Savage Hunger (Project Nemesis)

by Celeste Anwar

  Jasmine pulled away from him, covering her chest with her arms, shuddering. “I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Believe it,” Dante said. “It’s not exactly something a person would lie about. Any normal person would think we’re crazy. Where do you think all this blood came from all over us?”

  She noticed them for the first time, from their naked bodies, to the blood covering nearly inch of them. She looked down at herself and saw blood smeared across her chest and arms. Numbly, she began wiping it off herself.

  Zach recognized the look on her face as shock. Her big brown eyes looked close to tears. Every instinct told him to leave her alone, that she’d be better off without them. But would she?

  She took a step back. “What am I supposed to do now? Can I go with you? I can’t stay here by myself! What if more soldiers come?”

  “For God’s sake, Jasmine! We can’t take you with us. What if we change and hurt you? We don’t have as much control over it as we’d like. And danger only makes it worse. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the next full moon. We could turn and infect you. Do you want to live the rest of your life like us? Monsters?” Zach said on a growl, frustration making him tense and pace.

  “But you kissed me. You all did! What if you infected me?”

  He ran a hand through his black hair. “You feel any different? You’d be feeling the change right now if it was going to infect you.”

  “N-no. Nothing except scared and relieved all at the same time.”

  “It must pass through the blood then,” Dante said.

  Zach nodded, feeling a measure of relief himself. “You can’t trust us, Jasmine. We’re monsters now. Monsters, werewolves, whatever the hell you want to call it. I can’t guarantee that at some point, it won’t be us fucking your brains out all over the place. There’s only so much we can resist, baby.”

  His words sent a shudder through her. “But you didn’t hurt me. You had some control over it. I trust you. And…you wouldn’t have to force me to do anything with you.”

  “Jesus H. Christ. Don’t say shit like that to us. I might take up the invitation.” Zach growled in frustration. “We don’t want to risk hurting you!”

  She just looked at them with those sad eyes, hope draining from her face. “I…I don’t think I have any choice but to trust you. I don’t think I’m going to make it to the embassy on my own. As much as I hate to admit needing someone…I need you. All of you. I’m willing to risk it if you’ll let me go with you.”

  Zach kicked the sand, turning his back on her to go wash off in the surf. Dante and Lucas followed suit, hoping the salt water would erase what they’d done from their minds. It took away the immediate bloodlust, but that was all. So much had happened to them, they might never be whole again.

  Dante looked at his brethren and at Jasmine, who stood apart, looking lost and alone. She washed her arms off then tied together the torn pieces of her shirt. If anything, it only made her look that much more appealing to them seeing the flash of her sexy stomach.

  “Fuck,” Dante said, scrubbing his face and hands. “She’s enough to tempt a saint.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lucas agreed, reading his mind. “We have to take her with us. We don’t have any choice, Zach. We dragged her into this. It’s up to us to make sure she gets home safely. Especially now since we’ve killed some of the guards looking for us. This’ll be like a beacon pointing straight at us.”

  “I know. It still makes me feel like shit that we have to do it,” Zach said, straightening up. “We need to go before more come. I don’t relish another fight and my balls are cold now.”

  Dante and Lucas chuckled, agreeing.

  “Come on, Jasmine. We agreed. You’ve got to come with us, like it or not. It’s the only reasonable choice for now.”

  Afraid as she was, she looked almost relieved. Apparently, she’d rather go with them, monsters she was a little familiar with, than face down monsters she didn’t know.

  He supposed he couldn’t blame her.

  Chapter Five

  “They’ve had two incidences off the coast of South America. There’s been casualties,” Freda said to Dr. Wagner, getting off the phone.

  “Us or them?” he asked, looking up from the computer on his desk.

  “Us,” she said.

  Dr. Wagner sighed in disgust and closed his laptop. “Imbeciles. Did they bring the tipped bullets like they were supposed to?”

  “Everyone’s using them. They aren’t working anymore. They’re healing too fast for them to be effective. The silver tipping only slows them down.”

  “Dammit. I didn’t foresee this happening. I thought we had the method of execution right. They need to come back and get the tranquilizers. It worked on the cats, it should work on them. Tranquilize the subjects, shoot them in the head, and burn the bodies to get rid of the evidence. It’s the only way to kill them. Have any locals been infected?”

  “Not that we know of, but it’s too early to tell yet,” Freda said.

  “Get in contact with the Captain. Make sure the locals think it’s chupacabra and not something else. They must be heading down the coast and moving faster than we anticipated.”

  “Agreed. I’ll call the captain and get them to return for tranquilizers.”

  ***

  “Come on. We’ve got to rescue the bags and get some clothes on. We can’t stay here like this. It’s too dangerous to be seen,” Zach said, leading them back into the jungle. “Try and keep up.”

  When she saw how close they’d been to where they rescued her, she looked at them with surprise on her face. “Were you guys following me?”

  Zach shrugged. “We wanted to make sure you got home okay and didn’t get hurt by anyone. I guess it’s a good thing we did or things would be different right now.”

