“I’ll let you keep the girl, but you can’t keep the boy.” How could his voice be so clear and succinct, yet so animalistic?
The sound of twigs breaking reached my ears, and we ducked behind a thick tree. This was useless; he had all our scents. We had to assume he was like most Alligatoridae and had a keen sense of smell. Take the world's oldest hunter and a human, put them together, and we were hopelessly outclassed.
Was there even a point in fighting?
Wait.
Scent.
Maybe he was more man than was comfortable for my mental health, but he was clearly also a decent amount of animal. I knew how to deal with animals.
I carefully unzipped my bag, cringing with every sound it made. I pulled out a device I made after a run-in Africa and hoped it would help here. I pulled the pin on the grenade-shaped canister and tossed it in his general direction.
Our eyes met for a moment, before I ducked back behind the tree.
Aerosolized peppermint oil reached my nose right as I heard him snarling and going back down the hill. A nice, strong scent that would feel like inhaling glass for someone like him.What now, bitch?
I gestured for Shannon to go, and we dragged Drew’s dead weight to create more distance. She needed a chance to at least get a tourniquet in place.
“We need to render first aid,” Shannon whispered, leaning him against the tree we used for cover. “Or he won’t make it.”
“Do it,” I told her, walking a few trees down the line, prepared to make a distraction if she needed it.
A deep, dark laugh yanked every single muscle of mine to attention, like he yanked all my puppet strings. Something inside me folded, and each joint collapsed. Starting with my ankles and knees, then the weight of my upper body. Every motion was foreign, and I found myself disorientated. Like the body taking action wasn’t mine.
When I finally made sense of things, I was on my hands and knees on the ground.
Tears pricked my eyes as I realized I wasn’t fully in control. He was.
The laughter came closer up the hill, followed by his slow footsteps, but I couldn’t move.
Do something!
He came from around a tree a few feet down. His unamused eyes seared into me, but softened when he realized what position I was in. He did that thing again, where he motioned for me to come, and to my dismay I found my hand and knees slowly crawling toward him. The mechanical motion felt unnatural, but right all at the same time.
Humiliation burned my cheeks, but something primal and hungry filled his eyes, making his pupils widen dramatically. Itpulled me forward, and I found my pride calming. Like this was normal.
Like this was where I was supposed to be.
I was supposed to go to him.
No, that wasn’t right. I wasn’t supposed to crawl to anyone. It was bad enough I tolerated people like Gale for profit. I didn’t do it because I wanted to.
Yet, the thought was mine. Born from a soft place that I buried long ago, so I could survive.
The realization struck me like a backhand.
It was another version of me doing this. The little girl that did everything she could to be good so that she wasn’t disposable. So someone would love her.
He wasn’t controlling me.
I froze in my tracks. The magnetic pull dragging me to him broke. This wasn’t mind control or anything else. It was my subconscious dragging the invisible tether between us. Not him.
An urge to satisfy him that disgusted me. I glared at him so he knew exactly how much I hated him for turning me into this.
That irritation filled his eyes again, as if I’d dangled a treat for him and took it away. He stalked toward me. The urge to continue crawling filled me so strongly that I had to lock every muscle to keep myself in place.
It didn’t matter. He stood less than a foot away from me. His shadow cast over me, reminding me exactly how big this monster was.
