by Mandy Rosko
Gwen offered Shepard her hand, but he stood on his own. She looked at the scratch on his arm curiously before turning to John.
“Are you out of your mind?!”
“Me! You were letting him kiss you!”
Shepard had something between a smirk and a grin on his face. He couldn’t help it, he liked hearing Gwen give the cocky wolf hell. It being over a kiss he’d given and she’d enjoyed, made it that much better.
“What I do is none of your business! Stop smirking!” She’d turned and yelled at him. Shepard sputtered. He’d forgotten she could sense emotions.
Di went to stand beside John for support. When he ignored her, Shepard felt enough pity for her to forget the situation.
John was scowling something fierce at Gwen, his arms shaking and fists clenched.
“You know what? Fine. If you want the hunter you can have him.”
“John,”
“Don’t talk to me.” He turned away from her and stood at the other end of the room. Di followed him and, again, he ignored her.
Gwen sighed. Shepard could see her chin trembling but, before he could say anything, she took a deep breath and faced him.
He thought she would chew him out for kissing her; instead, she eyed the scratch on his arm again and asked, “When did he turn you?”
He should’ve known she would figure it out so quickly. He was about to answer, but his ears perked. It was the sound of a gun being loaded outside, a bright little red dot appearing between Gwen’s eyes.
He dove for her and pushed her out of the way before the shot was fired. When the bullet missed, more rained in on the cabin. Everyone else ducked and covered their heads as wood chips, pieces of old wallpaper, and dust rained down on them.
Shepard threw a protective arm around Gwen, praying she wasn’t hit. No one moved until the shooting stopped. Shepard was the first to his feet.
“They’re reloading their guns. We need to go, now!”
“I hear one of them sneaking through the bushes to the back, the other is still in the front,” Di said, shaking slightly but trying to act as though almost getting killed hadn’t affected her.
Evey answered her. “Then we should hurry.”
Shepard took Gwen’s arm and helped her to her feet. “You alright?” he asked, looking her over as they hurried to the back door, ignoring John’s growling.
“I’m fine,” she said, suddenly yanking her arm out of his hand.
“Sorry,” she said at his confused look. “You were hurting me.” It wasn’t just that, she felt guilty about leading the hunters to Evey’s house, which was now more destroyed than ever. She was sure she’d covered her tracks, how did they find her?
“Oh.” Shepard didn’t have time to feel like an idiot. Suddenly, the door burst open and Jimmy came inside with his gun in hand. The second he saw Shepard, he froze.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, gun still up and pointed right at him.
Shepard could have sworn that his brothers had seen him on the side of the road earlier. Maybe they thought he was some random hitchhiker.
John took the moment of confusion to grab a long piece of hard wood from Evey’s floor and hit Jimmy in the head with it. The hunter’s eyes glazed over before he fell. Shepard caught him before he could hit the floor and possible injure himself.
“Are you insane!” he yelled, angered that his brother was now hurt. He hoped there wouldn’t be any permanent damage, but he also knew that if there was, the Were had most likely inflicted it on purpose.
Evey came forward, her fangs extending.
“Come any closer and I’ll stake you!” He didn’t happen to have a wooden stake on him, but the threat was enough for her to back off. “No one is killing any of my brothers,” he said.
John bristled at the command. “Why you—”
“He’s right,” Gwen said quickly. “We need to get out of here right now, there’s no time for this.” She then turned to the only vampire in the room. “Evey, if we leave him here, you won’t bite him if you come back and he’s still unconscious, right?”
Shepard liked that idea. He didn’t want to take Jimmy with him and turn him into a hostage like he was, but leaving him in the house of a vampire also worried him. Being a new Were and having Gwen’s support on his side helped, but realistically he was still their captive and had no say in anything. If they didn’t listen to her, his brothers were done for.
The vampire sighed and rolled her eyes.
“Please?” Gwen begged.
“Fine,” she hissed. “But, I’m not taking him to a hospital if he’s injured.”
Shepard sighed, it was good enough for him. He took off his shirt and made a makeshift pillow out of it before leaving with the others and sneaking around the back. Gwen had a hard time not openly staring at his chest, something John noticed and wasn’t pleased with.
***
Allen was beginning to worry when Jimmy didn’t call back to him. With his gun raised, he took a few steps toward the house.
“Jim?” he called, looking under the car to be sure no Weres were hiding. A flashlight taped to his shotgun made sure he could see that there weren’t.
He looked up in time to see David’s fist slamming him in the eye. White stars flashed and he went down.
“Sorry, bro, didn’t want to do that,” David said, pulling him closer to the house, away from where John might “accidentally” run him over with the car. It seemed he was hitting Allen a lot lately, hopefully his brother would forgive him for it one day.
“Nice hit, hunter,” John goaded, knowing that he really didn’t want to hurt him. Shepard would rather punch Allen himself than let John do it. Him taking out Jimmy was bad enough.
“The Shepards are having a really bad day,” Dianna said. Shepard glared at her and she turned away.
“Alright, they’re both taken care of,” Evey said, the guns that Jimmy and Allen had been using in her hands. “Where are we going now?”
