I quickly rattle off our location and a description of what they’ll be working with when they get here before I lose the small signal I managed to pick up. By the short pause on the other side of the phone, it’s clear the emergency operator’s head is where mine’s at, already mentally preparing herself to deal with yet another pointless tragedy.
The call drops as we split up, the signal always spotty in this area, but worse the closer to the forest you get. We each take a different car to check for survivors, Bane’s eyes meeting mine a few moments later, resignation in their golden depths. He shakes his head as he withdraws his fingers from the driver’s neck. Mine, I don’t even need to touch, but I do so just to be one hundred percent sure. Miracles happen, but with the way this man’s head is hanging, I’m not expecting him to survive a broken neck this severe. I wait an extra minute, trying to will a pulse to life that isn’t there, but Mason’s voice has my own start sprinting.
“I’ve got a live one!” Bane reaches them first, trying to decide if it’s better to pull him out or leave him until the medics arrive.
Rounding from the other side, my steps slow until stopping completely. “Guys.” My voice is a breathless whisper as I eye the trickle of blood dripping out of the broken tail light. “Guys!”
Though I ran down here expecting death, I lock up with momentary fear. Whatever’s inside that trunk, I’m sure it’ll be an image that will haunt me until the day I die, something that will star in my nightmares for years to come. I don’t want to see, don’t want to know, yet I can’t bring myself to look away from the droplet of blood as it splashes onto the small puddle in the dirt below.
“Fuck,” Mason curses on a whisper beside me, but recovers faster, smacking my shoulder to snap me out of it and get me away from the back. “Go pop the trunk.”
Nodding quickly, I head over to the driver’s seat, eyeing the unconscious survivor with more caution than before. For a few seconds, we were thrilled to find anyone alive. But of everyone here, it’s looking like he’s the one that really should have died in this crash.
Popping the trunk, I hear the resulting silence as if it were a scream, realizing where this is going. The trunk won’t unlatch with all of the damage, but with the tail light busted, one of us can get in to see if they’re still alive, if there’s any hope.
“I’ll go,” Bane offers, but I shake my head, already stripping off my shirt.
“No, I’ll do it.” I swallow. “Gotta face our fears eventually, right?” The attempt falls flat, and I watch them share a nervous look, though neither of them stops me as I undo my jeans.
With a slow breath, dark purple scales start to coat my body as it shrinks down to just a few feet. Slithering across the forest floor, I head towards Mason’s outstretched hand as he crouches down. He picks me up, bright blue eyes wary and giving me ample time to change my mind. When I don’t, he reluctantly helps me slide into the hole in the trunk, careful of the sharp edges.
It’s a mangled mess, but in this form, it isn’t hard to navigate through. It’s the onslaught of claustrophobia that threatens to drown me, that I won’t be able to get back out, but I push that fear away in favor of the one I’m about to find. As I brush against her body, I’m just sighing in relief that it isn’t a kid. There are some traumatic things that you can’t let go of no matter how much you try, and that would have been one of them for me.
She’s still warm, but that means little if the wreck was recent. Her faint heartbeat, though? It’s music to my ears; well, body. It’s more a sensation of feeling vibrations in this form, and as I slither over her body, attempting to ignore all of the blood now coating my scales, I try to find a position to shift back in so that I can kick the trunk open without hurting her even more.
Her shallow breathing grows more labored, and I still as her faint heartbeat falters. A spike of fear has me moving before I can think about all of the ways this is going to blow up in my face. Coiled on top of her chest, I rear back as much as I’m able to in here, striking quickly and sinking my teeth into her neck.
The venom that I pump into her bloodstream isn’t the same one I use to kill; it’s the one we use to turn humans. Shifters are mostly born in this day and age, but turning isn’t unheard of, it’s just frowned upon because of the complications. Sometimes their bodies aren’t able to accept the change, and many of them can’t mentally handle it, end up either killing themselves or having to be put down to keep us from being exposed.
What makes matters worse is the randomness of it all. A shifter’s bite only triggers the change, activates the dormant gene in their blood if they have it, but doesn’t necessarily determine what the person will become. A pack of wolves might try to turn a human they want to take as their mate, only for her to become a rabbit.
It also means that for better or worse, this woman became my responsibility the second I sunk my fangs into her.
The trunk is torn open, Bane standing there with a crowbar in hand, golden eyes now wide. “Stryker, what the hell did you do?”
Carefully withdrawing my fangs, I slither out of the trunk and shift back, yanking on my clothes before gently starting to extract her from the wreckage. Removing the duct tape on her mouth before touching anything else, blood pours from her mouth, though she’s still unconscious.
“I could feel her dying, Bane.” Mason cuts the bindings on her wrists as I get her torso out, and Bane helps free her legs until I manage to finally pull her from the trunk. Carefully cradled in my arms, I don’t dare remove the shards of jagged metal jutting from her body when she’s already lost so much blood. “And I couldn’t just sit by and watch it happen.”
He runs a hand through his dark hair nervously, but one look at the woman in my arms and his gaze softens. “I’d have done the same thing. Come on, we don’t have much time before people show up; we need to get her out of here.”
“Hold on,” Mason demands, and I turn to see him looking positively furious. “We take her, that fucking bastard gets off scot-free.”
Without waiting for a vote, he storms over to the driver’s seat. Stabbing the airbag so that it deflates, he grips the back of the man’s head and slams it forward so hard that there’s an audible crack. Wiping his palms on his jeans, he catches up with us as we head back to the car as quickly as possible without jostling her too much.
I slide into the backseat with her and Mason, Bane getting us out of here just as we hear sirens approaching. My thumb strokes a soothing, steady path over her cheek, stained with dried blood and tears.
“Stay with me, baby, we’ve got you now. Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore.” Running a gentle hand through her tangled mess of dark brown hair to get it off of her face, I lean down to kiss her forehead. “And if they try, I’ll kill them.”
