by AJ Merlin
Except, there was something on the broad fridge, marring the handle of the pull out freezer that sat under the fridge itself.
It surprised me to see such a stark stain in a room that looked so clean. Maybe a cooking accident?
I sidled closer, fixated on the dark, still wet patch that dripped down to the floor, though I was sure it wasn’t coming from in the freezer since it started at the handle and not the drawer.
The moment my eyes connected with the connecting red streak on the floor, my thoughts slammed to a halt. I pulled back from the window, grabbing Noah before he could look in as well.
He stopped, gaze roving my face and finding my eyes that had to be as wide as saucers. “What?” He asked, flattening himself against the side of the house as well. “Was he in there?”
I shook my head, unsure of what to say.
“Then what, Alek?”
“Blood,” I murmured through numb lips. “There’s blood on the freezer.”
He stiffened, his own fear-scent bitter in my nose. “Are you sure?” The raccoon shifter demanded, a tremor in his voice.
“I…I don’t see how it could be anything else,” I admitted. “And I think it’s still wet.” Dried blood wasn’t shiny, after all.
Both of us were silent, and I stared at the darkened neighbors house as I counted my blessings that whoever was there either wasn’t home or was sitting in the dark.
“What if someone’s dead?” Noah asked, taking a step back. “You should call your enforcer boyfriend. He can come out and-“
“What if someone’s not dead and needs help? I countered, cutting him off.
“Then they’d better hope he gets here fast,” my roommate shot back. “I know what you’re thinking, I get it, but this isn’t our responsibility! All we can do is call someone, Alek!”
“Then you call someone,” I said, pulling my phone from my pocket and handing it to him.
“Yeah? And what are you going to do?” He’d already opened my phone and as I watched, he scrolled through my contacts quickly.
“I’m going to go in.”
At my words, he nearly dropped my phone. “What? But we just said-“
“You just said,” I replied, having to wipe moisture from my cold palms once again. “I can’t just stand here if she’s hurt.”
For the length of a breath, I thought he’d disagree. I expected him to go back to the car, my phone in hand, and call Roman for backup. Admittedly, I was sure that Roman would be very good backup. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was, I wasn’t sure he’d get here in time to really help.
“You’re right,” Noah said unexpectedly, pocketing my phone. “I’ll follow you.” He held my gaze for a moment, and it occurred to me how lucky I’d been to end up in the same foster home as Noah all those years ago.
Even though back then, neither of us had ever considered our circumstances particularly lucky.
The window was unlocked, and cheap, so it wasn’t difficult for me to slide it up from the sill enough to hoist myself onto the frame and inside.
My feet touched down beside the kitchen table silently, though I paused for a heartbeat to see if anyone had heard me.
Nothing. No one moved in the house, as if no one was here at all.
Quickly I gestured for Noah, and helped him through the window so he could crouch beside me.
If there was any doubt before now that the red on the freezer handle was benign, that thought was exorcised from my brain when I took a breath and smelled the coppery, tangy scent of fresh blood in the room.
“Fuck,” Noah whispered beside me, having done the same thing.
“Yeah,” I agreed, not standing up. Instead I continued to crouch, moving carefully though the kitchen with my eyes fixed on the bloody streaks that led out of the room and into the dining room beyond.
It was a massive feat that when I saw the small, pale hand on the carpet I didn’t stop moving and look for a way out.
My heart rose to my throat as if it was trying to choke me, and I glanced back to see if Noah had seen it too.
He had, and his face had gone dead white, eyes lightening to the yellow of his shifted form at the sight.
“Don’t shift,” I breathed, worried suddenly for him. While for me, shifting was a fight response, for him it was one that happened when he was afraid.
He looked at me, lips parted to show his canines ending in delicate points.
“Don’t. Shift,” I said again, still very softly.
Noah nodded once, but the motion didn’t exactly exude confidence.
I’d have to hope he’d be alright. Crawling forward, I paused again before I entered the dining room, not wanting to be surprised if Michael was in the other room.
Footsteps sounded above me, drawing my attention briefly to the ceiling. He was upstairs?
Good.
Abandoning some of my caution, I scrambled forward and around the doorframe, breath catching in my throat as I saw the woman on the floor in front of me.
Don’t you dare vomit, Alek, I chanted internally, swallowing back the nausea that had risen to flood my mouth with spit.
While I’d realized that he beat her, he wasn’t exactly subtle about that yesterday, my brain had refused to think about what that really looked like.
The woman lay on the floor in front of me, one eye swollen shut and blackened. Her lip was split, and blood flowed sluggishly from her nose.
The worst injury I could see was a cut on her head that reached back into her now-matted blonde hair and still bled.
Most worrying, however, was the fact that none of her injuries were healing. That meant that either she was too weak to heal, or she’d had so many injuries in such a short time that her body was simply too exhausted.
“Oh my god,” Noah choked out the words behind me, a hand rising to cover his mouth. “Oh shit.” He wasn’t being quiet enough, but I didn’t bother shushing him. “Is she…?”
