by Jayla Kane
Hunter roared.
He was standing over me—his black eyes were locked on mine, searching, searching for life, studying my panic as the grey was swallowed by that dark pupil, and then a drop of blood splashed by my shoulder and he stood up, took a single step over my body so that he was standing over me and roared.
It was deafening. If I’d had the breath to do it, I would’ve begun to cry—never in my life have I been so scared, so terrified. Hunter wasn’t human—I don’t care that he walked around on two legs and had hands and a mouth that used words most of the time—that was not human.
I couldn’t see the other guy. But then I could breathe.
“Jesus,” the voice said, but it wasn’t an apology. Wasn’t good enough. As I lurched into a sitting position Hunter sprang and disappeared in mid-air, instantly reappearing behind the prick that almost killed me, his claws an inch from his throat. He didn’t even know Hunter was there.
“Fuck you,” I gasped, the sound almost unrecognizable; I felt like I was spitting razors, but it had to be said. Hunter’s black eyes locked on mine and he bared his teeth; he’d never had fangs before. I stared at him and he stared at me and we were both thinking the same thing, and that stupid prick realized then and only then that he was about to die—
“Enough,” came a woman’s voice, echoing down the stairs. Hunter blinked.
“Do it,” I hissed, and his claws clicked in the air as the prick’s eyes widened and he began to turn around, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. Hunter’s eyes went back to mine—
“Miss Keller,” the woman called. “If you would be so kind as to let both the gentlemen go—we have things to discuss.”
Power.
The prick was frozen, so scared of the shadow creeping over his shoulders that he couldn’t bear to turn around. I pulled myself to my feet and faced him. “They must need something,” I spoke to Hunter, who was… Rumbling, for lack of a better word. Not purring, but not making any kind of noise a human makes. He was waiting, I knew, because if he killed this guy it wouldn’t be a solo crime. We’d be in it together. I swallowed, my throat dangerously raw, and walked towards him, ignoring the asshole standing completely still between us. “Hunter, it’s okay. It’s alright. Come back when you can—I’m going to go see if I can… Negotiate. Okay?”
Those black eyes flashed, then changed right in front of me. And once Hunter was fully human again—at least in appearance—that stupid motherfucker turned around and grinned at him like he was safe. “Now that is quite a talent,” he said, envy in his voice. “You must—”
I slapped him as hard as I could. He swung towards me, his face a snarl, then froze again.
Hunter was still inhuman. The sound he made reminded us all of that. And its message was clear, without a single word: touch her again, and I’ll rip you apart.
“Don’t do that ever again,” I hissed, and the asshole’s eyes narrowed at me, his mouth thin and firm. “Trust me, he’ll make it quicker than I will.”
It was a mostly empty threat, I thought; all the same, the blood drained from his face as he studied my expression. Hunter seemed satisfied that he wouldn’t try anything else for now when he saw that, and stalked around him; he followed me up the stairs, leaving the asshole behind. I wondered if there was another way in and out of the dungeon, or if that guy just liked hanging out down there and occasionally suffocating people when he got in the mood.
Magic was real.
And so far, it was awful.
When we got to the top of the stairs, I understood why Hunter had such a hard time telling me what he’d seen. The room inside was recognizable, and although it was in pretty rough shape—the furniture was obviously expensive antiques, but somebody thrashed it and shredded the walls—it looked like a room.
The person in the corner did not.
“Mr. Black, I expect you have other things to attend to,” the voice said, and now I didn’t hear a single woman’s voice—I heard several. Many. All intertwined together so that it was like talking to a chorus. And although they were mostly hidden in a long flowing black robe like something my mom might wear, the face was… Gone. Just a shapeless, featureless mass, tucked inside the black hood. Just… nothing.
“It’s alright,” I heard Hunter murmur behind me, as if he knew what I was thinking. He wanted me to know I wasn’t imagining anything, and even though I hated him so much for dragging me into this nightmare, I recognized the kindness of the gesture. The protective impulse.
I guess I was one of Hunter Black’s projects now. Like Molly, his little sister.
For some reason, that didn’t sit so well with me.
“Why are you doing this?” My voice sounded firmer than I felt, more resolved. I let my fury show; I might have been terrified by this creep show a little more if I hadn’t just watched a 6’6 monster man roar into the face of an asshole that could steal your breath, but here we were. It hurt to talk, so I let the question hang in the air and waited.
“Mr. Black,” the woman said again in her thousand voices, and now there was a thread of discord in the musicality. “Please leave us.” I caught a ripple of movement from under the cloak, as if she were clenching her hands.
As if Hunter frightened her.
Good.
“It’s okay,” I told him again, our tentative bond growing even stronger—and more dysfunctional—as I relied on him coming back if he left. He would. I knew he would. He had to. “Just…” I couldn’t beg for it, though. I was too angry.
He understood, I could tell—all of it, every word I hadn’t said. I felt him take a step away from me. “I’ll be back,” he said, but not for my benefit; he was warning this thing in the corner. She held perfectly still when he bent his knees, as if he were about to take an elegant dive, and then disappeared.
