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I growled at him as I pushed myself forward, using all the strength I could muster. The plan was to collide with him and make him drop with me to the floor. Then I would find a way to terminate him on the ground. But as I growled and jumped athim, I heard his gun go off. A burst of rounds came from it and buried themselves into my chest.
I fell to the ground, barely feeling the impact of my back against the dirt. I did feel a warmth spread across my chest, and then it was all quiet.
Chapter sixteen (Hayley)
I snapped at one of the human hunter’s necks as Luke fell to the ground. A heaviness came upon me, and for a moment, all that made sense with the world paused. It felt like with him falling to the ground and probably to his death, nothing about the world made sense anymore, and this was the end. I jumped at the hunter that had shot at him.
He moved his gun to direct it at me, but I was faster than him. He took a shot, but I moved out of the way and dragged him with me to the ground. He landed on his back while I fell right on top of him. He never got the chance to recover and come for me again. I buried my claw into his face and felt it break through his jaw. Anger flooded me as I squeezed his head and heard it squish and then pop in my hand. I was getting very good at this killing thing, and that disturbed me, but there was no time to contemplate the kind of person I was becoming.
Luke was dying.
I jumped away from the man and looked around me, waiting for another person to attack, but that was all of them. I knelt next to Luke and saw the blood dripping from his chest and spreading on his clothes. I have to get the bullets out. I could still hear his heart beating, but it was slow. Very slow, and it was straining. He was going to survive. I have to get the bullets out that were putting that much strain on his lungs and heart.
We were stuck in the middle of the forest with knives, backpacks, and just water and food. Even if I had the chance to do a quicksurgery on him, I lacked the technical know-how. There was only one option. I would have to use my claws to get the bullets out of his chest.
Without time to contemplate, I tore his clothes, exposing the pulsating bullet wound on his chest. He had a string on his neck that I overlooked before, and it was attached to some pendant that was stuck to his back. I wanted to pull the pendant around to see what it was, but there wasn’t time for that. I focused on the wound instead. Three bullet wounds. Two at close proximity and one at his side. The first two are the ones I am going to have to remove. The last one at his side and the one in his shoulder he got earlier aren’t lethal, and he would survive with them inside of him. I would get back to them when I could find us a place to hide out and for him to heal.
I extended my claws and used them to cut the first wound, making it larger and more blood to spurt out. I extended them some more until the claw on my thumb hit the first bullet. I sighed as I picked it up with the claws on my thumb and index finger, looking at Luke. His eyes were closed, and he looked so calm. He looked like he was just asleep. The bullet was safely lodged in my fingers and I pulled it out and threw it down. That was the first one gone. His lungs would heal faster now, and he would be able to breathe better. Now for the one lodged against his heart, I knew I had to be more careful.
I made a bigger incision, and it had gone deeper than I had expected it to. My claws weren’t going to get to it, no matter how long I extended them. The only thing I could do now was reach into his chest with my fist. I took a deep breath before I did that. He would most likely heal without a scar and fast, though, but if he doesn’t get enough rest, the healing process will slow up. What should take hours will take days.
It was barely believable that hours ago, he had wound a rope around me and had told me he would deliver me to Viper. Ideally, I should let him die here, alone in the woods and with the rest of them, but I couldn’t do that. There was something different about him, something that made my heart beat faster and my loins stir. He’s not going to die on my watch.
I stuck my fingers into his chest and moved my hands about in the squishiness of his flesh. My finger touched the bullet, and I let my claws do the rest of the job. I searched some more and wrapped my claws around the bullet before pulling it out.
A gentle sigh came out of him, and I fell to the ground, looking up at the stars, exhausted. I wanted to lay down there and go to sleep, but more hunters, humans, and werewolves might still be out there, and they will come for us.
We all knew the game had changed. The human hunters came for the two of us, but they seemed more focused on Luke. I was sure Viper hired them. He was cleaning up, by the looks of it.
Luke had asked me earlier why I killed James, and I didn’t tell him. I wanted to know if Viper would be involved in the crime ring himself; now, I saw that he was.
There was something that had been eating at me for a while now. James had put me in charge when he sent us to the reservation to get Luke and the other werewolves out, which meant he was also grooming me to take over sometime later. If he did that, would I have also taken over the criminal ring and trafficked kids? He would have known I wouldn’t agree to that, and I would have brought the council down if I had learned of that. Then he must have had another plan in mind.
