Chapter 4-Slade- ten years ago

We rent a couple rooms out in a motel on the outskirts of Camden to clean up and catch a few hours of shut eye before tonight’s hunt. We have to do most of our investigations during nightfall, as several large wolves stalking the walking trails in broad daylight would be sure to draw too much unwanted attention. Wolves are nocturnal creatures for one thing, and our pack members are much bigger than your garden variety wolf, so eight of us spotted in a small, rural town while the sun is still up, would likely cause a panic.

 Night not only gives us the most freedom to roam the crime scene and track the creature responsible for the local dead man, but it also gives us a chance to blend into the forest and shadows to escape unwanted eyes and recorded videos from gob smacked bystanders. Not to mention, the town of Camden is mostly farmlands, with large open spaces, and fewer places to hide in the sun. The place where the hiker was drug from the trail, is like the only wooded area in the town limits, a nature park owned and maintained by the local government. So, we stick to our own rules, the plan, and wait for night to fall and the moon to guide us.

Even with him turning the shower on and the taps at full force, it isn’t enough for our sharp ears not to overhear Willow giving River a piece of her mind as he takes her call in the motel bathroom. She’s upset that he took so long to return her call and feared the worst for her mate. River does the best he can to calm her fears, but Willow isn’t entirely wrong. This is a dangerous job and several hunters have fallen while doing it over the years. I learned this for myself when that rogue nearly tore my throat out in that cave last week.  It’s a huge risk we all take to protect our own kind and humans, and not all of us make it back home in one piece. I’m sure sooner rather than later, River will choose to return to his mate and stay on pack lands. Not everyone is cut out for this job or this life, and it’s harder for the ones with mates.

Wolves are usually ravenous, that is a part the movies got right. But it’s not true we just go off and eat people or anything. Most of us anyway, even in a shift, can typically control ourselves and not indiscriminately attack humans, as it goes against our self-preservation instincts. Wolves typically only attack when provoked or protecting the weaker members of the pack. I have never eaten a person while in my wolf skin, though I have hunted down fresh game to satisfy my hunger beneath the moonlight. While I walk on two legs, my appetite is often just as fierce because we metabolize our food sources quicker than humans and need more calories to refuel and energize. It’s why you hardly ever see a fat Lycan because of our supercharged metabolism.  That evening, we devour several large pizzas between our band of hunters, with Clay and Wolfe wrestling over the last piece.

They also fight over the remote on what to watch on the small flatscreen. I consider leaving the room and going to crash in the other, but with Hawke and the silent twins there, it’d just be too awkward.  I’m also tempted to rent a room for myself but decide it’s not worth the hassle or the cash in my pocket, as we won’t be using it for most of the night anyway. Before I left for the hunts, I’d poured my own blood and sweat, many hours worth of manual labor, into the pack owned construction and remodeling company. It is the main source of income to Shadow Ridge as we take care of our own and all the able- bodied males do the work that supports the whole pack. Now I’m paid for my services as a hunter instead and I can’t say I’m upset to leave my construction days behind me. I found the work too tedious, boring, and constrictive for my own liking.

I leave my cousins to their fight over the TV and shuffle over to the small table in the corner of the room where my father sits hunched over his file. He takes it with him everywhere he goes. It’s full of newspaper clippings from cases, and crime scene photos of those victims, thanks to an inside contact with the Portland Police Department. Most of the stuff in there is related to Bale, and every life he takes, my father considers that blood staining his own hands too.

I take a seat next to him. I’ve seen the photos and the contents of the file. I nearly threw up the first time. It hasn’t gotten any easier to look at really. The youngest of Bale’s victims are just kids, younger than myself, whose greatest crime was sneaking out late one night to drink beer and smoke weed in the woods. They were no threat to Bale at all and he didn’t need to kill them.  Hell, even the night he snapped, his wolf left a trail of carcasses in the pack lands, animals killed just for the sport of it. Wolves didn’t kill for sport; they killed to eat or defend. But Bale broke the laws of the moon, of nature, the pack, of man. He killed needlessly and in excess, often just because he could. He needed to be stopped and put down.

