24. Chapter Twenty-Four

Iwoke up to something being dropped on my lap and jumped.

"Good morning. You forgot to get dressed," Jabari said as I looked up at him with a glare.

He was clothed, thank god, because the angle was terrible. I looked down at myself and noticed what he was talking about. In my haste to pass out and let my injuries begin healing, I had forgotten to get dressed, naked as the day I was born. Behind Jabari, Heath was squatting next to the fire, poking it with a stick. There were no fresh logs on it, and I realized that meant we were about to leave. I was also too embarrassed to say anything or look too long at Heath, who was not looking at me at all.

I grabbed my underwear and slid them on first without standing up, trying not to think about how I had been sleeping fucking naked in a cave with two grown ass men—one I was kind of related to and one who I found much too attractive for my own good. My bra and shirt went on next because I didn't have to stand up to get those on either. My jeans were more of a struggle, forcing me to stand up and lean on the stone wall.

When I was finally decent, I looked around to see that it was dawn out, and there was a vampire, wide-eyed and terrified at the mouth of the cave, just out of the sun's rays, stripped bare. I looked back at the fire, hoping either man there would acknowledge my question.

"Um. Why is he still alive?" I asked softly, pointing at the mute vampire.

"I wanted you to be awake. This is educational for you." Jabari gestured to him. "I'm going to show you what we do when we have to kill a vampire who might have belonged to someone, and we must report the death."

"Wolves do it too," Heath commented softly. "Good morning, Jacky." His gaze was guarded. I felt like he was shutting me out, and I had just woken up. "When this is over, I want—"

"No. You shall report to the werewolves in Seattle," Jabari snapped, cutting off Heath. "I shall handle the nest. Divide and conquer. Don't worry, I shall make sure reparations are paid to all appropriate parties, including the local pack." Heath settled, accepting that from what I could tell.

"What are we about to do?" I had no idea what they were even talking about.

"Come." He waved me to follow him. Other than some slight dizziness and a minor ache around my injuries, I was fine. The dizziness was the more worrisome problem.

We stopped in front of the vampire, and Jabari grabbed him by the ankle. His head began to shake violently, and he screamed. I wondered if he was trying to beg for mercy. By his face and Jabari's slow walk, dragging him along, toward the sun, that's exactly what I thought he was doing.

"Jabari, what are you—"

He let go of the vampire once most of it was in the sun. I couldn't breathe as blisters formed, and the vampire screamed.

And screamed.

And screamed.

He was struggling to survive, trying to lift his arms to drag himself back into the shade.

I was horrified. The blisters burst, and the skin began to…melt.

The screaming didn't stop. I could only stand there, shell-shocked by the horror unfolding before my eyes.

Chunks began to solidify again and crack like drying mud, crumbles of dust falling from the vampire. When I jerkily stepped forward, Heath grabbed me. Jabari looked up from the vampire dying below him.

"This is the exact same execution vampires would have given him."

I wanted to be sick.

The body began to crumble except for the piece Jabari left in the shade—his head. When the vampire was dead, and the screaming stopped, his face was frozen in a look of sheer terror and pain, the likes of which I never wanted to see again.

Jabari picked the head up. Heath left me, carrying a black bag. The head was dropped in, and the bag was closed.

Then I was sick. I staggered to the wall after the first ejection of everything in my stomach. The second had about as much as the first—chunks of rabbit and water.

"It's hard seeing it for the first time," Heath whispered, understanding dripping off him like sweet honey. I was overwhelmed by the urge to punch both of them in the face for making me see that. "We could have beheaded him, but…Jabari felt you needed to see."

"Did my family come up with that?" I demanded, looking past Heath, gagging again just from the memory burned into my mind. Fuck both of them: Jabari for thinking I ever needed to see that, and Heath for letting him get away with showing me.

"No. Other vampires did. Certain crimes must always be punished in certain ways. They broke the two most important rules of their kind, and to show respect to other vampires, I will execute them in the manner dictated by their section of the Laws." He didn't seem bothered. "This is just one way we keep peace among the different species, honoring the customs of others when necessary."

"They wouldn't have known," I mumbled.

"Yes, they would have. If I had cut his head off and sun-burned the body, they would have known."

The screams echoed in my head. "Not…that was wrong."

"Do you think the execution wasn't justified?" Jabari sounded deeply confused now.

