by Lisa Daniels
“I am truly sorry. You are beautiful girl. I do not hesitate to say that. In mind and in heart.” He bent to kiss her knuckles. “I hope to speak to you soon.”
Although for Tia, it was a little sudden for someone to suddenly be making that sort of declaration, it did lift her heart, making something flutter. Under the obnoxious noise of the music, the shifting neon glare and the sleazy press of hopefuls packed inside, Tia didn’t feel ashamed to say she wanted to speak more to this man. Instead, he retracted from the conversation, as if spooked. As if summoned.
She watched the man with the amber eyes depart, along with the fascination and consternation he carried with him.
She bit her lip, idly drumming the side of the table as she stared at her phone, with Danny’s number displayed. There was something suspicious about his withdrawal. She knew she had no right to pry into it, no reason to think it anything other than something normal.
However, she always liked seeking out truth, as well.
Chapter Two
Danny hesitated outside the filthy alleyway, with the pungent odor of accumulating trash and rotten food, and the stain of urine on the walls. His heart thrashed in wild fear, his lips were dry over his teeth, and his limbs trembled, turning into mush. If he did this… if he dared do this, what retribution would it bring?
Growling hatred hit his ears. Lurking further down the alley, tucked in the darkness, shone animalistic yellow eyes. The figure emerged out of the black, revealing a decrepit, dirt-stained man with a savageness to his features, a hungry, gaunt restlessness. Living on the city streets had not been kind, compared to his natural habitat in the mountains. The man hated this environment with a burning fervor, but it also offered more stability. Security. Except he had rejected the life the others had offered, and dragged his son with him.
“Well, boy? I don’t see anyone tagging behind you. But I smell the scent on you. Are you going back in?” His father limped over, his emotions betrayed by the enlarging of his canines, the intense glimmer of the twin suns in his stare. Danny knew he caught the scent of fear as well, knew his heart traitorously pumped the sound to his father’s enhanced ears. The mild inflection of his question betrayed the knowledge bubbling within. He merely waited for Danny’s new excuse.
“There was cop presence, and no one was alone. We can’t be suspicious. We have to pick and choose, if we do this at all.”
His father, Nikolai Lubova, shivered indignation, but kept the rage in check. A slice of moonlight cut through the clouds, hitting the open corner where the buildings widened out. “You’d have me eating rats again, boy? You’d reduce yourself to that level, too? I thought you would be more proud of your-” he started coughing, clamping a liver-spotted hand over his mouth, “h-heritage. Proud of who we are. You disappoint me every time.”
Danny had no idea what to say. Every option led to ruin. His father hated how he refused the flesh, rejected the attempts to indoctrinate him in the noble way their ancestors had lived. Yet, Danny still assisted his father with kills, still lured people out whenever the craving of flesh became too strong for Nikolai to endure, even after he lost the advantage of his once handsome features, and the strength in his arms. The move to America had reduced that assistance, almost as if Danny was trying to wean his father off the flesh – but at least four more women would never find their way back home to their families.
How did you tell the man who brought you up that you didn’t want it? How could he explain that there was so much more to the world than the Bulgarian forests and mountains, and the flesh-eating branch of the others he knew?
The ones he had met here were different. They averted human flesh, for the most part, taking rigorous training to immunize themselves to the craving. They didn’t go on rampages in small, isolated villages, spreading infection like the Slavic brethren. His father, hoping for glory in the new land, was disgusted upon finding this out, and refused the offer of a job, a chance for security.
Unbidden, flashes of memories assaulted Danny’s brain. Whole villages erased from the mountains. Howling laughter, as many dived into the living skin of pleading, crying humans, content with their nature, the sinew stuck in the gums of their teeth.
“They just live differently here, father. They learned to cope without it.”
“Ridiculous. Oppressing their nature. You know,” Nikolai said, giving his son a disapproving glare, “I know you will flake out again. You’ve always been soft. Nothing like your older brothers. They made me proud. I wish you were strong, like them. I still wish.”
