The Hunted (Blood Series Book 0) Read online

  The Hunted: Prequel Novella to Blood of a Werewolf

  T. Lynne Tolles

  Version 1.0SW March 25, 2013

  Copyright © 2013 T. Lynne Tolles

  ISBN: 978-1-3018683-1-5

  Blood of a Werewolf

  First 10 and a half Chapters

  T. Lynne Tolles

  Version 8.1SW March 21, 2011

  Copyright © 2010 T. Lynne Tolles

  ISBN 978-1-4524288-2-6

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are the work of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, locals or events is coincidental.

  T. Lynne Tolles

  Edited by Erin Potter of Shamrock Editing

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Info

  The Hunted

  Blood of a Werewolf

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Letter from Author

  The Hunted

  Prequel to Blood of a Werewolf

  Devon approached a black Audi TT in the badly lit parking garage and hit the unlock button on his keychain. He was fully aware that he was being followed by someone or something but showed no sign of that knowledge to his follower. This wasn’t the first time he had been in this kind of predicament; he and his brother Blake had spent most of their adult life on the run. Some that came after them were better than others, but when you lived the kind of life Devon and Blake did, you learned a few things along the way.

  His pursuer—a heavy set man, badly dressed, with no agility whatsoever—was mediocre at best and Devon had detected him almost as soon as he had left his office building. Devon had reasoned that this man used his mass and strength to overcome his victims, not nimble prowess.

  Devon could see his own reflection on the car as he reached for the door handle. Even as he feigned unawareness, his dark eyes searched for his attacker in the reflection. He caught just a glimpse of the lumbering man making a dash for him in the darkness.

  Devon skillfully spun around as the heavy-handed man grabbed at him from behind. Devon was deceptively strong for his just under six foot tall, lean stature. He used his body weight in his spin to propel the briefcase in his hand into the face of his attacker. The weight of the laptop within served as an added kick to the man’s face, leaving him stunned and bloodied from a newly split lip.

  Devon’s attacker quickly steadied himself and threw a punch. Devon sidestepped the punch, surprising the man, and slammed the opened door of the Audi into his body, pinning him between the car and door. When Devon pulled the door open again the man moaned, staggering forward where the door had been. Devon locked his hands together and slammed them down hard on the back of the man's neck, rendering the man flat on the ground and out cold.

  Devon grabbed his briefcase with what he knew contained a smashed laptop. He grumbled as he tossed it into the car onto the passenger’s seat, then jumped in and started the car before he’d even closed the door. Slamming the huge man’s body into the door had sprung the door’s hinges and it took three attempts to get it to close well enough that he could drive the car.

  He slammed the gearshift into reverse and stomped on the accelerator, smoking the tires on the slick cement floor, and then threw the gearshift into drive and peeled out leaving only smoke and tread behind him.

  Once out of the parking garage and into the streets of the city, he pulled his smartphone out of his jacket pocket. He hit a button and said, “Text Blake.”

  The phone beeped and he said, “611, send.” The phone beeped in response.

  Over the years Devon and Blake had come up with codes to inform one another of impending problems.

  911 meant, “I’m in trouble. I need help,” and the receiver would engage a GPS tracker programmer on their phone to locate the sender and head there to help.

  811 meant, “I’m in trouble at home.”

  711 meant, “I’m in trouble, could use a distraction.”

  611 meant, “I’ve been attacked. I’m okay. Meet me at the house.”

  This was the message he was sending to his brother now. It had been tested, used, and amended many times. If one brother made it to the house before the other, he’d pack his own stuff, then pack for his sibling if he hadn’t shown up yet. It was fast, well-practiced, and allowed them to get as far away from the impending danger as they could in a short amount of time. There were many variations to the plan and many predefined codes. It was rather like a playbook a football quarterback and his teammates would memorize for different patterns of defense and offense.

  It saddened Devon that their lives had come to this—a bunch of codes, moving all the time, and always, ALWAYS there was the danger of one or both of them being killed. He wanted more of a life for his little brother—stability, a home, some place they could feel safe. He wished these things for himself as well, but this was the life they'd been dealt. No sense in wishing for things out of your control, he thought.

  Devon looked over at his briefcase as he set the smartphone on the armrest between the two seats. He shook his head and smirked, releasing a long, loose lock of his dark hair from his ponytail that swept across his cheek, tickling his nose. Damn…another computer, he thought with disappointment. Though he had gotten into the habit of backing it up daily, it was a rather expensive way to do battle and a pain in the neck to load and set up the way he liked, but it worked and it was better to have to replace his computer than be killed, leaving his brother to fend for himself.

  A couple more turns and finally he was on the freeway heading to the condo. He stomped on the accelerator and felt the transmission slip easily into its last gear as he weaved fluidly in and out of the traffic. The tension and adrenaline waned as he took a deep breath and sighed with a little relief. Driving had always been relaxing to him. The sweet smell of leather, the purr of the engine, and a driver’s seat that conformed to him like it was an extension of his body giving him support in the turns—this was relaxing to him.