“To the hospital,” Gwen said quickly.
“Why?” Dianna asked.
“Well, we need to have Doc look at David because someone turned him,” she said with a sneer on her face, angered by the idea that either Dianna or John changed David so close to the full moon. Probably John, she would need to talk with him about it later. “Plus, for some reason my dad thought you two were taking me home.”
Dianna looked away at her glare, but John stood his ground. “We were just trying to keep him from worrying about you,” he said. “What do you think he would have done if he found out you were taken by some lowlife hunter?”
“Watch it,” Shepard hissed.
“Can we just talk about this in the car?” Gwen said before a fight broke out.
“Di, you sit up front with John,” Gwen said, much to John’s shock. He’d assumed Gwen would be sitting with him to get away from the man who’d stolen her. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t a prisoner when she was with the hunter. She gone with him willingly, not because of some cruel blackmailing scheme. This was the man she’d cried her eyes out over, whom she still loved, worried about, and had wanted to wait for rather than be with him.
John had to fight back his rising jealousy, it didn’t matter. The hunter was turning and the full moon was in fifteen hours. If he didn’t kill him, the strain of his first change would.
It was a side effect from not allowing the body to adjust to the changes that came with being a Were before turning for the first time. Soon, the hunter would be out of the picture and he would be there to comfort Gwen.
When they were all in the car, Di noticed him looking in the rearview mirror, glowering at Shepard who was sitting close and whispering to Gwen. Di put her hand on his shoulder.
“Are you alright?” she whispered.
John shrugged her hand away. She pulled it to her chest, hurt. “No,” he said, starting the engine and pulling away from the little house.
The gas station across the road was dead, there were
cars parked, but no people in sight. They must have heard the shots and ran for cover until everything was clear. The police would be around soon.
“I guess I’m not going home for a while,” Evey grumbled.
A small part of Shepard hoped that his brothers wouldn’t wake up until the police did arrive and take them in for questioning. It would buy them the time they needed to get to the hospital without worry. Hunters or not, they would never run into a hospital shooting off guns. They would both make something up, something that became easy after so many years. The problem was, they now had the guns that had been shooting up the house. All they needed was a cop to pull them over to make things worse.
Chapter Seven
“Sorry for what I said in the truck back there.”
Gwen was so happy she wanted to cry. “It’s okay.”
She’d been eating herself up with guilt ever since she found him, John, and Dianna gone. Terrified that they might have hurt or tortured him all because she had to get angry and toss him out when she knew John was out sniffing for her. What she found was almost just as bad.
He was turning. Now that he was sitting so close to her, she could smell the faint scent of his change; his scent was changing from that of a normal man to a werewolf. With the full moon only hours away, she didn’t know if he could survive his first change.
That werewolves could only change under the light of a full moon was another common mistake usually seen in the movies. It was true for newcomers, the first change happening against the will of the new wolf, but after that, with practice and patience, the changes could be controlled. David’s change was going to happen only hours after he’d been scratched and his body wouldn’t have enough time to adjust before it happened. If, by chance, he did happen to survive, he could turn into a rabid wolf, the very thing he feared and hunted all his life.
Gwen wrapped her arms around his bare shoulders and whimpered.
“Are you alright? What’s wrong?” he asked, making Gwen sob. He didn’t even know about the risks. He knew he was changing, but he didn’t know he was going to die.
She shook her head, not knowing how she was going to tell him, or if she even should. What was the use of making him count down the last seconds of his life?
“I’m just glad you’re okay,” she lied.
Shepard squeezed her tighter. She felt so guilty she wanted to jump into a river. At least no one was saying anything to enlighten David about the full extent of his condition.
“He’ll have to see Doc,” Di said. Gwen groaned again.
“What? Why? Who’s Doc?” David asked, immediately tense and suspicious.
Gwen held him tighter, praying she wouldn’t give anything away to him.
“He’s a doctor we see,” John answered for Di, glaring at Shepard in his rearview mirror. “We don’t hide anything from him, he’ll need to examine your scratch.”
Doc would also probably tell David about the risk to his life. That thought only made Gwen more miserable, but when David looked at her for confirmation, she could only force a smile and nod her head.
***
“You don’t love him, so you have nothing to worry about.”
Gwen hesitated. “But I do, Daddy.”
Larry slid his eyes shut and sighed. Four little words that just about broke his heart.
His daughter came into Bill’s room with Evey not ten minutes ago to explain the situation. Their pack master had woken up but was still weak and could only listen to the conversation. As it turned out, the man who’d broken her heart in the cruelest way possible was not only in the building, but he was a Shepard to boot. A hunter trained to kill her without mercy.
He tried to reason with her, to explain that the man couldn’t be trusted. It was bad enough when she told him that he brought her to a motel room, broken truck or not. He didn’t want to think of the intentions the hunter had for his only daughter. He wanted nothing more than to have the man beaten and interrogated, preferably using Johnathan’s methods. No doubt the poor boy would enjoy the chance to get his revenge after having his ear shot off in the woods.
But, his little girl had to go ahead and say those four horrible words. He now knew it was out of the question.
