#wr dani chatzy

[mor-beck-more-problems]

Creatures in the Woods || Morgan & Dani

TIMING: Current

PARTIES: @surmamort & @mor-beck-more-problems

SUMMARY: Morgan loses control. Dani walks a gray line.

CONTAINS: animal death, references to domestic abuse

The moose died from a blow to the head, bashed in when it hit a tree after being ambushed by a pack of wolves. The broken shards of skull pierced its brain and the bitter fluid that once protected its thoughts of soft meadows and sweet bark leaked out along with its blood and puddled on the ground and fed the soil until the grass wilted with its weight. When Morgan found it a day later, tense with dread, it was the brain-blood smell that pulled her off the trail of the rabbit she was hunting and into the ground. The last thing she noticed was the lullaby of the flies circling its head and the way the gore-slick skull fragments shone in the summer sun almost like porcelain. The last thing she felt was the mouth of death salivating inside her and the plunge of gravity when the ground falls away.

“Nnnnnggghh…” Morgan scraped the soaked ground with her mouth. The fluid made her appetite come alive. She growled, following the trail to the corpse. The wolves had torn away much of the muscle meat, but there were still crepe thin lungs dangling behind its ribs and a fat heart waiting to burst between her teeth. She tore her way through the carcass up and up until she was kneeling in it and tearing the skull apart to get to the brain. It was half eaten by scavengers but what little Morgan’s mouth could find made her moan with relief and a need for more.

Dani felt brittle in every sense of the word. Weak, weak, weak. Dani stood still in the small clearing she’d parked in. It was far enough away from the town’s edge that she felt it a good place to settle, at least until she either found somewhere else, or until she felt herself welcomed back home. It had only been a day, and yet, it felt like an eternity. In the back of her truck were a few different bags. Some with weapons, some with clothes, and some with food. She’d been out there a few weeks already, and while she’d been taught to live off the land in case of emergency, she needed to live quietly. There was a stream nearby that’d aid her in getting her hands on clean clothes.

She moved along the trail that seemingly only her feet traveled as she pursued the bubbling stream. She could hear it from where she was, but she could hear something else. Ahead of her laid a dead moose, its organs spilled from its insides-- or, what was left of them. It was picked clean, a crow to roadkill, all aside from its hide. It was ripped from the inside, blood smeared against the grass. It was so red. So was the individual ahead of it, bent over, hands gliding against sinew, fingers picking, digging for more. Dani felt her heart in her throat as she drew her crossbow and charged an arrow into the slot of it. She pulled back and leveled it with the zombie’s head, only to falter as she got a better look. Morgan Beck. Of fucking course. Dani watched as the woman dug for the moose’s brains, her fingers picking cleanly as if she’d done it before, or as if it were foreign and she was trying to be careful, the hunter couldn’t tell. It’d be easy, she realized. To kill Morgan now. She could end it here. The back and forth, the way that Dani’s skin crawled every time she saw her… It could all end here. The only issue? As soon as Morgan’s face flashed before her, Bex’s did too. The desperation in her friend’s face, the love that’d shown. Not only on Bex’s, but Morgan’s, too. The way that their care for one another was palpable. Dani felt like she was going to be sick, and not because of the gory scene laid out before her. She kept the bow raised out of her own protection but looked around them. Would Morgan try to attack her? She swallowed thickly before she pushed through the trees, closer to her. “Morgan,” Dani said, her voice leveled and careful.

There was only so much fluid and viscera Morgan could find. She tore the moose open, screaming with frustration. “NNrrrrggg!”  More. The ache. Feed meat. Eat death. She heard a sound and looked, sniffing and licking her lips. She was a mess of blood from her nose to her feet. Patches of moose fur cand bone chips stuck to her clothes and bristled in the hot wind as she crept forward. She growled. Somewhere, there had to be more. More meat. More death.

