Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2023-08-02 05:22 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2023-08-02 05:22 pm
Entry tags:
Fanfiction: it wouldn't give us any closure (The Quarry, Travis/Laura)
I can't believe this is still happening to me. Here is a Travis/Laura Quarry fic filled with blood and atrocious coping mechanisms.
Perhaps regrettably, this fic is named after a line from Kirin J Callinan's 'Big Enough', the song with the screaming cowboy in the sky.
Title: it wouldn't give us any closure
Fandom: The Quarry
Rating: somewhere between PG-13 and 15. So... 14? I'm rating this 14.
Pairing: Travis/Laura
Wordcount: 4,700
Summary: Laura jerks awake with blood in her mouth and seven stab wounds in her chest.
Laura jerks awake with blood in her mouth and seven stab wounds in her chest.
“What the fuck?” she whispers, rasping and breathless. Staring up at the jagged hole in the ceiling. “What the fuck?”
Fuck. Travis tried to kill her.
He might have succeeded. Her whole body is in agony; her vision keeps slipping out of focus. She’s breathing in shallow pants, blood bubbling in her throat on each quick exhale. It seems like a miracle she regained consciousness at all.
Maybe miracle isn’t the right word. It might be easier if she hadn’t.
She forces herself to sit up, clutching her injuries. Feels like a bad idea to move, pain stabbing through her like glass, but the alternative is lying there until she passes out again, and she’s never been great at staying put. It’s hard to tell if there’s blood leaking between her fingers; every inch of her is covered in blood already.
What the fuck happened here?
There’s an incomprehensible amount of blood in the room. Bodies: the giant guy is lying against one of the walls, torn open. Chris Hackett is face-down against the floorboards, apparently shot; good work from Ryan there, she guesses.
And then there’s Travis.
Shit, she wasn’t expecting that. Travis Hackett is lying beside her on the floor.
Looking at him seems to intensify the pain of her wounds, somehow, and they’re already a lot more intense than she can handle.
He’s on his back; from the look of it, he got fucked up by a shotgun blast to the chest. Maybe Ryan tried to avenge her. Kind of sweet of him, if sweet is the right word for anything that ends with someone lying dead on the floor.
She puts a hand on Travis’s chest, ignoring the blood; she’s kind of beyond being squeamish. He’s still warm.
Not just warm, she realises with a jolt; he’s breathing. Barely, and probably not for long; they’re both going to bleed out here. But, for now, he’s alive.
She kind of wishes he were conscious as well, so she could spend the last of her strength kicking him in the fucking face. She may technically still be breathing, but this guy killed her; she’s not making it out of here. The least he could do is let her get some revenge before she goes.
She’s not making it out of here. There’s no way, right? Her chest’s a mess of stab wounds; her mind is a little clouded, a little giddy. It feels like she’s watching herself from underwater.
She pats Travis down, delves into his pockets. “Yeah,” she mutters, “sucks when someone else is doing it to you, right?”
Car keys. If she can drag herself out of here, if she can find whatever car he arrived in...
She doesn’t know who she thinks she’s kidding. They’re in the middle of nowhere. Even if she makes it to the car, she’ll pass out and crash long before she makes it to a hospital.
But she’s not just going to lie here and wait to die.
-
Moving is killing her, in the most literal possible sense. Standing is too much for her to manage, and crawling feels like a bad idea; she has a vague sense that she doesn’t really want her injuries facing down. So she’s mostly kind of scooting along on her butt, using her feet and her right hand; her left hand is clamped across her wounds.
With every muscle she moves, her body is screaming at her that she’s making a mistake. But she doesn’t know what else to do.
She’s made it out of the house, at least. She can see a few vehicles nearby; maybe Travis’s is among them. But they’re parked on gravel, and she doesn’t have any shoes on.
The thought is abruptly hilarious. She doesn’t have any shoes on. Like that’s her biggest concern right now. What the fuck is wrong with her?
Yeah, ‘all the blood loss’ is probably the answer to that.
