Secret Worlds (539 page)

“You can’t hide from me, Riley!” Samson called out, his voice bouncing back and forth between the trees, echoing eerily and making it impossible to pinpoint his location.

Where are you, you bastard?

Slowing to a cautious trot, I tried to listen for any sign of his whereabouts above the sound of my breathing, but was only greeted by silence. Even the creatures of the forest didn’t dare to make a sound for fear that the dangerous beast hunting amongst the trees would find them. Samson was out there somewhere.

Watching. Waiting.

I could feel his eyes on me as surely as if he was standing right beside me, his proximity raising a ridge of fur from the back of my neck all the way down to the tip of my tail. As much as the thought of fighting him terrified me, it paled in comparison to the nauseating sensation of being watched by him. For a fleeting moment I wished I still possessed my human voice and could call him out. Instead, I had to settle for emitting a brief, sharp bark that I hoped would draw him out into the open. At first I thought he wouldn’t rise to the bait, but then my ears perked, swiveling towards the sound of snapping branches as something approached.

Something big and fast.

He exploded out of the darkness in a horrifying maelstrom of gnashing teeth and rending claws, the sight of him leaping out of the shadows like a vision from my nightmares rooted me to the spot in fear. My mind screamed at me to run, but I seemed unable to propel myself into motion, frozen by his twisted visage.

Move, Riley! Run!

One giant razor-tipped hand swung at me faster than I could ever have anticipated, swatting me aside as though I were no more threatening than a fly. I felt the air rush past me as I went airborne, my legs scrambling uselessly as I struggled to tell up from down. I landed with a jarring thud that knocked the air from my lungs, leaving me gasping for breath for a terrifying, eye-watering moment.

Clawing at the ground, I pulled myself back up to my feet, my legs shaky but sturdy enough. Blood matted the fur on my side, and I knew without looking that the impact had torn open my stitches. It wasn’t a lot of blood, but any amount wouldn’t be good around a crazy werewolf. Shaking off the fogginess in my head from the fall, I rounded on Samson, or at least I tried to.

He was gone.

Ghoulish laughter sounded in the dark, made impossible to pinpoint by the overlapping echoes and ghostly creaking of the trees. Somehow, we had made it back on to the road leading to my cabin, but the open area didn’t make me feel any safer. Not for the first time since being thrust into the cluster fuck that my life had become, I felt as if I’d stepped onto the set of a cheap horror movie. Any minute now I would be overrun with zombies or the denizens of Hell.

Maybe they’d be kind enough to take out Samson before they feasted on my brains and devoured my soul.

A flicker of motion in the corner of my eye had me spinning around, once again too late, as Samson streaked towards me. The gleaming canines of the wolf, out of place in his mostly human face, distorted his lips and garbled his laughter. The madness I remembered from when he had torn into my belly all those years ago shone bright in his eyes, and I wondered how I had ever missed the evil inside him.

He swung at me again, his hand cutting through the air in a blur. I leapt back, trying to dance out of his reach, but didn’t quite make it. Pain burned along my ribs as his claws scoured across my flank, my flesh as yielding as warm butter. Anger blinded me, the wolf taking over for a moment, granting me an extra burst of speed as I rounded on him with snapping jaws.

I was so surprised when my teeth connected with the flesh of his arm that I almost released my hold on him. Thankfully my thoughts cleared enough for me to tighten my grip rather than letting go. Bones ground between my teeth, blood and meaty flesh squishing against my tongue. Growling loud and low, I shook my head as though his arm was a rabbit and I was trying to snap its neck.

He howled in pain, his other fist crashing into the side of my skull with the force of a dump truck, filling my vision with stars, and knocking me loose. Staggering back several paces, my legs even more rubbery than before, I stared up at him, wishing that the heat of my anger would make him drop dead.

“You want to play rough do you?” he asked in a snarling chuckle. “We can do that.”

I wanted to say, “We’re not already?” but had to settle for baring my teeth and snarling instead.

The change is normally a dizzying combination of pain and pleasure, the sense of freedom as one half of my consciousness emerges nearly orgasmic. The shift that Samson forced on me was nothing like any of my previous experiences. I’d heard of an Alpha forcing the change on another were, but had never thought I would experience it firsthand.

