Predator Girl (A Paranormal Romance) (21 page)

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “You get me down, I’ll tell you all I know and I won’t mention you to the government. If you plan to avoid mass loss, you’ll take it. I’ve made deals with your kind before and they’ll tell you I’m a man of my word.”

She tilted her head. The wolves fidgeted behind her, looking around. “All right,” she sighed. “I guess we’ll see how fair you are. Bear, Sparrow, get him down. We’ll take him back to the den. I smell trouble heading our way.”

Through the willow vines, four dark spots crossed the field. It couldn’t be members of the Rooks—the end of the woods was the boundary line. This field was Jackal territory. What else was there for them to be afraid of?

The two canines came forward and in a smooth movement went up the tree. I watched as their long, fingerlike toes grabbed my rope. One held it up while the other gnawed it in half. Together they eased me to the ground. I sat there, exhausted, unable to get up. My foot was swollen, and the tiniest touch set it off. It was in an odd position, too, unnaturally cricked. Oh, God, would I have to get it amputated?

The girl, Cheetah, crouched beside me. Her clothes reeked of damp dirt and plants, like she’d been underground. “Nasty,” she muttered. “Yeah, that looks like Rex’s handy work. Bear, you’re the biggest. You’re hauling. Can you hold on to—?”

“Jared,” I said. “Jared Ferlyn.”

The wolves fell still. “Ferlyn?” Cheetah whispered.

“Uh, yeah?”

Bear looked up at Sparrow, who was still in the tree. “Told you.”

After they untied me, we left the willow quickly. My hands hurt but I held onto Bear’s thin coat, riding on his back pony-style. It was awkward, knowing that except for the fur, it was a teenage guy beneath me. I’d have preferred Sparrow, although she was probably too small.

Actually, all the Jackals were smaller than the Rooks. Still large for canines, but even Ilume could take on a pair and I wouldn’t have worried. We had agility on our side, too. The Jackals were slow movers even when they ran, but they were sly, silent, and experts in camouflage.

We came within feet of the beings on the field. They never looked our way. I squinted over my shoulder at them. Humans? They were talking to each other, laughing and joking. My nose twitched, picking up on bloody breath and hearts that have never beaten.

I shuddered. Nightlings.

The government had their hands full of them right now, especially since the vampire fetish broke out. Girls aren’t running and screaming from them these days, so they’re getting braver. You used to only find them in small towns or places that were heavily wooded with good game. Now, they showed up in cities, dance clubs, high schools. I even heard about one getting into a sweet sixteen party. In the U.S., the number of missing teens had tripled in the last year. I owed the Jackals. If they’d have left me there, the bloodsuckers would’ve found me and eaten me for sure.

On the other side of the field was a marshy, curved pond. The forest restarted. Cheetah got up from crawling in the grass, then led the way under coniferous trees. It was pitch black by this point, so I startled when Bear went from trotting in a straight line to dipping downward. He was moving down stairs; I could feel it. The earthy smell on Cheetah’s clothes grew strong. We were headed underground.

At the bottom, Cheetah opened a door. Dim light flooded the tunnel, and Bear padded out onto a flagstone floor. Mounted on the rock walls were fancy, iron torches. No light bulbs. The place reminded me of last Halloween, of the haunted house the guys and I went to. Will hated haunted houses. That was the year we scared him at the Serpent Mansion and he about peed his pants.

At the end of the hall was another door, this one made of steel. A security camera hung nearby, the first sign of electricity. I’m not sure what I expected on the other side of the door, but it wasn’t a grand lobby.

The Jackals’ home made the Rooks’ look like a hobo shack: this place was fit for royalty. The polished white tile was clear of paw prints. Picasso paintings and a reprint of the Mona Lisa were framed on the walls. Music filtered out of a grand piano near the doors, played by a woman wearing a dress and fuzzy slippers. Along the room’s sides, two staircases arched together like a horseshoe.

“Quickly, into the wash room.” Cheetah made a shooing motion, whipping her head around. The lobby was empty save for the pianist, but I suspected it wouldn’t be for long.

Under the staircases was a normal-looking hallway. No more torches—we had lights now. They took me through the first door on the right, into a room dedicated solely to silver knobs and showerheads. Bear rolled me off his back. My blood had stained his fur.

