Page 25 of Heart Broken Mate

He was soon in front of me, and just as I guessed, he didn’t waste any time attacking. He swung the club at me. His swing was quite heavy, and if it hit me, it was sure to do some damage. If it hits me in the head, it will do even more damage. I couldn’t let that happen.

His swings were heavy but slow, which made him predictable. I could see his moves before he completed them, and all I had to do was move out of the way. That continued for a while, and Buff was quickly getting frustrated, and I was getting tired. He had trusted in his strength too much, and I could tell he was just about as strong as I was.

I think that is the beauty of being a street rat with no one who could trace her heritage. It was hard to guess my abilities, and everyone was always surprised when they came up against me.I like it. I could have enjoyed fooling around with Buff some more, but I had serious business to handle. I stepped closer to him, and when he swung at me again, I grabbed the club close to the handle, just above his hand, where there were no spikes, and stopped him. He glared at me and wanted to drag my hand off by force, but I held on to it firmly, surprising him with my strength. I head butted him in the nose, and he staggered back. Before he could recover, I kicked him in the stomach and knocked the club out of his hand, almost breaking his hand in the process.

He tried to recover and fight me back, but I pushed him against a tree and pinned him against it, hands wrapped around his neck and squeezing hard. I could feel all of my strength focused on my hands, and the feeling of the muscles in his throat against my hands filled me with such power I hadn’t felt before. I was looking right into his eyes and killing him. I could almost feel the life slipping out.

“Tell me,” I asked him as he struggled and tried to get at me with his claws. I could see his eyes glowing hard, and he was trying to change. He would never get to do that. The pain in his neck and the gradual loss of oxygen reaching his brain would make it close to impossible for him to do that. “The lone wolf, Luke, was he hired? Is he part of the hunting group?”

He didn’t reply to me. He was heavily focused on changing, and I squeezed harder on his next. A gentle yap escaped his neck. It sounded like the sound of a helpless dog dying. His eyes were bulging, and his hands had stopped struggling.

“Was he hired?” I shouted at him. “Did Viper send him out with the others?”

He nodded, or at least what could pass for a nod, with my hand wrapped that tightly around his neck. I should let him go now. He had answered my question. There was no reason to still keep choking him.

Except there was. He was a hunter, too, and if I let him go, he would only keep coming after me. I had cut down their number to eighteen. It will be good to have one less coming after me. I rationalized my next action and kept my hands on his throat.

Something caught my periphery. It was a stick about the size of a small trunk, and it knocked right into me. I fell down but was up immediately and threw the trunk away. Buff was by my side, coughing and wheezing. I didn’t care about him. Someone had thrown that log at me. I had to be him because I could sense that connection again.

I ran towards the direction the log came from, back into the woods, but there was nothing there. No one. I smelled the air, and still nothing. He had been here; I could have sworn it. He had been watching me. I looked up in the trees, but the sun and green blades of leaves dancing to the tune of the wind gazed right back at him. I scoffed. There was no one up there. There was no one here any longer.

I walked back out into the field, and Buff was gone too.

Chapter eleven (Luke)

I ran through the woods, staying high in the trees to stay out of sight. Bonne has always complained about how dexterous I am with climbing and how it seemed rather unfair. I am a werewolf, not a monkey. I can go miles in the trees without getting caught. The trick is to be as fluid as possible and spread your weight all over your body so that the branches don’t creak when you land on them, and the leaves don’t fall. It is harder to do when you are tracking other werewolves because of our heightened senses, but practice does make perfect, and I am perfect at this.

I had watched from the top of the tree as Hayley attacked Buff. She had handled him almost effortlessly, and I noticed two things about her immediately. She was dangerously fast and very strong too. That was an unusual combination in a werewolf. There was something different about her. Something special, and it only made me want to meet her more. But I have to hold off. I have a job to complete. I could have let her kill Buff and then kept on her track, staying in the dark and gathering information about her, but then I got an idea and attacked her, distracting her from Buff and giving him a chance to escape. She had left him and came to look for me.

She had been asking him about me. She wanted to know if I was on the hunt too. I thought she sounded worried a bit. But why would she be worried that I was on the hunt also?

