“Again,” he said. His hits were more like nudges. He was trying to piss me off, and it was working.
I shifted my weight with my next swing and hit his arm. Long ago, I’d stopped aiming for his head or vital spots when we sparred. I didn’t want to hurt him, not in a permanently damaging way, anyway.
“Come on, twinkle-toes. Dance. Move. Do something more than swing those little toothpicks you call arms.”
Scratch that. He was going to lose some teeth. I swung harder, aiming for his mouth. He laughed. Jerk. He continued to block each pathetic blow. My swings were too loose.
Focus. I shook my head and stepped back to roll my shoulders.
“That’s my girl.” His soft voice and sad eyes told me just how worried he was. He’d kept his emotions tightly blocked the whole drive, but now they were starting to slip.
We fought quietly in the motel room for thirty minutes before my nose stopped bleeding and another thirty before my skin stopped throbbing. It still ached, but I called a stop regardless.
“We can’t stay here,” I said, moving to the bathroom. I grabbed a hand towel for each of us, tossed one to him, and used mine to wipe the sweat and blood from my face.
“I don’t know what they are, but I think we need to listen to that letter.” The towel muffled my words.
“All right.” He snatched the keys up from the table. “I’ll get what we need and be back in four hours.”
I laid a hand on his arm as he passed, stopping him. His gaze met mine. I had no words for how much his simple agreement and willingness to help meant to me.
“Just come back.”
He nodded and left.
Still in my running clothes from that morning, I went to the hotel’s meager exercise room and hogged the treadmill for the next hour.
Three
“The car’s loaded,” Ethan said with a nudge to my shoulder.
I lifted my head from my arm and wiped the drool from my face as I blinked at the clock.
“Good nap, princess?” He chuckled as he moved away.
“It was.”
The hotel was pretty dead, given the time of day, which meant no neighbors, which meant no emotions to pull. Having drained most of the excess with sparring and running, I’d crashed as soon as I had returned to the room.
I sat up and caught the bag he threw my way. It wasn’t the bag I’d packed for his house.
“Clean clothes,” he said.
“You went back to my place?”
He nodded as he walked into the bathroom and turned on the water.
“Why? What if they’d been there waiting?” I stood and paced to the bathroom. He moved out and gestured for me to get in.
“Hurry up. I want to be on the road again in thirty minutes. It’ll be the road trip we should have taken after you graduated,” he said with a grin.
“Gah.” I threw my hands up in the air and stomped off to close myself into the bathroom. There, I discovered he’d packed a lot of what I’d left behind. Half of my wardrobe consisted of exercise clothes. The other half, office clothes. Seeing it all crammed together in a bag looked weird.
I plucked out clean underthings, yoga pants, and a fitted tank before stripping. The shower felt great, and I lingered a bit too long. Threads of annoyance, twisted in with amusement, touched me as Ethan rapped sharply on the door. I turned off the water and towel dried before I quickly dressed. Steam billowed out the door as I stepped out.
What I saw stopped me. A man held Ethan by the throat. The sight of my friend dangling in the air wasn’t as scary as the sight of the furred arm that held him there. The nails of the man’s hand were long, black, sharp, and inhuman.
The bag fell from my fingers, a soft sound in the oddly quiet room. The man turned his head to look at me, and a smile curled his lips. Another man sat on the bed, watching the pair. He too turned to look at me.
“With a human?” the lounging man said. “That’s worse than being with the werewolves.”
Ethan’s face had already turned an unhealthy red. His hands were still pulling at the hand at his throat. Yet, I felt no fear from him. He knew what was coming.
“Put him down.” I bit out the words, anger surpassing my fear for Ethan. I didn’t wait for them to comply. I pulled deep. Both men grunted.
“Stop or I snap his neck,” the one holding Ethan said.
I laughed bitterly and pulled again.
“I’m not stupid. He’s dead either way.” I exhaled and was about to pull again when the sound of splintering wood interrupted me.
Before I could turn to look at the door, the man on the bed reacted. His teeth erupted from his mouth while his nose stretched and thickened. The mountain flew past me. He reached the bed as the man’s clothes split apart. In a blink, the mountain grabbed the man by his newly formed fur and tossed him at the window. The glass shattered, and the wolf cried out as he fell two stories.