Page 38 of Save Me Enemy

“Go away, Corey! This has nothing to do with you!” she screams.

She tries to turn the car back on, but it stalls. She’s terrified of him, why? I have reason to be scared, but no one else but me has met him, right?

“Things have changed, little bug,” he snarls. He raises a hand, and to my horror his fingers start to shrink while the palm of his hand gets bigger and slowly turns to a paw. “I’m stronger now, a better killer, and I’m going to rip you to shreds for killing my wife!”

The car roars to life just as Corey smashes his head into the passenger window and shatters it. He stands back, laughing as Catherine speeds away. Terrified, I watch over my shoulder as he changes into a wolf right before my eyes.

But not a normal wolf.

He’s hairless, except for a ridge of spiky hair along his spine. His body is too big, too strong, and he looks over his muzzle at me with human eyes as he opens his mouth and laughs. Even though he looks sort of like a wolf, the noises he makes in this form are still clearly the voice of the human man.

I shudder in terror as he starts running after us and I sink down into my seat and cover my face. “Why would you do this, Catherine? Why would you bring me to him?”

“That was never the plan, Cricket, I swear!” She takes a corner fast, the rear end skidding out before she frantically straightens the car again. “I knew my scientist friend had changed him, but he told me Corey wouldn't be anywhere near here!”

“Wait, the scientist you were taking me to is the man creating these monsters?”

Catherine gives me a terrified look from the corner of her eye, but she buttons her mouth shut and looks back in the mirror. “He isn’t behind us anymore,” she says instead of answering me, although she doesn’t slow. “I think we’re safe.”

I take a breath to yell at her right as she screams. Corey’s in front of us, running straight at the car. Catherine slams on the brakes and we hit him, the sickening crunching sound only made more sickly by the human laughter that flows out of the wolf-thing’s mouth.

Catherine isn’t wearing her seat belt, and she flies through the windshield on impact. Her body hits the asphalt and rolls, scraping and leaving a trail of blood in her wake. I’m screaming, I can hear myself, but my body is going through another episode brought on by my terror.

Corey is unharmed as he stalks around the ruined car, he doesn’t even have a scratch. He stands on hind legs as his hands go back to human and he pulls me out of the car through the window, holding me in the air by my neck. The crazy laughter coming out of the mouth of a monster chills me to the bone. As he clenches my throat, my vision starts to fade, my body twitching uncontrollably as I dangle from his vise-like grip.

“No!” I scream, choking past his hand. “I will not die like this!”

“Why not? It’ll be fun!” Corey snarls, sharp teeth snapping with the words that a mouth like that should never have been capable of making.

He throws me roughly into the forest with an excited growl. As I sail through the air, I have time to see him stalking towards me on human hands and wolf legs before something hard hits my back.

There’s no time to cry out.

Not time to register how much agony my body just absorbed.

Because my vision goes dark.

Chapter14

Jackson

Isee the crash happening as if it’s in slow motion. The driver’s thrown through the windshield and her body stops rolling just as I reach her. Catherine’s face is destroyed, scraped away by the road, and she looks at me and screams without making any sound. I want to feel pity for her, I want to be completely destroyed by her being so grievously injured, but I found the notes and I recognized her hand.

She brought Cricket out here on purpose.

I step around her, snarling, my wolf form full of fury as I approach this new monster. He’s thrown my pregnant mate out of the vehicle and against a tree. She isn’t moving. This monster is though, and he’s lunging straight at her to finish the job. I howl, a long mournful sound, and a beast like something out of my worst nightmares turns to face me.

“The cabin where Gabriel took the boys isn’t far from here…”Chase says into my mind, stepping up beside me in his smaller wolf form.

I know immediately what he means—we’ve found our enemy's base of operation. We’ve found his newest monster. Howls answer mine from down the road and the monster’s head whips around to see two more wolves, Ryder and Cole. We have him surrounded.

The beast laughs, a distorted human sound as he stands on his hind legs. I watch in horror as he shifts only his face to reveal who he is. When he opens his mouth, his teeth are still fangs, and he speaks past them with little issue.

“The puppies have come to play with the big dog?” Corey snarls, stepping towards Cricket.

I lunge in warning, my snarl downright fucking feral.

He stops, hand extended toward her, and laughs again. “You bastards killed my wife and stole my child. What’s the expression? An eye for an eye? A wife for a wife?”

---