“You don’t actually fucking shoot it with a shotgun if you want to preserve the pelt!”
The other man reached his hand up to touch his face and then looked at his bloodied fingers.
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“Did it bite you?”
The man that Morgan was going to assume was the leader from here on out turned away from him in disgust, just as one of the other hunters put his hand under his jacket, as though he was reaching for a gun. Terry was right. Now that Morgan had seen him up close, even with all that winter gear on, he recognized him as one of the hunters who’d attacked his pack over two months ago.
“Of course not, you idiot. That fucking thorny bush shredded my hand when you fucked up and made the wolf panic.”
“Are you sure?” said the man with his hand on a gun.
Their leader rounded on him. “Of course I’m fucking sure! You really think I would want to be a werewolf?” He spat into the snow. “If one of those diseased flea-ridden things ever sinks its teeth in me, I’ll put myself out of my misery.”
Morgan smiled an openmouthed, tongue-lolling dog smile, but in his mind, he was grinning evilly. He had bitten that hunter. He could still taste the blood in his mouth.
He just didn’t want to admit it to the rest of his hunter buddies in case they took him prisoner, waited for him to transform, and skinned him instead.
The easy targets were always the better ones, after all.
“Find those fucking wolves!” the lead hunter shrieked.
Morgan had to come out of his hiding place. He barked a shrill-sounding bark to get their attention before they could go after Nick and Terry.
They all turned as one, saw how close Morgan was to them, and then jumped back onto their snow mobiles.
Morgan had to run again, as much as he could in all this snow. He didn’t know how much longer he could do this for, because unless he found a good place to hold up until backup arrived, they were going to catch him eventually.
He just hoped he hadn’t pissed off that one hunter enough that he would want to tear the skin right off Morgan’s body the second he
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captured him.
Again, the sounds of the engines grew louder as the hunters came almost on top of Morgan.
Now that shotguns were banned, Morgan had a little more confidence in his ability to keep away from them.
Until that other hunter pulled a handgun out of a holster under his jacket then fired.
Morgan skidded in the snow and turned before the bullet could make contact with him, but it missed his head by inches. It had been so close that he felt the heat of the bullet as it soared passed.
“Get a clean shot! Get a clean shot!” someone yelled.
Right. Shotgun pellets would damage his pelt, but a single bullet wound, provided it was the only one and it killed him, would still make his pelt valuable to have. His heart pounded faster at the thought that they would just outright kill him before skinning him. A better way to go, yes, but he wanted the fighting chance. He wouldn’t let them kill him!
Easier said than done. His lungs were starting to burn, and no matter how quickly he took in breaths of cold air, it felt like he wasn’t breathing at all. There wasn’t enough oxygen to sustain him.
He was getting tired.
When hunting rabbits, wolves usually worked better with the rest of their pack around.
One wolf would chase the rabbit or whatever animal they were after in a nice big circle. When that wolf grew too tired, he would step aside as another took his place, then another, and another, until their prey became so tired that one of the wolves eventually caught it.
Morgan didn’t have any other members of his pack to take him out of the field when he got too tired, and right now, he was the prey that would get caught once he slowed down.
Still, he managed to push it for another thirty minutes before something yanked him out of his adrenaline-fueled run for his life. Another shot sounded. This one clipped his ear, and he cried out,
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losing his footing for several seconds and rolling in the snow.
Fuck! That fucking hurt!
When he stopped rolling, he shook his fur out, bright-red blood spattering all over the clean, white snow. His head throbbed and inner ear was killing him. Morgan looked up and saw that the hunters had overshot him when he made that sudden stop and were now turning around to get back to him.
Morgan pushed himself back on all fours and then cried out, his wolf whine piercing the air as one of his front paws received a jolt of pain that went right up his bones.
He struggled to three legs, keeping his paw off the ground. He must’ve fallen on it wrong during his fall.
He made it three leaps over the thick and heavy snow before he was forced to stop. His heart was racing so fast, and his tongue drooped ridiculously in an effort to cool himself down.
He no longer felt the cold. It was hot as hell outside. If he had any sweat glands, he knew he’d be drenched.
Still, it was almost a relief to allow his body to fall into the snow. It was sticky as all hell, but it felt as soft as a goose-feather mattress against his body. He hardly minded it when the hunters rode up in their snow mobiles.
They must’ve seen the state he was in because they were confident enough he was down to turn off their engines.
“Did you kill him?” asked one.
The younger one answered. “I guess so. I was aiming for his head, so, yeah, I must have.”
“There is a good amount of blood pooling at his head, but despite that, Chance, if you’d done anything other than clip him, he wouldn’t have been running those last several steps before he went down,” the leader said. Morgan could just picture the guy rubbing his chin as he thought out loud. “I think we just ran him down. He’s passed out.”
No. He wasn’t.
“We should kill him now, then,” said another hunter, and the click
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of his weapon sounded as he cocked it.
An empty shell landed by Morgan’s head when he did that.
“Yeah, get the pelt while he’s still alive. The fur stays nice that way.”
Oh, right. Maybe Morgan should do something before they could skin him right here and now.
