The Hunter

Caught

Something poked into the side of Mira’s head. She refrained from snapping at whatever it was. As she came out of her sleepy state, she heard the murmur of voices. Her blood turned to ice in her veins. She’d finally been found, but the question was by whom?

“Wake it up, damnit.” A gruff male voice grated against her sensitive ears and she barely managed not to flinch. “I refuse to kill anything in their sleep, not even a mangy animal.”

Hunters. No shifter would talk about another shifter with such little respect. As her heart rate threatened to spike with of a mixture of fear and outrage, she forced herself to calm down. The only thing keeping her alive was their belief she was asleep. They would hear the change in her heartbeat and breathing, and they wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. The anger was easier to deal with than the fear. Right now flight wasn’t an option, which left her with fighting her way out of this mess.

Even with the rage slowly simmering in her, she managed to refrain from snapping or growling at  him for calling her a mangy animal Sure, she wasn’t the cleanest she’d ever been, but she bathed as often as time allowed her. In reality, they were partially to blame for her being this dirty. She mentally shook her head to clear the frustrations slowly bubbling up inside of her. Right now, she had to focus. If her fear or anger got the better of her, she wouldn’t stand a chance.

Another poke from what had to be a gun irritated her further and this time she barely stopped the growl building in her chest. “Dude, I’m trying, alright? It isn’t moving. If I didn’t see its chest rising and falling, I’d think it was already dead.”

“Well, obviously, you aren’t trying hard enough,” the gruff-voiced man snapped. “Do I need to do everything around here?”

“Hey, cut him some slack, alright?” One of the other men apparently decided to try and play peacekeeper. “You’re always harder on him than anyone else.”

“Trying isn’t doing,” Gruff-voice practically snarled the words. “And our family are doers, not triers. If we only ever tried, we wouldn’t be running our own base, would we? I won’t let him disgrace our family name, and are you really telling me that you’d be satisfied with only trying?”

On a chance, she mentally took a deep breath and popped her eye open to glance at the hunter right above her. The rock shielded her from the others, and her gut had been right. The hunter stood with the rifle loosely in his hand as he stared stonily at the gruff-voiced man who likely was his brother.

“What else do you want me to do?” the hunter above her spoke harshly. “We’re practically shouting and it still hasn’t woken up. I can shoot it now if you’d like but other than that I doubt we are waking it any time soon.”

The gruff hunter sighed. “Let’s just pick it up and take it with us.”

“What happens when it wakes up and attacks us for moving it?” The hunter shook his head. “We wouldn’t be able to kill it before it killed a few of us.”

She’d heard enough. She refused to die now. Not when she’d fought to stay alive for so long. With a fluid motion, she jumped to her feet and shifted into her human form. As luck would have it, the hunter had a knife in his utility belt and she intended to make it her lifeline. Before the hunters could register what was happening, she had knocked the gun out of the hunter’s hand, grabbed his knife in her hand and held it to the man’s throat.

As the hunter gulped, the scent of blood flooded the cave. Thankfully, the knife had just nicked his neck at the slight movement.  She disliked killing harmless humans, and in her clutches, that’s exactly what the hunter was. The hunters probably didn’t know how easily she could snap his neck, and she had no intentions of informing them.