The first thing Nif thought when she woke again was she was kind of getting sick of waking up in unknown places. Her head pounded and her right arm ached in dull pulsing waves. Keeping her eyes closed, she strained her ears to hear if anyone had noticed her waking up. Over her own breathing, she could hear the low humming of a television through the wooden floor her cheek was pressed against.
What was the last thing she remembered? The forest. Crashing the van. Oliver. Where was he? Was he okay? Her throat clenched imagining him left out there, nobody knowing where he was, unconscious and freezing during the night.
A toilet flushed and a door opened and closed. Nif risked opening her eyes a crack, squinting from the light shed from the naked bulb set in the ceiling. Someone had dumped her on the floor of a small bedroom, blackout curtains over the only window so she couldn’t tell if it was day or night. For a moment she felt completely adrift, a step removed from the natural movement of time, but then her stomach grumbled and it pinned her more firmly to reality. Whether it was breakfast, lunch or dinner, it had to be close to a meal time. A metal bed frame ran across the far wall, the springs sagging in the centre, and a wooden chair was by the open door. She couldn’t see Oliver in the room. Her heart sank.
Footsteps approached from the hallway and Nif closed her eyes and did her best to calm her breathing even though her arm was starting to throb. The person paused and Nif imagined someone watching her, maybe checking to see if she was conscious yet, before the front doorbell rang and a voice drifted up from downstairs for someone to answer it.
The footsteps hurried away and someone called out that the pizza was here. Nif’s stomach rumbled, but she ignored it to instead flex her arm. Someone had bound it, but she was pretty certain her wrist was broken. The pain was incredible, waves of heat racing up into her shoulder and spiking into her chest, but it cleared the last of the fog from her head.
Downstairs the television was turned up — some kind of sports game — and there was the familiar clang and bustle of plates and cutlery. Hopefully the pizza would distract them for a little longer. Nif carefully propped herself up against the wall and then had to pause to get her breath back, her head spinning. How long had it been since she’d been captured? The last thing she’d eaten was a strawberry and pecan muffin from To Bean or Not to Bean on the drive over to Moira’s university. Was that yesterday? The day before? She felt like a hollowed out shell.
Carefully, she eased herself along the wall until she reached the door. She snuck a look into the hallway. It was dimly lit by the light filtering up from the stairs. There were three doors that opened onto the hall not including her own. Was Oliver being kept in one of those? The room she was in was near the end, opposite what was perhaps a bathroom if the soft hissing of the plumbing was anything to go by. No one else appeared to be up here and she eased back into the room, tugging the door shut behind her.
Moira’s phone was thankfully still tucked into her bra. At least Baskerville or his brother’s hadn’t snuck in a grope while she was unconscious. It took a few seconds for the phone to switch on and all the while Nif strained to hear anyone’s footsteps on the stairs. But her heart sank when the password screen appeared.
“Dammit,” Nif murmured, her head dropping back to softly thump against the wall. Why hadn’t she handed over Moira’s phone when Baskerville had asked? Then again, Nif’s phone was huge, the screen big enough to read books on, which was why she’d gotten it in the first place, and she’d have had a hard time trying to hide it.
She cupped Moira’s phone in her palm. Her lifeline and yet a few digits were all that kept her from calling for help. Until the phone rang in her hands. She swallowed her shriek, pressing the vibrating phone to her chest as if the soft hum would be audible from downstairs and then answered it without even checking to see who it was.
“Shit, Nif? Is that you?” Moira’s voice was like a hit of pain relief. The throbbing in her arm faded and the headache eased and for one perfect moment, Nif thought everything was going to be okay.
“Moira.” The name was spoken on an exhale, so quiet Nif didn’t think she’d heard her.
“Thea! She answered!” Moira yelled, the phone briefly being held at arm's length. “I knew you still had my phone. I’ve been trying it non-stop for hours. Where are you? Are you okay? Is Oliver with you? He went after you, but no one’s heard from him and I’m worried something awful has happened.”
“Oliver was with me, but they tranquilised him and I passed out for a bit. I don’t know where I am or where he is. Baskerville took me out to a forest. He wanted to hunt me. He’s not alone. His whole family is in on it.” The same icy fear that had almost been her undoing beneath the tall, wintery trees threatened to swallow her up again. The edge of the phone dug hard into her palm, grounding her. “I almost got away, but they caught me. Oliver tried to rescue me, but they shot him! What time is it? They may’ve left him out there, cold and alone. Someone needs to go check, but I don’t know where he is!” Nif’s voice rose in volume as she panicked.
