Page 5 of Muted Voices (Broken Ashes #1)

I know how painful claw marks that deep can be, and the blood quickly flowing from the wound is concerning; he managed to get River really good, and as River starts to sway, struggling to stay upright on his leg, Griffith is still unable to get up, and Ransom still dazed I realise that it's up to me. I don’t really know these men. I could do what most people would do, and while the wolf shifter is distracted, I could make a run for it, but that’s just not in my nature. I can’t leave them to potentially get eaten and pulled apart by the shifter, especially after they were concerned enough about my safety that they wanted to walk me home, so it’s technically my fault that they’re in this situation anyway.

Keeping my stance relaxed, I whistle shrilly, gaining the shifter's attention immediately. I just make out Griffith’s eyes widening in worry as he tries and fails to get up again before my attention goes to the wolf shifter, and I ignore the growl of warning coming from River who is still limping and healing really slowly.

The wolf shifter stares at me, his eyes glowing hungrily. As he takes a menacing step toward me, I roll my eyes, “Oh come on, you overgrown puppy, I thought you wanted to maul me to death? If you’re not quick, I might decide to run,” I taunt.

“Neith, no,” I hear Ransom groan, but out of the corner of my eye, he still looks dazed enough that he can’t seem to get up, so I ignore him.

I need to get him away from the guys, preferably putting myself between them and the shifter since they’re all injured, and also so if I miss, which is very unlikely since I’m such a good shot, I don’t want to get one of them instead, that really would be adding insult to injury.

With this in mind and staying relaxed, I start to walk to the left, the wolf stalking my every move as I easily draw him away from River, and then keep going to make sure that I’m in between them and the wolf. I briefly catch Ransom’s narrowed gaze and wink at him, not able to keep watching him for long enough to see his response since my attention should be on the thing that is trying to kill me.

Once I’m satisfied that they’re protected, I stop, jut my hip out to the side, and raise my eyebrow at him, “You know, you aren’t very good at this. If I were you, I could’ve taken me down five or six times by now.”

I’ll admit I’m having fun with this, but then what do you expect? He did try to kill me, and he’s tried to kill the guys now as well.

“For fuck sake,” I hear Griffith curse behind me, and my smile widens, which taunts the shifter, making him growl.

I figure I should do this right, which is why I sigh and say, “Are you feeling reasonable enough to let these men take you in now? The very least you’ll be able to do is plead your case, although your odds aren’t too high considering that you’ve now attacked several SID agents.”

Without any warning, he launches himself using his shifter speed to sprint toward me. The guys all call out in a panic, but faster than any human should be able to move; I calmly pull out my gun, aim, and shoot him straight between the eyes, dropping him in one shot more than two meters away from me.

I don’t look at the guys to see their reactions, I know they’re going to have questions that I will not answer, but the fact of it is that I couldn’t let him kill the guys, and I certainly wasn’t going to let him kill me, nasty fucking way to die, being eaten.

Something about how strong he was against three such strong supernaturals is bothering me, and so I put the gun away, just in case the guys think that I’m going to do anything else with it, and then slowly approach the now very dead shifter, unlike you see in the movies, he’s not shifted back to his human form, you stay in whatever form you’ve died in.

Crouching near the body while I ignore the sounds coming from behind me as the guys finally heal enough to start moving properly, I frown; he’s a wolf shifter, as we thought, but up close, it’s easy to see that his proportions are off, his back legs longer than his front, following my instincts I lean further forward cursing my hair as my ponytail falls over my shoulder. I pick up a long stick and push up the lips on his snout before prodding the gums, only for two eight-inch long fangs to appear.

Fuck.

Abandoning the mouth, I look over the rest of him more closely, noticing that instead of normal paws, he has talons, a strange mix.

“What the fuck do you think you were playing at?” River demands, sounding angry and very much human again. I get the feeling that he doesn’t get angry often, and I must have really scared him by doing what I did, especially since he thinks I’m human and, therefore, should have died. Clearly, that hasn’t caught up with him yet.

Before I can answer though, Griffith interrupts, “What the fuck is that on your neck?”

“Shit,” I mutter, standing up and turning to face three very angry but decidedly better-looking supernaturals; I mean, they’re all standing, which is an improvement for sure.

Understanding flits across Griffith’s before he takes a step closer and growls as he says, “Are you fucking stupid? Did you really put three tiny bandaids over a wound from a shifter? A wound that could kill you?” He asks incredulously, anger saturating his tone, “They’re too small even to begin to cover the wound properly. Why didn’t you go to the fucking hospital.”

