Page 1 of Hunted

1

River

“WHERE THE FANGED HELL ARE THEY?” I growled, glaring across an overgrown cornfield out in the middle of nowhere, North Texas that practically screamed dispose of your dead bodies here.

Dry corn leaves chafed and rasped in a constant symphony, husks whispering in the relentless Panhandle wind. Despite it being early October, the night could barely be called cool, our fall days still bearing the relentless heat that scorched the Lone Star State for six months out of every year. A vast blanket of stars stretched out across the endless Texas prairie. An ominous full moon burned in the sky overhead, making up for the lack of any man-made light. As I watched, a thin line of clouds obscured the moon, casting the field in partial shadow.

“Give them another five minutes.” My uncle, Guillermo Montemayor, scrolled through his phone wearing a bored expression. You’d think we weren’t about to meet with the leaders of the Vampire Nation. Or that there hadn’t been multiple attempts on his life in the last week.

“They’re five minutes late already. The last team we sent in that missed a rendezvous by that margin showed up in body bags. I’m calling it.”

This earned me a raised eyebrow. Okay, so sometimes I forgot he was still my Alpha and not just the eccentric uncle who liked fast, expensive cars, Italian shoes and kicking my ass at Fortnite on a regular basis (the bastard.) Guillermo was one of the most powerful shapeshifters in North America. He had an unparalleled gift for projection and had ruled the Southern Territorial Council, which governed werewolves across most of the southern United States, for the past three decades. He also commanded the Tracers, the elite military unit of shifters based out of Dallas, Texas. The Tracers were well-funded, ruthlessly trained in everything from black ops to SWAT and rescue operations, and most of us were recruited because we possessed paranormal abilities beyond that of the general werewolf population. The ability to manipulate moon magic fell along a spectrum. Most werewolves could draw enough energy to shift from their human skin to their wolf form and back. But a few had special gifts. There was no one other than my mother who could rival Guillermo’s projectionist abilities, combat magic capable of controlling and neutralizing dozens of minds at once during a battle.

Or at least, that had been true up until a year ago when a black ops military team had infiltrated the Tracer compound in Dallas, releasing an aerosol agent into the ventilation system called Blackout. It was designed to neutralize the effects of the lycan virus, preventing werewolves from accessing moon magic so that they couldn’t shift. This chemical agent went one step beyond others that had come before it though and targeted the Tracer military.

I’d been recruited to train as a neural manipulator with the Tracers four years ago at the age of nineteen. Neural manipulators stripped and rewrote memories from our targets. Before werewolves came out to the world, our primary purpose on teams was to clean up incidents every full moon where rogue wolves had attacked humans and forcibly changed them by infecting them with the lycan virus. We altered the memories of their family members while the rest of the team provided resources for the newly infected shifter and erased all evidence a supernatural attack had ever taken place.

I’d hoped upon entering Tracer boot camp that I would finally have answers, would finally find more people like me. But even among the other neural manipulators in my training class, I’d been an anomaly. All neural manipulators could strip memories, read the threads of a person’s conscious thoughts and rewrite new permanent memories to take their place. Since the age of twelve, I’d been able to hear the thoughts of everyone around me, the constant stream of voices shouting in my head something I could neither turn off nor keep out. At least not without great concentration.

Since the Tracers specifically sought out those of us with talents, the Blackout attack had greatly impacted operational readiness.

“You put me in charge of security,” I said flatly. “So either you let me lead your security detail or you get someone else. I won’t be responsible for some black ops team taking you out because you refused to follow protocols.”

Guillermo pinched the bridge of his nose. “We need this meeting to happen, River. You know this.”

“I don’t trust those fracking leeches.”

“You trusted a vampire to jump us here,” he pointed out.

“And I didn’t have to like it. You know that old saying that nothing good ever happens after midnight? That goes double when you’re dealing with the undead.”

“I don’t like this any more than you do. But we’re out of options.”

