by E. J. King
“In some ways, it is the same,” she agreed. “But blood matching is much more intense than regular human love. When a Were finds their Blood Mate, an instant connection is formed. It the strongest bond in the supernatural world.”
“Blood Mate?” I winced. “Sounds kinky. And deadly.”
“Sometimes it is,” she said with a wry smile. “I’ve been told that it’s chemical. It’s like how humans have different blood types. A blood match happens when a Were finds another Were with the same blood type, except it’s a very rare thing in our world.”
“I take it you haven’t matched yet?” I tried not to sound too interested.
Olivia’s smile faded. “Unlike a lot of Weres, I try not to surround myself with my own kind. It’s easier to stay alive when you only have to worry about yourself.”
“Maybe. But I would argue that if you are alone, you don’t have anyone to watch your back.” I didn’t really like hunting on my own. Even when I had gotten sick of always having my family around, I had felt safer knowing they were fighting alongside me.
“Well I’m not alone anymore, am I?” Her pointed stare was penetrating. “Are you watching my back, or just my rear?”
I laughed loudly. “You make me seem like such a sleaze.”
“I just call it like I see it,” she quipped.
It was easy being with Olivia. She knew how to take a joke, and could tell them just as easily. The more we talked over the next couple of hours, the more I realized that she no longer felt like a stranger. Somewhere along the way, we had entered friend territory. That was probably a good thing considering we were sharing a motel room.
“You don’t snore, do you?” she asked later as we each climbed into our respective beds.
“Nah. I’m usually too preoccupied with my night terrors.” I lay on my side, on the edge of my bed that was closest to her. She did the same, a mirror image but prettier.
“I don’t know the last time I shared a bedroom with someone other than one of the kids.” She tucked her hands under her head like a child feigning sleep.
“I think you’ll like it.” I rolled onto my back and studied the cracked ceiling. “It’s nice not being alone when you wake up.”
She let out a long breath. “Sounds nice.”
I wanted to say something else, but the quiet in the room felt oddly comforting. Knowing that she was there, just a few feet away in the dark, felt good. More than good, actually. It felt pretty amazing.
It wasn’t long before her breathing became rhythmic and deep. I listened to the calming sound for what felt like hours, until at last I drifted into sleep.
I awoke rested and content. Most of my nights were filled with terrible dreams about monsters and death, but for the last six hours I had done nothing but sleep. I had a feeling that Olivia was at least partly responsible for my nightmareless snooze. I rolled over, expecting to find her sleeping form. Instead, I found an empty bed.
With a start, I shot upright. Looking wildly around the room, I was relieved to find her in the chair in the corner of the room, laughing at me.
“Did you think I ran away in the middle of the night?” she teased.
Her eyes sparkled with good humor. I noticed that her dark hair was damp which meant she had been awake long enough to have showered.
“Pardon me for being worried about you,” I scoffed to hide my embarrassment.
“Oh, please. Don’t be such a baby.” She pointed to the bedside table. “I even brought you coffee and a donut.”
My eyes widened with delight as I caught a whiff of the coffee. “Is it possible for a human to blood match a Were? Because I think this might be love.”
“I think you might be an idiot. Or crazy. Or both.”
“I’m not the one sitting in the corner of the room watching people sleep like a stalker.” I devoured half of the donut in one big bite, much to Olivia’s disgust.
“While you were snoring your life away, I did a little research.” She held up a book I had never seen. “I know where we need to go next.”
“What’s that?” I eyed the book wearily. It looked suspiciously like a modern version of the journals from my parents’ Hunter Chronicles, a collection of books that had been handed down by Hart Hunters throughout the centuries. “Hunter journal?”
She tossed it across the room and it landed heavily in my lap. “Matt’s journal. I snaked it last night for some light reading before bed.”
“You stole it?” I asked, flabbergasted. Not only had she taken it on the sly, she’d done so before we had even known that Matt had turned me in. That meant she must’ve had her own suspicions all along.
“I figured it would be the best place to learn more about Violet. I know Matt pretty well, and it was clear he wasn’t planning on telling us the full truth.” She pointed at the book. “Open it to where I marked a page.”
I turned it open to the spot marked by a turned down corner and began to read.
Violet appeared on our doorstep today, accompanied by a young girl. Barely a teenager, she looked wild and scared. I remembered that feeling. Her parents were dead and she had been on the prowl for a year, hunting down the Weres responsible. Even without our training, she exhibits a strong ability to control the Were urges. With a little time, I think we can teach her how to be in complete control of her body. But I’m not sure we can teach her how to move past her thirst for revenge.
I looked up, surprised. “Why are you sharing this with me?”
“I don’t know.” She looked as perplexed as I felt. “I guess because we’re friends now and I figured you should know.”
I was so moved by her honesty that I didn’t even think to tease her.
“Do you remember Violet?”
“Vaguely.” She pulled her feet up and hugged them to her chest. “I was in a pretty bad state when she found me. There’s a lot about my past that you don’t know, about how I got to the point where I needed complete strangers to take me in.”
