Read Online Red Hood: The Hunt by Erik Schubach - Free Book Online

again.  “That's when she arrived.  I heard the pack move off toward the chateau again.  Then the snarling and snapping and yelps of pain of battle.  I was saved I thought until I heard it.  The sound of digging behind the shed.  A wolf was digging under the walls, avoiding the silver like it had figured it out, but I thought wolves were dumb animals, incapable of rational thought.”
    She exhaled loudly again. “I knew right then and there, that I was going to die.  It was a truth I could not change.  The fear I thought I'd have was not there, I had nothing to live for anymore with my family dead.  But some primal survival instinct made me run to the door anyway as the snout came up under the rocks of the wall, lips pulled back to show snarling teeth.  I paused when I saw the green eyes of a man, they weren't the eyes of an animal and my blood ran cold.”
    She snarled. “I grabbed a hay fork and repeatedly stabbed at the wolf, trying to stop it from digging further as I realized the sound of battle outside was subsiding.  With a great snap of its jaws, the wolf snapped the fork and flung it aside as it pulled itself into the shed.  I threw the board out of the cradle and ran outside.”
    Then she got the predatory look I had seen on her face in the alley.  “Then he leapt at me from the shed, impossibly fast and impossibly far.  I closed my eyes and waited for my death but instead I heard a thump and a yelp.  When I opened my eyes, the wolf was at my feet with a woman in a billowing red cloak on its back.  She had stopped him from killing me.”
    She squinted and crossed her arms over her chest like she was hugging herself to protect herself from the memory.  “They tumbled across the ground.  The wolf didn't fight like any wolf I had seen.  He seemed to be looking for weaknesses in the woman's defenses.  She held two silver daggers and used them like claws of her own.  Then the wolf wound up in front of the woman and me, and it turned its eyes on me.  Those green human eyes, and I could see the almost smug expression on the wolf as it smiled.  I swear to God that it smiled, and I realized it was closer to me than the woman as he leaped with his fangs bared at me.”
    Her breathing increased.  “Almost faster than my eyes could register it, the woman seemed to pirouette in the air unclasping her cloak which she flung over me as she flew past.  I felt the impact of the wolf like a house had been dropped on me.  I could feel the snapping of jaws and slash of claws on the cloak but impossibly, none made it through.”
    Then I saw hate in her eyes and something I have seen in the mirror in my own eyes, the need for vengeance.  “I heard yelping and thuds as the beast was pulled from me.  I threw the cloak off and ran toward the chateau, it was stupid really but I was little more than a child.  Home had always been safety though if I had thought about it, it had also have also been breached.”
    She bit her lip then continued.  “I looked back and the woman, who had just kicked the wolf twenty feet from her, gave an incredulous look at me like she didn't believe I was so stupid to leave the safety of her cloak.  It was my fault... in her distraction the Alpha Wolf dove at her and his jaws clamped down on her throat and tore it out in one violent movement as I stared on in horror.  But then the wolf's head snapped to the east and the first rays of sunrise came over the peaks.  He gave one hateful look at me and started running away as he changed back to human.  He never looked back, so I don't know what he looked like, but I know those eyes, I'll recognize them when I see him.”
    I understood that intimately and now I think I knew her fascination with me and my story and why he knew the big wolf who attacked my family had green eyes.
    Then her hand drifted back as she cried, and she grasped her cloak.  “I saw the remains of my family after that and I numbly started walking toward town