  A few minutes later he passed a highway sign announcing the approaching exit when his phone chimed. He looked at it to see an emoticon from Blake—a semicolon and a capital ‘P’ responding to his displeasure at having to move on again. Devon understood Blake’s disappointment and felt the same.

  Taking the long, sweeping off-ramp, Devon was making his way through streetlights and stop signs into the neighborhood they had barely gotten to know. This had been a short stint, less than three months. Either they were getting sloppy in covering their tracks or the hunters were getting smarter.

  Looking back at the last two places they had rented and how they lived their lives, he felt sure that it must be due to sloppiness. The hunters they had seen lately hardly seemed like rocket scientists; however, he hadn’t really carried on any kind of conversation with the fellows. There’s not really time for small talk when you’re trying not to be killed.

&nbs
p; It must have been those speeding tickets Blake got and that little run in with the Feds when he got caught hacking into the police and DMV database to clean up his driving record, Devon thought. Their uncle had pulled some strings with somebody important and gotten the authorities to drop the charges, but if the hunters were looking in the right place at the right time, they’d have had a straight shot to their front door.

  It had been a scary time for them both. Blake was looking at hard time in federal prison and if that wasn’t enough, Devon would be on his own without a back-up. Blake could be a pain in the butt, but he ALWAYS had Devon’s back. Blake was known to be flaky—he admitted as much—but when it came to Devon, Blake was unfailing. He wasn’t as strong as Devon, but he was quick, wiry, and agile for someone so tall. Smart too—too smart for his own good. Devon always wished Blake would put that talent to good use, but so far it had almost landed him in an eight by eight cell with bars for a window.

  “I knew that fancy car of his would cause us trouble,” Devon said out loud to no one but himself, shaking his head. He knew, though, it would be a long, drawn out war to try and get Blake to get another car. If Blake was anything, he was stubborn—stubborn as a mule. Devon thought back over the years and wondered just how many times he’d thought or said those words to his brother. Thinking about his brother’s stubbornness and the trouble it caused them put a faint smile on Devon’s face.

  Devon pulled into the parking lot of the condo complex and backed into a spot that was not his own where he and his brother made sure the light was always broken. It made the black car almost invisible. Like a cat, Devon made his way slinking from one shadow to another until he made it to the familiar door. Without making a sound, he unlocked the door and quickly stepped in. He kept the lights off and moved silently through the condo grabbing this and that from here and there until he had assembled all that he needed—the necessities. The rest could be bought on the road or when they settled again.

  So far so good, he thought. Often the hunters came in pairs and would be waiting for them back at their latest sojourn. Of course he wasn’t out of trouble just yet. With a pen light he continued on to Blake’s room, packing those things his brother had informed him were requisite to his needs. Some of the items Blake had told him not to forget seemed ridiculous to Devon, but he knew there’d been a few things he had requested his brother grab for him that may have seemed the same to Blake. Like the copy of War and Peace he’d put on his necessity list. What Blake didn’t know was that it wasn’t the book itself that meant anything to Devon, it was the flower pressed between the pages he had put there the day of their parents’ funeral. He had taken that flower from their mother’s coffin that day and deposited it in the book. It served no real purpose, the dry, frail blossom, but it was his last connection to their parents and he wasn’t willing to part with it, if he didn’t have to.

  With bags packed and slung over his shoulder, he texted Blake another code informing him he had everything and was heading to the designated meeting place. As before, he kept to the shadows trying not to be seen. He was alert to anyone or anything that made a sound or posed a threat in his proximity.

  A guy wearing jeans that sagged so much Devon wasn’t sure how he was keeping them up was carrying a bag of trash across the parking lot fifty yards or so away. His flip flops smacked the pavement loudly as he shuffled along. Devon was startled by the sound of the trash bag crashing to the bottom of the obviously empty dumpster. The sound of crashing and breaking bottles echoed out of the trash bin and off the walls of the nearby buildings. It had been so loud and distracting that Devon never heard the grisly, dark man step out of the shadows between two large bushes and in behind him.

  Something cold and hard raked the back of Devon’s shirt and instantly he knew what it was and that he was in serious trouble.

  “Hands where I can see them,” said the hunter, poking him hard with the gun.

  Devon slowly raised his empty hands and stood silent and unmoving as his mind raced. This had been a clever hunter, waiting for a cloak of distraction. The hunter in the parking garage had been easy to spot. He had been clumsy and plodding, albeit strong. This hunter, however, had been stealthy. Devon was going to have to come up with something clever to get out of this on his own; after all, he had already sent the code to Blake that he was on his way to the meeting place. By the time Blake started to worry something might be amiss, things would be done here. He was on his own for this one.

