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All things considered, it was enough to give anyone some road rage.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The shifter changed, revealing the one-eyed stranger James had briefly seen after Morgan had been kidnapped by hunters before Christmas. His eye patch was gone, revealing the mess that was Hunted and on the Run
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hidden beneath it, made more hideous by the blood and small wounds that covered his face and chest. It reminded James of the shotgun blast he’d gotten to the side of his face when he’d tried to charge a hunter full on.
Though he was suspicious, especially since John had yet to appear and this was apparently his mate, James did his best to not stare at the scarred eye.
“You’re Storm?” James asked.
Storm nodded. “Yeah.”
James was about to ask him if he wanted any clothes to wear.
Standing naked and bleeding in the middle of the road, and all the cars blocking any possible traffic from coming or going, wasn’t exactly a good thing. Storm spoke first, however, and quickly, falling to his knees in front of James.
“Hunters came for us at the motel we were staying at. They took John and left me for dead. I don’t know where they are. Please help.”
The man’s voice shook with the emotion he spoke with. It was as though he was scared that James would simply order his pack to turn around and go home without John now that he’d been taken.
He looked behind him to the rest of his alphas. Markus, usually one to joke around and have fun, was also staring at James with a little fear on his face.
It seemed the panic Storm felt was rubbing off on the others.
Mark had been particularly close to Eric before he had been killed. John was also a friend, and even though Eric did come back once in a while to join in on some of their hunts by possessing his medium boyfriend, James knew it wasn’t exactly the same.
Markus didn’t want another friend to die on him.
James would never consider letting those hunters hurt one of his own. His only prayer was that the lot of them could find John before he’d been tortured so much that James would be forced to put him out of his misery.
“All right, everyone get your trucks off the road and park them 108
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somewhere hidden. We wolf out and go hunting for one of our own.
Let’s find him and bring him home.”
Everyone did as they were told with the speed and effectiveness of soldiers who followed orders in battle.
James looked down at Storm. “Are you too injured to help us search for him?”
Storm shook his head.
“Good. Shift into your other form and take us to where you last saw John. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick up his scent and figure out which direction they’ve gone in.”
“And if we find out you had anything to do with his kidnapping, and this is all some kind of trick,” Mick said, his fingers turning into claws as he spoke and his eyes becoming gold, “I swear to God I’m going to do to you whatever those hunters do to that kid.”
James thought that might’ve been a little excessive, considering the shape the guy was in. He doubted Storm was involved, but if he was wrong…well, he might’ve said the very same thing.
Storm just nodded and got to his feet. “Understood.”
* * * *
John wasn’t sure how he’d managed to do it, maybe it was the sight of the knife that one guy was about to bring down on his eye, but he’d managed to break through the strips of bedsheets that were being used to tie him up, and he’d caused the van these two goons had stolen to crash.
Whoever they’d taken the van from, the guy had carried around some hunting gear, which was common for the area, but he hadn’t been a hunter of the paranormal variety. If he had been, there would have been needles and vials of all kinds of drugs in the van for these two to use on John.
There hadn’t been any, so they were about to attempt the old-fashioned method of making a werewolf transform so they could skin Hunted and on the Run
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it. Torture.
John would’ve been lying if he didn’t admit that part of him wanted to just lie down and die now that his mate was gone, but letting them cut out his eyes, or slowly remove his nose, tongue, ears, fingers, anything like that, was just beyond him. He wanted to die.
Not like that.
He’d ripped through his bindings and attacked the man who had been advancing on him with the pocket knife. It wasn’t a hunting blade, so it hadn’t had its handle modified for a better grip, and when John attacked Robert, the thing all but flew out of the guy’s hand in his surprise.
It had been a bit of a struggle at first. He was a werewolf now, and the hunter now had the strength of one as well, but when John’s hand found the knife, he hadn’t hesitated in stabbing the hunter turned werewolf in the throat with it.
The diver, Tatum, had screamed behind him and had been about to pull over when John attacked him from behind as well.
His next memories were hazy, but from what he could piece together, his hands turned into claws and he sank them into Tatum’s face and neck. He’d just started ripping when the wheel spun at such a sharp angle that the whole van fishtailed and then started to roll.
John couldn’t recall anything much after that, not even pulling himself out of the rubble. When he finally came to, he was just walking down the empty street. Everything on him hurt, and he figured he was probably injured, but he didn’t care in the least.
He’d just saved himself from death, but what was the point?
Storm had been shot right in front of him. His mate was gone, and right when they were finally starting to come to an understanding and getting to know each other.
John collapsed onto his knees, the hard fall onto the asphalt scraping his skin.
Nothing matted anymore. He wanted to die. His body shook with the urge to let everything out, but all he could manage was a small 110
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despaired sound.
