I knew I was convincing because I was being one hundred percent honest.
But John’s hateful glare didn’t waiver. “All the more reason you should be put down. So you can’t infect someone else.”
Good God, this guy was so full of hate it threatened to bubble up out of him like steam escaping a volcano. There was no reasoning with this level of loathing.
I gripped the little stun gun so tightly my hand hurt. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I said, taking a step towards him. He flinched but didn’t shoot. I doubted I had long before he pulled the trigger, though. “You shot into my window when I was a wolf. You saw that I had myself in chains so that I couldn’t hurt anyone.”
I didn’t know if John, my former coworker, the guy whom I’d taught how to clean the frozen yogurt nozzles, had been the one to shoot at me during the full moon. It was a guess. But the slight change in his tight, angry expression told me I was right.
“You know I don’t want to hurt anyone.” I sounded like a broken record, but it was working. He was watching me warily but not shooting. I took another small step, slowing sliding the taser out of my pocket.
“You’re a werewolf,” he said. “A damned monster. You can’t help it.”
I took a deep breath. His trigger finger shook, but he didn’t pull it. Not yet. I had one chance. I had to do this right.
“I don’t want to be a monster,” I said, trying to sound as contrite as possible, a kid apologizing to a teacher. Then in one swift motion, I lifted my hand and stepped sideways, pressing the tip of the taser into the back of his hand. His whole body shook like a spider jolted by a electric wire. The gun toppled onto the pavement and he fell to the ground.
For a second, I couldn’t stop watching John and thinking how close I’d come to being shot in the chest with silver. Because this man hated what I was so much that he’d taken a job at my workplace in order to make sure I was the monster he loathed and probably to figure out where I lived.
Then he stopped shaking and lay still on the ground. Not dead, but stunned. And probably not for long. I bent down and grabbed for the gun. A pale hand beat me to it.
Damien stood there, holding the silver pistol. He aimed it at John, who was still shaking.
Relief washed over me like a tidal wave. It was over. The hunters had been caught, thanks to my (slightly idiotic) plan.
Then I realized Raff was missing.
“Where’s Raff?” I asked.
“Hurt but okay,” Damien said mildly. “Do you want me to shoot him?” He nodded at John.
Yes. No.
“I don’t know,” I said. The way John looked at me, like he wouldn’t sleep until I was dead, had shaken me to the core. But I didn’t know what to do with him. “Shouldn’t we, like, bring them to the wolf pack for questioning or a trial or something?”
Damien rolled his eyes. “I don’t know how you wolves run your criminal justice system. If it were up to me, I’d drink his blood and be done with it.”
“Is that what you did the other hunters?” It was just a question. I was curious.
Damien took a long moment before he answered. “If I could have, I would have, but I only managed to subdue one of them. The other two ran.”
“Shit,” I said. If some of them were still out there… “Give me the gun. I need to go after them.”
Damien did not give me the gun. “Raff went after them.”
“You let him chase down guys with guns filled with silver bullets?”
Damien smiled at me. He was amused. Bastard. “First, it was your idea to stand here and be bait for guys with silver bullets. And second, I disarmed one of them before Raff chased them off and the other didn’t seem to have a gun.”
“He could have other guns! And there are five of them, at least, which means one of them is lurking out of sight. The idea was to capture them, not chase them away,” I said, but the words were automatic, just word vomit. The truth was, I was worried about Raff. And, after looking in John’s eyes, I knew as long as one of them was out there, none of us was safe.
John moaned, moving a little as he did.
“I can kill him.” Damien flashed fang. Something about him baring his teeth like that made me recoil. It was such a primal display of his preternatural power and I had to take a step back.
“No. We should bring him to Sasha. To the wolf pack,” I said. “He’s helped kill three of ours. Justice must be served.”
“Suit yourself,” Damien said. He walked over to John and cracked him in the head with the back of the pistol. John stopped moving. I’d read somewhere that knocking someone out like that was pretty dangerous in real life, not a simple thing like in movies, but at the moment I wasn’t all that concerned with John’s health and safety. I just didn’t want to be his judge, jury, and executioner.
Raff came jogging around the house. He was panting and he nodded at me like he was too out of breath to speak.
My heart soared when I saw him alive and well. I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been until then. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine. But the others got away.” He breathed heavily as he spoke and pointed to the guy on the ground. “I see the last one is here. Good work.”
“Where’s the other guy you dropped?” I asked.
Raff and Damien exchanged a look. That said it all. He was dead, and I was guessing that was Damien’s doing.
“We should take this guy to Sasha, right?” I didn’t know how the wolf pack would deal with something like this. I felt so much like an outsider.
“Yes, right, that’s a great idea. I’ll text her to let her know we’re coming and that we’ll have a prisoner.” Raff pulled out his phone. “Damien, would you mind dealing with the camera?”
Damien nodded. Apparently he knew which camera because he climbed up the tree with the ease of an immortal goat and yanked the little security camera from the trunk. He dropped down and set the camera in my hands.
“How do we get this guy up to the orchard without him waking up?” Raff asked.
