The Trouble with Beasts (Howl for the Damned: Book One)

by D. Fischer

  “No,” I whisper, thunder drowning the word. “No!”

  “Then you leave us no choice,” Toothless snarls, and then he lunges.

  I hit his jaw with the end of my stick. The force of it snaps his head to the side. I twirl, spinning and spinning nature’s weapon in a dance with my own body’s movements. Using both hands, I swing the stick, and it knocks Scarface in the gut.

  Scarface recovers first. He grabs the end of my stick and yanks. I let go because the strength behind it outmatches mine. The last thing I need is to fall on top of him. The stick isn’t worth keeping.

  With the new possession occupying his hands, I twirl, and my heel connects to his nose. Blood sprays as he howls. My feet land perfectly at a crouch. Toothless has recovered, and he lumbers toward me. At the perfect moment, I thrust my elbow back, right into his groin.

  I hear his wheeze and groan, but I don’t turn around to observe my work. Instead, I spin swiftly on my heel and sweep his feet out from under him.

  Standing quickly, I loosen my limbs as Scarface barrels toward me like an enraged bull. Blood pools at the scoop above his top lip, leaking from his nose. I thrust my palm up to strike the area again, but he blocks it. Blow after blow after blow, he and I engage in our fight while his friend cups his family jewels in the mud.

  They have hell to pay. They killed my father. And on top of it all, they think they should have the luxury of shifting. These beasts – these creatures – sully the beauty of the species as a whole.

  I have no doubt the rumors are true. The audacity of coming onto my friends’ land just to find me and a little necklace.

  The rain and the mud make everything slick, and the thunder and hail mask the sounds of contact. Toothless stops groaning at the same time wolves howl in the distance. I’m all turned around, and without a sun or moon to guide me, I don’t know if it comes from the direction of the compound or . . .

  My heart skitters in fear, smothering the numbness I’ve relished. It could be more of them. More Bane. I can’t take them all on at once, and I have no idea where the fourth Bane is. Could he be leading their pack to me?

  No. No, they can’t shift. The howl has to come from a wolf –

  I sense Toothless standing a split second before I’m punched in the jaw. Teeth singing, I stumble as my head snaps. He put so much weight behind it that I stagger. I’m kept from falling when a rough hand grabs the nape of my neck. I grunt as my head is whipped at an odd angle by Scarface, and I’m lifted as his intrusive fingers dig inside my pocket. The familiar pressure of the pendant is gone, leaving my upper thigh cold and damp. I’m dropped to the mud, palms scraping against protruding sticks.

  I look up and watch the pendant dangle from my attacker’s hands. Scarface grins down at me, taunting, triumphant, and seemingly dazed. The wolf pendant pulses while it swings. Does he feel it? He said he could hear his wolf, but does he feel the magic like I do?

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit! Growling, I lunge, wrapping myself around his legs and forcing him to fall.

  I crawl my way on top of him, screaming in outrage and going straight for the necklace.

  Toothless’s arms wrap around my middle, yanking me off. He hurls me, and my spine slams into a tree trunk. I yell as pain rockets through my back, fingers digging into my scraped palms. My vision is blurry and my jaw aches to clench. A sting crawls up my inner arm, and I look at the gaping wound in my inner biceps. Blood wells thickly and trails quickly down my skin. It plops in the mud.

  The men peer at me from where they stand. Their chests heave, and their lips are curled in a snarl. Rainwater and mud soak their clothes, their hair, but they don’t bother to wipe it away. Scarface passes the necklace to Toothless, who balls it in his hands.

  “Little girls shouldn’t pick fights they can’t win,” he says, the sound echoey to my ringing ears.

  “No,” I breathe as they begin striding toward me. A small voice in my head screams at me to get up, to fight because once they reach me, they will kill me. They’ll kill me and take the necklace.

  I work to gather my knees underneath me, laboring past the blinding pain.

  “No.” No! They can’t take the one thing my father asked me to protect. They can’t have it. They can’t go without punishment for killing my father.

  As they prowl toward me, reward in hand, my breaths come heavier, more frightened. The thought of my impending death and sure defeat settles in the pit of my stomach. I scream, small at first, and then it builds and builds.

