The Shepard's Agony (11 page)

“
Are you alright?”
she whispered.

John shrugged her hand
away
. She pulled it to her chest, hurt. “No,” he said, starting the engine and pulling away from the little house.

The gas station across the road was dead, there were cars parked, but no people in
sight
.
They
must have heard the shots and ran for cover until everything was
clear
. The police would be around soon.

“
I guess I’m not going home for a
while
,” Evey grumbled.

A small part of Shepard hoped that his brothers wouldn’t wake up until the police did arrive and take them in for questioning
. It would buy them the time they needed to get to the hospital without worry. Hunters or not, they would never run into a hospital shooting off guns. They would both make something up, something
that
became easy after so many years. The problem
was
, they now had the guns that had been shooting up the house. All they needed was a cop to pull them over to make things worse.

Chapter Seven

“Sorry for what I said in the truck back there.”

Gwen was so happy
she wanted to cry. “It’s okay.”

She’d been eating herself up with guilt ever since she found him, John, and Dianna gone. Terrified that they might have hurt or tortured him all because she had to get angry and toss him out when she knew John was out sniffing for her. What she found was almost just as bad.

He was turning
. Now that he was sitting so close to
her
, she could smell the faint scent of his
change
; his scent was changing from that of a normal man to a werewolf. With the full moon only hours
away,
she didn’t know if he could survive his first change.

That werewolves could only change under the light of a full moon
was another common mistake usually seen in the movies. It was true for newcomers, the first change happening against the will of the new wolf, but after that, with practice and patience, the changes could be controlled. David’s change was going to happen only hours after he’d been scratched and his body wouldn’t have enough time to adjust before it happened.
If
, by
chance
, he did happen to survive, he could turn into a rabid wolf, the very thing he feared and hunted all his life.

Gwen wrapped her arms around his bare shoulders and whimpered.

“
A
re you alright? What’s wrong?” he asked, making Gwen sob. He didn’t even know about the risks. He knew he was
changing
, but he didn’t know he was going to die.

She shook her head, not knowing how she was going to tell him, or if she even should. What was the use
of making him count down the last seconds of his life?

“
I’m just glad you’re okay,” s
he lied.

Shepard squeezed her
tighter
. She felt so guilty she wanted to jump into a river. At least no one was saying anything to enlighten David about the full extent of his condition.

“
He’ll have to see Doc,
” Di said. Gwen groaned again.

“What? Why? Who’s Doc?” David asked, immediately tense and suspicious.

Gwen held him tighter, praying she wouldn’t give anything away to him.

“He’s a doctor we see,” John answered for Di, glaring at Shepard in his rearview mirror. “We don’t hide anything from him, he’ll need to examine your scratch.”

Doc would also probably tell David about the risk to his
life
. That thought only made Gwen more miserable, but when David looked at her for confirmation, she could only force a smile and nod her head.

***

“You don’t love him, so you have nothing to worry about.”

Gwen hesitated. “But I do, Daddy.”

Larry slid his eyes shut and sighed. Four little words that just about broke his heart.

His daughter came into Bill’s room with Evey not ten minutes ago t
o explain the situation. Their pack master had woken up but was still weak and could only listen to the conversation. As it turned
out
, the man who’d broken her heart in the cruelest way possible was not only in the building, but he was a Shepard to boot. A hunter trained to kill her without mercy.

He tried to reason with her, to explain that the man couldn’t be trusted. It was bad enough when she told him that he brought her to a motel room, broken truck or
not
. He didn’t want to think of the intentions the hunter had for his only daughter. He wanted nothing more than to have the man beaten and interrogated, preferably using Johnathan’s methods. No doubt the poor boy would enjoy the chance to get his revenge after having his ear shot off in the woods.

But
, his little girl had to go ahead and say those four horrible
words
. He now knew it was out of the question.

Still, that didn’t mean he had to accept it. “Sweetheart, he’s brainwashing you, you have to see that. He’s using your history together to get you into bringing him on our good side.”

Gwen wanted to scream. It was late, she was exhausted and she wearing the second pair of clothes that weren’t hers, but she knew she hadn’t been tricked or brainwashed into thinking anything. Even with how tired she was, she liked to think her mind was sharper than that.

“Where exactly is he right now?” Larry asked.

“
He’s with the others. John didn’t want to let him out of his sight
,” she answered truthfully, not wanting her father to see David in case a fight broke
out
.
Regardless
of the
fact
that
Shepard, at this very
moment, was standing outside the door of their room, leaning against the wall and listening to their conversation with his increasingly new heightened hearing.

The wolves were so distracted they didn’t even know he was
there
; neither did Gwen.

He knew perfectly well the difficulties involved in sneaking away
from
a werewolf, he’d been trained to do
it
. He had to take off his shoes so that the male and treacherous female with him wouldn’t hear him getting away. He had to admit though, turning into a werewolf made slinking off extremely easier since the man named Doc wouldn’t let him into the room while he worked on John’s ear.

“
Don’t even think about leaving!” John had snarled, angry that he couldn’t bully the doctor into at least keeping the door open so he could watch
him
. The man had been relentless, and he didn’t want any normal patients walking by and seeing the raw, bleeding area where his ear used to be while he cleaned it. “Take a step and I’ll hear you!”