In the light I could see them clearly. The Jackals didn’t look like the Rooks; they were grey dogs with darkened socks, black stripes across their long backs. Spots dappled their heads and chests. Their tails were bushy like a golden retriever’s and just as expressive. Each had hazel eyes flecked with bronze, even Cheetah.

Cheetah wasn’t as tall as I thought. She was a small-boned girl with messy brown locks, a jagged scar over one cheek and down her shoulder. She wore black shorts fused together with a tube top. What did the girls call those things? Jumpsuits? Flipping one of the knobs, she aimed a spray of boiling water down my back.

“Ouch! That’s hot!” I rolled out of the way. “What’s wrong with you? Are you trying to stew me?”

She chuckled and tapped the knob she’d turned. It was the cold water knob. “You’re just frozen. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you just came out of Mab’s court. Your lips are blue and you have the complexion of bleached flour. Well, except for your jaw.”

“My jaw?” I touched it and winced. Oh, yeah. Rex had swiped me. Jackass. I hoped my blow broke his nose.

Cheetah’s eyes dropped to my chest. “He bound you up pretty tight. You’ve got bloody stripes across your front and arms. I’m surprised he didn’t kill you.”

“Oh, trust me; I’m supposed to be dead. But he had his bodyguard deal with it and he didn’t want to literally
hang
 me.”

I thought of Fox, wondering if I hated him yet. Nope. I saved all my malice for one individual—Rex, number one on my shit list, and he was going down.

That is, if I got out of here.

Easing myself back under the shower, which had cooled, I watched Cheetah. She acted like Ilume that first day at the mansion, staring at me, guarded, but curious.

“Are you going to kill me?”

Not the smartest thing to ask, but I figured what the hell? Judging by their home and attitudes, I suspected the Jackals were more domesticated than the Rooks. Less likely to cage or eat their guests. And, okay, I was sick of waiting to die.

She sat down on the dry tile. “Depends on what kind of a threat I think you are,” she said, half smiling. “Right now with your condition, I’m not particularly worried. If I decide to help you, however, bring you back up to par, then I might worry.”

“So I’d be a threat because I tag Otherworlders?”

I wanted to understand what she was thinking, get inside her head, because again I had an idea.
Keep on good terms with this girl,
my gut-feeling said. If I could get her pack to like me, I might be able to help the Rooks as well as myself.

“No wolf wants to be monitored by some dinky, silver tracking bracelet.” She glowered. “You can trick a faerie into wearing one—the dumb things like anything that sparkles—but not us. We’d find a way to rip them off anyway.”

“I know all that.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

“Yes. I do.”

She leaned back, hands around her knees. Her eyes tightened. “Not that I don’t believe you,” she said, “but
how
do you know? You don’t spend time among those you catch.”

The shower rained down over my back. I glanced at the red water running into the drain, then at my arm where my stitches were coming out . . . Ilume’s stitches. “But I have, which is why
I’m
not going to tag any of you. Ever.”

“Hmm.” Cheetah stared at the drain, thinking. “That’s what he said, too, when we brought him in.”

“What who said?”

“Rich Nylref. He was a Finder who tricked the governments into funding a werewolf project. The Canadian and U.S. governments set him up a lab in our territory.”

“And you killed him. Right?” I interrupted. Arasni had mentioned this Nylref guy, how the man and his lab went up in flames.

Cheetah’s nose wrinkled. “No. Let me finish before you ask questions?”

“Sorry.”

“He set up a lab in our territory. We were
going
to kill him, and then our alpha male, Raven, got injured in the woods. He would’ve died if it weren’t for Nylref’s help, and during his stay in the lab Raven learned that Nylref wasn’t sending all his research into the government. He was hoarding most of it, especially the part about the link between you mortals and us werewolves—”

“A link?” I sputtered, half laughing. “Right. What kind of link? A genetic link?”

“Jared.”

“Sorry. Go on.”

“Oye. Yes, a genetic link. Raven let him research the pack so long as he was closely monitored and didn’t tell his government. He studied everything, discovering that our genes, the ones that trigger our change between man and wolf, are compatible with humans. The old werewolf tales had part of it right—a werewolf
can
create another werewolf, but it takes more than a bite.”

