Chapter 6 Kendra
KENDRA
This room isn’t mine.
The wrongness seeps into my consciousness before my eyes even open, the pillow carrying the ghostly scents of cigarettes and industrial bleach where there should be the familiar Tide Pods and that faint mildew I’ve never managed to scrub from my fitted sheet.
The blanket scratches my skin like sandpaper, thinner and rougher than anything I’d willingly sleep under, and the mattress sags in the middle.
My fingers find my face before the rest of me wakes up, pressing into tissue so swollen the contact sends a white-hot spike of pain lancing behind my left eye. I let out a moan that sounds pathetic even to my own ears, the sound scraping raw against my throat.
The memory of what happened returns in jagged, disjointed pieces.
Amber eyes glowing unnaturally bright through the swirling blizzard, a sound that made my entire body vibrate like I’d been trapped inside a bass speaker cranked beyond its limit, the sudden betrayal of ice beneath my boots, pavement tilting sideways, and then nothing but darkness swallowing me whole.
I touch my jaw again, gentler this time, and the ache pulses deep into my molars, radiating through bone.
Whatever happened between the gas station confrontation and now, I clearly introduced my cheekbone to something unforgivingly solid.
I force my eyes open slowly, keeping my breathing steady despite the panic trying to claw its way up my throat.
Yellow walls stare back at me, water stains mapping constellations across a ceiling that hasn’t seen fresh paint in decades.
The carpet beneath the bed has worn through to the padding in patches.
I’m in a motel room, and not just any motel room, but the kind where people stay when they’ve run out of better options.
Near the window, a man sits at a small table with a beer can loosely gripped in one hand, his attention fixed on a television bolted to the dresser.
Some old black-and-white comedy plays across the screen, complete with an artificial laugh track that erupts mechanically after every line, funny or not.
He hasn’t noticed I’m awake. His back is partially turned toward me, his focus locked on the screen, and the canned laughter cycles through the cheap speakers at a volume that mercifully masks the sound of my shallow breathing.
I scan the room without moving my head, ignoring the throb of pain that accompanies even that small movement.
My coat hangs on the rack by the door. My boots sit beneath it, lined up neatly, neater than I would ever bother with.
No one else appears to be in the room. Just me, this stranger, and the relentless laugh track.
Did those men from the gas station grab me?
The bigger one with the pistol? The shorter one whose face I filled with pepper spray?
My pulse hammers against my throat, and I force myself to swallow it down, willing my body to remain still.
The survival instinct that’s kept me alive through every other crisis in my life whispers from the back of my mind: Panicking gets you killed. Move carefully.
I slide one leg off the bed with excruciating slowness, testing the mattress for telltale sounds.
Nothing. Encouraged, I shift my weight and lower my second foot to the carpet, feeling the grit of it beneath my feet.
The bed releases a faint groan of protest, and I freeze instantly, muscles locked tight. The man doesn’t turn.
I mentally measure how many steps it will take me to reach the door. My coat and boots are right there, practically calling to me, but grabbing them means noise and wasted seconds I can’t afford.
I ghost past the table where he sits, timing my footfalls to coincide with the peaks of the laugh track.
He lifts the beer to his lips without turning, completely oblivious to my silent progression across the room.
My fingers stretch toward the doorknob, the cool metal finally making contact with my skin, hope rising in my chest like a bubble about to break the surface.
The bathroom door flies open, and I let out a scream, the sound tearing from my throat.
The man at the table jolts so hard his beer can goes airborne, liquid arcing across the room.
He scrambles from his chair with a stream of curses, the legs scraping harshly across the floor. But I’m not looking at him anymore.
The shifter from the gas station fills the bathroom doorway completely, a mountain of a man holding a stack of folded towels. He’s massive, making the standard-sized doorway look like it was built for a child.
Run screams through me so loud my teeth ache, and my legs are already tensing to obey.