I pick up the photo of Bale’s first victim, the one that sent him on a violent rampage. A member of our pack he slaughtered after finding the beta in the woods mating a she-wolf. A couple months prior, Bale had claimed the she-wolf was his mate, but Star rejected him and said she felt no bond with Bale. He lost all control when he happened upon them that night and ripped his rival apart. But he had already been spiraling downward before that attack, with violent bar fights with town locals, and several bloody altercations with other pack members. My father had vouched for him, even when the pack council stripped Bale from his duties as a rogue hunter when he became a liability. Thought Bale could learn to control it, unlike his father before him who lost his mind to madness, and Father even sought help for his pack mate from the healer with tonics that helped to calm his aggression.

For a while it seemed to work. Bale had not assaulted any human locals or taken pack spars too far and injured his fellow wolves for several months. But when he felt he could control himself and his wolf without the calming tonics, and felt they held him back, he secretly stopped taking them. And then he became fixated on Star and began to stalk her, though she made it clear to him she’d already been claimed and joined with her true mate. Seeing them together, that sent Bale over the edge. He didn’t even give the other wolf a proper, honor bound challenge to a fight to settle their differences. Bale slaughtered him with no honor and no chance to defend himself. He left Star alive but injured as he slashed her across both cheeks with his claws in a rage. He fled the pack like a coward afterwards.

Father has been tracking his cub mate and his crimes ever since. He blames himself and won’t find any peace until Bale’s body is returned to the ground. As is our custom, unless a warrior dies in battle or protecting the pack, their body is given back to nature for new life to grow and flourish. Those killed in battle or self-sacrifice, have a special honor granted to them upon death. I hope I get the honor of a warrior’s death and wake.

“We’ll find him, Father. He can’t run and he can’t hide forever,” I say.

“Well, he’s done a pretty good job of it so far. He seems as though he’s always a step ahead.”

“He’s bound to make a mistake. And when he does, we’ll catch him.”

“But how much more blood will be spilled in the meantime?” he challenges, “far too much has been spilled already.”

I want to tell him it’s not his fault, but many have tried before me, and he will not believe it anyway. Besides, some in the pack do hold him responsible. He vouched for his cub mate and stayed the council’s hand on locking up Bale before he took a life or exposed our race. But that is a cruel fate, possibly worse than death to cage a wolf, and I understand why my father fought to save his friend from it. I also see things from the other side, how the council knew Bale was a threat that needed to be contained and they acted against their better judgement by listening to a well-respected, second in command of the pack. The cost was a high one, especially for my father in the end.

Losing my mother wasn’t the only thing that aged my father quickly, losing a friend to madness, also took its toll, and I can see it in the lines on my father’s face, the dark circles beneath his amber eyes, the patches of grey in his hair, and he’s only forty. He has sixty years left of his natural lifespan but looks like a wolf a decade or more older than that. Life on the road, and the horrors he’s witnessed, has also stole his youth before his time. I wonder if this is my future too.

River emerges from the bathroom, freshly showered, and eyes the pair of us. It is not lost on him the serious tone of reflections between Father and Son. Then again, he is the most perceptive of my cousins and has the most maturity, and more like a son to Father than a nephew. River knows firsthand the high costs of this life, as he lost his father to it when he was hardly more than a cub. He’s now torn between familial duty and his responsibility to his mate.  He has no brothers to take his place, but Father doesn’t pressure him either way. He will leave the decision up to River.

 I’m glad I don’t have a mate I would have to reject for this calling or worry about. Surely the moon understands that I am not mate material. There will be no moon favored pairings for me. I will never partake in The Joining which is the physical consummation of the mate bond, or The Claiming which is when mates mark one another in an intimate act. Usually the rituals are done together, but one can come before the other, breaking tradition. Bale marked his alleged mate brutally in a place all would see during The Claiming outside of any joining ceremony. His intentions may have been to mate her afterwards, but he never got the chance. He had scarred her face maliciously so she, or anyone else who looked upon her, would never forget his claim. He was a sadistic fucker for sure. And Star could be counted as one of his kills, because the she-wolf took her own life less than a year after he stole the life of her true mate and marked her forevermore in more ways than one.