“It’s okay, Jennifer. I need you to stay calm,” Thea said. Moira must’ve put her call on speaker. She couldn’t hear much on the other end as if they were all holding their breaths. Was Clare or Sapha there? Had her parents been called? “Do you know where you are now?”
“I’m in a house. Oliver isn’t here, but maybe they’ve put him in another room. The place is more than one storey. They’ve just ordered pizza!” Nif almost laughed.
“Can you tell me who took you?” Thea asked.
“Baskerville and his family. There are five of them. Wolf shifters. All of them, I think. They’re a pack. A man named Daz appears to be their alpha, but I get the feeling Baskerville is still calling all the shots. Oscar drove the van. Dougie should still be in highschool. He’s young. Maybe sixteen or seventeen? And a sister called Stella, but I never saw her shift into her human form.”
“You’re doing really good, Jennifer,” Thea assured. “Are you in a safe place right now?”
“They can come in at any minute. They’re all downstairs eating. They still think I’m asleep.”
“Okay, Jennifer. This is what I need you to do. First, go into Moira’s settings and turn off any sound or vibration notifications. We’re going to track you, but we don’t want them to find the phone.”
“I need the passcode.”
Moira spoke up, voice shaking and muffled as if her fingers were pressing against her lips, and rattled off the four digit code.
“Got it?” Thea asked.
“Yeah.” It was hard using the phone with only one hand, Nif’s broken wrist still cradled in her lap, but she managed and shakily pressed the phone back to her ear. “I did it.”
“Good. Now I need you to walk me through what happened. If you hear someone coming, leave the call connected but hide the phone.”
“I understand.” Nif tried to explain the events after her kidnapping, but she struggled to keep things straight in her own head. She was exhausted and in pain, and she had to keep stopping to check if the thumping was footsteps on the stairs or from somewhere else in the house.
“Take a deep breath for me,” Thea was saying and Nif realised she was starting to hyperventilate.
“Have you found her location yet?” Moira asked someone and there was what sounded like a negative. Something about interference. A net of some kind, which made no sense to Nif’s foggy mind.
“Jennifer,” Thea said. “Is there a window at all? Can you tell us what you can see?”
“Okay,” Nif said. She moaned deeply as she pushed herself up against the wall, her wrist tucked against her chest and the phone pressed against her ear.
“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” Moira sounded panicked and Thea ordered someone to take her out of the room.
“I’m okay,” Nif panted, eyes closed but standing on both feet. Her knee felt wrenched, something she’d not noticed over the pain of her wrist, and she suspected her entire body was black and blue from when she flew through the van windscreen. “I think I broke my wrist when I crashed the van.”
“A van?” Moira shrieked from further back.
“You should see the other guy,” Nif joked, and winced as soon as she said it. “Pretend you didn’t hear that. Give me a second. The window has curtains.” She edged herself towards the window, using the wall for support and tried to move as quietly as possible. Someone would be up to check on her soon. Surely all the pizza was gone by now. How long had she been on the phone?
The black out curtains were heavy and she had to wedge the phone against her shoulder to avoid using her sore wrist. Beyond the window she could see the moon.
“Is it a full moon tonight?” she murmured, and peered out into an overgrown garden painted in silver moonlight. “I don’t see any other houses. Just a big garden surrounded by huge trees. There’s an old shed and a ute with no wheels growing weeds out of its windows.”
“And yet you said something about pizza. Was it delivered?”
“Yes. I can see lights through the trees. They’re moving. Red and white.”
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“Maybe near a road.”
“They’re moving fast and they’re pretty frequent. One, two, three, four...heaps are going past.”
“A freeway or major thoroughfare then. That narrows it down. You’re doing so good,” Thea praised.
A shout rose up from downstairs and Nif could hear arguing.
“I think they’re coming up. What should I do? Pretend to be asleep?”
“If they’re wolf shifters, then they probably can tell if you’re faking. Hide the phone on you but don’t hang up. Try and get out of the house if you can.”
“But what about Oliver?”
“See if you can find out if he’s in the house with you, but don’t take any risks. We’ll do our best to track your location and be there as soon as possible.”
“Be careful,” Moira called out, but Nif couldn’t reply. Heavy boots were thumping up the stairs, two at a time, and all she had time was to stuff the phone back into her bra and steel herself beside the window, cradling her broken wrist. At least she was on her feet.
“Did you close the door?” It was Dougie, his voice a tired whine.
“You were the last one up here. What do you think?” a young woman growled. Nif instantly knew the woman was Stella. She must’ve shifted really young. The ends of her sentences lifted up as if she was about to howl and some words were interjected with yips or huffs.
