The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(39)

I am ripping its spine out.

Actually, I’m cracking it apart, vertebrae by vertebrae, and pitching the bones as far as I can in opposite directions. That’s how you kill this thing.

If it can be killed.

I thought I’d finished it off when I’d decapitated it and threw its carcass back into the bog it had invaded up by Salt Mountain territory. In retrospect, maybe I cut its ass off, not its head. It’s a worm the size of a truck. How do I know which end is its ass? I’m not checking the holes for teeth.

It should be Salt Mountain’s problem, but they don’t do shit until an issue is sitting on their doorstep, if then. I draw my arm back and cannon a vertebra into an oak. The kid with Killian almost jumps out of his skin when the bark explodes.

And what am I going to do with this shit? I toe the slimy, mottled green carcass, and the flesh slides off the rest of its remaining skeleton with a limp squelch. That’s not edible meat.

You know what? I’m gonna haul it up to those hillbilly fucks and leave it at the back door of their kitchen. Either it’ll piss ’em off, or they’ll eat it. Win win.

I pitch another vertebra into the distance, this time aiming for height. Killian and the kid crane their necks and shade their eyes.

The kid whistles.

Did they hike all this way just to watch me muck around?

And what am I gonna have to do to get them to fuck off? Killian probably wants me to teach the kid some kind of lesson. I’ve told him before. I’m not some wise old fucker who lives in the woods. He’s rolling the dice. Except when it comes to her, the control I have over the wolf is always touch-and-go.

For her, I’d kill the wolf, no matter that it’d be the end of me as well, and he knows it. The wolf’s too smart to test me. For every other living thing, he’ll take his chances.

I crack the last few vertebrae apart. The wolf is intrigued. He wants to gnaw on the bones and bury them, see if it regenerates so we can kill it again.

If I thought the bones would burn, I would’ve made a bonfire. As it is, I have the sinking suspicion that the wolf is thinking about stealing our skin tonight. If I don’t want to wake up to a pile of bog worm skeleton, I’ll have to sleep up in the tree. The wolf isn’t mad enough to risk the leap to the ground, and he can’t navigate a rope ladder. Not yet.

They say the wolf and the man are one, but not in my case. Mine is an abomination. He’s mad, bloodthirsty, and I suspect, much more fucking clever than I am. He doesn’t have opposable thumbs, though, and he’s constrained by the laws of gravity, and I exploit the hell out of those weaknesses.

I hurl a vertebra at the top of a pine where two turkey vultures are perching on a dead branch. I nail the spot right between them with a crack, and they startle, squawking with indignation, wings flapping. My wolf strains to chase them. The fact that he can’t fly is of no consideration whatsoever.

“Dudes were just hanging around for the leftovers,” Killian chides.

“The meat’s poison.” There’s something in the layer of slime on this thing’s skin. I can feel it eat at the flesh of my palms almost as quickly as my shifter healing repairs it. It’s unpleasant.

I wipe my hands on my jeans, a thin film still sticking to my skin. I’ll try peanut butter when Killian and the kid leave. It works for sap and tar, why not bog worm?

“What is it?” the kid asks, gawking at it from a safe distance with his nose turned up.

I grunt and shrug. “Dead.”

“Do you think it’s our culprit?” Killian comes to stand beside me and considers the baggy, deboned carcass splayed at my feet.

“No. It lived in a bog up by Whitetail Ridge. The bog wasn’t near big enough for all the bones.” Whatever has been hunting our kind has killed at least two hundred souls over the course of the past two decades. The bog this fucker was squatting in was no more than a yard in diameter.

“It could be stashing the bodies somewhere else,” Killian suggests.

“Do you see arms?” I point out the obvious.

“Maybe it eats the bones.” Killian strokes his chin. Dude might be a shade less dictatorial now that he’s mated, but he still clings to a bad idea as tightly as a good one if he comes up with it himself.

“It’s not big enough. It’d take days—maybe a week—to metabolize a shifter skeleton. What does it do with the other person he took while it’s digesting? Tie them up with its flipper things?” I toe the vestigial fins along what was its belly or back.

The enemy that’s stalking our kind takes two at a time, usually a female and a male. We only figured it out when Cadoc Collins called a meet between the local packs.

Apparently, whoever’s been doing this has been picking off couples from Moon Lake for years with impunity. Quarry Pack had only ever lost one here and there. During Declan Kelly’s time, we were never sure that he hadn’t had something to do with the disappearance, especially when it was a female.

It wasn’t until the meet when we compared notes with Salt Mountain that we realized our packs often lost folks within days of each other, far too many times for it to be coincidence.

My best guess? He’s using females to bait the males. What happens then? I have no idea.

We’ve never found the bodies, signs of struggle, clothes, or personal effects. After Rosie, Cadoc’s new mate, recounted all the people her folks have lost—it would be impossible to hide so many dead on pack land. That means we’re looking for a predator that can transport its victims.