Good news before, well before you start reading. Golden Bond's hit 103 in werewolf, pretty sure that's the best so far. Thanks to everyone for your support.
There's not really anything else I can say.
Happy? ehhh Reading?
Love, lots and lots and lots of love
NJ Kuhr
XOXO
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Zeek took one look at what was left of the kitchen island and laughed until tears where glueing his eyelashes together.
I ignored him and made my way upstairs to our bedroom, jumping the steps that had been pulled loose or snapped in half.
After I was cleaned up, ate two steaks and half a dish of pasta salad Zeek offered to teach me how to play chess but a strategical game would only add to my unease. We played Egyptian ratscrew instead on the coffee table in front of the back windows. It was fast paced and we could get some of our aggression out on playing cards.
Light slaps so we didn't break each other's hands but it still stung like the dickens. Wincing when I clipped him with a nail a bit meaner than was necessary, Zeek shook his hand and frowned at me. "This is always the worst part. Standby to standby. It basically means waiting to wait some more, which usually precedes the part when shit hits the fan."
"What did you do about it?"
"Me?" He slammed his hand down on the queen when I wasn't looking. "Mostly I played a lot of football. Bash prefers to reserve his strength and spends the time on finances and paperwork."
I grinned, "He likes numbers."
Zeek gave me a secretive look. "Doesn't look like he's worried about preserving his strength now that he has you."
The blush wasn't as strong as it normally would have been. "Nope. He's gotten a bit behind on his budgetary obligations too."
"Oh, no." Zeek cried in mock horror throwing the back of his hand over his forehead. "Not the budget, anything but that. How will the pack survive? We all know there isn't anyone capable of budgeting his world domination the way Bash expects it. We can't have that. You have to go. It's a matter of saving the universe for all mankind."
I'd leaned back rocking as I laughed, my abs aching when they were already sore from hours of tumbling. My laugh, something that brought the pack joy and peace; a gift the Moon gave to her children. Love had brought laughter back into my life and it was that sound that first made Bash fall in love with me. He'd accepted the mate bond the second he crossed my scent before he even found me but that wasn't love. When I sat in a puddle of mud laughing like a maniac Bash fell in love with me and not the mate bond. He saw me that day. He really saw me.
And my laugh, my special gift.... I learned it not only inspires love, it also kills.
Zeek and I had distracted ourselves with fun. We distracted ourselves so well we weren't prepared for it. Omega danced through the pack bonds, sending any wolf within hearing distance of the cabin into nirvana. I'd fallen into a false sense of security, all my paranoia and when I needed it most I didn't have it.
The cabin was lit up like a Christmas tree. The back wall of windows reflected the living room and our game back to us, not the forest. The mirror affect that left me at a disadvantage so I kept the lights off; I didn't even know I could hate something so much.
The men around the cabin couldn't sense him because the only thing their wolves could feel was my laughter. My laugh like the mirror affect that prevented Zeek and me from seeing the shadow, I learned to hate these things but not before the werewolf crashed through the wall.
He was the grotesque hybrid that Bradley became when he and his wolf fought for control. Elongated palms that stayed somewhere between a hand and a paw with horrific claws at the ends of fingers that were partially separated but couldn't spread apart, they went for Zeek first. They were followed by a jaw with a wide gap because the top and bottom row of fangs didn't line up properly.
Thick sockets stuck out around his eyes hooding them in shadow but the wolf yellow iris shown like headlights. His dirty clumpy hair grew up and away from his short pointed ears in a mohawk that continued down his spine and into his tail. The rest of his body was red raw skin except for his hands and feet which had red fur socks. He stood on his hind legs like a man but the knees bent wrong and his feet were deformed standing him up on his toes.
Zeek had two seconds to grab me and throw me towards the front door as the glass rained down around us before Bradley was on him. Two seconds that he needed to protect himself. Bradley's jaw locked down on Zeek's neck as I was flying backwards, arching into the air as a human projectile. The smell of Zeek's blood and the rotting sickness from Bradley filled my nostrils before I slammed into the bench seat.
