Fang
The sky had not yet begun turning pink when I slipped out. I went to sleep with a full bladder, intending exactly this. Darkwater was wrong, and that feeling had only gotten worse as the night went on. Made it hard to sleep.
She would have been going to bed around this time, but she only needed five hours of sleep most nights - four if it was a high pressure situation. More if she had eaten her fill of a kill. My money was on five.
I had less than five hours to find Tori and bring her home.
If I wasn’t back before the boss woke, my face would end up looking worse than Spike’s - and that shaven idiot was ugly on the best of days, with that smashed nose and ears that were too big for his bald head. Fucker had a head like a lumpy onion and if he didn’t figure out how to be part of the unit, he was going to end up dead.
I waited until I had some distance from the cabin before I broke into a run. Darkwater wouldn’t let me kill him. It didn’t matter that he was trash and did more harm than good, killing too much, leaving too many clues. The kid took the fall for it, but those last hunters had found us because of him, not her.
But she needed soldiers for her fight, and I was nothing if not a good soldier. It was all I had ever been good at, not that anyone gave a fuck. Explosions still sent me back there, seeing it all again. I saw their faces on the backs of my eyes on tough nights. That was a different life, but the scars would always be with me.
Some things you just couldn’t unsee.
And even though I’d never seen the enemy, Old Willow had vouched, had wanted us to prepare. She urged Darkwater to gather as many wolves as would follow her, make more if she had to. Fate of the world shit, by the way they talked about it.
Above my rank. I did what I was told.
Well, mostly. Darkwater wasn’t perfect, even if she was the toughest, strongest bitch I’d ever known in my life. She made mistakes.
Especially in talking to others. She couldn’t lead for shit but there was no one else to do it. When Old Willow passed, there was no one to pull Darkwater back from the edge. It was a fucking shame that Tori never got to meet Old Willow. It would have done her a lot of good.
She’d done me a lot of good. I don’t think I would have made it without her, mentally anyhow. She pulled me back from the brink with that stupid, sweet smile and those big green eyes that saw everything.
The pack that Turned me didn’t know they had. I was sport. I wasn’t supposed to survive it.
There were a lot of things I wished I could forget, those three days of dying weren’t the top of the list, but they were damned close.
Old Willow would say, There is no growth without pain, packbrother. You choose how the pain shapes you, how you grow. She was right. And I was determined to do my level best to get the runt through this. Through all of it.
The storm and snow had erased all the tracks, there was no trace of the kid that I could find. No scent, no trail - but there was only one spot she would have gone. There were two gas stations, one stoplight, and one market in this little town.
The runt would have gone to the market. Easiest to steal from, bigger stuff anyhow. She still had a bug up her butt sometimes about taking things, but she’d get over it eventually. If anything, Darkwater didn’t let her have enough time around humans now.
If she had, Tori would see that over the last four years, she had drifted far, far away from mankind. The runt was nothing like them now. They were prey, she was predator. Not that she was good at it. The boss was good at knocking her down, not so much at building her back up.
I had blown my shot trying to keep her from losing her mind. It was all too much for a kid.
As the wolf, and I was a biggun’, I prowled around the store, sniffing. The storm had taken the scents from around here. Had she been here? Did she make it this far?
Behind the market, I looked around to make sure the town was still asleep, that there were no cameras watching - I had learned to hear them more than I saw them, that whine of electric current. When I was sure, I shifted, taking the brute and giving the loading door a good yank, popping the lock apart and lifting just enough that I’d be able to squeeze in.
As the wolf. If they looked at security tapes from the inside, they’d see a big, ragged red-brown wolf stalking the aisles. Just a hungry animal that found an open door. I sniffed around the inside, and plain as day, there she was. I stopped to take a big bite out of the jerky display, chomping through wrappings and trying my best to not eat the plastic.
This wasn’t the first time I’d pulled this particular trick, but it had been a while. “Accidentally”, I knocked a glass bottle off the shelf with my tail, sending it crashing to the ground, shattering and spraying juice everywhere - and I ran, looking spooked, for the door I came in.
She’d been here, I just had to figure out where she went. That meant a spiral search pattern, basic strategy. I set out, trying to keep close to buildings, hidden, as I sniffed, trying to find any sign of her. I didn’t have much time, if people saw me wandering around, they’d call the cops and I’d get shot at and chased off. That was a shorter clock than Darkwater right now.
When I found her clothes under a dumpster two buildings over, I could have cheered. Sheer fucking luck with this much snow on the ground. It was her flipflop that did it, seafoam green poking up from the snow next to the bin. By the scent, a raccoon had been digging around here.
She’d abandoned her clothes. Now I knew something had happened. She had seen something, heard something, that made her need to shift. There was no sign of the bag, so she either had it with her, or it was taken from her. Little girl with a roll of cash like that was a target. If I found the fucker before Darkwater woke, I’d maim them to the point that dental records would be needed to ID them.
From the dumpster, her trail disappeared quickly, which is what I needed to do. I could hear cars puttering around, the town was waking up and there wasn’t much hope of picking the trail back up this way. I had to think.
What could she have seen?
Wildly enough, the kid wore such baggy fucking clothes that I could pull them on. Fine by me, I pulled on the baggy shorts, the shirt that would be oversized on her but fit me decently enough. Her flipflops were way too small though. I slipped them in my back pocket.
My hands went in my front pockets and I slouched, walking barefoot through the back alleys of Riverford, such as they were, making sure to walk right through my wolf tracks. I tended to stay away from towns. I made people nervous. Big guy, hairy, shaggy beard, scars and faded tattoos? Everything about me screamed “danger” to most people even before a human’s instinctual fear came into play. The runt was much better suited for runs into town. I wish she’d see that it was just as important to the pack as my ability to stretch someone’s lower lip over their head.
Probably moreso.
I had some time to kill before the shop opened and cleaned up the mess I had made - I didn’t want to be there right as it opened, too weird. I decided to get the lay of the land, do some recon and figure out what I could.
The snow hid my bare feet - it was cold, I looked like a crazy person, trudging through snow that came to my knees in shorts. There was a good chance the market wouldn’t open today. I hit the southern end of town, seeing the eyes from windows of a couple of the houses. The cops wouldn’t be far behind in a town like this, they’d escort me out of town if I was lucky. Some places they wanted to toss you in their little jail, the one cell they had in their tiny cop-den.
As I was about to turn off, find somewhere secluded to shift and run off, I smelled it.
Fuck.
Of all the things I expected to find in this little shithole, this was not one of them. There was a wolf here. Somewhere near this part of town. Male. Adult. Alone, by the scent - and it was everywhere. He’d spent more than a little time on this turf for me to be able to smell him through the snow.
Fuck.
The smart play was to run back to the cabin, grab Darkwater and Spike and come as a pack. The pieces added up, the kid ran into him, smelled him, probably mouthed off. If she was dead, he was going to wish he had died - and he’d be wishing it for a long, long painful time. He’d regret his fast healing.
As the edges of my vision began to turn pink, I knew the smart play was out of the question. She had disappeared last night and Darkwater had stopped me from coming. I was furious. Someone had taken my little sister. Some fucking wolf had hold of her, and had for hours.
I ran.
Out of town, to the south, where the scent was stronger. He had a den somewhere and I was going to find it and tear his jaw off and Tori would wear it as a necklace. I was going to make him wish he’d never seen her.
I wasn’t going to lose another person that counted on me.