“Oh, he won’t wake up,” Damien said. “Not for several hours, at least.”
Chapter 17
Despite the late hour—it was almost dawn when we arrived back at the orchard—all of the lights in the house were ablaze and several people came running out to meet us when we pulled up. They were all big folks with wide shoulders and large muscles, and I realized these were more warriors like Raff. Men and women who trained to be buff protectors even in human form. At that moment, I was grateful to see them.
They pulled an unconscious John from the backseat and carried him inside. Raff and I got out and followed the procession. The prisoner was taken through the big house to a back bedroom that was empty save for a few plastic storage boxes stacked up near the closet.
Shackles and chains had been installed so recently that little piles of dust from the drilled holes sat on the maroon carpet beneath the chains. John was chained up, shackles snapped around his wrists and ankles. Raff and I watched from the doorway. John didn’t wake up and they propped him against the wall, his head lolling to the side like a child sleeping in a car seat. It was a pathetic sight and I had to fight the little pangs of sympathy that resounded through me. He’d wanted to shoot me. No, he’d wanted to destroy me and all of these people in this house, people whose only crime was being bitten or scratched by a werewolf at the wrong time of the month.
“He deserves what he gets,” Raff said, and I wondered if he was fighting the same inner demons, trying to reconcile the innocent-looking unconscious man with the vicious, hateful guy who’d tried to kill us.
“I know,” I said.
But I turned away and wandered back through the house. I sat on the sofa in the living room that was connected to the kitchen. A moment later, someone shoved a mug of tea at me. It was Jean, dressed in white and looking wrung out. I took it, and reveling in the comfort of holding a warm mug in my hands.
“He killed Drake,” she said, taking a
seat beside me. “Or helped his friends kill Drake. Same thing.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jean nodded. “I wasn’t fishing for sympathy. I have plenty of it. Drake had many friends among the pack. He was one of the first who helped organize this group, you know. He’d been part of a pack in Montana, but they were… well, old school is I guess what you kids would say. They settled things through fights and believed physical strength was the only kind that mattered. And don’t get me started on their views about women.”
There was something familial about Jean, as if she was my long lost aunt. “That’s what I thought all werewolves were like,” I admitted.
Jean smiled. “Holly told me you’d been reluctant to come to meetings and I wondered if that was the case. But she said you were fairly hostile when she tried to explain.”
That was true: I hadn’t been very nice to Holly.
“I wasn’t very open,” I admitted, another pang striking something inside me. This time it was guilt. John had worked with me at the yogurt shop. He’d hunted me down, even though I wasn’t in a pack, even though I locked myself up every month to ensure I couldn’t do any harm. I’d done my best to avoid other werewolves, and yet if I’d been coming here regularly, talking with others who shared my experiences, maybe I would have recognized John for what he was. Maybe we could have stopped him before he’d killed anyone.
“None of this is your fault,” Jean said, correctly reading my thoughts. “For as long as there have been supernatural things in the world, there have been people trying to destroy them or use them for personal gain.”
I sipped the tea. It was slightly fruity and sweet, with a hint of hibiscus. “But why target werewolves? It’s not as if any of us got up one morning and said, ‘hey, I hope I get bitten by a moon-mad wolf man so I, too, can be forced to transform into a wolf every month.’”
Jean’s expression hardened slightly, her jaw tightening. Her face reminded me so much of Raff’s that I suddenly wondered if they were related. And then icy fear crept into my veins. “I mean, most people here didn’t choose to be werewolves, did they?”
“Most of us were turned by chance and happenstance,” she said, but I noticed her voice had lost some of its warmth. “But some of us chose to be turned in order to be closer to an afflicted family member.”
A cold lump formed in my throat. “Did you?”
Jean shook her head. “Drake and I were both bitten decades ago after our car broke down late at night. We never found the wolf who did it, but we learned to forgive them, whoever they were. Forgiveness is a powerful thing.” There was definitely a pointedness in there and I thought of Holly. She’d been alone in her apartment with a vampire, whom she could not infect, when I’d burst inside. She hadn’t expected to be near a human she could hurt and wolf-Holly had acted on instinct. Still, it was hard not to resent her for ruining not only my mortality but my chance to be a vampire.
“But others,” Jean continued, staring off into the distance. “They chose to become one of us because they didn’t want a family member or loved one to leave them behind. Of course, sometimes you get left behind anyway. Life is funny like that.”
I swallowed the lump of ice that had formed in my esophagus and nodded. Jean got up and went onto the next room, a parlor were several people were playing cards. I’d passed through there earlier and no one had been enjoying themselves. The cards were merely a means of distraction.
Raff wandered into the living room. He stared in space, looking lost, his gaze landed on me for only a second. He headed back toward the kitchen. The ice in my midsection expanded.
I set my tea on the end table and went back through the maze of hallways until I reached the back of the house. A man I didn’t know with dark hair and skin was guarding the prisoner’s door.
“I need to speak with him,” I said.
For a second, the guard only stared at me like I’d asked him to pull down the moon, but then he opened the door and let me through.
“Five minutes,” he said.