"No, I just…" Of course, I thought the execution was justified. He had helped kill so many supernaturals without cause, and there had to be a punishment that was final in the end. I took a deep breath, hoping my stomach didn't try to leave my body again. "That was gruesome. I wasn't ready for it."

"You still have a human constitution. You'll grow out of it." His voice sounded weird and awkward. He stepped closer to me and patted my shoulder, obviously uncomfortable with his own actions. "You fight well. Now, you just need more experience with the harsher parts of our world, so they can't catch you off guard anymore."

Is he trying to comfort me and talk me up?

I wasn't sure what my expression was saying to him, but he pulled away quickly. Heath was left next to me, holding the black bag with a head in it. I stepped away from the bag, looking down at it, my stomach doing a couple of flips.

The screaming was all I could hear.

"We have to get moving soon. The vampires were bleeding last night, which should make visually tracking them easy. We need to get to their nest and kill them before another night comes around. I burned the arm, so don't worry about there being any evidence of a fight left behind." Jabari was back to a stony General, ready for his army to pack up and fall in. I found my socks and shoes, slipping them on. Jabari kicked out the fire and buried it under dirt and sand in the cavern. Heath repacked Jabari's bag and handed it off to him, throwing the black bag on his own back. Heath's lack of disgust at the execution surprised me, but he had said werewolves did it too. When we started walking out of the cavern, I let Jabari take the lead. I didn't ask as we walked down the steep, thin path on the cliff face, but the moment my feet were on solid ground, I turned on him.

"Have you seen that before?" I asked quietly as we walked.

"Yes. A few," Heath answered. "I was in the Boston pack for a very long time, probably a hundred and twenty years. We had a vampire nest, and every couple of decades, someone in the pack caught a vampire doing something illegal. I was part of the inner circle to another Alpha, so I attended with him when he and the local Master executed the vampire."

"Did you…"

"Puke? Yes, the first time I saw it. Everyone does." He gave me a small reassuring smile. "You aren't the first, and you won't be the last."

"Davor still retches at the thought," Jabari said loudly from the front. "I won't tell anyone you threw up if you don't want me to. You might have lost your stomach at the end, but you held out for the entire thing. Better than most. The only person I never saw get sick was Niko, but he was exposed to it growing up."

I sighed, not wanting to continue this line of conversation. I couldn't even hate on Davor for his physical reaction because it was completely understandable. The part about Niko didn't surprise me, for some reason.

"How far do you think they are?" I asked, hoping he had some sort of answer. Jabari only shrugged. Great.

"Look at the blood, little sister. This is what we're following," he said, pointing to a bush. I stepped up to see what he was talking about. Blood was splattered on the leaves, and the dirt was stained with it. "One stopped here, exhausted from the loss of blood, and because of that, we have a trail to follow. Consider this your introduction to tracking lesson." He gave me a pondering look. "You can also look for fibers caught on branches. I would pay attention to footprints as well, but vampires generally walk softly and don't leave many traces of their activities."

"I know how to track," I told him softly. "I do it all the time."

"With your nose. It's our best resource to track, much like the wolves, but you need to learn to track with your eyes. Do you ever hunt in your human form?" He continued to stare at me, waiting impatiently for an answer I knew was going to upset him or annoy him.

"No," I said, crossing my arms.

"We'll go hunting together. We'll start with easy game like your deer in this country. When you get better, you will visit Zuri and me in Africa, and we'll teach you the thrill of hunting real game." He awkwardly patted my shoulder and started walking again.

I gave Heath the most confused look I could muster. When Jabari was once again some distance ahead of us, I dared to speak again.

"What changed? Did you talk to him again?" I asked softly.

"I woke up to him mumbling about how he didn't understand you. I didn't say anything but heard a lot of grumbles about what his father would do."

"Oh, dear god," I muttered. "He's trying to be Hasan and turn everything into a lesson. All my favorite times with Hasan were when we pored over a book, and I was learning something new. He was the keeper of knowledge into my new life, and I soaked it in." I sheepishly shrugged. "I soaked it in as best I could. You know, applying knowledge helps one remember the lesson, but until recently, I didn't have to apply a lot of it."

"The way you talk about him sometimes is so…different from the relationship you seem to have with him," Heath pointed out. "You have fond memories and get a relaxed look on your face when you think of him as if he really is your doting father. But you don't treat him like that now."

"Her fiancé was alive when Hasan found the accident. Hasan only Changed Jacky," Jabari said loudly ahead of us. "She hasn't told you?"

