The Nine

by C. M. Stunich

  There was nothing in the eyes of that creature that I could recognize, no sentience or acknowledgement of what it was doing or why. I'd seen some shifters infected with dust before but not at this stage, not like this. No wonder Bennett didn't believe in a cure. I wasn't sure I believed in one either after seeing this.

  Dropping into a sudden crouch, I rolled to the side and came up swinging, my blade cutting straight through the creature's neck and severing its head. Blood spattered over me, and I knew I had to be careful about getting it in my eyes or mouth, into a cut. If I did, I could be the next infected shifter the guild had to take down.

  I could just imagine Mikhail standing over me, mouth pressed into a thin line, eyes cold and hard. He'd put a sword through my brain without a second's hesitation. He'd feel bad about it, but he'd do it. Maybe for a few night's after, he'd feel bad, but he'd get over it because in his mind, he'd have done the right thing.

  Fucker.

  Panting, I stepped toward Bennett, his hands wet with blood, and put my back up against his naked one. The corpse of the wolf he'd killed was lying nearby, head also severed. Seeing as Bennett had no weapons, it was a fairly impressive and utterly grotesque feet. Good thing he was an alpha; his leg wound should've healed already. If he'd been of any lesser rank, I'd have to wonder if he might be infected now, too.

  "Six more, right?" I asked, my hands tight around the hilts of my blades. They were wrapped in black leather, smooth and well worn to the shape of my hands. Holding them was almost as natural as shifting, as breathing. But killing shifters who'd done nothing wrong? That was hard. Seeing monsters that used to be people, that was harder.

  "Six more," Bennett said, his voice this deep, low growl, threaded with violence. He was taut behind me, strung up and ready to burst. If we didn't have more targets to deal with, I'd have to wonder if he might turn all of that pent-up rage on me. "Keep your calm, fox." A wild scream exploded from one of the tunnels, and I heard the sound of heavy footsteps. I didn't bother to turn and look; Bennett could handle it.

  While I stood there waiting for my next target, I sheathed one katana, and pulled out my gun instead, switching off the safety. My ears swiveled around on the top of my head, listening for the next monster I'd have to dispatch, the next target. I couldn't think of these things as people, as wolves, or else I wouldn't be able to do it. Seemed hypocritical for an assassin, huh? To have a problem killing somebody? But I killed bad guys for a living. I killed men who were sex trafficking young girls, doctors at research labs that were testing on supernaturals, leaders of drug cartels. That's what I did. I didn't kill stupid but innocent teenagers who took the wrong drug or had a little condom-free slip up. They needed education, support, maybe a fucking spanking from their goddamn parents not a death sentence ...

  More sounds emanated from the nearby tunnels as Bennett slammed his newest target into the wall, cracking the stone. All the noise from that fight, echoing around the vast cavern, it was destroying my ability to pinpoint the new sounds I was hearing, the screaming and the growling. Because of that, I didn't have a lot of time to process what was happening with the remaining five wolves all came out of one tunnel.

  I fired off a single shot and hit one of them between the eyes.

  I could've made a few more shots, probably taken out at least two of them. But for a minute there, I was stunned. The person I'd just shot ... she had breasts and blonde hair streaked with pink. Yes, her face was still elongated and distorted, her eyes empty. Yes, she still had fluid leaking from her pores, but ... I'd clearly just put a bullet in the head of some pre-teen girl.

  For a split-second there, I faltered. My emotions got the better of me, something that'd never happened to me, not even on my first mission. Fuck. But I'd also never killed an innocent teenager before.

  The four other wolves bore down on me so quick that if I hadn't had Mik as a teacher, if I hadn't had ovaries of fucking steel, I'd have died that day.

  A quick drop to the floor, a roll, and I ended up going underneath the feet of my attackers. They were powerful, strong, and fast, but whatever this disease did to them, it made them a little stupid, too. The goo that leaked from their bodies was warm and foul smelling; I almost threw up as I dropped the katana to the floor, whipped out my other Ruger and fired off several shots from either hand.

