CHAPTER SEVENTEEN || HUNTER
The dream was wrong, somehow. I knew it immediately, the moment it began.
Our clearing, the soft grass and the ancient pines and the full moon, was darker than it should have been.
The colors were too muted—almost gray, as though the saturation had bled away completely from the world around us.
And the air was thick with the smell of fireworks and something else—a chemical and faintly metallic odor—that I couldn’t place.
I frowned.
Had I just heard a noise, right before I had gotten here? It felt like I had.
Daniel and Lee were already there, standing close together, their faces tight with the same unease I was feeling.
Yeah, I had heard a noise, the instant the dream had started. The crack of gunfire. It had been oddly loud, as though it had come from an enclosed space instead of outside, where we now stood.
“Something’s different,” Daniel said, looking around the clearing with confusion. “This isn’t—this isn’t how the dream usually goes.”
Lee was very still, his head tilted. As I watched, his eyes went distant and unfocused, his expression oddly blank.
“Lee?” I asked, alarm surging through me as I took a step toward him.
Then, without warning, the clearing dissolved.
We were suddenly standing in a bedroom.
It was small, sparsely furnished, with a sheriff’s department jacket hung over the back of a desk chair.
A holster was on the wooden nightstand beside a narrow bed.
A man was lying in the bed, frozen, his eyes wide.
A gun was still in his hand, which was shaking, as though he was gripped by a seizure.
For a moment, I didn’t recognize the man at all—my dream-self processed him as a random early-thirties guy with sandy blond hair and a medium build, wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of pajama pants.
What was he doing here, in our shared dream?
But then, an instant later, I recognized him as Jensen.
The sheriff’s deputy for the county, who had an office inside the “everything building” in Crescent Springs.
He came into the bar all the time. He’d helped lead the search for our missing hiker two months ago.
He always ordered a whiskey—neat—when anyone else was around.
When he was alone, without any other patrons, he always ordered a cosmopolitan, blushing right down to his roots and avoiding eye contact.
I’d had to learn how to make it on the fly—consulting Google—just for him.
It was our little secret and I’d never told a soul, not even Lee.
Jensen in bed, his face contorted, his sheets soaked with sweat. His breathing was ragged and uneven, as if he couldn’t catch his breath. As if something massively heavy was sitting on his chest.
And then the dream shifted again and, to my horror, I saw that something was.
The Mara crouched over him, spiderlike. Its faceless head was inches from Jensen’s face, its torso split open, tentacles extending from the cavity to press against Jensen’s throat, his heart, and his solar plexus.
The suckers at the ends of the tentacles pulsed rhythmically, drawing something shimmering and faintly luminous from his body.
His mouth was open, as if he wanted to scream, but no sound came out except shuddering gasps.
The second Mara was at the foot of the bed, perfectly still, its featureless face turned toward the window. Standing guard. Waiting its turn.
Daniel made a choked sound beside me. Lee’s hand found mine and gripped hard.
I watched, helpless and horrified, as the color drained from Jensen’s face. His breathing grew shallower. His heartbeat—audible even in the dream, my wolf senses bleeding through—slowed. Then it faltered. Then it slowed again. Worse this time.
The creatures didn’t seem to know we were there.
I understood with horrible clarity. This was just like the dream about Robert. We were seeing the future.
“Where is this?” I demanded, wrenching my gaze from the feeding creature and turning to my twin. “Do you know where he lives?”
Lee blinked, and then, in the next instant, we were back in the clearing. The color had returned to the scene around us. And the acrid smell, almost like fireworks, was gone.
Everything was back to normal.
Except nothing was normal, was it? The Mara had apparently gotten past the pack and into the town. Or they were going to, at any moment.
And then they’d claim another victim—Jensen.
“Huh?” Lee asked, dazed.
“Where did this happen?” I demanded again. It occurred to me that I had no idea where Jensen lived. “C’mon, Lee!”
Lee blinked and then his eyes refocused. “Poplar and Second,” he said, meeting my gaze with a strange certainty. “The blue house with the chain-link fence. Third from the corner.”
“You’ve been there?” Daniel asked, staring at him.
“Not yet,” Lee replied grimly. “But I’m sure.”
Then the dream shattered.
* * *
I was wide awake and on my feet in an instant.
Lee tore out of bed as well, throwing on clothes, his expression grave. Daniel sat up, his dark eyes wide and terrified.