My stomach dropped, and the snarl that ripped out of me, uncontrolled and vicious, made Heath take a step away, his eyes flying between Jabari and me, waiting for another bomb to go off.

"Why?" he asked softly after a moment. "Why would Hasan do that to you?"

"I don't know," I snapped. "And it's been the…problem. He lied to me for four years, saying my fiancé was dead upon his arrival. Then his story changed to my fiancé was too far gone to survive the Change, and even that was a lie. In the end, he let Shane die and kept me in this world. Do you know the answer, Jabari?"

"I always have," her brother said. "But you aren't ready for it."

I growled at him before turning back to Heath.

"See? So, four years after trying to be part of the family with siblings who resented me for things I had no control over, I found out that the man I had come to love as a father in my new life was…a liar. It took me a while to catch it because I was still learning what different scents meant, but when I did, he didn't…tell me the truth."

"I'm so sorry." Heath reached out to touch my arm, but I pulled away before he could. "Jacky, that's…" He looked back at Jabari. "And none of you thought about how painful that would be to learn?"

"What do you know about it?" Jabari snapped.

"I watched my human wife die of old age," Heath said softly. "And if there's one moment in my life where I didn't want to continue, that was it. The pack around me forced me to eat for a year. They didn't let me run off and waste away. So, I would think I know a lot about losing a loved one and finding the future ahead of me very painful, one I can't fucking imagine."

Jabari's eyes went wide as he looked back at us. Then he started walking again, away from us, following the blood trail. Heath growled, about to rush after him, but I grabbed the wolf.

"It was a long time ago," I said softly. "Just leave it. That's why Hasan and I are complicated. That's why I spent seven years pretending none of them were my family."

"If my pack hurt me like that, I would have disappeared too," he said. "That's hard. I'm sorry, Jacky. Let's get through this and get home, away from this jackass. The fact that you're even here helping him and that family of yours is…amazing." He shook his head in disgust.

"Yeah, well…I thought I had started a war," I reminded him. Now that wasn't the case. It was clear the vampires were a seemingly random occurrence, but I wanted to see it through. "I wanted to clean up my mess and prove I could. Turned out, it wasn't my mess."

"Or mine or anyone else's," he said, nodding slowly. "But really, let's get this over with and get back to Texas. I hate this rain, and I hate your family."

We kept trudging through the evergreen forest, the rain falling on us. Heath didn't seem any worse for wear from the night before, and other than my aching pieces, I was feeling fine. Jabari looked like he wasn't injured at all. Every so often, Jabari called me up and pointed out something and made me find the next piece of the trail to follow.

A few hours in, I checked my phone and sighed. It was dead, so I couldn't check the actual time. Looking up, I had to guess it wasn't noon yet, maybe ten or eleven in the morning still.

"I think we've found them," Jabari announced.

Heath and I stepped around him to see what he saw. There was a cave, but not one in the side of a mountain. It went kind of down into the ground, ‘under' the mountain. What lay inside, no one could see. We walked closer together, Jabari setting the pace, which was cautious.

"If this is their hiding place, no wonder they were able to come after us both nights. We've been in the same…ten- to fifteen-mile area since we left the cabin," Heath pointed out. "Meaning they aren't completely out in the middle of nowhere."

"It's good hunting," Jabari commented. "They are close enough to the campgrounds and hiking trails to attack humans."

"And if someone goes missing out here…" I looked around. "Well, they would just be one of many who have gotten lost out here."

"Yes, Jacky. That's exactly the conclusion I was coming to. They're using the forests and mountains in the area for a hunting zone where no one has to know they killed anyone."

"Then they ran into two werecats when they got here," Heath continued, crossing his arms. "Two werecats who took it personally when humans were in trouble and helped them. Guardians of the area. They were in the way of freedom to vampires, who had no way to defeat them."

"Then a group of werewolves decided to take a camping trip," I said, helping put the story together. "Easier prey, something to power them up to take out bigger problems."

"And once all was said and done, they thought they would get away with it. Until we showed up with Jabari," Heath sighed.

"Unless they cut our fuel line in broad daylight, they have help from a local human, though I'm still trying to figure that one out. I don't see any of those three having a real motive."

"They'll talk once we deal with the more dangerous group." Jabari nodded down at the cave.

We were close enough now, I could see it was part of some sort of cave system. How big it was, I didn't know, but it was terrifying to think I was about to go in it after vampires.

"Then, let's go kill these vampires," I said, hoping the courage I portrayed covered up the waver in my voice.