Share
37: Hecate Strait
Sean
“Ready, little girl?”
Tossing the two beaded braids below her ear over her shoulder, Sandy flashes me a heart-stopping grin and tucks her backpack of clothes in a sheltered niche above the water level at high tide. Naked and flinching at both the cold air and the sharp stones on the shallow cave’s floor, she grabs the two waterproof equipment packs and heads for the cold, northern Pacific water. “Last one in’s a smelly wolf.”
“You’ll regret that.” Hobbling to the same niche where my mate left her clothes, I stuff my pack in beside hers. “Hold up, Sandy. My phone’s ringing.”
Shoving my hand in the outer pocket, I retrieve the device, immediately alarmed to see Ian’s number. “Ian?”
Related chapters
Where Wild Things Roam 38: Torture
Darby Numb with shock and bitter cold from sitting against the cavern wall, I still notice when Slimy returns, his long leather duster sweeping outward like a cloak, blackness spreading out behind him like the darkest night. He’s still wearing his vicious grin, but it falls immediately seeing the punctures that linger, bright red and gaping open at my wrists.Crouching over me, he jerks my face up to look at him, turning it left and right. I assume he’s looking for more injuries, but at this point, the punctures are the least of what I’ve suffered. And frankly, I hope the fact that they’re visible creates a problem for him. A big problem.“Who did this to you?” he demands, his freezing fingers closing on my throat when I fail to answer, my eyes drifting away from his face to stare
Where Wild Things Roam 39: Hunt
Jack Tessa, Ian and I are deep into the mine now, with no signal to the mapping device and following a blind tunnel. There’s occasional jabber on the pack link as pockets of vampires are located and swiftly killed, but no one’s found any sign of Darby. Or any other non-vampire for that matter.The whole mine reeks of vamps, like a fucking cesspool of eviscerated decomposing body and rotten eggs. And I don’t mean eggs a little yucky and past their time. I mean the kind that explode the grey muck of ghastly stench that poisons your olfactory memory for the rest of your days. It’s fucking revolting.The fuck? Do they just not have noses? How the hell can these vamps live trapped in this stink?They are foul creatures, Triumvir.
Where Wild Things Roam 40: Tenuous
Leo “How long has she been like this?” Dr. Myers demands as soon as I materialize inside the specially outfitted hospital room with Darby, directing elemental air to lower her gently to the bed. A flurry of activity ensues as Dr. Myers waits for my answer, barking orders to the hospital staff inside the room.Flattening myself against the wall to keep out of the way, I reply over the blips and bleeps of the monitoring equipment and the hushed, rushed dialog between staff trying to save Darby. “It took me an hour and a quarter to get here. That was within a few minutes of Ian finding her.”“Her pulse is rapid and erratic, respiratory rate is high. BP is low. Temperature is 35°C.”Dr. Myers checks Darby’s pupillary response, then steps back against the opposite wall as a nurse uses medial scissors to cut Darby’s jacket and shirt off, exposing four circular burns like the ones you get from the cigarette lighters in old cars. “There are more injuries here, Dr. Myers.”I blanch, staring
Where Wild Things Roam 41: Reimaged
Darby There’s this twilight period between sleep and waking, where untethered consciousness warps into the illusionary and hallucinatory thoughts and impressions of dream. The fragmented evolving mindscape of bizarre sounds, abstract landscape, and ephemeral ideas that’s the knife’s edge of lucidity and oblivion. In this place, our meandering cognitive perceptions, odd and out-of-context when dismantled upon waking, seem completely unremarkable and entirely reasonable.It’s in one of these hypnagogic intrusions into the veiled plane between life and death, while my brain steadily reassembles the strictures with which I interpret the world, that a perfect symphony of low level fragrances—petrichor tinged with moss and vetiver’s fresh, intensely green woodsy-ness—flashes, like a sputtering burst at the
Where Wild Things Roam 42: Bonds
Mattie“Hello Mattie.”“Alpha.” I know he hears the surprise in my tone. “Please, come in. Would you like some tea?” I offer, lifting a pot from the setting on sofa table in the living area of our Candlewood coven house. I’m taken aback by his presence at our door and worry for the reason. Though my coven is powerful, none of us engages in any significant form of white or healing magic. I ache to have to tell him that, if that’s why he’s come. “How is your mate?”Prompted by my question, he appears to think of his Luna and smiles, and I’m shocked again to see he—the ever-composed Alpha Ian—is blushing. “Recovering, thank you,” he replies in his smooth baritone, declining tea with a massive hand raised in a stop and slight shake of his head.“That&rsq
Where Wild Things Roam 43: Prescience
Ian“Thank you all for coming.”Though each of these individuals seated around the scythe-shaped table in the second story conference room has already committed to assist Candlewood in the war to take out Cordelion, with the actual attack looming like gathering storm clouds on the horizon, I’m all the more grateful to have them here.“Now, don’cha go gettin’ sentimental on us, Big Black Wolf,” Big Easy chides with a hearty laugh through a wicked smile that makes the skull tattoo on his face seem to come alive. He lays a hand on Vermillion’s on one side and Tarot’s on the other. “We come like we always do. Lookin’ forward to a good party.”Beside him, Vermillion’s lips curl in a sinister smile, the pointed tip of her tongue running over her elongated wolf teeth, but
Where Wild Things Roam 44: Defeat
CarsonEven though he’s technically in charge, I’m never inclined to directly obey Cordelion. Except when he’s stupid enough to be planning a head-on attack on the Candlewood weres. Then, I’m all in, but I’m still taking a few personal liberties. Sure, I told a couple hundred more vamps if they didn’t show up in three nights, he’d be coming to kill them—which isn’t really true, Cordelion never does any of his own legwork, so it’ll be me— but I’m taking my own sweet time getting back. He knows I’m a late riser anyway.And breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I never skip it.As it happens, I’m sitting in a dingy crowded diner with my hands wrapped around a steaming mug of the absolute sewage this place calls coffee and that I have no intention of drinking, and looking over the my menu options sitting at the other tables when I overhear a co
Where Wild Things Roam 45: Broken
SeanThe lakeshore forest around Cordelion’s compound is a devastated wasteland. Between Lili’s unextinguishable fire and a couple stray lightning strikes from Anna during the mopping up, the lake house was leveled down to the foundations. Black ash is all that remains of the vampires, both those trapped inside and the ones who managed to port. It drifts in black smudges on the icy wind and on the surface of the water.All told, we wiped out a conservative three to four thousand of Cordelion’s coven overnight, suffering only thirty injuries, and with some quick first aid by Mattie’s witches, the poisoned arrows were removed from those who were hit.The only missing were is Ian.We’ve pulled together the best trackers from every pack and all but the wounded are combing every square inch of this place from the ground into the catacombs and even the lake. Mattie and her coven sister, Olivia, assure me no one got through the warding they put up at Ian’s behest, and the last weres to see hi
Latest chapter
- Where Wild Things Roam 54: Postlude
- Where Wild Things Roam 53: Afterward
- Where Wild Things Roam 52: Shifting Tides
- Where Wild Things Roam 51: Rising Waters
- Where Wild Things Roam 50: Invaders
- Where Wild Things Roam 49: Deadly Tic-Tac-Toe
- Where Wild Things Roam 48: Second Chances
- Where Wild Things Roam 47: Desperate Measures
- Where Wild Things Roam 46: The Call
