Hunt Me! I Crave the Chase (Spooky Boys #3)

They had always been tight-knit creatures. Their secrets were kept close. There were records of the basics, sure. Shape-shifting. Three possible forms. The clusters of communities that lived off-grid. The eye colors that showed rank. Blue for alphas, purple for omegas, gold for betas. Their main weaknesses were silver and wolfsbane—and fire.

I knew all of this.

Buuuut, that was about it.

That was as far as Lydia’s mentorship had gotten me. Apparently, even with all of the Evans’s years of monster hunting they’d never managed to gather more than a few sparse details. Maybe because—and I realized this belatedly—a lot of the werewolf population apparently preferred to live their lives as large fluffy were-dogs.

As I pushed into the bathroom and stripped off my clothes quickly, I lamented my life.

You’d think the fact that I was born in Elmwood would’ve helped things, considering it was supernatural central for the Northeast. But it hadn’t. Probably because I had been a snot-nosed brat who had no business asking about genitals.

When our parents had broken the secret to us, I’d been the only kid who freaked the fuck out. Everyone just took it in stride. Vampires? Oh yeah, those bad boys were real. Werewolves too. Ghosts. Witches. Demons. All the creepy little things that kept nine-year-old me up at night were apparently hiding in plain sight.

I’d avoided them as covertly as I could.

Until I couldn’t anymore.

Until Lydia’s training forced the monsters under the bed in front of my bullets.

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I pushed away the memories as I pulled the shower door shut behind me and turned the water as hot as it would go. Naked and vulnerable, my skin crawled. At least…until I remembered Mutt was still here, guarding the front door.

He’d promised I’d be safe.

And I…believed him.

The water was blistering as it pelted against my back, the now-familiar numbness that had crept inside my mind settling back into place. It’d been easy to push away my metaphorical demons when Mutt was with me, but now that I was alone in the bathroom, memories—writhing, twisting, serpentine memories—crept to the surface.

My arousal dimmed.

Thoughts of knots and fucking drifted away as I tried not to fall into the trap my mind had laid for me. Focus on the water. Focus on Mutt. You’re safe, you’re fine, you’re?—

So alone.

So alone, alone, alone.

I shut my eyes and the world was dark. There were no monsters. There was no werewolf waiting to have his dick sucked—standing like a wet dream—in my stained front room.

I wasn’t Markus, the kid who’d been kidnapped.

I wasn’t Jeffrey, the chosen keeper of the Evans family legacy.

I was just…

I was…

Lonely, lonely, lonely.

Without thinking, I reached for the bar of soap and?—

“No soap,” a familiar cheerful, rumbly voice echoed from behind me. I startled, slamming against the cool tile as I whipped around to face my intruder. The room was impossibly bright for a moment, blinding me before my eyes refocused.

“What the?—”

“You smelled lonely,” Mutt said, shattering me open. My heart pounded, and the hot water burned and burned and burned. I smelled…lonely?

Could he actually smell emotions?

How—