Page 17 of Blood of Vengeance

No questions, no options. A direct order. One I fully intended to follow.

I gave the man a nod and kept walking, not stopping until I had reached one of the largest and most volatile brothers on our team. The one who owed me big. The closest thing I had to a man I could trust. More because I had dirt to hold over his head than any sort of expected loyalty. And definitely not just a prospect.

“Rush.” I bumped fists with the man I had gotten bloody for just the night before. “You’re babysitting.”

The big shifter glanced over my shoulder to where Locklyn still sat on my bike. I could see the tension in his jaw, knew he wanted to complain, but he had more of a brain than to do so, considering I had helped him avoid a charge. I also knew he had a mate of his own, not that he had admitted that fact yet. But he would get it. Even without knowing how Locklyn and I were connected, he would protect the woman for me. I knew it.

Thankfully, Rush bit back his irritation and kept shit simple. “Anything I need to know?”

“Yeah. Don’t touch her, keep the chatter to a minimum, and don’t fuck this up.”

He grunted his acknowledgment then walked past me, heading straight for Locklyn. Her worried eyes met mine, bouncing to the approaching man and back. I waited until he had arrived at her side and spoken a few words to her, until I saw her visibly relax a little, before I continued on to my team.

“We’re here to hunt for Chiggy’s body,” Cutter said, giving me a solid beat of attention before moving on to the others. “The trackers have seen evidence of tire tracks out this way, so this is where we start. We need to figure out what happened so we can track down whoever did this. Be cautious in your travel. I don’t want to be comparing paw prints for days on end because you got too excited to watch where you stepped. Now shift, and let’s get this shit over with.”

My brothers all moved out to strip, folding and setting clothes in neat piles on the rocks around us. Shifting destroyed anything we wore, and running around the desert as a naked human was never a good idea. Being conscious of the need to care for our clothes came almost on an instinctual level for us. Shifters in other parts of the country didn’t seem to worry as much, but they’d likely never been stung by a scorpion on their nutsacks. Only took once for a man to figure out he needed his jeans to stay in one piece.

I glanced over my shoulder as I folded my pants, catching Locklyn looking at me. I kept my back to her, letting her see all she wanted to. Letting her get an eyeful. A certain sort of pride came with knowing she watched me. That was my mate; this body now belonged to her. Scars, ink, muscles…all of it. Hers and only hers. She just didn’t know it yet. She’d figure that out and see the rest eventually.

Once naked, I shifted into my wolf form. My brothers all did the same, making their shifts on their own time. No one rushing. This wasn’t a rescue mission—we were looking for a body. We had time. I even took a moment to run back to my bike and give Locklyn a good view of this side of me. Wanting her not to be afraid. The thought of leaving her behind and out of my watchful eye didn’t sit well with me, but I also didn’t want her traipsing around the desert or coming upon anything that she maybe shouldn’t see.

Thankfully, she seemed distracted and almost intrigued by me.

“Your fur is darker than I would have expected, what with you being more blond than brunette.” She reached over slowly, letting her fingers lightly touch the top of my head. Taking a moment to familiarize herself with my fur before moving to scratch around my ears as if I were a dog. Not that I minded. That shit felt good. “Do I really have to stay here and wait?”

I growled low and laid my head on her thigh, holding her in place. She sighed and looked away.

“Fine. I’ll stay here.”

Her acceptance was about all I could hope for. I gave her one last nuzzle, earning another ear scratch, before turning and running back to my brothers. They had all shifted by that point, and Cutter looked ready to lead us on our trek. Not that he needed to do much more than point us in the right direction. We’d created search parties before—we had that shit on lock.

Searching took a good few hours. We stopped twice for water breaks and even sent Zed back to where we’d started to make sure Rush and Locklyn were okay. They had shade, food, and water so the rest weren’t too worried, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Was the heat too much? Was she hungry? Did she need protection from something other than the elements? The need to spin around and race back to her sat heavy on my shoulders, the pull in my chest growing worse as the hours passed. But I resisted the urge to turn around. I had a job to do—find her father’s body. That was how I needed to take care of her.