And they’re dead, Danny thought, with savage, bitter satisfaction. He thought once more of the woman inside the club, the dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty that had a way of looking into you, of saying words that struck somewhere close to home. She would have been the perfect target. He knew she would have followed him out the club, he could smell the arousal coming from her skin, no matter how hard she tried to hide it. He might have even taken her to a motel and screwed her under the blankets, but then Nikolai would be lurking nearby, waiting for the morsel that was promised.
Everywhere, at each turn, all roads twisted and bent into Nikolai, and the memories of the killings, the promise that blood was thicker than water.
“You should have taken the offer, father. We wouldn’t be like this. They wouldn’t be looking for us. We would not be skulking criminals. This is not pride. This is foolish stubbornness.” Shit, Danny thought, even as he forced the words out from his constricted throat. He won’t listen. He never does. The pride kills him.
His father lashed out with clawed hands. Danny flinched as the sharp nails tore into his cheek, leaving bloody furrows. “No Lubanov will bow down to the demands of weak-willed, shameful inheritors of our blood. I would rather live in shit and piss than bend the knee to the softness that infects our whole society.”
Danny breathed hard, the fear pinching his heart, fogging his brain. He hated his father’s anger, dreaded it. Still, the words kept escaping. “No Lubanov ever got exiled from their own community before,” he spat. “Even your appetite was drawing too much attention.” Guilt pounded at Danny as well. For failing his father. For having taken so many lives. For not being able to stop. It was always luck, or a certain word someone said, that spared them. Not because he was a morally correct person.
He might try to take the righteous stance, but he was every bit the monster he believed his father was. And monsters stuck together, so the stones didn’t hurt them.
Nikolai snarled, before falling silent. The tentative slap of footsteps perked Danny’s attention. Fear iced every cell. No. It couldn’t be. His father backed deeper into the shadows, growling softly. To Danny’s relief, the peach odor of the blue-eyed girl didn’t permeate his nostrils. It wasn’t her. He slid further into darkness as well, heart palpitating fast.
One, two, three people trotted into the filthy under stain of human society, where Danny and Nikolai lurked. A new worry punctured his brain, when he recognized the distinctive scent of his species.
The others, who hunted.
“Run,” Nikolai hissed. “Son, get behind me. You are faster.”
“Father…”
“Run!” Nikolai snapped. The noise drew the three others, though they had long since detected the scent, probably from when Danny had entered and left the club. Or maybe they had been following for days, tracking old smells.
“Father, I’ll help…”
“Run!” Nikolai howled, swiping at his son. “Abomination of blood you may be, but you are still my son! I will not have you die! Not after everything that has happened. Obey this, if nothing else!”
Wasting no more breath on words, Nikolai’s teeth distended, the claws thickened, and strands of hair began developing on his face. His throat rumbled in a series of growls, and he lunged at the three intruders.
Danny groaned. If his father had fed in the last three weeks, he would be so much stronger. He would cope. But he was too addicted to human flesh – he refused
all else. Stubborn, foolish man.
Screams, yelps and growls flooded the tight, narrow space.
Now, as his father fought the werewolves, Danny knew he had a real chance at freedom. He could leave the old man to his fate, and escape without a murmur. Maybe he could slink off to a distant state, and try and join the companies down there under a different name.
Maybe. Just maybe.
But, even after all this time, with the knotted rope of hatred, misery and guilt squeezing his guts, he couldn’t.
He just couldn’t leave the old man. Besides, he would be chased to the ends of the earth, anyway. No werewolves accepted the Lubanovs anymore. Whatever noble dynasty his father claimed of their lineage, had fallen to scraping out scraps from the bottom of a barrel. There was nothing left in the world but to run, hide, and kill.
Danny took off the restrictions placed on his mind, giving in to the animal side. Power flooded through his muscles, twitching every nerve. With a bone-grating howl, he dove into the pack of American werewolves alongside his father.
