The shifting started on its own, leaving me naked, bleeding, and very human not even a quarter mile into our run from the farm house. It wasn't something I could have put off a second longer. One second I was a searing pain of blood red wolf dashing through thick and high field grass, and the next I was curled on the ground, biting down on my own hand so that the sound of my screams were stifled.
"You big dumb idiot wolf," Skye lectured to me, her mouth a grim line.
"Immune to silver...but to a point. It's good to know," I managed to squeak out in between panting breaths. Turning my lower half, I groaned when I realized that the wounds did look worse than they felt. A good ten or so rounds, scattered from ankle to ass littered my pink, pale skin. The blood was still coming out, but it seemed to be more of a slow ooze.
Skye changed the instant she noticed the wounds, going from joking and confused to filled with horror when she took it all in. Now she was bent down, examining my legs, her fingers hot and probing over my skin. I stopped breathing and she stopped looking at my legs when we heard a twig snap. We both heard the oncoming footsteps, just as we both knew that my legs wouldn't heal in enough time for me to make a getaway at all. Shaking my head, I motioned with my hands for her to go on.
"Go, they clearly know you are with me, and whatever they have planned for me will now include you, and that I cannot abide." I took a breath in, feeling my lungs strengthen as one of the bullets came out and thudded to the earth near my hip. "Gods that feels strange, good and bad all at once. Go Skye, for the gods sakes, both of us getting captured isn't going to help any. This is my fight."
Skye, looking from me to the area that was increasing in noise, leaned down and swept my hair from my face. She looked into my eyes, an unreadable but intense expression filling her face. She looked softer, kinder, but no less fierce as she spoke. "They don't know about the silver, or they wouldn't have bothered with the guns, so keep that to yourself. They didn't shift any that I could see, but they didn't quite smell right so be careful. Don't hold back, you can't do that now Hannah. You must go for the kill, no hesitation, no mercy. I'm-," She opened her mouth to say something else, but I never heard it. Mason had stumbled into the area we were, mere seconds from having a visual on me.
With that she sprung up and shifted mid stride, eerily silent considering how fast she was going, and disappeared directly to my right. I decided then to start moaning dramatically, hoping that it would cover up Skye's escape and draw them towards me and not her.
"She's over here," Mason yelled over his shoulder as he walked carefully towards me. His face didn't hold as much a sneer as it did some kind of strange intense fascination. It was just this side of predatory, and that I didn't like. Another of his heavy footfalls and I was growling, a half human, half feral sound that cause Mason to stop and hold up his hands.
"You are one tricky little bitch." This time his face held anger, and perhaps a bit of contempt, I couldn't be sure. "Where's Skye? Did she get tired of the lesbian lovers on the run bit?" he asked as he bent down, eyebrow raised and his mouth twitching at the corners with clear mocking. I was never the boiling over with anger types, but something about him, an intangible yet disgusting attribute had me going already. So, I spat at him.
"You know, all the dossiers said you were nice, tame, newly wolf, easily...impressionable." Mason said as he wiped the spit from his cheek and flicked it to the side. "But you seem to be none of those things, though the files never said how beautiful you look. You take so much after your mother." He tilted his head, an examination of some kind going on as his eyes went from my face to my breasts, to my naked backside, and finally to the multiple wounds on my legs. I could feel some of the bullets pushing against the inside of my skin, but I willed them back. It wasn't the time for that, not with his gaze so fixed on the wounds. It burned but it held, luckily I was saved by Nick.
"We lost the other wolf," Nick said as he bounded into the area we were, coming to stand just behind Mason, he had his hands on his knees, panting hard.
"I want you and Paul on her, your welcome to shift, but only if you have to. I want eyes on her until we can get Hannah out. She will not spoil this for me," Mason commanded, his voice leaking through some of the frustration he was clearly trying to hold back. Nick nodded and went running the same way he came, yelling out Paul's name so loudly that Mason flinched. The inappropriate laugh that escaped me didn't help matters. Mason hauled back and hit me so hard across my cheekbone that I could feel it crack on impact. The pain in my face actually helped direct some of the intensity from my legs, which were starting to hurt almost to the point of insanity.
"You will show me some respect," he told me as he stood and straightened his clothes out, brushing off random bits of grass and dirt. "That is not a request, it's for your own good Hannah. I am in charge of you for the foreseeable future, and it is you that determines how this relationship works, how much freedom or how little you have depend on me alone. It would be wise to please me." It was a revolting way to put what he was insinuating, but it wasn't without its benefits for me. With that nice intro I leaned off my arm, turning my body towards him very slowly. My skin wasn't too happy to be putting my abused flesh right into the hard ground but I needed his attention off the gunshots. Because there was no way on this earth I was going anywhere with him.
