Alpha Domination (Alpha Wolf Book 1) Page 14
“What?”
“Their sport is supernatural. We have to get out of here. They’re werewolf killers, Georgie.”
He grabs my arm and starts tugging me downwind, away from the shots. I stumble after him, my feet like blocks of ice. I can smell Caleb on the air. But not just Caleb. There are at least six other bodies, now. All human as far as I can tell, no odd hint of wolf to their scents.
“We need to go faster, Georgie. The pickup isn’t far from here.”
I can feel tears scraping down my cheeks as the blistering wind stings my eyes. “I’m t-trying,” I chatter, trembling now his body heat isn’t close enough to keep me warm.
His gaze rakes down my numb legs to my snow-caked shoes. “Come here.” He slips his weapon into the back of his jeans and scoops me up, carrying me as fast as he can through the trees. My arms clutch around his neck, my whole body shaking with cold. I whimper how sorry I am, but he brushes the words aside focusing on the path ahead.
“H-How d-do you know the c-car is near?”
“Because I know these woods. After I called an ambulance, I trailed you both here. I’ve been combing the area looking for you for hours, but the snow washed away your scent and the blizzard has made tracking footprints nearly impossible.”
“S-So how did you f-find me?”
“I heard you scream,” he murmurs quietly, his eyes flashing to mine with regret. “My hearing is my better ability.”
A gunshot sounds, snow ricocheting less than a metre from Nathan’s feet. He stops in his tracks and then pivots slowly to face Caleb.
“You’re a greedy bastard, Nathaniel!” Caleb screeches. “You have your own bitch. This one’s mine. Now hand her over and call off your friends.”
“They’re not with me. They’re hunters, Caleb. You brought hunters to my territory, you fucking moron.”
“You’re lying!” Caleb shouts, but his voice trembles and his skin pales.
Nathan lowers me cautiously to my feet, keeping his gaze on Caleb’s gun. “Think about it, Caleb. Why would I lie about that? You’ve already seen them once. Staying here is putting us all in danger. We need to move.”
“Then give me the girl!” he shrieks, his gun wobbling as he points it at us.
Facing him, Nathan raises his hands slowly, the action lifting the hem of his coat so I can see the weapon tucked into the back of his trousers. “You know that isn’t going to happen, Caleb. Cut your losses and leave now. And then maybe I won’t kill you.”
The bastard laughs, the gun shaking even more in his hand. The tension in the air is thicker than the whirling snow. The scent of the hunters is getting stronger. If we stay here, we’ll all die.
“I’m not leaving without her, Nathaniel! She’s my ticket to a new, better pack! Mine! She belongs to me!”
“Nobody is going to belong to anybody when those hunters get here, Caleb. Put the damn gun down.”
I press up close against Nathan’s back, sliding his weapon free from his waistband. I sense him tense as I check the safety in his shadow. Caleb is railing again. He hasn’t noticed that I’ve armed myself, too busy glancing back for the hunters as they close in and shouting at Nathan from what he thinks is a safe distance.
My hands are trembling from the cold when I draw the gun and fire at Caleb around Nathan’s still figure.
Dashing Through The Snow
The bullet pings off a tree behind Caleb. He flinches and glances at it, momentarily distracted.
Nathan pivots, grasping the gun from my hands and firing another shot at Caleb as he shouts for me to run. I can barely feel my legs as I sprint through the snow, Nathan on my heels. Bullets ricochet around us as Caleb gives chase. Nathan is shouting, urging me on, but my limbs are protesting, searing with cold and pain.
I glance back in time to see a dark figure emerge beneath the trees and launch a bullet into Caleb’s chest. A scream leaves my raw throat, prompting Nathan to look as Caleb collapses to the floor, yelling. The figure closes in on him and scarlet matter sprays from his head with the loud crackle of gunfire.
“Keep moving, Georgie!” Nathan roars, threads of panic lacing his tones.
