Page 38

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

Avery

When Avery wakes up, he’s curled against Sascha’s side, both of them in nothing but underwear.

Sascha’s awake, poking at his phone. Avery smacks the device out of Sascha’s hand, knocking it to the mattress, and throws his leg over Sascha’s waist. His lips descend, and they kiss like they’ll die without it, Sascha squeezing Avery’s hips hard enough to make him gasp.

He bucks down, finding Sascha already hard under his ass.

“We do not —” Sascha moans when Avery bites his neck. “—have time to fuck right now.”

“Do we have time to shower?”

“I don’t think showering is negotiable.”

Avery kisses him quickly, there and gone, then bounces backward on the bed. “I’ll blow you in the shower, then.”

Neither of them lasts very long, which Avery supposes is a good thing.

He licks come from his lips as he climbs off his knees, only to be swept up by Sascha, kissed, and finger-fucked with his back pressed against the cold tiles.

Then Avery washes Sascha, following the contours from his firm pectorals to his toned belly, then down to his well-muscled ass.

Sascha ends up face-first against the tile, moaning while Avery, on his knees again, circles his tongue over Sascha’s hole.

It ends with Sascha massaging hotel conditioner into Avery’s hair, Avery’s cheek resting on Sascha’s chest, right above his heart. They rinse off and exit the shower to find half an hour has passed, but Avery doesn’t regret it, and Sascha doesn’t appear to either.

They dress, then go to the complimentary breakfast bar on the main level and try not to look like starved dingoes with how much food they eat, even if it’s an accurate descriptor.

Then, heaving twin sighs of exhaustion, they shrug on their heavy backpacks and leave the hotel with a friendly wave to the concierge, as if nothing’s wrong. Just another couple on vacation.

“What’s the plan?” Avery asks tentatively, worried by the way Sascha is frowning at his phone.

“I can’t get same-day tickets for a flight off the island.

They’re booked until tomorrow, so we’ll have to take the ferry to St. Ignace instead.

I was hoping to avoid that obvious of a play, but I don’t want to stay here too long.

We did our best to throw them off our trail, but they have numbers on their side, so they could easily spread out, cover more ground, and… ”

Avery knows better than to express optimism, but he does so anyway.

“The island is really busy, and it’s still early.

We’ll get to the ferry and take a taxi north out of St. Ignace until we can get a car, like you said.

It’ll work out, Sascha.” Sascha doesn’t reply, which means Avery’s attempt at reassuring him didn’t work.

Without anything else to say, Avery grips Sascha’s hand, squeezes it once, and follows him into the street toward the docks.

Not wanting to look around and see what he’s missing, Avery stares at the road as they walk, allowing Sascha to tow him.

Despite extra strength from the werevirus and building muscle on Dennings Farm, he’s beginning to wilt under the heavy backpack again.

All Avery wants to do is get onto the boat and sit down, which makes it twice as bad when Sascha’s fingers tighten, and he stops abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Where?” Avery asks, because he doesn’t need any other signal to know they’ve been caught.

“Up ahead, by the ferry booth. One cougar and one wolf.”

“Have they seen us yet?”

Sascha pulls Avery behind a building. “Don’t know.

Fuck .” He pulls out a tourist map of the island, frowning hard as he studies it.

“Okay, if we go through here”—he indicates a courtyard advertising nearby bathrooms—“we can get to Market Street and hit Fort, and if we follow that to Huron, it’ll take us into the woods. ”

“ Wonderful ,” Avery says, sarcasm thick. “Exactly what I wanted. More traipsing around through a bunch of fucking trees.”

A hysterical grin overtakes Sascha’s face as he stuffs the map into his backpack. “This time, I have no idea where the fuck we’re going either. I’ll try to take us in the direction of the airport, though.”

“‘Try’ being the operative word?”

Sascha only laughs, and it’s not a happy one, but Avery laughs too. They must look unhinged, speed-walking down the road wearing equally manic grins, but not a single person seems to notice.

True to Sascha’s word, taking Fort Street to Huron Road brings them to a fork, both sides branching into different sections of a massive chunk of forest. Sascha frowns at the map again before saying, “The roads here are a fucking nightmare. Anyway, we’re going right.”

That’s the more heavily wooded road. Avery only sighs .

Sascha continues to mutter while they walk. “I’m thinking we can walk to the airport and maybe just… hang out inside until we can get a flight.”

