The Hunters Heart

Chapter Four

Damon

It was impossible not to watch her when she was in the room with me.

Not even when I was surrounded with so much disaster, my ex mates people bleeding right before me. Not even after knowing that I was almost killed earlier, a bullet barely missing me.

It was the way she carried herself, her stealth and aura. I watched her now as she rolled her sleeves up and began ti work on the unconscious men sprawled across the lobby of my building.

“This is gonna cost a ton to clean up, couldn’t you have done it less bloodily.” I groan as I watched Theo drag one of the men, their weight barely bothering her as she dragged them across towards a closet room.

“You’re a billionare, use that money for something good.” She called out as she hurled the man into the small room. The only sign that he was alive was the groan he let out.

“Multi-millionaire” I corrected her. “And one doesn’t stay rich if they’re throwing money at this and that mess.” I was joking, she snorted in response. We were starting to speak each others language as weird as it seemed, just as I was careful with her, she was careful with me.

Theo didn’t break a sweat as she hauled another man up and carried him over, while I easily picked up the third man to the closet and left her to deal with tying them up. She was efficient with her work, and she did it so thoroughly that it was hard to see any fault in it all.

And the way she didn’t tire, the way she carried the bodies of the men that obviously weighed more than her over to the closet…it was almost inhuman strength. I was in awe watching that unfold before me, her green eyes in slits like those of a predator.

“They will serve their purpose once they’re awake,” Theo called out to me as I stood rooted after hauling the third guy, and I was so in my head that I failed to do anything else. “But for now, you need to clean up after yourself.”

That snapped me out of my thoughts.

My secretary immediately jogged up to me, seemingly uninjured by the whole fight. He filled me in on the protocol they followed to protect majority of the staff. When in danger, they were to evacuate somewhere safely while the security personnel took care of everything. And that was exactly what they did.

They were a few deaths of course, and many of my security details needed questioning as to how the threat got to do this much damage that nearly took my life.

“Deal with it, and have PR control the story.” I nodded at my secretary. “Get me a detail on every injured and dead person, and report back to me. They or their families will be compensated for what happened today.”

“Right away sir.” The Secretary said before leaving to get the job done. I sighed watching him leave, not everyone that worked here was a werewolf, some of them were truly vulnerable and it would be entirely my fault for dragging them into my family business.

I turned around to find Theo a little farther out, seemingly looking around the building for more clues that the attackers might have left. I felt an unusual pull to her and found myself hurrying over to her side before I could decipher what was going on.

“Got anything, detective?” I teased as I got to her side.

Theo harrumphed as she twirled a knife with her fingers, “Hardly. But I think it foolish to wait around for the attackers to wake up so we question them. It will be a waste of time, I will rather be out looking.” She turned to me then, her eyes frowning. “And don’t call me detective, I am a hunter.”

Her nostrils flared just so, and I smiled inwardly. I was getting to her. Good. The best way to know someone is when that explode, and so to trust her I must pry her open and make sure she’s entirely on my side.

“Alright, Hunter,” I stressed the last word intentionally and she rolled her eyes, “Where do we go from here?”

Theo brought her knife closer to her nose and took a whiff of it, I realized it was caked with blood of possibly one of the attackers. Except she wasn’t using a knife earlier.

“I dabbed some of their blood on my knife,” she said with a shrug, like it was as casual as dipping cookies in milk. “It will help us track the others, here.”

She let me sniff and my wolf senses immediately made me growl, hunger for a hunt rising from my insides. All my senses were alert and I knew exactly where to find them, and hoped to the moon goddess that it would lead to Logan.

This was all for Logan.

“Let’s go,”

•••

Following a trail easy enough in the woods, but in a city like Aetheria, mixed with the stench of the people and the rot of the city, it was much harder. Thankfully, with Theo by my side, we were able to track the scent of the blood towards the outskirts of the city that lead to the Crescent bayou, a muddy patch of land surrounded by water and waste.

“I never thought to use the scent of someone else to find another,” I chided at Theo, less questioning her judgment and more out of curiosity that she could just do that. “Usually you hunt someone with their scent.”

Theo shrugged before answering, “It’s more to do with who the person mingled with recently, it helps if they have been…intimate with each other. Their scent carries in each others blood.”

I cringed at that idea, “So we’re following someone that f****d him?” I asked. “What if it’s a totally human and normal person and not Lyra’s people.”

“Then that’s it I suppose, we try another way.” Theo said as she stalked around the bayou, eyes sharp and ears perked up in alert. The fog was thicker in these parts of the city, making sight even more difficult for the normal human. But Theo seemed to be fairing well with that.

The bayou was alive with the sound of birds above us, and crickets far away. Insects buzzed behind my ear, and it felt like I could feel the pulse of the place.

A snake slithered by my leg, its hissing sounded more like a warning than anything, making the hairs in my back stand. Theo stopped midway and turned to me, a sort of confused look to her.

“I can’t follow the trail beyond this part of the bayou, I don’t know where else to go.” She seemed a bit lost. I couldn’t pick up anything at first, but with my heightened abilities of an alpha, I began to catch a whiff of something, and I began leading the way.

We were quiet for most of the way, her steady breathing beside me being the only sign that she was with me on the path. I strained to hear anything, but there seemed to be no one else nearby. There was only water, and the trees that surrounded us.

It was eerily quiet, not even the snakes were here. Neither could I hear the sound of the crickets and the birds.

“Something isn’t right,” I whispered to Theo. It felt too quiet, like trouble brewing over the horizon.

Theo paused and looked ahead to a patch of land that seemed dryer than the muddy trails, and just there sitting on the ground was a notebook covered in blood.

I hurried over at the sight of the familiar leather cover, not stopping to think why it was there. I crouched and sniffed at the blood, and my hands began to shake at the familiarity of it all.

“Logan,” I whispered, “He was here, is here. I don’t know. This is his blood, this…”

I trailed off when I caught sight of Theo’s eyes. There was something in there that was soothing, she seemed to be reaching out to comfort me without moving a muscle and we were a stuck in a sort of trance.

Then I smelt it. A whiff in the air, it causes me to still and snap out of Theo’s gaze.

I could smell the Heart wolf. She was a myth, a legend that was passed down generations. And yet here I was in the middle of the bayou with Theo, and I could almost smell her.

Before I could make sense of any of it; the heart wolf or my sons blood coating an old notebook, I heard a snap. Theo and I looked up just in time for the wires to shoot up and capture us in a vice so painful it jerked me back to relief.

We had walked right into a trap.