Full warning: 3Plus, Abuse, Angst, Beast, DubCon, F/F, Fingering, M/F, OC, Oral, Rape, Solo, Violence, Voy, WIP
Music:
Twisted Tension – Blood+ OST Chapter 1: The Holistic Approach
“There’s no science to it—werewolf hunting. You just kind of make it up as you go along, and if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, you run like the blazes and try Plan C.”
“What happened to Plan B?”
“ ‘Run’ is Plan B.”
The door caved like a rotten floorboard. It hit the hallway floor with a crash to wake the dead while chips of forest green paint sprayed out over varnished wood floors and spotless cream upholstery like a shower of pine needles. Chunks of splintered wood still swung from the warped hinges, making tiny squeaks of apology.
Without looking twice at the mess, a woman in mud-smeared jeans, a worn vintage t-shirt, and wet hiking boots in need of a good polish stepped through the wreckage and swung her sidearm up to scour the living room. The three precisely arranged cushions on the couch were spiked with chips from the door like DIY pincushions. A narrow hall runner fleeing Ground Zero down the hall was in a similar state. The woman scowled at the empty room and waited for her eyes to adjust. The bay window’s filmy curtains turned the dull grey daylight into beige shadows.
Nothing. Not a sound, or so much as a flicker of movement. Well, damn. Damn, damn, double damn.
Cocking a hip, she looked around suspiciously and flipped a heavy black fringe out of her eyes. A fortnight back, she’d hacked the fringe out of a full head of sensibly ponytail-length hair a while back after a night of heavy drinking. It might have been the stupidest thing she’d ever done. Maybe. Or maybe just the stupidest thing she’d done in a while.
The house was quiet inside. The light snowfall deadened any outside noise that might have trickled in. The gun dipped slightly as she skimmed the room again. A decorative bowl of pinecones on the sideboard, a careful array of house-and-garden magazines splayed just so on the coffee table. Gold tapers in a squat wrought iron candelabra on the mantelpiece. Spirits above, she hated these DIY Interior Design types. A hallway ahead turned off to the right, leading into darker shadows within the house – and closed doors. Cautious, she scented the air. Letting the gun drop completely, she heaved a sigh and said it out loud.
“Damn it…”
A crash ricocheted down the hall—from deeper in the house. The back door had given out. A moment later, heavy bootsteps crunched over the torn panels and a second heartbeat fluttered into the edge of her hearing. Hunter’s heavy measured breathing. Denim rasping, rubber boot soles scuffing linoleum. Casting one last glower at the lounge room, with its stained-wood coffee table and coordinated upholstery, Louise slouched off toward the heartbeat, mumbling something entirely unladylike under her breath. This scent was utterly cold.
In the kitchen, the newer earthy scents of male, damp felt, and something rich and savoury floated on the air. Louise liked it more in here. From an olfactory standpoint, anyway. The mix circled the homey little kitchen on the occasional puff of air sneaking inside through the spindly remains of exterior door.
Relaxing in the atmosphere of competence and warm security her partner radiated, Louise let her gun hang loose from one hand. She leant on the hall doorway and said, “He’s not here.”
The newcomer stood by the lit stove, broad-shoulder and swathed in a heavy black felt jacket over jeans and snowy boots. The slim bulk of a handgun bulged ever so slightly under one arm of the unbuttoned jacket. Her quiet pronouncement drew barely drew a glance. He already knew.
Eyes on the stove, he flicked the hammer back on his shotgun and slung it over a shoulder on its strap, keeping it out of the way while he examined the contents of a simmering pot. “I know. I told you I couldn’t smell anything outside. He hasn’t been here for quite some time,” he rumbled. He glanced at her over his shoulder. “This has been on for a while. It’s boiled half dry.”
It was true: the scent trail in the house was chilled with time, only the barest hint of fresh warmth it left in it to suggest a spark of life, like a hand stuck in a deep drift of snow and held until every finger has gone numb. Louise raised her eyebrows and slid her Browning back into the underarm holster. “What, he just up and left din-dins on the go? C’mon, it’s not like he can get his kibble any-old-where.”
A faint smile played about her face as she watched her partner poke around the kitchen, amused at the way he still acted so much like a child on an Easter egg hunt despite assuming an air of implacable dignity the vast majority of the time.
When a shudder ran through her, she ignored it; even with the scent trail hours old, the deep musk of a mature male werewolf hung heavily in the air – mingled with the far fainter smell of humanity, latent but oozing out of the very walls. This was his home—his den. And the signals all this stimuli was mainlining to her primal side were setting off a chain of automatic responses in her that picked up momentum with every passing moment, even while she fought to shut it down. She grit her teeth against the inevitable.
On the stove, the pot bubbled. Her curiosity piqued – and in need of a distraction – she pushed off the door and ambled over to the stove, brown eyes alight with bright interest of boredom. “What is that?”
The man picked up the wooden spoon marinating in the stew and stirred gingerly a few times, sniffing. When Louise peered in, however, it took her all of a fraction of a second to realise what she was looking at.
“Okay,
I’m done.” She spun her hands into the air and backed up a step. “That’s just a little too
Dog Soldiers for me. The hell is with this guy? A sadist
and a werewolf?”
The man stirred the stew a few more times and then dropped the spoon. “It could be pork,” he pointed out reasonably. He was trying not to grin at her expression of indignant distaste, but he appeared to be having a hard time of it.