The gravel’s not great on her soles, or on the palm of her hand. Or any of the rest of her; the few remaining scraps of her clothes aren’t really doing much. But, astonishingly, it hurts less than getting stabbed repeatedly with a mirror shard.
Because this fucking cop has come from the wrong decade, it’s a manual key; she can’t just hit a button and see what it unlocks. She’ll just have to try it in the doors individually.
She makes it to the nearest vehicle, a pickup truck. Grips the handle and drags herself up the door to try the key in it. At least it’s red, she thinks, lightheaded, and her blood won’t show on the paintwork.
Fucking priorities, Laura.
The key doesn’t work. She knows in an instant that it’s not working, but she wastes a few precious seconds trying to jam it in anyway, internally begging reality to rearrange itself. Swears, quietly. Swears loudly. Screams “Fuck!” as loud as she can, and it feels like the effort tears her insides open all over again, but it also feels kind of good.
Okay. Whatever. She’ll try the other cars. It’s not like she’d be any less dead either way; this whole plan is fucking ridiculous.
She eases herself back to the ground and sits there for a moment, breathing hard.
Something disturbs the gravel.
There’s something behind her.
She doesn’t whip around at the sound; she’s not really capable of sudden movements right now. She has to kind of roll herself around to get a look.
It’s a werewolf. Not Max, not Chris, not Kaylee; it’s white. There is another fucking werewolf at Hackett’s Quarry.
Laura starts laughing. It rasps and gurgles through the blood in her throat.
Yeah, fine. More werewolves. Fine, whatever.
She’s going to get torn apart instead of bleeding out, she guesses. By this point, it really doesn’t make much difference to her.
The werewolf creeps closer, and Laura’s laughter dies. It’s starting to sink in that this is real.
She tries not to breathe. If it’s any consolation, not breathing is probably about to get a lot easier.
The werewolf sniffs at her wounds. Laura’s trying to stay still, but she’s shaking; she think she might have been shaking since she woke up.
It’s so fucking close. She can’t handle this. She forces herself to close her eyes, but that’s almost worse: knowing it’s there, hearing it snuffling, feeling the heat coming off its body—
Teeth sink into her shoulder, and she screams. Lashes out with a strength she thought was already gone, and maybe that’s what saves her; maybe the werewolf thought it had come across a corpse and wasn’t prepared to get kicked. Whatever the reason, the wolf jerks away, runs into the forest, and Laura’s left lying there in the parking lot, breathing hard.
Fuck. She’d thought she had to be past pain by now. But her shoulder is burning where the—
Where the werewolf bit her.
Holy shit. She just got bitten by a werewolf.
It’s not how she was planning it. But it looks like she might survive this after all.
She lies on the gravel for a while, just breathing. Feeling her wounds knit themselves together, feeling her mind slowly beginning to clear.
There can’t be much of the night left. Maybe she’ll make it to dawn without turning.
She’ll still be a wolf next month, obviously. But at least she’ll have a little time to figure out what she’s doing about it.
A part of her wants to go back and find Travis, laugh in his face. He pinned her down, he plunged that glass into her chest fuck knows how many times, but in the end he’s the one dying on the floor.
The thought catches in her mind. He’s the one dying on the floor.
He’s the one dying.
She clambers to her feet.
-
Travis opens his eyes. Stares at her, a little vague and bleary, before his gaze sharpens. He scrambles backward across the floorboards.
“Scared of me?” Laura asks, straightening up from her crouch.
Honestly, it’s kind of satisfying. A part of her was terrified as she waited for him to wake up. This guy stabbed her repeatedly in the chest; he wanted her dead, and he came pretty fucking close to getting what he wanted. The wounds don’t hurt any more, but it’s hard to forget how it felt.
“How—?” His gaze darts between himself and her.
“How am I alive? How are you alive?” She runs her tongue across her teeth; she can still taste his blood. “You fucked up the stabbing. I got bitten again. Came back here, bit you.”
There is a very long silence.
“You saved me?” Travis asks. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“I don’t fucking know,” Laura says. “I broke out of jail and thought it’d be a great idea to go to Werewolf World instead of heading back home, so I guess I just make bad decisions.”
