Shy (Once Bitten, Twice Shy, #2)

by Marie, Noelle

  But Markus was out there. And a gun had went off. Markus may have been an asshole, but he was her asshole – her brother. And though her racing mind demanded she run, her heart would never allow her to actually do it.

  Instead, Katherine twisted open her bedroom door and hurried to where she’d last seen Markus – the living room.

  The wall was cracked where the door had brutally collided with it, and the couch was overturned. But that was nothing to be concerned with compared to the scene playing out in the middle of the room. Markus was on his hands and knees, blood oozing from a circular gash in his upper arm – a gunshot wound, her mind supplied numbly – trying to get to his feet even as the man holding the gun that had undoubtedly caused the injury threatened to bludgeon him over the head with it.

  “Markus!” she cried in alarm.

  Disbelieving hazel eyes met hers. For the entire time she’d known the man, she didn’t think she’d ever seen Markus look so utterly furious. “What in the hell is wrong with you, girlie? Run! Get out of here!”

  But she couldn’t. Because Katherine had turned to look at Markus’s assailant and shock had rendered her immobile.

  It wasn’t Rogue.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Katherine wouldn’t have recognized him if it wasn’t for the eyes. Black, beady, little things peering out at her from a pale, sunken face. The last time she’d seen those eyes the man they belonged to had been wearing a ski mask. He had claimed to have killed her parents and was threatening to do the same to her.

  He smirked at her, the false smile pulling at his lips completely mocking. “Well, what do you know? Looks like I don’t need you to tell me where she is after all. How’ve you been, little beastie?”

  His condescending, oily voice confirmed that he was exactly who she thought he was, and her blood ran cold, turning to ice water in her veins. She stared at the gun the man had aimed steadfastly at Markus’s crumpled form on the living room floor.

  Katherine urged her mouth to open and work together with her tongue to say something – anything – to get the man to point the weapon elsewhere, but her heart had climbed up from her stomach and lodged itself in her throat, beating there frighteningly fast and making speech an impossible task.

  “What’s wrong? Wolf got your tongue?”

  The man – the hunter – chortled at his own joke, the demented laugh causing a shiver of apprehension to rush through Katherine’s small form.

  “Well, don’t just stand there. Come say hello to an old friend.”

  The man’s words registered in Katherine’s ears, but she was still frozen in an unpleasant mix of fear and shock and could say and do nothing, let alone follow his order.

  Katherine’s entire being tensed as he cocked the gun, still pointed unwaveringly at the incapacitated Markus. “Unless you want me this shoot this animal, you better get your ass over here. Now.”

  Katherine forced herself to move. As soon as she took a jerky step forward, however, Markus was snarling furiously at her, impossibly livid. “Run, princess! That gun is loaded with silver bullets!”

  “Shut the hell up!” the man hollered, bringing the weapon down in an unexpectedly swift motion and hitting Markus across the face with blunt metal.

  “Stop!” Katherine shouted, uncaring of the terror that could be heard clear as day in her voice as Markus collapsed to the floor, alternately groaning and spitting blood out of his mouth.

  Silver bullets. As if getting shot with a regular bullet wasn’t bad enough. The silver in the round lodged in Markus’s arm prevented him from being able to transform into his wolf form.

  It was one of the many quirks Katherine had learned about werewolves since becoming one. If in contact with even the slightest bit of silver, a werewolf could not transform out of whatever form he or she had happened to be in when contact with the silver was made. In human form, the silver wasn’t actually harmful and merely meant one couldn’t transform into his or her wolf form until contact with the silver was severed. But silver was like poison to a werewolf’s animal side. If the hunter had shot Markus in wolf form… he could very well have died.

  “Get over here,” the man barked at her, immediately snapping her out of her panicky thoughts. This time Katherine didn’t waste a single second in obeying, scurrying over to him from across the room. She cringed when he grabbed her and roughly forced her to turn around so that he could lock a pair of silver handcuffs he fished off his utility belt around her wrists, successfully securing her hands behind her back.