“Griffith, calm down,” River warns him, back to his usual self, seemingly and clearly worried that Griffith is going to scare me.

“Right one, stop fucking yelling at me right this fucking second,” I reply, moving toward him so I’m standing toe to fucking toe, even though it’s not nearly as intimidating because I have to look up at him in order to make eye contact, interest sparks in his eyes as I don’t back down or even feel frightened at his angry tone.

One of the guys scoffs, trying to hide his laughter, but I refuse to break the stare-down I’m having with Griffith.

“You put bandaids on a fucking shifter cut,” Griffith grits out.

I throw my hands up in exasperation, which admittedly would have had more impact if I wasn’t standing so close to him and didn’t smack him in the chest when I did; however, I refuse to apologise and instead carry on, “Well, what did you expect me to do? Have you ever tried to stitch up a cut on the back of your neck? It's damned near im-fucking-possible. It is almost as awkward as trying to stitch up your side; I got dizzy last time because I did it standing up and kept going around in circles trying to get to it better. I looked like a damned dog chasing its tail.”

I realise after I finished my rant that there were a lot of things in that sentence that I probably shouldn’t have said, and I’m hoping they focus on the ridiculous side of it rather than the more telling side of it, a small town waitress shouldn’t be stitching herself up.

“Shifter claws kill humans,” he growls, and then his eyes widen as it occurs to him what it means that I’m standing in front of him, perfectly fine and still smelling wholly human. I take a step back. I have a feeling I’m going to need to make a swift exit in a minute.

“She’s definitely human,” River chimes in, his head tilted to the side as he studies me and then sniffs the air to check.

“But how?” Ransom asks, his eyes narrowing on me.

And that’s my cue to leave before any more questions start to be fired my way and before they realise that a human just moved quickly enough to kill a wolf shifter running at full speed.

“Well, thank you very much for walking me this far. I can see that you guys now have your hands full with dealing with this, you don’t want the locals to catch wind of it, or there’s likely to be unrest and riots and all that sort of shit.” As I’m talking, I move further and further away from them as they turn to watch me walk away, all of their arms folded over their chests, and I take a moment just to appreciate the delicious view in front of me that I’m most likely never going to see again. “By the way, that wolf is part vamp and not naturally so; we all know that’s impossible. You’ve got a mad scientist on your hands, and one that’s playing god and who’s creations don’t seem to be able to control themselves.”

With those parting words, I finally spin on my heels and speed walk over that barrier, the tension that I didn’t realise was there releasing as soon as I’m on the other side as I make no rush to walk away.

“Neith,” River starts to say, only to be interrupted by Ransom, as I don’t slow down.

“Let her go, she’s clearly had enough, and she’s right; we have shit to deal with, especially if the last thing she said is right,” Ransom says.

I don’t stop. I don’t look back despite how much I want to. It’s surprisingly hard to walk away from them, knowing that I’m never going to see them again, but I force my feet forward; I need to get home, and I need food. I’m hungry, really fucking hungry.

Ransom

I stare after the beautiful yet entirely strange and quirky woman. Of course, that doesn’t detract from her beauty at all; if anything, it adds to it. River is practically vibrating next to me, wanting to go after her to make her stop, ask her all the millions of questions that we desperately want answers to now because she’s not a normal human, and there are many reasons why she isn’t, but the main reason is that she put herself between us and danger, she willing protected three supernaturals and virtual strangers at that. I don’t know about the others, but I have never had a human try to protect me, and I have no idea what to do with it.

It's one of the reasons that I’m insisting we let her go, she’s an anomaly and before we talk to her again, and make no mistake we will be talking to her again, I want to make sure that we know who she is and whether she’s a threat to us because she sure as hell feels like it.

Don’t be a dick and lie to yourself; she doesn’t feel like a threat; her actions prove it. You think she could be a threat because she’s making you feel things that you’ve never fucking felt before and you don’t know how to fucking deal with that.

Thankfully, Griff decides to interrupt my inner chastising, “We’re seriously just going to let her walk away? Ignoring the fact that she actually can walk away since we can now be certain that the blurry-faced woman that I saw in my vision, wearing a Bobby’s shirt that got attacked, was in fact Neith?”

“We know where she works, we know the vague direction that she lives in, we will talk to her again, but right now she’s closed off, she went toe to fucking toe with you, she’s had enough, we aren’t going to get her to talk tonight and I have a feeling that Neith is the kind of woman that if we push she’s just going to get more stubborn and we’ll never find out about any of the mysteries that surround her and there are more than one,” I try to reason with the big brute, I’m not stupid I know that for some reason his Gargoyle is still close to the surface and those instincts seem to be urging him to go after Neith most likely for the same reason that mine are, she protected us.