Maybe he wanted to pull out before handing it over to Viper or me. That was the easiest conclusion to come to, but a more insidious one made my stomach turn.
James was grooming two alphas. One to handle the dirty business and the other to handle the people. I was the latter, and Viper was the former. If that had happened, it would have only been a matter of time before I found out about the other business. Viper wasn’t very good at keeping his mouth shut, and he would have bragged to me about it. It was still hard to see James in the light of someone terrible, and I knew I was just grappling at straws, trying to justify what he did, but that was the only option left for me.
James was a messiah to me. The last memory of him that keeps playing in my head wasn’t the one where he came to save me from the streets. It was the one where he shook hands with people who I saw as the devil. People who bought and sold kids. It was hard to live with that.
I pushed myself up and looked around, noticing that our bags were just a couple of feet from me. I walked to it, picked up the two, and removed the bottles of water in them and also the little food that I could carry. I stuck them in my pocket, took a drink of water, and walked back to Luke. I opened his mouth and forced him to drink some water as it would help him heal faster. He needs food too, but I would have to figure out a way to get that into his body later.
I removed the vial he gave me earlier on from his pocket, turned it over in my hand, and decided it might help. It enhanced every ability I have, so it might enhance healing too. The downside to that, however, is that I would have to cut him again when I had to remove the remaining bullet in his body. A small price to pay.I lifted his head up slightly, and the string came into focus again. I ignored it for now and focused on getting some of the contents of the vial into his mouth. When I was done, I took some myself and swallowed it.
I would need to carry him and needed as much strength as I could garner.
I knelt by his side again and pulled at the string behind him, hoping it held an address to a place we could hide out for him to get better. But it didn’t hold any address. It held an explanation as to why I had been feeling the way I had been feeling around him since I first saw him. The reason why he came for me, even though it was a foolish thing to get himself involved in pack business.
On the end of the string was the other half of the moon pendant I had on myself. He was the person my mother asked me to look for when she handed me the pendant all those years ago. I fell back as the sudden realization hit me, and my knees couldn’t hold me. I felt cold and weak.
***
It was easy getting a place to stay. I considered walking back to the reservation and returning Luke to his lone wolf friends, but it was a long walk back, and then I would have to repeat the journey, getting away from town. Luckily for me, after walking back a couple of miles, I came across a bothy on the far end of the plain meadow. I didn’t see it earlier because I was focused on running, but with Luke on my back, there wasn’t much running going on. I was listening and smelling the air for any invader and was soon hit with the smell of dry logs and followed it,hoping to find a cabin and praying it was abandoned but came across a bothy instead. It wasn’t much compared to a cabin, but it had a door and a bed, which surprisingly looked clean. Even if it weren’t, we couldn’t be picky. I let Luke down on the bed and got him comfortable. I had cleaned the blood off his chest with his clothes, now he was shirtless, and the pendant settled on his chest gently. I watched it for a while before kneeling and removing my own from my neck. Mine was attached to a chain, but his was attached to a string. It didn’t really matter much. It was the pendant that was the most important thing of it all. I examined the two of them, and I was right. They made each other whole.
Are we supposed to make each other whole that way too? I looked at him, and a wave of sadness hit me. I needed him to wake up because I needed to talk to him. I couldn’t believe I had been searching for him all these years, and he had just been a few miles from me. It was chilling to think about.
When it became obvious he wouldn’t be waking anytime soon, I gathered some wood and made a fire for the night. I knew it was risky, but I didn’t think any hunters would be coming for a while now. We had decimated a number of them, and they would need to take time to recuperate. Werewolves were mostly irrational, and they could get overwhelmed by their emotions easily, but they had a human part, too, and it was intensely analytic. They would know I wasn’t a mere wolf to be trifled with and would make better plans to come at me. Some of them might even start to assume that Luke was working with me.
I went to sleep too but didn’t sleep deeply as I kept my ears to the ground, picking up any tiny sound or difference in the air pressure. It wasn’t the best sleep I had ever gotten, but it would do. It would have to do for now. I woke up early in the morningand added some more wood to the fire. It had dewed overnight, and it was even colder that morning. After I built up the fire, I went to check on Luke. He looked better, the color was returning to his face, and I knew it was just a matter of time before he woke up. When he does, he shouldn’t eat dried bread and water or those canned beans in my bag. We needed something better. I would have to go hunt, but I didn’t want to leave him all by himself. I didn’t think anyone would come for him, but I wanted to be here when he woke up.
