Page 99

It was the best I could do, considering the wolf got a pretty fucking good head start.

It was a long hike too. An hour. Maybe two. I had no clue where I was, my phone was growing dangerously low on battery, and I needed water. Medical attention.

The decision was stupid but one I wouldn’t abandon. I wasn’t going to come out of this hunt with nothing but claw marks in my flesh and bruised pride to show for it.

There had to be something more I could get from this. To hunt this creature my whole life and then come so close without vindication wasn’t good enough for me.

I smelled the blood before I saw anything. Because blood had a smell. Especially fresh blood. It was cemented into my senses. And the moment my nostrils caught wind of it, my heart rate spiked once again. I tried to slow my breathing as I clutched my useless fucking gun.

Death hung heavy in the air.

To my left was a boot. With a foot still inside it, the bloody stump of a bloody bone sticking out of it.

I knelt, touching the skin that used to connect foot and leg. The ruined flesh was still warm. My ears pricked up. No sounds. No pleading, no crunching of bone and flesh against sharp teeth. A wolf in a bloodlust would not be quiet.

It was gone.

I continued forward, knowing what I was about to find.

I crept into the campsite, the tent looking similar to the state of my own. Torn apart, shit littered everywhere.

But there was a lot more blood.

And a corpse. A fresh one.

Like his leg, his torso was still warm. Chest cavity caved in. I scanned the area for more corpses or bodies. None. Single camper.

“Bad fucking luck, dude,” I said to the dead man. It was impossible to decipher his age because he was so thoroughly mauled. The attack l differed from the ones I’d seen. It was more brutal. Frenzied. The wolf was angry. Probably because its first prey had escaped it, taking his frustration out on this poor fuck.

I hadn’t heard him scream, so it must’ve been quick, at least.

I followed the paw prints that led out of the camp, wondering if I might be able to catch up with it now since it was full and likely tired. Dawn was approaching. The sun was warming up the horizon, making it easier to see the tracks and the droplets of blood that I assumed came from its muzzle or claws.

I couldn’t guess how long I had walked, my head pounding and my body pretty much spent. I just knew that the trees became less dense before I emerged on a trail that looked vaguely familiar. I looked in the direction of the sun, now lighting the trees with dawn rays. I figured that I’d somehow done a very large loop, back at the trailhead where I had parked my car.

Handy for me, since I hadn’t thought through how in the sweet fuck I’d make it back after such a huge hike. Having to call Dante for a rescue was only slightly better than lying down and dying in the woods.

My body froze as I heard a muted animal grunt from ahead of me.

“No fucking way,” I whispered, hand curling around my gun.

I followed it because I didn’t have much else to do, and I didn’t want to give up.

Holding my breath, I crept closer to the sound, hiding behind a tree before risking a peek into the clearing where the grunts were coming from.

The beast’s grunts weren’t grunts at all. They were snores. It was curled up in the middle of the clearing taking a goddamn nap.

Hunting two humans, killing one of them, tired a wolf out.

I leveled my gun in its direction, wondering if whatever witchy protections it was under extended to when it was sleeping.

It was tempting, almost overwhelming to pull the trigger. But the saner part of me knew it was likely suicidal. The witch’s magic would guard the beast while sleeping, I was almost certain. So the sound of the gun would wake it up, piss it off, and result in it going straight for me.

Cursing, I lowered my gun and did the only thing I could do… Wait.

The beast had to shift at some point. Soon, probably. And in my current state, I could not take on a werewolf.

But I sure as shit could take on whatever human skin it changed back into.