The Hunted

Thirty

She had been surprised at the eagerness of the werewolves to use such weapons. Red, of course, had been there.  As had Phillip, Li, and Deacon, the sisters' Jenny and Juliet,  Monroe and Toby, Lucas and Hope, Shayla, and Chandra.  The latter was quiet and severe but one of the best in the bunch.  Henry had come with Lucy one day to see how things were going.

            The wolves had picked up the weaponry quickly as they shot at targets Blake had set up.  It had been clear to her that they needed a challenge and so she'd made it harder on them, splitting the group into teams and sending them into the woods for games of paintball.

From there, word spread like wildfire that the human was taking werewolves to shoot each other and her class had tripled in size overnight.

Most of the time, Blake joined them in the forest but today she'd left it to Red and Toby to run. The Beta's Mate was slowly coming around to like her.  Not as much as Monroe did, but Toby had started to be less openly hostile than he had been weeks ago.

Perhaps most telling of Blake's life in Sanguis Ridge was the fact that she had communicated with Malachi very little since she'd begun training the werewolves in hand-to-hand combat and weapons training.  She had meant to tell him – had gone so far as to type messages but she'd deleted each one of them.  Instead, she'd told him only of Caden's death and that she was going to be having a warlock using a memory spell to dig around in her brain to revisit the attack. The only messages he received from her in addition to those were the same nightly check-in texts that she sent to her brother and Hix so that they knew she was still alive.

Blake wondered how Malachi would feel if he learned that she was not only alive and well but willingly teaching these werewolves about hunter tricks and fighting techniques.  He'd probably be pissed.

            "Were the teams even or will Red have the upper hand?" Lucy asked from the steps, drawing Blake back into the conversation.

            "I left him and Toby in charge of the teams.  Red's a better strategist than Toby so if I was a betting woman, I'd put my money on him."

            "Didn't he have you camp out in a tree yesterday?" 

            Blake laughed.  "Yeah.  I was up there for an hour.  It was freezing.  But Red knew that I could do the most damage as a sniper so he had me guard the flag while he, Juliet, and Deacon hunted the others.  Worked out in our favour since we won but man was I cold."

            Lucy offered Blake a knowing smile.  "He must have enjoyed warming you up afterwards."

            Henry chuckled and a look of teasing entering his eyes.  "Toby told me that he really wants to win and that Monroe's sole goal is to hit Red in the face with a paintball, so your Mate might have his work cut out for him."

            Still so strange to have anyone refer to Red as her Mate.  Blake hadn't realized how much the werewolves of Sanguis Ridge had been avoiding the word around her until it had come out in full.  She hadn't been able to hide the fact that they'd kissed, not when they'd stood so close that their scents had entwined – or at least, that was what Red told her.

            And since gossip travelled quickly in this place, everyone knew that Blake and Red had crossed an uncrossable line.  There was no going back now, not when they'd opened the floodgates. 

Her fault, of course, for kissing him.  She'd been hurting after finding Caden's body and Red had just been there.  As he was always there when something went wrong or she was hurting.  So she had kissed him and immediately found herself wondering why she hadn't done so earlier.