Hunted (Riley Cray) (21 page)

“Rise and shine,” Johnson crooned, all signs of his earlier drunken slur gone.

Looking up through the wet tangle of my hair I found him standing in front of me with an empty bucket in one hand and a wicked looked knife in the other. Noticing the bright white stubble on his chin, I wondered how long I’d been out. I could smell the oily stink of the metal from a few feet away, a shudder of revulsion rippling through me as I tried to recoil from it. Silver. The damn bastard had a silver knife.

So, this isn’t just some random, spur of the moment kidnapping and torture session then.

“Five more minutes, Mom,” I said, yawning wide.

“God, you think you’re so damn smart, don’t you?” he asked with a growl, dropping the bucket on the floor and stepping close to me.

Pressing back into the chair I tried to put as much space between me and the knife as I could, but the zip ties didn’t allow for much movement. Most of the stuff Hollywood spouts about garlic and vampires, weres and howling at the moon, is absolute tripe, but as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. All that talk about weres and silver? Unfortunately, that’s true. There’s not much you can do to a were that they can’t heal eventually, but inflicting a wound with silver is one of those things. A wound from silver will blister and burn, and in some rare, horrific, cases, fester and rot resulting in permanent damage. Needless to say, I did not want that knife anywhere near me.

“I thought leaving that deer carcass in Holbrook’s room would make him see you for the filthy animal you are, but I guess he’s almost as dumb as you,” Johnson mused, testing the sharpness of the blade against the flat of his thumb.

Dumbstruck, I momentarily forgot the danger looming so close. All pithy come backs fled from my mind at the revelation.

“That was you?”

I’d spent the last few days thinking that Samson was close, had watched me sleep in the woods, and had taken the remains of my kill as a sign that he was watching me. Learning that it had been Johnson was something of a relief, but at the same time opened up a whole other realm of problems. He seriously had it out for me, and I had no idea why.

“What is it about you weres anyway? Why can’t anyone else seem to keep their hands off you?”

“Just our winning personalities I guess,” I replied, rewarded a second later with a backhand to the mouth.

I tasted blood again and made a show of licking it from my lip before spitting it at him. I missed, but I didn’t care. I was testing his mental faculties, and judging by the faraway look in his eyes he wasn’t really seeing me. I couldn’t smell the booze on him like before, but there was still something going on that made his eyes distant and his attention wander.

“You all think you’re so smart don’t you? He thought he was hot shit too,” he said, his eyes focused on some distant spot behind me. “That bastard isn’t laughing now.”

What the fuck?

“Who’s not laughing?” I asked, not really sure I wanted to know the answer.

“She’s not laughing anymore either. Serves that dirty cunt right,” he said, ignoring me. His gaze continued to dance around the room, unable to settle on anything for more than a few seconds before moving on to something else. “I do miss her though, my darling Cheryl,” he went on, seemingly oblivious to my presence. “But she shouldn’t have done it, not that. She should’ve known better. She knew I hated those filthy beasts. She shouldn’t have done it.”

He was quickly coming unhinged. It made him a hundred times more dangerous than before, he was unpredictable now, but it also made him sloppy, and I thought I just might be able to use that to my advantage, provided that I lived long enough of course.

“Who’s Cheryl? Who’s not laughing? What did you do?” I asked, though I was beginning to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I already knew the answer.

Instead of answering me, he crossed the room in a couple quick strides and gripped the edge of my chair. The legs of the chair grated on the rough concrete floor as he whipped me around to face the wall behind me. Vomit rose in my throat as I stared at the gruesome trophy nailed to the wall. I wanted to look away, wanted to scream, but my horror left me frozen and unable to do anything but stare at the bloody pelt.

It was obvious that Johnson had no experience skinning an animal, but despite his shoddy attempt there was no mistaking what the creature had once been. I was sure that at one point the fur had been thick and beautiful, silken to the touch, but now it was matted with blood, dirt, and gore. Tears began to track down my cheeks, hot and salty, they stung as they dripped over my split lip before falling to my shirt, tinged pink.

