Page 22 of Rabid
The shifter in man form is older. His hair is more white than gray, half covering a face that’s battle-scarred, and even in my upside-down perusal, I immediately note that he’s missing an eye. The look of him has my hackles rising, while his one light hazel eye takes me in as though I’m no better than a next meal. The white wolf whines and scratches at the base of my tree, and the man stops beneath me to survey my situation.
“What do we have here, boys?” he grumbles, as though he’s disappointed he didn’t catch something better.
With half-shifted claws, he slashes out at the taut line of the snare holding me hostage, and I immediately begin to drop. The sudden change in my falling weight snaps the branch that my chained wrists were hanging from, and I go crashing to the ground. I hit the unforgiving earth hard, my bones rattling with the collision, my body destined to become a walking, snarling bruise.
I try to flip to my front, the itch of my wolf’s shift just beneath my skin, but the two massive wolves are in my face instantly, growling their threats before I can so much as blink. I cough through the pain, vision swimming as my blood tries to get back to where it belongs in my body. Through the dizziness, I flick my gaze back and forth between the predators, while my wolf tells me to fight. She might have a point. We’re going to die, there’s no doubt about that, but at least we’ll go down with our fangs in someone’s fur.
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll talk yourself down, mutt,” the old man warns with a growl, his one eye narrowed on me, while the empty socket of the other is wrinkled with the lines of an old, mangled wound. “I can smell yer desperation right alongside that fury, but neither will serve you well. Shut that shit down.” Without warning, he reaches down and grabs the chain at my ankles and yanks. Rocks, pine needles, and sticks dig into my back as he starts dragging me away, the wolves walking threateningly on either side of me.
I scream at him to let me go, but I can do nothing to stop him. Not with this battered body. I need sleep and food and water. I need to heal, and then maybe I could go down in a blaze of glory against these three—a proper fight to the death. But right now, I’m no better than the deer carcass the man just drug me past, the scent of its blood clinging to the air.
Stopping, he drops the chains, and my legs fall uselessly to the ground. He stands over me, irritation emanating through him. “Listen here, mutt, I don’t know how you got here, and I don’t care. Yer pack owned now.”
Pack owned.
I stare at him with a mix of fear and hate in my glare, wishing I had the strength to kick his knee from its socket.
If he can sense the vicious want in me, he doesn’t let on. “You got two choices. You come quietly, or we tear you apart now,” he offers, as though either option is just fine with him.
He gestures to a sling-type litter on the ground, made with heavy canvas stretched between two carrying poles. The dead deer is on it, along with a decent-sized pile of hares and pheasant. These shifters have obviously been busy in their hunt. “You can ride on that, or we can keep dragging ya across the ground, but I can’t promise you’ll still have all yer skin by the time we stop,” he tells me. The two wolves watch me like they enjoy the option involving flayed skin and are hoping I choose the hard way.
With shaky arms, exhausted grunts, and heavy effort, I begrudgingly scoot myself right next to the carcasses. Sweat spills down my back, and I pant like I just ran a marathon instead of pushing my sore body onto the fabric that’s stained with animal blood. Once I’m settled, he nods in approval. The white wolf huffs, but both of the shifters slink forward and take position between the poles, teeth biting down on the strap tied between them before they start dragging the litter forward through the forest.
My body bumps and falls, the fabric cinching tighter around me as the pole smacks my face. It’s not the best mode of transportation, especially when a string of dead rabbits fall onto my lap, but it’s marginally better than being dragged on the ground.
The man walks beside me, his good eye cutting over. “Oh, and if yer thinking of running,don’t.You’ll be fair game for claiming if you do.”
My blood runs colder than the dead deer’s.
What the hell does that mean?
Chapter Eight
I’m not sure how the hell it’s possible, but I somehow doze off.
That reprieve is cut short when the litter is abruptly dropped, and I go pitching forward. My bound wrists catch my fall before I faceplant, and I feel the canvas drop flat on the ground, no longer curled around me or the rest of the caught prey.
“What the hell isthat?” The voice isn’t what I’d call feminine, but it’s certainly female.
I look up and sit back on my bare ass, taking in the female standing over me with her hands on her hips, while the one-eyed male who caught me comes up to her side.
The woman looks...well,rough. There’s no softness to her whatsoever. As if she’s spent every single day with bare skin baking beneath the sun or rolling around in the dirt. Her gray hair is pulled back in a harsh tie secured at the base of her neck, and frown lines bracket her downturned mouth. Her clothes are strange, but now that I have a moment, I notice the male is dressed the same way. He’s in a pair of dirt-colored pants, the hems stained all the way up his calves. As if he ran through mud puddles every day for a month and never bothered to change. She’s in the same crude fabric, in a shapeless smock.
“Caught her in a snare,” he says with a shrug.
She cuts him a look. “She best not have tainted the meat, Terris. Get her off of there and go tie her up in the back.”
My eyes widen at thetie her up in the backthreat, but just as I start to scramble backward, her hand shoots out lightning-fast and grips my hair. “Don’t you fucking move,” she growls, and I freeze beneath the sudden presence of her wolf pressing just beneath her skin.
In response, my wolf rises up, fangs popping through my gums, an answering growl ripping from my own throat. I’m not sure how I forgot about them, but a sharp pain appears on my hip as the white wolf from earlier nips at me, pinching the skin in an obvious warning.
My growl tapers off to a grumbling wariness, heated eyes flying between the woman, the two wolves, and the hunter who caught me—Terris.
“We don’t play like that here, girl. You try to flash fang, and we’ll tear into you so fast your head will spin,” she promises. I’m outnumbered and incredibly weakened, so I force my wolf back inside me, and my fangs disappear. With a brutal shove, the woman releases me before hauling up the string of hares and walking off. “Boys, get the deer. Anddon’trip off any of it, or I’ll rip off a piece of you.”
The wolves rush to comply, teeth yanking the heavy carcass forward and leaving a trail in the dirt in its wake. I take the moment to look around, my nude body prickling with the cool air, but what I see makes even more chills scatter over me. This place looks like something right off the horror set forThe Cabin in the Woods. A sagging, dilapidated two-story cabin bears down on me, set between the trees like it shoved its way between them and decided to grow roots.
A crude washing line is erected on the side of the house, full of bloodstained rags that no amount of scrubbing can clean, along with more handmade clothing flapping around in the breeze like hands shooing me away. Somewhere far off, the sound of snarling wolves travels through the woods, making my blood run cold at the ferocity of it.