My limbs can’t go any faster, hysterical thoughts racing around my head. Nathan’s warm hand closes around my wrist pulling me on. There are two more figures now. And they’re following us. Silver glints on metal and I know they have weapons. They’re hunters. They’re going to kill us. Fuck. Fuck.
“We just have to get to the pickup.”
Caleb is dead. He’s dead and now we have a worse enemy.
Goosebumps rise on my arms. My skin is crawling. I’m sucking down hysterical breaths as my legs turn to jelly. I need to run. I need to...
Nathan feels the change in my skin under his grasp. “No, Georgie! No!” he shouts.
I’m looking over my shoulder at the black shapes. They’re going to get us. I can’t see their faces, but I know they’re going to get us.
Nathan shakes my wrist, steering me. His eyes are wild on mine. My skin is bubbling. My breath is burning. “Look at me,” he commands. “Look at me. We’re going to get out of here. You cannot change. Understand me? You cannot change!”
My stomach is rolling. I don’t know if I’m going to puke or pass out. The urge to become a wolf is overwhelming. My eyes are streaming and my bones are searing.
Nathan throws his arm back and fires a couple of rounds. There’s a noise that suggests one of them has been hit, but my ears are pounding with the sound of my own blood. I know we’ve changed course. The wind is no longer at our backs, but these attackers are human. They can’t smell us anyway.
I try to say something to Nathan, but it comes out garbled. My vocal cords are already turning. A bullet narrowly misses my thigh. My skin is burning, boiling, bubbling.
Nathan curses.
The skin below his palm is beginning to bristle with the threat of fur. My right knee suddenly buckles with a torn yelp, a shot sailing over my head and missing by a fraction. Nathan stops abruptly and releases some fire of his own. I’m on the floor, in the snow, squealing in pain as my leg jars between forms. I’m fighting with all my power, but I’m losing. The panic is making me.
Nathan quickly reloads his gun. He stuffs it into the back of his waistband and scoops me up, veering to the left of the path we were taking and sprinting with all his might. My vision is blurred, but his face looks collected. The only thing that belies his fear is the sound of his thrumming heart against my ear.
My spine contracts. I choke down a scream. Nathan is hushing me. He’s still running. Running faster than I’ve ever seen anyone run. Everything burns. Then whiteness turns to blackness. The snow is gone.
I’m on some kind of wooden floor. Nathan’s put his gun by my side. Through pain blurred eyes, I can see him closing a door. But the hunters are coming. The hunters are coming. They’re going to kill us.
Vomit rolls upwards in a wave. My eyes and nose stream as I choke, my crushed, distorted throat unable to cope. Nathan is crouched by me, forcing me onto my misshapen knees. He holds back my hair as I gag and suffocate. Concerned gaze and thinned lips is all I can see. His fingers work on my throat until I can release the last vestiges of nausea onto the floor.
I suck air down my scalded windpipe. He’s stroking my hair as I crouch, body spasming uncontrollably. His head is cocked carefully to one side.
“We’re safe, Georgie.”
“But–”
I gag. I can barely talk. My tongue is swollen. My mouth isn’t quite the shape it should be. Each chord in my voice box twangs with a wrong note.
He positions himself so all I can see are his eyes and his calm, reassuring face. “We’re safe here. For the moment.” My gaze shifts to the door and back, cold sweat dripping off my brow. “I need you to take deep breaths. In for ten and then out for ten, okay?”
I nod as best as I can. Breathing is harder than it should be. My diaphragm is skewed and my lips feel twisted.
After a few minute
s, my skin stops burning and the fur melts away. My nose and mouth shift into a more comfortable shape, just in time for the short, sharp yelp that accompanies my leg crunching back to normal. I collapse on my side, panting hard, rivulets of sweat dripping off me.
Nathan strokes my hair. His head is still cocked slightly to a side. He seems to be listening. The only thing I can hear is my heartbeat.
My gaze moves around the room. There’s a desk and a chair with some binoculars on. I realise, blearily, that we’re in one of the Conservation Centre’s camouflaged hides for observation.