  The gun nudged him forward towards a building between a break in the carports. It was the laundry room, Devon knew. The windows were small, dark, and high—too high and small to get out of, and dark due to the light timer that had been installed to save electricity and money.

  Devon was forced at gunpoint to the door and shoved into it, which indicated to Devon that his hunter wanted him to go inside. Devon opened the door into the dark, muggy room to be blinded instantly by the fluorescent tubes of light that hummed and popped as they grew in brightness. They had been activated by the motion sensor that had been tripped when they’d entered the room. It was loud and humid in there. A washing machine working on the spin cycle of what must have been a very heavy load seemed to be doing some kind of strange hula dance as it inched forward. Two dryers hummed side by side, tumbling their contents round and round within.

  Quite a good place to “take care of business” so to speak, Devon thought. The windows were too high for a passerby to see anything nefarious going on, and it was noisy already so a muffled gun shot might be heard but might not be identified as anything more than a car back firing. Lastly, the room could be locked from within to ensure there would be no interruptions.

  Devon stepped further into the room, his mind running in overtime trying to come up with a plan. He still had the duffle bags hanging from one shoulder and thought maybe he could use them somehow. There was nothing horribly heavy in either of them, unlike the heft of his computer in his briefcase, but maybe he could knock the hunter off balance, giving him some time to try and knock the gun from his hand. He waited for the hunter to come closer to him, and under the guise of turning to face him, Devon spun quickly at the last moment. The weight of the bags gained force with the spin and Devon kicked his leg out, catching the hunter behind one ankle and sending him backwards out of balance.

  It was not enough to make the hunter fall, but the man did have to steady himself with his gun hand. This was Devon’s chance. With the gun temporarily not pointed at him, he dropped the bags and lunged at his attacker, sending them both into the loudly thumping, out of balance washer, returning it to its original spot against the wall.

  Devon grabbed the hunter’s wrists, keeping the gun pointed away from him. Unable to turn the gun on Devon in such close proximity, the hunter slammed the gun into Devon’s head, splitting it open near the temple and his left eye. The men spun back and forth in an awkward dance as each forced their strength upon the other. Still holding the man's wrists, Devon’s back met the wall with a bang. He kneed the hunter’s thigh and turned them pinning the hunter to the wall. He slammed the hand holding the gun over and over again into the wall until finally the hunter dropped it near Devon’s foot. He kicked it away from them. He released the hunter’s wrists, cupped both his hands, and slapped both the hunter’s ears at the same time.

  The hunter was disoriented by the blow and Devon was sure his ears were ringing, but the hunter still threw two quick punches, landing one in Devon’s abdomen and the other in his left lower jaw. Surprised by the blows but shaking them off, Devon planted one of his own punches into the hunter’s left cheekbone then slid towards his nose. The hunter stumbled back reeling from the pain as he staggered forward. Devon put all his strength into his next punch, catching the hunter just under the jaw and lifting him up a tiny bit. The hunter fell back into a heap on the floor near a silent washing machine. Devon cradled his aching, bloody fist in his other hand.

  Once he could see that the hunter was not getting up, he g
rabbed the bags and fled the laundry room, limping towards his car. He knew he looked like hell and kept his head down in hopes no one would notice the blood running down his face or his bloodied fist. The pain was starting to kick in as he strained to get the thirty feet to the sanctuary of his car, when from behind he heard the whine of a revving motor and the skidding of tires. He turned just in time to see the hunter standing between him and the black sports car whose back end was skidding forward in an arc towards the swaying hunter taking aim at Devon.

  As if in slow motion, the back quarter panel of the sports car skidded into the dazed hunter, sending him flying head first into the dumpster with a loud thump, and leaving him in a pile like old rubbish. A familiar face appeared out from behind the door of the devil black sports car and a very tall man unfolded himself from the car. Before Devon knew it, Blake had the bags and his beat up brother in the car and was burning rubber out of the parking lot.

  They were on the freeway in no time, flying like the wind, when Blake asked, “You okay?”

  “Ya. I’ll be fine. Just a little sore,” Devon answered, cupping his fist. “How did you know something was wrong?”

  “I didn’t, but when you texted I was so close to the condo, I thought I’d just do a drive by to make sure you had left,” Blake said.

  “Glad you did,” Devon admitted, wincing.

  “Well, someone has to look out for you,” Blake said, loving this moment. Often it was Devon saving Blake’s hide, so he was really enjoying being the hero this time.

  Devon’s glare soon broke into a strained smile.

  “So where to this time?” Blake asked, smiling ear to ear.

  “I don’t know, maybe west?”

  “West? Cool. California then? I need to spy me some teeny bikini-clad surfer girls,” Blake said as he put on his sunglasses and turned to Devon with a huge, cheesy smile. He looked ridiculous wearing sunglasses in the dark car at night, but Devon thought anything less just wouldn’t be Blake.