I was prepared for her glare when we passed, though it was unlikely she could have mistaken me for a working girl. With my jeans and hoodie, I did not look anything like someone out to turn tricks. Hopefully, we would find this rogue wolf before it found her.
The traffic picked up slightly as we went from block to block. I raised my face to the wind, scenting the air for anything animal. A bevy of smells hit me, automotive fumes being the strongest. Mingled along with oil and car exhaust was an assortment of greasy food, garbage and something unidentifiable. I didn’t like it though. There was a stench on the air, as if the lack of hope and dreams had grown stale and rotten over time.
For more than an hour, we followed both physical and psychic senses, finding nothing but dead ends. We’d covered a lot of ground, miles since we’d left the car. I was beginning to get frustrated. I didn’t expect it to be easy, but my eager anticipation was fading.
When we passed by the entrance to another side street, my senses went on full alert.
Everything in me commanded that I follow my instinct. I would find our werewolf.
“Do you feel that?” I turned to Kale with a renewed excitement. “We have to go this way.”
I walked fast, a sense of urgency quickening my pace. Kale frowned down at me, his brow furrowed in thought.
“I feel it now that you’ve drawn my attention to it. I didn’t before.” The weight of Kale’s heavy gaze drew my eyes to his. “I can still just barely make out that Were’s energy. Your powers have seriously grown. And fast.”
I couldn’t be more powerful than Kale. He was older than Arys, for crying out loud.
Of course, many other factors played a role in it, such as the fact that Arys killed and derived a lot of pleasure and power from it, whereas Kale was doing the willing victim thing. I turned it over in my head; the realization, shocking. I don’t think I fully realized what Arys and I really had going on together.
The street was lined with apartment and condo buildings on either side. Additional side streets and alleys branched off between them. Though there were lights on in many windows, we didn’t see anyone. If I were a human living in this part of town, I wouldn’t be out at night either.
As we progressed from block to block, my senses began to burn like wildfire. The energy of the Were was strong, thick with the negative lashings of unrestrained primal fury. She was hunting. I could feel it. It caused me to quicken my pace; Kale, hot on my heels.
“This werewolf is hunting somebody,” Kale said, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb the silence around us. “Her hunger is so fierce. I hope she doesn’t already have prey in her sights.”
I knew the werewolf we sought wasn’t far. I allowed both my nose and my psychic abilities to guide me. Together, one sense seemed to complement the other so that I could almost see her in my mind’s eye.
My legs moved faster until I was almost running. I knew she was close, and I wanted to reach her before she caught my scent and ran. I could feel Kale beside me, moving with the stealth and grace that nothing living could ever possess. Now that we’d located our target, the urgency within us grew. The power inside me seemed to respond to the excitement of my wolf. It began to scratch at me like a dog begging to be let out.
“This way,” I announced when instinct and the sudden tangy scent of blood pulled me between two shabby looking apartment buildings.
As we slipped between the buildings, the pale glow of the streetlight behind us fell away. There was only darkness ahead. My eyes quickly adjusted, making out what lay before me. It was a parking lot with an alley running behind it. One single, dim bulb glowed in a streetlight near an overflowing dumpster.
Rounding the building, I already knew what I would see between the building and the dumpster: our werewolf and what was left of her prey. She hovered over the body of a man, tearing chunks of flesh from the bone with a ripping, squishing sound. She was so engrossed in feasting on the kill that it took a solid five or ten seconds before she looked up at us.
We were too late for this victim, but there wouldn’t be another. Her dark wolf eyes landed on us, and the vacancy within them struck me as eerie. She was completely out of her mind. Not a semblance of sanity remained in her murderous gaze. Her face and hands were smeared with blood, so much so that I couldn’t tell at first glance what shade her olive skin was. Her long, black hair hung in dread-like chunks to her waist, and her clothing was splattered with blood and gore.
For a split second, I flashed back, seeing an image in my mind of a time when I’d slaughtered a man just like this. After Arys and I had bonded, I’d lost control to the hunger and killed a human who was abusing his girlfriend. She had thanked me later. The gruesome images were never far from my mind. I lived with the fear of losing control like that again.