There is no doubt that it could’ve ended very differently if she wasn’t here, at the very least, we owe her our lives, and that’s not a small thing at all.

“I’ll fucking say she’s a puzzle,” River replies, with a cunning smile, “I love puzzles.”

“We know,” I reply and then force myself to turn away from Neith’s rapidly shrinking figure, she will be fine, I tell myself, she was last night when she went up against the wolf shifter, and tonight she killed the fucker. My mind starts to try to pick apart the mystery that surrounds her and grows more complicated the more that I get to know about her, but I force it to stop. We have a job to do and one that’s a whole lot more complicated than we thought it was going to be. “Let’s get to work, as she said; I highly doubt that the locals are going to take kindly if they realise that a shifter was on the loose so close to their town.”

“If Neith is to be believed though, it’s not just a simple shifter,” River points out. “Although that does bring up another mystery about her, how did she know to check the shifter over to see if there was anything unusual about him?”

“A good point. It’s one of the first things that we do, but we’re agents; that’s our job, and not only that but we’re supernaturals too, I think we can all agree that the strength that this shifter exhibited was not normal and was in fact far more than he should’ve had. We should have easily been able to subdue him and take him in without him having to lose his life.” Griff adds.

I watch as River scrubs his hand across the back of his neck and winces, “Yeah, I’m kind of embarrassed about that. Not a very good first impression is it, to lose to one shifter when you're supposed to be a rare and powerful supernatural.”

I chuckle as Griff stares at him incredulously before he frowns like the thought has only just occurred to him as well, and he doesn’t like it. It’s extremely telling and I refuse to admit that I feel the same.

“Don’t worry, man,” I point out, “she thought there was something strange about him anyway, and if she’s right and he is part vampire, then she knows he was crazy strong.”

River sighs in relief, “Good point. I’m glad she’s not a normal human.”

“Let’s get on with it, shall we?” Griff suggests, striding forward and clearly done with this conversation, although whether it's his usual boredom that he has when other people are concerned or that he feels confused about how much Neith doesn’t bore him remains to be seen.

River nears the body and then takes a deep inhale, his nose wrinkling in distaste, “Oh he’s definitely a vamp and a wolf shifter, but he smells all wrong, like he’s rotting, there’s a chemical smell that’s underlying it all, and although we know that it never really was a possibility, he isn’t a natural hybrid, he’s been experimented on and made this way. He smells like the others.”

“You think he was made by the guy that we’re looking for?” I ask, instantly alert.

River sniffs again and then nods, “Yeah, same chemical smell underlying the other scents. It would be undetectable to any other shifter.”

“This one lasted longer than any of the others that we came across,” Griff points out, “and what the fuck was he doing all the way out here? We had absolutely no leads that pointed in this direction. The closest one was in that town, damn near five hours away. The only reason that we are here is because I had a vision of Neith.”

“A vision that lead to us finding the hybrid,” I reply. “So maybe that’s why you had the vision of Neith.”

Griffith hums, not really agreeing with me but not disagreeing with me, as he replies, “Yeah, maybe.”

“I don’t think that’s right; it doesn’t ring true,” River interrupts.

Although I agree with him, I really need to keep us on task, which is why I say, “We better call the others and get transport out here. This body needs to get back to the lab so that they can work out exactly what this monster is doing to these poor supernaturals.”

“On it, boss,” River immediately replies, pulling out his phone, putting it on speaker, and dialing one of our other team members.

While it rings, Griff mutters, “I think we’re lucky that it’s unlikely that anyone but Neith is going to come out this way.”

“Absolutely. None of the other locals seemed that friendly, did they.” I reply with a grim smile.

“Everything okay?” Reed’s deep baritone growl comes through the phone, sending shivers down my spine despite the fact that I know he’s unequivocally on our side and one of my best friends. It’s an automatic response, one that all supes who come into contact with Reed have, and one I definitely try not to show around Reed; he hates it.

“We’ve run into a small hiccup,” River replies.

“What kind of hiccup?” Evander barks, always on edge when we’re separated like we are now.

“You know we were following Griff’s vision of that blurry-faced girl?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Raiden replies this time, sounding impatient as usual.

“We found her, but it also found the wolf shifter who isn’t just a wolf shifter but also a vamp,” River explains.

“Fuck, a hybrid?” Reed questions, “Do we know if it’s the same as the others?”

“Oh yeah, definitely smells exactly the same with the same chemical undertone to his scent,” River replies.