Rogue Wolf by Paige Tyler
Chapter 14
“I want your word that you won’t even think about getting out of this truck,” Trey said as he pulled off Mountain Creek Parkway onto the narrow road leading deeper into the Cedar Ridge Preserve.
Samantha remained silent in the seat beside him for so long Trey was sure bringing her with him had been the dumbest idea of the century. Right up there with how they’d decided to end the TV show Game of Thrones.
“You don’t have to worry about me staying in the truck,” she finally said. “I’m an ME, not a cop. I have no interest in dealing with any suspect until he or she stops moving.”
Trey could tell from Samantha’s elevated heart rate that she was nervous. Of course, those nerves had started building long before she’d demanded he take her with him to the heavily wooded area only a short trip from her apartment complex.
He’d first picked up on the tension filling her beautiful body shortly after coming back from the bathroom. It was obvious she’d been trying to tell him something important before Connor called. It was possible she was having one of those defining the relationship moments, but part of him had hoped she would broach the subject of her stalking him and the Pack. Maybe admit she knew they were werewolves or at least confess to stealing his blood. When she’d gotten stuck, Trey had tried to talk first, finally deciding to tell her what he was. Then the phone had rung, and a minute later, both of them had been dressed and running for his pickup. Bringing her with him was stupid, no doubt. But it wasn’t like he could have stopped her from following if he’d left her back at her place. At least this way, he knew where the hell she was.
“There’s no one else here yet,” Samantha announced unnecessarily as he turned into the gravel parking lot surrounded by acres of thick pine forests and one poorly lit building that held the park’s education center. “You’re going to wait for backup, right?”
Trey shook his head as he reached for the door handle. “There’s no time for that. It’s been at least ten minutes since the witness who called Connor saw the man carrying a body into the preserve from the direction of the Mountain Creek subdivision. Even if the suspect was moving slowly, he’s probably already on the way back out of the woods. I have to try to cut him off before he reaches the perimeter of the preserve.”
“What kind of witness would be out here this late at night?” she asked desperately as Trey stepped out of the vehicle. “And if they saw the Butcher, why would they call Connor instead of 911?”
Trey sighed. He really didn’t have time for this. But that didn’t keep him from turning around to lean back in to look at her.
“The witness who called Connor was out here in the woods looking to score some drugs. Nearly every street cop in the DPD knows him, but Connor has helped the guy out a few times, so he called him first. Connor called dispatch the second he got off the phone with me. The cavalry will be here soon, but it won’t matter if the Butcher is already gone.”
“But what if it’s not the Butcher?” she pressed.
He bent down a little lower, catching her eyes. “Whoever this person is, if they were actually carrying a body, I have to stop them because there’s no scenario where a man in the woods in the middle of the night with a body is a good thing. I have to go, Samantha. This is my job. Connor and my other teammates will be here soon.”
Samantha looked like she was close to crying but nodded and sat back a little in her seat. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”
“I will,” he assured her. “I left the keys in the ignition, so lock the doors after I get out. There’s a flashlight under the seat, but if you feel the slightest bit nervous about being in this parking lot alone in the dark, I want you to start the vehicle and get the hell out of here, okay?”
He closed the door before Samantha could start asking questions about whether she had a good reason to be apprehensive. As he headed south past the education center, he fingered his badge, hanging by the chain around his neck, then slipped a hand down to make sure his off-duty weapon was secure in its ankle holster.
Trey was running at full speed by the time he got to the start of the Cattail Pond Trail and headed due south. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the warning sign for the place being a poisonous snake habitat, declaring the existence of all kinds of slithery killers out here. He almost laughed. Maybe they’d get lucky and a rattlesnake or moccasin would take out the Butcher for them.
A little farther in, Trey slowed enough to send out a quick text to Connor, letting him know where he was. Connor replied immediately, saying that he, Hale, and Trevor had just pulled off Belt Line Road and would come in from the west in an attempt to herd the killer Trey’s direction. More of their pack mates were on the way, and dispatch was trying to get enough patrol units together to establish a perimeter around the preserve. A helicopter was en route, too. But the Cedar Ridge Preserve was huge. There was no way to get enough cops out here to cover that much real estate. Not quickly enough to matter at least.
There was a stillness to the overgrown pine forest as he ran through it, like the other creatures who normally prowled these woods sensed the tension that came with having an unnatural killer in their midst. He swore he could feel every living thing out here stop what they were doing to watch the drama unfolded.
He was at least a half mile into the woods, leaving Cattail Pond Trail far behind as he continued working his way south, when he picked up that familiar burnt electrical odor. He slid to a dead stop, lifting his nose to test the wind direction before shooting a quick text to Connor and the others: Caught his scent south of Cedar Break Trail. Heading east toward Straus Road. Trying to cut him off.
Trey left the trail then, running hard in a southeasterly direction. The scent he’d come to associate with the Butcher was definitely stronger in this direction, but getting through the undergrowth was much tougher now that he was going cross-country. Thickets and vines tore at his arms and legs as he moved, actively resisting him and drawing blood here and there. The only bright spot in the situation was that the killer was also having to deal with the same terrain. Hopefully, it would slow him down even more than it did Trey.
