Page 82 of Meeting Her Mate

There it was, that immense look of terror in his eyes. I showed no reserve the second time around, digging my claws into his body, aiming for his heart. Ralph yelled as I pounced on his body, my claws piercing deeper, my mouth closing around his neck.

I had played it out for this long for a reason. If Ralph had the Wolf’s Bane, he would have surely used it by now, but it was evident that he did not possess it. It became clear to me that there was only one vial of the potion currently in this building, and it was with Blair.

As for Ralph, I felt that I had gotten in a good amount of slashes, cuts, gashes, and bites. Good enough for retribution for the horrors he had unleashed on the town, but not good enough for revenge for killing my parents.

I had to kill him. A life for a life.

Out of nowhere, Ralph brought up a shard of glass as I was pummeling him on the floor and stabbed it into my leg. I howled and recoiled as the glass went into my body, jutting out at a strange angle. Immediately, my focus went from torturing Ralph to taking out that glass from my body. I closed my jaw around it and tugged. A spurt of blood followed the glass as it came clean out, but by now, Ralph had taken advantage and had fled.

As my leg trembled from the pain, I waited for a little while for the gash to heal. In the meantime, I cast a look around the destroyed lab and saw that Will was still chasing the two men. But the men had gained some distance on him and were heading to the staircase.

Will! They’re headed upstairs; I called out to him.

Tend to yourself, my mate; you’re hurt. I will see to them, he said and glanced back at me, half with worry, half with love.

Don’t you worry, I’m healing up, and when I do, it’s game over for Ralph, I said. It was only after I had reassured him that he left in pursuit of Blair and Maurice.

My attention turned to my leg, which was now sealing itself up thanks to my rapid healing ability. But the downside to my downtime was that Ralph was nowhere to be found. I could not sense him amidst the hullabaloo of the blaring alarm and the flashing lights. However, his scent was still with me, and if I just put my nose to the ground and followed it, I was sure that I’d find him. He had bled a lot. Enough for me to track him. But where was he? There was no presence of him on this floor, and as far as I knew, he had not escaped via the elevators or the staircase.

Could he even use the windows? That was impossible. There was no way someone like him would use the windows to escape without falling twenty floors below and breaking every bone in his body. Part of me wished that this had already happened and that he was down on the pavement, breathing his last few breaths as death took him. That way, I would avoid having to kill him, but he would still be resigned to the fate he deserved.

However, with my nose to the ground, I could almost make out the lingering path his scent had created. A dense red pathway floated through the air, curling around the corridors, twisting as it unfolded across the laboratory. I ran after it without a doubt in my mind that it was his trail. Werewolves could track their prey for over ten miles based just on the scent. Some could even track their prey for over a hundred miles, but those talented wolves were few and far between. I was not one of them, but I had a feeling that Will certainly was one. He had never explicitly told me that he could do that, but given how he had tracked me from the commune to Beckett Pharma’s tower the first time I was kidnapped was a telling sign that he possessed the gift of tracking.

In this confined space, my gift of tracking was just as good as his. And the more I followed the trail, the more it became apparent that rather than run, Ralph had chosen to hide in plain sight. He was here somewhere amidst the false trails of his blood and the fake scent he had emanated to throw me off. He was hiding somewhere, biding his time, waiting for me to give up so he could come out. Come out when the coast was clear. Vampires were just as notorious for their tracking skills, and I knew one thing: He could track me in this lab. He could sense my presence wherever I went.

But it was not a stalemate situation, as I was the predator, and he was my prey. He could not move from where he had hidden himself, and I had all the liberty that mobility could offer.

The trail in the air stopped at the vents in the far corner of the laboratory. Just as in the rest of the laboratory, these vents were functional but had never been used, all a part of a ruse to let me and Will think that we had found the location where Wolf’s Bane had been made.

I could feel air rattling through the vents into the rest of the air ducts spread throughout the floor and the building. But within these rhythmic rattles was one unmistakable and non-rhythmic sound of someone shaking.

He knew that I had found him. He was aware that there was nowhere left to run. Those sounds he was making were quivers of fear. And possibly blood-loss-induced shivering.

I wound my claws around the vent’s entrance and tore it off, revealing Ralph cowering behind steel pipes. As the red light of blaring alarms fell on his face, he hissed at me, revealing his fangs, fangs that had miraculously regrown in the past few minutes. His eyes were reduced to slits, like a cat’s, and his nails were jutting out of his fingers like claws.

Ralph lurched at me, but I had the freedom of space, whereas he did not. He could only lunge forward. I sidestepped and avoided him but grabbed onto the back of his neck as he lunged forward. My teeth gripped him hard enough to choke him. He flailed limply as I held on to him, his hands thrashing in the air.

And it was at this moment that I knew that I had to kill him now.

Chapter 30: Will

Ilooked at Alexis balefully one last time before I pursued the chase of Blair and Maurice. The sight of her bleeding leg had shaken me and had made me rethink about this quickly falling apart plan of ours. Perhaps it was better to retreat, regroup, and come back with reinforcements. But that would risk the lives of hundreds of werewolves. By then, Blair will have made more of Wolf’s Bane, and he’d have the means at his disposal to wipe out all the Grimm pack. It had to be now.

I had to end this tonight and make sure that the syringe containing Wolf’s Bane was not used at all. Better yet that it was wasted somehow. Not that I was planning on letting Blair live after tonight, but even if he were to somehow survive, it would take him a long time to remake Wolf’s Bane, if at all. I’d make sure to destroy this tower and all the information within it if that’s what it’d take for something like Wolf’s Bane to never exist again.

The staircase had hundreds of stairs, both leading up and down, but I could hear both Blair and Maurice heading upstairs rather than in separate directions. If only they’d gone in separate directions, the chase would have been much harder for me. But they had not thought of that, and that was good enough for me.

Good enough until I realized that the reason why Blair insisted Maurice assisted him was that Maurice was, like myself, a werewolf, and Blair was using him for his muscle. That would not pose a problem, I thought. The last time I confronted Maurice, it had been clear that he stood no chance against me in a physical battle. But Blair was a twisted man, capable of malicious cunning.

But no thought was enough to deter me as I chased them up and up. I’d cross that bridge when I’d get to it. Right now, my rage drove me. I let it strengthen me. If there was ever a time when I needed to let it loose, it was now. So I allowed it to course through my veins, empowering my wolf form and granting me clarity as I tracked my quarry.

But my quarry, it seemed, was in a mood of mockery and jest. They quipped and jeered as they ran, and occasionally I could hear what they were saying, despite the sound of the building-wide alarm.

“Teamwork makes the dreamwork, hermano,” Blair sneered. “Live to see another day.”

“Backup’s waiting,” Maurice said, among other things that I could not decipher. I had expected backup to be there, and it had been a bit alarming for me that so far, there hadn’t been any reinforcements. Had they really expected to kill us off with that gas chamber? If so, their planning skills were just a tad behind ours.

“Hold him back while I ready the chopper,” Blair said between other garbled mumblings. “Hold him. You can hold him for a little while. For fuck’s sake, you’re a wolf. Don’t forget that.”