Chapter 1
Chapter 1
“Give her another shot. It’ll keep her going. She doesn’t need to be in the peak of health. We just need her to be alive when we deliver her, or we’re all fucked.”
I felt another needle bury into my skin and groaned. I knew what was coming next. The uncontrollable beating of my heart, practically tearing through my chest wall. I had no idea what was in the shots, but it must have been some form of adrenaline. Every time the pain coursing in waves through my body became to much to bear, and I started to succumb to that blissful darkness, they gave me another, the metal tip puncturing yet another area of my sweat stained skin, driving down nearly to bone, before releasing the liquid that somehow left a metallic bitterness on my tongue. My captors wouldn’t even let me sleep, for fear I might not wake up. They were probably right to be fearful. My body was catching up to what my brain had long ago decided.
I couldn’t take any more of this inhumane torture.
I was on my fifth shot, and I knew my heart couldn’t keep the pace the medicine demanded of it. The men had given up on trying to remove the source of my pain, the bullet, burrowed into my shoulder. Without removing that lump of metal that I could feel grating against my scapula with every lurch of the vehicle, I was only going to grow weaker.
When they’d first dragged me into the van, they’d slapped a bandage on the wound which had been oozing blood that pooled into the blankets on the floor where they had discarded me. But that had been hours ago, even days maybe. I’d lost track, laying on the makeshift bed between the two benches along the sides of the van where the three werewolves sat, doing little else but watch me, occasionally prodding me with their feet to make sure I hadn’t died.
They sat with their backs pressed against the van’s side walls, as the driver went over another bump. It felt as though the roads were becoming more remote from the number of potholes we seemed to be hitting, the axel sometimes dropping so deep, I would slide across the floor. I didn’t hear nearly as much traffic either, and the smooth roads of the highways were long gone.
I felt it suddenly. The burning in my veins. And I sat up, fighting against the feeling, clawing at my chest, whimpering even though my throat was dry from dehydration. Goddess, it hurt so much. My heartbeat began to accelerate and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I let out a sob, my dirty hair falling over my shoulders as I tried to draw my knees in to my chest.
“Shut the hell up. I can’t take any more of your feral shrieking,” one of the men bellowed, pushing me back down to the pile of scratchy blankets.
I’d nicknamed him “asshole,” but he seemed to be some type of leader. He was always the one barking the orders at the others. Not that there were too many orders. We’d been driving with few stops other than gas and a little food, not that they’d given me any.
My back arched up as I struggled against him, fighting to free myself from this nightmare road trip. His rough hands held me down, forcing my body to still although my heart felt as though I were running a marathon.
“Don’t waste your energy. That was the last shot. We’ll be there soon and the alpha will want to see you. You need to rest until we get there.” The voice was from the youngest werewolf. He was a little older than I was and I’d nicknamed him ‘the grunt.’ His voice was kind, even if he had been the one to toss me in the van at the start of all of this, though really it had been a collective effort. One of them had grabbed me from the ground and I didn’t know where the others came from, but suddenly they were there in medical gear, that had been long since discarded to some corner of the van. Surprise surprise. They weren’t the EMT’s sent to help me after all. I tried my best to still myself, but my hands involuntarily fluttered against the blankets, jitters from whatever the hell they had pumped in to me yet again. I couldn’t tell if the tremors were muscle spasms at this point, or if my body was experiencing small seizures from shock.
The van finally came to a lurching stop on dirt and gravel. I heard it spit up into the wheel wells as the driver applied the brakes. I’d nicknamed the driver ‘the betrayer’. I could hear him open and close his door through the thin metal partition that separated the back of the van from the front. The men began to move around, grabbing their go bags and gear, popping open the door, turning to pull me out.
One of them pulled me up to my feet and tore off my dress. I tried to cover my body, but he was already pulling an oversized shirt over my head, completely disinterested in my nearly naked form.
“Put these pants on. You’ll be more comfortable.” He handed me a pair of sweats and I gratefully tugged them on, tying them as tightly as I could. They still hung loose on my hips.
“You look more presentable now. This will be over in a minute,” the grunt whispered in my ear as he propelled my forward.
I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be comforting, or if it meant that I would soon be dead.