When she was far gone into the woods and had decided that she wasn’t going to catch me just yet, I dropped from the top of thetree. I took a sniff of the air and knew exactly where Buff had run off to. Bonne’s concoction came to help immediately. I walked out of the woods and into the field. He had stumbled through the area and back to the other forest, no doubt taking time to recover and maybe strategize an attack again. Or he might have just given up. After a fight like that and experiencing the kind of power and skill she has, he would be wise to give up.

With The Twins dead, and the testimony from Buff about her strength, I knew the other hunters would start to pull out. They were realists, and whatever the Palace would pay them wouldn’t be worth it. Why go after a target that would probably kill them when they could just go for others that were easier? They might not get as good pay, but they can do multiple jobs in the time it will take to track down Hayley.

She’s making a reputation for herself, which is good.

But there was also a downside to that. The number of hunters after her will cut down drastically. Their high number worked in her favor in one way before. The hunters will always get in each other’s way, which will slow them down. Werewolves are very territorial and aggressive. A couple of them might even take each other out. The volatile and unthoughtful ones—people like Buff and maybe even The Twins. With those kinds of hunters gone, she would be left with the tactical ones. People like me, who love the hunt and relish it. People who were just as powerful as she was, or maybe more. They would be harder opponents to go up against, and they would be less distracted now that other hunters had pulled out.

I came out on the other end of the side of the meadow, the smell of wet grass and earth whirling around me. But lost within themwas the smell of blood, pain, and fear. That was Buff. I was getting closer to him now.

I thought about climbing the trees again but decided against it. I will keep to the forest floor. Buff is injured, and he is not a serious threat. I had watched her go through this same woods from a distance, and I could see the determination on her face. She wasn’t just running and trying to evade the hunters. She had a destination in mind and was circling to get the werewolves off her scent before she made her way to her destination. I was rather interested in that destination.

It didn’t seem to me like she was going to a hideout, somewhere to stay until everything cooled down. If she wanted to do that, it would have been more sensible to stay back in Nillport and hide out there. Surely, she has friends that will hide her until the storm calms down—she might have put them in danger, but they would have made it work. Once the storm calms, then she could make her way out of town. No, she wasn’t just looking for a place to hide. She was looking for a place to get things done.

Now, I was interested in the two things. What was her plan? Why did she kill the Alpha? Bonne had thought she snapped.

That happens to werewolves sometimes. It isn’t just our senses that get heightened. We feel things more deeply, too. Emotions for werewolves are always a roller coaster. Anger can easily lead to destruction; sadness can lead to despair, and happiness can easily become euphoria. And there are times when you feel the rush of a thousand emotions. The sludge hits you so hard, and then you snap. Snapped werewolves mostly go on killing sprees, and they target humans. They go on a hunting spree that’s supposed to make them better, but it doesn’t work. They just keep killing, and in cases where they stop, the risk of snappingincreases a thousand fold. The solution to a snapped werewolf is to kill them. It stops their pain, and you save lives.

Our nature is complex and very volatile. No wonder Bonne wants nothing to do with it.

The secret to keeping yourself from snapping as a werewolf is to focus on the physical senses. The smell, the sounds, and what you can feel. They help to dampen the emotions; over time, you get used to it, and using the physical sense to dampen the heightened emotions becomes second nature.

Hayley, however, doesn’t look like someone that snapped. She looked in control. Very much in control. She’d killed two hunters and would have killed another if I hadn’t gotten in the way. Snapped werewolves aren’t that coordinated. There is something else going on with her, and I intend to find out what it is.

The sun moved overhead, and I knew it was midday even though with the canopy, only small streaks of light passed through into the woods. I could still smell Buff, and he was getting stronger. He had stopped running and was resting. He wasn’t bleeding much. She didn’t cut him as much. She had choked him and had wanted to watch the life slip out of him.

Those were signs of someone on the edge of snapping, though. They are usually on the border of psychopathy. She could have simply clawed him. That was a more painful way to torture a werewolf, but she had strangled him, dragging out the experience.

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