I yank the doorknob and pull, but before I can take two steps into freedom, a hand the size of a dinner plate presses flat against the wood above my head.
The handle slips from my desperate grip as the door slams shut with a bang that vibrates through the frame.
I spin around and grab the knob again, twisting with frantic strength, pulling with everything I have, but his palm might as well be welded to the wood.
He’s holding it shut with just one arm, and the muscles in it don’t even flex with the effort of containing me.
“Okay, okay.” I raise both hands, palms out, backing against the wall until I can feel it solid behind me. My heart pounds so hard I’m certain he can hear it. “I get it. I pissed you off with the pepper spray. Please don’t hurt me.”
He tilts his head, confusion settling across features that have absolutely no business being this beautiful.
Up close, in better light, he’s not just big, he’s gorgeous.
High cheekbones, a strong jaw framed by closely cropped hair, full lips that part slightly as he studies me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle with something that isn’t entirely fear.
He turns to the disheveled man still standing by the table, beer dripping from his fingers onto the carpet. The shifter passes him the towels without a word, and the man takes them on reflex.
That’s when I notice it. There’s a slit deliberately cut into the back of the shifter’s shirt, and through it protrudes a long strip of something I can’t immediately identify.
Dense and dark, it runs straight up the center of his back.
Whatever it is appears coarser than human hair, thicker, with lighter tips that shift subtly when he moves.
I narrow my eyes, trying to process what I’m seeing.
I’ve watched enough documentaries and news specials about the supernatural communities to recognize certain features shifters can’t fully hide in human form, elongated canines, unusual eye colors, sometimes patches of fur, but I’ve never seen anything like this.
I try the door again, desperation overriding caution. My hand finds the knob, twists, pulls, and the door cracks open a precious two inches before his palm slams it shut so fast my fingers slip right off the metal.
“What in the actual fuck?” I stare at his arm braced above me, then at his face, indignation momentarily displacing fear.
He grins at me, and the transformation is startling.
The hard angles of his face soften, his eyes brightening with something that looks dangerously close to joy, and he suddenly appears almost boyish despite outweighing me by what must be over a hundred pounds of solid muscle.
“You cannot leave, my queen.” His voice runs deep and careful, wrapped in an accent I can’t place. “It is too dangerous.”
Before I can process the absurdity of being called “queen,” he drops to one knee.
His head bows low enough that I find myself staring at the crown of his head, where that strange ridge of fur stops right at the base of his neck, the individual strands dense and dark where they disappear beneath his collar.
“My name is Kojo,” he says, his voice now coming from somewhere near my hip. “I am Bouda.”
I look to the other man, who tosses the towels onto the table and wipes his beer-wet hand on his pants with a grimace. He clears his throat and meets my stare with steady brown eyes set in sharp features.
“Bouda is a hyena shifter,” he explains, his tone shifting into something calmer, more grounded, clearly intended to de-escalate the situation.
“I’m Aiden. Freelance journalist and a friend of Kojo’s.
” He nods toward the massive form still kneeling at my feet.
“His village was attacked by poachers. Well, radicals, but his people call them poachers because when they kill, they use the bodies of their dead for profit.”
The casual delivery of such horror makes my skin crawl. Kojo rises to his feet and just stares at me, his gaze boring straight into mine as though nothing else in the room exists. The heat radiating from his body reaches me from two feet away.
“Do you mind giving us your name?” Aiden asks, keeping his voice neutral.
“Yeah, I do mind.” I cross my arms over my chest, trying to create some barrier between myself and whatever is happening here. “I want to know why you threw my car and then brought me here and won’t let me leave.”
Aiden dips his chin, a smile at the corner of his mouth like we’re sharing some private joke. “I’m human. I’ll let Kojo explain the rest.”
My gaze shifts back to Kojo, and my nerves spike so hard my hands begin to tremble against my will. He bows his head again in that formal way that makes no sense directed at me. “My queen.”