Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
The twig Delainey was fiddling with snapped between her fingers, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She tossed the broken halves at the fire and tried to ignore her trembling hands.
She wasn’t going to freak out. She couldn’t.
She and Reece had trekked across more of these damned woods until night encroached again with no sign of more pursuers. If the two from earlier had friends, they might still be waiting for them to report back, and they never would because she had killed a man today.
Well, a werewolf, but close enough. He was in his human form. He had a face, and he was dead because of her.
Their second night’s camp was rougher than the first, a narrow shelf of flat ground between two boulders, barely wide enough for both of them to sit side by side.
Reece had scraped out another shallow fire pit and built the flames up from dry pine needles and split sticks.
The boulders at their backs were cold and gritty.
She squeezed her eyes shut until her face hurt, then blinked them open again. She had never killed someone before.
Delainey liked to fight. She liked violence. But this wasn’t a time of war. She was a civilized woman; when would she have had the chance?
The chance, ha!
As if it was something she had been waiting for. Bile swirled around her near-empty stomach, and she wasn’t sure if it was the hunger making her nauseous, or the shock, and surprisingly, the guilt.
She didn’t feel guilty for fighting back. It was her life or his. But she had thought if she was ever going to kill someone, she would have meant to do it. The blast of power she had sent his way should have knocked him off his feet. Maybe knocked the air out of his lungs.
It shouldn’t have sent him crashing into a tree and broken his neck.
But Delainey had to keep on a brave face.
She didn’t want Reece to know how much this had rattled her.
As a werewolf, he had probably killed dozens of people.
Life in a pack was violent; at least, that was what they said.
Though from what Elise had told her, the most violence she had witnessed had come from a battle over who was going to get the last cupcakes on some wolf’s birthday at a party last month.
There was a hollow in her chest, all cold and heavy, like something fundamental had changed about her. She had to find something to fill it, because she wasn’t going to let some kidnapper werewolf steal a piece of her… even if she had stolen everything from him.
Something snapped in the fire, and she forced herself not to jump. Reece was a shadow next to her. Too close, too present, but they couldn’t escape one another, not with the stupid, freaking shackles on their wrists.
Beyond the boulders, the woods were a wall of black, the trees visible only as slightly darker columns against the sky. The temperature had dropped sharply once the sun went down, and Delainey could see her breath in the orange glow.
Her stomach growled, and the shadow that was Reece looked her way.
“We should hunt,” he said.
“No.” It came out fast. An automatic denial that wasn’t exactly logical; neither of them would be on their best if they were faint from hunger. But she recalled the skinned bunny from yesterday and didn’t think she could handle the blood.
The wolf she had killed hadn’t bled. Was that a small mercy? Or did it make it worse, that he had looked like he was sleeping if you ignored the wrong angle his head was tilted at.
“It won’t take long,” Reece offered, as if that was her objection.
But she shook her head harshly. She reached into her pocket and pulled out two protein bars. That was the only thing her—don’t call him a victim, she thought—the rogue wolf had been carrying. She offered one to Reece.
“You got that off a dead man,” he said, and it felt like a stab to the heart.
“If you won’t eat it, I will.” She started to jerk her hand back, but he reached out and grabbed the bar, his fingers brushing over hers.
Delainey put thoughts of its provenance out of her head and tore into the wrapper, eating it like it had done something to her: stole her boyfriend, called her a bitch. It tasted like ash and fake chocolate, but that might have been two days in the forest.
The bar didn’t last long, and her stomach was still growling when she stuffed the wrapper into her pocket.
She shouldn’t litter, she thought distantly, and had to bite back a laugh at the ridiculousness of it. They had left two dead bodies some miles back, and she was worried about one biodegradable wrapper.
Her priorities were skewed.
Reece stuck his own wrapper in his pocket and stared at the flame.
“Was that your first kill?” he asked.
He didn’t look at her when he said it—his gaze stayed fixed on the fire. His voice was still a bit gruff, but he was having an easier time talking now. If the manacles were messing with his wolf, he was starting to get some control back.