When he was gone, she visibly relaxed. We watched one another for a long moment, the open door yawning behind me and filling the air with the smell of long forgotten dust and whispers of movement, far below.
“So,” I said, and gave her a pointed look.
“Miss Keller,” she said began, and I could almost feel the anticipation in her voice, a mix of delighted satisfaction and ruthless ambition, as if she’d just snared her opponent’s queen in a very, very long game of chess. “Have you heard of the Ashwood Society?”
“You know I have.” I gritted my teeth. Spinning yarn into gold.
“We’d like to make you an offer.”
Chapter Ten
Hunter
Jake was in bad shape.
I knew he was; I’d been paying attention, as much as I could. And although I was painfully aware of Jake’s flaws—many of them had been on display lately, some of the ones I liked least at the fore—I loved him. I felt… I felt hollow. I watched him go through this thing with Raven and it ripped me apart not to have known how dangerous the Society was, what they would do to get what they wanted.
So it wasn’t a surprise to me when Percy told me they whipped her.
What was surprising was that she let them. That she’d stepped up when they called his name—taken his place, let them do to her what Lucas had done to Jake for years. I didn’t get it. It wasn’t a mystery to me that someone in the Society knew about Jake’s past; they probably had mind-readers and all kinds of shit in their ranks, who knows what all, and Jake had a target on his back whether he knew it or not. He was a Warfield. Synonymous with wealth, and Ashwood itself. Our town revolved around the Warfields; technically, I guess my family owned the largest piece of property in the county, but we were white trash. No one was worried about us, we were just land rich, and obviously so. The Warfields were worth billions. International barons of industry. Jake laughed all that shit off—he never even talked about it, unless he was drunk and offering to fly us to Cancun—but the Society would want in on that. Who wouldn’t?
And they punished him, in two ways: they pulled out the worst pain of his past, the most painful, humiliating and vicious betrayals
combined into one. Raven, the love of his life who abandoned him after she murdered his brother, stepped in to take a beating that could’ve been the same one he got from Lucas when he was nine.
Fucked up. That bitch back in the office had something to do with it, I was sure.
I knew seven members of the Council now. I was the Wolf. Raven, Sineater, Jake, Master of Games. Percy Hatchett was the Song, that bitch was the Rose, and although I didn’t know his standing with the Society I knew that fucker in the dungeon had to be on the Council. He wasn’t Titus Devereaux, who was the only other high ranking member we’d pegged—no idea what his title was, but I knew his face, and he wasn’t the strangler downstairs. How else could that prick suffocate someone from across the room? You could only get that kind of juice from a position on the Council.
Seven Council members… Two of them marked for certain, excruciating death.
Just as soon as I figured out how to save my sister.
Jake needed food, but he couldn’t eat. I remembered what it was like in the beginning—I hadn’t slept either, was awake for days trying to figure out what was happening to me and how to control it. I hadn’t succeeded, of course, but I’d been following Jake every moment I wasn’t doing something else, and so far no claws had appeared. Nothing that told me he was going to turn into a monster because I’d signed the book. Not like I had.
But something was wrong.
I could feel it. But I couldn’t fix it—the worst part of what was happening to Jake didn’t have that much to do with the Society at all. It had to do with Raven.
And I had no advice for that.
Protect yourself? Surrender? I couldn’t say what would be better, what would keep him sane. I didn’t know; maybe the girl I’d kidnapped would.
After I propped Jake back up with some food and forced him to lay down for a while, if not to sleep, I slipped out and went back to the office. He was meeting Raven in an hour, but at least he’d pretend to sleep for my sake. It was Friday night, and he looked like a corpse; maybe Raven could talk him into sleeping some more—I’m sure she had more powers of persuasion at her disposal, anyway. The door to the office was open, but the room was vacant again; it looked like it had the first time I walked through the door, like some innocuous waiting room somewhere that could’ve been picked up and transplanted to any place in Northern America. Nothing magical about it at all.
But as I stood there, looking around me and wondering what the hell to do, it began to… To shimmer, for lack of a better word. As if it wanted to change.
I took a deep breath and thought, then went over and closed the door behind myself so that no one walking by could see in.
Sure enough, the room shifted around me immediately. Maybe it was cued to Society members—the spell that hid it tracked the magic in my body, somehow, and changed when people like me stepped inside it.
People like me—people with my disease.
I thought about ripping it apart some more—maybe gouging a couple of holes in the walls, or ripping apart the floor… But what was the point? The damage was done.
The way Artemis spoke to me when I was about to dissect that fucker downstairs came back to me, hushed and low, as if she were approaching a wild dog. And the truth was, the part of me that wanted to kill him wasn’t so savage because it’d been twisted by the spells that wracked my body, that became more and more pronounced every time I started to transform. No… The part of me that wanted to kill him was human.
It was, and always had been, Hunter Black.
He hurt her. I would never forget the way her face looked, the grimace that gripped her as her body begged for air. She was writhing on the floor in agony and he was just standing there, his hand held out in a tight, white-knuckled fist, like he was watching a curious sort of television show. Tense, but not dangerous.