That was fine with me.
John was moaning softly, his eyelids cracked like the light in the room was painful. He had a massive bump on the left side of his head where Damien had hit him with the pistol.
“Why me?” I asked.
His head rolled on his neck and his mouth opened. His lips were terribly chapped and his eyes, when he finally opened them wider, were bloodshot.
“Go ahead and kill me,” he spat. “We’re not going to stop until every disgusting, unnatural thing is eradicated.”
I tried to ignore the chill that washed over me as he spoke. His words dripped with hatred and his eyes narrowed.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “I can’t promise the others won’t, because you and your buddies killed three of their friends. But me? I’m just here to find out why you chose me as a target. I wasn’t hurting anyone and yet you infiltrated my work place and then shot at me.”
He scoffed and a little spittle came out of his mouth, dribbling down his chin. It was gross but not as gross as whatever was in this guy’s head.
“You weren’t hurting anyone? What bullshit. You harbor a disease. An infectious disease that any moment could learn how to spread through the air or through sweat and then what happens? The human species goes extinct because we let vector-harboring pests live!”
I curled my lip in disgust. Vector-harboring pests? I mean, yeah, werewolfism was contagious, but that was taking things a little far. “Werewolves are only contagious for one day a month.”
He scoffed again. “For now, maybe. But nothing stops monsters from becoming more monstrous besides full eradication. You all need to be put down.”
I refused to flinch, but it took a herculean effort to keep my expression neutral, and a bigger effort not to punch him in the face. He was unhinged. “You act like I’m dangerous, but you’re the one who went around shooting people. Lucky for us, you’re not going to hurt anyone anymore.”
He smiled, but it was twisted and wrong, the smile of demon who knew he was going to win. I did flinch then, unable to help it. “I’m but a soldier. My life means nothing. The Guardians of Pure Life will make sure all of you are destroyed. We shall salt the earth until every last abomination is gone from the face of this planet.”
The absurd declaration let some air out of the tension balloon. Sure, he was completely serious, but at the same time, seriously deluded. Five guys with guns—even filled with silver bullets—were no match for the sprawling, wide world of supernatural creatures. Hell, they weren’t even a match for this one pack of werewolves.
“Wow, you’re really a piece of work. And I doubt your buddies can do much. One is dead and we’ll hunt the others down in no time.”
Now his smile twisted into something even more sinister. “You think that’s all of us?” His laughter was hollow, but it jarred something loose in my stomach. “There are enough of us to destroy you, and that boy you live with, the one who lets a parasite hang off his neck, and all of the parasites and pests in this region. And we won’t stop until it’s done. In fact, my men should be dealing with your little leech-feeding friend right about now.”
My stomach rolled, its contents churning like loose change. Michael was in danger. I’d assumed he wasn’t even a target, but now this jerk was saying he was next on the list. And he and his little gang of assholes knew where Michael and Damien lived.
I turned on my heel and headed for the door.
“You know how disgusting and vile you are. That’s why you chain yourself up.”
I ignored him and left the room, taking a deep breath when the door shut behind me. Tears stung my eyes, but I refused to cry because of that asshole.
The man guarding the door gave me a sympathetic look and I realized he’d probably heard everything. “He’s the monster,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I figured that out.”
But I’d also figured out Michael was in immediate danger from other so-ca
lled “Guardians.” And I needed to go make sure he was okay.
Chapter 18
I called Michael twice and then sent him a text message, warning him that he and Damien were targets of the hunters. We’d been stupid to think they only wanted to target werewolves, especially since they’d tried going after shifters first.
He didn’t answer and I seriously hoped that was because he was still being pissy about how this mess was my fault. At least if it was just his bad attitude preventing him from replying to a text, he was still safe.
And he had to be safe.
But just in case, I had to go warn them in person. And of course, all the way at the orchard, it was going to take way too long to drive back to Seattle. Plus, I didn’t have a car.
Raff was nowhere to be found. He must have been somewhere in that giant house but I didn’t have time to search. I found Jean in the kitchen, stacking plates in the sink. I was tempted to ask if she had a car I could borrow, but then suddenly Raff appeared from a mudroom behind the kitchen.
“There you are,” he said, irritated. “I’ve been looking all over for you. What part of this whole bodyguard arrangement do you not understand?”
Jean smirked.
“Don’t encourage him,” I said. To Raff, I said, “I’ve actually been looking for you. We need to go.”
He blinked. “It’s three o’clock in the morning. We need to sleep. I was trying to find you to tell you that Jean has given us a room.”
“A room? As in just one?”
“It’s a full house, dear,” Jean said, wiping her hands on a dishtowel before heading back into the living area to retrieve more plates.
“There are two beds in the room,” Raff said, suddenly looking a little flushed.
“Forget the room,” I said. “We have to go check on Michael. I just spoke to John—”
“The hunter?” His voice got so loud that people in the living room turned back to look. Raff stepped closer and whispered, “Why were you talking with that guy? He’s dangerous!”
Moon Cursed: The Reluctant Werewolf Chronicles, Book 1 Page 11