“I’m not sure…” I trailed off. That was another explanation, of course, as to why her wounds weren’t healing. My eyes traced her body, from the blood on her hands to the stained fabric of her white t-shirt.
The t-shirt that moved when she inhaled weakly.
“She’s alive!” I gasped, darting forward to sit beside her. “Hey, can you hear me?” I wasn’t sure what to do, and pressed my hand comfortingly against the less-injured side of her bloody face. “D-do you still have my phone?” I added shakily as Noah sat on her other side and checked for a pulse.
“Yeah,” he said, fumbling in his pocket.
“Text Roman-Romeo is the contact. Tell him where we are.” Whether or not we’d be in trouble was a moot point when this woman needed help. “Tell him-“
“What the hell are you doing here?”
In the frazzled, terrifying moments of finding the woman, neither of us had thought to listen for the man.
I looked up, eyes wide as he loomed over us from the doorway, a rag in his hand.
“How could you?” I whispered, hands shaking as I pulled my bloody fingers back from her. “Look what you did.”
His beady eyes looked over the woman before finding mine again. “How could I?” He repeated, as if I’d said something insulting. “How could she? Thanks to you, she decided she wanted to leave.”
My blood went cold, leaving me with a strange feeling of being disconnected from myself. “You did this because she wanted to leave?” Slowly I rose to my feet, unsure of what exactly I was planning on doing.
Noah didn’t move. He’d taken off his shirt to use as a cloth to stop the bleeding from her face, and only glanced up in concern. His eyes went between us, falling on the man and narrowing. “I’ve called the enforcers here,” he said coldly, only the slightest tremor in his voice.
“They won’t come here,” Michael sneered.
“They’re already on their way,” Noah shot back.
The shifter’s face fell in concern for the first time, his gaze flicking between me and the wo
man. “Whatever,” he growled. “They won’t look that hard when they show up and I’m already gone.” He glanced at the woman and snorted derisively, the sound driving a spike of anger up my spine.
When he turned to leave, I stepped forward quickly, reaching out for him. “Don’t you dare go anywhere-“
It occurred to me when he grabbed my wrist how stupid I was for being so hasty. The alpha’s eyes narrowed, turning an inhuman brown as anger bled from them to the rest of his face. He roared in my face, grip like iron on my wrist.
Noah yelled, but all I could do was try to break free from him as he picked me up by my hoodie, ripping the fabric, and tossed me like a rag doll across the room, my back hitting the wall hard and my head connecting a second later, causing unconsciousness to slam through my brain before I could hit the floor.
Chapter Sixteen
Ringing filled my ears, heralding me back to consciousness.
Had I been out very long? It hadn’t felt like it, and the room that swam in front of me looked the exact same as it had.
Noah was still with the woman on the floor, though his mouth moved and his fear tinted the air around us.
“ALEK!” I finally heard, and met his eyes with a few more fervent blinks to clear my vision.
“I’m okay,” I mumbled, shakily getting to my feet.
“Are you actually?”
I put a hand to the back of my head, coming away with blood, but didn’t find an open wound.
“I’m already healed,” I said, the headache from hitting the wall ebbing. “How long was I out?” The man was gone, and his scent was quickly fading.
“Just a few minutes or so. Can you help me-“
“No,” I interrupted, the confusion at swimming back to consciousness quickly being replaced with irrefutable anger.
“What?”
“No. Is Roman really coming?” I felt cold, as if all of my blood had been replaced with ice and my heartbeat only served to make me colder. My hands shook, but not with fear.
With rage.
How dare he hurt this woman?
How dare he leave in order to escape Roman and his comrades?
But most of all, how fucking dare he lay a hand on me and think he could just walk away?
Ever since I’d stopped letting people use my full name, ever since I’d met Noah in the foster home we’d shared ever since I was nine years old, I had never, not once let an alpha lay a hand on me and walk away unscathed.
I sure as fuck wasn’t about to start now.
“Alek…” Noah’s voice was careful. “I know what you’re thinking, but you really don’t need to. The enforcers will catch him-“
“And do what?” I asked, trembling. “Tell him not to hurt her so badly next time? Maybe they’ll slap his wrist and keep him in jail overnight?” Rage made my voice tight, though it still shook. “Don’t leave her,” I requested. “I’m going to go find Michael, so that at the very least, I can save the enforcers the trouble of finding him.”
As I spoke, I stripped out of my hoodie and laid it over the woman, not caring that it might get bloody. I had no use for it when I shifted, anyway, and it’d just end up getting torn, I was sure.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” my best friend argued, pulling the hoodie up over her shoulders as I walked through the room, barefoot once I kicked my shoes off at his side. “At least leave your clothes with me?” Noah sighed at last, resigned to my plan.
It was a damn good thing that as shifters, none of us were particularly concerned about modesty surrounding nudity. Clothes didn’t make it through shifts, and finding somewhere private to shift from human to animal or back again wasn’t always reasonable.
I left my clothes in a pile by him and let my maned wolf surge, unsurprised that my less polite instincts were already gunning for a chase.
And to be honest, I had no intention of leading him back here nicely.
