Rachel Caine: Chicks Kick Butt

But I’d gone only a few yards when a second scream split the night again, followed by two deeper, masculine shouts of fear and pain. What the hell was going on?

I pushed myself harder, my brain racing now. Bear? There was no growling or roaring, and I hadn’t smelled anything even slightly ursine. Besides, black bears typically shy away from humans. As do bruins, though to my knowledge, no one had ever spotted a bear Shifter in the heart of the Appalachian Territory.

So what the hell was happening?

I flew through the forest, retracing my own path with no thought for the living buffet scurrying all around me this time. The screaming continued, terror from Robyn and Dani, sheer agony from their boyfriends. I’d seen a friend murdered once, and I recognized sounds I’d hoped never to hear again—my friends were being slaughtered.

My clothes hung on branches ahead, but I raced past them. The screaming was louder now, but there were fewer voices—Mitch had gone silent. I was too late for Dani’s boyfriend, and before I’d gone another few yards, Olsen’s screaming ended in a horrible, inarticulate gurgle.

My lungs burned and my legs ached—werecats are sprinters, not long-distance runners—but I pushed forward, demanding more from my body than I’d ever had reason to expect from it. This couldn’t be real!

Robyn’s screams intensified with her boyfriend’s silence, then suddenly stopped, and for a moment, my heart refused to beat. Not Robyn . I couldn’t lose my roommate of more than a year. The girl who left her toothpaste open on the bathroom counter and made me hot chocolate in the middle of the night, when nightmares woke me up.

Then in the sudden quiet, the forest produced a new voice, and my next steps were fueled by simultaneous terror and relief.

“… mouth shut, bitch, or I’ll slice you wide open. Her too.”

Robyn and Dani were alive—so far, anyway. But who the hell was with them?

A few steps later, I cringed as the scent of blood rolled over the forest, overwhelming my senses and shredding my heart. The sheer volume was horrifying, and the thought of how much Mitch and Olsen must have lost made me sick to my stomach.

I slowed as I approached the campsite, logic and caution finally catching up to the terror that had propelled my dash through the woods. I couldn’t help the guys, and I’d be no good to the girls if I burst into the clearing and got shot by some psycho backwoods hunter. So I snuck the last thirty feet or so, silent and virtually invisible in the dark, as only a werecat can be.

The campfire flickered through a tangle of branches. I blinked, edging forward slowly, hidden by a thick, fat bush. I saw Olsen first, and had to swallow the traumatized whine trying to leak from my throat. He lay on his back in the clearing, his shadow twitching on the ground with every lick of the orange flames. His blue eyes were open; his mouth was slack. His coat was unzipped, his shirt completely drenched in blood, which now soaked into the ground beneath him. He’d been gutted.

Mitch lay in the same position, a quarter of the way around the campfire, his face forever frozen in a grimace of agony. His stomach and chest had been sliced up the middle, but unlike Olsen’s, Mitch’s coat and shirt had been spread open, showcasing the full extent of the damage. So the girls would know the same thing could happen to them.

Nausea rolled over me for the first time ever in cat form. I’d seen a lot of slaughtered deer—I’d even brought down a couple myself. But these weren’t deer. They were friends.

My vision blurred until I couldn’t keep the bodies in focus, yet when I glanced away, my focus returned, as if my brain didn’t want to interpret the images of carnage my eyes were sending.

I blinked and forced the image back into focus, determined not to punk out. If I couldn’t even look at the corpses, how could I hope to save Robyn and Dani?

Maybe I couldn’t. I wasn’t a cop. I wasn’t even an enforcer. My summer training sessions with Faythe had included neither rescue missions nor hostage negotiation. But I had to try. I was all they had.

My roommate and her best friend knelt on the ground on the other side of the fire, and watching them through the flames sent chills through me. Like I was already seeing them die. They cried and huddled together, alternately staring at their butchered boyfriends and cringing up at their captors.

Three men stood between them and the campfire with their backs to me, each dressed in hunter’s camouflage. Two of them held hunting knives, still dripping blood onto the packed dirt. They were human, based on the scent, but every bit as monstrous as the cruelest Shifters I’d ever met. And one of them smelled vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t quite place his scent.

I backed carefully away from the bush concealing me and began to circle the clearing slowly and silently. I needed to be within pouncing distance before I made my move.

“Where is she?” the man in the middle demanded, and my heart actually skipped a beat. Did he mean me? Had they been watching us? Or had they simply seen five hiking packs and deduced an absence? Had they gone through my stuff to determine my gender?

“Where’s who?” Robyn said through chattering teeth, loyal to a fault. She would keep me out of this, even if it cost her last breath. But I couldn’t let that happen. They were scared and defenseless against men with knives, and I remembered being scared and defenseless. I remembered way too well.…

The man in the middle backhanded her, and Robyn fell over sideways, unable to right herself with her hands taped together in her lap. It took all of my self-control to hold in the growl itching at the back of my throat as I rounded the halfway point of the clearing. Drawing attention to myself before I was ready to fight would only get us all killed. That was one of the first things Faythe had taught me.

The tallest of the men hauled Robyn upright by one arm as I continued to circle silently, aching inside while she cried. “We know Abby was with you,” he said, and I froze in midstep. I recognized that voice. A few more feet, and my eyes confirmed what my ears already knew. Steve … something. He’d transferred into my psych class a week into the semester and had sat in the desk behind me ever since, trying to make conversation while I only nodded.

What the hell was going on? Had he followed us?

“Where’d she go?” the second man demanded, and I noticed as I edged along that the contents of both tents had been dumped in a pile about three feet from the campfire, including my sleeping bag and purse. Was this a robbery, or were they looking for me? Neither possibility made sense—college students don’t carry much cash, and I barely knew Steve and had never even met his accomplices.

The third man stepped forward, silently threatening Robyn and Dani with the knife when no one answered. My blood boiled, even as fear spiked my veins with adrenaline demanding to be used.

Robyn cringed, tears pouring down her cheeks. But Dani answered, staring at the blade now inches from her throat. “She went for a hike!”

“In the dark?” Steve crossed bulky arms over a bulkier chest, the tip of his knife tapping against the waist of his thick camo pants.

Dani shrugged, and I saw a spark of the stubborn defiance that made her fun to debate—and might soon get her killed. “She likes nature.”

“And she took a flashlight,” Robyn added, shaking violently, either from the cold or from shock. “Please, you can have anything you want. My purse is over there.” She nodded toward the pile of supplies. “Just take it and let us go.”

“Oh come on, this is a party!” Steve glanced at his friends with a look of anticipation that chilled my blood. “But we’re one girl shy. You have her number?” Robyn nodded slowly, and Steve glanced at the third man. “Tim, give her a call.”