The carved backboard cracked when I hit before I crashed onto the bench snapping the hinges and the lid to the compartment in half. The momentum pushed me further rolling backwards over the side I sent Bash's shoes and the river rocks inside the doormat flying around the entry way slamming my side and head into the floor.
My elbow collapsed out from underneath me when I tried to put my weight on it. Pushing myself up with my other hand the smooth stones caught under my feet and knees sending me sprawling when I tried to get up. Making a break for the door on three limbs was awkward and painful.
Four seconds. Four seconds since Bradley broke through the window before he landed on my back sending my jaw into the floor and one of Bash's steel-toed boots into my abdomen with enough force to knock the wind I already didn't have right out of me. I didn't have time to fight.
Still in motion and trying to gain footing after being thrown across the cabin and I was slammed back into the floor. I was going to fight. I wasn't about to run, landing hard and at a horrible angle I was about to get to my feet and use every dirty rotten trick I knew to fight back. There wasn't time.
Five seconds. It took Bradley five seconds after my laugh incapacitated my own guards to eliminate Zeek and capture me. Five. A backhanded fist to my temple and I was out.
o
I woke up groggy and the sense of déjà vu was overwhelming until I figured out why. It was like waking up in the cage for the first time. When I didn't know I was a werewolf and I thought my worst problem was a case of dissociate identity disorder. I surged forward before I knew what was happening; Gem and I both fighting to reach the surface.
The burn is what cleared my head and allowed me to push Gem back down so we stayed in my form. Chained to a chair we were sitting in the middle of a cabin, an older one that was probably built during Roosevelt's presidency by the first forest service men if the smell of decaying tree trunks was any way to guess. That and the packed dirt floor and aged roots growing through the timbers.
None of that matter as soon as I saw the body. It was so mangled I would never have been able to guess who it was if his smell hadn't been infused into the cabin until he was just as much a part of the scents as the pine and the tree wax.
This was Charlie's home.
Old Man Chuck had survived hundreds of years of wars and strife only to end up alone hanging from a game hook in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere skinned like a trophy kill. Judging by the amount of blood underneath his body he was skinned alive, allowed to heal and then skinned again. That or there should be more bodies but there was only one. The silver hunting knife embedding in Charlie's neck meant he would never have to suffer through that again.
The tears made the chains stuffed between my teeth chaff my skin where it wrapped around my face. They mingled with the salty metallic flavor of the silver burning my tongue. It took me a few minutes to realize the sound of my crying hid a gurgling sound coming from behind my shoulder.
I wasn't the only one tied to a chair with silver chain. Zeek was wrapped in so many links I couldn't see his body underneath them all. What I could see was blood, lots of it. Bradley had nearly ripped his throat out and his body was fighting the silver so he wasn't healing like he should. He was going to bleed out if I didn't do something.
Pushing against the floor I shoved but the chair was bolted down. The gurgling sound told me air was escaping out of Zeek's neck. I wasn't a doctor and even without Laurel's teachings I knew that was very, very bad. I rocked forward only a few centimeters and back putting as much power into it as I could. Each time I gained a little more motion until I got enough momentum to break the chair legs and fell backwards.
Getting to Zeek was hard still tied to a chair on my side but I wiggled enough I could start kicking at the legs of Zeek's chair. I couldn't get as much energy behind my kicks because I was tied from the knees up but after a few well aimed strikes Zeek crashed sideways so we were both face to face.
"Zeek. Can you hear me? I'm going to go around you and try to untie your hands. When I get you lose you need to untie me. Zeek?"
I only got a wheezing mumble in return before he could make his tongue shape words I understood. "I'm sorry, Betty. I knew better than to grab the wheel. I'm sorry."
"It's Parker. I'm Parker. We're in Charlie's cabin. I need you, Zeek. Bradley's coming."
He wasn't here with me now. His eyes weren't focused on anything. There was a growing puddle in the gap between his neck and the floor. Blonde locks were colored red around his ear and one side of his head. "We.. we were fig..fighting. I gra... grabed the... the... the wheel. Tha.. that's why we crash... ed. Why weee crashed."