  My world shifts in a blinding light.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Jacob Trent

  Her scream scatters the birds and rodents that were taking shelter from the storm. My wolf lunges, lurching forward by the desperation of the sound. He races through the mud, between the trees, over fallen logs. Her trailing scent is still lingering despite the downpour. Other scents are mingled with her own – scents that don’t belong to anyone in the pack.

  Behind me, my own pack races on my heels, leaping over branches and growling into the storm. I’m terrified. Absolutely terrified of what we will find – or won’t find – when we reach the place she screamed from. Will they kill her? Will they take her?

  Rex’s wolf nips at my heels, urging me faster and faster.

  Ahead, a bright light seeps between the trees. It’s not far off. Not far. Not far. My mind flashes to Allie’s death, and my wolf snarls. I won’t be too late. I won’t stand by and let someone else I care about fall. I won’t. We won’t, I realize as the pack – Amelia, Trevor, Travis, Damien, and Cinder create a wall of racing wolves behind Rex.

  When did this happen? When did Jinx wiggle her way into so many hearts? When did she begin to belong?

  I hear shouts – human shouts, and see the head of a man through the soggy brush and patch of pine trees. My wolf pushes through the pine needles, and we leap onto the back of a Bane. My teeth sink into the back of his neck, wrapping around his spine. Blood coats our tongue, slicks back down my wolf’s throat. He crunches harder. It’s messy. It brings back the Realms War until reality and memory collide. It creates a frenzy inside my wolf’s mind, a frenzy for blood and revenge for those we couldn’t save.

  Using the momentum of his fall, my wolf yanks back, snarling and pulling the spine. I hear the crack of the large bone, and my wolf releases our prey. He snarls, waiting for the man to move – to twitch. He doesn’t, and when my wolf finally believes him dead, we glance around. I half expect to see vampires. To see the gula and the demons, the glint of swords and fire.

  My wolf shakes his head, clearing the memory back to reality. The blood along his jaw sprays against a nearby trunk.

  A few trees away, a white wolf stalks a man. Her scent tells me she’s female but nothing more. She doesn’t have that unique scent that each individual has. All I can scent is ‘female’ and . . .

  Jinx. The knowledge rocks into me as I remember Rex and Evo saying that the individual killing off the Bane Pack in the city didn’t have a scent. She had skinwalked, and when she skinwalks, she has no scent.

  Each strand of her white fur glows despite being plastered to her muscular, sleek body with the rain and mud.

  He backs away from her, blanching. Her lips are curled back into a snarl, and a low, continuous growl rumbles in her chest. Swaying in his hand is Jinx’s pendant.

  Pride fills my chest. She survived. She held her own. She’s . . . She’s a wolf!

  My pack gathers behind me, watching with the same stunned silence I do.

  I open the pack link. Don’t attack, I send them through mindspeech.

  Cinder curses. What do we do?

  We wait. Just . . . my wolf paws the ground at the memory of Allie’s wolf’s body falling lifeless to the ground, blood smeared all over her fur. Just wait.

  Jacob! Cinder pleads.

  Skinwalker, Amelia whispers in awe. Indeed. Indeed, she truly is a skinwalker. Not a shifter. Not a witch. Not a shaman. A beast – an impossibility. Unique. Beautiful. Ab
solutely beautiful.

  With every stride to the remaining Bane, her muscles ripple. Every snarl she makes vibrates the muddy ground beneath my wolf’s paws.

  “Please,” the man begs, his back hitting a tree trunk. “You can have it. You can have it!”

  The glowing wolf lunges. Lunges is the wrong term. One minute she’s stalking toward him, and the next, she’s leaping, disappearing from the forest floor and reappearing, jaws clamped around the Bane’s face.

  As a group, the pack startles.

  Holy shit, Damien hisses.

  Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

  The Bane drops the pendant and grips the fur of the white wolf. He screams, and when he falls, Jinx’s white glowing wolf reappears back on her four paws next to him. As soon as his side splashes the mud, his face covered in blood, he blubbers. He looks to me, to Rex, to the pack behind me, and pleads.

