Chapter 6 – Tells

Dax

The thing’s in pieces at our feet and my body’s still waiting for round two.

I never come down off a kill clean. My blood’s still up, my ears are still hunting for the next thing to hit, and every muscle I’ve got is wound tight and ready to go again.

Adrenaline does that, and it means when my wolf decides to change the subject, I’m in no shape to win the argument.

My wolf was all business the whole time. Now the thing’s down, and he turns around, takes one long look at the hunter and loses his entire fucking mind.

‘Ours,’ he says, like the fight was a date. ‘He held. He didn’t run. He told us what to do and he was right. Ours. Bite him. Claim him.’

He held because he’s too stubborn to know when he’s beaten, I tell him.

‘Brave.’

Dumb. He knifed a corpse in the kidney and looked betrayed when it didn’t drop.

‘Ours,’ says my wolf, who has never once been talked out of anything.

I make my biggest mistake of the night, which is breathing.

The wind shifts and I get all of Noah at once. The fight’s stripped away the control he usually wears over everything. He smells like sweat and adrenaline, and like the thing he keeps convincing himself is fear.

It’s not. It’s the same want I smelled on him at the tree earlier tonight, only now it’s cranked all the way up by nearly dying.

I’m naked, I’m standing over a corpse, and my dick picks right now to take an interest. That’s adrenaline too. Obviously.

‘Ours,’ my wolf breathes, and I don’t argue with him, which scares me worse than the corpse did.

“You’re staring,” Noah says.

“You stink.”

“You’re naked.”

“And?”

He’s got no and. There’s a whole lecture loaded behind his teeth, and instead his eyes drop for half a second before he drags them back up to my face like I won’t have noticed.

“Put something on, for God’s sake.”

“My pants are confetti. You’re standing on some of it.”

“I’m not looking for your pants.”

“You don’t seem to be having any trouble looking at my dick.”

“I did not.”

“You absolutely did, Hunter.”

Noah looks away first, clicks the flashlight off and shoves it in his jacket pocket. He slides his knife back into its sheath, and all of a sudden both his hands are empty.

‘He’s putting his weapons away for us,’ my wolf says.

Or he wants both hands free to strangle me. Up close and personal.

The smart play is to get back behind my fence, take a cold shower and have a long talk with myself about what I’m allowed to want.

Noah told his girlfriend he loves her tonight, and I was close enough to hear that he meant it.

I take a step closer anyway.

He doesn’t back up, which is new. For three weeks he’s kept a crossbow’s length between us, and tonight he plants his boots over a dead man and lifts his chin like he’s daring me to try something.

‘Closer,’ my wolf says. ‘He wants us. Smell him.’

Somewhere in the back of my head, a sane voice points out that I had a dead guy in my mouth a few minutes ago and nobody should want to kiss me right now. I ignore it.

“This is a bad idea,” I tell him. Out loud. To his face. Genius move.

“What is?”

I keep my mouth shut. Every true answer to that question sets something on fire.

His hand comes up to shove me away and lands on my chest, right over my heart, because there’s no shirt to grab.

He doesn’t shove.

His hand just stays there while everything in his face fights everything else in his face and loses.

That’s when his scent changes. The sharp green note he carries whenever he’s lying to himself fades out, and all that’s left is want, loud enough that he’d shoot me for smelling it.

I get a hand around the back of his neck. Nothing in either of us is soft right now.

My thumb finds the hinge of his jaw. His pulse is still slamming from the fight.

There’s grit on his jaw, dirt and worse off the thing we just killed. I press in anyway and feel his throat move when he swallows.

He could put me on my back in the leaves for a second or two. He’s stronger than any human I’ve ever met, and faster.

He grabs a handful of my hair instead and pulls, hard, like he can’t decide whether to drag me in or throw me into a tree. I couldn’t call it if my life depended on it, and I don’t think he could either.

His fist tightens. The sting lights up my whole scalp, and I growl before I can stop myself.

I’ve wanted plenty of women. I’ve never wanted anybody the way I want him right now. I’m dying to find out what he sounds like when he finally quits fighting it.

His eyes drop to my mouth. Mine are already on his.

‘Now,’ my wolf says. ‘He’s practically begging. Do it.’

We both lean in. There’s almost no air left between us. His breath snags against my lips, and I go up like he struck a match on me.

That’s when I feel the pack.

It hits as a cold jolt in my chest, and it has nothing to do with the hunter.

Every wolf in my pack would have felt that fight. The shared pack sense lets us know whenever one of us is in trouble, and right this second, Finn and whoever he grabbed are tearing through these trees to save me from whatever attacked me.

They’re close enough that I can hear them.

And I’m naked over a corpse, with my mouth about to land on a hunter’s.

There’s no good way out of this, so I take the bad one.

“Go,” I say against his lips.

He blinks like I hit him.

“My pack’s coming. They know a hunter’s been taking shots at me for three weeks, and if they find you here, they won’t stop to ask why. Get to your truck and go. Please.”

For one second he just looks at me, and I can see a question in his face that I’ll never have the guts to answer.

The hunter face slides back into place. He snatches his crossbow out of the leaves, and he’s gone into the dark, low and quiet, like I dreamed him up.

‘No,’ my wolf snarls, and he lunges after Noah so hard that I’m a step into the trees before I catch myself. ‘You had him. You sent him away. Bring him back.’

Shut up, I tell him. Please. They’re almost here.

I haul in a breath and try to put on a face an Alpha would wear, anything that doesn’t show what nearly happened. It doesn’t work. There’s too much of it and no time to hide it.

Finn comes through the trees first, half-shifted, claws out and teeth bared, ready to die for me. He skids to a stop. There’s nothing left to fight.

It’s just me, naked, stinking of a dead thing, dark magic and the hunter who’s spent three weeks trying to put silver in my chest.

Finn breathes in once, and I watch him read every bit of it.

Out in the lot, an engine turns over. Tires crunch across the gravel and fade off toward the road. Noah’s gone. I didn’t realize how scared I was for him until right now.

Finn’s eyes go to the sound, then back to me. He isn’t smiling. He looks like he’s adding something up and hating the total.

“Tell me he ran because you put the fear of God in him,” Finn says. “Tell me that’s what I’m smelling.”

I don’t answer.

We grew up together. He reads it in about a second.

“...Right,” he says, mostly to himself, and drags a hand down his face. His head’s already turning toward the trees, toward the sound of the others closing in. “Okay. They’re maybe a minute out.”

He looks at me like he’s trying to find the guy he had a beer with on the porch and coming up short.

“You want to tell me what story we’re selling them, Dax? Because right now, I’ve got nothing that makes sense.”