  Didn't drop a damn one of the creatures. They moved too fast; I was shaking; the angles weren't right and the light was bad and the sound was off.

  Shit!

  One of the werewolves launched themselves at me as I went to stand up, cracking my skull against the floor of the cavern. My vision blurred as pain took over, blinding me momentarily. I still had the wherewithal to grab my mom's knife and thrust it upward, into the throat of the wolf attacking me. Pretty sure that saved my life.

  Bennett saved me next.

  He flew over me and tackled the wolf off, landing on top of me in his place. Much as I had mixed feelings about the alpha wolf's naked body on top of mine, I was fucking grateful to be alive. He pushed up to his feet, straddling me and snarling as he flashed claws on the end of his fingers. Whatever signals he was sending to his pack, they worked. For a minute there, I almost believed that Bennett would be able to command them to back off. And that both thrilled and terrified me.

  If he commanded them and they listened, we'd be safe and they wouldn't have to die.

  If he commanded them and they listened, then I was no longer just an assassin. Then, I was a murderer who killed teenage girls.

  Whatever vestiges of sanity the creatures had left in them faded as fast as they appeared, owed more to Bennett's dominance than anything else I guessed. The wolf he'd knocked off of me, the one with my mother's knife sticking out of its throat, it was the first one to launch itself at us.

  This time, it was the monster who knocked Bennett back. I rolled out of the way as he crashed into the ground next to me, swinging my gun up and putting another round through the side of its skull.

  Its.

  Because I couldn't keep reminding myself who these monsters really were or it was going to be me with my head severed and lying on the cavern floor.

  Scrambling to my feet, I whipped out another knife and chucked it at another female. No, another it. It, it, it. My hands were still shaking, but I managed to nail the creature between the eyes again. Good for me. I was a killing machine with or without my magic.

  Bennett let out a roar as he surged to his feet and clocked one of the others in the head. When he spun back toward me, toward the last of the wolves, I saw his eyes go wide with surprise.

  That's when I realized there was something else behind me.

  Even though I had a bit of a warning, spinning and swinging my leg out to knock my newest attacker down, it didn't work.

  Because my next attacker was on the wall and not the floor.

  A scaled creature threw itself at me, swinging a tail full of sharp, serrated points into my leg and knocking me down at the same time it severed my leg, right at the thigh. Fucker bit me on the shoulder, too, stabbing needle-like teeth into my flesh.

  Or at least, that's what it felt like.

  My catsuit was made of dragon leather—don't ask—and it was as strong as steel. Yet, whatever this thing was, it cut through it like butter. As I collapsed, I realized it didn't hurt, and that's when I knew I was in serious fucking trouble.

  Blood sprayed everywhere, literally sprayed. It soaked my attacker from head to fucking toe in a fountain.

  It was a shifter of some kind, what species exactly, I could no longer tell. But it dropped down on me and crushed me into the ground as I fumbled to get my hand to obey me. I was still holding the pistol, but my fingers refused to obey, refused to pull the damn trigger. I'm losing too much blood; I'm in shock. I'm going to fucking die.

  I would have, too, if it wasn't for Bennett.

  He saved my ass a second time by grabbing the lizard by the skull and yanking him off of me. His hand still squeezing the creature'
s head, he cracked it like an egg, and then threw the body against the wall where it slumped to the floor, twitched, and then went still.

  "Little fox," he said, not at all sympathetic, as he leaned over me, and my vision blurred. "You're bleeding profusely, and you're not healing. Cat got your tongue and your magic?" I opened my mouth to tell him off, but no words would come out. I wanted to say screw you and eat a dick, but all I ended up doing was gasping and tasting the metallic whisper of my blood on my mouth. Am I going to get infected? I wondered, which was a stupid thought because I was literally dying right then and there, probably minutes away from it.

  "Fuck," Bennett cursed as he stood over me. "If you die, that vampire freak is going to be up my ass, isn't he?" My eyes flittered shut. Through sheer force of will, I opened them back up. I had the feeling if I let them close again, that'd be the last time.