  “I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t kill him,” she spoke softly, staring at Markus and hoping his sharp ears didn’t pick up on her pleading. Somehow she knew the man would be furious that she was begging the hunter to have mercy on him instead of worrying about herself. “Please.”

  As much as Markus liked to pick on her, she knew he’d lay down his life for hers in a second – and not just because Bastian would certainly order it of him. He’d do it for any of his pack mates.

  And so would she.

  The hunter had the nerve to laugh at her plea. “Oh, don’t worry,” he breathed in her ear. She cringed at the feel of it hitting her skin. “I won’t. Not yet at least. After all, someone needs to deliver my message.”

  Without warning, he grabbed the chain interlocking the cuffs around her wrists and yanked her backwards, nearly causing her to lose her balance. Dragging her over to Markus’s form, he kicked her pack mate hard enough in the ribs so that he was forced to roll painfully from his stomach to his back.

  “Hey!” Katherine protested as he proceeded to stomp his booted foot on Markus’s chest and loom over the injured man.

  The hunter paid her no mind.

  “Tell that alpha dog of yours that I’ve got his precious bitch, and if he doesn’t find her by nightfall… well, all he ever will be finding of her is a corpse. I don’t think I need to tell you what will happen if he doesn’t come alone.”

  Without further ado, the hunter jerked her towards the front door. This time, though, the unexpected yank did cause her to lose her balance, and tripping over her own feet, Katherine landed on the floor with an oomph, banging her elbow rather badly on the way down.

  The man sneered in disgust at her fallen form, muttering something that sounded vaguely like the word “pathetic” before grabbing her by the scruff of her fur cape and pulling her to her feet. He pointed his gun directly at her head.

  “Walk,” he ordered.

  Swallowing around what had to have been her heart still stuck in her throat, Katherine nodded. In no time at all, he’d forced her out of the house, across the yard, and into the section of woods that was in the opposite direction of the large clearing where the claiming ceremony was supposed to take place in less than an hour.

  He didn’t care one lick that she didn’t have on any shoes, not allowing her pace to slow even as the sharp rocks and sticks hidden in the tall grass of the forest floor dug into the sensitive skin of her bare feet.

  “Stop.”

  Katherine tensed, but obeyed, when they weren’t more than fifty or so feet into the woods and the order escaped the man’s mouth.

  “Takes off your clothes.”

  As his next demand registered in her ears, an emotion other than terror finally managed to rear its head – anger. The volatile mix of the two combating emotions – cold fear and hot fury – threatened, for a moment, to make her sick.

  When the man dared to touch her – he made an impatient grab for the fur cape hanging from her shoulders when she didn’t immediately comply – Katherine did the only thing she could think of and head butted him as hard as she could in the face.

  The man jerked backwards and cussed as blood poured from his nose. He wasn’t completely incapacitated, however, and quickly grabbed her around the middle before she could run. She tried to kick him as he hauled her up into the air – her heels connecting a few times with his shins – but was slammed brutally to the ground before she could inflict a
ny real damage.

  “Stop your nonsense,” the man groused. “I’m not interested in that. I’d never lower myself to lusting after a dirty animal like you.” He offered her a smarmy smirk. “No matter how sweet you look like you’d taste.”

  “Disgusting prick,” Katherine muttered under her breath, but otherwise managed to bite her tongue as he preceded to haul her back to her feet, and skipping the niceties altogether, pulled a sharp looking pocket knife out of somewhere – his pocket, she imagined – and simply cut the fur cape and dress off her stiff form.

  When he had finished, the only fabric left on her was the tiny slip that Sophie had picked out for her earlier. He sneered at her nearly naked form. “The reason I wanted this,” he held up the ruined fur, “off of you was to ensure that lover boy can pick up your scent. Now go rub yourself against that tree there.”