“How did your parents die?” Some people might’ve thought the question was a bit off topic, but I knew from experience that drastic changes in people could usually be tied back to traumatic incidents, like a family slaughter.
Olivia looked away, her eyes staring blankly out the open window. I knew that she wasn’t avoiding me, rather she was letting herself get lost in her memories.
“When I was seven, my older brother, Zach, was out on a hunt and he came across a Were. At that point, my family was still focusing on hunting Souls, and he didn’t know how to handle the wolf. He got bit.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “My parents did everything they could to help him, but mostly they just had to keep him tied up. Then my dad learned about the cure.”
I asked, “Alpha blood?”
“The one and only cure for Were-syndrome,” she affirmed. “They turned their focus to hunting Weres, certain that they would be able to find the monster that had turned Zach. They were so distracted with their mission, they barely even remembered that they had a daughter. Then one day they got careless with Zach’s restraints and he broke free.”
She stopped talking and her breathing became more erratic. I could tell that she was trying to hold back a tidal wave of emotion.
“He killed them.” Now she looked at me, her eyes cold. “He almost killed me, but I was able to fight him off and eventually get a silver blade into his heart. But not before he bit me.”
“He turned you?” I couldn’t keep the shock out of my voice.
“It was a deep bite and I was alone in the house with two dead parents and a dead Were brother. If I had been a little stronger, or if someone else had been there to help me, I could’ve drank some of Zach’s blood and I would’ve been cured. But that didn’t happen. I fell unconscious almost immediately and when I finally woke up, Zach’s blood had drained from his body and I had turned. No going back.”
It explained so much- why Olivia was always so distant, so reluctant to let anyone in. It explained why she always had
a look in her eyes that said she was deeply hurting. And it explained why she had been willing to help me, someone that she barely knew.
“What happened next?” I asked quietly. I wanted to know everything, every detail of her life. But I didn’t want to push her away. Not when she had finally let me in.
“I basically snapped. Unlike Zach, I was able to control my urges for the most part. But I didn’t want to. I was hungry for revenge and made it my mission to find the Alpha Were, the one that had caused the destruction of my entire family.” Her feet dropped to the floor with a heavy thump. “I gave into the beast inside me and spent most of my time as a wolf. Then one day a woman found me in the woods and she didn’t try to hurt me. She didn’t need to. With a snap of her fingers, I was under her control. I turned human again and she took me to Matt and Eva.”
I wasn’t sure I heard her right, or if maybe she was being facetious. “Snap of her fingers? Like magic?”
“Yes.” She shrugged. “It’s not that strange. Many Hunters, Soul and Were alike, turn to the Otherworld for some help.”
“The Otherworld is volatile and unpredictable,” I said, not sure how she could sound so cavalier about witchcraft. “Violet should know better than anyone just how dangerous it is to mess with nature.”
“Sometimes nature needs to be messed with,” Olivia said with a stubborn lift of her chin. “If you could’ve used powers from the Otherworld to save your family, wouldn’t you have done it in a second?”
We both knew that I would’ve done anything to save my family.
“Do you know how we can find Violet now?” I thought it best to change the subject.
“I haven’t seen Violet since that night five years ago, but Matt kept in touch with her. I won’t make you read all of the boring details, but she asked him to keep her updated on how I did under their care. When my condition started to improve, she sent them more Were kids to train.”
I flipped through several pages, quickly skimming the messy handwriting. Violet’s name appeared throughout the journal, but not much detail was given about the elusive woman.
“She’s like a witchy Mother Teresa.”
“There’s a powerful witch back in Rothsburg. Matt and Eva were good friends with her, but she wasn’t close to the Were community. I think she will be able to tell us where to find Violet, and I know she won’t tell anyone we are in town.” Olivia got up slowly, walking to the edge of my bed. She held her hand out for the book and when I placed it in her open palm, our fingers brushed and her hand jerked away. “We should get moving.”
I had mistakenly thought that because she had opened up to me, we were no longer in the awkward stage of our friendship. But instead, she was even more guarded around me as we drove toward Rothsburg. Only now instead of just uncomfortable silence, she also couldn’t seem to look at me.
“Are we okay?” I asked when I couldn’t take the quiet any longer. “You’re acting even stranger than usual.”
“We’re fine,” she said in a distant voice.
“You’re regretting opening up to me about your past, aren’t you?” I asked directly.
Her head snapped in my direction at last. “No. Of course not.”
“Good.” I stole a quick glance in her direction. “I’m glad you let down your wall for once. I was getting tired of trying to claw my way inside.”
“That’s a terribly graphic thing to say,” she said with a laugh that made me smile. “You needed to know the full truth. Plus, no matter how much I tell myself not to trust you, I can’t stop it. You are kind of irresistible, Hart.”
My heart thumped in delight. “You aren’t so bad yourself, Silver.”
“Stop,” she said abruptly.
“What did I say? I wasn’t trying to offend-”
“No, not that. Stop the car. We missed our exit.”
