That time he did swing at me.
I’d never noticed how big Johnson’s hands were, his thick fingers curling into fists that were easily twice the size of mine. One monstrous fist swung at my face, connecting with my right cheek, making my teeth rattle in my skull. He was just human, but he still packed a hell of a wallop. Pain exploded beneath my eye, the deep burn enveloping the right side of my face making me wonder if he’d broken my cheek bone. I tasted blood as the inside of my cheek ground against my teeth. Infuriated, I tried to spit the blood in his face, but instead only managed to drool on myself.
“Hit on a sore spot, huh? So that’s it, you’re a little lacking in the manhood department, eh?”
“Shut up, bitch.”
A blow to the stomach had me doubling over in the chair. I spent the next few seconds dry heaving as my abused stomach tried to expel the last of its meager contents. When I finally felt like I wasn’t in danger of throwing up all over myself, I turned an angry glare on my captor.
“You seriously need some new material. Let me give you some pointers. Asshole. Prick. Shit for brains. Should I keep going?”
“I. Said. Shut. Up. Bitch,” he snarled, punctuating his words with shots to my face.
“Dickless wonder,” I added as a last insult, spitting blood.
I knew the punch was going to hurt, bad, even before he began to swing, the gleam in his eyes switching from drunken fury to murderous.
Damn, maybe I went too far that time, I thought a second before it landed, the impact snapping my head back.
I caught a glimpse of the ceiling as my head rolled backwards, my eyes dancing over a disgusting proliferation of cobwebs stretching between the floor joists overhead.
Spiders. Why did it have to be spiders? I wondered distantly, and then my eyes slid shut.
***
Cold water struck me in the face, the shock of it expelling the air from my lungs in a startled gasp. It plastered my loose hair to my face, streaming from my chin to drench my shirt. Choking, I tried to shake my hair out of my eyes, but the motion made my head swim and nausea reignite in my stomach. By some small miracle, I managed not to vomit on myself.
Point for team Riley!
“Rise and shine,” Johnson crooned, all signs of his earlier drunken slur gone.
Looking up through the wet tangle of my hair, I found him standing in front of me with an empty bucket in one hand and a wicked looking knife in the other. I could smell the oily stink of the metal from a few feet away, a shudder of revulsion rippling through me as I tried to recoil from it. Silver. The bastard had a silver knife.
So, this isn’t just some random, spur of the moment kidnapping and torture session then.
“Five more minutes, Mom,” I said, yawning wide.
“You think you’re so goddamn smart, don’t you?” he asked with a growl, dropping the bucket on the floor and stepping close to me.
Pressing back into the chair, I tried to put as much space between me and the knife as I could, but the zip ties didn’t allow for much movement. Most of the stuff Hollywood spouts about garlic and vampires, weres and howling at the moon, is absolute tripe, but as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. The talk about werewolves and silver? Unfortunately, that’s true. There’s not much you can do to a were that they can’t heal eventually, but inflicting a wound with silver is one of those things. It will blister and burn, and in some rare, horrific cases, fester and rot, resulting in permanent damage. Needless to say, I did not want that knife anywhere near me.
“I thought leaving that deer carcass in Holbrook’s room would make him see you for the filthy animal you are, but I guess he’s almost as dumb as you,” Johnson mused, testing the sharpness of the blade against the flat of his thumb.
Dumbstruck, I momentarily forgot the danger looming so close. All my smart ass comebacks fled from my mind at the revelation.
“That was you?”
I’d spent the last few days thinking that Samson was close, had watched me sleep in the woods, and had taken the remains of my kill as a sign that he was watching me. Learning that it had been Johnson was something of a relief, but opened up a whole new realm of problems. He seriously had it out for me, and I had no idea why.
“What is it about you weres anyway? Why can’t anyone else seem to keep their hands off you?”
“Just our winning personalities I guess,” I replied, rewarded a second later with a backhand to the mouth.
I tasted blood again and made a show of licking it from my lip before spitting it at him. I missed, but I didn’t care. I was testing his mental faculties, and, judging by the faraway look in his eyes, he wasn’t really seeing me. I couldn’t smell booze on him like before, but there was still something going on that made his eyes distant and his attention wander.