Free I Am The Alpha by A.J. Downey, Ryan Kells Page B

like fire and had me groaning pitifully. My shoulder roared in agony as a series of blows landed against it.
    “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! Chloe! Quit hitting me goddamn it!” I roared, doing my best to fend off her wildly flailing fist.
    “Get out!” she screamed. Her eyes were wild, knuckles white on the steering wheel as she continued to hit me with her right hand. Her foot slammed on the brakes again, probably to try to force me out of my car.
    “No! Don’t stop!” I ignored her still flailing arm, leaned over until I was practically lying in her lap and reached down to shove my palm into the gas pedal. The car shot forward and she screamed, both hands now on the wheel as she steered. “Don’t stop, don’t slow down, just get us the fuck out of here!”
    Behind us a pair of voices rose in animalistic howls that rapidly faded away as we sped off into the night. The twins’ hunt had to begin anew.
    It took a good half an hour to get Chloe to calm down. I wasn’t surprised though, she had seen something rather disturbing. Something she had never been exposed to, and I whole heartedly believed that now. She didn’t have a freaking clue about her father’s true line of work. Luckily, she had enough sense not to try to stop again after her initial attempt to get me out of the car. She had also stopped trying to hit me.
    She got back on the freeway heading east, back the way we came, but there was little I could do about that at the moment, so while I waited for her to calm down and start asking questions I pulled a bottle of water out of the glove box and downed two of the same Vicodin that I had been giving her. My ankle wasn’t too bad, the four deep puncture wounds had already scabbed over. My shoulder was worse, but it was still healing nicely enough so I wasn’t overly concerned. Of course with my metabolism the two pills did little more than a couple of aspirin would for a human. Still, something was better than nothing until my body could repair itself.
    “What the fuck are you?”
    Chloe’s speaking surprised me and I glanced away from the road to look at her. She was a mess. The bruising on her wrists stood out sharply against her pale skin, her hair, a tangled wild mass surrounding a face that screamed she was still in shock. She was a whiter shade of pale, her eyes sunken, almost hollow despite how wide she held them. Her lips were pressed into a tight line, whether to keep from crying or screaming or both I couldn’t say, but maybe I could head some or all that off at the pass. She seemed to operate better when she was pissed off.
    “I would think that was fairly obvious,” I said, laying thick the patronizing tone. “I’m a man that turns into a wolf like creature. You’re smart, I’m sure you can put two and two together.”
    “That’s bullshit,” she snapped, some of that fire I first saw coming back, which was much preferable to the sad and subdued version of herself from the last day or so. “Werewolves? That’s a fucking fantasy.”
    “We prefer wolf-kind, but you’re more or less correct. Werewolf does fit the bill, we just don’t like the term.”
    She took a deep breath. “And those were your brothers back there?”
    “Not by blood. They’re the biological sons of my adoptive father, the Alpha of our Pack. The man that made me wolf-kind in the first place.”
    She laughed, a high pitched, hysterical kind of giggle for a second before she bit her tongue or the inside of her cheek, pressing her lips closed again. I could smell the coppery tang from the small, self-induced injury. Hard to miss in the close confines of the car. My stomach clenched and it reminded me how much energy I had burned in my transformation. I needed to eat, but we needed to put more distance between us and the twins right now, more than I needed to fulfill the need to refuel. Food could wait.
    “Are they the ones you were talking about?”
    “What’s that?”
    “Back home, before we left. You said there