It was not pleasant.

Pain ripped through me, searing a burning path along every single nerve in my body. Howling and snarling, the wolf was pushed down into the darkness, locked away with a speed and savagery I’d never experienced before. The agony of the change tore a howl from my throat, the piercing sound transforming into a shrill scream as my vocal chords shifted back to human. Fur fell from my skin in fast dissolving clumps, caught up on the wind before they had a chance to hit the ground. I tasted blood as my teeth moved and shortened, returning to my stubby, flat-topped human incisors and molars. The transition from wolf to human took only a few seconds to complete, but felt like a lifetime of torture.

When I was able to draw breath again, it burned all the way down my throat. I couldn’t move at first, my entire body still shaking with pain and covered in a chilling sweat. I tried to take a step towards him but stumbled to the ground, scraping my cheek. All the while Samson looked on, laughing a grating, snarling chuckle that sent a ripple of fear through me. As much as I tried to stop it, I couldn’t hold back the low whimper that flowed out of my burning throat.

The wolf was afraid, and so was I.

“What…the hell…did you do?” I asked around gasping breaths.

A superior sneer curled Samson’s lip back from jagged teeth, wrinkling the skin along his stubby snout. “I put you in your rightful place. You’re not worthy of the wolf.”

“The hell I’m not!” I shouted, scraping up the dregs of my resolve and anger to fuel my legs into motion. Wailing like an enraged banshee I rose up on shaking legs, and launched myself at him. I knew I’d have as little effect on him as a clumsy puppy while in my soft and defenseless human body, but there was no way I was going to do nothing. I had to at least try to fight him before he ground my heart to useless meat.

He caught me with one giant hand around the throat, lifting me up off the ground to leave my feet dangling in the air. Clawing at his fingers, I tried to pry his hand loose, but might as well have been pulling at tempered steel for all the good it did. My lungs began to burn with the need for air, my mind growing fuzzy as black sparkles danced at the corners of vision like dark fairies calling me into the beyond. Still I fought him, raking my nails against the solid flesh of his arm while frantically kicking out at him, occasionally connecting with his thigh or hip.

Gradually my movements grew slower, my fingers becoming clumsy and difficult to control, my legs hanging useless and leaden.

Drawing me closer until the rancid heat of his breath ruffled the hair around my face, Samson peered down into my eyes and spoke in a low, gloating voice. “Goodbye, Riley.”

The discordant sound of a car horn cut through his moment of glory a second before the headlights lit the darkness. Loose rocks and debris shot out from under the tires as someone gunned it and came tearing down the road towards us. Time seemed to slow as the car advanced on us, creeping forward second by second until it was a hairsbreadth away. I felt the heat of the engine against the backs of my legs, and heard the ping of rocks bouncing up to strike the underside of the car. In front of me Samson appeared to be frozen in disbelief, his grip on my throat loosening a fraction, but not quite enough for me to draw a breath.

I was out of air, and out of time, but dammit I wasn’t going out without taking the bastard down with me. My vision had narrowed down to dark pinpoints, but I didn’t need to see for what I planned to do. Winding up as if preparing to kick the winning goal at a soccer game, I swung my foot forward with every last ounce of strength I possessed, nailing him in the ’ole family jewels.

Snarling in pain, his hand flexed and then sprang open, dropping me to the ground. For once luck was with me, and as I landed the slope of the ground carried me off to the right, and out of the car’s path as it continued on its trajectory, plowing into Samson. Time returned to normal the instant the car’s front bumper drove him backwards into the broad trunk of a towering pine tree, pinning him there. The noise that came out of him was somewhere between a howl and a wail, and sent a shudder through me.

My throat burned as I drew my first ragged breath in what felt like a lifetime, my mind swimming from the sudden flood of oxygen. Slowly my patchy vision resolved into the ruined front end of Alyssa’s car, the billowing steam obscuring Samson’s face, though his snarls and enraged shouts remained clear enough.

“You fucking bitch! I’m going to tear you open and eat your guts!”

Using a nearby tree to haul myself up to my feet, mindless of the rough bark scraping the top layer of skin off my palms, I had to swallow several times before I managed to say, “Yeah, yeah. Take a number, asshole.”

