline to fight the other males and claim a breeding female.
Yodeling, the alpha male turned and sprayed Clover, marking her as his. The other males began to gather around him in a circle, snarling and snapping their chall
enge to his claim.
One leapt and sank his teeth in the alpha’s shoulder, another went for his Achilles tendon.
I edged around the perimeter, making my way closer to Clover while scouting as much as I could of the clearing. I need to wait as long as possible before giving the pack a common enemy. I just didn’t know how long I had with the way Mallory was staked down. I couldn’t send out a pulse of energy to probe him. There were too many of the hyenas in the way. One of them might intercept the push and recognize it as foreign.
The male alpha reached for the attacker on his shoulder. His claws pierced the challenger’s ribcage. Curling his hands, he ripped outward, flinging his opponent aside in halves. With a ragged bone from the freshly vanquished shifter, he thrust backwards, pushing the makeshift weapon through the second attacker’s eye to bury it in his brain.
I shook my head, my mind slow to process what I was seeing. Each species of shifters had different talents, some more than others. But the alpha seemed to have the strength of a bear and the rabid single-mindedness of the wolverine that had almost been the end of me.
It wasn’t the inbreeding, or the species, or the effect of Clover’s heat. It was something else, something I had failed to detect in their scent earlier but finally came to recognize.
All of the males were on some kind of drug. It made them reckless and frenzied. Their brains wouldn’t process pain and they would push as hard as they could until they collapsed.
I counted the circle of hyenas. Three corpses, two alphas, and four male betas. There could be more in the trailers, but that matched the eight males I had detected around the scarred tree.
The female shifted to her human form. Seeing her, I dropped the 9mm in the bushes shielding me. She was as old as Delilah Frost, maybe older, far past her breeding age. Without another shifter female, they all thought their pack would die off.
“Enough!” she snarled. “Asuri will mount her first. From him, we will get strong cubs. You may mount her when her heat passes if there are no cubs growing in her womb.”
A blood curdling chuckled escaped her foul lips. “She will not break like the humans did.”
Retrieving the 9mm, I moved into a crouch and picked my first two targets. Settling my grip on both on both handguns, I leapt, a murderous snarl shredding the air around me.
Chapter 22
Clover
Waking to a dark and gloomy valley with a spiked collar fastened around my neck, I had no idea how long Mallory and I had been missing. But every last minute in the hyenas’ presence was like living in a dumpster fire attached to a kerosene pump. Until the female shifted to her human form and foul words began to drip from her twisted lips, I didn’t think I could feel any more desperate or disgusted.
I looked at Mallory. The insertion of each spike had pulled him from an unconscious stupor for a few flashing seconds, a scream dying on his lips as he blacked out until Asuri viciously drove the next thick, rusted piece of iron into the old wolf’s body. He should have been in Night Falls, boots up, a tumbler of whiskey in hand and some old country singer crying out his woes. Instead, he had been sent to save my sorry ass.
Closing my eyes, I searched for my wolf. She scratched and nipped to get out. Letting her surface meant she and I would die. I would have done it, denied the pack their prize, but I could feel that Mallory still lived, if only faintly. As long as he hung on, I would, too. I might have a chance to help him—and they would have no reason to keep him alive if I was dead.
“She will not break like the humans did,” the old bitch finished.
My eyes flashed open, my gaze full of hate and trained on the female. She was monstrous, had given birth to the monsters around her. My noise was delicate enough I knew she was the mother of all the males present except for the oldest beta—and even there I sensed a kinship. I could scent which of the other males had fathered one another. They all stank to high heaven with their inbreeding. Even the pervasive odor of pig and goat shit blowing toward my face was the sweetest perfume compared to the hyenas around me.
I froze at the first gun shot.
Hot blood sprayed my face, forcing a blink. Ears ringing, I heard the far off snarl of a cat as something new dropped into the circle of trailers and trucks. Two of the beta hyenas collapsed, one missing half its head. There had been two gun shots, not one. Dressed in ripped clothes hanging on by threads, the newcomer held a pistol in each hand.
I blinked again, blood from the dead hyena clouding my vision, my hearing slow to recover. The shooter was clearly an alpha shifter. But I couldn’t smell anything other than a mountain of crap and he looked like he was made of bark and mud. No fur or skin showed, not even the eyes were visible that I could see.
He trained the pistol in his right hand on me. My mouth opened, a howl from my wolf scratching to get out. He fired, missed, hitting the chain on my neck and shredding the link. He rolled, came up, fired at me again. Missed again, breaking the link on the chain that bound my left hand to the base of the trunk.