Dani stared ahead at Morgan as she turned, gore dribbling from her chin. It was caught in her hair, at the lapel of her shirt. She was… disgusting. The hunter swallowed thickly. The urge to shoot, to put Morgan down, numbed her fingertips and clawed at the back of her throat. She couldn’t, though. Every time she thought about it, the documents with her father’s name attached appeared. Each time she met Morgan, she’d known her to be unlike what she’d been taught about zombies, but this…? She was playing right into stereotypes and a part of it made Dani’s chest ache. She took a step back. “Morgan, what the fuck?”

Morgan shambled forwards, her mind beyond any language besides hunger. Death’s appetite needed more than an abandoned carcass could provide. Noise meant food. More. Eat. When she could get her hands around the noisy body and eat the pieces, maybe then it would be enough.

“Fuck,” Dani grunted as she stumbled backwards. Morgan moved towards her, mirroring that out of a horror film. She glanced over her shoulder. They were going deeper into the woods now, away from the stream. The clothes she meant to wash were left behind in a bag dropped at her side. She should kill her, she should just do it, the hunter thought. But Morgan wasn’t herself. Dani had seen Morgan. This was not her. What was she supposed to do? It was clear now that she was starving. Dani would need to get her something to eat. “Over here,” Dani decided to say as she moved off in the opposite direction, closer to the stream. Hopefully there’d be deer there, or maybe another moose, or literally anything.

The body moved and Morgan lunged. Her hunger drooled in her open mouth, teeth bared, but the only thing she caught was the air. She stumbled and followed the body. It wasn’t a quiet body. The grass and twigs screamed under its feet. Squirrels scattered up the trees. Morgan reached for them. What moved could die. What died could feed. But they escaped and Morgan grunted with desperate frustration and then there was nothing but the tall moving body ahead and the sustenance it promised.

Dani easily evaded Morgan’s lunge with a step backward. Immediately, the zombie became distracted by a few squirrels that scurried near the trunk of a tree. As Dani watched her, she felt the pit in her stomach grow. Ever since she’d found out what her father had been killed for, the idea of hunting had left a bitter taste in her mouth. Morgan before her, clearly not herself, only deepened the wound. Had her father died like this? Helping one of the many fae he’d been forced to experiment on? She blinked back the sudden anger that ripped through her and turned towards the stream, hitting a stick she’d picked up against a tree to gain Morgan’s attention again. The stream was a quiet trickle, and as Dani looked around, she saw nothing at its bank. A little further, they’d have to go a little further. She made sure to maintain a careful distance between herself and Morgan.

A guttural scream came from Morgan’s blood-stained mouth as the body evaded her. Her staggering steps grew quicker, angrier. There was life under her fee and the shrieks of feathered flying meat and in the rushing river. It splashed in swimming meat unseen. It panted in the distance on fur covered backs of meat that ran.But Morgan knew none of this. All she wanted was death. She would cannibalize herself for it if she could, her stomach clenched so desperately. But she would take the body dancing in front of her. She lunged, teeth bared, and caught the edges of Dani’s clothes.

Dani had seen starving zombies before. She’d taken care of them with chicken wire and a dagger into the brain. She knew all the steps. She could easily hide Morgan’s remains, but there was no way she’d do that, not when Dani knew how much this… zombie meant to Bex. She knew it was dangerous, too, what she was doing. For a moment, the hunter wondered what Bex would think, seeing Morgan like this. Could Dani hold it up in front of her, explain to her that this was what she was trying to protect the world from? But as much as Dani didn’t want to admit it, this was still Morgan Beck, brought to the brink of her existence as a zombie due to her hunger. What had happened? Dani wanted to know, but felt it futile. She was a monster-- the kind of creature that Dani’d been taught to slay, so why was she helping her now? Irritation festered, licking at her skin, once Morgan lunged at her. She shoved her shoulder into the zombie at her advances and side-stepped once again. “You’re making it really fucking hard to hel--” Dani froze at the sound of something. A deer. She saw it with her own two eyes.

