[note:
small proofing details may change with final copy]
Craig couldn’t predict setting a werewolf free would lead to this much
trouble.
Two months after the kidnapping of his best friend’s mate, Phil can’t
stop thinking about the Hunter that set him free. He can’t get the smell out of
his nose, and its driving him nuts.
Craig’s only ever known for one thing, hunting werewolves. He was born
into it, raised to do nothing but kill the beasts, so when the hell did he let
one free. Worse, why can’t he stop thinking about it.
When Phil and Craig meet up
again, they start events that will slowly entangle all of them in the war
that’s about to unfold—as long as they manage to survive the first wave.
“There,” Craig’s dad,
Marty said, though Craig wasn’t allowed to call him Dad. He was squatted down, his gun lying across his lap, his
fingers lightly lingering over the dirt, pointing out a sign they had been
looking for months now. “Ya see that, boy?” he asked Craig, his voice always
going to a gravel of disappointment whenever he spoke directly to his son.
“Yeah.” Craig sighed. It wasn’t that he hated hunting,
or that he didn’t want—need—to be here with his da—Marty, but it was for
totally different reasons than he was ever going to admit in this small group
of people.
Though, truth be told, it was for the same reason that
Marty adopted the disappointed tone
with him. He didn’t know, however, the minute details, except that he’d fucked
up and let a werewolf free when, clearly, it was too injured to make it out
itself.
That was the lie he’d told himself—and it was true, he
did let it go. But something told him there was more to the story.
It was complicated, and Marty didn’t know the details
Craig did. He just suffered through an over blown ego that was going to get the
better of him. Craig just hoped at the end of it, he wouldn’t be changing into
the wolf Marty hunted. Then, again, maybe that was what Marty truly wanted…try
to fuck up his viewpoints, so that now he truly did believe the bullshit he was
shouting.
The group started off again without another word or
look between Marty and Craig, thank God. These hunts had begun to pull his
heart in two directions and as the ripping magnified, his brain was beginning
an alliance with the heart that told him all this was bullshit.
They crept on through the brush, the pine needles
thick and bulky as they made their way toward the area where they had picked up
that guy a month before. Marty and the four others with Craig were certain the
beasts would still use the same area of this vast land when they shifted, and
that made his mind leap with his heart and had him seeing the bullshit as it
was, rather than letting his history and upbringing cloud his judgment.
Still, if he thought about it, he understood why and
where his dad’s mind had snapped, why he’d slowly started to shape into Marty,
but he didn’t really want to think of that at the moment because he didn’t want
to remember. He didn’t want to sink back into that depression that made him
learn to use the weapon between his palms along with the way he whispered
across the pine needles without a sound.
He didn’t want to know what would truly happen if his
mind fought with the two parts of his heart, or if it chose the side that was
currently losing.
He didn’t want to live the rest of his life in this
futile fight for extinction of a creature no one knew a thing about, nor would
they ever.
He didn’t want this life anymore, and so he needed to
fight the influences he had been brought up with, battle the instincts to fight
before thought or feeling, wrestle with memories from a past he hasn’t been
able to work through, because it’d be pushed into his face every second he
stumbled.
He had finally found something to change his
perception of the world he once knew, and it was proving to be right. It was
proving to change him without a second thought on his part, like that one
moment when he woke like the Prince kissing Snow White.
Yeah, that was really girly. Craply apt, though. Shit.
“What?” Dave said from his left, making Craig jump
slightly. He hadn’t thought he’d laughed out loud.
Craig smiled a little at him as he shook his head.
Nothing. That was what it was. It was nothing—nothing anyone of this group
wanted to hear or understand. Nothing that mattered in any manner if his father
got what he wanted and found what he needed, because without one werewolf, he’d
be deep into the hole his father had beaten him into moments after his mother
had been slaughtered. He also wouldn’t be coming out alive.
Craig
sighed for what seemed the hundredth time as Marty opened his mouth to run off
shit about the abominations and what he was going to do to them once he found
them. It was dinner time, and probably the last chance even to piss before the
night took over the world and the werewolves would populate the place in the
form that made them a shit load more fun to hunt.
It also made them safe, though. Marty was at the point
where he was ready to hunt them in human form, tracking and hoping as he
slipped into their houses and slit their throats. It wasn’t like they would
ever know if they were wrong, especially if, in their minds, that person they
just slaughtered was a werewolf.
Craig was over it. Even more, he was over Marty and
his fucked up mind.
His cock was also throbbing. The further into the
forest they had gone, the harder he had gotten. The titch in his neck pricked
up even more. All it wanted was for Craig to drop everything and start running
until he ended up in the hands of…
Of his—
Yeah, his what?
was a better place to put that thought. A thought that just shouldn’t have been
there, but the closer the night had come, the more he felt as if everything in
his life was wrong and that when he had been holding that werewolf…that felt right. That was the place he
was meant to be.
Those thoughts felt more right, that with the werewolf
was where he should be, than when he’d admitted to himself he was gay, which
happened to be a long time after he realised guys turned him on. How fucked up
was that?
Taking in a deep breath, Craig tried his hardest to
push away the lust. He wanted it to go away, but the best he could do was try
his hardest to forget that he was hard in the first place. It didn’t help. It
was difficult to get rid of the need to run his hand down the hard line and
relieve some of the pressure.
It was harder to just not let his dick take control
and pull him in the direction it wanted to go and be with the beast…to the
person under all that fur. Craig wanted to sooth the one with the dark eyes
that held sadness.
Craig had started thinking about the man under the fur
from the first time he closed his eyes in the van as they drove out of the
boondocks of the national forest where they had parked. Honestly, he hadn’t
really put focus on what the body of the man looked like until a week later,
when those eyes and the beast would have clearly turned into a man. Yet he had
no real knowledge of what they looked like when they were human, how much they
changed, filled out from human to beast—and that
had made his mind crazy. It could never choose.
Lately, however, those eyes and dark hair had been
attached to what Craig’s last one-night stand had looked like. Lean muscles,
sharp lines. Solid features. A male through and through, though no taller than
Craig’s five-foot-eleven frame. Though that man had been blond and hairy, Craig
had seemed to darken it all and strip him of every bit of hair so that all that
skin was his for the taking.
He shuddered. His head snapped up, looking to the
west. His muscles pulled tight. His thighs trembled to move. He needed to get
moving. He needed to be somewhere else. Anywhere else but here.
“What’s up, kid?” David asked him, gaining the
attention of everyone else. None looked at him. They were all scanning the
trees, trying to see something that wasn’t there, feel something imaginary.
“I…don’t…know…” Craig said slowly, shifting with his
inner arm, his rifle into his hand.
“It’s nothing, the boy’s fucked when it comes to
instincts,” Marty sneered, making Craig roll his eyes, thankful he was facing
the other way.
“That might be,” David agreed. “I think we should head
out.”
“Right, gents, let’s move out,” Marty ordered.
Turn
in tomorrow for the final one *smiles*
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