Battling shock, part of my brain tried to process that one of my hands was free, that I could maybe do something to defend myself. I reached for the bolt that secured the collar, my left hand clumsy because all I ever asked it to do was carry things or join with my right hand in texting.
Alpha bitch threw a burst of energy at me as I tugged on the bolt. All my senses screaming in warning, I felt the wave as soon as she sent it out. My freed hand flew forward, the fingers curling as if I could catch the deadly energy and throw it back.
That’s exactly what I did. I caught it, the skin on my hand burning, and then I threw it back like a hot potato. Seeing the female stagger then fall stunned to the ground, I stared at my hand like some kind of idiot.
Clover!
I jerked around as I looked for the speaker. Only nothing had been spoken. I had heard the call in my mind.
More like I had imagined it in my desperation, surrounded by threats and my only known ally an old wolf staked to the ground and unconscious.
Clover!
My head snapped in the bark-mud thingie’s direction to find another threat flying at my face. I reached out, caught the pitch, and reared my arm back to return fire, my brain working on autopilot but at the speed of a glacier.
Not an alpha blast, I realized. A gun—a 9mm I didn’t recognize.
I scrambled to keep hold of the weapon. It dropped to my lap. I scooped it up and clumsily shot at the chain securing my right hand.
The bullet entered the ground half an inch from Mallory. The old wolf groaned and spit out a small, defensive burst of his alpha energy. The wave was too weak to seriously hurt me and I couldn’t risk killing him by deflecting it. Feeling the energy absorb into my skin, I tried to spread it out to minimize the damage.
My skin tingled with a weird sense of rejuvenation.
I didn’t have time to analyze what I had just done with Mallory’s burst or the old woman’s. Everything was happening too fast and I was trying to process all of it in real time. Bark-mud thingie was locked in battle with two betas and Asuri, blood from a savage swipe by the alpha hyena had the creature bleeding. One of the betas had its jaws locked around the intruder’s wrist—the wrist that was attached to the hand holding the gun.
Swinging the arm, it got a shot off at Asuri that went wide.
A growl from the third remaining beta signaled the next direct attack on me. He launched in my direction as alpha bitch got onto her hands and knees. My gun hand swung forward. I pulled the trigger. The attacker dropped, his shoulder half torn off, blood spurting in thick streams.
Alpha bitch screamed and yanked him to her.
One of her favorites, I figured. She had watched Asuri murder three of the other betas before she called an end to their bloodshed.
I didn’t have much time. I pointed the 9mm at the chain securing my right hand. The tip of the barrel shook like crazy. My wolf nosed at me, her brain working better than mine. I jammed the gun between my thighs for sa
fekeeping and let my wolf get to work. My fangs sprouted and my hands and feet began to shrink to something more delicate. My neck muscles bulged, eliciting a yelp as the spikes began to penetrate my flesh.
Alpha bitch gnashed her teeth at me as she healed the beta I had just shot. I knew the second her precious offspring was out of the danger zone, she was sending another hot blast of hate my way. Behind her, another of the betas stopped attacking the intruder. Shifting to his human form, he ran toward the SUV that had rammed us off the road. Mud thing was busy dodging Asuri’s alpha blasts, his gun hand half severed at the wrist and the weapon nowhere in sight.
My right hand slipped free of the spiked cuff as the fleeing beta returned, the gun I had brought with me from Night Falls in his hands. Standing a foot behind the female, he lifted the pistol and took aim at me. I grabbed the 9mm and tried to roll, my ankles still cuffed.
He shot, the air momentarily filled with the sound of a bullet slicing through flesh and then my legs were coated with a fresh spray of blood.
Dazed, I looked at him, then at the inert form at his feet.
Alpha bitch—his mother and his mate—was missing her lower jaw.
Dead?
Dead as fuck, I prayed!
Tightening my grip on the 9mm, I pointed it at the beta who had shot her and squeezed the trigger. Asuri beat me to the target, knocking the pack’s traitor to the ground, wrapping both hands around its skull then twisting and jerking at the same time.
The traitor’s head landed at my feet.
I puked in my lap.
Kneeling in front of his dear sweet bitch of a mother, Asuri cupped the face with its missing bottom jaw. Hands shaking, I took aim at his head and fired. He threw himself backwards, leaving my shot with nothing but air where his face had been nanoseconds before. Twisting in my direction, he sent out a crazed, hateful, furnace blast of energy I could almost see as it left him.