Morgan only knew the pull of hunger. The body shoved her back, tripping her to the ground, but once there, she began to crawl. Her reach was short but her urge was swift. She clawed at the body’s clothes salivating for the closest thing to relief she knew.

Dani wanted to remark how pathetic Morgan looked. She wanted to be cruel, to be as callous as the brunette had been in the thrift store, but everything that the hunter wanted to say fell short on a venom filled tongue. She pressed her lips together and turned her attention to the deer. If she left Morgan out here, how long would it be until she found someone incapable of taking her down? Or… helping her? Dani took a deep breath as she aligned the bow with the deer and let the spring go. The arrow shot through, and the deer kicked up for a moment before making an awkward run towards the stream only to fall to its demise.

Morgan was trying to gnaw through the body’s clothes when the sound of fresh meat falling tore her attention away. It was big and fresh and red where it was pierced. It was motionless. It was silent as death. It was hers. She scrambled across the ground until she reached it and tore in. Her blunt teeth pulled up more soft hide than meat, but her hands wrenched the red spot open so the death meat could spill out. She couldn’t open it fast enough. The tissue went down so well, soft and soothing as love. She stopped once to choke down a liver. Once again to crack open the skull. The gray meat was the best meat. She ate it so desperately she ended up smearing some on her face trying to fit all of it through her mouth at once.

Time means nothing to hunger or death, and so it felt like nothing at all for Morgan to gorge herself until all the good flesh was picked from the bones and she fell over, sated.

But time means a great deal to people, and so when the rest of Morgan surfaced, the first thing she noticed was the new tint to the sky. Hours had slipped past her in a few hazy moments. The second thing she noticed was the blood and flesh staining her hands and nails, and the taste of raw flesh l in her mouth. Trembling, she looked down at the horror show splayed across her curled up body. If she could slip under again, if she could stop thinking, if she could not know-- but she did. Too well. Morgan screamed. “No, no, shit, no…” She tried to wipe her wet hands but there was hardly any part of her still clean.

Immediately, Morgan seemed drawn to the deer. At least it had worked. Dani watched silently as the zombie clambered towards her meal. The way that Morgan ripped open the deer with such ferocity, she wondered what kind of harm could be done unto a human. She wondered how far she would’ve gone, should it have been somebody not immune. It was clear that the zombie was not in her right mind. Dani had seen gore. She had seen death. She had pressed others’ organs into the stomachs until help came. She had seen brain matter and loosened veins and sinew and bone. She’d seen it all, but not like this. Dani swallowed down the bile in her throat and gave Morgan a moment of peace, willing herself to look away. It was sickening, allowing the zombie to exist like this, to not end it. But her father and what he’d died for, as well as Bex’s face, it all flickered before her. Weak, weak, weak. Jeanette’s voice rang loud. She gripped the crossbow tightly until the sound of Morgan’s fingers squishing through the meat of the deer had ceased.

Dani heard Morgan’s scream and it made her jump. Unprepared, she drew her bow again and took a step back. Morgan was searching herself, probably for her humanity. Dani watched her carefully, and even though she couldn’t see her face, she knew that the zombie was scared. She hated herself for doing this, for allowing this, but she had to. She couldn’t kill Morgan Beck. Morgan Beck was a zombie, but she… Dani clenched her jaw. She knew that the sight of her would be less than ideal, but it’d only be a matter of time until the zombie turned around. She instinctively lowered her bow and set it on the ground, lifting her hands. The last thing she needed was for Morgan to tell Bex she had pointed a bow at her in her greatest time of need. It went against everything she had learned, and against everything she knew, but she did it. With trembling hands, she held them up to where Morgan could see them, the sleeve of her own shirt shredded from Morgan’s desperation. “Morgan.” It was like last time, only softer. There was no anger, no rage. It felt weak in her throat, the words. They felt twisted and gutted.