And I lost it.
The rage I felt didn’t belong to the magic, though; I couldn’t blame the Society for making me want to become a murderer. That was me. That was mine.
Because Baby Keller was also mine.
It was my fault; she was mine to protect, to guard, to keep safe from whatever the hell it was the Society thought they were doing. She belonged to me in the very specific sense that a leash, when held, has two ends.
I didn’t kill him because she thought it would hurt me to do it; she thought she was talking me down.
But she was just reminding me of the difference between us, the layer of tension that would always be there. She thought I was an animal before I ever became one.
I just didn’t want to prove her right.
I opened the door down to the dungeon and walked through, descending into the darkness below. My footsteps were quieter now; my body was more attuned to the sounds and smells around me all the time, even when I didn’t look like a beast with claws and fangs. My vision wasn’t better, which I thought was strange, but whenever I found myself in the dark I could still navigate anything just by listening to the distance between echoes and smelling the air. I found myself pausing sometimes and doing just that, outside, on the Commons, and wondered if it was obvious to anyone passing by.
The dungeon smelled musty. Before, I hadn’t erupted into a willing beast when I was down here; I cradled Baby for as long as I dared, then laid her down on the bed and leaned against the wall, dozing and listening like a cat. Since then, I’d felt my body transform several times, and it was slowly getting easier to control. I stopped in the middle of the central hallway and focused on the scents around me. That film of dust, sure—that was obvious. It overlaid everything. But underneath that… The tang of my own blood was fresh and sharp, mixing with a swipe of adrenaline laced with fear—Baby’s sweat, on the floor where she almost died. If I concentrated, I could pick up the smell of that fucker… And follow it to another cell. He’d been in here, waiting, for some time. I guessed correctly that they weren’t necessarily expecting me to stay with her, although I also guessed that they knew I had. So he was sent here to monitor us.
I didn’t recognize him, but something about his scent tickled my memory… I couldn’t place it. Whatever it was about him that bothered me, assaulting Baby aside, it’d happened before I signed the book.
That fucking book.
I wondered what they wanted from Artemis Keller, beautiful, venomous youngest sibling of the beautiful, not-as-venomous-as-I-once-thought Kellers, what the Rose had said to her once I left. What kinds of lies she told.
Baby was smart. She would have bargained more, gotten a better deal—I had to hope. Maybe she was even gone, returned to real life and joining the Homecoming Planning committee for her senior year of high school or some other mean girls shit.
But no… I could smell her, I realized, ignoring the distracting patch of her distress in the dust beneath my feet as I walked through the hall and back towards her cell. I reached down and touched the handle on her door, then stopped myself and knocked. I just wanted to give her a second, to let her compose herself.
As if we were any kind of allies, or could be, after this. “Come in,” she called, playing along; she must’ve known it would be me.
Swallowing hard, I opened the door and checked inside.
She was sitting on the edge of the hard bed, and even before I stepped inside I could smell the tears that ran down her cheeks, almost gone now, iridescent in the dim light. She looked up at me unblinking, fierce and unwilling to admit they were there. Or any other sign of weakness, for that matter.
“I know why I’m here,” she said clearly, sitting up straight. I came in and closed the door behind me, wishing there was a way to know if someone was watching us inside—if there were cameras mounted anywhere. I hated invading her privacy, which felt stupid. As if there were boundaries I hadn’t smashed through already, as if I could somehow go backward in time and make this right.
I waited. She cleared her throat; her muscles must have been bruised, painful to talk through, and there was a rasp to her words that wasn’t there
before. “Before I tell you, I need to know something.”
“Okay,” I said, and I was glad that the firestorm of emotions racing through me didn’t show in my voice.
“I’m here,” Baby said carefully, “because of you.” I nodded, waiting, and she bit her lip, her brow lowering. “They want us… You really don’t know?”
I stared at her and waited, my skin growing cold.
It took her a minute to spit it out, the words bitter on her lips. “They want us to have sex, Hunter. They want us to fuck. That’s why it had to be you.”
Chapter Eleven
Baby
It was almost comical—almost. Hunter has about three expressions, and only two of them were visible at any given moment; one was a predatory grin that told you he was about to fuck some shit up, and the other was a stony blankness that passed as his every-day look. It revolved on a hundred to one split, from what I’d seen. The third expression I’d witnessed exactly one time, and then dreamed about, in detail, for the next nine months.
But this… This was special. Both of his black eyebrows flew up on his forehead and his mouth fell open, showing off how lush those lips really were when they weren’t pinned in a straight line. I almost laughed; I mean, it’s funny, right? It’s funny.
And also horrible.
The Rose, as she called herself, did not shift into anything recognizable during our little chat. No shred of her that would be identifiable as human in the regular world showed up, and I’m including her personality in that statement—she was the worst kind of monster in the world. The psycho worked her way up to it, though; she didn’t just come right out and say, hey, listen girl, that big-ass redneck I blackmailed into kidnapping you? Yeah, you need to hand that dude your V card sis. Peace.