“You sick bastard,” I said, my voice weak, little more than a whisper.

“She was mine!” he thundered. “My wife! He had no right, no right to put his disgusting were hands on her. He ruined her!”

“Where is she? What did you do to her?” I demanded, struggling against the ties that secured me to the chair.

“Cheryl?” he answered distantly. “She’s sleeping.” His eyes drifted to the large freezer against the wall. A smear of blood was stark on the white top and handle.

He’s totally lost it, gone completely fucking mad
, I thought, lightheaded.

“Oh God. What have you done?” I asked, tears wetting my eyes.

In a brief moment of numb horror I thought it almost funny that I should weep for Johnson’s dead wife, reduced to dead meat piled up inside the freezer. Would I end up the same way? Or would Johnson mount me on the wall as another gruesome trophy?

“Shh. You’ll wake her up,” he answered, dragging my chair back around to face the stairs, though I couldn’t get the image of the skinned were out of my mind.

“Let me go, Johnson. Let me go and no one has to know about Cheryl or the wolf. I won’t tell anyone,” I pleaded, unnerved by the hysterical edge to my voice and the wet heat of tears sliding down my face. I didn’t like him to see me so weak and afraid, but there was no repressing the terror that roiled in my gut like a thousand snakes twisting and turning over one another.

“Let you go?” he asked in a hollow voice, blinking several times, and then turning to look at me, his eyes clear and bright as if he had just awakened from a dream. “Oh no, I can’t do that. Someone has to pay.”

“Has to pay? What the hell did I ever do to you?”

“You didn’t have the good grace to die when that mangy dog Reed tore you open. Everything would be so much better if you had just died.”

The doctor’s had considered it a miracle that I survived the attack, the rate of virus transference so rare, and the severity of my injuries so great. Johnson however, appeared to see my survival as some twisted cosmic oversight. There was nothing I could say in the face of such unbridled hatred that would change his opinions. So I did the only thing I could – I let my smart mouth run free.

“Aw come on, Johnson, we’re not all that bad. After all, once you go were you never go back. Even Cheryl knew that,” I said with a crooked, leering smile.

“Don’t you dare say her name!” he bellowed, his hands shaking with rage at his sides.

“Who? Cheryl? Your dead wife that you crammed in the freezer because she liked wolf dick more than yours? That Cheryl?”

“I said, don’t say her name. Your filthy mouth doesn’t get to sully her name,” he snarled, spittle flying from his lips.

“But you’re the one who chopped her into pieces. Your logic is a little skewed, Harry.”

“Stop talking,” he muttered, his gaze once again shifting to unfocused mania.

“I mean, I’ve never killed anyone. How many people have you killed?” I rambled on, ignoring him.

“Don’t you ever stop talking?”

“Not really. I tend to babble when I’m about to be turned into sushi. It’s a nervous habit. But then, I guess we all have our faults, eh Harry? I babble, you skin weres. Looks like we’re both a little flawed.”

“Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up!” he chanted, pressing his hands over his ears and squeezing his eyes shut.

I was pretty sure that if I pushed him anymore he would crack and either crumple into a broken ball and weep, or gut me like a fish and mount my head on the wall next to the poor unfortunate were who’d been unlucky enough to sleep his wife.

I hope she was worth it, buddy.

“I won’t ever shut up, you sick bastard. While I’m still breathing I will make you regret ever laying a finger on me,” I said, the calm iciness of my voice surprising even me.

I was beyond sadness now, beyond anger and frustration, beyond fear. I hovered somewhere in the realm of pure blistering fury that reduced the world to crystalline purity. I don’t think I’d ever experienced such clarity as I did in that moment, strapped to the chair in Johnson’s grimy basement unsure of whether I would ever see the light of day again.