“Sorry,” I whisper, my throat and voice raw.
Nathan kisses my forehead and continues to stroke my hair, listening carefully for whatever’s happening outside. My hand finds his knee and I squeeze gently. I need him to know how grateful I am.
“I killed one and injured the other, but I can’t hear anyone coming. It’s hard to tell how many there were,” Nathan murmurs.
“Six,” I growl through the ache in my throat. “I smelled six.”
He glances at me with measured surprise. “That leaves us four able bodied, then.” He pushes a strand of hair back from my face. “We’re going to need to move sooner rather than later. How are you doing?”
“Sore,” I whisper. “I didn’t mean to panic and put you in danger.”
“It’s okay, dahlin. It’s been a pretty intense day. Here.” He hands me his thick parka and peels his leather jacket from my shoulders. His gaze drops to the torn fabric of my blouse, but he doesn’t say anything as I zip the coat up over it. The material is puffy and warm, almost glowing with his residual body heat. “Better?”
I nod.
“Good. Now, we’re going to have to make a run for it.” My eyes light up with fear, but Nathan’s voice remains calm and collected. He must be frightened, too, but he’s keeping cool like this for me. Maybe that’s part of what makes him an alpha; his ability to keep his head in stressful situations. “Odds are, the longer we stay here, the more likely they are to find us. This place might be camouflaged from the outside with all this snow, but we’re sitting ducks.”
My heart starts to pound again.
“Do you think you can do this?”
“It’s not like we have a choice.”
His mouth forms a grim line. “No, we don’t, but I need you to keep your head. I probably wouldn’t be able to shake them a second time.”
“Okay,” I answer, unsteadily.
He helps me to my feet in the dark. Pale light washes through the hide window, silhouetting his figure. Tension unfolds in my chest. I want to put my arms around him and bury my face into his chest until the night fades around us.
“Ready?”
I nod, even though I’m far from ready for this. He inches the door open, listening carefully. The draft brings with it scents of the woods. I close my eyes and sniff. The hunters are still out there, but they’re not close by. I relay the information to Nathan in whispers and he nods.
We creep from the hide like mice. The wind and snow sting my face and cheeks, but the parka manages to keep me warm. Nathan motions the direction we need to head in and we sprint in silence until we reach his abandoned pickup. Relief flares in my chest, but it can’t be this easy.
Something crackles faintly in the tree line. Nathan stiffens, momentarily. Then he lobs his car keys to me and tells me to get in. I climb in the passenger’s side without thinking, still expecting a European drive, as Nathan pivots, bringing up his gun. I can’t see who he fires at, but I hear him discharge two rounds before he leaps into the truck.
A dark shape reaches the treeline in the same moment that the engine roars to life. A sharp scream punctures the air, torn from my throat. Glass shatters in from the driver’s side window. The hunter is firing. Nathan shoots back, twisting the steering wheel and ramming us into reverse at the same time. I see the hunter go down, clutching his left leg, as we speed off.
The pickup bucks and jolts as we thunder through the woodland. The wind burns, whipping through the broken window. My hands are shaking and I’m concentrating on breathing so I don’t change there in the car. Nathan spins the wheel. The tyres complain as we whirl out onto a snow laden track.
“Are you okay?!” he yells above the sound of wind and road. I pant, my breath trembling. “Georgie?!” he shouts again, snatching a wild glance at me.
There’s blood above his eye, dripping down his brow.
My lip quivers. “Nathan, you’re hurt?”
“It just clipped me,” he dismisses.
I swallow down the urge to throw up. The cut is deep, maybe an inch above his left eye. The bullet has more than grazed him, but at least it’s a graze. At that height, a few inches back and it would have passed straight through his skull. I grip the edge of my seat, trying to stop my hands from shaking.
“Georgie? Are you okay? Georgie?!”
“Y-Yes,” I finally answer, my tongue unsticking from the roof of my mouth. “They nearly killed you, Nathan.”
“It’s fine.”