  Bennett leaned down, smelling like amber and musk, earth and decaying leaves and pine. He smelled like forest, life, and sex. He might've been a psychopath, but this was not a bad smell for my last moment of life. Not bad at all.

  I even liked it when he picked me up and held me against his chest, something that would normally push all my buttons in the worst, worst way. And yet, when my head lolled to one side, I could hear his heart beating inside his warm, hard chest.

  "Keep alert, little fox. It'd be a shame if I wasn't the one to kill you."

  Creepy as that was, it was also comforting. This time, when my eyes slid shut, I was pretty goddamn sure that Bennett Beowulf was not going to let me die.

  A lot of confidence to put into a crazy person, huh?

  I couldn't have passed out for long. When I next opened my eyes, I was lying on a large bed in a room with vaulted wood ceilings, and log walls. A lodge. The lodge. Bennett's lodge.

  I was lying on the alpha male's bed.

  Crap.

  When I tried to sit up, my body refused to obey me. It flat-out staged a revolt. My fingers and toes twitched, but that was about as far as I got. Even when I realized I was naked, my body fully exposed, and started panicking, I still couldn't move.

  "Don't fight it," Bennett said, sitting naked on the bed in front of me, his dark hair wet and stuck to his forehead, gold eyes locked on mine. We were both clean and wet, scrubbed of the foul goo and the blood from the cavern. It made sense that I was no longer wearing my clothes, but it also gave me a very clear view of what was happening with my thigh.

  My leg really was about this close to being severed.

  I could see muscle and bone, and the thin bit of tissue keeping it all held together.

  Bile rose in my throat as I flicked my eyes from my wound and back up to Bennett. I was bleeding profusely still, the dark sheets beneath me soaked and wet, but it was no longer spurting. That was good, right? Right?!

  Bennett sat up and crawled toward me, reaching his hands around my thigh, his hot, warm fingers invisible to my nerve endings. I couldn't feel him touching me and that was terrifying.

  "I'm going to assume that if I save your life ..." he began, fingers moving up toward the wound. "That I'm not going to regret it." He touched the edges of my bleeding flesh, and a scream tore through me, making Bennett shudder. Not sure if that was from the pain of having his eardrums burst or perverse pleasure at seeing me in pain, but I was naked and he wasn't taking advantage, thank fuck.

  His fingers grazed the edges of my wound before he pulled back, lifting his wrist to his mouth and tore into his flesh, creating this ragged wound that oozed even more crimson fluid onto the sheets. The entire bed, mattress and all, was going to be soaked by the end of the night.

  "These things can get intense," Bennett told me as he reached out and let his blood drip into my wound. I'd be worried about diseases, about the dust infection, whatever, but at this point, staying alive was the important thing. If I was alive, there was hope. Hope for what, I wasn't sure. Right now, I knew I was in shock.

  I was hurt, I was dying, I'd just killed a kid.

  Fuck.

  "How ... intense?" I managed to choke out, but Bennett just smiled at me with big, white teeth. He let his blood spill into my wound until I was coated in him, and then he leaned forward and brought his wrist to my lips.

  "Drink." A simple, sharp command. This was a man who was used to telling people what to do and getting his way when he did it. But I didn't have the strength to argue, and I knew how powerful an alpha's blood could be. Fighting him now would cost me everything and there was a big difference between being stubborn and standing up for one's beliefs, and being stubborn simply for the sake of it. I didn't need to prove a fucking point; I needed to live.

  Bennett's coppery blood sluiced between my lips, down my throat. I drank it like it was water from the Holy Grail, all of that scalding crimson liquid sliding across my tongue and filling my belly.

  The more I drank, the better I felt, the sleepier I felt.

  "Relax, fox," Bennett said as my eyes drooped again and I started to fade. It was a different sort of fatigue from before. That felt like death, but this, this was just sleep. "Let yourself into the wolf's den ..."

  I passed out with Bennett's ragged, bloody wrist pressed to my mouth.