Well, I’ll be damned if I go down without a fight. No matter what, I’ll always come out swinging.

Evidently, so would Johnson. A single swift blow to the side of my head cut through my brief moment of insight, plunging me into darkness. Before I fully sank down into unconsciousness I was able to utter a single grating “Bastard.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

TRYING TO OPEN my eyes, I found my right eye swollen shut, and my vision blurred in the other. I tried to reach up and explore the swollen state of my eye, but instead found my hands strapped to the arms of a chair with zip ties that bit into my skin viciously. Then I remembered Johnson’s ham-hock fist arcing towards me and my inability to evade the punch.

At this rate he wasn’t going to have to torture me, a few more blows to my skull and I was likely to die from a hematoma. The dizzying thumping in my head added credence to the thought, while the white spots dancing on the edge of my vision gave me pause.

I’d had plenty of time to envision my untimely demise over the past few days, but not even in my wildest imaginings had I thought I would go down like this. It seemed cruel somehow, to have suffered through so much only to die from internal bleeding in a dark, dank basement, never having had the chance to say goodbye to the few people in my life who actually meant something.

I wonder if depression is a symptom of cranial bleeding.

“Fuck this,” I muttered, shaking my head to clear some of the dizziness. “I’m not going down like this.”

Swallowing against the lump in my throat, I huffed a lank string of hair out of my face to look over my surroundings once more, hoping against all odds that I’d spot something close at hand that I could use to escape. Unsurprisingly there was nothing there except the same dusty and useless crap as before. The only potentially useful items were spread out across the workbench, across the room.

Eyeing the rusting tools longingly, I spied the shaft of a screwdriver, miraculously untouched by the passage of time and disuse. I was sure that if I could somehow get my hands on it, it would work as an effective weapon.

And therein lies the problem, idiot. You’re tied to a chair. How exactly do you plan on getting around that little snag?
my internal voice asked with no small amount of bitterness, the thoughts full of cynicism.
Johnson will let me out
, I answered, a plan beginning to formulate in the back of my mind. I just wasn’t sure which was more repulsive – the thought of my plan succeeding or failing.

* * *

As soon as I heard the door at the top of the stairs creak open I closed my eye and bowed my head until my chin touched my chest, feigning unconsciousness. The smell of booze was strong again, meaning Johnson would be sloppy. It would either work to my advantage or mean that I was royally screwed. I was hoping for the former.

Keeping my head down, I slit my eye open just enough to watch Johnson’s drunken progress. Staggering down the creaking wooden steps he weaved across the room towards the work bench, sloshing whiskey across the floor from the bottle in his hand as he went. He’d lost his dress shirt since his last visit, leaving him in slacks and stained t-shirt, yellow pit stains spreading out from his underarms.

Ew, gross.

Even more disgusting was the prominent bulge in the front of his pants. Revulsion bubbled on the back of my tongue even as I thanked God for helping me with a way out. Fighting against the urge to gag, I swallowed the acid burning in my throat and continued to watch and wait.

Setting the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the workbench Johnson dug through the crap littered across its surface, tossing objects aside at random. All the while I kept my eye on the screwdriver I had spotted earlier, watching it get shuffled about amongst the junk. For several minutes he sifted through the random tools and trash, occasionally snatching something up, studying it for a second or two before discarding it. Whatever he was searching for continued to elude him.

With a final grumble of “Goddammit” he whirled around, reaching out for the edge of the workbench to steady himself.

“Oh well, little wolf, looks like we’re going to have get creative,” he said, advancing towards me in a drunken stumble.

Continuing to feign unconsciousness I tracked the toes of his shoes across the dirty floor until they came to a stop in front of me. I felt as much as heard the wicked snick of the knife coming free from the sheath he’d strapped to his belt, the air full of the sharp oily tang of silver. It took every ounce of self-control I had to remain still and maintain the charade when all I wanted to do was recoil from the blade and cry out for help.