Hunter - Book 2 of the Hunted Series

Chapter 11 - Cleaning up

I woke up by Nick shaking my shoulder. He was sitting crosslegged on the bed beside me, packet of chips beside him, laptop on the bed in front of him.

“Want to see a birth? The internet has everything.”

"Not for months, Nick."

"Neither do I." He shut the laptop and put it on the bedside table, shaking his head. "There's too much on the internet." Nick moved to the window beside the bed and gazed out of it. "I think Stonehaven isn't burning any more, I can't see smoke."

I went to sit beside where he stood. One of his hands came to run through my hair, looking in the direction Stonehaven was. Had been.

"Was that earlier about Matt?" Nick asked, glancing down. When I nodded, he asked, "What's wrong with him?"

I told him about the bite. Nick's face drained of color when I said it, like Jeremy's had, and it just confirmed how big a deal it was. I kind of knew but ...to see everyone's reaction, after months if indifferent faces at girls suffering from the bite, it kind of drove home what we'd survived. As I spoke he came to sit beside me, our legs pressed up, his arm wrapped around my waist.

"Clayton survived. I grew up with him after. I can try and help you with this, and I know Clayton will, he's probably already mapping out how to tear this idiot apart. Which vein to go for first." He reassured me, nuzzling against my neck, his fingers twisting around mine and squeezing.

"He might not even survive the changes."

Nick didn't say anything then, as if he couldn't think of anything positive or reassuring, so he just nodded a fraction, chin brushing against my shoulder. My hand found his thigh, stroking it, feeling it flex and react to my touch under the fabric of the pants. Nick was so alive, so warm, I just had to touch him and I felt reassured somehow. Jeremy was right- Matt had a flood of grown werewolves who were raised from kids knowing about this and all here to offer him guidance and Pav was a trained nurse. I had to let them do what they knew how to do.

Elena interrupted us a few minutes later as she carried in some of our stuff from the room she'd taken over. Nick squeezed my leg and went to help her, moving things in, and I went to put them away, the cleaning somehow distracting from the greater problems. I was already looking forward to going downstairs and seeing Matt again, feral cub or not.

We had to go to Stonehaven, very suddenly, just as lunch was about to be finished. There was the problem of Nathan potentially being in the basement in a cage, and while it was usually private there would be investigations into the house fire now. He might have been burnt enough to cover his unusual genetics as a werewolf but if they found a body in a cage in a basement there'd be all sorts of assumptions and possibly worse trouble for Jeremy.

So we had to go and get it cleared out in under half an hour, slowly, carefully, without knocking down the fragile remains of the house, make sure there was no trace of the cage after, and then somehow re-soot the places our feet had touched. Only Nick and Noah went inside, Nick with enough balance to not lean on everything, and Noah being small and light enough to tiptoe behind Nick and follow his every footstep. I had a bag of fine soot from Forestwatch but went to gather soot from things, moving around to do it evenly, so that I could have an extra bag afterwards so they could cover their tracks as they backed out again.

They found him. I still didn't like him but the death he must have suffered, I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and I couldn't look at the blanket as he was carried out. Or whatever remained of him.

I did feel bad for Nathan, dying in that house alone, wondered how he'd been treated by that man, if he'd been abused for being too weak, too submissive to be any good. He'd tried to rape me, I knew that, but he'd also made it clear he'd hoped I'd love him eventually. He'd just been a screwed up kid that had no clue about the world.