He stares at her for a moment longer. Opens his mouth, closes it again. Presses a hand to his chest, wincing.
“Oh, yeah, I didn’t know if you got shot with silver,” Laura says. “So, uh, I guess maybe you’re still about to drop dead.”
“It’s burning,” Travis says. “Kind of. Under the skin.” He lets his hand fall. “I don’t think it’s deadly.”
From Laura’s perspective, that’s not a bad outcome. A little lingering pain probably isn’t going to improve Travis’s disposition, but, honestly, he kind of deserves it.
There are still shards of mirror scattered across the floor. They keep catching her eye, the vicious glitter of them in the light coming in from the corridor.
It must be silver-backed, she realises. That’s why Travis was clutching a shard of it when she turned back; it’s a weapon that could kill a werewolf.
Or a human, of course. She guesses that was just a bonus for him.
“Are you still planning to kill me?” Laura asks.
“You’ve given me a hell of an incentive,” Travis says. He climbs to his feet; it puts her on edge. “You’re the one who bit me. If I don’t take you out before I turn, I’m not getting the chance again.”
There’s silence as they look at each other. Waiting for someone to speak, or maybe waiting for someone to lunge.
“Did you save me just to make me suffer?” Travis asks at last. “My family’s dead, and somehow we’re still not free of this curse. Even if Caleb’s still around, there’s gonna be no one left to do the hunt.”
“If we’re asking questions, why did you try to kill me?”
“You killed my parents,” Travis says. “You killed my niece. You got my brothers killed. You damn near killed me. Why wouldn’t I try to kill you? Why aren’t I killing you right now?”
It doesn’t feel good, hearing it listed out like that. But. “That’s a good question.” She spreads her arms, trying to ignore how hard her heart is beating. She’s playing with fire, she knows, but she can’t let him see that she’s scared. “Why don’t you kill me?”
“You don’t want to tempt me,” Travis mutters.
“Why did you try to kill me then? I know it wasn’t your first opportunity.”
Travis groans, quietly. “You were a wolf. You were coming at me. I had the shard in my hand.”
“And then I turned back,” Laura reminds him.
“I know. I’m not gonna pretend I didn’t know.” He pauses. “All that time trying to keep you alive, and I was just gonna have to kill you anyway. I figured maybe it’d at least give me closure for my family. And then you turned back.”
“And you realised you weren’t going to get that closure,” Laura says, realising it as she’s speaking. Fuck. What do you say to that? “Did it help?”
He’s silent for a moment. “Everyone’s still as dead as they were before I stabbed you,” he says at last, dropping his gaze, “so I guess it didn’t make much of a difference.”
Laura rests a hand over the now-healed wounds, reliving that moment: Travis’s hand on her shoulder and his breath on her face and his weight pinning her down, the white-hot bite of glass in her chest as she screamed. “It made a difference to me.”
He looks at her again. Doesn’t say anything for a while.
“Why are you still here?” he asks at last. “You didn’t just turn me. You waited for me to wake up.”
“I don’t know,” Laura says. “I guess maybe I need closure as well.”
His gaze feels uncomfortably searching. She looks away, around the room.
One of the larger mirror shards is covered with blood, or more blood than the others; there’s not much that isn’t covered with blood in this room. Looking at it is making her feel kind of sick.
She crouches down to touch it, draws her hand back with a hiss; it’s like touching a hot iron. Fuck, she forgot about the silver.
There’s a tattered, bloodied strip of dark fabric against the wall; when she touches it, she knows from the texture that it used to be part of her T-shirt. She wraps it around the glass blade, careful not to touch the backing with her bare skin.
She looks up. Travis is watching her.
She can’t blame him for wondering what she’s doing. She’s not sure what she’s doing herself. But she meets his eyes with a challenge anyway. “What?”
“Is that a souvenir,” he asks, “or are you planning to slit my throat with it?”
“Apparently this camp is full of fucking werewolves,” Laura says. “You don’t think it’d be a good idea to have a weapon?”