  The white wolf looks to me. Jinx. Jinx looks to me. I blink once. Twice. A silent communication happening between us. I dip my head, hoping she understands.

  She does. She lashes forward, striking like a snake, and rips out the man’s throat.

  Jinx Whitethorn

  I’m me. I’m me, but not me. I knew that the moment I had skinwalked into another form – a wolf form. I didn’t have time to marvel at it. The man had my pendant, and I was determined to get it back – to make him pay for everything he admitted. Everything he and his pack had done to my father. My father, who was loved by my mother and would have been loved by me. He and his pack had robbed me of a life I could have had. Of my heritage.

  And then . . . Then they were trying to rob me of what my father passed down to me; a pendant I’m meant to protect. I’m meant to keep this pendant away from those it damned. A damnation that has probably saved countless lives from these bloodthirsty beasts.

  But now, as he twitches while bleeding out from his throat, I stare at the blood on my paws. Glowing paws. Glowing white fur.

  I’m . . . me. I didn’t black out. I’m not like the shifters where I’m two beings in one. I’m just me in another form. A form that disappeared effortlessly from one spot to reappear in another. Like smoke. In that split second, I felt like smoke. Like air. Like a spirit.

  Why is this different from the last attacks? Why didn’t I black out?

  A twig snaps, and I whirl. A growl rips from my throat as I prepare to defend myself once more. There’s one more in these woods. Four men were in that car.

  The huge black wolf still stands there, and behind him, the Riva pack whose many scents drift my direction. I can smell everything in this form; the rain, the bacteria in the mud, the pine. Even the charged aroma of lightning.

  I straighten from my crouched, defensive position. Jacob’s wolf relaxes. He pads toward me slowly as if not sure I’ll attack him too. Would he defend himself against the monster I am?

  Maybe this encounter was different than the times before when all my fear and adrenaline wanted was to preserve my pathetic life. Maybe this time, I was preserving my father’s legacy. His last dying wish. Or maybe it’s because I found myself. In this world of seemingly perfect order, I belong somewhere. I belong here. Even as a monster. A beast. A freak.

  The black wolf snorts as I shake my soaked fur, peppering the space around me with mud and rain droplets. When he’s directly in front of me, towering, he peers down his muzzle.

  I know what he wants. He wants submission. I can feel the weight of it press softly against my spine, but I don’t feel the weight of his alpha order. Not the way Cinder had described. Not an immediate obedience.

  I make myself fuller, straighter, just as alpha as he is, and watch as he visibly stiffens. To smooth over my refusal, I nudge the bottom of his jaw with my cold wet nose. Starting at his spine, his bones crack and reshape. Fur and muscles tug and pull against the transformation. I back away to allow him the space to shift from wolf to man.

  Naked as the day he was born, he crouches in front of me. “Jinx?”

  I nip at the space between us, even as exhaustion overcomes my muscles.

  “How?” he glances at the dead guy, traces the puddles of blood, then back to me. His eyes are wide, surprised. “How’d you do it? I thought you couldn’t control it.”

  Shaking my head, I attempt to clear the heavy weight settling there. It presses and presses against my brain. My body quivers with the effort to stay upright. I give in to this urge, and as I collapse in a heap of blinding white light, Jacob catches me. His arms circle around my human body, and I peer up at him with heavy, exhausted eyes. The trees’ canopies are his backdrop, and the rain falls around us like a curtain of white.

  I open my mouth to say something – anything. To tell him thank you. To tell him how striking his coffee-colored irises are against the grey sky. The last thing I remember is glancing at the inside of my arm where a throb pulls my attention.

  There, among the soft flesh, is a gaping, clean-cut wound. Blood coats my skin as it oozes out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jacob Trent

  “Call Reese,” I bark to the pack on my heels. I adjust an unconscious Jinx in my arms. She had fainted, either from blood loss or from exhaustion, and I didn’t hesitate to take action. Her deep wound had bled the whole way through the compound, leaving a trail of red droplets.

  Cinder opens the door to the exam room. Foot poised, I was ready to kick it in.