"That's a nice little speech, did you practice it on the way over?" I asked, a flirtatious smile plastered on my face as I spoke to him. Mason, like any good male, regardless of species, was staring at my expanse of skin, and was only shaken from his perusal of the curves by my voice. His laughter following sent a chill over my skin, something like cold fingers that wound it's way through me. I pushed a few of the bullets out with the cover of his voice next.
"Wolves, with you lot it's all rutting and biting and hunting. Is that all you ever do?" he asked, but it didn't seem to be really directed at me, more like a thought said aloud that had somehow escaped. My thoughts were correct when he continued ranting, and damn me if I had no intentions of stopping him. "You all act so superior, like fucking royalty. Prancing around with your money and power, making kings and titles and taking up all the damn land. Everyone thinks you are ridiculous, you and those vampires you claim to hate so much are just the same spoiled children throwing fits when things don't go your way. And then here you are, coming to us for a hunt of one of your own. You had to stoop to me, the best bounty hunter on the continent." He had his arms out, speaking to me as if he was making perfect sense, which he wasn't.
"I didn't come to you to hunt myself down Mason. I am clearly no friend of theirs if they are hurting me like this." My voice sounded reassuring, as I was trying to infuse as much innocence and vulnerability into my words as possible. If he had some kind of hatred for those like my father, I needed to let him know that I sure wasn't one of them.
"No, you're no friend of them," he said angrily, spittle flying out of his mouth. "You're family, you're his daughter." The last words were said with such venom, and realization that it was becoming certain that Mason wasn't going to be easy to reason with. There were still a few bullets left pushing against my skin, and they seemed to be taking their sweet ass time coming out.
"That may be but if they are hunting me down like this, you think I'm like them?" I asked, instantly regretting opening up this line of questioning when I looked to his face.
"It doesn't matter, now I have leverage against Henry Porter, and his new partner. Two coasts for the price of one." The last bit he murmured under his breath, low enough that I could just barely catch it. The pieces clicked fast in my head, a probability that I had never considered, but one that made perfect sense for all of them.
"Did my father hire you, or did Monsieur LeFevre?" I asked, narrowing my eyes like a bird sighting prey. I knew my father would come for me, but I never imagined just how far his deal with that LeFevre seethe had become. It must be a sad day for the Porter household when it has to turn for help and advice from vampires.
"Oh your father is my point of contact, but let's just say my initial consultation happened over a croissant, in Paris. He is a very interesting man, varied tastes. Henry put up a fight over sending a contractor in to collect you," Mason said, relaxing his back against a tree trunk and fishing out of his pocket an apple. Who the hell carries an apple around with them, on a hunt? The bite he took out of it was unnecessarily loud, and annoying.
"I bet he did, it's a wonder his usual recon crew didn't handle this. They could have sniffed us out faster than you lot, no offense. And without all the bullets." I hissed in a breath, trying to cover the sound of another bullet casing exiting the entry wound. Mason gleamed one brown eye at me, an assessing stare that I wasn't comfortable with.
"The vampires all seemed particularly concerned with capturing you, I even get a bonus for time. Your father seemed particularly concerned with staying unconnected to it, and from I get a bonus if no one identifies me or traces me back to him. Strange, is it not, that it isn't the other way around? Your father seems less concerned with you, and the good French vampire very...interested. " He toyed with the apple some more before taking another chunk of it's flesh. If he was trying to unnerve me it was working, his teeth seemed unnaturally sharp all of a sudden.
"My father is a coward who doesn't know what to do with me, and the Lefevre's want nothing more than to see me erased from this earth. My father will take me in, and someone from that seethe will kill me shortly after. You want to hurt them, release me. There is nothing more destructive to those two groups than to see me walking away from their grasp. I would rain down all the fire in hell on them, you need only to sit back and watch." In my head it made perfect sense, but whatever warped world Mason was living in, it didn't quite reach his reasoning. He laughed at me before speaking, a patronizing smile highlighting the insult.
"Oh Hannah, I think we can update your profile with some more adjectives. How about annoyingly direct, honest, and good at flaunting her assets to the point of misdirection. Such a pity. I have waited too long to get into a position of negotiation with Henry, and now I have a vampire who will owe me a marker. I cannot release you child, though your anarchy speaks to something in here." This was met with no heartfelt gesture of placing his hand on his chest, but one more crude, and directly lower. I had to fight the bile to stay down.
"You're just going to hand me over to them then, where?" I asked with some added petulance, stalling for time as I tried to forcefully push the last of the silver out of my thigh. If I was correct there were only two left, and one I think had hit bone felt like it was stuck somehow. I wasn't aware of the probability of me shifting with them in, but trying and failing weren't an option. This had to be a clean get away, or Mason would do something vile to me. It was a promise never spoken, but resting just behind his eyes. It was all I could do but keep him talking. "Listen Mason, if you want to get back at my father, then letting me go is the best thing you can do. I am a direct threat to both of them. I can destroy everything." To my own ears, my voice sounded off somehow, as if I was listening to a raspy and dramatic version of my usual self.