“There a reason you chose the one I used on you?”
Fuck him for asking. “I’ve tested it out.” She taps her chest with two fingers. “I know it’s sharp.”
She’s not actively planning to kill Travis. She saved his life, after all, whatever the fuck was going through her head when she made that decision.
But he tried to kill her. It seems like a good idea to keep a way to return the favour to hand, just in case.
She could do it right now. She could hurl herself at him, right now, and plunge the glass into his throat. The possibility seems to revive the burning, throbbing pain in her chest, like just the thought is reopening her wounds.
Maybe he’d beg her not to; maybe he’d fight back, maybe he’d pin her down or turn the glass on her. Maybe they’d both die, locked in a fucked-up embrace, and everything Laura’s done since regaining consciousness would just be a total waste of fucking time.
Maybe she could kill him without any effort at all. He’s distracted; he’s not looking at her, he’s looking at his arm. The place where she bit him, and the memory makes her teeth itch.
“Who bit you?” he asks, looking back at her.
“I don’t know, a werewolf,” she says. “Just outside the house, where the cars are parked. Uh, it was white.”
His eyes widen. He grabs one of the mirror shards, bare-handed, and Laura jerks backward.
But Travis just leaves with the shard, even though the silver must be burning his skin, and in an instant Laura is standing alone in the room.
-
With everything that’s happened, it’s almost hard to remember why she came here in the first place. But Laura heads down to the lake to take a boat across, let Max know that he’s no longer a werewolf.
She’s a werewolf now, of course. Feels like she’s left a trail of corpses behind her for a net gain of zero. But they can deal with one thing at a time.
Max is already here.
Max is already fucking here.
Max crossed the lake to meet the wolf pack, and now he’s lying dead at her feet.
-
She washes the worst of the blood off in the lake. Sits next to Max for a long time, her eyes closed. She kind of needs a moment to process everything.
Eventually, when the pre-turning hunger subsides and the beginnings of daylight start to glow through her eyelids, she opens her eyes.
She undresses Max’s corpse, which is a pretty fucking hideous experience. But he’s in her spare outfit, for some reason, and the clothes she’s been wearing are a shredded mess.
She still has Travis’s car key, and the wrapped blade of glass he tried to kill her with. Should be easier to carry them now that she doesn’t just have to tuck them into her remaining clothing scraps.
She looks for a moment at the key in her hand.
-
She falters to a halt as she makes it to the parking area outside the Hackett house. Travis is already there, walking slowly from the direction of the woods.
They look at each other.
“You left pretty quickly,” Laura says.
“Looking for the white wolf,” Travis says, after a moment.
To cure himself? But he could have done that by killing her. It would have been easier; she wasn’t a wolf yet, and he knew where she was, and it’s not like he hasn’t shown willingness to take her down.
“Did you find it?” Laura asks.
He shakes his head. “That was our last chance. Not exactly gonna be in a position to hunt next month.”
She guesses she might have to resign herself to living as a werewolf. Still, it’s not the first inconvenient, bloody monthly occurrence she’s learned to deal with.
Travis walks over to a nondescript black car. Digs into his pocket, pauses.
“Looking for this?” Laura asks, producing his key.
“When did you take that?”
“Plan A was just to get to a hospital and let you bleed out,” Laura says. She keeps finding her eyes drawn to the shredded front of his uniform, dark blood against darker fabric. “I guess that’s not how things worked out.”
She tenses up as he approaches her. But he just takes the key, with a small nod.
If she’d kept trying to unlock the cars while she was bleeding, Laura vaguely registers, she’d probably have tried his last; it was the furthest from the door. She’s not sure she’d have made it that far.
Travis unlocks the car, pauses. “You got somewhere to go?”
Laura raises her eyebrows. “You’re offering me a ride? You tried to stab me to death a few hours ago, and now you expect me to get into your car?”
Travis scowls. “I don’t expect anything. It’s an offer. Take it or leave it.”
She’s losing her fucking mind. He’s just going to throw her back in that cell, or take her somewhere secluded and fill her with silver. But the car she came in is at the bottom of the lake, and she’s too exhausted to think of alternatives.