That made one of them because she still couldn’t control her magic.
Delainey opened her mouth to answer, then closed it.
Why did this guy think he deserved a heart to heart? They were prisoners together, relying on each other for survival. He didn’t get to know her deepest, darkest acts.
But even though she couldn’t say the words, she nodded.
She didn’t expect Reece to say anything back. What was there to say? She felt guilty for what she’d done, but she wouldn’t have done anything different if she had to do it again.
She wasn’t going to let someone kill her because she was afraid of what her magic might do. She was going to survive, and she was going to try and let Reece survive right along with her.
She wasn’t sure if she owed him that, but she wasn’t going to let him die if she could help it.
“I killed my first wolf when I was nineteen.” His words came out of the shadows. The fire really didn’t offer that much light, surprisingly, but she wasn’t much of a camper. Give her a nice hotel room with luxury room service and a spa any day.
Oh, a spa, that would be nice.
And a jacuzzi. Her mind was trying to find nicer things to think about, but she couldn’t ignore this conversation.
“In Hobson?” she asked. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around.
The southern basin pack had only been around for about ten years or so, she thought. And judging by how old she thought Reece was, maybe thirty, maybe a little older, it had probably been before he joined up.
Wolves weren’t supposed to kill each other. Again, back to that civilized society they all allegedly lived in, but things happened.
Things happened in covens, too.
“I’m not from around here,” he said. He stretched his legs out toward the fire, his mud-caked boots nearly touching the ring of stones around the pit, and leaned back on his palms.
“Okay.” She was tempted to ask where he was from, but she got the idea that if she pushed too much, if she prompted him too hard, he would clam right back up. She wanted to know what he was going to tell her. This man was a bit of a mystery.
One she wanted to solve, she was horrified to realize.
It must have been the days spent surviving together, because there was no other reason to feel that way.
But she remembered the night at the Brass Tap, the way he had followed her every place she went, his eyes never leaving hers.
She had felt powerful that night. Desired.
When she had led him into the back alley and let herself get pressed against the wall, she had been tempted to see where it could go…
before sanity came crashing back down and she remembered exactly who he was and why that couldn’t happen.
She expected Reece to let the conversation lapse, but a few minutes later he spoke again.
“I was turned when I was seventeen,” he said.
He held up his hand and rotated it back and forth in front of the flames before looking at his index finger.
In the firelight she could see how large his hands were: wide palms, thick fingers, the knuckles scarred and rough.
“A wolf nipped me in threat, telling me to back off or something, and a few weeks later…”
“Fur?” she guessed.
“Fur,” he agreed.
That was fucking strange.
Humans got turned into werewolves, that definitely happened. Often it was a ritual thing: partners of pack members, friends, business associates, people they wanted to share their fur with.
As far as she knew, wolves were normally very careful not to bite humans.
It was one thing if a wolf thought he was facing off with a witch or some other form of supernatural, then the wolfiness couldn’t be passed on. But against a human, you didn’t nip in threat unless you were reckless or you didn’t care.
Delainey forced the questions down.
Reece was going to share what he was willing to share, and that had to be enough. “My parents kicked me out not long after that, when I turned eighteen,” he said.
“That’s horrible.” She didn’t want to start finding excuses for why he might be so standoffish and bristly, but that kind of rejection probably had something to do with it.
“I had no idea what to do or where to go,” he said.
He was picking at the fraying edge of the tear in his sleeve, pulling a thread loose and winding it around his finger without seeming to notice he was doing it.
“I wasn’t a tough kid.” He huffed out a laugh.
“I had no idea what life in a werewolf pack would be like.”
“Yeah, that had to be a rude awakening,” she agreed.
“A pack took me in a little bit later. I was just as big then as I am now. The senior wolves saw me as a threat, like I was going to start challenging for leadership, when all I wanted was to apply to college and start my own life. I didn’t want to deal with any wolfy bullshit.”
She had a feeling she knew where this story was going, but she let him keep talking. The more he spoke, the better she felt, which was kind of strange.