“Aren’t you the alpha’s pet human? What the fuck are you people doing?”
I snarled and darted forward, landing a punch that did a satisfactory job of wiping the disgust off his face, replacing it with pain and surprise. As he staggered back, I closed my fingers around his windpipe, shoving him flat against the wall.
“Where is he, you son of a bitch?”
Vic gasped, clawing weakly at my arm. The pain barely registered.
‘Easy,’ the belt said, the sound of it echoing in my skull with its excitement. ‘Too easy. Must find the alpha. Must.’ I got the idea that it wanted to find Chaz for the challenge—the kill—not because I wanted to find him to prevent him from hurting someone else while handing him a nice helping of revenge in the process.
Vic was struggling to speak. My fingers eased up just enough for him to take a breath. “... not ... you can’t ...”
With a shake that thumped the back of his head against the graffiti-stained concrete of the body shop, I hefted him higher until his feet left the ground. He choked, his eyes bulging. The belt was radiating a fierce desire to squeeze the life out of him by collapsing his windpipe, which I only barely managed to suppress.
‘Kill it. It doesn’t deserve to live.’
“I need him, you fucker. Shut up and let me do this.”
Vic was already looking at me like I was off by a few degrees on the crazy meter. I’m sure by now I had notched over from “a little nuts” to “totally batshit” in his eyes. Maybe I was. Gritting my teeth, I ground out a few more words, all the while battling the belt’s urging to crush his windpipe.
“I need to know where Chaz is hiding. Tell me. Now.”
With a little more effort, I eased my grip on his throat just enough for him to speak.
“Not ... not telling ... you!”
“Talk, you mangy excuse for a moon-chaser! Or do I need to use some silver to cut it out of you?”
“Never!” he choked. By then he’d regained the urge to fight, and started struggling. He kicked me, hard, using the leverage of the building behind him to shove me off him. We both landed on our asses, me sprawled a few feet away.
He made the mistake of trying to jump me instead of running.
Already hyped up from the earlier chase, burning with the need to hunt, the belt rose up in me like some leviathan from the deep, sliding into my limbs and directing my actions like I was no more than a marionette. With a detached sense of dull horror and panic, I could only watch and take in the sensations like a bystander in my own head as I whipped out one of the silver stakes, using the momentum as Vic yanked me toward him to embed it deep in his shoulder. He let out a howl of pure agony, his grip loosening, and I forced the stake in deeper as I rolled him to his back to straddle his waist.
His irises still burned that strange yellowish color as he gaped up at me, the hand from his uninjured side weakly clawing at my shoulder. The silver was paralyzing him. Even through the gore and the rip in his shirt, black corruption was visibly creeping over the edges of the wound and into his blood as it spread through his veins like poison. Unlike Chaz, Vic’s body wasn’t strong enough to handle the taint for any length of time. If the weapon stayed in his body too long, he’d die, even if the wound alone wasn’t a fatal one.
This was too much. While I was caught up in the chase, the thought of killing Vic hadn’t seemed so bad—but this wasn’t what I’d signed on for. He wasn’t who I was after. This wasn’t how I’d pictured this hunt ending. Maybe beating him up, hurting him a little, yeah. But I’d had every intention of sending him on his way and moving on to Chaz as soon as Vic told me where to find the bastard. The threat of using silver on him had only been that—a threat. I had never intended for things to go this far.
I silently told the belt to stop hurting the lesser Were and to pull the stake out. It ignored me. My muscles wouldn’t respond no matter how hard I concentrated on shifting my position.
For the first time, it used my mouth to speak, one of my hands cupping Vic’s jaw to force him to look at me while the other still held the stake firmly in place just below his collarbone.
“Where is your pack leader? Where are the rest of the Sunstrikers hiding? Tell me now and I’ll make it quick.”
The Were stared up, his eyes now bloodshot and dilated with panic and pain. His voice was weak, every breath a gasp. “Can’t ... won’t ...”
My facial muscles twisted in a frown. It wasn’t me making it happen. Inwardly, I was screaming, searching for the key to get out of this prison in my mind and stop this before the belt went too far.
“... kill you ... Every Other in Tri-State Region will kill you for this....”
That set my heart to skipping a beat, even though I doubted the truth of the statement. No doubt, the local shifters in the community wouldn’t be happy to find out one of their own had been hurt by a silver-wielding vigilante hunter. Thanks to the pictures of me in full hunting regalia that had made it into the news after the fight against a crazed sorcerer in Royce’s restaurant, La Petite Boisson, no one would have difficulty figuring out that Vic’s wound came from one of my stakes.
I hadn’t wanted to do anything more than rough him up. What if he died from silver poisoning before I could regain control of myself? I stepped up my efforts. A shiver traced down my spine, and the belt backed off, letting me withdraw the stake from Vic’s shoulder.
It left a dark hole that instantly filled with blood and pus threaded with black flakes of rot as his body fought to repair the damage. The smell of putrefaction that wafted up made me gag, but I managed to keep from tossing my cookies and concentrated on the task at hand.
“You can still walk away from this,” I said, hoping it was true. That wound made me worry. Had the stake been in too long? Was he going to die anyway? “Just tell me where to find Chaz. I’ll let you go.”
Though his eyes were glazed with pain and he’d gone frightfully pale, he pulled his lips back in a rictus grin. Blood flecked his lips when he answered in a gurgling whisper. The stake must have clipped his lung. That, or the internal silver taint had spread faster than I’d thought. “... die ... You’ll die for this ... hunter....”
Chilled, I rose on unsteady feet. This wasn’t what I’d meant to do at all. The White Hats were supposed to help me interrogate and then release him. Killing him wasn’t in the plan. Wasn’t part of the deal.
My preoccupation gave the belt an opening. Once again, my limbs moved of their own accord. Before I could stop myself, the belt had me draw one of my guns and fire point-blank into Vic’s forehead in one smooth motion.
The gunshot echoing between the two buildings was extraordinarily loud.
I screamed and staggered back, dropping the pistol as the belt released me just as fast as it had taken possession. Vic’s feet and arms jerked, his body moving in small spastic fits as if denying the last spark of his life had been stolen away. Something oatmealish splattered the concrete below his head in a growing pool of blood, and his eyes stared up and up into nothing.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, no.”
‘What? He would have died anyway. That just sped it along.’
“You ... What the fuck are you? How could you say that! Oh, fuck, he’s dead, I shot him—”
‘No one who matters will ever know it was you. Stop worrying.’
I staggered back, reaching for the edge of the nearest building. I leaned over, and my chest heaved in an effort to take breaths to calm down, but they were coming so fast, too fast, I couldn’t stop seeing those eyes staring up—