His vision blurred with tears. He tried closing his eyes, but all he could see was Storm’s face and chest exploding with blood as his body flew backward. The bang of the gunshot was still echoing in his ears.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
A loud and familiar click sounded behind him. John barely took the effort to lift his head and see who was behind him. His nose was so clogged even couldn’t even scent the world around him anymore.
Tears still made a blur of everything, but he recognized Tatum standing there. He was still naked, and if that red all over him was what John thought it was, then he was covered head to toe in blood. It was like that scene out of Carrie. After wiping away his tears, John was even able to see that Tatum was even giving John the evil stare, like he was trying to explode John’s head with his mind.
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” Tatum said. His body was trembling about as much as John’s was.
John looked away from him. Death by gunshot. Not a bad way to go. Might hurt a bit, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad as being skinned alive and having his body parts cut off while he was awake.
“I don’t care.” John’s voice was hoarse. He just waited for the shot to come.
The sound of a cat roaring grabbed his attention, and he turned just in time to see a bloody, one-eyed cougar leap out of the bushes on the side of the road and launch itself at Tatum. Its long claws were extended out, mouth open and teeth ready, and the rage in that one eye was unlike anything John had ever seen.
When the cat made contact with the man, Tatum screamed. He’d tried to turn his stolen gun onto the cat, but it didn’t even go off.
Must’ve run out of bullets, the stupid bastard.
The cougar landed on Tatum and began ripping the man to pieces.
Several alpha wolves that John recognized jumped out from the woods and joined in with all the eagerness the cougar possessed.
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One wolf, the largest of the pack with the scarred face, saw John sitting there and came forward.
“Are you all right?”
John started to cry again at the sound of his alpha’s voice inside of his head. He looked back to the one cat in that group of wolves that were piled on top of the now still hunter. They were definitely making sure Tatum was dead.
John stared particularly hard at the cat. There must be some mistake with his vision. It had been blurry with tears just a second ago. He was only seeing what he wanted to see. Storm was dead.
“Sir, is that…?” He couldn’t even finish. He lifted his hand to point, but the entire limb of his arm shook.
As though sensing John’s stare on him, the cougar lifted his face out of the wreckage and turned to look directly at him.
Now John really started to cry. He broke down like a sobbing omega, and the cat approached him quickly.
Storm shifted into his human form, and John threw his arms around Storm’s shoulders. There was blood all over him, from both his own wounds as well as from Tatum’s body.
John didn’t mind. He clutched his mate tighter. “I thought you were dead. Jesus Christ, I watched him shoot you.”
James had survived a similar shot from a similar distance, and that had been with silver pellets. Still, something like that wasn’t exactly easy to live through, even by shifter standards.
“I know. I’m hard to kill.”
John laughed.
A couple of the alphas also shifted back into their human forms and stepped up to him, patting him on the back, letting him know how glad they were that he was safe. Now that Tatum was dead, they no longer had to bother with the mutilated body.
James’s pack was not filled with the kinds of wolves that ate human flesh, but Tatum had been ripped up enough for the police to think it had been a bear attack. His stomach was ripped open and 112
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entrails were hanging out. His neck and limbs were twisted at odd angles. Had his head been ripped open and the brains scooped out, one might even think a zombie had attacked him.
He was not getting back up from that.
It seemed that James had also shifted when John was too busy clutching at his mate. “The trucks are parked just outside of town a couple miles in the other direction.” James nodded toward the corpse in the road. It was going to traumatize whoever found it. “Do we need to worry about his partner?”
John thought of how satisfied he felt when he stabbed that son of a bitch in the throat. Then there was the crash of the vehicle itself. “No.
I killed him. Crashed their van, too. We should be fine.”
James nodded. “Let’s get out of here then before some human authorities show up. We ran passed that motel you both stayed at.
Cops and guys with cameras all over the place.”
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Chapter Eleven
John had shifted and done incredibly well when it came time to run back to the trucks that his pack master owned, considering all that they had been through these last couple of days as well as the car crash he’d survived.
Still, when it came time for him to shift back into a human, Storm had to help him into the truck with the most space. His mate had passed out while leaning against Storm’s shoulder.
Storm had clutched the hand of his mate tightly during the drive back to this new pack where he would be staying.
The wolves packed in the truck with him, one by the name of Markus, and the human John had spoken of named Isaac, as well as a few others he didn’t know, all stared curiously at him.
It only caused him to hold John’s hand tighter as the man slept on him.
He knew this would happen, this cautious curiosity that the other alphas of John’s pack would feel toward Storm. Even James’s beta, Mick, had threatened Storm, and rightfully so.
No one threatened him now, but he did not lower his guard. If they decided to throw whatever stones they wished until he made amends, they would be perfectly within their rights to do so.
