Authors: Marcy Jacks
Tags: #none
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overnight, and Phillip was only more than happy to accommodate her wish of eradicating every hunter who would dare to harm her baby if ever given the chance.
Phillip’s pack was well hidden, but even when the hunters passed through the town to search for easier pickings, Nick had still been sent after them.
Now they were dead, and he was back.
“I’m just looking forward to a shower,” Nick said. He heard the clinking of glasses and ice, then the slosh of water, before Phillip’s footsteps approached him.
Nick lifted his hand to accept the offered glass and sniffed the contents. Definitely water. The glass was cold against his fingers. He drank eagerly.
“I know, and I won’t keep you, but I’ve got one more mission to
send you on.
Nick released a satisfied sigh when he pulled the glass away from his lips. “All right, shoot.”
“James tells me that he’s been having some problems with hunters lately. Apparently, someone gave away their location not too long ago, so they’ve been swarming his pack like hornets.”
“Could that be why the hunters I took out were in the area?”
“Possibly,” Phillip said. “It could also be that the hunters who all knew about his pack location are all dead, and that’s why those hunters I sent you after moved on out of the area. They came to take a look, found nothing, and left.”
“That still leaves the problem of hunters coming here and sniffing around if there are rumors in their mills of a pack near Brampton.”
“And James DeWitt’s pack isn’t the only pack near Brampton,” Phillip said, his voice giving Nick the idea to how much the thought of more hunters coming and tracking around the area displeased him and his mate.
“What did he ask from you?” Nick asked, getting to the point and
wanting to know exactly what his new mission would be.
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“He’s trying to get his alphas more organized. A couple of them have taken on mates of their own recently, and one of his omegas even mated with a human.”
“Okay,” Nick said, still waiting to find out what this had to do
with him.
“You’ve met him already, the last time he came to pay his respects. He knows about your blindness, and he’s pretty impressed with your kill rate despite that.”
“I’m a werewolf. Anyone in his pack could hunt like I do if they’d dedicate themselves.”
“Well, that’s what he’s asking you to do. He wants to know if he can borrow you for a couple of weeks so you can give his alphas some pointers on the way you hunt down the hunters. I swear, sometimes you can sniff them out before they even reveal themselves to be hunters.”
That was just because he could smell the gun powder and metal from all their weapons hiding under the scent of all that leather and cologne they always doused themselves with to throw off any sniffing wolves.
What he did was nothing special, but his pack leader was asking him to do this, so he would. “When would you like me to leave?”
“As soon as you’ve packed. James put in the request a couple of days ago, and I told him I’d run it by you when you came back from your hunt.”
Nick tried to put together how much time he would need in his head. There was the shower, packing, getting transportation ready, and he was definitely taking a nap before he left…
“Nick?”
“Yes?”
Phillip hesitated, and Nick didn’t like the slight bit of anxiety he scented coming from the man’s pores. That wasn’t exactly a normal thing for a leading alpha.
“Ever since James came here those months ago…didn’t you
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recognize him?”
Had they ever met before? “No. Why?”
Maybe the man was someone he’d met briefly and forgot about
from when he still had his sight. It had been a good ten years—so long already—since his vision clicked off for good, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’d met up with someone he’d been vaguely acquainted with back when he could still see and not recognized them at all.
He’d thought those days were long behind him by now. “Who is he?”
“I’m only bringing this up because I remember how you were back when you split with him, and I didn’t want you to go over there unprepared.”
“Okay, what?”
His ears picked up the wet sound of Phillip’s tongue rubbing against his teeth. “James is Adam Trenton’s pack alpha,”
And just like that, Nick felt the strange sensation of the floor vanishing beneath his feet. Somehow, he’d managed to keep his footing.
Adam Trenton, Nick’s teenage sweetheart ten years ago, the boy he’d sworn to himself was his mate, who he’d dumped after finding out he was going blind.
Nick hadn’t seen him since that day he’d walked away, leaving Adam begging for an explanation because of how cruelly Nick had destroyed his fragile heart.
First loves were always a bitch.
The last image of Adam that Nick had seen before he’d left, before losing his sight forever, was of his crumpled, defeated face, tears spilling from his red eyes.
And Nick had just agreed to go over to his pack and tutor him and his other pack mates about hunting.
“Fuck.”
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Chapter Two
Adam didn’t understand the eager atmosphere that was floating around the pack. He didn’t like the thought of some guy he didn’t know coming in and telling him what a horrible job he was doing as one of the protectors of his pack.
He would never say it out loud, but the thought that James didn’t have the kind of faith in them that Adam had in himself and his own
hunting abilities was a downer.
Adam didn’t like questioning himself or his skills, and yet everyone walking around couldn’t seem to wait to meet this skilled alpha that Phillip was sending over.
It didn’t matter that hunters had been swarming around for the last three months, or that they really could use the extra help. Adam was in no mood to be logical about it, so when he was put on rotation to prowl around the outskirts of the land, he gladly went for it.
He needed time to sulk by himself anyway.
