Predator Girl (A Paranormal Romance) (15 page)

Her head dropped to my shoulder. In seconds, my shirt was damp. Her tears were on a steady flow, soaking the material. “Daisy . . . Daisy and Lenny and Adonis,” she whispered. “I saw all of them get sucked underground. Rex was the only one to come back up. None of the others came. Oh, God.” Her voice cracked, and she collapsed in sobs.

“Hey.” Without thinking, I brushed a few loose hairs behind her ear. It stressed me to see her like this. I’d never been able to stand girls crying, but with her it was worse for some reason.

Weird.

She sniffled, glancing sideways. She made a funny face as I withdrew my hand. “Why are you doing this?” she muttered.

“Why am I doing what?”

“Saving me. You came to help us. You could’ve run, fled far into the woods before Rex called off the fight. I know you have a good sense of direction. You could be on your way home by now.”

Oh, trust me: I could’ve been on my way home the other night.
“Look, if I had truly wanted to escape, I’d have done it already.”

“You would’ve, huh?”

“What do you think we learn in Finders school? Proper English? How to scramble your brain with trig problems? That’s junior high stuff, babe.” I trampled over a thorny vine, noticing the way I shifted Ilume, not letting it touch her.

Ilume noticed, too. “Babe,” she repeated, but didn’t speak after that.

The temperature began to warm up. I ducked under moss-infested branches and avoided bizarre, curly ferns which, if you came too close, would reach out like fingers and try to touch you. Herds of penny-sized lizards darted around the underbrush, changing colors to match the foliage. Every now and again, faint whispers came in the wind, but I could not decipher them.

This was definitely not a normal area. Clearly PIU had deposited more than just trapdoor spiders here; but if it were more Otherworlders they would’ve listed them on the warning signs, unless these Otherworlders had found this place on their own.

I looked down at Ilume. Her eyes had closed. “Hey!” I gave her a hard shake.

She gasped. “Ugh, you jerk!” She slapped my chest, making me wince. “I’m not dying, okay? I’m a werewolf! We have a high tolerance for the venom of abnormals.”

“You mean Otherworlders.”

“Same thing.”

“Then how come Lenny dropped dead so fast?”

It made me nauseous just thinking about the silver wolf and the venom oozing out of his fur. He’d lain still, unwilling to fight for his life.

Her eyes filled up again. “Lenny was a half-blood. He’s a werewolf, yes, but his dad was a mortal. In fact, it’s common with a lot of wolves to have a single human parent. I didn’t though. Neither did Rex or Althea. I’ll be okay.”

Here we go again with people talking about things that shouldn’t be happening. Lenny was a hybrid? Didn’t hybrids die in their childhood stages?

“Is that what Hunters High taught you?”
Aspen’s words echoed in my mind.

I shook my head, shoving the thoughts away. On the plus side, it was good to know that Ilume wouldn’t just drop dead, but I couldn’t quite sigh in relief. She’d still been poisoned, and it would take effect at some point. “How much time do you think we have?”

“Well,” she sighed. “Forty-eight hours maybe. My hips are already numb and so is my one thigh. I can’t feel anything in either one.”

She flexed her feet, but I could feel her one leg tremble below my fingers.

I felt all tense and hot again. The stress propelled me to move quicker. Forty-eight hours wasn’t a lot of time, and I had no idea where we were going or where the end of the fence was. “Do you smell anything? We need to catch the pack’s scent. Even just a hint so we know where to go.”

But as Ilume whiffed the air, I knew there was nothing. My senses were Finder-fit, maybe better than hers. There were only the woods. “No,” she whispered, grim. “I don’t even smell the Jackal trail anymore.”

I groaned, frustrated as we slid down into a dark hollow. “Yeah. Me neither.”

As we moved through the woods, I kept sneaking glances at him. In place of fear, determination had taken over. His jaw was tight, chin high. He held me close, like saving me was the most important thing in the world.

Why is he doing this?
I was tempted to ask again but feared his answer. It was bad enough, the feelings I had for someone the pack called my
pet
. I thought I’d popped all the bubbly emotions, but apparently not. Every time I looked at him, my heart threw in an extra beat. The tips of his hair had gone flat, dampened by the sweat on his neck. He kept tossing his bangs out of his face, blue eyes scanning our surroundings. A few times he stopped, picking up on an off noise, and I didn’t miss how his grip on me would tighten.

I liked him. I liked him way more than I should have.

You can’t do this to yourself.
My chest went from fluttery to throbbing. When I put aside daydreams and looked at reality, I knew these feelings would land me in another Thagen disaster if not worse. At least Thagen had been wolf, someone who ran a successful pack. Jared was human, and not an average one. I wondered which was worse: loving a human teenage boy, or loving a human teenage boy who was trained to hunt my kind.

Sunset came sooner than I expected. We started losing light, and while I could see in the dark I knew Jared couldn’t. Despite his protests, I convinced him to pull over for the evening. We were near the edge of a steep drop off, where trees angled down the hill. I could see the stars as they appeared, giving me an idea that we were somewhere to the east.

I had lost the feeling in my left leg. Earlier, I could feel my foot, but now I could barely curl a toe. When Jared asked me how I felt, I told him fine. He nodded, looking relieved. Guilt ate at me for lying.