Too late as well, he realized, there was a scent of peach there, just a short distance behind them. The warmth of her. The human he had tried to spare from the ravenous teeth of his father, and the craven heart that could not resist those demands for long.
Danny felt the world collapsing around him. The death he had tried so hard to avoid decided instead to follow him, as if hungry for it, mocking his attempt at goodness.
I deserve this, he thought, despair seeping. I deserve this.
Chapter Three
Horror wedged into Tia’s soul. One moment, the world had been perfectly sane, or as near to sane as you could get in a world that routinely indulged in war, suffering and strife, and where people still abused one another on a daily basis. The next moment, after following Danny out of the club, things had taken a drastic shift into madness. She saw him cut into a corner of town notorious for drug dealers and sexual assault, and decided right there and then that she wouldn’t be stupid enough to go there alone, and she wondered what on earth had possessed her to even contemplate following the man outside. If he had grabbed a cab, that would be the last she would see of him. If he turned out to be as dangerous as her instincts screamed at her, then that would maybe become the last of her.
Nope. Insanity averted, she began to venture back into the club, texting her friend again to say she wasn’t going to stalk the guy – except a hard, rough hand clamped down on her shoulder.
In shock, she whirled around to face four men, all with eye colors varying from deep brown to sickly yellow. Her bowels turned to water when the tall, chestnut-haired one grasping her shoulder then spun and shoved her forward.
“She can be bait,” he said. “The target was interested in her, enough to actively leave her alone instead of use her for happy fun snack time.”
Target? Bait? Snack? “What the hell is happening?” Tia said, trying to break out of the man’s steel grasp. “Why are you doing this? Let me go!”
“Nuh uh, sweetheart,” the man growled. “You’ll be taking a little trip with us downtown. No harm, well, very little harm should come to you… in theory.”
The other three strode ahead, grinning, leaving Tia with the far stronger, amber glare of the man who now clamped a hand over her mouth and bustled her along the street. She bit his palm viciously, but all it brought her was a sharp thud to the side of her head, and temporary unconsciousness. When she recovered from the inky blackness, the man was ready for her. “You can scream all you want now, sweetheart. No one here will hear, or care. If you do scream, though, I can’t guarantee your safety. Just saying.” He gleefully squeezed her throat, making her choke and gasp, making a mockery of the notion of safety.
Confusion and fear flooded Tia. She struggled to think, to understand what was happening. Sweaty, rough hands grasped at her flailing limbs. The stench of sweat and rotten food made her want to gag. “Why are you doing this?” she managed to force through her throat. Every time she raised her voice, the man’s grip became harder. He could quite easily snap her neck without a second thought. Tia sensed the strength under his skin, knew that there was absolutely nothing she could do, even though her body involuntarily kept fighting, thrashing like a fish trapped in a net.
“Never you mind why. But if you keep asking stupid questions – well, if you keep talking, really, I’ll kill you.”
Tia immediately bit her tongue. Fear and rage burned along with disgust when she felt a distinctive boner pressing against the back of her thighs. Even if the man wasn’t planning to rape her then and there or kill her, he obviously enjoyed her struggling, the sheer power he had over her. He made audible sniffing sounds next to her ear, and laughed quietly.
“I can smell your fear…”
Of course you fucking can, fucker, Tia thought savagely. Who wouldn’t be afraid? She swallowed her mind-numbing panic and tried to manage the shaking in her limbs, even as he moved her closer to what sounded like the stirrings of a fight. Shrieks, yelps and howls ripped the atmosphere.
Fear intensified. It sounded like a pack of dogs fighting. Is he going to feed me to dogs? She frowned at the thought. The man has me in a vice grip and that’s the first thing I think of? Her thoughts shot in all directions, fueled by terror and the vain attempts to calm down her racing heart, to remind herself that panic was what got stupid people killed.
Why the hell was this man so strong? Why was this even happening, whatever it was? Bait? Target? Snack?