  It didn’t take long for them to recover the bags and get dressed. As bright as dawn had made the beach, inside the jungle it was a completely different story.

  Spattering light made it difficult to see anything clearly. The scrape and jab of bushes tore at her already ragged clothing and snatched at her bare arms and face.

  She resisted the urge to complain, knowing they’d only reluctantly agreed to take her with them. She wasn’t going to give them an excuse to regret their decision.

  Still, she couldn’t help but react to every insect biting and sucking her blood. Every vine looked like a snake. Every broken limb or floating leaf she was sure was something horrible out to get her. She knew enough from school and television to know that the jungle was not a place she wanted to be. They had every sort of deadly spider, frog, snake, and scorpion imaginable plus then some.

  Jasmine didn’t want to admit to anyone that she was spooked by the wildness of the jungle, but after being attacked on the beach, her nerves were on edge. There was only so much a woman could take before having a nervous breakdown.

  She was proud of herself for handling an unbelievable situation as well as she had. To think that the men she found herself first kidnapped by, freed, and then rescued by weren’t completely human?

  It was a hard pill to swallow. If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes she would have thought she’d lost her damned mind.

  She was pretty close to thinking she had anyway because of her willingness to go with them into the jungle, but she didn’t have many options available to her.

  They were on the run and she knew it. They didn’t have time for her to act like a frightened baby screaming at everything. So she bit her tongue and ran after them and tried to keep up with them as well as she could.

  Heavy vines and limbs littered the area, making the going rough and uneven. It wasn’t like they could run straight through the jungle at any point. There weren’t any visible paths for them to take. She wished they’d had something to hack their way through, but Zach was at point and picking the clearest path through the jungle that he could.

  Dante followed him. She moved behind him, and Lucas pulled
up the rear. Given the misery that she was quickly being consumed by, she almost regretted begging them to take her with them. Except the uncertainty she’d been faced with had been too much for her to bear. Whatever had infected them, as much as she might fear and disbelieve it, she knew she was better off in their company than at risk on her own.

  She couldn’t speak a lick of Spanish beyond hello and goodbye.

  After what seemed like hours of stooping and bending and avoiding roots and vines, she was so exhausted, she could barely move without wincing in pain.

  They finally took a break.

  Tired but not stupid, she thoroughly checked the area to make sure there were no spiders or snakes where she wanted to plant her ass. Satisfied at its safety, she collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily and feeling so grateful to rest that she wanted to cry.

  She choked back her feelings, wincing inside.

  “Drink this,” Lucas said, offering her some water out of a bottle. She sipped it gratefully, feeling immediately relieved from the cool water sliding down her parched throat. Her cracked lips felt better as well.

  “Not too much. We don’t know when we’ll find more water. I’ve been keeping an eye out for bamboo,” Lucas said, scanning the jungle with his warm, hazel eyes.

  She followed the line of his vision. “Bamboo?”

  “Holds water you don’t have to sterilize,” Dante said. “It has a lot of uses in a place like this.”

  Zach threw a pack of peanuts to her he pulled out of the bag he’d been toting. “Eat that. You need to keep your energy up.”

  Jasmine nodded and tore open the package, eating slowly so she didn’t get sick. At first, she didn’t think she could eat at all, but as she munched, she felt herself slowly returning to normal. She must’ve used all her excess glucose moving through the jungle—running on empty. No wonder she felt so horrible!

  “If you need to go, now would be a good time,” Zach pointed out.

  She grimaced. “Great. I hate pissing in the woods.” She was a lot of things, but a country girl wasn’t one of them.

  “Get used to it,” Lucas said, grinning.

  “Easy for you to say. You all have dicks and don’t have to worry about something crawling up your ass when you least expect it,” she said, feeling flushed that they were all looking at her.

  They chuckled at that.

  Nodding, she got up and found a tree to put her back on, relieving herself. She was dehydrated. She hardly had anything to let go. Dripped dry and feeling irritated at the lack of sanitation available, she pulled her pants back on and returned to the men.

  She missed toilet paper already. And water and soap.

  Jasmine sighed.

  They returned to picking through the jungle, slower this time, almost as though they sensed she was near her breaking point.

  The food and water had taken her mind off her misery for a little while, and she was able to think about the offer she’d made to the guys. She’d been pretty much ready to do just about anything it took not to be abandoned, even giving herself to them if that would sweeten the deal. Obviously, it hadn’t been needed since none of them had jumped at the chance.

  Maybe they had too much on their mind to think about fucking at a time like this? Maybe they weren’t as interested as she’d thought, or maybe she’d come across desperate or pitiful to them?

  She’d like to think not.

  If they’d been attractive to her before, that attraction had only intensified rather than dissipate with the knowledge of their tainted blood. It wasn’t the animalistic nature of whatever it was that had altered them, but the fact that they’d showed no fear in coming to her rescue.

  It was enough to make any red-blooded woman swoon.

  Added to that was the fact that they were each devilishly good-looking, powerful, attentive, and concerned, and the combination was enough to wilt any woman’s resistance.