She opens the passenger door.
-
She doesn’t feel great about leading Travis to her parents’ house, so she gets him to leave her at a nearby motel instead, with enough money to stay for a couple of nights. It gives her time to gather her thoughts, keep an eye on the headlines, figure out what her story is going to be when she sees her family.
She ends up pinning her disappearance on the Hacketts who are too dead to contradict it. They arrived at the camp a night early, she says, and that psycho family grabbed her and Max, locked them up in cages in the basement. It’s come out in the news that the family were up to some shady shit, that their house was sitting on some kind of dungeon.
She was released in the aftermath of the massacre. She’s careful to specify that. The Hacketts abducted her, and the Hacketts mostly ended up dead. But she couldn’t have had anything to do with it; she was in a cage the whole time.
She already talked to the police, she says, and an officer drove her home. Technically true. She asked the cops if she could be kept out of the news, and she’d really appreciate it if her family could stay quiet about her experiences as well.
It doesn’t occur to her until later to wonder why she didn’t tell the truth. The werewolves would probably be too much, but she could have said that Travis Hackett was the one who locked her up. It’s not like she has any reason to protect him.
-
She can’t get back into a routine at home, and it’s kind of fucking her up. She’s always been a person who sets her sights on a goal and goes after it; when she came back from camp, she thought she’d have her upcoming studies to focus on. After everything that’s happened, though, it’s kind of hard to stay focused.
She should probably have seen it coming, but her experiences with the Hacketts have left her with problems beyond a dead boyfriend and the fact that she’s a fucking werewolf. Some pretty messed-up things happened this summer. You know, the kind of thing you might want to talk about.
But a lot of those things would get the police asking questions. And you can’t really talk about your trauma from losing an eye or getting stabbed seven times in the chest if you don’t have a scratch on you.
She lies on her bed, thinking. Resting a hand where the wounds should be.
She knows where to find one person who’d believe her.
-
Travis’s eyes widen when he opens the door to her. She shoulders past him into the sheriff’s office without waiting to be invited.
Why the fuck is she back here?
Travis closes the door. It sends a spark of adrenaline through her. They’re shut in a room, they’re in an enclosed space together, and historically the outcome of that has not been great.
“Why are you here?” he asks, turning to face her.
She’s restless, shifting on her feet. “That is a great question.”
“You here to kill me?” Travis asks. “I couldn’t blame you.”
Is she here to kill him? The whole drive up, she was asking herself what she was actually going to do when she saw him, and the answer just wasn’t coming.
It seems like she’s spilled enough Hackett blood already. But she still dreams about Travis stabbing her, pretty much every night. Maybe, as long as he’s out here, she’ll be haunted by the idea that it could happen again.
“I don’t know,” Laura says. “Maybe, uh. Maybe to fight you?”
“To fight me,” Travis echoes, flat and frowning.
That could be the answer. If she knows she could at least fight him off—
“Don’t hold back,” she says.
“Is the winner spilling blood in this fight of yours?” Travis asks.
She draws the blade of glass out of her purse, unfolds the bubble wrap she keeps it packed in. She’s washed the blood off and wrapped one end heavily in electrical tape; she can hold it now. She’s been carrying it since everything went down, which is obviously an insane thing to do, but she’s given up questioning it. “We’re gonna find out.”
Travis’s eyes linger on the glass. “Do I get a weapon?”
“You’ve got a fucking gun,” Laura reminds him, gesturing at his holster with the point of the glass.
“We both know that’ll just slow you down.”
“Slow me down, then,” Laura says.
She lunges.
It’s clear that he’s not braced for it, and he goes down hard underneath her. She’s barely braced for it herself; she’s faster as a werewolf, stronger, and she keeps surprising herself with the way her own body moves.
In seconds she’s got him pinned between her knees, the blade almost biting into his throat. He drops his head back to get clear of the silver, hissing between his teeth.
For a long few seconds they just stare into each other’s eyes. She can feel the shallow rise and fall of his breathing beneath her.
