the rifle and marched toward the entrance.
“Dylan, where are you?” she asked, but only the wind replied.
It was daylight, and she gauged the sun to be almost directly above them. There was a small patch of blood near the white rock of the entrance, and she feared the worst, but realized it was probably Chris’. Dylan’s hands, even when he transformed back into a human, had been sticky with it from holding the old bear. Even when they’d made love, some of it had smeared off on her thigh. She felt unclean, warped by sweat and blood and semen and dirt and fear.
She followed the path, back up to the cliffs. Below she could make out the surf. It had settled a bit since this morning, and the sun was bright again, almost as if had forgotten its rain and thunder and temper from the night before. A bird tweeted somewhere distant.
From this vantage, she could make out the beach where Chris had been shot the first time, and where he’d injured the first poacher, that fateful day. Everything started from that, like dominoes falling, one after the other. Blood for blood. It was not a foreign concept, in human politics or shifter. But that never made it right.
There was something white on the sand. She squinted, trying to see through the salty atmosphere, and brought up the scope of the rifle, peering through it. It was a boat, the same outboard the four poachers – now one, she thought gritting her teeth – had come into their lives from. There were two figures, walking toward it on the sand, she didn’t need the scope to know who they were.
Reckless idiot, she cried to herself. What had he hoped to do? Parley for their lives? Or was it worse than that. She knew that only hours earlier she had calculated, bet on the same selfless strategy. He’s trying to lure the poacher away from me, she realized and cursed him aloud, her eyebrows narrowing into daggers and not caring if they could hear her or not.
No, not like this. Dylan was a hypocrite. I’m not losing anyone else, he had said. And neither am I, you bastard. Her fists bunched at her sides as she slung the rifle onto her back and took off running, her jeans creaking with each long-legged jump she took down the path toward the distant beach. I’m going to beat the crap out of him before this ends, she thought, scrubbing her cheeks with the back of her hand to keep the tears at bay and her vision clear, even as she skidded over tree roots and bypassed switchbacks, sailing through the air and landing hard on the balls of her feet.
“Just you wait,” she panted.
The sand felt good under his feet. He had left his shoes back in the cave with Sarah. He knew she might hate him for what he’d done but he hoped she would understand. But maybe that’s precisely why she would hate him for this. They were one and the same, equal in their passions. It was why they had been such a good match, he reflected, and couldn’t help but smile even as Arthur behind him urged him toward the crude skeletal frame of the outboard down the beach.
His arm ached where the poacher had pulled it behind him. It might even have been dislocated, he couldn’t be sure. His fingers were numb and tingly, and a dull pain swamped his whole right side. It hadn’t taken much more than a quarter hour of searching to find the poacher; he’d been clumsily following their trail through the underbrush.
To be honest, he wasn’t sure what he had hoped to accomplish, only to make sure that whatever happened, the rifle-heavy poacher didn’t find Sarah. When he stepped blindly out of the cover of the trees, his arms raised and face passive, he almost expected the older man to kill him there and then. But Arthur had had other plans, and Dylan could only grunt in pain and exhaustion as he was shoved face down in the dirt and his arm pulled brusquely up behind him. The fishing line that wrapped his wrists behind him now was sharp, and had already dug into the flesh like filaments of flame. He felt blood pooling in his slightly curved palms, dripping off his fingernails.
“Move,” Arthur commanded again, stabbing him in the back with the point of his rifle.
He hasn’t killed me, Dylan thought. That