Page 20 of Bad Blood

Three

It felt like a thousand needles were penetrating my skull and digging into my brain.

I groaned and squinted my eyes open, then immediately shut them against the bright light.

Everything hurt.

My shoulder, my chest, my arm, my ankle, my neck, my face…my entire body ached, like I’d been beaten to the edge of death and somehow managed to cling on.

Had I?

I tried to remember what happened, and…

Oh.

Oh, yeah.

Hadn’t I been in a pit?

My eyes flashed open. This definitely wasn’t a pit. What the fuck? Where was I?

Wait. Had Hunter caught me? But…I was running for days. Three days, I was pretty sure. I hadn’t seen any signs of being followed—by humans, at least. How did they catch me already? How long had I been unconscious?

My eyes darted around the room to see if I recognized anything, but none of it looked familiar. It was a big openspace with several pieces of furniture that were decorated in weird, mismatched patches, and along one wall, a wide wooden structure that had a bunch of…little things in it. Some of them were colorful, and I had the urge to look closer at them.

Were those words?

I leaned forward, and my chain caught on something. I followed the links to where it was wrapped around a concrete pillar several feet away.

Why wasn’t I in a cage?

I reached up to touch my muzzle, and it was still there. Of course it was still there.

I touched the collar around my neck, wincing when a spot beneath my shoulder twinged with a sharp lick of pain. I bit down on my lip to stifle the cry that tried to burst from my chest, then sat back when a wave of dizziness made the ground feel like it was tilting. White spots danced in my vision, multiplying until I couldn’t see at all. I groaned when my head started to pound on top of everything else.

I was about to fall off the world, and there was nothing to hold onto.

“Oh, you’re up. How’re you feeling? You hungry? How’s your head? How’s the pain?” Heavy boots sounded on the hard floor.

My eyes snapped open, and I tried to concentrate on who had spoken. A tall, blurry blob slowly came into focus, and I stared up at the giant in front of me.

I’d never seen someone as big as him, and…

Clean.

He was soclean.

His face was shaved down to the skin, and not a single smudge of dirt was anywhere to be found on him. His clothes were crisp and unsoiled, his short, dark hair shiny in the light.

I hadn’t known it was even possible to be that clean.

He took a step and I instinctively jerked backwards, then stood up. Pain shot through my left ankle and up my leg, and I started to fall over—except a huge hand snatched the front of my shirt and pulled me back upright.

“Whoa, careful, you?—”

With an angry growl, I ducked and slipped out of the shirt, leaving him holding onto it while I backed away. The chain was still looped through it, and it rattled and tugged at my collar as he held onto the shirt.

That wasn’t the same one I’d been wearing for the past five years—it was huge and clean and the material was thick, not ratty and riddled with holes.