She could kill him. She could kill him the way he tried to kill her; she’s got the same piece of glass in her hand right now. She could finish the job he couldn’t manage.
The image of stabbing him is too intense, overwhelming somehow. Maybe that’s why she’s not prepared when he brings his hand up and grabs the blade. That and the fact he’s touching silver barehanded, again, because he is fucking insane.
He wrenches it out of her hand in an instant, and, oh, yeah, he’s a werewolf too. She’s not the only person with superpowers here.
She freezes up. He has the blade, and in her mind she’s suddenly back in the Hackett house, screaming her throat raw as he stabs her. Reliving that instant of knowing she’s about to die.
But he doesn’t stab her, doesn’t push her down; he doesn’t even push her off him. He stares at the blade in his hand for a long moment, and then he holds it up, its makeshift handle facing her. It takes her a bewildered moment to realise he’s offering it to her.
“What the fuck,” Laura whispers, “are you doing?”
“If you want to kill me, kill me,” Travis says. “Pretty sure I earned it.”
She stares at him for a moment longer, and then she slams his wrist down, as hard as she can. The blade of glass jolts onto the floor and shatters.
She had to remove the temptation before thinking too much about it. If she’d lingered any longer, she might actually have killed him, and she already has enough blood on her hands.
“Ouch,” Travis says, dry. “Could’ve just said you didn’t want it.”
No weapons, and he’s not struggling. Which means this isn’t a fight any more; this is just Laura holding him down.
She’s very aware, suddenly, that she’s still pinning his wrist to the floor.
She doesn’t want to kill him. But she can, she can—
She can take control of this situation. She can get the upper hand, she can make him lose his composure. She can tell herself she has too much power over him for him to harm her again, and maybe then she’ll be able to leave her near-death behind her at last.
When she kisses him, all she can think about is biting into his arm. The taste of his blood is so clear in her memory that it feels like she’s tasting it now.
He kisses back at first, clutching at the front of her jacket. Moves one hand up to her face, into her hair. But then she makes a move of her own, reaching down between their bodies, and he breaks away; it feels like he’s shivering, almost feverish.
He presses a hand against her shoulder, like he’s trying to hold her away from him. The touch brings back vivid images. He held her by the shoulder while he was stabbing her, too.
“How old are you?” he asks. It sounds a little breathless.
“Twenty-two,” Laura says. “You tried to fucking murder me. Don’t pretend you have morals now.”
Her thumb finds the button of his pants.
“Laura.” He’s grabbing at her hand. “Laura. Laura. Think this through.”
It cuts through the fire in her head at last, and she goes still above him, breathing hard.
“If this is what you want, tell me,” Travis says. “But you were trying to kill me a moment ago, so I have a feeling you didn’t plan this out.”
Her arm is starting to shake too badly to support herself. She collapses against him, buries her face in his neck.
God. Fuck. What’s wrong with her? She came here to confront the man who tried to kill her, and now she’s trying to fuck him?
“I was a normal fucking person before I met you.” It comes out like a sob.
“I don’t know if you’ll believe me.” He rests his hand on the back of her head. “But I’m sorry.”
They lie there for a long time, just breathing, among the shards of broken glass.
Perhaps regrettably, this fic is named after a line from Kirin J Callinan's 'Big Enough', the song with the screaming cowboy in the sky.
Title: it wouldn't give us any closure
Fandom: The Quarry
Rating: somewhere between PG-13 and 15. So... 14? I'm rating this 14.
Pairing: Travis/Laura
Wordcount: 4,700
Summary: Laura jerks awake with blood in her mouth and seven stab wounds in her chest.
Laura jerks awake with blood in her mouth and seven stab wounds in her chest.
“What the fuck?” she whispers, rasping and breathless. Staring up at the jagged hole in the ceiling. “What the fuck?”
Fuck. Travis tried to kill her.
He might have succeeded. Her whole body is in agony; her vision keeps slipping out of focus. She’s breathing in shallow pants, blood bubbling in her throat on each quick exhale. It seems like a miracle she regained consciousness at all.
