5
Circling around the campsite, I counted two humans clad in thick clothes to protect them from the mosquitoes and armed only with the metal prongs on which they roasted their wieners. A cooler full of food sat on the grass beside where they were propped up in their camp chairs. I licked my lips and growled, salivating, moving deftly in the darkness until my paw crinkled a leaf by accident. Alerted to the sound, the humans stood and looked my direction.
They saw me, firelight lapping at the snarl on my maw.
I didn’t think. I just lunged.
Chapter 3: Billie
My heart couldn’t stop pounding. Sickening anxiety and guilt reduced me to a wreck in my bedroom. My fists clenched as I swallowed the humiliation of Gavin’s rage. His harsh voice rang in my ears. Thinking about how his eyes latched onto me made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. Then it was a flash of David takingaway my binoculars and grounding me. The tone of Catrina’s voice as she mocked me. It overwhelmed me, bringing me to my knees on the hardwood floor. The only comfort I could find was in clutching my arms and closing my eyes, small reassurances from my usual misery. But this time, there were flickers of something else. Something wild: anger as electrical as the excitement I’d felt watching the hunt, as uncontrollable as my heartbeat. It swelled hotly in my throat and coiled in my head like a viper.
What gave Gavin the right to talk to me that way? I hadn’t done anything except look at him.
I wished desperately that I could fire something back, but even if I mustered the courage to talk to him, I couldn’t back up what I wanted to say. I’d get out one, maybe two sentences before he would pick me up and crush my bones. I was helpless to assert myself, but that didn’t mean I didn’t deserve to be heard, right…? Or maybe it did.
Burying my face in my hands, I cried and stared woefully at the window above my bed until the muffled voices downstairs were silenced. Beyond the smell of salt from my tears, a faint dirt and sweat smell was reminding me of the hunters; strange that I’d never noticed these smells before. The rich, sweet perfume stirred up by Alpha David moving throughout the manor was most prominent. A few minutes later, the front door closed. From the window overlooking the front of the manor, I watched David trudge through the night and get back into his truck.
On my bedside table, the smartphone David let me have buzzed. ‘Go help Colt butcher that elk,’ read his text message.
The evening’s events stung me so much I didn’t even want to leave my room. I texted back, ‘Okay,’ and watched as David marked the message read, then pulled away in the truck.
The manor was eerily quiet, with everybody gone. My bare feet padded down the hardwood corridor on the second floor, past Catrina’s room and Colt’s room, and the master bedroom belonging to Alpha David, all with doors closed. I paused outside of Colt’s room and found the smell permeating from under the door to be the most pleasant: musky and piney like evergreen sap. His room never used to smell that way, so I wondered if what I had been smelling was a new cologne. Gingerly, I continued through the manor, pausing at creaking floorboards and harsh gusts of wind out of fear that I’d be ambushed again. When I finally made it through the basement door, I stepped onto cold cement and was smacked by the overpowering metallic stench of blood. It was so oppressive that it suffocated me, and I tasted it in the back of my throat and gagged.
In the chilly butchering room, Colt had the elk hanging by its hind legs on hooks above a metal grate below. The carcass was already skinned, its legs below the ankles sawed off, head removed, and savory organs harvested. They sat on a pile of ice cubes on a metal table, a gory scattering of offal glistening under the bright lighting in the room. Donning nitrile gloves and an apron both stained crimson, Colt had a hook in one hand and a curved butcher’s knife in the other, pausing from trimming the elk’s tenderloin to glance at me. “What’s with the face? You’ve done this before.” He smiled.
My hand clasped over my mouth from the smell. “I’m not feeling well,” I mumbled. The gash on Colt’s nose drew my eyes. “Are you okay?”
He wiggled his nose and the adhesive closures bridging the clefts of skin just below his brow crinkled up. “It’s nothing,” said Colt. “Just annoying.” He returned to work on the carcass, his lingering smile present in the atmosphere around him. “You can start packaging up the offal. The recipient's list is on the corner of the table.”
After washing my hands and putting on my gloves and rubber boots, I divvied up the organ meats on the table before me, sealing them in plastic, writing names on their labels, and storing them in a cooler.
“I’m glad it’s you down here and not Cat,” Colt eventually said.
“Was she supposed to help you tonight?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t too keen on it though.”
I carefully trimmed the fascia off the tenderloin cut. “Why?”
“She was just… unpleasant today.” His back was turned, so I couldn’t see his face. “Hey, how’d those binoculars work for you? Did you try them out yet?”
My guilt roared back to life. “David caught me using them.”
Colt peeked over his shoulder at me, his eyebrows pinched. A frock of black hair hung over his brow. “He did?”
“I’m grounded,” I said.
Now he looked annoyed. “He grounded you just for having binoculars?”
“Well, it was a little more than that…” I tried to focus on the cut. It was easier to give my eyes something to stare down at. “He caught me as I came in from outside.”
“You went outside?” Colt dropped his hands to his sides and faced me. “You could’ve just used them from your room!”