Jacks, Marcy - Mason Returns to His Mate [DeWitt's Pack 8] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic ManLove) (15 page)

“Oh dear, you’re that young boy!”

Derek looked down into her left hand and noticed the little pink

bottle in her hand.

She’d gotten him with pepper spray. It had sure as shit felt like

acid to him.

“Uh-huh,” was all he was able to say. He flinched when she

reached down for him, but she didn’t spray him in the face again with

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any of Satan’s liquid pain like before. Instead, she helped him to his  feet and pulled him into her bedroom before sitting him down on the  bed.

“What in the world are you doing breaking in here? You should  have stayed in the forest. That’s where you were all night, wasn’t it?”

Damn, did every werewolf in the pack have to always know about  Derek’s sex life?

“I need your help. Mason was poisoned with silver, and now I  think he’s dying out in the trees.”

Maggie looked at him sharply. “Come again? Silver poisoning?”

She didn’t say it as though she were hard of hearing or anything  like that, but rather because she was shocked to the possibility of it  even happening.

Maybe that was actually horror on her face. Derek was still having  a hard time seeing.

“He was shot with a silver bullet?” Her footsteps sounded as she

walked away from him.

Derek heard a tap running. She had a connecting bathroom in

here, it seemed, and then she handed him a cool wet cloth. He

gratefully put it over his eyes.

Wait! A bathroom! The first aid kit must be  in there somewhere!

“No. A hunter held him down and punched him with silver rings  on his fingers. Mason’s face is pretty messed up. I barely recognized  him.

“We must go to him right away. Is he near here?”

No, he wasn’t. Not with that crowd fighting out there. From what  Derek had seen when he ran out to James and that cop, right before  the hunters jumped out of the trees to attack, the werewolves  outnumbered the hunters at least five to one.

The hunters were skilled, however, and they had gadgets and guns

on them, and they’d been planning for this, whereas the werewolves  could only fight at close range, with the exception of Jason, Isaac, and  the one cop who was still alive last time Derek had checked on him.

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They could use guns, too, but did they carry those kinds of weapons on them all the time? Derek had had to run into the cabin where he’d been staying to get his from under the mattress before he was able to go back to Mason.

Regardless, the fight was still happening, which meant it would be hard getting  back to Mason. He told all this to Maggie, including where he’d left his lover.

Her lips thinned and eyes squinted in thought, and then she went back into her bathroom. Derek’s eyes were starting to feel better already, even if he was still blinking a lot. She had to of put more than just water on this cloth.

She came back from the bathroom with another dry cloth, one of those brown bottles of disinfectant, and what looked like just a plain bottle of water.

“Will those help?” Derek asked, looking at the supplies and  realizing that they didn’t look like much for what Mason was  suffering from.

“This will be more than enough to save him,” Old Maggie said,  surprisingly lifting up the water bottle instead of the disinfectant.

He knew almost nothing about werewolves and their medicine, so  he was just going to have to trust her on this one. He got to his feet  and held out his hand to take the bottle.

She slapped it away. “Do not be an idiot. I’m going with you.”

Derek watched her walk slowly and carefully out the bedroom door, her pace clearly showing off her age.

“Really, I can get it to him faster.”

She spun around and glared at him. “You, young man, are rude and ignorant. I am a wise woman and a werewolf. You will likely be the one to have a hard time keeping up with me.”

Derek sincerely doubted that, but before he could utter a word,  Old Maggie vanished around the door, and in the hallway, Derek heard a terrible ripping sound.

He rushed out to help, thinking that maybe she’d been attacked.

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He came face to face with a pair of golden eyes big enough to be basketballs. Old Maggie had transformed, and she was enormous.  Bigger than Mason was, and maybe even bigger than James.

With all that white fur, she could have passed for an arctic wolf had it not been for her size.

Watching him and growling slightly, Old Maggie bent down her magnificent head, opened her jaw, and gently scooped up the supplies she’d placed on the floor. It looked like she was keeping her lips and tongue back to keep them from getting too wet, and was sheltering both bottles and the washcloth behind her massive teeth.

Derek swallowed hard at the sight, and the huge white wolf snorted in what sounded like a laugh and then stuck her nose in the air.

Maggie sniffed deeply, her eyes briefly lowering to the cuts on

Derek’s hands and knees, and then she moved back in the direction of

the kitchen.

“Hey, wait!” She was fast. She hadn’t been kidding when she’d  said Derek would have a hard time keeping up with her. He got into  the kitchen just in time to watch her neatly leap across the broken  window sill, not so much as disturbing any of the glass on the tiled  floor.

“Damn,” he said then ran for the door. He unlocked it and headed

out to be with Mason.

* * * *

Detective Ryan Miller was having a pretty shitty day. First he had that conversation with Officer Decker, a conversation he didn’t much

feel like thinking about right now, and then he watched Officer  Decker get shot in the back of the head.

The poor bastard was currently lying facedown in a muddy pool  of his own blood, and even as Miller fought for his life thanks to the  gun wound in his own lower abdomen, he couldn’t help but think of

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the time he and Decker spent together. Christ, it was only two days  ago that they’d―

Fuck! Miller shot off his gun again, catching one of those kids  with a rifle in the neck. The boy couldn’t have been older than twenty,  and he dropped his weapon and grabbed at his spurting neck wound.  His eyes were wide, but he was still alive and determined.