The door slammed open, the hallway light now on, and Stella loped in, completely unconcerned about what she may find inside, while Dougie lingered back, wearing a ruffled blue and black school uniform. He was twisting a button anxiously, a habit since some of the buttons had obviously come off in the past and been replaced with others of a slightly different colour. In his spare hand was a box of pizza, the logo a familiar chain.
“I see our clever little bird is awake,” Stella grumbled, approaching Nif side on, never taking her eyes off her. The woman was only a few years older than Dougie, but there was something about her dark golden eyes that chilled Nif to the bone. The curve of her mouth was mocking, her lip curling up to reveal a canine tooth too sharp for a human. Her brows were like dark slashes and her hair was the colour of chestnut, strangely neat for someone who was the personification of wild and unruly.
“You should let me go,” Nif whispered, shrinking back against the curtains.
“I don’t think so. You’re not stupid.” She laughed, a deep, huffing sound. “What you did in the van is proof enough of that. Let me guess, you’re going to tell us how you won’t tell anyone. That you’ll pretend this never happened. That you won’t go to the police. We’re not stupid either.” Stella leaned in close and snapped her teeth, then laughed again.
“Where is Oliver? Did you hurt him?”
“Ha! That big oaf?” Stella snorted. “He’s just as defective if he has a non-shifter as a friend.”
“Please. I need to know,” Nif begged Dougie, hoping he’d be swayed. He shuffled awkwardly.
“Bas said the bear shifter is useful. We locked him up in the shed,” Dougie admitted and Stella growled, cuffing the younger boy over the head. “Hey! What was that for? Daz and Bas want her to know they have him. That way she’ll do what they say!”
Stella just huffed and paced, back and forth, as if she could barely stand to be enclosed in the room. So Oliver was alive, still. The relief was almost paralysing.
“Why are you doing this?” Nif tried and was honestly surprised when Stella answered.
“Because your kind are aberrant outcasts that need to be scrubbed off the face of the Earth!” Stella spat, her words so heated Nif could almost feel them waft hot against her cheeks. “There is no point to you. You’ve nothing to offer and all your kind do is take, take, take!”
“But you don’t even know me.”
“I know your type.” She tossed her hair back and crossed her arms, almost protectively. Dougie watched, wide eyed, from the doorway.
“Our father was just like you. A non-shifter. A freak. Took his power with his fists and then he didn’t even have the balls to stick around. When Mum got pregnant with Dougie, he flipped his shit and skipped out of town. Good riddance I say, but then Mum died.”
“It was my fault,” Dougie whispered.
“No it wasn’t,” Stella said, voice almost bored as if they’d had this conversation many times and she was getting tired of repeating herself. “Five kids in less than ten years would mess up anyone.”
“How old were you?” Nif asked softly. “When your mother died?”
“I was two,” Dougie admitted. “I don’t really remember her.”
“I was barely five,” Stella said. “Daz was fifteen going on forty. He’s been the alpha even before our father left, but with Mum gone and our deadbeat dad in the wind, do you think the authorities would let us be?” Stella’s teeth sharpened inside her mouth, twisting her words. “You’ve no idea what we went through. You’ve lived on borrowed time until now, wasting resources and using people as if you have the right.”
Nif could barely understand the young wolf shifter now, but there was no missing the hatred burbling up from the young woman and spewing sharp through her words.
“My brothers always give your kind a chance, just in case you’re a late bloomer, but I know it’s just rubbish. I’ve always been right. No amount of prompting has ever amounted in any shifting from you lot.”
“Come on, Stella,” Dougie said. “Bas will want to know she’s awake.”
“Right. Well, Dougie thought you might be hungry.”
The younger boy lifted the pizza box and smiled shyly. Nif couldn’t recognise the uniform and he wasn’t close enough for her to read the school shield embroidered on his pocket.
“I don’t see the point of feeding you,” Stella added. “You’re not livestock. It’s been generations since our family ate what they hunted. We’re much more civilised now.” Again that laugh. It would haunt Nif’s dreams. “Go on, give it to her if you’re going to. I’m going to tell Bas his precious pet is awake.” She looked Nif up and down and smirked. “She doesn’t look like she’s going to shift any time soon.”
Stella passed Dougie in the doorway, but she lingered, keeping a sharp eye on the two of them as Dougie offered Nif the pizza box.
“I hope you like pepperoni. We’re mostly meat eaters in our family, but you can always pick it off,” he said. Nif reached out and he shuffled closer, close enough for Nif to make out the words Anning High with the motto Endeavour to Excel written in cursive beneath.
“What year are you in at Anning High?” Nif asked quietly, offering the boy a smile.
