HUNT (A Shifters Short Story)

I flew through the forest, retracing my own path with no thought for the living buffet scurrying all around me. The screaming continued, and I heard terror from Robyn and Dani, but sheer agony from their boyfriends. I’d seen a friend murdered once, which was how I knew exactly what I was hearing in that moment—my friends were being slaughtered.

My clothes hung on branches ahead, but I raced past them. The screaming was louder now, but there were fewer voices. Dani’s boyfriend Mitch had gone silent. I was too late to help him, and before I’d gone another few yards, Olsen’s screaming ended in a horrible, inarticulate gurgle.

My lungs burned and my legs ached—werecats are sprinters, not long-distance runners—but I pushed forward, demanding more from my body than I’d ever had reason to expect from it.

This couldn’t be real. Werecat strays were always slugging it out in territorial disputes and dominance challenges, but the most dangerous thing I’d ever encountered in the human/college world was my Chemistry professor’s hardline no-late-work policy.

Robyn’s screams intensified with her boyfriend’s silence, then suddenly stopped, and for a moment, my heart refused to beat. Not Robyn. I couldn’t lose my roommate of more than a year and the best friend I had in the human world. The girl who left her toothpaste open on the bathroom counter and made me hot chocolate in the middle of the night, when nightmares woke me up.

Then in the sudden quiet, the forest produced a new voice, and my next steps were fueled by simultaneous terror and relief.

“…mouth shut, bitch, or I’ll slice you wide open. Her too.”

Robyn and Dani were alive—so far, anyway. But who the hell was with them?

I’d gone a few more steps when the smell of blood rolled across the forest floor like an olfactory fog, overwhelming my senses and shredding my heart. The sheer strength of the scent was horrifying, and the thought of how much Mitch and Olsen must have lost made me sick to my stomach.

I slowed as I approached the campsite and logic and caution finally overcame the terror that had propelled my dash through the woods. There was nothing I could do for the guys, and I’d be no good to the girls if I burst into the clearing and got shot by some psycho, backwoods hunter. So I snuck the last thirty feet or so, silent and virtually invisible in the dark, as only a werecat can be.

Flames flickered through a tangle of branches; the campfire still burned bright. Blinking, I edged forward slowly, mostly hidden by a thick, fat bush. I saw Olsen first and had to swallow the traumatized whine sliding up from my throat. He lay on his back in the clearing, his shadow twitching on the ground with every lick of the orange flames. His blue eyes were open, his mouth slack. His coat was unzipped, his shirt completely drenched in blood, which now soaked into the ground beneath him.

He’d been gutted.

Mitch lay in the same position, a quarter of the way around the campfire, his face forever frozen in a grimace of agony. His stomach and chest had been sliced up the middle, but unlike Olsen’s, Mitch’s coat and shirt had been spread open, showcasing the full extent of the damage. So the girls would know the same thing could happen to them.

The wound was long, and deep, and straight. The weapon could only be a blade, wielded by a human hand. This was not shifter violence.

Nausea rolled over me for the first time ever, in cat form. I’d seen a lot of slaughtered deer in the seven years since my first shift, at age thirteen. I’d even brought down a couple myself. But these weren’t deer. They were friends.

My vision blurred until I couldn’t keep Mitch’s body in focus, yet when I glanced away, visual clarity returned, as if my brain didn’t want to interpret the images of carnage my eyes were sending.

I blinked and forced the slaughter back into focus. If I couldn’t even look at the corpses, how could I hope to save Robyn and Dani?

Maybe I couldn’t. I wasn’t a cop. I wasn’t even an enforcer. My summer training sessions with Faythe had included neither rescue missions nor hostage negotiation. But I had to try. I was all they had.

My roommate and her best friend knelt on the ground on the other side of the fire, and watching them through the flames sent chills through me. As if I were already seeing them die. They cried and huddled together, alternately staring at their butchered boyfriends and cringing up at their captors.

Three men stood with their backs to me, each dressed in hunter’s camouflage. Two of them held hunting knives, still dripping blood onto the packed dirt. They were human, based on both their scent and their weapons, yet every bit as monstrous as the cruelest shifters I’d ever met.

One of them smelled vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t quite place his scent.

I backed carefully away from the bush concealing me and began to circle the clearing slowly and silently. I’d have to be within pouncing distance before I made my move.