Page 30 of Untethering Dark

“I heard you yelling.” Her distress had drawn him out of his den. “And I had to see what the trouble was. This may be my land, but this is also your home, and I take care of those who live here.”

“I’d have gone after them you know.” Where her fingers curled around his wrists, she was cool to the touch, more so than most living creatures, but not completely devoid of warmth. “I can take care of myself.” There was no heat to the words.

“I don’t doubt that. But would you have eaten them after you killed them?”

“Um, no...”

“So, you see, my motives were not completely altruistic. You were after revenge, and I was after dinner.”

“It wasn’t revenge,” she corrected. Though her cheeks reddened, she shrugged. Embarrassed but not ashamed. “One of them ruined your offering, and rather than waiting around to get eaten myself, I thought I’d hunt down my replacement.”

He chuckled.

Pure, selfish survival instinct. Hunt or be hunted. Kill or be killed. That was the way of nature, something he understood and respected.

Maybe he met his match. Someone not shackled by a rigid moral compass was more likely to accept his bloodthirstiness than try to tame it.

“How rude of me to interrupt.”

Bawdy shouts echoed in the night, followed by laughter and the beginnings of drunken song. A shift in the wind brought faint scents of campfire, alcohol, and worsening body odor.

Trespassersagain?

“What is it?” The witch turned her head in the direction his ears had pricked, leaning over her gate, straining to hear whathe did. What was shouting to his ears must have been whispers to hers.

A brazen idiot bayed at the moon.

Astrid’s brows ticked up in surprise. That, she heard.

Human revelers again, and in the same part of the forest as before.

There was no way for him to know for sure if it was the same group that disappeared the night before, not without ever seeing them, but there was something about their frivolity that made him bristle with more than his usual anger. Something taunting.

Somehow, some way...

They’d returned.

Chapter Ten

“They’re back.” The mighty Gudariks’s voice wavered.

Astrid’s fingers crept toward the teleportation scroll tucked into her back pocket. Whatever had the power to unsettle him was exactly the sort of thing she should avoid. “Who’s back?”

“Humans.” He growled, lowering to all fours. Powerful haunches rippled and tensed for explosive movement. As uneasy as he seemed, the pose screamed fight rather than flight, and Astrid took an instinctive step back. Ending the day as collateral damage couldn’t be lower on her list of things to do. “They were here last night,” he continued. “I spent all night and most of today looking for them, but they disappeared.”

Disappeared... Such a thing shouldn’t be possible. At least, as far as she knew, no one hunted by him ever escaped to tell the tale. What breed of humans could just vanish?

No wonder he was disturbed.

Johanna had mentioned poachers the other day, hunting wolves up north, and the possibility that they might cut down this way. A group such as that would be adept at evading detection, but enough to shirk the supernatural, as well as the law? Improbable, but maybe not impossible. The skill set could be just similar enough.

And then there was that cigarette-smoking man with his tactical gloves, and the eerie quality of a predator as he stalked her back to her cottage. A man used to hunting.

It’d be just her luck if she’d unwittingly shown mercy to a poacher.

But poacher or not, that man should be dead, as any human daring to stay after dark.

Unless his paltry offering spared him.

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