He stuffed the spare keys back in his pocket and jogged down the road, not even bothering to shift, and rapped on the driver’s side door.
Her glare could have set a lesser man on fire. Slowly, she rolled the window down.
Austin leaned in, resting his arm on the window sill. “I believe you’ve got something that belongs to me. Its name is Torrin. Also my truck. Stealing a truck is considered a felony pretty much everywhere.”
“Please die, Austin.” She bit the words out as if they tasted foul. “Right here, right now, so I can watch.”
He winked at her. “On the plus side, if you ever get tired of pretending you’re a bounty hunter, the bar owner would pay you good money for a mud-wrestling gig.”
Her face was turning redder and redder.
Suddenly, she turned the keys in the ignition and started the truck up again. Austin let out a low growl of annoyance.
Again, he pulled the keys out of his pocket and hit the kill switch. The truck had only driven a few hundred feet down the road when he stopped it. He started jogging towards it.
The back door banged open, and Torrin flew out of the car and shot into the woods. Austin spat out a curse.
Savannah had slashed through Torrin’s ropes and let him go rather than let Austin have him.
He started to run, snarling, because although Torrin was a skinny little bitch of a shifter who would break if Austin smacked him too hard, he did have one skill. He was a very, very fast runner. He’d had to be, to survive this long with all his stupid vandalism and thieving.
As he ran, he shed his jacket and kicked off his boots. Then, in one fluid motion, he unleashed his wolf without breaking his stride. He felt the mild sting as his bones snapped and cracked and reset, his fangs shot out, his ears lengthened and sharpened to points. Fur flowed over his skin like a river, and his clothing shredded and fell away.
The colors of the world faded from technicolor to dull and muted, but the richness of a thousand scents flooded his nostrils, more than making up for it. Rich loamy earth, sweet sun-ripened berries, the tracks of raccoons and squirrels and rabbits criss-crossing through the dewy grass, the green smell of crushed leaves, rushed at him as his legs slashed through the air.
Savannah was in fox form now, chasing him, and she smelled musky and sweet. His wolf wanted her. It wanted herbad.Wild power flowed through his body, and he yearned to skid to a stop and let her catch up to him. His animal was clouding his thoughts. It wanted him to chase after Savannah and pin her to the ground and…No!
He banished those treacherous thoughts from his head. With a massive wrench of effort, he forced himself to ignore her, arrowing through the underbrush, heading deep into the woods after Torrin.
Then he felt a sharp sting as Savannah clamped her jaws on his flank, piercing his flesh with her needle-sharp teeth. He let out a howl of fury and spun in a circle until she flew off, landing with a thud on the soft, mossy forest floor. But she kept chasing after him, tripping him up, until he realized that it was too late. Torrin was long gone.
With a snarl, he spun around to face Savannah, who was already vanishing into a thick clump of underbrush. Genuinely pissed off now, he forced his way through the tangle of snarled branches – only to see her bushy, white-tipped tail vanishing into a hole in the ground.
Damn foxholes.
Cursing, he turned around and trotted back the way he came.
His mark was gone, and so was Savannah. He’d just had his ass handed to him by a shifter a third of his size.
I’m coming for you, foxy lady. I know where you sleep. And payback’s a bitch.
He was trotting along, panting, laughing ruefully to himself, when he felt it.
The darkness.
He froze where he stood, heart jack-hammering in his chest. Hellish visions swarmed in front of him, crowding out the trees and the scents and the sunlight.
He was inside the Watering Hole again, and someone was slumped over the bar, their head a bloody ruin.
Instantly, he did what Korbin the healer had told him to do – resisted with all his might. Tried to use his Dominus power to push the images from his brain.
Instead, it grew more warped and horrifying. Barry was the one lying slumped over the bar, his head half blown off, and demons were clawing at his face. Austin’s brother Grant crawled over the bar in human form and began gnawing on Barry’s arm. Savannah, her hair in flames, danced on a table, flapping bat-like wings. Horned monsters swarmed over Barry’s body, tearing at his flesh, their eyes wild, their faces twisting in hideous snarls.
It wasn’t a future vision. Some shifters had those, passed down through the father’s side of the family, but his father hadn’t been a Seer, and future visions showed things that were actually going to happen – not these hideous visions of hellscapes.
So he was just going crazy.
He pawed at his head, as if he could claw the visions from his flesh. As he backed away, snarling and snapping, he tripped over a chair leg and crashed to the floor. How? How could he feel anything in this hell-vision? How could he be physically affected by it when it wasn’t real?