A gurgling scream penetrated the air, and out of the shadows stumbled a… something. At first glance, Tia couldn’t make heads or tails of it. She saw fur, an elongated snout, glinting brown eyes dumped on a bulging body of fur and claws. A second glance made her mouth drop open in astonished horror, as another shape bounded from the darkness into the sliver of light offered, and tore into the brown-eyed something. Tooth, fur and nail collided – the jaws of the second one clamped around the throat of the first and bit hard, yanked harder. An explosion of blood and bone erupted where the throat of the first one once lay, safely tucked inside. The gore and spray of arterial blood caused Tia to retch weakly, and she felt the alcohol of that evening well up from her stomach into her mouth. With a disgusted snort, her captor tilted her over the side, away from the fight and from him as she heaved and vomited out acid and alcohol. She dimly registered the boner digging into her thigh shrinking, and allowed the thought that if anyone wanted to rape her in the future, maybe she should puke on them. This came accompanied by hysterical internal laughter, as she felt her mind breaking apart, piece by piece.
This was not turning out to be a fun evening. Werewolves, Tia contemplated weakly, letting the idea worm into her consciousness as she stared at the ground where her vomit congealed. She wanted to black out again. Fucking werewolves. And not the Twilight kind. I’m officially mad. Or I’m still unconscious, and my body’s lying in a ditch somewhere. That notion comforted her more than the prospect of werewolves tearing each other’s throats out in front of her. Or of the nice, insane world she lived in being a lot more fucked up than people gave it credit for.
“I have your girlfriend here!” the man holding her barked, grabbing her painfully by the hair mere seconds after she had wiped her mouth. Roots gradually began twanging off her scalp. “You come near and I’ll break her bones without a second thought! Surrender!”
All that greeted her captor’s words was ominous snarling. Tia glanced up again, groggy and weak, the side of her skull throbbing, and watched as one of the werewolves, with his snout area wet and leaking, fixated yellow eyes on her. The monster took a step forward, the lips crinkling, that dreadful rumbling sound reverberating throughout the alleyway. How could no one hear this? Surely there had to be people nearby.
Frantic howling behind the yellow-eyed one caused their focus to snap back, as a new mountain of fur and flesh lunged into him. They bit, scratched and rolled in the grime of the alley, smashing against red brick wall, against dumpsters. The
horrible thing about this, Tia realized, muzzily, was that this would sound like nothing else but a drunken brawl. And everyone knew better than to come down into somewhere like this to investigate the sounds of violence. That would be plain suicide.
“Where is that fucker?” the captor spat, pressing his bulk into her back. “That’s the older one. Disgusting bastard.”
He was talking to himself, but Tia started making stronger connections in her brain. The confusion of her purpose here evaporated, as she linked the amber-eyed Danny with the result of her current situation. Somehow, impossibly, the four men were hunting for Danny. That could be the only thing that could even begin to remotely explain why she was trapped in the arms of a man who could snap every bone in her like a twig. It didn’t really explain the whole werewolf thing, but it was a start.
Why are they hunting him? She flinched as the tussling werewolves rolled closer. If they’re the same?
“Fuck it.” Her captor, apparently bored of standing there holding her like a puppet, whammed her on the side of the head again. The first hit dazed her, made her consciousness swim. The second sent her collapsing onto the ground.
Chapter Four
Exhausted, breath huffing through red-smeared lips, Danny stumbled out the alley across a narrow backstreet, heading towards the site of a dilapidated warehouse tucked somewhere in the rotten heart of the city, where only those who didn’t mind squalor or the loss of dignity went. He and his father had cleared out the ones who lived there over a week ago, but the unwashed scent seeped through the furniture and carpets, spoke of the legacy of self-destruction humans had invited upon themselves.
In his arms, he cradled the unconscious woman, leaving the remains of his former life behind. His father, that twisted, miserable, prideful soul, had breathed his last, defending that misguided sense of honor. His father may have been many things – a despicable individual with a black and corrupted heart – but his first thought had still been to protect the pack. To make sure Danny escaped the situation alive, to fight another day.