“Year eleven,” he said even as his sister was striding across the room. Stella backhanded Nif across the face and she bounced off the wall, crashing into the metal bed frame. The pizza box ending up under it, slices with pepperoni dashed across the floor.
“Hey,” Dougie complained, but he didn’t move to help Nif.
Nif had instinctively reached out both hands to catch herself and the blinding shock of jarring her wrist left her breathless, a scream lodged in her throat. Bracing her arm against her body, she froze, pushing the pain down deep so she could breathe again without crying.
“She was fishing, Dougie. Don’t tell her anything, okay. Now go on, get. I’ll keep an eye on her.” The wooden chair was dragged across the floor and a body huffed as it settled, but Nif ignored the wolf sister until finally she felt she could relax the muscles in her head. The headache was back and there was no way she could stomach any pizza.
“Can I have some water?” Nif whispered, risking a glance up.
“No,” Stella bit back.
Nif hoped the others had heard her comment about Dougie’s school. They now had his first name, his year and the school. Surely that would be enough to track him down and get a home address?
The sound of a blender switched on in the kitchen and suddenly the power went out.
“Again?” Daz shouted. “How many times do I have to tell you, Dougie. You can’t use the blender at the same time as the sandwich maker!”
“I need my protein shake,” Dougie shouted back. “How else am I going to bulk up?”
“Have you heard of exercise?”
“Wait. What’s that?” Stella growled. The chair was knocked over as she stood abruptly, her eyes glued to Nif’s chest. It was glowing. In the dark, the lit screen of the connected call could be seen through Nif’s shirt. “Hand it over or if I take it I might end up plucking out your heart instead.”
Nif pulled out the phone and reluctantly passed it to the woman. Her connection to her friends cut off as Stella dropped the phone and slammed her booted heel into the screen. It shattered, the phone going dead.
Instead of shouting to her brothers, she howled, but their responses were just as immediate. They piled into the room, and Nif found it hard to breathe in the claustrophobic space.
“What is it?” Daz asked, arms crossed over his chest.
“She had a phone. Someone was listening in all this time.” Stella gestured to the dead device on the ground and began to pace again. She was clearly itching to transform.
“Shit. What did they overhear?” Daz asked.
“She asked what year I was in,” Dougie admitted. He looked at Nif as if she’d betrayed him somehow. She wondered what he would’ve been like if he’d not be brought up by a bunch of sociopaths.
“And she said out loud the school he goes to. If they don’t already have this address, then they will soon,” Stella said and she apparently gave up fighting to change and gave a full body shake, shifting into her wolf form and wiggling free of her clothes and boots.
Baskerville stormed over and before Nif could move, he grabbed her chin and shook her head until she wanted to vomit.
“Looks like you want the hunt to end sooner rather than later,” he growled. “This isn’t how we normally do things. You see, we’re really only doing this for you. To make you more fit to be in our society.”
“Let go of me,” Nif said through clenched teeth. His grip grew tighter.
“You should be thanking us. We’re offering you a chance to shift. You and the other defects only need the right circumstances to introduce a shift and that’s what we provide.”
“What if I don’t shift?”
“Then you don’t deserve to exist.” Baskerville let go of Nif’s face to instead grip her jacket and yank her to her feet. She swayed but his grasp kept her from falling. “Non-shifters and partials are abnormalities that must be eradicated from the human race. It’s our duty to assist.
“So the others you killed...” Morris and the O’Conner sisters, Jeremy the young chef and Belinda and Sarah.
“Don’t take it personally,” Daz said over his brother’s shoulder. “It’s just natural selection.” The alpha brother turned to Oscar and gave a nod, and Oscar snagged a confused Dougie out of the room. Stella remained by the door, her hackles raised.
“Bas, we should leave her here,” Daz said and strangely enough it wasn’t an order like Nif expected from the supposed pack leader. “Burn her with the house. No evidence, no consequences.”
“I think this will be the most exciting hunt yet, brother,” Baskerville said, never taking his eyes off Nif. He sniffed deeply, as if he could smell Nif’s fear. “We’ve grown lazy without the need to watch over our shoulders. This time the stakes are higher. We’ve got our prey,” he shook Nif and laughed when she cried out in pain. “And yet a second party will be at play. Will they get to her first or will we?”
“Very well, Bas, but we must be quick. The safety of the pack is our first priority.”
“Of course, brother,” Baskerville said and released Nif so suddenly she stumbled and crashed to her knees, the pain briefly drowning out the pain in her arm. “You better run little girl. We’ll give you a headstart, but don’t think that’s going to save you. The only way you’ll get away from us is if you sprout wings and fly.”
Nif ran.