“Please be careful,” my roommate said again when I strode past him on long, thin legs made to run. With the coloring of a dark red fox and a face like a wolf’s, I was a surprise to most people when I changed. Maned wolves weren't really wolves, after all, and there was no canine on this planet that could outrun me.
And certainly no bear.
Thankfully, his scent was still heady on the stagnant air of the house, and I followed it easily through the living room, then out the still-ajar front door.
Once in the yard, I started to trot. My paws made very little sound in the grass, and just to be safe I stayed off of the sidewalk. Instead I stuck to the shadows once more, never losing the man’s scent as it took me behind his house and through the yards of a half dozen other houses.
He himself never shifted, instead choosing to run in his human shape.
Probably a smart idea. A bear would have been rather conspicuous, even at nearly ten at night.
It surprised me how much distance Michael had been able to put between us, and finally, when the houses ended and became cluttered buildings and dimly lit streets of an old neighborhood, I paused on a patch of grass.
If I kept going, this would take me into the Old Heights.
Caroline’s fears crept into my brain, prompting me to wonder for a handful of seconds if there was some truth to the stories about the dire wolf in the Heights.
Don’t be a child, I admonished, rolling my eyes and stamping my foot in the grass. Those were just rumors.
And I wouldn’t let rumors get in the way of my hunt.
The scent led me down a deserted street, past a building that hummed with activity, and into a small park. Here the man had paused, moving from a bench to a trash can and back again.
Why had he hesitated? A sharp tang tickled my nose and I realized he was afraid.
Of me?
Truthfully, I hadn’t expected him to know I was following him, and certainly not this far.
Leaves rustled behind me and I whirled, ears pricked at the sound as I readied myself for a large, ursine shape to explode from the patch of trees.
But there was nothing. No movement, and when I tried to find a scent, I couldn’t smell anything apart from leaves, grass, and Michael Fairfield.
I was just jumpy, I supposed.
Not to mention, I was losing time.
Again I set off, still following the scent that had a distinctive edge of anxiety to it. Truthfully, that made it all the easier to find in the myriad of scents in the Heights. His fear almost beckoned me, it was that easy to track him from one street to another, and finally to a large, clearly abandoned building that sat by itself in a lot.
A shiver went through me. Half from anticipation, and half from my own nerves. This place was straight out of a horror movie, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if at any moment, a chainsaw revved a welcome at my arrival.
But Michael Fairfield was in this place, and that meant I was going in too. Not to mention-
A new scent caught my attention. Something dark and cold, like mint leaves in a pine forest. I turned my head, scanning the darkness behind me through narrowed eyes.
Then, as if it had never been apparent at all, the scent disappeared.
It had smelled good, and that was enough to distract my impulsive brain from my hunt for just that long. Even if it was only a small taste, it was enough to distract me.
Softly, I growled under my breath. Not loudly enough that anyone in the building would hear me, but just enough to let anyone else know that they weren’t welcome here tonight.
I got no answer from the surrounding darkness, and hadn’t expected one anyway.
Still, I couldn’t help giving thought to the possibility that tugged on me, causing my steps to slow.
Was someone following me?
For a wild moment I wondered if it was Roman. Maybe he’d caught up with me, and now was tracking me to see where Michael was.
But no. That wasn’t his scent, and I would’ve known if he was following me.
Perhaps what I’d heard was only a night-so
und, and this was just someone’s drifting scent.
That was the best explanation, after all, since there was certainly nothing in the space that I could see.
Finally I turned, not letting myself look anymore into the darkness as I walked carefully through the fluorescent light of the parking lot outside the half-torn down, old brick building in front of me.
Luckily, it was only one floor. He couldn’t escape me up any stairs, and it wasn’t big enough that I could easily be thrown off his trail.
Still the fear remained, growing in strength when I entered the building through a long-empty window frame.
Michael Fairfield stood in the middle of the room, chest heaving as he looked around. His eyes found me, but he barely seemed to notice.
Not even when I parted my teeth and snarled at him, the signature roar bark of a maned wolf filling the well-lit building with an echoing threat. Seemed like someone had kept the lights on, though I had no idea why.
The shifter just kept spinning in a circle, his fear palpable as he searched for something that obviously wasn’t me.
I roared again, the sound renewing the echo of the first one as I stalked between piles of rubble and old lumber towards him. One paw in front of the other, I could feel the way the fur at the back of my neck rose to resemble my namesake.
Finally, when I was within lunging distance, Michael looked me in the face and snarled. His features morphed, quickly becoming that of a bear as his muscles bulged and pulled at the fabric of his shirt.
“You should’ve stayed home,” he growled in a voice that was becoming guttural.
Still he stank of fear.
I couldn’t reply, but I also didn’t want to wait for him to shift. I surged forward, long legs carrying me across the floor in just a few strides as my jaws opened wide and I prepared to go for his throat.
Except, I didn’t get there in time.
Another shape dropped down from one of the many holes in the ceiling, revealing itself to be a man who wrapped his arms around Michael’s throat, grip not letting him shift any further.