He focused as hard as he could on his human form, putting it into his mind until it was all he could see. His body stretched out and his fur fell away. He heard the loud curses of the hunters as they stepped away from him.
Hunters always had been really strange when it came to actually seeing a werewolf transform. It was like they were afraid of it or something.
Finally, Morgan was human again, lying in the snow, which felt somewhat colder against his skin now. It definitely felt a lot more pleasant after the run he just had, and now that he had sweat glands again, every inch of his skin started to produce moisture, and not just the pads of his paws.
“Motherfucker!” one of the hunters yelled. It sounded like someone kicked the side of their snow mobile in frustration.
Then an angry face came right into Morgan’s line of vision. His hair was grabbed roughly. It hurt, kind of a lot, actually, but he was too tired to care about that, or about the snarling face of that hunter he bit.
“You think this will keep us from skinning you alive, you freak?”
Morgan smiled at him. He had probably a thousand things he could say to make the hunter all the more pissed off. He had it in mind to announce that he’d infected the man in front of his friends,
but the smile itself seemed to do it the most.
The hunter slapped him, just like he’d done to his fellow hunter.
Morgan barely felt it.
“Pick him up! We’re taking him and making a new camp.”
“What about the others?” someone asked.
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A voice that Morgan hadn’t heard speak yet chimed into the conversation. “They won’t follow. If theirs is only a pack of three, then they will go to the nearest pack for shelter. Their kind won’t want to risk any more deaths. We should take what bounty we have and just go.”
Morgan managed to pull together enough energy to lift his head and look at the speaker.
The guy had a friggin’ eye patch over his eye like some kind of pirate. Morgan didn’t know people actually wore those in real life.
Morgan didn’t know why or what it meant, but the man’s one eye met both of Morgan’s and something passed between the both of them that he didn’t fully understand at first.
When he did, he wanted to sigh with relief.
Whatever this guy’s motivation, he was trying to allow Morgan’s friend and mate to escape.
“Is that true?” asked the younger one.
“Sometimes,” said their leader. “It depends, but these three must have been a pack on their own. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been wandering around out here by themselves, especially in last night’s weather.”
They all seemed to think it over for another solid thirty seconds. It was the longest half minute of Morgan’s life.
“We got one for today, and we know there are others out there,” said their leader. “Selling his pelt and the ones we already have will more than get us through the winter. Now everything else we catch will just be profit.”
The faces of other hunters seemed to light up with that news.
“Let’s get him tied off, we’ll make a new camp, wait until he turns again, and have him skinned in a few days. Then we can start looking for others.”
That was the best news Morgan had heard in his entire life. Nick and Terry were going to make it back to the pack, they would be safe, and if he could hold out long enough and keep them from skinning
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him, maybe he could either escape on his own or be rescued by his
friends.
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Chapter Eleven
Now that he was no longer in wolf form, there was no need to be gentle with him.
At first they tried tying his hands behind his back, and Morgan was still so run down and out of energy that there was little he could do but let them.
Then the rope had gone around his neck, and they’d tied the other end to the seat of one of those Ski-Doos they were riding around on.
They’d alternated between speeding up and slowing down, forcing Morgan to try to run to keep up, but with all the snow he kept tripping over, it was impossible. After he fell over for the fifth time, this time flat out refusing to get back onto his feet, even when they dragged him by the neck a little, they were forced to admit defeat and someone had to get off their ride and walk with him, holding him by his leash.
It was degrading, but he was too tired to argue. His body wanted to give in and pass out now that he’d worked through all his adrenaline. He hoped they planned on feeding him. Something with protein, preferably. Having only a bowl of rice yesterday for supper, and this morning for his breakfast, was definitely not enough to keep his engine going. If he just got some energy in him, he could fight back, stay awake at the very least. If he accidentally shifted into the wolf in his sleep, he was fucked.
The man with they eye patch was the one walking with him, both of them stepping awkwardly over the slightly flattened trail of snow that the snow mobiles were making.
It shamed Morgan that he couldn’t even pull together the strength to break the ropes binding his hands and attack the man.
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Overriding that was the curiosity he felt as to why he would basically offer his vote to allow the others to escape and why he didn’t smell entirely human, either.
He wanted to ask him what he was. The man walked with a stick
up his ass that Morgan knew had nothing to do with the fact that he was guarding a prisoner.
He was scared that Morgan was going to rat him out. What the hell was he?
Morgan was better equipped to handle the cold, even without a fur coat on him, but now that he was walking, stumbling, through so much of it and his body was hardly producing any heat at the rate they were walking, he soon started to freeze.
Again, the man with the eye patch spoke up for him. “I think we should find someplace soon. It’s starting to turn blue.”
The leader of the hunters stopped the snow mobile he’d been riding to turn and look back at them. He’d since bandaged his hand with a strip of a shirt one of the other men had been wearing under a jacket, but blood still seeped through and stained the yellow material.
He frowned, staring at Morgan, as though determining whether or not this was a decent place to stop.
“We’ve been moving for nearly three hours now. Those other wolves aren’t coming back,” Storm―the name Morgan had heard―said.