  He gestured at a large evergreen.

  Feeling the barrel of the gun dig into the small of her back when she hesitated, Katherine reluctantly obliged. Ignoring how the rough bark scratched her skin, she rubbed her bare arm and hip against the trunk of the tree as instructed.

  Satisfied, the man once again began to pull her along.

  The sky got progressively darker as they continued to walk and he occasionally ordered her to rub herself up against random shrubbery as they traveled further and further into the forest. She thought about trying to make a run for it a few times, but the gun that was more often than not trained on her form kept her from making an attempt. Still, her mind raced as she desperately tried to think of a way out of the deadly situation she’d found herself in.

  It continuously came up blank.

  They had to have covered at least three miles – her feet were cut up badly, but the quickly cooling air numbed most of the pain – when they came upon a small clearing. Katherine instantly recognized it as the place she’d experienced her first transformation under the light of the full moon.

  But tonight wasn’t the night of the full moon, and she certainly wasn’t there with Bastian and her pack. Instead, she had a vengeful hunter for company.

  She flinched when he roughly shoved her back against a small tree, letting one of her hands free of the silver handcuffs only so he could force her arms around the trunk of the tree and quickly recuff said hand.

  She wasn’t in the awkward pose he’d forced her into for more than a few minutes before her shoulders began to strain. To take her mind off of the discomfort, Katherine finally dared to speak.

  “How did you find me?”

  The man smirked from where he leaned against a tree opposite her. “Well, now that’s an interesting story,” he admitted, twirling his gun in a seemingly nonchalant manner and talking to her as if she were an old friend and not someone he’d just kidnapped. The sarcasm that saturated his voice, however, gave him away. For whatever reason, the man loathed her. “I was tracking down a lead on a possible werewolf sighting in South Dakota, lounging around my motel room and minding my own business, when a news story on the television caught my attention. You see, a teenage girl had made her way back home to Iowa after having mysteriously disappeared from there seven months before.”

  Katherine’s stomach churned as realization dawned.

  “Imagine my surprise when the news reporter said your name and a picture of your sweet little face filled my screen. Katherine Mayes, the itty bitty girl who’d gotten the best of me all those months ago. I was tempted to hunt you down right then and there, but I finished the job I was on before seeking you out. Of course, by the time I got to Middletown, you were already gone. Fortunately, I remembered that the reporter covering your story had mentioned something about Fort Saskatchewan. I knew that it must have been close to where the beast who’d killed my partner took you all those months ago and where you’d undoubtedly returned. I’ve been searching the area for weeks. Lady Luck must have truly been smiling down upon me last night when I stumbled upon a piece of werewolf trash drinking himself into oblivion at a seedy, little bar just outside of the city. And even luckier, he recognized your name. Had a rather violent reaction to it, in fact, and threw his mug across the room in a fit of animalistic rage. Got the both of us kicked out of the bar.”

  Katherine’s eyes widened in disbelief. Could it be? “Rogue?” she croaked.

  “Ah, yes. That’s what he called himself – horribly uncivilized name, really. It wasn’t hard to wheedle the location of your colony out of him, and it was even easier to get him to tell me exactly where to find you and your little pack. You know, I don’t think he likes you very much.”

  For a long moment, Katherine was too furious to speak. She knew that Rogue hated Bastian – and by association, her – but to put the entire town at risk by revealing its location to a hunter? It was an unthinkable betrayal.

  The hunter was amused by her speechless anger if his subsequent grin was anything to go by. “Don’t worry your little head about him, beastie. He wasn’t much use to me after I picked his head clean of information. After all, he was a werewolf. It would have been remiss of me to let him live.”

  Katherine blanched at the revelation, but her fury at Rogue didn’t entirely evaporate upon learning of his fate. After all, because of him, she might soon share that same fate – death. Unless… it was a long shot, but maybe she could convince the hunter she was more than just some deranged animal that deserved death – that she was human too. It was unlikely, she knew, but she didn’t have anything to lose by trying.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked quietly, studying him closely for his reaction. “Is… is it because Bastian killed your partner in Middletown? Were you two close?”

