Valek
Iknow my prey is in the tree.
But I want her panties.
The first pair she flung is about forty feet back, caught on a low juniper branch, a pale blue scrap of fabric fluttering in the dark like a tiny surrender flag. The second pair is higher up, tangled in the crook of a birch maybe fifteen feet off the trail.
Clever girl.
I backtrack at an unhurried pace. It's impressive that she scaled the tree so easily, but it will take her time to get down safely. I reach up toward the panties and hook my finger in the waistband, giving them an experimental tug. A sharper tug and they're free.
I press the fabric against the lower edge of my mask, inhaling through the dark balaclava beneath the glowing neon LED tubing.
FUCK…
Her honeysuckle scent blazes through my nose and hits the back of my skull hard enough my eyes slide shut.
The forest disappears. There is nothing except the heat of her distilled into a few square inches of pastel blue cotton with a neat little matching silk bow, and I breathe her in again, slower this time.
Mate.
I exhale through my nose as slowly as possible, so slowly it gives me a fucking head rush from the lack of oxygen. I want her scent inside my cells for as long as possible.
I fold them into my jacket pocket and retrieve the second pair she discarded, finding them by scent immediately. These are black lace, corset style, with ribbon ties.
She packed these on purpose.
I bury my mask in the lace and inhale so deep my ribs strain against my jacket.
She's going to ruin me.
The second pair joins the first in my pocket as I return to the crumbling forgotten wall, pushing and breaking through the underbrush she so easily darted through like the little rabbit she is.
It doesn't take me long to discover the clumped dirt packed into a crevice between the stones, the edge of deep green fabric poking out alongside grass.
I dig my fingers into the dirt and pull another prize free.
This one is a sports bra.
Cute, but disappointing.
I was hoping for something more mouth-watering.
I vault the low wall and push deeper into the young pines, needles scraping my jacket. The clearing opens ahead, moonlight flooding the grass.
I stop beneath the tree, my mask tilting up and eyes sweeping the canopy branch by branch. Checking every shadow, every dark mass that could be a body pressed against bark. The leaves are thick but not impenetrable, and the moonlight is generous enough to separate trunk from limb from empty air.
My prey is gone.
I circle the base of the oak, inspecting the trunk. There's broken bark where her feet kicked chunks loose. A smear of dirt from a hand on the lowest branch.
But these are from climbing.
The ground is covered in thick leaf litter with fresh leaves scattered on top of it, shaken loose by her going up the tree. If she landed on it, or ran through it, I would have heard the leaves crunching.
Which means she went through the thickest section of canopy, branch to branch, before dropping somewhere I couldn't see.
This little omega just fucking tree-hopped away from me.
My mouth curves behind the mask.
The hunt just got interesting.
I move through the forest in expanding arcs.
Nothing.
Her scent is everywhere. She scattered it. The panties, the bra, whatever else she tossed from that duffel bag while she ran. She turned the entire hillside into a minefield.
And now I'm the one feeling watched.
My little huntress.
I climb to a rocky outcropping and crouch, tearing the mask off and holding it low to kill the light. Without the neon tubing, I'm as dark as the trees around me.
Think.
She's competitive. She won't hide forever.
She'll want to see if I'm still looking.
I stay low and wait.
The wind shifts.
One thread of honeysuckle cuts through the ambient noise of scattered decoys, warmer than the rest.
Warmed by her body heat.
She's northwest. Moving fast.
I drop off the outcropping and land silently on the forest floor, pulling my mask back on.
The clearing I enter next is smaller than the last one. A rough circle of silvery grass ringed by dark pines, open to the sky and the moon above. A river must be somewhere nearby, close enough to hear but hidden behind the slope.
My eyes find her immediately, standing on the far side.
Flashlight off, hanging from her fingers at her side. Coat open and feet planted.
She's been waiting for me.
I step out of the treeline.
She steps forward.
I take a step to the left and she mirrors it, one step to her left, keeping the distance constant.
I take another.
She matches.
We circle each other like wolves. The moon lights up her eyes as she watches me with the same intensity with which I'm watching her. She isn't afraid. Not even cautious.
This is hunger.
My pulse kicks harder against my ribs.
I stop circling.
She stops, too.
Her left hand comes up from behind her thigh, gripping something. It isn't the flare gun. Whatever this is, it's black. My eyes slide to it, taking in its compact shape. A canister with an orange safety tab.
