Hunter's Trail

“Scarlett? Are you okay?” Eli asked from far away. I found his ice-blue eyes and tried to focus as they peered down at me with concern. Eli is tall, a few inches over six feet, with blonde hair and a lean, muscled, surfer build.

“Yep, yep, I’m good,” I said through my clenched teeth. “Just give me a second here.”

“You’re awake,” he said wondrously, examining my face like it might have been remade while he’d been away. “When I saw you having the seizure, I was so afraid you . . . but you’re okay?”

“More or less,” I said, pointing at the ground, where my cane had fallen. Eli bent to retrieve it for me. I thanked him and said, “Wait, Will didn’t tell you I was awake?”

Eli’s face shifted to something like bitterness. “Will hasn’t told me anything. At first he called twice a day to see if anything had changed, but then it’s like he gave up and forgot about me. I thought maybe he was punishing me.”

“Yeah,” I said uneasily. “There’s a lot going on there. Can we talk in your room?” I’d kept an eye out and was fairly confident that no one had followed me there, but the open-air motel was beginning to make me deeply nervous anyway.

“Oh, yeah, of course.” Eli put an arm around my waist, which almost made it more difficult for me to walk, clumsy as I am, but I let him help me down the hall to one of the plain motel doors, because sometimes guys need you to do that. He had rigged the bolt on the door to keep it open while he’d made his soda run, so he just pushed the door open and we walked inside.

The motel room wasn’t the worst one I’ve seen, but it wasn’t far off, either. Everything was shabby and threadbare, from the patchy, faded orange carpeting to the polyester bedspread that looked like it might have been saved from an estate sale in the ’80s. Or from a Dumpster. The bubble-front television had actual knobs instead of buttons, which I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.

Eli had made his own changes to the room: he’d pushed the bed to one wall, next to a round Formica table, creating a big open space where he’d laid down a clean sheet. He helped me to one of the four chairs next to the little table and took the next one for himself. I nodded at the sheet on the floor. “What’s going on there?”

“Oh,” he said, embarrassed. “I was trying to exercise.”

I nodded. “You must miss getting to surf.”

He shrugged. “I go over to the campus every night and run on the track, or do laps around the top of the parking garage. This is more for push-ups and stuff. A little yoga.” He ducked his head, embarrassed. “You know . . . man-yoga. For men.”

I blinked, finally understanding. I’m used to Eli being human, because he’s always been human when he’s around me. But werewolves are damn near indestructible, and he’d suddenly lost the ability to survive almost anything. It must feel vulnerable. No wonder he was trying to beef up.

Great job, Scarlett. Had anything good come out of what I’d done? “How do you feel?” I said quietly.

He smiled wanly. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“You go first.”

Eli exhaled. “I feel . . .” He thought for a moment, and a slow, building smile spread across his face. It sent a thrill up my skin. “I feel amazing,” he confessed. “I know I don’t deserve it, after what happened at the bar. But it’s like I’ve been walking around for years with thumbtacks stuck in the top layer of my skin, and suddenly they’re all gone. And it’s scary in a way, because I’m more . . . easily damaged. But it’s incredible,” he finished. He reached across the table to take my hand, and for once I didn’t pull away. “I was so worried about you,” he added. “But now you’re awake.”

His smile shone across the table, gratitude and happiness and guilt all sewn into it, and God help me, I didn’t want to tell him. For a moment, I considered just getting up and leaving. I could wish him luck, make my good-byes, and encourage him to get the hell out of town. I didn’t want him to know about the pack, or the murder, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to know that the wolves were committing mutiny and coming after me. The nicest thing I could have done for him would be to tell him we were over and walk out of there.

But I needed Eli to tell me more about the pack. And I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to him.

I took a deep breath, knowing I was being selfish. “There are some things you need to know,” I began.

It didn’t take long to fill him in on what had happened since I’d awoken. When I got to the part about Anastasia and her goons jumping me at Will’s, Eli’s hands tightened on mine, and his lips pressed together like he was swallowing a growl. Old habits.

“I can’t believe Ana’s terrorizing you for a cure,” Eli fumed.

“I don’t know,” I said tiredly. “I’m starting to think I should just give her what she wants.”

He sat up straighter. “You can’t do that!” he barked.

I arched an eyebrow, a little annoyed. Scarlett does not respond well to being told what to do. You’d think Eli would have figured that out by now. “Why not? I mean, she wants me to cure Lydia. It’s not like she’s trying to get me to rob a bank or drown a bag of puppies.”

“Because you have no idea if you would survive it, for one thing,” he said, holding up a finger to tick off his first point. “Because if it worked and you did survive it, every werewolf and vampire in the city—and probably lots of other cities—would come gunning for you. And because if it didn’t work this time, Ana would probably just think you were lying and you’d be exactly where you are now.” He waggled his three fingers.