"Persistent," he added in, holding up his finger like he was ticking off a list. Oh, he didn't know how persistent.
"If you want a marker," I said, teasing him with a dramatic pause. "I can get you a vampire in a much better position than Lefevre." Mason looked interested, but something else was working behind his eyes also. Suspicion, it looked like, but his damn face changed entirely from one moment to the next. Mason was unnaturally hard to read.
"They claim you haven't been running in any super communities since your excommunication. How are you going to get me anyone who would want to make a deal, little wolf?" he asked, in a tone that suggested my own mental incompetence. I was instantly irritated, more so for everyone calling me little wolf than anything else. I settled for rolling my eyes while I thought for a moment about what I was going to say. Too much information, or too little, wouldn't do me any favors.
"If you let me go, I can get you a meeting with Elijah Drake." At the mention of Elijah, Mason's eyes flashed such a brilliant white that I lost sight of his irises all together. To my knowledge, no shifter had white eyes like that. The only ones that did were, fairies. Oh shit. The Fey often did spell work, and that kind of magic was very powerful against a werewolf such as myself. I had to walk a much finer line now.
"Elijah Drake, now that's a piece of man that was carved out of the good stuff huh?" To this he took another bite of apple and laughed. "Outside of the fact that he doesn't deal with my kind, and excluding the obvious lack of believeability that he would know you at all, what on this earth would I have to trade him with? You?" His interest in this new turn in conversation went from incredulity to some kind of realization. Leaning down, but keeping his distance, he peered into my face. It was a look that spoke of an underlying power, as if he was looking into me, and not at me. Then he abruptly stood, leaning against the tree as he was before, crossing his arms and taking another chunk from the apple.
"You're in love with him, aren't you little wolf? The werewolf in love with the vampire, how touching, the idealism of love." Mason asked with a smirk. Trying to keep my face as calm as possible I smirked as well, despite my thunderous heart that was beating a fevered tattoo against my ribs. Mine.
"I am in a position that he will listen to me, my feelings for him aside, I can get you a meeting and a favor from him. The rest is irrelevant, only to provide some credibility to my claims." Sitting up more I tried to put some more effort into pushing out the last of the silver. Somehow the mention of Eli, and the feelings that brought up, had lent me some needed focus.
"Well that clears some things up." He was mumbling again, skirting the edge of another rant, I could hear it in his voice. "One wants you dead, and one wants nothing to do with you, and here I am now, in the possession of someone that no one seems to want, yet is desperate to have. It's quite a rare moment for me you see." Mason was pacing near me, nervously stepping from foot to foot with erratic speed. "I am a collector. The ultimate hunter if you will. There is something I want, or someone else wants, I set about acquiring it. There has never been a target that has caused me to veer from course, never in all the hundreds of years. There is something about you Hannah." He licked his lips for a moment, and it was hard to gleam anything from his demeanor about what that meant. Perhaps I had reached through to him, and he was considering my offer. For someone like him, it was a good one. I knew, as he did, that the Drake's never made deals with other species, never. A coup for anyone such as Mason.
"Don't just hand me over to those idiots," I interrupted softly when I noticed his eyes go white again. "I am a prize, and they just want to kill me so they can get what they want faster. You know a real catch when you see one Mason, you can use me to get something better than they are offering." The seductiveness in my tone was shocking, even to my own ears, but it was doing something odd to Mason. "Let me go Mason, and we both win."
"Interesting, interesting," Mason muttered, resuming his pacing the second I finished speaking. The bullet I had been trying to expel wasn't making its way out, and only succeeding to cause my femur to throb. Sweat was starting to form on my forehead, both from the pain and all the concentration I was throwing into talking to Mason. "No you are quite right Hannah, you cannot simply be handed over to your father, or to that vile vampire. This deal is becoming more and more one sided, what with all the information they have left out, it's simply not fair. No, no, I must not do that now, no that will not do Hannah. Such beauty, such passion, such strength, such a waste to be given to incapable hands. I cannot let that happen to you." The breath I was holding released on such a rush that Mason noticed it as well, smiling at me with too many teeth.
"Eli will reward you for letting me go, I will make sure you get what you want." It was said with honesty, but that must not have translated to Mason because he started laughing hysterically. Small tracks of silvery tears were leaking from his eyes, traveling down each of his cheeks with surprising speed. The hair along my arms and legs was standing tall, the skin beneath clustered in goose flesh.
"Oh dear Hannah, dear sweet little wolf. I'm not giving you to Eli either, you're mine."