Lying against a pale-barked tree trunk, I felt heat below my back. This part of the woods was not like the rest of it. Electricity was in the air, and I felt the eyes of many abnormals as they scurried about the forest floor, curious. Something drew them here. Something I couldn’t quite identify. The temperature had cooled significantly, and if it grew much colder Jared would need to take us in a different direction. I knew Lady Winter, Queen Mab, owned area nearby, and her frosted eyes didn’t look kindly upon trespassers.

Mist settled in the drop off. It started to drizzle late into the night. I had put Jared’s jacket on, wearing it like a dress, but it was thin. Cotton sucked in moisture like a sponge, and I froze my tail off. At one point Jared disappeared to take a bathroom break, and while he was gone I tried to transition. It was so painful I gave up half way and reverted. The venom was moving quicker than I thought.

“Hey, hey!” Jared came back to find me collapsed and shaking on the ground. He bent down, lifting me up. “What the hell are you—oh . . . oh, crap, you’re freezing.”

“I-I can’t transition,” I admitted through chattering teeth. “I do-don’t know what’s wrong.”

“The venom’s paralyzing your muscles.” He caught on fast. Pulling me against his chest, he settled down by the tree, curling his arms around me. “We’re running out of time. You’ve got to let me keep moving.”

“N-no. You and I both need rest, and it just gets d-darker the further we go. You can’t see in this.”

I shook my head, wrapping my arms around his waist. Oh, this was a bad idea. Such a bad idea. It had been a long time since a boy had held me. Despite his chilly hands, the rest of him was warm. He was like a smooth rock that had been bathing in the sun. I shouldn’t have been so content.

But if you’re going to die,
I thought,
you deserve to be content.
I wasn’t afraid of death. Half my hunters had faced a worse end today. My father had faced it when he met a nightling near the border. I was lucky: my end would be quiet, painless.

We weren’t going to make it back in time. I knew that much. We had spent hours moving down the creek, waiting to come across the Jackals’ scent again. Now we were even further out. I didn’t have forty-eight hours left; I had closer to six, twelve if I was lucky. Why waste that time worrying? Rex—the selfish, ignorant excuse for a wolf who I wish would’ve stayed in that spider’s tunnel—would pick another mate. My mother would weep, but she was strong. She had survived my father’s passing; she would survive without me.

I didn’t want to spend my last hours of life stressing. I wanted to spend them here, with the guy who hadn’t put me in harm’s way, the one who had tried to protect us and hadn’t run for the hills when I was in trouble. He might be human but that didn’t matter now.

This boy had followed me into a club, chased me down an alleyway. I had hated him, feared him. Now things were different. I had heard rumors about humans being capable of great compassion. Now I believed it.

I snuggled up against him. If only we had more time.

I had to be a brick wall. My heart was set in stone, untouchable.

But as her fingers knotted in my tee, nose bumping my chin as she shifted in my lap, I felt the brick wall crumbling. Her chest rose and fell with mine, our hearts mirroring each other’s beats. God, she was turning me into a marshmallow. A big, soft, toasted marshmallow with a melting center. I hated it! I hated how much I liked this.

You’ve got to give her up, man,
Peter would say.
Just let her go. Either Rex is going to separate you two, or something else is. What if you can’t save her from the venom?

What if she dies?

That last thought caused me to jerk. I must’ve fallen asleep, for as my eyes shot open the woods were dimly lit, the stars replaced by pale pink clouds and warm air.

I yawned and laid back, Ilume still passed out on my chest. “Hey.” I shook her gently. We needed to get an early start, see if the pack hadn’t come looking for us and left a scent trail. “Wake up.”

She didn’t respond. Her hand, the one that had held onto my shirt, lay limply in her lap. Her head lolled on my shoulder, my neck no longer warmed by her breath.

Oh, no.

“Ilume?” I shook her harder, sitting up. “Ilume, hey! Wake up!”

Nothing.
Oh, God, how could I have fallen asleep?
Panicking, I pressed two fingers under her jaw, praying that she wasn’t dead.

A pulse. It was weak, but thank God she had a pulse. Holding her around the waist, I pushed myself off the strange curling tree and stood up. She couldn’t die on me. Not now. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, the first girl I cared about in years. I had just gathered her into my arms when I heard footsteps. I froze.

The trees were dense where we stood above the valley, obscuring my view. The footsteps resumed, faint and hard to hear, but I could tell it had two feet and was most likely an Otherworlder.
Someone knows how to tread lightly
. When they move with that kind of consideration, they tend to be one thing.

Predators.

A strange odor clung to the mist, something like rawhide and flowers. Definitely animal. I inhaled, hugging Ilume closer. The scent of woodland dog was present as well, and it didn’t smell like any of ours. It smelled more like the tracks, like the creek water.

Like the Jackals.

My mind raced, trying to decide whether to put Ilume down and find a weapon, or hold onto her and make a run for it. I looked this way and that, but there weren’t any branches worthy of being made into spears, no jagged rocks, nothing.

I was about to take off when the intruder stepped out of the trees. It wasn’t a wolf, but a man. His bald head gleamed in the sun, grey beard tangled with twigs and bits of wildflower. He blinked at me with pale eyes, a gnarled walking stick in hand.