Trey was running at full speed by the time he got to the start of the Cattail Pond Trail and headed due south. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the warning sign for the place being a poisonous snake habitat, declaring the existence of all kinds of slithery killers out here. He almost laughed. Maybe they’d get lucky and a rattlesnake or moccasin would take out the Butcher for them.
A little farther in, Trey slowed enough to send out a quick text to Connor, letting him know where he was. Connor replied immediately, saying that he, Hale, and Trevor had just pulled off Belt Line Road and would come in from the west in an attempt to herd the killer Trey’s direction. More of their pack mates were on the way, and dispatch was trying to get enough patrol units together to establish a perimeter around the preserve. A helicopter was en route, too. But the Cedar Ridge Preserve was huge. There was no way to get enough cops out here to cover that much real estate. Not quickly enough to matter at least.
There was a stillness to the overgrown pine forest as he ran through it, like the other creatures who normally prowled these woods sensed the tension that came with having an unnatural killer in their midst. He swore he could feel every living thing out here stop what they were doing to watch the drama unfolded.
He was at least a half mile into the woods, leaving Cattail Pond Trail far behind as he continued working his way south, when he picked up that familiar burnt electrical odor. He slid to a dead stop, lifting his nose to test the wind direction before shooting a quick text to Connor and the others: Caught his scent south of Cedar Break Trail. Heading east toward Straus Road. Trying to cut him off.
Trey left the trail then, running hard in a southeasterly direction. The scent he’d come to associate with the Butcher was definitely stronger in this direction, but getting through the undergrowth was much tougher now that he was going cross-country. Thickets and vines tore at his arms and legs as he moved, actively resisting him and drawing blood here and there. The only bright spot in the situation was that the killer was also having to deal with the same terrain. Hopefully, it would slow him down even more than it did Trey.
As he ran, his inner wolf tried to make sense of the burnt-electrical scent. It was one of the killers, that much was obvious, but he’d never encountered a human who smelled even remotely like this odor. Sure, there was a slight undertone of humanity there, but for the most part, whoever it was smelled like a science experiment gone wrong.
A vibration from his back pocket distracted him for a second, and he yanked out the phone to see a text from Connor: It’s another body dump. A leg, an arm, and organs.
Trey grimaced at the image, then pushed it away as he replied back: A quarter mile from Straus Road. I’m close.
He’d barely put his phone away when a blur of movement from off to the right caught his eye. Someone big, but surprisingly fast and quiet, was running through the woods, crossing the track he’d been taking and heading straight for Straus Road. The burnt-electrical scent with the hint of something almost human underneath it grew stronger by the second. It was definitely the Butcher.
Trey moved to the left, feeling the muscles of his legs and back begin to shift as he put on more speed, a growl rumbling up through his chest as he set a course that would intercept the killer. As he got closer, he could tell from the man’s silhouette that he was close to seven feet tall and broad in the shoulders and chest. Then again, it was difficult to be sure, given the heavy robes the guy was wearing. There was even a hood that covered his head and made it impossible to see his face.
Shit. He was chasing a damn monk.
Even in a frigging robe, the big man ran fast. Way faster than someone his size should have been capable of in these woods, especially in the dark on a moonless night.
Unless he is a supernatural.
Trey kept having to adjust his intercept angle until he was running parallel to the killer, twenty or thirty yards separating them. Every once in a while, the heavy cowl would shift, and Trey was able to catch a quick glimpse of the guy’s nose or jawline. Never enough to describe him to anyone, but even with the parts he could make out, there was something damn familiar about him. Trey sprinted faster, needing to see that face.
A subtle movement a few hundred yards south of the big man snagged Trey’s attention and he glanced that way to make out the shadow of someone else running through the woods with them. This guy was average height and slower but heading in the same direction. Trey got the feeling the big man in the robe was running interference to make sure he couldn’t reach the other man.
The wind wasn’t quite right to let Trey get a whiff of the second guy’s scent, but from what he could make out through the trees, he was definitely a normal human, even if he was one who ran with a killer.
The sound of a twig snapping underfoot from somewhere way too close snapped Trey’s attention back to the monk he’d been trying to catch up to only to realize the man was nowhere to be seen. The burnt-electrical scent hung in the night air, so he knew the guy was somewhere nearby, but he didn’t have a visual on him. Trey couldn’t even pick up a heartbeat. All he saw were trees and shadows and the unsettling reality that a man who weighed close to three-hundred-pounds and ran faster than an Olympic sprinter could also apparently turn invisible.
He heard the loud thump of a single heartbeat at the same time as a veritable mountain stepped out from behind a pile of thickets and hit him with a tree trunk.
A rational part of Trey’s mind told him it hadn’t actually been a mountain. Or a tree trunk. It had simply been a very large man with an equally large tree limb. But as he felt the ribs on the right side of his chest crack and cave in, the less-than-rational part insisted that it really had been a mountain. And a tree trunk.
He seemed to fly through the air for a very long time. Long enough to hear another one of those incredibly slow heartbeats. Then gravity reasserted itself in the form of the ground coming up to meet him and any air left in his lungs was immediately lost when the impact cracked a few more important-sounding bones. It was only when he felt something big and bulky under him that Trey realized the guy had thrown him through one tree and that he’d landed on another.
Trey would have preferred to stay right where he was for a second to get his lungs working again, but the thudding of extremely heavy boots coming his way convinced him he didn’t have that option. With a groan, he forced himself to roll to the side, ignoring the grating of bone on bone as things in his chest shifted painfully. Scrambling to his feet, Trey considered going for the gun holstered at his ankle but knew he didn’t have time. The huge man was only a few strides away, closing on him fast.
Trey extended his claws, cut loose a savage howl of anger, and launched himself at the man. His claws slashed through the thick material of the cloak and the flesh underneath. With the insanely slow heart rate, he didn’t draw nearly as much blood as he should have. Not that the big man seemed to care one way or the other. He lunged forward and slammed a shoulder into Trey, sending him tumbling backward through the pine needles and other debris covering the forest floor.