The scent of the vampire, winter and blood, lots of it, hit my nose. The wolf inside me howled, banging to get loose, but it didn’t bother me. We’d made peace together a long time ago. My other side, though, was yet to be tamed.
The closer we got to the bloody trail Venom left, the harder it was to control my thirst. There was too much blood. The fucker had been tearing apart every human he’d met on the run. The bodies we came across were either ripped and left to die or already soulless. No biting, just plain murder.
He was doing it on purpose to get me unhinged and stop me from tracking him.
Prez glanced at me over his shoulder as we rode into the woods a few miles from leaving Forest Grove. “You okay?” he called out.
If I said yes, it would be a lie. I pressed my lips and kept my eyes on the road. The boy murmuring his maker’s name beside my ear maddened even more.
Dasher checked on me too when I didn’t reply. I envied him and Prez for their control. All this blood and neither of them grew a fucking fang.
I, on the other hand, was losing my fucking mind. My throat was closing, burning. My body felt as if it was shoved into a furnace. My thoughts spiraled around one thing.
Blood.
The need to rip the world to bloody shreds and feel the splatter on my skin.
I wasn’t even a hybrid. I was born to shifter parents. Wolf father, reindeer mother. Our clan crossbred a lot and procreated in identical twins. My twin brother was perfectly normal, but I came out broken.
I had a tinge.
That was what you got when your mother whored herself with a fucking bloodsucker.
Venom.
My body was boiling now at the memory, my madness painting the trees and the wind rattling their branches red. I growled, shaking my head like a feverish drunk. The motherfucker had given my mother the foreplay bite and offered her some of his blood. The filthy shit lingered in her system when she got pregnant with me, and she passed his stain to me. The fucking tinge that had me licking the blood covering my skin when I came out of her womb instead of crying for the nipple.
They didn’t call me Mad Dog for no reason. My tinge was my weakness, my curse. My body and sanity refused it so hard that it literally fucked my brain up when I was around too much blood.
Shifters and vampires were natural enemies. Our bloods were never meant to mix. Because when it did, shit happened. Like creating a thirsty-for-blood, mad werewolf.
I howled, my hands clawing up. My beast was my defense, breaking out to dull the tinge, before I’d set off and do the devil knew what.
“Fuck. Mad Dog is gonna lose it,” Dasher warned.
I wanted to speak, tell them I was going to get it together, but my tongue was tied. Prez nodded at Terror, and I knew what it meant. He’d ordered him to take me and the boy home.
No.
I needed to go with them. If anyone was going to kill the bastard, it should be me. Had to be me. No one hated him more than I did. No one deserved to have that kill more than I did.
“No.” A groan erupted from my mouth.
“We can take it from here. Just go,” Slasher yelled over the bikes and accelerated.
I did, too, until I was riding by his side. The forest reeked of blood from every direction, and I was losing Venom’s smell, crimson havoc in my head. But I wasn’t going to sit this one out. “I can do it. Please.”
He must have heard the urgency in my voice because he slowed down. “Fuck. Stay with your brother as far from the blood range as possible. We’ll call for you both when we have him.”
CHAPTER 15
TERROR
I hid my bike and rode my brother’s, taking him and the boy back west away from the trail of corpses.
The boy had passed out again as Mad Dog clawed at an oak tree trunk. His wolf feet extended, putting holes in his boots. Then he returned to his human form for a few minutes before he half-shifted again.
I hated to see my little brother like that, and I hated vampires. Except for Prez and Dasher, I hadn’t met one that didn’t deserve to be flayed, chopped to pieces and fed the bloody shit that would come off their asses in the process.