“So, tomorrow?”

Scowling, Sascha says, “I’m not sure what else we can do. This island is so fucking tiny it’ll only take an hour to cross. Where the hell are we gonna hide otherwise? We can’t just walk in circles around the shoreline hoping no one heads us off.”

“That’d be funny. Like that scene in The Emperor’s New Groove,” Avery says, throwing him a smile that’s easier than it should be. “Hey, Sascha.” Avery tugs Sascha to a stop, then gently pries the map out of his trembling hands.

“I can’t handle a speech right now, babe,” Sascha says, exhaustion clear in the lines of his face.

“That’s fine,” murmurs Avery, stroking his cheeks like he could erase every mark left by anything other than a smile. “I don’t have enough words for a speech, anyway. I just want you to know?—”

A howl pierces the air, sending birds fluttering from the surrounding trees into the painfully blue sky.

It feels wrong to hear such a sound in the middle of the morning rather than while lost in the dark woods at night.

Something about the mournful wail feels so at odds with the sunlight, Avery almost pities the wolf.

Then Sascha seizes his hand, and they break into a run.

Avery doesn’t know where they’re running, and he doesn’t think Sascha knows either.

He’s dragging them away from the source of the howling, but then there’s another, and another, and another, until the woods around them convulse with the discordance of abused piano keys.

Ahead, to the right, Avery sees the stone walls and iron bars making up St. Ann’s Cemetery, and Sascha yanks him to a stop.

“No,” Sascha says. “Not a fucking cemetery. Not today, goddamnit. ”

“What’re you afraid of, zombies?”

Borderline hysterical, Avery finds the retort hilarious, but Sascha only hauls right to avoid the rows and rows of gravestones ahead.

They run so hard their hands unlink, backpacks slamming into their spines with every stride.

It’s not comfortable for Avery, but after what Sascha’s body has been through, it has to be even worse for him.

Eventually, Avery has to slow, desperate for more air.

He braces his hands on his knees, gasping.

Sascha, who, contrary to Avery’s assumptions, isn’t doing as poorly, fidgets but doesn’t rush him.

As Avery is working up the will to resume, a cave to his right catches his eye.

The opening is a horizontal slat in the stone, a gaping toothless mouth far too similar to the one he hid in beside Forgotten Lake.

A sign nearby calls it Skull Cave, claiming the interior was once strewn with human bones.

Avery wonders if they’re still in there.

When he tries to speak, Avery only manages a shaky whisper. “Are we gonna make it out of here, Sascha?”

Sascha stares down at him, brow knotted.

Avery wonders if he’s trying to figure out how best to lie.

Another chorus of howling rises like omens from the earth.

A single feline scream heralds the cougars joining in the hunt.

Avery meets Sascha’s eyes, his pale brows furrowed over blue-gold irises and pinprick pupils, contracted in the sunlight breaking through the trees.

In the end, Sascha doesn’t lie.

“We should shift,” he says instead.

“What’ll we do with our bags?”

Sascha tugs his shirt over his head, leaving his blond hair ruffled. “Can’t do much with them if we’re dead, can we? Put ‘em behind the fence.” He goes for his jeans, but Avery grabs his hand.

“We’re not getting naked out in the open, you braindead doofus. Let’s go farther into the trees.” Avery shoves Sascha to get him moving .

It’s painfully surreal. Avery rolls Sascha’s clothes, followed by his own, trying to make them take up as little room as possible.

Sascha blinks in and out of the aether, then sits by the backpacks, watching Avery roll his neck.

He feels played with, like one of those interactive pet toys, moaning on half-dead batteries while their operators watch and chuckle.

The trees shudder, then silence falls across the little intersection just beyond Skull Cave, leaving it so still every crack of Avery’s joints feels like laughter before a gunshot.

Halfway through his transformation, the too-familiar, vastly unwelcome cloaking spell drops, and just like that, Avery and Sascha are surrounded. Frozen in place, exposed on the edge of a historical cave remembered only for its bones.

Sascha raises his hackles and puts himself at Avery’s back, but it doesn’t do much when there’s only two of them and Avery is still swollen and torn, his new build not yet finished assembling itself.

One wolf darts in, meaning to hobble Avery before his shift can finish, which must have been their plan.

Roaring, Sascha swats it away. He also pushes back the second wolf, but the third strike comes from a cougar and a wolf coming at Avery from different sides.