I laughed and hit the brakes. Olivia quickly gave me directions and it didn’t take long for us to arrive at a quaint home on the edge of town. The closest neighbor was still a few acres away so we didn’t have to worry about being watched on our way to the door.
Olivia knocked, softly at first and then harder. “Sophia! It’s me, Olivia.”
Still no answer.
I walked to the closest window and bent down to peer through an open slit in the curtains. The house was immaculate inside except for an overturned chair and some shattered glass on the floor.
“Move over,” I ordered, nudging Olivia away from the door. Before she could stop me, I kicked it open.
“Lincoln!”
It wasn’t until we stepped inside that she understood why I had resulted to such drastic measures. First, she spotted the glass, and then she sniffed the air purposefully.
“There were Weres here recently.” She shrugged when she caught my slightly alarmed glance. “What? We can smell other Weres. Deal with it.”
“Consider it dealt with,” I said, already moving on.
Aside from the scene of the struggle, nothing else in the house looked out of place. I also couldn’t detect any blood, and Olivia admitted that she couldn’t smell any either.
“What now?” I asked, frustrated that yet again our lead had come up empty. It was like the universe was conspiring to make sure I never found Violet.
“I’m not sure.” She looked around the house one more time. “I don’t see anything here that is going to help us.”
Out of options, we headed back to the car.
I had parked it at the end of the dirt road, worried that I might get stuck in the mud if I pulled up further, so we had to walk for several yards. Halfway to the car, Olivia froze.
“What do you smell now?” I asked, only half joking.
“Not smell. Hear.” Her head turned and I followed it to where she was looking down the road. “Bikes.”
“Shit,” I muttered. “How did they find us here?”
Her head titled. “It’s not all of them. Maybe four?”
“Too many for us to take on. Let’s move.”
“No, it’s too late. We won’t make it to the car in time.” Her hand closed over mine like a vice as she pulled me toward the woods.
CHAPTER FOUR
We had just made it behind the trees when the bikes appeared. She had been right- it was four of them.
Being Weres, they also had super smelling powers and knew instantly where we had gone. They followed close behind as we ran. Olivia moved easily over the rough terrain, leading us deeper into the woods.
“We should split up,” I said.
With her Were blood, she was faster than me. Our followers would stick with me and she would have a shot at escaping.
“No.” She didn’t even pause for a second to think about it. “We stick together.”
I didn’t exactly have time to argue since I was busy running for my life. But then Olivia suddenly stopped and I crashed into her.
“What’s wrong?”
“We have to fight.” She pulled a knife from her boot and handed it to me. “Take this.”
“Fight? We have one weapon between us and we are out-numbered,” I said in exasperation. “If we fight now, we die.”
“Don’t be such a baby.” She quickly started removing her clothes. “And we have more than one weapon. You have that knife, and I have my wolf.”
Once again, I was in the woods watching Olivia undress and I couldn’t enjoy it. My life was weird.
“I’m going on the record that this is a terrible idea.”
“If we’re lucky, they haven’t had a chance to change yet. They’ll be easier for you to kill in their human form.” She was down to just her underwear now.
It was beginning to rain, making soft splattering noises around us that made it harder to hear if the biker Weres were closing in.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m tougher than I look.” I gulped hard as her panties hit the ground.
“There’s nothing wrong with the way you look,” she quipped with a wink before hitting the ground.
&
nbsp; I was still reveling in her compliment when her transition completed. She padded next to me and we both stared hard into the trees, waiting for the inevitable attack. Her head brushed my thigh and instinctively I reached down to pet her head, then yanked my hand back because I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate.
“Are they close?” I asked.
A low growl told me that they were. I could feel her muscles tense and knew that something was about to rush at us.
Two men appeared first and they charged without hesitation. Olivia had been right when she’d hoped for their human form. They were good fighters, but in the end they were no match for a Hunter and a wolf. I dispatched one of them with a swift kick that broke his neck while Olivia ripped out the throat of the other guy. It was a little disturbing to see her with the man’s blood covering her fur, but at least we were both still alive.
When the other two arrived, they had both changed like Olivia. They also moved slower, like animals stalking their prey. The one on the right lunged at me suddenly, but Olivia jumped through the air, knocking it slightly off track. While I was distracted, the second one flew at me. I got my hands up just in time to shove its snout away from my neck, but I dropped the knife in the process. With one hand, I gripped its neck and I fumbled around for the blade with my free hand.
The cold rain had made my fingers numb, making it almost impossible to know if I was touching the blade. It was until it sliced open my palm that I was able to feel it.
The next few seconds were all training and instinct. My hand closed over the blade, and then I swung it around the Were’s back, swiftly plunging it through the heart in one perfectly aimed stab.
I pushed the dead body off me and jumped to my feet, fully prepared to help Olivia. But the fourth body already lay on the ground, back in human form. Olivia had just finished transitioning back into human form and was using her discarded shirt to wipe Were blood from her mouth.
When she caught me staring, she used the shirt to cover her naked body. “Can’t a girl get a moment of privacy?”
“Sorry.” I bent down and scooped up her jeans, tossing them to her before looking away.