“That was real,” Daniel said, scrambling out of bed, too. “Like with Robert. And way more detailed. How did you know you could—”
“I just did. I realized I could look,” Lee replied, seeming unsettled. “I feel like I could look right now, if I wanted to.”
Daniel’s lips parted and his eyes widened. “It should be getting weaker.”
“Now isn’t the time. Get dressed,” I cut in. “Both of you. We need to go. We have to stop this.”
We threw clothes on and armed ourselves in under a minute. Two blessed iron blades from the kitchen table, one for Lee and one for me. Daniel grabbed his messenger bag—chalk, herbs, whatever he needed to cast on the fly.
Then we ran out the door and raced down the pathway to the gravel lot, piling into my pickup truck.
The moment we were on the road, Lee pulled out his phone, calling Reed. “Jensen Clark is going to be attacked. Right now.”
Reed said something through the phone that I didn’t catch, but I heard the alarm in his voice.
“Yeah. The sheriff’s deputy.” Lee paused, then added, “Poplar and Second. It’s the blue house, third from the corner. The Mara are either feeding on him now or they will be soon.” Another pause. Then, “Yeah, we’re on the road. Gather everyone. We’ve got our weapons.”
Lee hung up, his expression tense. “They’re coming.”
Getting from the commune to town was an eight-minute drive. We did it in five, with me behind the wheel, pushing the engine hard through the dark mountain roads until the trees gave way to buildings.
It was less than two hours before dawn, and the town was deserted as we sped down the street. In the darkness, it didn’t look idyllic at all. It looked like a scene from a nightmare.
Daniel sat between us, his hands already crackling with faint golden light, whispering under his breath, his expression set and focused, preparing spells. Lee sat on the passenger side, the blessed iron in his hands, grim and pale.
Poplar Street was quiet when we screeched to a stop. Streetlamps cast pools of amber light on empty sidewalks. The blue house—third from the corner, exactly where Lee said it would be—was dark except for a dim glow from the back bedroom. A nightlight, maybe. Or perhaps something more sinister.
As I put the car in park, we heard the gunshot.
Lee and I piled out, with Daniel right behind us. Lee handed me my weapon and then the three of us moved as one unit, fast and quiet. A light came on in the neighboring house—no doubt because of the gunshot—and Daniel immediately whispered a spell under his breath.
The air around us seemed to thicken, reflecting color in weird shimmering patterns, like an oil slick.
“It’s a misdirection spell,” Daniel said, barely even slowing down. “No one will notice us.”
An otherworldly wrongness was palpable before we even reached the front door—that crawling, cold pressure against my skin, signaling that something was deeply wrong.
The Mara were already here.
I was about to kick in the door when Daniel shot me an amused glance and shook his head minutely. “You don’t need to do that. You’ve got me.”
I stepped back to give him room.
Daniel cast another spell, twisting his forefinger and middle finger in the air, in a gesture that mimicked a key in a lock. The door opened with a click and swung inward.
I led the way inside.
If the Mara attacked anyone, it would be me this time. Not Lee and sure as shit not Daniel.
Never Daniel.
The house was small and single-story. We passed through a darkened living room, then into a narrow hallway that led to a bedroom at the back of the house. The wrongness was most intense from that direction.
I surged forward, raising my weapon.
When I burst into the bedroom, the Mara were already there. One of them was on top of Jensen, who was convulsing, as if gripped in a seizure. The other was standing guard at the foot of the bed.
The Mara closest to me bolted forward, its torso moving again to unleash those obscene tentacles. It reached out with its elongated arms, preparing to grab me and hold me steady.
I slashed at it with the blessed iron.
The creature moved quickly, but I’d caught it by surprise and it didn’t react fast enough. My blade cut a thin line into the skin of its torso that hissed and smoldered.
The Mara batted my weapon out of the way and then surged forward again, impossibly fast, crashing into me.
I hit the wall behind me hard enough to knock the breath out of my body.
Daniel and Lee piled into the room behind me.
Lee darted forward and slashed at the Mara, slicing off one of the creature’s tentacles before it could touch me.
Then Daniel raised his hand and flooded the room with dazzlingly bright white light. I barely managed to screw my eyes shut and turn away before it blinded me.
A metallic shriek erupted from all around us. The earsplitting sound of tearing metal. The room filled with acrid smoke—the smell of burning flesh.
Then glass shattered. The bedroom window, most likely. It was followed by the thud of something large and heavy hitting the ground outside.