I had turned the hot water knob on, but my skin felt cold again.
Aspen,
I thought, remembering his story about being born human and becoming a werewolf; and Ilume’s story about Lenny the half-blood.

“Let me guess: blood transfusions?” It was the only half-logical thing I could think of.

She nodded. “A series of compatible blood transfusions.”

“And you know this works because?”

“I’ve seen it. A boy from a nearby town came into the woods. Typical human story: stepdad was abusive, beat his mother. The kid shot the man and took off, hoping to die among the trees instead of behind iron bars. Nylref found him, and the kid volunteered to be a test subject. It all seemed good. He had no future among humans anyway. We’d agreed to adopt him into our pack . . . only one problem.”

I was dying to ask who this person was, but instead I went along. “What problem?”

“The only compatible blood samples he had for the kid were loose-spills.”

“What’s a loose-spill?”

Cheetah shifted on the floor. “Well,” she said, uneasy. “The Rooks and us, we’ve had some bloody fights one-on-one. Nylref tended to visit battle scenes afterward, collect the blood that has been spilt from werewolves not of our pack. We call them loose-spills. Maybe you don’t know this, but what you look like in the werewolf world defines what pack you will belong in. There are subfamilies in the werewolf gene pool, just like there are with birds, bears, cats, et cetera. When Nylref did the transfusion on the boy, he didn’t come out to look like a Jackal.”

“He came out to look like a Rook.” Screw it, I didn’t even have to ask—I knew this had to be Aspen. He’d told the same story, and I’d picked up on the kid’s reclusive aura day one.

Cheetah’s eyebrows formed a line. “How do you know that?”

“He was my part-time roommate while I was with the Rooks.” I shrugged. “He mentioned his being born human. I thought he was full of—”

“Whoa, whoa, back up.” She held her hands up, shaking her head. “You actually
stayed
with the Rooks? In the same house as Rex?”

“I guess I’ll start from the beginning.”

Maybe it was because she’d spilled so much info to me or because she’d saved my life tonight, but I decided it was safe to tell her everything from the day I’d chased Ilume in the alley, to how I’d made the mistake of following Rex, to the traps he set along the boundary lines. Cheetah listened intently and never interrupted.

“I don’t know how many there are,” I finished up, talking about the traps. “My guess is most of the boundary lines are covered. They’re hard to spot, too. That’s how Rex caught me—I walked right into one.”

“He’s such a wuss,” Cheetah snarled. Her cheeks had gone red out of frustration. “Traps? Seriously,
traps
? I can’t believe it!”

“Are you guys really planning an attack on the Rooks? I mean, they only do dumb stuff because Rex threatens them.”

During my time with them, when Rex wasn’t present, the pack had shown their true colors to me. It was like watching flowers open up and everybody come to life. They proved to function as one big, happy family, and I’d come to like them. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.

Cheetah took a deep breath, running her hands up and down her legs. As her temper cooled, she said, “Raven is my uncle, although I’m not sure what he’s up to. We don’t want a war, but it’s becoming more likely. Rex’s family has continually stolen land from us over the last fifty years. We’re getting shoved out into dangerous territory where nightlings and other abnormals roam. We call it the Wildlands, the area just before Mab’s territory. We’ve tried to handle the situation but Rex isn’t a good listener.”

“Psh. You got that right.”

The last person I would ever take my problems to was Rex. I’d get better feedback from a Magic Eight-Ball.

“Yeah.”

She stood up, turned the water off. I sat there in my soaking clothes, all my nerves tingling as they came back to life. Most of my cuts had stopped bleeding.

“Sit still. I’m going to go get you a towel and some clean clothes.”

“Then what?” I asked.

She smiled. “Then we fix your foot. After that, we’ll see what Raven wants to do with you.”

I tried to take comfort in the fact that she said
fix your foot
before deciding to take me to Raven. If they planned to kill me, wouldn’t it be easier to just leave me broken? “Hey, Cheetah?” I caught her attention just before she went out the door. “What did Bear mean on the field? He sounded like I had a connection to Nylref or something.”

Cheetah blinked at me. “Well. Rich Nylref was a pen name, sort of. Should enemies find him he didn’t want them to trace his real name back to his family. Only when he and Raven became close friends did we discover his real name.”

“What was his real name?”

She frowned. It was a long moment before she answered. “Nick. Nick Ferlyn.”