  She’d thought she was progressive enough not to want or need a man to rescue her, or feel weak kneed at the thought of not one, but three interested men.

  She was just a woman, however. And it’d been long enough since she’d been with anyone appealing that having three handsome, muscular men ready to defend her, however reluctantly, was enough to rev up her engines and make her want to have a go at one or all of them.

  Normally, she could ignore her body’s sensual demands. She’d done it long enough she felt like a camel conserving water through a desert. She’d been able to hold off on getting some for years at a time. But now, she had this insistent urge in the back of her mind, niggling at her, wearing her down. As much as she tried to ignore it, she had an achy spot in her body that needed to be poked.

  She didn’t need love to satisfy those carnal urges.

  On one hand, she hoped it didn’t come up again. On the other, she kind of hoped that it did.

  Lost in her thoughts, following Dante’s broad shoulders, she barely noticed that the forest was getting darker. She’d been so absorbed with putting one foot in front of the other that she hadn’t taken much note in the change around her.

  “We need to make camp,” Zach said, stopping and looking around. They were surrounded by a grove of bamboo. Beneath their feet, the floor of the forest had turned to a soft loam. “It’s getting dark and this looks like as good a place as any to stay for the night.”

  Zach began shaking the trees, putting his ear to them to listen for water. He seemed to find something he liked and pulled a cleaver out of the canvas bag and started hacking away at the thick trunk. Within minutes, he’d chopped the tree down and sectioned it out. Sticking the corner of the blade in one end, he made a hole then put it to his mouth.

  Water dribbled out, moving down his chin.

  Jasmine was amazed. She supposed they’d had training for this sort of thing.

  Zach offered it to her and she drank her fill. The water had a slight green taste to it, but it was otherwise delicious and clean.

  “Start checking the other trees,” Zach said to Lucas. “I’ll work on building a shelter to keep the rain off us if it rains tonight.”

  “Probably will,” Dante said, looking up at the sky and sniffing as if he could smell or see something she couldn’t.

  Jasmine sniffed the air but didn’t smell anything and could see less. She busied herself pushing dead leaves out of the area.

  “I’ll see if I can build a fire,” Dante said, going off to gather dead bamboo trees and moss.

  He came back fairly quickly, fishing an orange lighter out of his pocket. He looked at Jasmine’s hopeful face. “It’s so humid out here. No guarantee this is going to work. If it doesn’t we’ll just have to huddle together under the shelter to stay warm. It gets pretty cold in the jungle at night. The ground leeches all the heat out of your bones, but we can lay down a blanket to keep it from happening too bad.”

  She watched him strip the bamboo down then press a piece to his face. “It’s cold. Still has moisture in it. We might not have fire tonight.”

  “You’re not just saying that so you can cozy up to me, are you?” she asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

  He grinned, making his dark face look that much sexier. “Maybe.” He laughed then worked at building a fire.

  The lighter couldn’t spark. After attempting to get it going for twenty minutes or so, Zach finally approached and told him to give it up and save the butane for another time.

  Reluctantly, Dante agreed. “Guess it’s gonna be the alternative.”

  Jasmine swiped at him and that slow grin, sitting back to watch Zach build a lean-to.

  “Anything I can do to help?” she asked.

  “Not unless you can see in the dark. You can gather a few of those ferns from over there and put them under here. This is about as done as I can make it for now. It’ll be a tight squeeze for all three of us, but I think we can manage.”

  The darkness was so thick, Jasmine was afraid to move far beyond their camp. She was terrified of stepping on a snake or a
spider. She pulled as many frond leaves as she could, her arms full, then returned to their shelter to lay down a bed of ferns for them to sleep on.

  Utterly exhausted, she was ready to crash for the night. They had a cold supper of some canned spaghettios. She was just glad they’d grabbed canned food with pop-top lids, since they didn’t have a can opener with them. She ate half the can and passed the other half to Dante. He wolfed his half down in under a minute and still looked hungry.

  She felt bad for having eaten at all. No doubt they needed more nutrition than she did. They were all bigger than her.

  “We need to hunt tomorrow. We’re just going to get weaker if we don’t get some meat in us. And something about changing to a wolf leaves me starving,” Dante said as he rubbed his rumbling stomach. She was right. He hadn’t had enough. But a night of being hungry wouldn’t kill any of them. At least they’d found clean water that they didn’t have to purify with fire.

  “Agreed,” Zach said, nodding.

  “You think they’re going to find us?” Lucas asked no one in particular.

  “Well, the others should ditch the boat in the ocean, but with that massacre we left on the beach, there’s sure to be some notice from someone in the area, if not local military or the project. Hopefully the jungle is thick enough to keep them from tracking us too easily, but I don’t want to give them an easy target to follow. We’ll keep traveling as fast as we can and put as much distance between us and the attack as possible.” Zach finished and gave a stretch, eyeing their sleeping space behind him where a blanket had been laid over the fronds.

  “We’ll dismantle it in the morning. Scatter everything as best we can,” Lucas said. “Man. I hate this shit. What I’d give to just go back home. What about you? You got anyone that’s going to miss you? Be out searching?”