Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
He stops and pulls into a parking space carved out into the wall of the mountain. Then he comes around, tapping the side of the truck as if he’s in a very good mood.
He cranks the tailgate down and opens the gate. He lets me out and allows me to scramble from the crate. By now I am in such a state I barely feel like myself. In hours, he’s turned me from one kind of animal to another kind of animal.
“There’s a dozen scent misdirects between where we were and where we are now,” he informs me. “And if you try to get out of this place by yourself, I can guarantee you will be lost in the dark until the end of your days. So stay close, and behave yourself.”
“You live here?”
“I live everywhere,” he says. “And well you know it.”
The years have not been kind to my father. He was always mad and dangerous, but now he is mad and dangerous in a way that has a finality to it. I think he’s doing this because he knows he can’t keep doing it. I think he knows that the world he lives in now is not the same as the one he used to hunt in. There’s surveillance everywhere now. Everyone has phones. You can’t appear and disappear at will. You can’t move from place to place without being recognized. This is his last stand. Corrupting me is how he’ll solidify his legacy.
* * *
Rex
The hunt is coming to its inevitable conclusion. We are on her trail now, and there is no way we will lose it.
We come across a small pack of strays. They scatter as my wolves and I come through the trees, but every single one of them is brought down within moments. Nicky is not here, but I can smell her. Her scent is growing stronger. We are getting closer.
I catch the nearest one and pin him down, my jaws on his throat forcing him to take his human form as he properly submits.
“He’s got her,” the boy says, whining for his life as I barely hold myself back from slaying him on the spot. “He’s taken her to his den and he’s going to feed her the special meat.”
“Can we go one day without a cannibalism scandal?” Percy says. He’s one of my prime hunters, and he’s been on a lot of jobs where wolves have gone a little too wild. For him, this is just another Tuesday.
I slide into my human form. I need information, and interrogations in wolf form are impractical for a whole host of reasons.
This is a battle for my mate’s soul. Her father has her, and he wants to turn her into the same thing he is. A monster. He wants to make her into the version of herself she has feared for a long time. She tried so hard to avoid becoming her wolf self because she thought she wouldn’t be able to control her nature.
And now there is a trail of blood and… I have to get her back. Now.
“Where’s the den?”
“It’s up in the old mines. He has secret paths in there, and some of the trusses are rigged up to blow. I wouldn’t go in there. He will know you’ve come. He’s counting on it.”
“Do you know why? He couldn’t possibly have known that Nicky was going to shift and run into the woods. Nobody knew that.”
The boy coughs. His throat feels raw from my jaws, I am sure. “He knew,” he says. “He started taking us months ago, and then he knew you and she mated, and then he knew that she’d turn and he knew that when she did, she’d run. He’s crazy, but he’s not stupid. He knows a lot of things before they happen.”
“Then we have to draw him out. Take these strays and put them with the others,” I say. “I want all the Runaways taken to the reserve and put under guard.”
* * *
Nicky
My father keeps trying to feed me. I keep rejecting the food.
“It’s tasty,” he says, holding out a strip of dried, salted meat. I remember him preparing his rations back in the day. He’d slice the flesh from the bone, then set it out on a mesh rack in the desert sun with a good helping of salt to preserve it. He used to make a lot of it. I guess that’s one habit that has not changed.
“I’m not hungry,” I tell him.
“You’re going to starve,” he laughs, tossing the dried meat down his gullet.
I watch him and I wonder why I ever thought I would turn out like him. How did I not notice how fundamentally different we are? How little we have in common past the obvious and superficial?
He really had the whole of my mind at one time. I thought he was the world, and I thought he was my destiny. I thought he was everything. Now, in filthy darkness just barely broken by a head lamp swinging slowly from an old rusty nail, I see him for what he is. A freak. A pervert. A weak man who made the worst choices every time he was given the opportunity to choose.