Because clearly I have a fetish for redneck werewolves and their uptight, hunter boyfriends.
Here is the opening of The Hunting, Vol. 2, which I hope will be ready for publication soon. Or soonish.
_______________
FROM
THE EDGE of the forest, cool and dark, Jackson watched his lover shiver in the
grip of a nightmare.
Shiver, and then thrash—Eric
twisted free of his sleeping bag and kicked it away like a mortal enemy, one
bare foot crunching hard into the side of the truck bed. He came awake with a low, violent cry,
sitting straight up and reaching for the knife he always carried strapped to
his left calf.
It was gone. Left behind three hundred miles ago,
abandoned in a bloody field, in a town neither of them would ever return to.
If
we’re lucky, Jackson
thought.
Eric relaxed slightly, the tension
leaving his spine. He scrubbed a hand across
his face and stared out bleakly around him.
His gaze swept the clearing and the woods, passing right over the
shadows where Jackson lingered. Even if
he’d known where to look, he was just a man, with human eyes. While Jackson was anything but.
Eric shivered again, and Jackson
imagined he could see the tiny hairs on the back of his neck rise up and stand
on end. The mornings here carried
autumn’s bite, today worse than usual.
The wind howled around the open truck bed, whipping the short, dark
thatch of Eric’s hair. An overcast sky
warned of a nearing storm, an hour, maybe less, before the heavens burst open.
It was their fifth day here. Five days camped out in the game lands of
upstate New York, slapping at mosquitos, staring at trees, and sleeping in the
back of the truck together—if together meant lying down together with as much
space between them as possible. If it
meant Jackson waking up each morning while the sky was still dark to find
Eric’s back turned to him, shoulders hunched against him, every line of him
stiff with rejection even in sleep.
Jackson didn’t wake for him to wake
up, couldn’t. Each morning he slipped
silently away into the woods to hunt, or sometimes simply to run, to wear the
edge off his own tension and forget that Eric hadn’t touched him willingly in
five days.
Not since Jackson had changed into
a wolf and slaughtered Eric’s stepbrother while he watched.
If that killing had been murder,
then so be it. It had also been
justice. When Jackson was human, he had
worried over morality, right and wrong, and crossing the line. Now he was at peace knowing he would not
hesitate to defend himself against any foe.
And to protect those he loved, to avenge the wrongs done them, he would
kill without mercy. Again and again, he
would kill, until there was no one left to harm them.
And that was why Eric wouldn’t
touch him.