Morgan jumped at the sound of her name. Her body hunched to hide itself, but it was no good, she was drenched and dirtied all over. When she saw who had called her, panic flooded her body. She scrambled backwards into the stream, panting and whimpering and struggling to hang onto any thought beyond No, please, I don’t want to die. No, please… She was screwed. She was thinking like prey and she’d lost her bag with her knife and her phone and she couldn’t concentrate and she was so, so screwed. But this is just what Odell had hoped for when she strong-armed all the butcheries in the county to stop selling to her, wasn’t it? At last she managed to say, “What do you want from me?” She just barely managed to keep her voice even, but she was kidding herself if she thought she could come off as a threat like this.

The shock and fear that splintered across Morgan’s features should have gone ignored, and Dani knew it. She should have felt nothing but contempt for this woman, this zombie. But the contempt did not come. Nor did the anger. What Dani felt was relief-- relief that the deer had been enough to satiate the monster in her. The bow was still on the ground, and though she had her dagger strapped to her forearm beneath her sleeve, she had no intent to actually use it. Morgan scrambled backwards and Dani stayed glued to the spot. She had no energy to fight, even if she wanted to, even if it came to that. Another flicker of Bex, another flicker of her father. She took a deep breath, but all she smelled was blood, and it was so red. “No, nothing.” She stayed put. “I…” Did she dare admit what she had done for Morgan? It wouldn’t matter, and Dani wasn’t sure if she cared whether or not Morgan understood what had happened. “I found you all fucked up. You kept trying to eat me or some shit, I dunno.” She shrugged. “I--” She looked towards the deer, bones and hide melting into the water. “Shot that for you.” She pursed her lips. “Then you came to.” Dani tried her best to keep her voice level.

Nothing Dani said to Morgan sounded plausible. But there was a deer, ravaged clean. Something in the bit of her stomach wanted to fall down and lick the hide, just in case, but it was just a whisper, and she could tell it no. Behind the deer was a trail of blood. And Dani’s clothes looked like they’d gone through a shredder on one side.

Had there been anyone else in between. Morgan couldn’t sense any aftertaste of human and she didn’t have any intrusive thoughts that felt strange but maybe she was too scared to know for sure, maybe she had already washed down the taste with all that deer. Morgan stood slowly and took another defensive step back. As much as she knew she shouldn’t take her eyes off an opponent, the smear of blood that led back through the woods held her gaze firmly.

“What was I--um--” Her voice was small and stammered so badly she had to stop and try again. “I remember a rabbit. I was hunting a rabbit. But I was me,” she added quickly. “I wasn’t like this, I was trying to catch it before I got like this. I haven’t--” Her voice broke again. “The butchers won’t sell to me anymore. Not anymore in the county. I tried. I did. And rabbits aren’t so filling but I didn’t want to lose it being picky but then--” She searched her mind. What had happened then? “There was something. Something big and half eaten and beautiful and I know it was an animal but I don’t remember what kind. Do you know if I-- if I might’ve done something to someone? In between?” She couldn’t live with wondering, and no one would tell her the truth like the slayer who hated her.

Dani kept her gaze on Morgan. Despite having helped her, maybe against her better judgement, she was a hunter. She had fought against her purpose. It felt wrong. She felt her skin tickle with the wrongs she committed in not taking Morgan down when she saw her that way. There’d been no telling whether or not Morgan had gotten to a human prior to their coincidental meeting, but Dani had to trust that what she’d done was the right thing. Not so much for Morgan, but for Bex. For the memory of her father, too. Still, Dani kept her hands where Morgan could see them. She felt silly. No matter how wrong it felt, Dani couldn’t kick the feeling that there was some part of it that’d been right, even if it was something she’d wrestle with in her days to come. “The butchers?” Dani raised a brow. So that was how Morgan got her… sustenance. That’s what she had meant by not being like what Dani thought-- not being animalistic, not like now.

