Luna of Rogues

Part 50 - Kill or be Killed

We carried on walking in complete silence. I couldn't help the feeling of dread building inside me. Somehow, Malcolm — the human — had managed to rattle me. There was something smug and cocksure about his manner, like we were all puppets and he was holding our strings, like we were acting out some sick performance for his benefit.

Within minutes, we reached the first sentries. They were crouching, and the snow beneath them was stained red because they had caught a squirrel. They tormented it like a cat would a mouse — letting it run half a metre, then dragging it back towards them with a knife.

Bloody ferals.

Distracted as they were, it was easy for us to sneak from tree to tree. Rhys and I were armed with our own knives and the strongest branches we could find. We snuck up behind them, hit them over the heads and then gutted them. Between us, we dragged their bodies into positions to make it look like they'd argued and killed each other, just in case anyone came looking.

It wasn't necessary. We could have gone around them easily ... but they would have kept the poor squirrel alive for hours. Hours of undeserved suffering and fear. Yes — we were about to kill hundreds of people, and we found the time to care about a single rodent. It was stupid but, at the same time, it wasn't.

With the ferals dead, I picked up the squirrel carefully. She was hurt badly — one of her feet was missing, her tail was broken, and they had removed her front teeth so she couldn't bite them. She wouldn't survive the day, let alone the winter. Sighing, I took hold of her neck and twisted as quickly as cleanly as I could.

"Why? Why are they so cruel, if they're just wolves?" Rhys demanded.

"Because we don't have a human brain and a wolf brain. We only have two halves, and they don't work quite right on their own," Leo said.

I nodded thoughtfully. "And Goddess only knows what else that pill screws up."

We heard snow crunching to our left, so we moved on quickly, before we were seen. Rhys and Leo had let their wolves out — their eyes were pitch black. I kept my hood up and walked behind them, and no one looked at us twice. I wasn't the only female, but I was the only one who didn't look like a corpse walking.

The camp was eerily quiet. It was the hour before dinner, when it was still too light for revelry but too late in the day for running errands or training. We reached the first water barrel before we had gone twenty metres, and we crowded around it, pretending to drink, while Leo measured the width and height and relayed the measurements to Fion.

Right now, Jace would be marching the prisoners to a meeting point between the camps, utterly clueless. I could only hope it would be a pleasant surprise for him — the feral threat destroyed without him having to lift a finger. Maybe he would even be grateful, and maybe he could overlook that I had lied to him. The last thing I needed was a war with the packs.

"Fifty-four centimetres, did you say?" she was asking. "That would be seven and a half millilitres."

I unscrewed the bottle and used the syringe to measure out the poison. The dark liquid was slow to spread in the water — extending inky tendrils in every direction. We watched it disappear warily. It didn't feel real, that what I had just done would kill people, but maybe that was for the best.

An hour went by like that. Occasionally, we would catch Aaron and Connor's scents and realise they had already dosed a barrel. More than a few times, we had to wait for Fion to finish calculations for the other teams before she could help us. We decided to call it a day when we had nearly run out of poison and every barrel we found looked familiar.

"Ryker and Emmett finished ten minutes ago. They're out. Team Knuckleheads isn't far behind," Fion informed us. "So move your asses."

"Yeah, yeah — asses are moving," I promised.