“Who was with him?”
“His brothers. A witch. I didn’t ask their names!”
I pressed harder. Blood welled around the tip of the crowbar. “What did you do to them?”
“Nothing. Nothing. They saved me. Jesus Christ, they saved me.”
“From. What?”
“Richard Collins!”
And I paused.
He wasn’t lying. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did. This man wasn’t lying.
And he was the closest thing I’d had to Joe in almost three years. “What did he say?” I asked, voice hoarse. “A message. You said you had a message.”
“If you would just get off of me—”
“Tell me what it is!” I roared in his face, spittle flying.
“He said… he said not yet. He said for me to tell you not yet. He said you’d know what it meant.”
Not yet.
That fucking bastard.
“Anything else?” I asked coldly.
“No. No just Oxnard Matheson. Green Creek, Oregon. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.”
DAVID KING had been a hunter of wolves years before. He was raised in the King clan, his father and grandfather before him doing the same work. He’d been raised to kill anything with sharp teeth. But after his first kill at the age of seventeen, after he’d seen the light in a female Beta’s eyes die out as she choked on her own blood because of him, he’d quit.
He’d been shunned by his clan. Banned from them.
That had been almost forty years ago.
They’d been the ones to massacre the family of Richard Collins. David had taken no part in it. It was after his time.
But there weren’t many Kings left. They’d gone into hiding because they were dying out one by one.
“Throats torn out,” David said, wincing as he plucked a small shard of glass from his side. “Blood spread on the walls. A message from the wolves.”
“What message?”
David sighed. “That he was coming for all of us.”
David had gone into hiding, using old familial connections to stay one step ahead of Richard and the Omegas. Most hunter clans turned him away, not wanting any part of a feud that would surely result in their deaths. But there were some with which old debts were owed, and he was able to go stretches of days, even weeks, without looking over his shoulder.
“There were times when I thought maybe I was good,” he said. “Free. Because I didn’t have anything to do with my father and grandfather. I didn’t take part in that massacre. Grandad was long dead. Cancer, if you can believe that shit. Man goes his whole life fighting against tooth and claw, and gets knocked down by cancer.”
“What about your father?” I asked quietly.
David laughed. It was a hollow thing. “Old man, he was. Memory long gone. He was in a nursing home in Topeka. Heard they had to scrape what was left of him off the walls.”
One month turned into two, turned into three, and David was starting to think he’d been forgotten, that he didn’t even register on any radar.
“That’s all it takes,” he said. “Complacency. Just one moment of complacency, and you get sloppy. Maybe I showed my face to people who weren’t supposed to see it. Maybe I left my scent somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be. Don’t know, really. But he found me.”
Outside Fairbanks. The snows were melting, grass poking through bright and green and then he’d been there.
“He asked me if I knew who he was,” David said. “Just showed up at my door and knocked, neat as you please.”
David didn’t even need to answer. Richard Collins must have seen the look on his face, because he laughed when David tried to shut the door and go for his gun. He’d almost made it, but he thought Richard had let him. “It was a game,” he said. “I think it was just a game to him. The big, bad wolf had huffed and puffed and then he knocked my fucking door down.”
The next thing David knew, he was strung up in his own temporary home, arms tied and stretched out above his head, legs bound together.
“He cut me,” David said, lifting up his shirt. His torso was a mass of scars, some still mottled pink, most thick and rigid and white. They crisscrossed over his chest and stomach, wrapping around his sides to his back where I couldn’t see. It looked like he’d almost lost a nipple. “With his claws. For hours. The thing about pain is that you can take a lot of it before you pass out. I took a lot of pain that day.”
He was delirious by the time it ended.
“One minute there was Richard, Richard, Richard, and the next he was gone, and there was a red-eyed wolf in front of me. An Alpha.”
“Joe,” I whispered.
“Joe,” David agreed. “Joe Bennett. I’d heard what had happened to Thomas Bennett. Never met the wolf myself, but I’d heard about him. Most everyone had, if you were in the know. He was this… legend, you know? The closest thing to a dynasty the wolves ever had. I have no love for wolves, okay? Some of them are fucked up, some of them are monsters, but humans can be too. I should know. I’ve seen it. But Thomas… he was always off-limits for most people. Sure, there were those who said they’d hunt him down one day. Just so they could say they’d hunted the Alpha of all the wolves, but no one ever did. It was just shit they spoke to make themselves seem better than they were.”
Apparently Richard had been gone a good hour before Joe had found David. There were two other wolves and a witch. They’d patched him up, asked him questions. Joe had been angry.
“Why?”
“Because he’d been so close to Richard,” David said. “Apparently, it’d been the closest they’d gotten to him. Or so they said.”
They left almost immediately. But not before Joe had pulled him aside, eyes burning red, asking him to deliver a message.
Not yet.
I scowled at him. “And it took you three months to get here?”
“You try being almost gutted by a crazed werewolf,” David snapped. “I needed time to recover. And I needed to make sure he wasn’t going to find me again. I didn’t have to come here.”
And he was right, of course. Though part of me almost wished he hadn’t. Because not yet wasn’t enough.
“How did they look?” I asked. “Did they look… were they okay?”
David smiled sadly at me. “Tired,” he said. “They looked tired. Didn’t talk with the others, not really, but they were all tired.”
I nodded, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Then, “He doesn’t know. Does he?”
“What?” I asked.
“About you. How you’re an Alpha.”
“No. I don’t think so.” Then, “How did you?”
“I grew up in this life, kid. There are some things you learn. Tricks of the trade, I guess. The red eyes give it away, mostly.”
“I don’t have red eyes.”
“That’s why I said mostly. When you’re in the presence of an Alpha, you just know, okay? There’s this sense of… power. Of something more. Especially with an Alpha in his own territory. I’ve met one other Alpha, aside from you and Joe. Back when I was a kid. You all felt the same.” He cocked his head at me. “How did you do it?”