The hunter could see the fear and the frustration on Morgan’s features. It was loud, even to somebody like Dani who normally wouldn’t care. As Morgan rambled, Dani continued to search the zombie’s features. Her gut continued to twist. Whether due to the smell of blood that laid thick and heavy in the air, or because she was allowing Morgan to explain herself. Finally, Dani pulled her gaze away and allowed it to settle onto her shoes. They were caked with mud and dirt, but it hadn’t ever been anything she cared too much about. “I don’t know, Morgan.” The name felt weighted differently on her tongue than before. The malice was gone. Exhaustion followed. “It was a moose that I saw you snacking on, you know. When I first came up on you.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “I led you here because deer typically are down this way. It seemed like the best option.” Despite knowing how to kill zombies and that being her priority, the texts, and everything else that Dani had learned from, told her how to satiate, how to bring them to. She supposed scribes included that information due to their own conscious being flooded with guilt due to the idea of being accomplices to murder, even by word of mouth. “I can’t tell you if you killed anyone. I wouldn’t know.” I hope you didn’t, because then what the fuck am I doing here?

Morgan’s face crumpled at Dani’s non-answer, but she nodded and did not argue. A moose fit the description of the blurry creature she remembered, but she was only half sure and maybe that was only because she didn’t want to be a monster someone had a reason to hunt down. She waited for Dani to go on. To explain how she couldn’t be too careful. How, now that Morgan was conscious and could be ashamed of herself, she should tell Dani how right the hunter was before she received a quick shot to the head. But there was only silence between them.

Finally she turned her gaze away from the bloody path and back to the hunter. “Why did you bring me back?” She asked.

Everything was quiet now, aside from the sound of the gurgling stream, swallowing and spitting past the corpse of the deer that laid against the cool rush of water. She made a note to move it after they were done here. Dani tensed at Morgan’s question. She had an answer, but it felt… wrong, explaining that it had been for Bex. A part of it had been, but her father had been involved, too. If she hadn’t approached either Jeanette or Lauren prior to this meeting would Dani have reacted the same? She inhaled sharply through her nose and looked up at the sky, taking note of the birds that fled in a hurry from the top of one to another. “It felt wrong. Killing you. Like that.” The words came out stiff and her voice sounded small. After a moment, the hunter finally leveled her gaze back to Morgan’s. “I’ve seen you. Maybe not like you are right now, but when you’re…” Almost human. “Not… covered in blood.” She tested out the words, but they still felt wrong. “It seemed wrong.” She nudged a rock just next to her foot with the toe of her shoe as she looked back down. “And, I guess… for Bex?” It felt odd, passing up on her obligation for others. Would it have been what her father would’ve done? She had nothing to offer either Jeanette or Lauren, she realized. They had lied to her about her father, about how he had died. No matter how many times Jeanette’s voice hummed in her ear, she knew it to be wasted.

Morgan gave a bitter laugh that came out like a sob. It must have been a while since Dani had talked to Bex, or Bex was too generous to tell her new slayer friend how upset she really was with Morgan. She wasn’t sure how much she could believe that this child soldier of a hunter was suddenly having a change of heart, but she did understand what it meant to do something for someone else. And just how fickle that could be. Would Dani regret sparing her if Bex ever said, oh I'm never talking to Morgan again? Would she come back to finish the job and take the question off her conscience? The longer Morgan stayed, the closer she came to testing that out.

“Good to know,” she said flatly. “Are you going to tell her about this?”

Dani was exhausted. There was no denying that. She wondered if Morgan could see her lethargy. The laugh that escaped the zombie caught her off guard and she took a small, tentative step backwards before she halted. She swallowed thickly and looked at Morgan once again. “Am I going to tell…” Dani thought for a moment. It would benefit her. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe Bex would be compassionate to Morgan’s situation, maybe it’d backfire. Dani hadn’t thought about telling Bex, not until Morgan brought it up. As far as she knew, it would be better that Bex didn’t see somebody who she cared about like this. At their lowest, at their most detrimental. “No.” She shook her head slowly. “It’s not my shit to tell. I’m a hunter, not a gossip.” She lowered her hands finally and crossed them against her chest. She dug her fingers into her forearms. “Why did your access to the butchers get taken away?” Dani had known very little about how zombies sustained themselves aside from eating living, breathing, innocent humans. At least, that’s what had been fed to her. If Morgan was telling the truth, then it meant she went against every urge she had to tear into a random human’s skull. It meant that all this time, she’d been telling the truth. Hell, the zombie had even admitted to hunting rabbits.