  The scent of medical equipment reaches my nose, wafting out into the hallway. It used to be a normal room until the Realms War when Reese had outfitted it with hospital supplies. She had used it to nurse some of our wolves back to health, but it’s sat empty ever since.

  Good. Good. Any other scent in here would have tipped my wolf over the edge.

  I hear Amelia’s fingers tap against the screen as she dials Reese’s number. Then, she weaves between her dazed packmates and enters the hall to make the call. I shouldn’t have allowed Reese to go to work. I shouldn’t have.

  Refraining from cursing, I lay Jinx gently in the bed that Cinder hastily pulled the covers back from. “Hurry,” Cinder whispers. “She’s lost a lot of blood. A lot, Jacob.”

  “I know,” I hiss, taking the towel Damien hands me and pressing it to the wound. “Where is she?” I bark to the room. “Where is Reese?”

  “Apply pressure to the wound,” Amelia says in a shaky voice as she enters the room. “Reese is on her way.”

  “I am applying pressure!”

  “The hospital isn’t far,” Cinder says, tugging on his hair. “It isn’t far.”

  “Sit your ass down,” I growl to him, my eyes flashing wolf when our gazes lock.

  “She’ll pull through,” Damien says softly. He props himself against the door that leads to the adjoining bathroom. He observes Jinx with open regard. “She’s pale,” he adds, whispering.

  I only glance at him, just for a moment, before I grab another towel from Amelia’s offered hand and replace it with the soaked one.

  Amelia touches my shoulder. “Breathe, Jacob. You have to breathe.”

  I grind my teeth. I can’t. I should have seen the wound right away. I should have whisked her back to the compound, but I thought the blood I was smelling was the Bane’s, and not hers. So much blood. So much.

  The pack hovers like mother hens, dotted throughout the room and hall. I bark orders at them, displacing my worry and anger. “Leave!”

  No one does. No one moves. “She’ll be fine,” I growl softly, clenching her wound tighter as I look at the soft unconscious face of Jinx. My wolf is raging inside me, and my next words are more for him than them. “I won’t let her die.”

  Amelia touches my shoulder lightly. “I’ve got this.” And she does. With little resistance, she ushers the shifters from Jinx’s bedside and tells them to go back to guarding the perimeter. There could be more Banes who show up. We’re vulnerable. It would be the perfect time for another invasion while we’re all in here, fretting over the tiny skinwalker.

  Their de
dication to Jinx touches something inside me though. Something I have been ignoring. Jinx didn’t only manage to wiggle her way into the hearts of the pack. She found her way into mine too.

  As a jumbled afterthought, I send mindspeech to Rex and Travis to search for the last Bane. Minutes pass. Maybe hours. I push stray hair from Jinx’s forehead. My fingers leave behind a strip of her blood. She looks so tiny in the large bed. So small. So innocent. She had managed to stay alive against two seriously trained killers.

  Rex and Travis enter, naked but with their clothes in hand. Amelia has asked them to sweep our territory with Evo and Jeremy for the fourth Bane shifter.

  “He’s gone,” Rex says to my back. I hadn’t realized it, but at some point, I had sat on the bed next to Jinx’s hip.

  “So is their car,” Travis adds, a grave dip to his tone.

  “He ran,” I say calmly.

  Rex lifts an eyebrow. “He’s reporting back.”

  They pick up a conversation about what this could mean. I know what it means. Wice will now know everything we do. A cherry to the top of what he will glean to his master. Jinx has the pendant – his wolf’s spirit – and now he knows that for certain. What will he do to become whole again?

  I speculate on the dangers this could pose for Jinx. I didn’t even notice when Rex and Travis left, but I did hear Evo say his goodbyes. I couldn’t muster a thank you to them, but luckily Damien did it for me.

  The only Riva members who remain with me and Jinx are Cinder, Amelia, and oddly enough, Damien. I look at the clock, curious as to what the hell is taking Reese so long, but it’s only been an hour since she was called. It’s Damien I look to now, and catching my scrutiny, he plops himself in a chair and scrubs his dirty face with both hands.