“He’s Jewish.” She jerked her head at the opposite wall where a woven wicker shape hung over the small kitchen table. “Magen David. This is new depths,” she added in disgust, “even for a Changeling. What kind of person hacks up the people they attack and puts them in
stew?”
The man glanced at her with vague concern, but shrugged casually regardless. “Opportunist. Gets infected, then attacks a human under the bloodlust. You’ve got a body and nothing to do with it then, so…” He waved a hand at the pot.
Pacing the kitchen agitatedly, the woman spun on her heel and fixed him with a look of derisive revulsion. “You’re disgusting.” She flapped a hand at his expression. “
Correct, but disgusting.”
She turned on her boot heel, pacing again. Her dark ponytail bounced with her nervous pacing.
The chuckle fading in his throat, the man examined her with an experienced eye. “Louise…” She didn’t even look at him. He frowned. “
Louise.”
Her head canted around in a questioning tilt but her posture retained a restless energy. An ashy tone had set in under her caramel skin. “Hmm?”
When he didn’t reply, she stared at him blankly for a moment before realising what it was. Her chin dipped as the frenetic aura faded. “Sorry.”
The man raised a black eyebrow and snorted softly. He turned away from the stove with a shake of his head. “Try to get a hold of yourself… I know you’re close to your transformation, but this is foolish.”
That got him an arched eyebrow in return. “Oh,
I’m close to my transformation? Who almost tore the head off of Mr. Rogers when we cased the house?”
“Cursed nosy neighbours,” Hunter replied snootily.
Louise raised her other eyebrow to join the first, but her partner deigned not to make a response to the rude comment she muttered to herself in another language.
Instead, he swung the shotgun’s leather strap back over his head and cocked the hammer. “Hold yourself together for half an hour. We’ll check the rest of the house. If nothing turns up, we see if we can pick up the trail outside. He’s only half-turned; he can’t have gone far.”
There was no response. He looked over his shoulder. Louise was standing motionless by the kitchen table staring into space hazy-eyed, her breathing deep.
“
Louise,” he barked. She started violently and looked around at him with a guilty expression, scrabbling for the strap of her rifle. He fixed her with a dark look. “Are you here?”
She nodded, swallowing hard. Her vision was faltering and little black and white spots danced in and out of focus like snowflakes. She was fighting with every trick and technique they’d learnt in a hundred years, but they had perhaps a day or two at the most to get somewhere she could isolate herself. “Yes. It’s just the house… being in proximity to this scent…” She was referring to the musk. A quirk of Hunter’s jaw said he knew: he was reacting to it too, although distinctly less favourably.
“This’ll be over with quickly,” he told her curtly. That was probably a given, but right then it was more important that they simply get moving, get
doing something, to get Louise out of the stagnating air in the kitchen. Already he could scent her automatic arousal – just a trace – and his own sympathetic response strengthening against the latent scents of spice, plastic, cooking meat, rotting leaves in the doormat and the cutting clarity of snow from outside. But no fresh musk; time to move and find a new trail.
Louise stood in the hallway, looking down the hallway. When he stepped up behind her, she turned with a cheerful smile.
“So,” she announced, “let’s go see if the Big Bad is playing Hide-and-Go-Suck with somebody’s innards.” Scenting the irritated distress thickening around her partner, she plastered on a grin and levelled her breathing. “Then we can go find some nice rat-infested motel to not give a stoat’s tail about, and drink ourselves into an alcohol-poisoned stupor.”
She reached up and tugged the one braid snaking out of his short hair from behind the ear with a cheeky grin as she slipped past, but before he could respond, she was gone, padding down the hall rifle first. The plushy hallrunner deadened the footfalls of her heavy boots.
Rolling his eyes Hunter hefted the shotgun and went after her, busting open doors and clearing rooms as empty as they searched the house attic to basement.
The place was empty, as was the detached garage and a woodshed north of the house. Louise stowed the little cash they’d been able to find in the house in the jeep parked around the block while Hunter pulled a map of the local area. A finger of woodland wedged between this estate and another a few kilometres west connected to a much larger nature reserve to the north. Conferring on terrain and personality-affected post-Change traits, they agreed that it was far more likely he would head for the other estate than the Park.
They prepped in the silence of mundane action. Hunter shed his heavy coat and Louise strapped a hunting knife to her thigh, holding Hunter’s for him while he pointed out ridges, creek lines and elevations on the map. Suited up, they headed into the forest, boots crunching through a thin crust of ice beneath the centimetres of fresh powder. A silver plume marked every exhalation like the ticking of a clock. Despite the analogy, Louise mused as she followed Hunter down a narrow game trail between the closely wooded brush, nothing about this process had really changed in two hundred years.
Hunter paused a few metres ahead, chin cocked, eyes narrowed off into the trees to the right like a hound scenting deer. Louise heard bark rasp and then a squirrel chattered and ran up a sapling’s trunk into a hollow knot. If the wildlife was moving again, he hadn’t been here for a while. After a moment’s stillness, the hunters moved on, punching fresh footsteps into a trail pockmarked with shallow, round prints that slowly filling as snow continued to fall around them. Two hundred metres from the woodshed, a second trail came in from the side and connected with theirs. New prints overlaid the first set and continued west on their game trail.
If the scent in the house was cold as a hand drifted in snow, this one was a stone in the sun.
