make it to the grove of tightly growing cedars off the bank, then maybe they’d have a chance. She winced and held the gun in front of her. “One of us might get away.”
Dylan snarled. “Both of us or none of us. I’m through losing people today,” he grated.
“Do you have a better plan?”
Without looking, Dylan reached down and touched Chris’ shoulder with his fingers. “This bastard wants a trophy and he was expecting bears. I say we give him bears”
She thought about it. It would mean abandoning the rifle, the only real form of protection they had against the poacher, if they both turned into bears. But it might just give them the speed and opportunity to outrun the poacher in his nest. They could make better distance as bears. But it was still chancy.
“I have a better idea,” she said.
From his perch, Arthur had a perfect 180 degree angle on both of his quarry. He hunched down, feeling the stone under his legs start to wear into the muscle, but kept his eye firmly locked on the sight. He would get one chance, one chance if he was lucky, and he refused to miss it. Through the magnification of the scope he could make out Kyle’s body. The shifters had killed him too, he suspected. There was a dark patch of blood but he couldn’t see the rest of Kyle’s body.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he muttered, his finger resting lightly on the plastic trigger.
The girl was a good enough shot. She’d managed to fire off two rounds at him, and if he hadn’t been slipping in another clip, that first one would have got him through the forehead. She knew how to shoot, which troubled him. These weren’t ordinary prey. Besides the fact they could change at will between bear and human, and he’d seen that well enough to know it wasn’t fiction any longer, at least one of them had training with a rifle.
He looked down his scope again. All he had to do was wait. If the girl was using Kyle’s rifle, there were only a couple more rounds left. Meanwhile, he had at least a hundred bullets and two extra clips. Let them get weary, and it’ll be their end, he thought.
Two minutes passed. Nothing. No movement at all. He craned his eye through the scope, trying to get a glimpse of anything that would signal their presence. He hadn’t seen them leave. To the left and right, it was open trail, he would have noticed. Were they playing coy or had they managed to sneak past him somehow? He felt worry gnaw at his stomach and started to chew on a twig. The muscles in his arm were starting to cramp.
Then, there was a flurry of movement – not from the tree trunk or the rock shield, but to the right. A brown movement. He tried to readjust and saw a bear-like form trying to lumber off. So, abandoning your sweetheart, huh, he wanted to mock. He looked down the graphite muzzle and prepared to shoot. Just then, another shot boomed to his right, and several chips of the boulder beside him sparked against his face. He flinched and turned back. A ruse!
Another shot, and he ducked, heard the ozone of a bullet swim above his head and snarled. He was leading away his aim while she took a shot. It didn’t matter, Kyle’s rifle was a bolt action, and his was a semi-automatic, which gave him at least a four or five bullet lead on her if it came to speed. He aimed down his sight again. The girl was running. A shame, but he wasn’t about to give up a good shot. Maybe he could just clip her, she was beautiful and the combination of the hunt and his mad lust for revenge had stirred other feelings in him, dark primitive feelings that bubbled in his loins.
“You’re on your own now, pretty,” he said, aiming for her ankles.
But the narrowness of his scope had suddenly been used against him. He saw a black shape move in the opposite direction, putting his aim off balance, and was forced to look over his scope with his own two eyes. He saw the black grizzly returning from the other angle, and saw the woman wrap one arm around his neck and swing her leg over his hump as if he were a horse. It was all one fluid movement, one second earlier or later, a slip of