The drive was long, and John still had not woken up by the time they pulled into dimly lit area that was DeWitt’s pack. The sun had set, and the stars had come out. John would likely be getting treatment from the pack’s wise woman, as well as from the mate of the leading alpha.
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other omegas, some female, most male, to accost him before he could attempt to follow John. They took him to another cabin entirely.
His heart pumped loudly in his ears when they sat him down on a chair and clicked on a light. He only managed to calm himself enough when he noted that they had brought out a first aid kit to use on his face.
Not weapons, knives, ropes, or any other devices that could be used to torture him. They were going to help him.
He was less than grateful for that help when they started the process of picking out the pellets that had been lodged into his skin, especially for the ones that had not gone in too deep and his quickly regenerating skin had healed over them. They needed to be dug out. It was quite painful.
Still, they were as gentle as they could be, and for that, he was grateful.
He didn’t become alert and fearful again until Mick, the beta who had threatened him, and Markus, another younger alpha, entered the room.
“Leave us,” Mick said, and the omegas scurried.
Storm didn’t know what to do. He nearly stood at attention himself, but Mick waved him back down. “Don’t get up. I need to talk to you.”
“All―all right.”
Storm would not be afraid. He had caused much pain to this pack, and he had also failed to protect his mate when John had protected him so many times. Saving him from the hunters, and then taking a silver bullet for him. Storm could handle whatever these men threw at him.
Mick inhaled deeply through his nose. “I would like to offer you something. Well, two things, I guess, but here is what they are.”
Storm listened closely, curiosity getting the better of him.
“First is my apology for my threat earlier today. It was made in the defense of a friend, and I saw very clearly that the both of you are Hunted and on the Run
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mates. I don’t know a lot about cougar-shifters other than they’re pretty rare, but I’m fairly sure you would never harm a mate.”
Mick looked at him. “That’s what I offer you. My apologies and my trust.”
Storm’s brows shot up high. Just the fact that this alpha was sucking up his pride and apologizing, as well as offering his trust, was something indeed.
“I appreciate that. I’m sorry as well, for what I’ve done to this pack in the past. I’ll do everything I can to make it up and make sure that your trust is never broken.”
Mick nodded. “Thank you, but it won’t be me you’ll have to say those words to. James leads this pack, and you’ll have to say them to him. I’m pretty sure he won’t hold anything against you, though.
Isaac used to be a hunter, and now that puny human is practically one of us.”
Storm was worried for when that event came, humbling himself in front of the leader of this pack, but he tried to tell himself to be calm.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I shouldn't be telling you this, but James and I have already spoken. You're good to stay here so long as you want to, and given the fact that you mated with John, that makes you one of us now, too.”
Storm inhaled slow and deep. “Do you mean that?”
Mick nodded. “Yeah. I do.”
Storm hardly knew what to think. This did not erase his need to make amends, but the fact that he would be given permission to stay and he would not have to leave John’s side made his heart flutter in his chest. He’d never had that happen to him before.
“That was everything,” Mick said, clearing his throat and stan
ding up quickly, looking like he was very much out of place. “I’ll, uh, let you get back to it.”
He vaguely pointed at his own face, signaling that Storm still needed some work done, but Storm wasn’t ready to have both men leave just yet.
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“May I ask you a question?”
Mick blinked down at him. “All right. Shoot.”
Storm cleared his throat. John had already had this discussion with him, but now he needed to hear it from someone else.
“John has told me that your leading alpha, and you as well, have both mated with males? Is that true?”
Now Mick really blinked down at him. His face turned a little red as well.
He cleared his throat before responding, and Storm worried that he may have overstepped his boundaries with the question.
“Yeah, uh, it’s been happening an awful lot with the alpha males around here. The unmated females are admittedly starting to get a little worried, but Ariel recently came out, claiming she was mated to Meg, and they’ve been making it work.”
Storm relaxed a little. So this was a natural occurrence here.
Maybe he should tell James about what was going on with the werecats and how they were slowly going extinct.
That could wait until after he’d seen John. “Thank you. I was just curious.”
Mick nodded. “Yeah, that’s natural. I’ll leave you to it and let the omegas come back in to see you.”
Mick left him alone, and Storm was a little surprised to note how Markus did not follow the older alpha.
He seemed to be struggling with something just as much as Mick had when he’d apologized. He wouldn’t even look Storm in the face.
“You…you take care of him. You got that? I don’t care if you’re mated to John, you ever hurt him again, even on accident, and I’ll make you wish you were never born.”
Storm should have known it wouldn’t be that simple. There would still be those who were protective of their friends. Still, he nodded anyway. As far as punishments went, this was the least he deserved.