  The next time I awoke, there were candles flickering, the wooden walls of the lodge room glowing orange in their light. When I told my body to move, it did, and I sat up with a groan that soon became a scream.

  Shoving the blankets back, I caught sight of my wound. My leg was no longer nearly severed from my body, but the gash was deep and there was a nick to my femoral artery that was oozing slowly onto the bed.

  "We'll need at least one more, if not two, rounds of blood therapy," Bennett growled, lying on his back beside me, his long fingers gripping the base of his rigid shaft. His gold eyes were focused on mine, his mouth twisting into a sideways smirk. "Or we could fuck. That might help."

  "Eat shit," I choked out, happy to find my voice. But there was this sense of relief that washed over me, this nightmare of blood and death fading away as I blinked back a sudden surge of tears. They were tears of joy, honestly, because I had so much shit that I needed to work out before my soul would be happy pushing up daisies.

  "Oh for fuck's sake," Bennett said, sitting up, giving me this look, like I was an anomaly he didn't know how to deal with.

  "I killed a kid last night," I said, my voice devoid of emotion, my fingers probing my wound. Without my magic, I couldn't heal this without medical—or supernatural intervention. I needed Bennett to finish what he started, but I also couldn't let this go.

  "They were dead weeks ago, when they stopped shifting. That girl you shot murdered her parents and her entire litter." I glanced over at Bennett, surprised to find him comforting me. But he wasn't really, was he? He was just reciting facts.

  “You’re really not going to lose any sleep over this, are you?” I asked as the alpha male sat up in bed, his tattooed body brilliant in the candlelight. Even with the bloody bed, my hurt leg, and the dead wolves, it was almost easy to picture spending the night with this guy. Outside the window of his fancy lodge bedroom, it was snowing, frosted white edges kissing the window frame. The trees were nothing but shadows against a starry sky, and the candles coupled with a roaring fire in the stone fireplace made it all sort of … surreal.

  I had phone calls to make, I knew.

  A lot of them.

  I had to tell Revel that I was sorry for bringing her over here under false pretenses (even if I’d done it unknowingly), I had to tell Riot and Fin how much I cared and how sorry I was, and I had to tell Mik that I’d deliberately disobeyed him.

  But right now … I just had to be here.

  “I knew there was a reason I fucking hated wolves,” I snarled when Bennett didn’t answer. He sneered at me, letting his eyes rake over my body in a way he hadn’t before, like I was a piece of meat. Not sure if he wanted to fuck me or kill me in that moment—maybe both—but like before, I wasn’t exactly turned off by it. All of this sexual tension a
nd almost fucking was really starting to get to me.

  "Whatever. Doesn't matter what you think, doesn't change the fact that she was a dumb kid who made a stupid mistake, not a monster, not really." Bennett just stared at me like he could give two fucks less about innocence or guilt, but even though he was, quite unarguably, a crazy son of a bitch, I knew it bothered him on some level. He was Alpha, and it was his job to protect his people.

  He'd failed at that, and even an egomaniac like him was bound to find that a little disturbing.

  Bennett ignored that statement, scooting closer to me, and then turning so that he straddled my lower thighs, his shaft protruding distractedly between us. My own blood soaked his knees as he bit his wrist and started dripping crimson onto my wound again.

  "You don't have any diseases I should worry about, do you?" I asked, thinking of lupine sickness, an STD originally only contracted by werewolves but more recently passed through the rest of the canidae population.

  Bennett just smiled which sort of scared the shit out of me.

  "Don't I get anything special for saving your life?" he asked. "Instead of an inquiry about my bill of health? You were so far gone, and that thing, was a komodo shifter—its mouth bacteria is rancid as fuck. If you'd tried to go to a hospital, or wait for your vampire whore to get here, you'd be dead. So maybe a thank you is in order, if not a thank you fuck."

  I stared at him, at his stubbled jaw and shaggy dark hair, his big, gold eyes and full lips. Bennett had a distinctly masculine face with a wide jaw and heavy cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and an attitude problem. He had toxic masculinity written all over him. And in that moment, I didn't give a crap.