It was with a sense of relief that I approached the driver’s side door and caught Holbrook’s familiar warm molasses scent, but concern quickly swept through me when it was joined by the scent of blood.

Tuning out Samson’s continued snarling rant, I opened the door with shaking hands, moving quickly to catch Holbrook as he slumped sideways towards me, nearly falling out of the car. Blood streamed from his nose from the airbag that had exploded in his face. He groaned fitfully when I pushed him back into the car and gently laid his head back against the headrest. I had nothing on me to stem the flow of blood, and resorted to tearing a strip of fabric off the bottom of his shirt to wipe the blood from his chin.

“I got him. I got him, Riley,” he muttered, his eyelashes fluttering against his pallid cheeks.

“Yes, you did,” I replied, mopping at another rivulet of blood before it dripped onto his shirt.

“Alyssa’s gonna be
pissed.
”

“I think she’ll understand.”

“I treated her bad…shouldn’t have told her she couldn’t feed. Wasn’t fair.” I felt guilty listening to his delirious confession, empathy and jealousy warring for dominance in the center of my chest.

“Shh. Just rest for a minute. I have to go finish something,” I soothed, reaching past him to retrieve the Glock from the passenger seat.

Straightening, I strode towards the front of the car, my steps sure and steady even though my weariness made it feel as though I was slogging my way through wet sand.

“…to kill you! I’m going to enjoy feasting on your entrails. And when I’m done I’m going to fuck your corpse!” Samson was ranting, his hands clawing at the hood, rending deep gouges in the metal, but doing nothing to move the car. He was securely pinned, and that was just fine and dandy.

Standing just out of Samson’s reach I raised the gun, aiming at his head. At such a short distance, I couldn’t miss. Blowing a stray curl out of my eyes, I said, “Fuck you, Samson” and squeezed the trigger.

I’m not sure how long it took before I realized that the magazine was empty. Blinking away the red haze in my eyes, I grimaced at the knowledge that some of it wasn’t just from my seething rage. I looked down at his hateful, sneering face with triumph. It had been reduced to a bloody, lumpy mess of shattered bone and lifeless meat that bubbled and sizzled as the silver bullets ate away at what was left of his brain.

Try and heal that, you son of a bitch.

The sound of a choking sob crept into my awareness, and it wasn’t until the first heavy tear landed on my naked breast that I realized I was the one who was crying. Tossing the gun aside, I wiped the back of my hand over my eyes and turned away from the monster who had irreversibly altered my life in so many ways.

Holbrook had slid halfway out of the car by the time I got back to him, the blood from his nose having slowed to a trickle. He jerked back to consciousness when I laid a hand on his shoulder, his glazed eyes roaming over my face.

“Did we get him?” he asked, his words slurred and rasping.

“Yeah, we got him,” I replied, sparing a glance at Samson’s bloody and broken body pinned between the car and the tree. “We got him.”

As dawn lightened the sky beyond the trees, I hauled Holbrook out of the car, pulling him up to his feet where he leaned against me, his mostly good arm draped across my shoulders for support. We stood there in silence for a long while, watching the sky fade from black to blue streaked with gold, until the birds took up the first songs of the day. I didn’t even care that I was naked as a jaybird. My feeling of vindication was enough to keep me warm.

“Looks like it’s gonna be a beautiful day,” Holbrook commented offhandedly.

“Sure does,” I replied with a smile.

Born and raised in England until the age of thirteen, A.J. Colby moved across the Atlantic and settled in Colorado in the mid-nineties, where she has resided ever since. Enchanted by science fiction and fantasy from an early age, she has made it her life’s mission to one day pen her own story filled with vampires, werewolves, and ghouls (oh my!)

A.J. lives in the shadow of the majestic Rocky Mountains with her fiancé/manager/pimp, Mr. Awesome Sauce and their horde of feline minions. When not writing she divides her time between reading, playing World of Warcraft, and collecting sewing machines and neurosis.

Find out more about the author at
http://www.ajcolbyauthor.com
.

Riley’s adventures continue in
Bitten
, now available on Amazon!