Page 15 of Her Eternal Mate

There was a brief moment when the grenades did not explode, and the soldiers looked in our direction with their guns aimed at the thicket behind which we were hiding. And then, in the next second, four powerful grenades blew up and created a chain reaction by blowing up all the grenades and explosives on all the soldiers’ belts, completely flattening the entire intersection by destroying the trees in a blaze of fire.

When the dust and smoke settled, the only thing that remained of all the soldiers were pieces of their tattered armor.

Chapter 7

Alexis

It was nothing short of a miracle what had just happened. It was Will’s battle prowess, thanks to which we had just taken down the fifteen soldiers. I was still in disbelief as I stood there at the center of the crater that the collective explosions had formed in the forest. All around me, viscera, guts, and torn limbs hung from the branches of the trees splattered the dirt path and spread in the shape of a blast radius all around.

While I was monitoring the area, Will had trekked up ahead with the dead soldier’s body slung over his shoulders. We were both headed for the commune. The werewolves had to be warned of this new threat in such close vicinity to the Grimm Abode.

The only downside to this was that we weren’t able to get anything useful from the soldiers we had killed. Their armor had been irreparably destroyed, their bodies were unsalvageable for any identification, and their weapons had eviscerated in the explosion.

The explosion…People as far as the south of Fiddler’s Green will have heard it. The pack must be alarmed at something so disastrous happening so nearby.

“Don’t think of the pack right now. Think of how we’re going to get to the pack,” Will called from ahead. I was far behind, scouting from the back to see if any soldiers would turn up. But it seemed that instead of coming from behind, it appeared that they were coming from ahead.

“More of them?” I groaned. I was tired, not having slept properly for the past week. The exhaustion was beginning to show its many effects on me now. From the blurred vision to the dizziness, I was starting to show signs of fatigue. But I’d be damned if I let myself slow down before reaching the commune.

“Not more of them,” Will said, allowing me to breathe a sigh of relief. “Their truck, the one they all came in, it’s going back to where it came from. There’s no license plate. From the looks of it, it’s a military-grade truck. But from what I know of military trucks, they’re normally camouflaged and bear the license plates of the American Army. This truck is neither bearing any plates nor is camouflaged. It’s jet black. Looks to me more like a mercenary truck than anything else.”

“Is it going away?” I asked, feeling the pain crawl up my legs, beckoning me to sit down. If only I could. My spirit had not broken, but my body had decided to give up. But this wasn’t going to be my end. Not now. With this thought, I shifted into my wolf form, immediately feeling a surge of energy coursing through my body, allowing me to relax my muscles and recover my strength. The moon was still out in the sky, granting me the opportunity to siphon its power into my body.

“Why have you shifted? Is there something wrong?” Will asked as he turned around and looked at me in surprise.

Just tired. There’s no other reason,I confided in him.

“You’re my good girl. You have been so brave of late. I appreciate everything that you’ve done. I love you, Alexis,” Will said with such kindness that my heart brimmed with joy and purpose.

I love you too,I said. Before I could await his response, I realized something. It struck me as bizarre as to why I hadn’t thought of this before.Will, there’s got to be some form of tracking mechanism on this soldier. Don’t you think so?

“Yes, there has to be. That would explain why the soldiers were wading so deep into the forest. They were looking for him,” Will said, putting the soldier’s corpse on the ground and examining the functional parts of his armor. “But I don’t know where it is.”

It’s futile to search for it. It may be a Nano chip, no bigger than the tip of a needle. Or even smaller. My point is we can’t just take the soldier’s body to the commune. That would connect his death to the werewolves. Right now, whoever is behind this has no clue that it was us who killed this soldier. But if we take him to the commune, it could trigger a fight. We’re not there yet. We can’t have another full-blown battle on our hands, not so recently after that fight with Griswold’s vampires. So we can’t take him to the commune, I said.

“While normally I would agree with you, the point remains that if we leave this body anywhere else, the soldiers will come for it and reclaim it. We cannot have that. If we take it to the commune, all the wolves will be around it. They will be able to help if the soldiers come. Our pack is strong. It can defend itself,” Will said.

Okay,I said. This was his decision. He was the Alpha. My role in this relationship, other than the romantic component, was to give him the advice that I sought fit. It was not obligatory for him to follow it every time. He must have some genuine reason to do things his way. Otherwise, he, quite often than not, listened to me and implemented my advice.

Finally, after traveling from thicket to thicket under the cover of darkness, we reached the commune’s entrance. Here, I shifted back into my human form. I felt relaxed, comfortable, and quite relieved that I was back here. It was utterly strange that this new calamity had somehow wiped away the negative mental effects of the previous one. As much as I tried to dig into those old feelings of PTSD, I found that they had no place in my mind right now. It couldn’t all be because of this temporary adrenaline rush; Will must have had a part to play in it as well. His words had resonated with me earlier on.

But when I thought of it, my words resonated harder. I had been anticipating something disastrous happening for the past week, and everyone had been telling me that there was no cause for worry. It was clear to me that my intuition had been right all along. The danger was upon us, whether the pack liked to admit it or not. We were not out of the water just yet. And to top it all, this new threat was more vicious and far more dangerous than any that we’d faced yet.

Once in the commune, we took the soldier’s corpse into the back of the Grimm Abode, in the horse stables. Back in the old days, when Will had newly consecrated this place decades ago, this place used to have horses. The commune members used horses, donkeys, and all types of livestock for their livelihood. Ever since the advent of cars and machinery, livestock had been rendered pointless except for the cow and the sheep that some of the commune members had kept for the purpose of organic farming and having fresh farm-to-table food available all year round. But these sheds were pretty much abandoned and secluded from the rest of the commune. Behind them was a great wall made of cement that barred the sheds from the forest in the back. All around them, there was a wire fence that ran up to twenty feet high. Atop it were barbed wires that prevented any wild animals from crossing over.

Will threw the corpse onto a pile of hay and regained his composure by taking long breaths.

“Now, we defer to your judgment,” Will said. “If you want to invite Maliha, you’re more than welcome to do so.”

“On it,” I said, taking out my phone and dialing my best friend’s number.

“Yo, yo, yo, what it is, homegirl?” Maliha spoke from the other end of the line. Her voice was raspy and coarse, making it obvious that she had been smoking weed.

“I need your help, and just as before, you’re not allowed to ask questions,” I said.

“No way. The last time you pulled that trick on me, it involved actual fucking bombs. There’s no way I’m going to be involved in whatever shit you’re pulling, and I mean that as your best friend. Beyond one point, someone as smart as me figures out what’s happening. So what really is happening?”

“Fine. You want the truth? There’s someone out there who has it bad for me and my family. I mean my extended family—the ones who live in Grimm Abode. Someone sent a murderous soldier with machinery and armor, the likes of which you have never seen. We have this dead body right now and want you to come here and identify the computing parts and use those parts to see who sent this soldier,” I said.

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