Things hadn’t always been contentious between humans, fang-heads and shifters. Up until five years ago, humans hadn’t even known we existed, not until an ill-timed traffic stop involving a vampire named Vlad had revealed the existence of supernatural beings to our human friends. Up until that point, those of the non-paranormal persuasion had been mostly happy to read Twilight anddebate whether it was sexier to have your neck sucked by a broody vampire or get cozy with a hot protector wolf who couldn’t keep his hands off you.

My hometown of Blood Moon, Texas was located two hours outside of Austin up in the Texas Hill Country. Ask anyone about Blood Moon and they’d probably tell you we had the best Whataburger in the state and that five years ago, we became the epicenter of the worldwide freakout over vampires due to the fact that we were only ten miles from the infamous exit sign where Vlad’s traffic stop had taken place.

Humanity was pretty much divided into two camps. The online fan girls and fan guys flocked to places like Blood Moon where they hoped to meet their very own Edward Cullen or Jacob Black and share that infamous plate of mushroom ravioli. Our tourism skyrocketed, with our quirky little Texas town rebranding itself to sponsor zombie-themed corn mazes at Halloween, a walking spooky history tour every fall, and generally all things ghoulish.

Everyone else expectedly lost their shit. Werewolves had been living amongst humans ever since the Yukon Gold Rush. We liked posting TikToks of our lame dance moves, complaining about barking dogs and who left their trash cans out on NextDoor. Our weekends were spent having backyard barbecues with our families where arguments broke out over who took the last hot dog and who put too much paprika on the potato salad. In the words of my brother West, the biggest reason to loathe werewolves is that we tended to cause the local barbecue pit to sell out of ribs and brisket whenever the Texas Longhorns were playing (which okay, that one was fair.) But suddenly the hardware stores were sold out of deadbolts and door hardening equipment. Everyone was ordering silver bullets and buying out garlic at the local H-E-B grocery. Incidentally, this did nothing to deter those of the fanged persuasion, who loved nothing better than to storm an Olive Garden after dark and carb out on chicken parmesan and bottomless breadstick baskets with the best of them.

Vamps had only two weaknesses. They were horribly susceptible to sunlight and they had an inconvenient need for O-Neg once a month, which led to many of them preying upon vulnerable humans and shifters alike, hence the war we’d been locked in for centuries.

But the dynamic had shifted in the past year with the election of a new president who was pushing extreme anti-paranormal policies and legislation. Among the most restrictive was mandatory blood testing at state and federal workplaces, and moving National Guard units into urban areas in response to what mayors claimed was werewolf and vampire-led riots and bombings.

The human government wanted to exterminate us like rats that happened to howl at the full moon. Now the only question was, could we actually trust the Vampire Nation not to do the same?

“You’ve got two minutes,” I snarled at my uncle. “And then I’m calling this cluster of an idea and we’re doing this over fracking Zoom. Which we should have done in the first place.”

“Eloquent as always. And for the record, August believed video conferencing posed a security risk to the locations of the coven compounds. They’ve had grave losses over the past week.”

“We have to find out how they’re being targeted.” But I didn’t argue. At twenty-four, my brother August was a year older than me and had just graduated from the University of Texas with an engineering degree. He worked remotely for a major tech firm based in Austin, plus managed cybersecurity for the Blood Moon pack. There was no one I trusted more than my brother when it came to tech and cybersecurity issues.

“I’m trying to keep you alive.” I scanned the cornfield.

Guillermo frowned off towards the interstate five miles north of where we were.

Anything? he asked me silently, the question slipping into my mind as easily as if he’d spoken it aloud. For Guillermo, who was Alpha over all the wolves in this part of North America, having to ask me if there was anyone in the area when before he’d been able to effortlessly sense and project into other minds had to grate. His ability to shapeshift had slowly returned after the Blackout exposure. But his projectionist abilities had not. No one was sure if they ever would.