Morgan’s laughter spilled out a little easier this time and sounded even more defeated. “I tried to talk Bex into leaving her parents’ house. And then when her mother came by to gloat about taking away my office and my job security, we got into it and I tried to make it so she couldn’t hurt Bex for a while. But that seriously backfired and now--” She splayed her arms out, showing what she had so easily been reduced to.

Satisfied that she wouldn’t have her head cleaved off in the next few minutes, Morgan knelt in the stream and started rinsing herself off as much as she could. “She warned me. Both of them. But I figured I’d lost everything enough times over to learn how to deal.” But she hadn’t been a zombie with a conditional grip on her humanity for any of those other times. As bad as things got when she was alive, she’d never been put in a place like this.

If Dani weren’t so concerned for the words that came out of Morgan’s mouth, then she might have found it odd that they were able to have a conversation like this. At the end of the day, the two of them cared for the same person. Bex had become increasingly important to Dani, and ever since she’d almost lost her to Frank… Dani would do virtually anything to protect her. To protect anyone she cared for, really. Bex was strong, there was no doubting that, but it had become apparent that she thought she deserved to be hurt, and it was now obvious to Bex who the other perpetrator was. Her mother.

“That’s where Bex is now, right?” Dani ground her teeth. She could hear it in her ears and feel it in her jaw, the anger she put into the movement. “After--” She wasn’t sure if she should mention this, but Dani kept replaying Morgan’s expression then, and even now. One thing was for certain, Morgan Beck cared for Bex. “After Frank attacked her, after I got her to the hospital. I got thrown out of the hospital and Bex started to cry about how she couldn’t be found by her. I figured it was her mom, but I didn’t…” She felt disturbed. Was it right airing this information to Morgan? Though, she’d already been so much with Bex’s mother. Dani dug her fingers deeper into her forearms. “I didn’t know how bad it was.” Frank wasn’t Bex’s only concern. What kind of mother was she to hurt somebody who genuinely cared for her daughter? What kind of things did she hold against Bex?

Morgan stopped washing. “Frank what?” But why? There was no reason to use him to keep Bex in line. And stars above, she was with a boy even more closeted than she was. Wasn’t that torture enough? It didn’t make sense. Morgan realized too late that she’d revealed how out-of-the-loop she was, but that was bound to come out sooner or later, wasn’t it? She looked down at the blood still caked under her fingernails and felt the weight of her helplessness all over again.

“Wouldn’t make much of a difference if you had. Bex is too scared of this happening to someone else to let them in. And you hunters never lift a finger against a human no matter how horrible and dangerous they are.” She went back to splashing her face clean. Her warbled reflection in the water made her look like someone’s nightmare demon. It was a shame she couldn’t give this face to Odell and make her keep it.

Dani swallowed hard. It felt wrong, airing out Bex’s dirty laundry like this. But Dani had tried to help. It had taken Bex awhile to finally accept her help, but it’d only been recent, and she hadn’t actually gotten to any of the actual protecting parts of it all. “He…” She reached up to scratch idly at the back of her neck. “Stabbed her. She took the knife out.” Dani left alone how odd it seemed that Bex hadn’t relayed any of this information to Morgan, but decided against bringing it up. A wild guess told Dani that the two weren’t exactly on speaking terms, and Dani wondered if that had anything to do with Bex leaving with her, especially when Morgan had begged for Bex to go with her. “Bex said that it’s her ex-boyfriend.”

