Page 69 of Oakheart

Handle what?

But before I could actually ask, he was loping off into the woods, looking angry and determined. I didn’t want to get between Viktor and his goals, so I just shrugged and headed back toward the truck.

I got bored after three minutes, though, and wandered over to the bare concrete. At where Giselle had died. I still wasn’t sorry. Didn’t miss her, or the idea of her. Instead, I wondered how a soul became so blackened, so monstrous, that they were willing to hurt children, murder people, burn houses down, and all in the name of what? Of Grant?

Grant was a worthless person, and a worthless leader.

“Well, well, well,” came a snide voice from behind me that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I spun around to find Marcus behind me, and bared my teeth at him. Marcus, I would be happy to kill, right up close and personal. He was with Dave, who was another thorn in my side, and loyal lackey to Grant.

I’d have said the only person missing was Grant, except that they’d actually left the house with other guys that afternoon, so a bunch of people were missing.

I was out of patience for it all, and rolled my eyes at him. “Grant not here for you to lick his boots?”

Marcus snarled and launched himself at me. It was a poorly conceived attack, coming at me with all his weight thrown forward, too much momentum to stop, and all I had to do wasside-step the attack. Well, and throw out an arm at about throat height for him to run into.

There was an audible crack when he hit, with enough force that my arm was actually pulled backward, and I wondered if that was it. If he’d snapped his neck on my bicep. I looked down at him, and he was clutching at his neck, eyes wide, opening and closing his mouth like he was trying to... to what? To breathe? Could he not?

He clutched his throat, his claws coming out and then retracting repeatedly, like he couldn’t control them. He didn’t seem to be healing, certainly not with any speed.

“You fucking killed Marcus!” Dave wailed as I stood there staring at the writhing man in confusion.

That transferred my confusion to Dave. Could he not see his friend was still alive? Also...“He attacked me. You think I should have stood here to be gutted?”

Dave started toward me, but his eyes darted to a spot on my shoulder.

No, something behind me.

Too late, I realized that he was looking at someone behind me. I felt claws rip into my side and around to my front as a triumphant Grant came around me, claws out, and shoved his hand into my unprotected belly. “Shouldn’t have ever gotten you and your whore mother to come back from Russia. Should have left you to die.” He grinned. “But that’s okay. We can always correct our mistakes. Who gives a fuck what happens to the pack when I die? They don’t need an heir.”

Dave came up next to us, and I thought he would also attack, but instead, he looked down at Marcus, still writhing and arching up.

Distantly, I realized as I collapsed to my knees beside him, that Marcus wasn’t breathing.

He’d collapsed his own trachea on my arm. Shouldn’t that have healed? How badly did he have to have hurt himself that he wasn’t better already? I looked down at him, holding my guts in with one hand, the whole world going strange and quiet around me in the waning twilight.

He was terrified. He couldn’t breathe, and he’d never experienced helplessness before. He’d inflicted it on others for as long as I’d known him, but finally, he understood how it felt himself, and there was a little bit of vicious satisfaction in me for that.

He died there.

Just like that.

Not gasping for breath, because he couldn’t even gasp. The fear in his eyes unfocused, and his whole body slowly went slack. Dave had been right, as it turned out. I had killed Marcus. Not really on purpose, and with one of the most rudimentary bits of fighting that Viktor had taught me.

But he’d taught me those things to fight Grant.

Not to die by Grant’s hand without so much as a fist thrown.

A dark gray form I’d have recognized anywhere came bounding out of the woods—Viktor, as a wolf. He rushed to me, whining and licking my face, then nosing at the wound in my side.

Not fatal, I didn’t think.

Probably not fatal.

I suspected Grant had meant it to be. Maybe he thought I’d lie there in the dirt and bleed out. Die by inches, like Marcus.

Marcus... where had Marcus gone? It was darker than last I’d noticed.

Fuck.WasI dying? Losing time couldn’t be a good sign.