Chapter 33

Chapter 33

“What are your chances when someone puts a gun to your head? You take the gun, or you pull out a bigger one. Or you call their bluff. Or, you do any one of a hundred and forty other things.”

Harvey Specter

There are not a lot of things I excel at.

Tennis? I’m terrible.

Baking? All my cookies burn.

But squashing down my fear and panic so that I can think logically and re-evaluate a situation?

Yeah, I’m pretty good at that.

Although plenty of fear followed the man shooting Scarlett with silver bullets and promptly shoving the gun in my face, I swallowed down the panic like a tough shot of whiskey.

I could panic in some therapist’s office later. Right now, I needed – and Scarlett needed – me to think logically.

I was still looking down the barrel of a shotgun packed with buckshot, and from the look of vitriol in his eyes, I would bet my life – literally – that saying the wrong thing might get me killed.

So, I attempted to say something that wouldn’t.

“How did you know we were werewolves?”

His eyes narrowed.

“I knew because of the way your kind walks,” he spat, “A little too fast and with a little too much confidence to be human. Spotted your friend as soon as she walked past my truck.”

He suddenly waved the gun at me, and I sucked in a breath. “Gotta admit, you’re much better at hiding it than your friend is. Would’ve mistaken you as a human if you weren’t with her.”

I didn’t know if his ignorance gave me an advantage. He certainly seemed to hate werewolves, and letting him know I was human might help me avoid a bullet.

But it could also earn me a bunch of questions I couldn’t answer, and I was treading on thin ice as it was.

“Who are you?” I asked. From what I knew of this world, humans weren’t supposed to know about wolves, not unless they had some direct involvement with him.

It wasn’t the trucker who answered my question, but Scarlett.

“Hunter,” she groaned weakly. The blood covered her entire shirt now, the original color barely visible. She definitely wasn’t healing, which meant I needed to get us away from this guy before she bled out completely.

“That’s right,” the trucker confirmed, “I’m a werewolf hunter. Your kind thinks your top of the food chain, but I’ve killed five werewolves in the past year…soon to be seven. Maybe when I’m done with you two, I’ll skin you and use your pelts as rugs. I could use a new fur rug.”

The sadistic gleam in his eyes as he spoke of skinning us was almost enough for my composure to crumble, but I held it together – barely.

It also meant that I probably wasn’t going to be able to appeal to any kind of conscience or morality in him. If Scarlett bleeding out on the forest floor wasn’t enough to make him second guess his decision to kill us, I wasn’t sure anything would.

*That brings me to Plan B…distraction.*

If I could distract him well enough, I might be able to wrestle the gun away and force him to give me the truck keys. And from there…well, I hadn’t figured that out yet.

*I can’t say it’s the best plan I’ve ever come up with, but right now, it’s all I have.*

“Are there more of you?” I asked. “More hunters?”

“Oh, there’s lots of us,” the trucker said, “More than you could imagine. All over the continent – hell, maybe even the world.”

“But you prefer to work alone.”

His eyes narrowed into slits. “How do you know that?”

“There’s two of us, and you didn’t call another hunter to help. You wanted to take us down on your own.”

He brandished the gun in my face, a stark reminder that I had no advantage against him. “Does it seem like I need any help putting your ass down? You’re all just a bunch of mangy dogs that need to be eradicated.” The vitriol in his voice was practically tangible.

“Oh, I see now,” I breathed a laugh, but there was no humor in my voice. “This is personal for you.”

At that, Scarlett managed to crane her head enough to give me a terrified look, as if silently asking why I was antagonizing the man with a loaded weapon in his hand.

The man bristled. “This is not – how do you –”

“Were you attacked as a kid or something?” I cut him off, “No…I don’t think that’s it. I don’t see any visible injuries, so that’s unlikely. Not you then. Someone close to you. Hurt or killed by a werewolf.”

“That’s none of your business,” he snarled, but the way he locked his jaw told me I was right.

“You’re about to kill me and my friend,” I said, my voice softer this time, “Can’t I at least know why?” If I could get him to open up, get distracted with his anger, then I could strike.

He was silent for a minute, his face hard, and I began to wonder if I’d miscalculated when his shoulders slumped and he started to talk. “It was my wife,” he said, and there was something new in his voice – grief. “A year ago, I came home to find her slaughtered in the backyard with her insides on her outsides.”

As he spoke, the gun fell to his side, and it took everything in me not to glance at the weapon. I didn’t want to give my intentions away.

“I thought it was just a hungry wolf at first,” he continued, “Till I saw it transform back to a human woman. My whole life changed that day. Not just the death of my wife, but everything I thought I knew about the world. I realized there’s true evil out there, and it wears two skins.”

He was so caught up in the story that he didn’t see me shift my weight onto my front foot, readying myself to pounce.

“And you want to know why my wife died? Why that wolf killed her?” He snapped, and for a moment, he looked just as animalistic as the creatures he claimed to hate. “Because she smiled. In the grocery store. At a man, who happened to be mated to one of your kind. The she-wolf took offense, followed my wife home, and…”

He closed his eyes, choking on the last words.

I struck.

With every bit of my human speed, I launched myself straight for the gun resting in his left hand. My arms outstretched, my fingers closed around the barrel, and –

The trucker jerked the gun out of reach.

Pain exploded on the left side of my face, and I crumpled to the ground.

I’d been cold-cocked with the same gun I’d lunged for.

Stars danced in my vision, and it might’ve left a nasty bruise. If only I was going to live long enough to find out.

“Nice try, bitch,” he scoffed, and I heard the cock of the shotgun before I saw it.

This was it.

He was going to kill me.

I was going to die at twenty-years-old, in a world that wasn’t even my own.

“Any last words?” The hunter asked, and I fought against the throbbing pain just enough to look him in the eye.

If he was going to kill me, I wanted him to look me in the eye as he did it.

“You don’t deserve my last words,” I snarled.

Something in the bushes rustled.

The hunter smiled and adjusted the gun.

I slammed my eyes shut just as he pulled the trigger.

The sound was so loud that it richocheted through my body, but –

No pain.

I hadn’t been shot, although I’d heard the crack of the gun only inches from my head.

I opened my eyes and my breath caught in my throat.

Crouched in front of me with a bullet wound gushing blood from his abdomen was Enzo. He kept his hand braced over the wound to staunch the bleeding, but his eyes were on the hunter, his teeth bared.

Another rustle from the bushes, and the hunter only had time to widen his eyes before two wolves lunged from the treeline and took his head off.