Without intending to, he wound up in Deacon’s old land. Ever since the guy had been killed, his final resting place being that pond he was always fighting with James over, the place had been deserted. Deacon’s pack had already left him, but now there was no alpha to oversee the land or to bring in new wolves. The grass grew high, and the small trailers and cottages were so dark and lacking any kind of life that, in a strange way, they reminded Adam of graves.
He’d never been here before, and couldn’t help his curiosity. Werewolves weren’t like vampires. They were hardly known for their riches, and even though James’s land and the cottages on it were nothing to write home about before Isaac showed up with all of his
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money, this place was downright depressing.
Adam wondered if it had been so lifeless before the end of
Deacon’s reign as well.
Most likely. That guy had been known for being a manipulative prick.
Adam stepped farther into the long grass, not knowing what he was searching for, when something tickled him inside of his nose, and he stopped.
There were humans in the area. They had guns.
Adam stiffly turned, ready to wolf it out of there. If they hadn’t seen him transform, then the fact that he was walking around naked would be a dead giveaway to what he was.
And he’d been the idiot to come off the trail he was supposed to
be guarding.
A sharp something grabbed him by the ankle. He screamed and went down, pain shooting up his leg. He reached down to grab at whatever it was, and then had to take a look at the damage when he felt metal under his fingertips.
It was a Goddamn bear trap! Those mother fucking—
A celebratory hoot sounded in the air, and Adam heard the laughter of the hunters as they came out of their hiding place, their boots crunching down on dry grass.
“Got ’im, boys! Let’s go pick him up,” the hunter who must have been their leader said.
Shit! Shit, shit, shit!
Adam rolled, trying to disappear into the tall grass, but the bear trap on his ankle tugged, and he released another small shout at the jolt of hot fire that licked his wound.
They’d bolted the trap into the ground with a chain. Adam was never getting it out and hiding before they came onto him.
And he didn’t.
The hunters, all of them wearing the kind of traditional hunting gear that suggested they were out hunting ducks or deer or something,
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pushed the tall grass out of the way and stared down at him with wide
smiles on their faces.
One would have thought they really had bagged a deer instead of
humanoid creature.
There were three of them, and hillbillies the lot of them from the
sound of their accent.
“Got you good, did we, boy?” said their eldest, their leader, with a gleam in his eyes. He took his cap off and rubbed his hand through his short silver hair. “Good thing, too. Hot as shit outside.”
“We gonna skin ’im now, pa?” asked their youngest. Christ, the kid barely looked twenty, if he was even that old.
“Not yet, son. See, we have to wait a bit. Make him change first, and then we can skin him and sell his pelt.”
That didn’t sound like the self-righteous anger that usually came
with hunters.
These three were thrill seekers, nothing else.
Fantastic.
“They run out of wild boar, or whatever the hell it is you hunt down in the South, that you fucking hicks have to come up here with bear traps?” Adam said.
The other young man, who looked like he was maybe twenty-five, came down on Adam hard with the butt of his riffle, and Adam saw
stars.
“You shut your mouth, wolf!” he snapped. “We know how dangerous your kind is.”
“Don’t lose your temper now, Jimmy,” said their father. “Lose your temper, and you lose your control to him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tommy, you keep your rifle on him now. His leg is out, but his
hands are still free.”
The youngest boy did as his father told him and pointed his smaller rifle at Adam’s face, cocking his weapon for effect. An empty shell flew out of the side of the barrel. “If you try anything while my
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pa and brother are putting you in the truck, I’ll blow your head off,
mister.”
Adam had to find a way to get out of here. If they put him inside any vehicle of theirs, then he would never been seen alive again. Or seen, for that matter. His body would vanish, and no one would ever find his corpse.
He had to wait for them to get the bear trap off his ankle. They could do whatever they wanted to him until then, but he needed the chain and the trap removed, otherwise he stood no chance.
He nodded to the boy, agreeing to be docile.
“Go get the rope, Jimmy,” said their father. Jimmy rushed off to do as he was told.
These kids must have been boy scouts when they were younger, he thought five minutes later as his hands were tied behind his back and another small rope was shoved between his teeth and tied tightly behind his head.
Just for the extra strength, the father came back with another rope
and tied his arms with them, too.
“Go round and round, and when you think you’re done, do it
another ten times.”
Jesus Christ.
The father left Adam to the care of his boys now that he was safely tied up and came back with a pair of metal sheers.
He put them around the chain that had been nailed into the ground, and Adam felt the snap of the metal reverberate all the way into his bleeding wound.
“Don’t you worry ’bout that,” the old man said at Adam’s small cry. “That’s gonna be the least of your worries in a couple of minutes. Get his legs, Jimmy. Watch the trap.”
No! They were leaving the fucking bear trap on his foot?
He had no choice. Even with it still on, Adam had to struggle, to fight to get away now that he was no longer chained to the ground.
“Easy, now. Easy,” said the father, as though he were offering
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comfort to an animal he was about to kill. Which he was.