Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
“So you don’t want to live in the country, but you want to live here? In the desert?”
“You know what I want? To have things be easy. I don’t want to run a port again. I want to have babies. Lots and lots of babies. I want to mate my mate, and I want to live in peace, and I want to stop worrying about fucking pirates, and vampires, and humans who have a problem with us.”
“You want that now,” Tailor says. “But once you have it, you’ll be bored. And we’re going to have babies. We need to put a safe roof over their heads.”
“What about the sky?” I say. “Isn’t that a safe enough roof?”
“It leaks a lot.”
CHAPTER 9
Damon
While Tailor and Conroy continue their negotiations, I focus on getting Kita more comfortable within herself. They are excellent at dealing with logistics, but there’s so much more than simple logistics to deal with. There’s how she feels about being the wolf that she is. I know she will never be truly happy in her own skin until she gets used to it.
So, the next day, I encourage her to shift with me one more time, and the two of us head out into the wild rocky plains to look for prey. I do not know if this is her absolute first hunt, but I do know that she is not used to using her wolf form very much or very well. There are adorable little lapses of coordination that come from her brain not having had the practice of operating four-wheel drive.
I love spending time with her. Just the act of running, playing, being is enough for me. I adore this wolf. I love her so deeply there is no part of me that does not yearn for her, even when I am with her. I think she has always sensed that, and it shows in the softness she has with me, the trust she displays when it is just her and me alone.
Pew! Ting!
At first, the sound is almost cute. A zipping noise, a little impact, a puff of dust.
It takes my animal mind a moment to filter the information, but then I hear the rumble of a motor and I realize someone is shooting. At us.
I look in the direction of the sound, and see a big open top vehicle rumbling around. There’s a driver and the shooting passenger, and the shooter seems to be taking shots almost at random. The closer they get, the more I can see how erratic their driving is, and how unsteady the man with the weapon is.
A bottle rolls out of the footwell and smashes on the ground and the smell of alcohol travels on the wind. They are drunk, bored humans looking for trouble. The worst kind.
The shooter keeps firing; bullets are hitting rocks and ricochetting at random. That is dangerous enough.
And then we are spotted.
“Dogs! Get ‘em!”
There’s no real cover out here. Just tussock, dirt, and rocks. There’s nowhere to shift back into human form and our clothes are miles away.
We run. As hard and as fast as we have ever run. Well, as Kita has ever run. She is smaller and slower and I could easily outpace her, but I do not want to.
I try my best to keep myself between Kita and the bullets, glad that her body is so much smaller than mine.
The humans shout with bloodlust as they give chase, but they have made a mistake. They’re not hunting us.
We are a lure.
They are the prey.
“Slow down, gimme a shot on these two. Looks like a mama and a baby!”
Another mistake.
As they pass our campsite, Conroy is in motion faster than the eye can see. Not quite vampire blink fast, but faster than all people and most shifters can move. He is a born fighter, a consummate alpha, and he is on the shooter in an instant, flowing from human to beast, jaws locked on the neck of the man who dies screaming in a most satisfying way.
Tailor follows, leaping from the shade of a rock, almost making it look like the shadow itself came alive. His attack is no less bloody and just as devastating. He locks on the arm of the driver, pulls him from the vehicle, and savages him on the ground.
In the meantime, the vehicle comes to a slow halt because everybody who was in it is dead and there’s no longer a driver.
Conroy stretches up into his human form as we all do the same. I grab Kita and hold her close, comforting her as she trembles against me. I am sure if she was in her human state she would not have been so scared, but she was in her animal state, more vulnerable.
It takes her a moment to recover, but she does not take long to join the other two who are walking around the vehicle, which they have of course immediately claimed.