He was set on taking Miller out before he died, and he pulled a  pistol out of a holster at his hip and pointed it straight at Miller.

He prepared for the shot, at least knowing it would take him out of  this fucked up alternate universe where people changed into giant  wolves and his ex-lover was dead on the ground.

The bullet never came. Another one of those giant wolves leapt

onto the boy with all the speed and grace of a diving hawk picking off

prey.

The boy screamed. At least, Miller assumed that the gurgling cry  that came from his mouth a split second before those teeth took his  head off was a scream. Either way, he couldn’t  help but wince, and  though he was a detective and had seen some strange shit, even he  had to turn away from the sight of that wolf chomping down on the  severed head. The crunching of bone under those massive teeth was  enough to make him shiver consistently. His body would not stop.  Every crunching sound felt almost like tiny grains of sand popping  between his own teeth.

Fuck.

The wolf swallowed the head then belched. Miller looked up at the massive animal, and in turn, it was looking back at him with a fixed expression. Its head was down and bloody mouth was open as it panted.

Miller didn’t want to go like that poor bastard had. He hated using his gun, and had never killed anyone before, but it would have been better if that boy had died by his bullet rather than through those terrible teeth.

The wolf came forward, putting one hesitant paw out, tail

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twitching slightly.

The rest of the gore and chaos vanished as panic overcame him.

He liked to think of himself as an adrenaline junkie. It was part of the

reason why he was able to do his job without going completely  insane, but getting his head taken off by that thing was way the fuck  out of his comfort zone.

Miller put the barrel of his Glock to his temple. It was hard and cold and just about everything else that was usually described in the novels he read. He was almost disappointed to realize that there was nothing about it that was different. Maybe that was just because this would be the last thing he experienced before he died.

The wolf whined and lunged. Miller pulled back on the trigger.

The fucking thing…the stupid mother fucking piece of shit Glock jammed on him. He couldn’t lower his weapon to get the spent case out of the slider and try again because the wolf transformed and was suddenly a naked human.

The man, wolf,
 
whatever
, the guy grabbed him by the wrist that held the gun and pulled his hand away from his head. He squeezed until Miller was forced to release the weapon, dropping it with a dull thud onto the ground next to him.

“What in the bleedin’ fuckin’ hell did you think you were doin’?” he asked, his accent strange and something Miller couldn’t quite place.

That question, and the fact that his head wasn’t being swallowed down the throat of the giant wolf right now, was enough to make  Miller feel pretty stupid. “Hoping to keep you from doing that to me,” he said, nodding toward the headless corpse.

The man looked back at his handiwork, as though he could have forgotten about it and then sneered down at the gun, batting it away with his hand as though it were a bothersome toy.

“Bah! Strange weaponry of today. Loud as a bitch in heat. Don’t know why you’d want to put somethin’ like that near yer ear.”

What the hell was this guy talking about?

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Whatever it was, it hardly mattered that the man had saved his life because Miller was intelligent enough to know that he was dying anyway. His body was already cold, and everything on him shivered.  No longer because of that disgusting crunching sound, but because his body was trying to produce some heat for him.

He must’ve closed his eyes without realizing it because the next thing he knew, he was being shaken awake.

“Rhyan! Rhyan! Stay awake, man!”

The stranger said his name in an odd manner, rolling the R and drawing out the syllables, but Miller didn’t recall ever telling him his name to begin with. How did he―?

A hard slap on his cheek pulled him out of his drowsy thoughts. “I said keep your wits about you! Stay awake!”

This guy could go and fuck himself for all Ryan cared. He just wanted to clock out already. He was tired. Whatever it was that had been happening here, it had been so much bigger than insurance fraud, and he and Decker hadn’t been even remotely prepared for the shit storm that came onto them.

Suddenly, Ryan felt pretty weightless. That man with the strange accent had picked him up and was taking him somewhere. He couldn’t help but think about how kind it was for him to risk his life like that, but he said nothing. The place where the bullet had pierced into his guts had long since grown hot and throbbed, and he just wanted this over with.

The man spoke to him, stroked him gently, searching for more wounds, but then did something completely strange, considering the warlike situation in the area.

He pulled back the collar of the brown duster Ryan was  wearing, as well as the blue collar of his button down shirt, then touched his

neck.

His fingertips felt warm and rough, but they traced over the patch of skin with a sort of hypnotic awe.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

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Get what? Miller could barely keep his eyes open, and it was a struggle to think. “Get … on my neck?”

The man had to shake him again. “Aye, where did this mark come from?”

Oh, his birthmark. Ryan often wondered about it, too, not so much recently, but when he was a kid, he loved it so much, enjoyed showing it off, and thought that it somehow made him special, that he had secret super powers or something stupid like that.

It was a little birthmark, circular in shape, and a little spiky along the edges. Strangely enough, if anyone looked closely at it, really observed and studied it, they could see the little speck of regular-looking skin that gave the appearance of a narrowed eye, as well as an open mouth with little fangs.

The birth mark resembled a dragon curled up but roaring in both

warning and rage.

“Was born with it,” he said and then passed out before the man  did his strange wolf thing again, transforming and howling into the  sky.