Morgan’s words struck Dani, but she swallowed the urge to bite back. She had no energy to do so. She’d been drained. Lauren and Jeanette’s words lingered, as did that fucking Prince song. It was on a constant loop. The distraction Morgan brought was welcome, believe it or not. “Yeah, well..” She trailed off before picking back up a moment later as Morgan stared into the water. “It’s in the code. We’re not meant to hurt humans.” Dani thought about her father. Despite him being a hunter, he’d been human, but they took him out regardless. Dani felt a pang of anger and it began to fester. “But I’m starting to figure out not all hunters feel that way. Frank is one, but he tried to kill Bex, so.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “She asked me… to protect her. Or be around her more. I don’t know.” It felt like a lifetime ago that Bex had asked such a thing, even if it’d only been a few days.

“Your hunter code is just a way of keeping things simple and shirking off responsibility for your actions. I’ve met a few of you by now and I haven’t found one decent hunter who wasn’t thinking for themself and using their own ‘code’ whether they admit it or not.” Morgan said, finally calming down enough to feel angry. She stood up from the stream, knowing this was as good as it was going to get, and started trudging out of the water. “No offense, but if your code says I deserve to die more than Odell Ochsenstein, I think it’s pretty bullshit.”

When she was back on solid ground she stopped and gave Dani a good long look for the first time. “Are you going to? Protect her? Because from over here, it looks a lot like everyone who’s ever beaten and used her is a hundred percent whole-grain human. What’s your plan for that?”

“I don’t do that,” Dani snapped. She carded a hand through her hair and took a deep breath. The hunter squeezed her eyes shut. Getting into an argument with Morgan wouldn’t help the situation. Bex was clearly in more trouble than Dani had originally thought, and by helping Morgan, Dani had uncovered just that. “I don’t do that. I don’t-- I don’t want to be like that. I only…” She swallowed thickly. Why couldn’t she push her father out of this? She hadn’t even known him, but she knew his stupid smile, and the cruel way in which he died. He had tried to help others, not even humans. Was she more his daughter than she was Jeanette’s? Despite never knowing him? “That’s…” She cleared her throat. “I’m not trying to kill you anymore, so.” She knew it didn’t solve for the time she had.

Morgan’s question made Dani’s skin crawl. “Of course I am.” She knew the implications. Frank was a hunter. Her mother was human, or at least that’s what Morgan had implied. Dani didn’t actually know any of that. “She’s…” Dani took another deep breath. “Important. To me. To other people.” Dani picked at the fabric at the hem of her shirt for a moment before dropping her hand away. “There’s a community of us. They’ll know what to do. But I won’t kill him. I’ll make it impossible for him to hurt her again, but I won’t kill him.” Dani looked up at Morgan evenly. “I’m afraid that Bex might try. She doesn’t know what it means to kill someone.”

Morgan wasn’t very comforted by what Dani had to say, but it had been so long since she’d felt soothed she wasn’t surprised. She shook her head. “You mean you’re not trying to kill me right now. Because I’m a well of useful information and you don’t want to make Bex cry. If I gave up everything I knew, if you called her up and she said she kinda hates me now for how badly I screwed up, that would change. Because I’m not a person to you. I’m something that used to belong to Bex.” She started walking back the way she’d come. The one good thing about her demon zombie self was that she knew how to leave a good trail home.

“Do your best to keep her hands clean,” she called over her shoulder. “Because, murderer to murderer, we both know she doesn’t deserve to learn how to carry someone’s life on her conscience.”

Dani steeled herself against the cruelty that Morgan provided. Logically, the hunter knew that Morgan did not owe her kindness. Dani didn’t even want it. Not really. What she wanted was to not see her mother’s gaze, but it was embedded now, even in Morgan’s features. Weak, weak, weak, weak. Dani closed her eyes and tried to focus on the beat of her heart and the way it felt in her throat, in the tips of her fingers, in her ears. She could hear Morgan’s footsteps fade, and only then did she open her eyes. The young hunter watched as the very thing she should want to put into the ground walked away, following the carnage she had created. Unable to provide an answer, she reached down for her bow and turned on her heel, moving toward the deer’s corpse. She dragged it out of the water and started back towards her truck. Morgan Beck was wrong. She had to be.