As he ran, his inner wolf tried to make sense of the burnt-electrical scent. It was one of the killers, that much was obvious, but he’d never encountered a human who smelled even remotely like this odor. Sure, there was a slight undertone of humanity there, but for the most part, whoever it was smelled like a science experiment gone wrong.
A vibration from his back pocket distracted him for a second, and he yanked out the phone to see a text from Connor: It’s another body dump. A leg, an arm, and organs.
Trey grimaced at the image, then pushed it away as he replied back: A quarter mile from Straus Road. I’m close.
He’d barely put his phone away when a blur of movement from off to the right caught his eye. Someone big, but surprisingly fast and quiet, was running through the woods, crossing the track he’d been taking and heading straight for Straus Road. The burnt-electrical scent with the hint of something almost human underneath it grew stronger by the second. It was definitely the Butcher.
Trey moved to the left, feeling the muscles of his legs and back begin to shift as he put on more speed, a growl rumbling up through his chest as he set a course that would intercept the killer. As he got closer, he could tell from the man’s silhouette that he was close to seven feet tall and broad in the shoulders and chest. Then again, it was difficult to be sure, given the heavy robes the guy was wearing. There was even a hood that covered his head and made it impossible to see his face.
Shit.He was chasing a damn monk.
Even in a frigging robe, the big man ran fast. Way faster than someone his size should have been capable of in these woods, especially in the dark on a moonless night.
Unless he is a supernatural.
Trey kept having to adjust his intercept angle until he was running parallel to the killer, twenty or thirty yards separating them. Every once in a while, the heavy cowl would shift, and Trey was able to catch a quick glimpse of the guy’s nose or jawline. Never enough to describe him to anyone, but even with the parts he could make out, there was something damn familiar about him. Trey sprinted faster, needing to see that face.
A subtle movement a few hundred yards south of the big man snagged Trey’s attention and he glanced that way to make out the shadow of someone else running through the woods with them. This guy was average height and slower but heading in the same direction. Trey got the feeling the big man in the robe was running interference to make sure he couldn’t reach the other man.
The wind wasn’t quite right to let Trey get a whiff of the second guy’s scent, but from what he could make out through the trees, he was definitely a normal human, even if he was one who ran with a killer.
The sound of a twig snapping underfoot from somewhere way too close snapped Trey’s attention back to the monk he’d been trying to catch up to only to realize the man was nowhere to be seen. The burnt-electrical scent hung in the night air, so he knew the guy was somewhere nearby, but he didn’t have a visual on him. Trey couldn’t even pick up a heartbeat. All he saw were trees and shadows and the unsettling reality that a man who weighed close to three-hundred-pounds and ran faster than an Olympic sprinter could also apparently turn invisible.
He heard the loud thump of a single heartbeat at the same time as a veritable mountain stepped out from behind a pile of thickets and hit him with a tree trunk.
A rational part of Trey’s mind told him it hadn’t actually been a mountain. Or a tree trunk. It had simply been a very large man with an equally large tree limb. But as he felt the ribs on the right side of his chest crack and cave in, the less-than-rational part insisted that it really had been a mountain. And a tree trunk.
He seemed to fly through the air for a very long time. Long enough to hear another one of those incredibly slow heartbeats. Then gravity reasserted itself in the form of the ground coming up to meet him and any air left in his lungs was immediately lost when the impact cracked a few more important-sounding bones. It was only when he felt something big and bulky under him that Trey realized the guy had thrown him through one tree and that he’d landed on another.
Trey would have preferred to stay right where he was for a second to get his lungs working again, but the thudding of extremely heavy boots coming his way convinced him he didn’t have that option. With a groan, he forced himself to roll to the side, ignoring the grating of bone on bone as things in his chest shifted painfully. Scrambling to his feet, Trey considered going for the gun holstered at his ankle but knew he didn’t have time. The huge man was only a few strides away, closing on him fast.
Trey extended his claws, cut loose a savage howl of anger, and launched himself at the man. His claws slashed through the thick material of the cloak and the flesh underneath. With the insanely slow heart rate, he didn’t draw nearly as much blood as he should have. Not that the big man seemed to care one way or the other. He lunged forward and slammed a shoulder into Trey, sending him tumbling backward through the pine needles and other debris covering the forest floor.
Trey somehow ended up back on his feet even as his ribs exploded in pain all over again. Stepping forward with a growl, he stood toe-to-toe with the giant, the two of them punching and slashing at each other over and over. The damage Trey inflicted on the man was horrendous, deep, slicing gashes across the arms, chest, and shoulders that went all the way down to bone. The wounds didn’t heal like they had on that female soul-sucker thing downtown, but the man never flinched. Hell, he never even made a sound. He simply kept swinging and punching, each blow more powerful than the last, as though all the trauma Trey was causing didn’t even faze him. It shouldn’t have been possible for any creature—even if it was supernatural—to sustain this much damage and not feel it.
A stray punch caught Trey in the chest, sending him flying yet again, bouncing him off a tree hard enough crack a few more bones in his back. When he hit the ground, there were a few moments as his vision started to fade and he had to waste precious seconds fighting off the approaching wave of darkness. If he passed out, he was dead.