"Stay with me, Zeek. I need you."
"I.. mm sss sorry, Betty. I'm sssor... rry."
The steady dripping sound as blood drops plunked into the pool slowed. I heard his heart weaken. There were long pauses between beats before the next beat never came; stretching out the pause in between until it wasn't a pause anymore and it was just silence. The only breathing came from me.
"It's not your fault, Zeek. It's not your fault."
There are two kinds of wailing. The kind when air is forced out like a scream and the kind of high pitched whine that comes from inhaling. Mine was the second kind, the whistling inhale that comes when grief is so powerful your whole body contracts inward. I was sucking air through my nose and down a throat closed shut by pain so hard it came out a sharp wail. My mouth was pressed together in a warped line when the muscles in my face tightened in overwhelming grief.
The wretched noise coming from my sinuses was the only sound in the cabin. The lungs in my chest were seizing in staccotic jerks against the pain unable to function. I was drowning. And Zeek's eyes were empty and lifeless.
I was inches from his face, trapped in this position because although I planned to wiggle until I was behind Zeek I couldn't move. I wouldn't have been able to get him out of the chains no matter what I told him, I couldn't get myself out of my own. It takes minutes for the eyes to cloud over. I knew. I watched a lot of crime shows.
Forensics had always been fascinating until now. I didn't want to know it generally takes up to nine minutes for the eyes to cloud over because the potassium begins to break down. All those useless facts that I used to think were so amazing were now more things I hated. Or would hate when I could again.
Bradley must not have been worried I would escape because I laid there staring at my dead friend for hours. About five because rigor mortis was setting in. I could tell by the blackish bruises formed by blood pooling in the body on the bottom side of Zeek's face and neck.
It was still dark outside so I knew morning was a couple hours away. How many hours of therapy was it going to take to address that; judging the passing of time by the decomp of Zeek's dead body?
I didn't know when I started humming but it kept me from making keening sounds and helped me breathe so I didn't stop when I was aware I was doing it. Funny the things people think about when they're in shock. Which I was pretty sure this was. Shock.
It took me a while to recognize the song was Homeward Bound. I couldn't remember the words but it was fitting and the melody was the voice of my mourning. Maybe I'd finally snapped. Maybe this was what insanity was. I'd finally broken and Bradley wasn't even here to see it.
Charlie's body was starting to rot. Between that and the smell of Zeek's cooling blood my sense of smell was failing. What had Zeek called it? Standby to standby. I was waiting to wait for Bradley to return and I was praying it would be soon. I wanted this to be over, no matter how it ended.
Bash might survive, some werewolves don't survive the death of their mate but we were new. He could, if he wanted to bad enough. He better. I hadn't suffered at Bradley's hands for so long only to find Bash and have him die over a mate he'd only technically had for three days though I knew what he would say.
Not three days, Parker. We've been mates our entire lives but for arguments sake I'll concede to the past eight months.
At first I thought it was me having a fake conversation in my head but then I felt it. Distance and the silver had dulled the bond but Bash was pushing into my head as hard as he could.
'Where are you? We're coming to get you.'
I struggled for a moment, hesitated to answer him. Should I tell him where I was? Bradley wouldn't stop once he killed me but Bash would have the upper hand if Bradley took the fight to the pack. Not telling Bash where I was only delayed the fight but there were also families and children at the Ranch. Telling him where I was meant Bash would bring only the dominant fighters and leave enough wolves behind to protect the rest of the pack.
'Parker, damn it. None of that martyr shit. Tell me where you are.'
'Charlie's. I'm at Charlie's.'
The sound of something big being dragged up the stairs of the cabin to the front door told me Bash wasn't going to get here in time. I didn't want to make it harder for Bash than it already was. I could feel him fighting his wolf for the reigns.
'Don't, Parker. Don't you...."
I severed the connection. Whatever Bradley was going to do to me allowing Bash to feel it too wouldn't help him. I couldn't stand to bring him more pain than he already had to carry. He didn't need to feel me die.
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PLEASE DON'T HATE ME.
I don't even think I can ask you guys to vote.
Forgive me, I'm crying too.