Still, that didn’t mean he had to accept it. “Sweetheart, he’s brainwashing you, you have to see that. He’s using your history together to get you into bringing him on our good side.”
Gwen wanted to scream. It was late, she was exhausted and she wearing the second pair of clothes that weren’t hers, but she knew she hadn’t been tricked or brainwashed into thinking anything. Even with how tired she was, she liked to think her mind was sharper than that.
“Where exactly is he right now?” Larry asked.
“He’s with the others. John didn’t want to let him out of his sight,” she answered truthfully, not wanting her father to see David in case a fight broke out. Regardless of the fact that Shepard, at this very moment, was standing outside the door of their room, leaning against the wall and listening to their conversation with his increasingly new heightened hearing.
The wolves were so distracted they didn’t even know he was there; neither did Gwen.
He knew perfectly well the difficulties involved in sneaking away from a werewolf, he’d been trained to do it. He had to take off his shoes so that the male and treacherous female with him wouldn’t hear him getting away. He had to admit though, turning into a werewolf made slinking off extremely easier since the man named Doc wouldn’t let him into the room while he worked on John’s ear.
“Don’t even think about leaving!” John had snarled, angry that he couldn’t bully the doctor into at least keeping the door open so he could watch him. The man had been relentless, and he didn’t want any normal patients walking by and seeing the raw, bleeding area where his ear used to be while he cleaned it. “Take a step and I’ll hear you!”
Shepard inwardly chuckled. After all, that the fool didn’t even know he was gone. Pathetic. He could find out all the information he needed and be back in time for that doctor to look at his scratch.
Even though sneaking away was the easy part, amusing and entertaining even, he didn’t very much like the idea of spying on Gwen. Unfortunately, if he wanted to learn more about what was going to happen to him, he had to. Though he had to admit, hearing her say that she still loved him did make him feel kind of giddy.
“He’ll have to be detained,” said Gwen’s father. Shepard’s ears perked.
“We can’t do that!” Gwen protested, much to his relief.
There was some hesitation on the older Were’s part. “You know we have to. He’s a hunter, a Shepard. We need to question him. He could give us the answers to so many questions. And, if John really scratched him, we have only a limited amount of time to do it in.”
That caught Shepard’s attention especially. What did he mean by, “a limited time”? He was eventually going to turn back and he imagined that the pain of the turn wouldn’t allow him very much strength to go anywhere when he was in wolf form.
“He could survive it,” Gwen said. “He’s strong. This doesn’t mean it’ll kill him.”
Shepard suppressed a gasp. Kill him? The change? Why would it do that? He’d never heard of anyone but his older brother dying from the change and he was a child at the time, already injured. The change surely wouldn’t do more then take a lot of his energy, he was a fully grown man. Dammit, he felt fine!
“You know what the odds are,” said Evey. She didn’t sound condescending about it, more sympathetic. Shepard wished he could see what they were doing, but he didn’t dare try to open the door even a crack.
“Full Moon is tomorrow night. The change is going to rip through his body.”
“We can’t take that chance,” said another, much weaker voice.
“Bill, don’t talk, you should rest,” said another unidentified voice.
Bill spoke regardless. “Anything we can learn from the enemy will be useful. I’m sorry, Gwen. I
’ll give you some time alone … if you want, but it will have be all.”
Shepard decided that he’d heard enough and quietly slunk away from the door, back to the floor where John was being treated for his ear. He wouldn’t leave right away, if the pack master was offering Gwen a chance to speak with him privately then there were a few things he wanted to tell her.
He clenched his fists. She lied to him, again. She knew he was changing and she never told him there was a chance it could kill him. Everyone in that room thought he was, without a doubt, a goner and they were all making plans around it.
Well, dying or not, he knew that, at that moment, he still felt strong and full of life. He was going to use that to plan his escape and get out of there. He wouldn’t die a prisoner being questioned for hunter secrets.
The only problem was that he couldn’t just walk out the front door and leave. If everything went according to plan at the cabin, his father probably had the pack master’s address book. He would know where they all lived, were Gwen lived, and he needed to stay alive long enough to discover if it was missing or not.
Shepard took a seat on the bench outside the room John and Dianna were in. He seriously contemplated telling them of her treachery to her pack. How she found them, and, in the first few minutes of her acquaintance with the Shepard family, offered them valuable information on her pack and money.
She sobbed out a story of how her heart was broken because the wolf she was in love with was in love with another woman. Shepard now knew that the woman in question was Gwen and the man was John, having figured it out some hours ago, and Dianna was jealous enough to offer them the location of their Moon Night spot. Apparently, Dianna was as cowardly as they came. John let her know that he thought so on a few heartless occasions, so, in an attempt to be brave and heroic in his eyes, she told them the location of their Moon Night.
“Please don’t kill anyone,” she’d begged, rather stupidly Shepard thought. What did she think they were going to do with the information? He wanted to tell her of their real plans and warn her to leave right then and there. He knew enough about werewolves to know that there would be women and children in the pack and he wasn’t the kind to hunt them. But, a hand on his shoulder stopped him from saying a word.