Shepard inwardly
chuckled
. After
all
, that the fool didn’t even know he was gone. Pathetic. He could find out all the information he needed and be back in time for that doctor to look at his scratch.

Even though sneaking away was the easy part, amusing and entertaining even, he didn’t very much like the idea of spying on
Gwen
.
Unfortunately
, if he wanted to learn more about what was going to happen to
him
, he had to. Though he had to admit, hearing her say that she still loved him did make him feel kind of giddy.

“
He’ll have to be
detained
,” said Gwen’s father. Shepard’s ears perked.

“We can’t do that!” Gwen protested, much to his relief.

There wa
s some hesitation on the older Were’s part. “You know we have to. He’s a hunter, a Shepard. We need to question him. He could give us the answers to so many questions.
And
, if John really scratched
him
,
we
have
only
a limited amount of time to do
it
in.”

That caught Shepard’s attention especially. What did he mean by, “a limited time”?
He was eventually going to turn back and he imagined that the pain of the turn wouldn’t allow him very much strength to go anywhere when he was in wolf form.

“
He could survive it
,” Gwen said. “He’s strong. This doesn’t mean it’ll kill him.”

Shepard
suppressed a gasp. Kill him? The change? Why would it do that? He’d never heard of anyone but his older brother dying from the
change
and he was a child at the time, already injured. The change surely wouldn’t do more then take a lot of his energy, he was a fully grown man. Dammit, he felt fine!

“
You know what the odds are,” said
Evey
. She didn’t sound condescending about it, more sympathetic. Shepard wished he could see what they were doing, but he didn’t dare try
to
open the door even a crack.

“Full Moon is tomorrow night. The change is going to rip through his body.”

“We can’t take that chance,” said another, much weaker voice.

“
Bill, don’t talk, you should rest
,” said another unidentified voice.

Bill spoke regardless. “Anything we can learn from the enemy will be
useful
. I’m
sorry
,
Gwen
. I’ll give you some time alone … if you want, but it will have be all.”

Shepard decided that he’d heard enough and quietly slunk away from the door, back to the floor where John was being treated for his ear. He wou
ldn’t leave right away, if the pack master was offering Gwen a chance to speak with him privately then there were a few things he wanted to tell her.

He clenched his fists. She lied to him, again. She knew he was changing and she never told him there was a chance it could kill him. Everyone in that room thought he
was
, without a
doubt
, a goner and
they
were all making plans around it.

Well, dying or not, he knew
that
, at that
moment
, he still felt strong and full of
life
. He was going to use that to plan his escape and get out of there. He wouldn’t die a prisoner being questioned for hunter secrets.

The only problem was that he couldn’t just walk out the front door and leave. If everything went according to plan at the
cabin
, his father probably had the pack master’s address book. He would know where they all lived, were Gwen lived, and he needed to stay
alive
long enough to discover if it was missing or not.

Shepard took a seat on the bench outside the room John and Dianna were
in
. He seriously contemplated telling them of her treachery to her pack. How she found them,
and
, in the first few minutes of her acquaintance with the Shepard family, offered them valuable information on her pack and money.

She sobbed out a story of how her heart was broken because the wolf she was in love with was in love with another woman. Shepard
now knew that the woman in question was Gwen and the man was John, having figured it out some hours ago, and Dianna was jealous enough to offer them the location of their Moon Night spot.
Apparently
, Dianna was as cowardly as they
came
. John let her know that he thought so on a few heartless occasions,
so
, in an attempt to be brave and heroic in his eyes, she told them the location of their Moon Night.

“
Please don’t kill
anyone
,” she’d begged, rather stupidly Shepard thought. What did she think they were going to do with the information? He wanted to tell her of their real plans and warn her to leave right then and there. He knew enough about werewolves to know that there would be women and children in the pack and he wasn’t the kind to hunt them.
But
, a hand on his shoulder stopped him from saying a word.

“
What would you like us to do?”
Garrett asked, sounding rather fatherly and understanding. He managed to pull it off, even with the sword strapped to his back.

“
Just …” Dianna stopped to think it over, as if she hadn’t thought so far ahead. “
Just scare them a little. Try not to hurt anyone. I’ll come in and make it look like I scared you away, then that’s that,” she said, rubbing her wrists and hands in a nervous habit.

Shepard watched her shake as his father pretended to consider her offer.

Tracking them down, he had no idea how she did it, and asking them to do such an absurd thing for her was probably the bravest, and stupidest, thing she’d ever done. Shepard wondered what her pack would do to her if they found out about it.

Garrett
eventually agreed to her plan, Dianna paid them a measly five grand when any werewolf pelt was worth twice that, and then she left.

Shepard knew what a h
unt this big would mean. Innocents would be in that pack and they would be killed, regardless of how young or old they
were
.
And
, their blood would be on his hands. If they accomplished a Moon Night
hunt
, of all things, they would have enough pelts and be moving to another area. He would never see Gwen again.

They’d fought over the subject, actually had their very first yelling-in-each-other’s-faces argument. He’d told her there was a chance, a big chance, that he’d need to move away soon. He didn’t know when or how far, or if he would ever see her again.
Now
, it was being confirmed that there was a big hunt coming up
and
that they would have to leave the
area
afterward.