Three hours and some change into the day, I did exactly that. The scent of decay came at me first, leading my wolf down a sandy rise and around a patch of baby brittlebush. The body lay in what looked like a dry creek bed, facedown and fully clothed. The sight of Chiggy like that—the vision of weakness in a man who was anything but—hit me square in the gut. I couldn’t move, couldn’t signal my brothers who had yet to find their way to me. All I could do was stare.

Stare and take in everything—the tire tracks, the footprints, the casing left behind from some sort of gun. I crept closer, not wanting to disturb anything but needing a better look. So I could take full inventory of his perfect position, the way his clothes had yet to be shredded. His wholeness in death. Scavengers looked to have gotten a hold of him if the amount of open flesh around his neck was any indication. Food was food to animals, and a dead body was a lot of food. Because that was how they had treated Chiggy in the end—as nothing more than some random dead body.

The very idea of one of my brothers being left for a snack in the desert filled me with the sort of rage that usually ended with me killing something or someone.

But I would need to figure out where to direct that anger before I got to that point. And to do that, I needed my team. I howled long and deep, letting my voice rise up. Letting my brothers know where I was and that I needed them. We would work this scene as a group, as a family. As a crew. We would make sure Chiggy got better than being left as a coyote snack.

I held back the furious heat growing within me and sniffed around the body once done howling, hunting for any scents that didn’t belong as I waited for my brothers to get to me. There wasn’t much, just an unusual floral odor whispering across the air. The scent of decomposition hit harder and almost covered it, but I caught a bit. I couldn’t identify it, though.

Preacher came over the hill first, running slow and careful. A man who had experience in crime scenes and tracking. I yipped to him as he approached, watching as his nose worked overtime. The man was a good scenter. Better than me, for sure. If I had caught that floral scent, he would as well. There would be two of us searching it out, logging it in to our brains to identify later. Preacher took a long moment to sniff all around the body and the air of the area then gave me a quiet huff. Scents logged. Time to move on to other evidence-gathering.

The rest of the team arrived shortly after Preacher. Cutter and Zed shifted human to examine the body, while the rest of us scented and circled outward to look for anything to give us an idea of who or how or why. Everyone acting responsibly and precisely, being extremely careful where we placed our feet. No one giving in to their rage just yet, though the feelings we shared were almost palpable. There was an energy to our group, a flavor on the air that we all tasted. We were ready to go to war against whoever had killed our brother. And we would.

Eventually, Preacher found a second bullet casing, alerting with a quiet yip-like sound and staying close to it so as not to lose the location. Eyes hard and body tight. Ready to rip someone’s throat out, it seemed.

I found remnants of tire tracks—not super-detailed but at least enough to get an idea on tire size. The find fueled my anger—the killer wasn’t even smart enough to cover his fucking tracks? How had he been able to get a jump on someone like Chiggy and then fuck up to the point of even a human cop finding evidence? The crime scene made no sense.

It was Cutter who finally rose to his feet and whistled for our attention, his own rage leaving him partially shifted, fur and claws standing out on his more human form.

“Brother Chiggy was shot at close range in the chest. The bullet looks to have been a hollow-point by the amount of damage done, though why he bled out so quickly isn’t immediately obvious. Either the assailant got lucky and just happened to be carrying that sort of ammunition that edged around Chiggy’s natural ability to regenerate, or they knew his physiology and came prepared with something that could kill even a strong shifter like our brother. Either way, the club has suffered a horrible loss, and we will grieve that loss before finding out the how, the why, and making sure the who never gets a second chance at taking out a Hellion.”

He bowed his head and placed his hand over his heart, holding space in silence for a long moment, the rage on the air cooling into something like grief. Like mourning. Every wolf watched him, giving the respect of silence to our fallen brother. Standing quiet in the desert and allowing our group rage to move in another direction.

It was Zed who finally broke the silence, shifting to his wolf form and rolling right into a soulful howl. The rest of us joined in, singing to the sky above. Calling out our sadness and loss and respect for the man who lay dead beside us. The one who had been a true brother to each and every Hellion member. We sang our grief to the sky above, letting the gods of Fate know this fallen brother had been respected. He had been loved. He had been a packman who would truly be missed.

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