I pass the tense silence and slow-moving hands of the clock by making sure all our gear is accounted for, well packed, and our guns are clean and loaded. Not that we use guns much in our line of work, but they do come in handy from time to time. I also carefully check our wolfsbane darts to make sure there is no leaks. Wolfsbane won’t kill our kind, but it will weaken us and slow us down. In the right amounts, it can also suppress a shift into our wolf forms or force us back into human skins. I carry a silver dagger too, polished and in my boot. You don’t need a silver bullet or dagger to kill a wolf, but injuries from silver hurt like hell and can incapacitate us. We can touch the metal, but it burns like fuck if it pierces our skin.

Usually, one member of our hunter band stays in human form to tote the gear or drive the getaway vehicle if a quick escape is needed. Sometimes their duties double as a sniper to bring down a wolf we’re hunting when it gets too close to civilization or unlucky humans out in the woods. We prefer to bring down rogues as nature intended in wolf-to-wolf combat, but sometimes the situation doesn’t allow for that. Father has already informed Clay he will be acting as the human lookout on tonight’s hunt. I’m not offended that he doesn’t yet trust my shooting skills or fighting skills in my human skin. And after I screwed up royally the last hunt, I will not argue or complain. I’ll follow orders like I’m told.

Clay paces the room until I threaten to stab him with my silver dagger. Then he goes to get fresh air, which I know is code for finding a female to fuck. There’s a bar just across the street from the motel which is prime hunting ground. Father warns him to keep a clear head and stay sober for the night to come, but I know him getting laid will probably help him focus better on the hunt. Father asks Wolfe to remain behind and gives him menial tasks as he doesn’t trust the two of them together and Wolfe is the more likely of the pair to get into drunken trouble. Clay is more of a lover than a fighter and can hold his liquor and knows when he’s had enough. I can give my cousin that credit at least.

I’m just getting ready to wash two days of the road grime off myself when River snatches the remote and puts the TV back onto the local news report just in time for the evening broadcast. He stretches out across one of the double beds and makes himself comfortable, his red hair tucked back into a man bun. When River shifts into his wolf, his fur is auburn, though not so quite as bright as his human hair. Willow is extremely jealous of all the attention his wolf gets from the other she-wolfs over his striking coat of fur, though it’s harder for him to camouflage into his surroundings sometimes because of it. It’s a cross the cocky bastard bears happily and even his damn wolf likes to preen from time to time while in his fur.

The report catches my father’s ear and he looks up from his file. It’s become a ritual for him to study its contents every day, like a stark reminder or a punishment to himself. I pray to the moon we catch Bale quickly, not only to get justice for those he has slaughtered, but also for the sake of Father’s sanity and so he can finally get some peace. I wonder if he will retire when his greatest foe is put down, but I think he will keep on hunting rogues, not just out of a sense of duty, but also atonement, until the day he joins the warriors in the sky after he fights his final battle.

The news anchor is warning citizens to bring all their small pets indoors every night and not leave small children unattended. To be vigilant, keep gates locked, doors closed, and stay alert. Few details are given surrounding the dead hiker, and the police force are refusing to comment on a possible connection between the animal attacks and the missing dog walker. The sheriff urges folks not to be reckless, not to try and take matters into their own hand and try and hunt down these animals. He warns them to stay out of the woods. The last thing this town, or our pack needs, is untrained rednecks firing at anything that moves in the trees. Things could get nasty real quick. Our wolves will defend themselves when it comes down to us or them.

 But I know people don’t just go missing, they just don’t want to be found, or people lose them, and I bet it’s the latter in the lost man’s case. I’m more sure of it now than before, that coyotes are not what plagues this town. And we had better put it down before anyone else gets hurt, either by the killer itself, or by the panic it brings along with it. A quick trip through the woods is all it will take to pick up the killer’s scent. Tonight, we will end this one way or another.