Going on pure instinct, he scrambled for the weapon holstered at his ankle, even as the voice in the back of his mind pointed out that if his claws hadn’t slowed the behemoth down, a little 9mm round probably wouldn’t even tickle him.
Not that it mattered. By the time he got his weapon out and pointed in the right direction, he realized the big man in the robe was nowhere to be seen. After shoving himself upright and staggering forward a few steps, he came to the conclusion that the guy was already gone. The revving of a vehicle engine from the direction of Straus Road a few seconds later told him there was absolutely no chance of catching the man.
He stood there in the darkness, wondering why the monstrously huge man hadn’t finished him when he had the chance. The only answer he could come up with was that the guy had attacked him simply to give his slower partner time to get away. Of course, if that was the case, he couldn’t help but wonder how much more dangerous the guy would be if he had really wanted to murder Trey. He had to admit it was rather disturbing that the guy may not have been trying to kill him and had still been doing a bang-up job of it.
Trey turned and started walking slowly in a northerly direction, taking shallow breaths to ease his aching ribs as he pulled out his cell to let Connor know that the bad guys had gotten away. Connor passed the information on to dispatch, hoping for the best.
He just made it back onto Cedar Break Trail when he caught wind of Connor, Trevor, and Hale approaching, along with a scent he definitely hadn’t expected. A few minutes later, he saw a flashlight bobbing up and down in the darkness, coming his way.
“We found her at the intersection of Cattail and Cedar Break trails trying to figure out which way to go,” Connor said as they all reached him a minute later. “We thought it was better to keep her with us than to try to send her back to the parking lot.”
Trey was about to thank his pack mates, but the moment he stepped into the beam from Samantha’s flashlight, she let out a shriek and came running toward him. He held up his hands to stop her, but it was too late. She slammed right into the busted-up ribs on the right side of his body. He tried to hide his grunt of pain. And failed.
Expression bordering on panic, Samantha’s heart rate—which had already been way too fast—shot through the roof. Yanking up his T-shirt, she aimed the beam of her flashlight at the exposed skin and the bruising already forming across his torso. He tried to push the shirt back down as quickly as he could, praying she wouldn’t notice the places where his broken ribs stuck out at strange angles.
“Crap,” she said. “You look terrible. We have to get you to a hospital. On second thought, maybe you should lay down here and wait for the paramedics to arrive.”
Trey grabbed the hand swinging the flashlight wildly around and pulled her closer before she hit him—or herself. “Samantha, I’m okay,” he said softly, getting an arm around her and rubbing little circles on her back with his hand, trying to soothe her. “I’m a little roughed up, but nothing I can’t handle. I promise.”
Samantha looked like she wanted to argue, but then took a deep breath and let it out with a shuddering sigh, her eyes coming up to meet his in the darkness. “Sorry. I was sitting in your truck completely losing my mind worrying about you, so I got out to come help. When I saw the bruises, I kind of lost it. Like I told you, I’m not really good with living patients.”
He wanted to be mad at her for getting out of his pickup, but seeing her so freaked out, he simply couldn’t do it. He promised himself they’d talk about it later. Because the thought of Samantha being in the same woods as that huge psychotic monk scared the hell out of him.
“We’d better get back to the parking lot before too many people show up,” Trevor said. “Or we’re going to have cops wandering around these woods all night trying to find us.”
After they got moving, Hale deftly fell into step on the other side of Samantha and distracted her with a vivid description of the body parts they’d found about a half mile to the west of their location. Trey didn’t have to wait long before Trevor and Connor tugged him back a few yards to talk.
“Samantha wasn’t exaggerating,” Connor murmured quietly. “You do look terrible. What the hell did you run into out there?”
“Truthfully? I don’t know have a clue,” Trey admitted, keeping an eye on Samantha to make sure she couldn’t hear them talking. “The guy was big, fast, strong as hell, and I’m pretty sure he could control his heartbeat. At one point he was hiding behind a tree only a few feet away and I know for a fact that I didn’t hear a beat for at least twenty seconds.”
“Are you saying the Butcher is a supernatural?” Trevor asked. “Any chance he’s working with the one you went up against the other night?”
“It sure seems like he’s a supernatural to me,” Trey said. “As for whether he’s involved with the creature who’s going around turning people into mummies, that’s anyone’s guess.”
As they walked, Trey described the fight in detail, emphasizing how much damage he’d inflicted, to little effect. He also told them about the second guy he saw.
“I’m not sure what it means, but I think the guy in the robe could have killed me if he’d wanted to,” Trey added as they reached the parking lot area already filled with cop cars. “Or at least screw me up a lot more than he did. But as soon as I was temporarily out of action and the second guy had gotten away, the big man disappeared.”
Hale, who’d clearly been eavesdropping on the conversation from several yards ahead, looked over his shoulder at Trey, surprise on his face.
“Why would a supernatural serial killer decide to let you live after he just dumped body parts of his latest victim?” Trevor asked.
Trey shook his head grimly. “I wish I knew.”