  The man snorted derisively. “Hardly. He’s not the first partner I’ve lost in the business of killing monsters.”

  Katherine swallowed. “Then why? Why go through all of this trouble to find me?”

  He eyed her incredulously. “I’m sorry, I thought I had made my intentions clear.” He pushed himself off the tree he was lounging on and approached her, leaning in close until their noses were nearly touching. “I am going to kill you.”

  Ignoring the way her stomach quivered in fright at the bold declaration, Katherine resolutely pushed forward. It wasn’t like she didn’t already know what he had planned for her after all. “But why kill any of us? Werewolves, I mean?” she asked, grateful that her voice didn’t give away her fear. “What happened to you to make you hate us so much?”

  She hoped that if she could at least understand the reason behind his abhorrence of her kind that she could find a way to elicit some sort of empathy – some sort of compassion – from the man.

  He snarled at her question. “That’s none of your business.”

  Katherine licked her lips. “If I’m going to die anyway, you might as well tell me.”

  The man was quiet for a beat too long, and Katherine was almost certain that he wasn’t going to respond when he surprised her by opening his mouth.

  “Stubborn little thing, aren’t you?” he muttered lowly before squarely meeting her eyes. “If you must know, my father was bitten by a werewolf some twenty odd years ago. He didn’t know it, of course – I would like to think he would have killed himself before he had the chance to hurt any of us if he had – but like I said, he didn’t know. How could he have? How could any of us have? Anyway, a month later he… changed. I watched him morph into a heinous monster with no conscious to speak of. He ripped apart my mother without batting an eye. My sister too. He would have killed me as well if I hadn’t managed to break his hunting rifle out of his gun safe and shoot him. I had to unload a half dozen rounds into him until he stopped moving completely – stopped trying to come at me and tear me to shreds too. I was twelve.”

  The man had kidnapped her at gun point and had cuffed her to a tree, and yet upon hearing his story, Katherine still hurt for him. She hated that she felt sympathy for the man – a killer who was responsible for numerous deaths, including those of Bastian’s parents, and yet… there
it was all, the same.

  “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” It wasn’t a lie – the sympathy lacing her voice was entirely genuine.

  The hunter, however, didn’t think so. “Please, you’re one of them.”

  “Yes,” Katherine hesitantly agreed, “I am. But that doesn’t render me incapable of experiencing emotion. I may turn into a wolf once a month, but I’m still human. I still feel. In fact, I think I feel even more now that I’ve been changed. What happened to you and your family was a horrible accident.”

  The man stiffened and Katherine knew immediately that she must have said something wrong. “Accident? What happened to my family wasn’t some accident!” he spat. “My father was turned into a monster – a monster that killed his own wife and child without a second goddamn thought! And I’m sure you can imagine where I ended up when I told the police what had happened. Apparently claiming that your father had turned into a wolf and slaughtered your mother and sister is enough to earn you a one way ticket to a padded, white room.”

  “I’m sorry,” Katherine tried again after giving the man a moment to calm himself. “You’re right. Accident was the wrong word to use. It’s terrible that a werewolf bit your father. It’s even worse that he abandoned him and allowed your father to transform with other people – you and your mother and sister – nearby. But don’t judge all werewolves on the actions – horrible as they were – of one. Bastian didn’t abandon me and leave me to fend for myself when he bit me, did he? He made sure that I was safe. He made sure that those around me were safe. We don’t want to hurt anyone. Why else would we live here, so far removed from society?”

  Unfortunately, the hunter wanted no part of the truth she was dishing out. “Shut up,” he snapped at her.

  But Katherine wasn’t so easily deterred. “Please. I’m so sorry about what happened to you. If you just let me go-”