Pepper spray.
I tilt my head.
Really?
The feral grin that splits her face is beautiful and absolutely fucking insane. "You didn't say I couldn't bring supplies."
My laugh comes out rough and startled behind the mask. The sound surprises even me. I don't laugh like that.
But this woman…
"No," I concede. "I did not."
She flicks the orange safety tab off with her thumb.
"Then come get me, wolf."
I lunge.
She fires and the spray hisses through the air where my face was half a second ago. I twist sideways and the cloud still catches enough of me even through the mask that my eyes, nose, and mouth light up.
She's already running.
And I'm right on her heels, half-blind and snarling.
The forest tilts downhill and she uses it, her smaller frame weaving between trunks with reckless speed. She ducks under a low branch and cuts hard to the left, boots skidding on the dirt, kicking it up.
I vault the branch entirely to make it further down the slope, cutting her off at the path.
She fires over her shoulder without looking. Blind shot. It misses by a wide margin but I have to dodge right to avoid it, which is exactly what she wanted. To send me into the fucking undergrowth that slows me for three critical seconds.
By the time I rip free of the bramble, rivulets of blood running down my forearms, she's twenty feet ahead again.
I accelerate.
She's fast but her stride is short, and on flat ground, it's inevitable. The gap shrinks with every second. Fifteen feet. Ten.
She hears me closing and does something I don't expect.
She stops dead.
I overshoot. My boots skid on the leaves as I pull up short, momentum carrying me past her for two strides before I plant and spin.
She sprays me point blank in the fucking mask.
I rip it off, snarling and clawing at my eyes, and I can't fucking see her or smell her now. All I smell is fucking capsicum.
But I can hear her.
Boots on leaves, crashing through undergrowth to my right, that breathless crazy fucking laugh carrying back to me like a bell in the dark.
I drag my sleeve across my watering eyes and follow the sound, stuffing the mask in my waistband.
The little rabbit shot me in the goddamn face with pepper spray and is now fleeing through the woods laughing about it.
I'm so turned on I can barely fucking think.
The forest blurs as I close the distance again. My left eye is streaming and half-useless but my right is acceptable, and my hearing has never led me astray.
If I let her get away again, I won't be able to follow her scent. Not with the pepper spray searing every last cavity in my damn head.
She's heading downhill. Toward the river.
The sound of the water swells as the terrain drops sharply and the trees thin, the ground turning from soft earth to loose shale that slides under my boots. She stumbles but catches herself on a half-broken sapling, using it to slingshot left.
I catch the same sapling and tear it the rest of the way out of the ground trying to do the same. Spinning on my heels and flinging the sapling aside, I lunge back up the slope after her.
She fires the pepper spray again.
The canister hisses dry air.
"Fuck!" she yelps, and throws the canister at me.
Just like old times.
I throw my arm up to block it and lunge forward, my other hand reaching for her.
It closes on air.
I skid to a stop, panting.
She's gone.
I crouch and examine the shale through my burning eyes, my chest heaving, every breath stinking of pepper spray instead of filled with sweet honeysuckle. Slide marks lead left, toward a cluster of pines growing at the edge of a drop-off.
The marks stop at the base of the first pine.
I look up, circling the base of the pine, blinking away the hot tears in my eyes and squinting to peer into the shadows.
Nothing.
Impressive.
I move to the next tree. It's massive, growing right at the edge of the slope that drops toward the rushing river. I'm reaching for the lowest branch to haul myself up for a better vantage point when a feral omega drops onto my back from directly above.
"GOTCHA!"
Her legs clamp around my waist, her arms lock around my neck, and her momentum carries us both sideways off the edge of the drop.
We're airborne for one horrible, glorious second.
We hit the slope together and the world becomes a violent rolling blur of dirt, rock, branches, and flailing limbs. I manage to get my arms around her and curl my body over hers as we tumble, taking the worst of it on my shoulders and back, the ground hammering me with each rotation.
A rock clips my hip. A branch tears through my jacket and lights up my ribs. The slope is steeper than I thought and we're picking up speed.
Then the ground disappears entirely.
There's a moment of weightlessness—Ivy cries out in my ear—and then we plunge into freezing darkness, split apart by the force of the impact.
The current isn't strong, but it's fast enough to shove us sideways, and my boots scrabble against slick river rocks as I fight to get my feet under me, my hand somehow still locked around her wrist.