“But–”
“I’ve had worse than this, believe me.”
I bite my lip. I don’t want to think about anything worse than this. It’s terrifying enough to consider he might have died in front of me mere moments ago.
“We’re going to head into town,” he says, loudly and calmly over the screaming wind that’s tearing into the pickup through his smashed window. “We’ll drive around a bit. Do a couple of passes. We need to make it as difficult as possible for them to track us. Okay?”
I nod numbly.
“Okay.”
Black Dog
Nathan leans against the desk. The receptionist glances up and clocks the blood smearing his forehead. Her lips part, but Nathan cuts across her, his smooth voice still calm and collected.
“I’m looking for Hattie Kennedy. She was brought in by an ambulance?”
The receptionist glances at me. I know I’m as white as a ghost and still trembling, huddled in Nathan’s too big parka. Her eyes move to the top of my head where my hair is stuck up awkwardly thanks to the dried blood clagging my scalp. I can feel bags twitching under my eyes.
It’s late morning and he’s been driving us around all night.
“It’s an emergency,” Nathan persists. “I need to know she’s alright.”
The woman clears her throat and taps away on the system. “Are you a family member?”
“Her brother-in-law. I’m her next of kin.”
The receptionist looks at him again and then hesitantly reels off directions. Nathan clasps my hand in his and pulls me towards the stairwell. We head up to the ward. I’m already out of breath when Nathan finally slows, his pace eerily silent on the tiled floor.
I can see a bunch of police beyond the glass door to the ward. They’re gathered around the foot of a bed, speaking to a doctor. My heartbeat quickens.
The patient they’re discussing is Hattie.
Her skin is almost as pale as the bedsheets, but that’s a better colour than she was before. Monitors bleep, recording her condition.
I press up against Nathan, my hand curling around his wrist so our pulses beat together. He rocks on his heel, as if he’s going to back off and turn the other way. “She looks better than she did,” I murmur.
He nods slowly and then his tongue unsticks. “You should stay out here. I’ll go handle the cops.”
“Okay,” I mumble, too tired to argue. “I’ll clean myself up in the bathroom.”
He half turns to look at me, his gaze washing down and then back up as if he hadn’t realised how shitty I must look. “Yeah, okay,” he murmurs.
He catches my wrist as I’m about to move. His head tilts slightly and I think, for a moment, he’s about to kiss me, but then he closes his mouth and releases his grip.
He moves through the doors and I disappear to the nearest bathroom. Minutes later, I’m running the water and washing my hands when I look up and see exactly what the receptionist saw.
A deep breath rattles down into my lungs.
I snag some paper towels from the dispenser and start cleaning up my face. Pulling the visible bits of congealed mess out of my hair is much harder. It’s also more painful, but after it’s done, I feel a little better even though some of the matting is left behind. I try to finger comb my tresses. It’s not a success, but it stops me from looking like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. Now I just look like I could be a patient’s distressed relative.
I examine my reflection. My appearance is less wild, apart from my eyes. There’s something there that looks more feral than before. It’s like I’m seeing myself for the first time.
Everything is slightly different.
The woman that woke up, terrified, in Nathan’s basement, doesn’t exist any more. She’s evolved. She’s finally the strong woman she always thought she could be. The woman her aunt said she was.
My fingers brush my lips and I close my eyes.
He kissed me when he found me. He kissed me like he thought he’d never see me again. But what does that mean? Am I reading too much into this? How does he feel?
My fingers clasp around the edge of the sink. The wildness and fire have ebbed from my eyes, replaced by uncertainty and sadness. How am I supposed to find out the way he feels about me?
I take a deep breath. Tonight is my last night with him before he sends me away. That’s when reality will really crash down around my ears. Then I’ll have to work out how to live as a normal person with this condition. How to live without him...
I shake myself. There’s no use dwelling on it.
The corridor is empty when I re-enter it. Through the glass, I can see that both the doctor and police have left the foot of Hattie’s bed.
And Nathan isn’t there either.