Maybe miracle isn’t the right word. It might be easier if she hadn’t.
She forces herself to sit up, clutching her injuries. Feels like a bad idea to move, pain stabbing through her like glass, but the alternative is lying there until she passes out again, and she’s never been great at staying put. It’s hard to tell if there’s blood leaking between her fingers; every inch of her is covered in blood already.
What the fuck happened here?
There’s an incomprehensible amount of blood in the room. Bodies: the giant guy is lying against one of the walls, torn open. Chris Hackett is face-down against the floorboards, apparently shot; good work from Ryan there, she guesses.
And then there’s Travis.
Shit, she wasn’t expecting that. Travis Hackett is lying beside her on the floor.
Looking at him seems to intensify the pain of her wounds, somehow, and they’re already a lot more intense than she can handle.
He’s on his back; from the look of it, he got fucked up by a shotgun blast to the chest. Maybe Ryan tried to avenge her. Kind of sweet of him, if sweet is the right word for anything that ends with someone lying dead on the floor.
She puts a hand on Travis’s chest, ignoring the blood; she’s kind of beyond being squeamish. He’s still warm.
Not just warm, she realises with a jolt; he’s breathing. Barely, and probably not for long; they’re both going to bleed out here. But, for now, he’s alive.
She kind of wishes he were conscious as well, so she could spend the last of her strength kicking him in the fucking face. She may technically still be breathing, but this guy killed her; she’s not making it out of here. The least he could do is let her get some revenge before she goes.
She’s not making it out of here. There’s no way, right? Her chest’s a mess of stab wounds; her mind is a little clouded, a little giddy. It feels like she’s watching herself from underwater.
She pats Travis down, delves into his pockets. “Yeah,” she mutters, “sucks when someone else is doing it to you, right?”
Car keys. If she can drag herself out of here, if she can find whatever car he arrived in...
She doesn’t know who she thinks she’s kidding. They’re in the middle of nowhere. Even if she makes it to the car, she’ll pass out and crash long before she makes it to a hospital.
But she’s not just going to lie here and wait to die.
Moving is killing her, in the most literal possible sense. Standing is too much for her to manage, and crawling feels like a bad idea; she has a vague sense that she doesn’t really want her injuries facing down. So she’s mostly kind of scooting along on her butt, using her feet and her right hand; her left hand is clamped across her wounds.
With every muscle she moves, her body is screaming at her that she’s making a mistake. But she doesn’t know what else to do.
She’s made it out of the house, at least. She can see a few vehicles nearby; maybe Travis’s is among them. But they’re parked on gravel, and she doesn’t have any shoes on.
The thought is abruptly hilarious. She doesn’t have any shoes on. Like that’s her biggest concern right now. What the fuck is wrong with her?
Yeah, ‘all the blood loss’ is probably the answer to that.
The gravel’s not great on her soles, or on the palm of her hand. Or any of the rest of her; the few remaining scraps of her clothes aren’t really doing much. But, astonishingly, it hurts less than getting stabbed repeatedly with a mirror shard.
Because this fucking cop has come from the wrong decade, it’s a manual key; she can’t just hit a button and see what it unlocks. She’ll just have to try it in the doors individually.
She makes it to the nearest vehicle, a pickup truck. Grips the handle and drags herself up the door to try the key in it. At least it’s red, she thinks, lightheaded, and her blood won’t show on the paintwork.
Fucking priorities, Laura.
The key doesn’t work. She knows in an instant that it’s not working, but she wastes a few precious seconds trying to jam it in anyway, internally begging reality to rearrange itself. Swears, quietly. Swears loudly. Screams “Fuck!” as loud as she can, and it feels like the effort tears her insides open all over again, but it also feels kind of good.
Okay. Whatever. She’ll try the other cars. It’s not like she’d be any less dead either way; this whole plan is fucking ridiculous.
She eases herself back to the ground and sits there for a moment, breathing hard.
Something disturbs the gravel.
There’s something behind her.
She doesn’t whip around at the sound; she’s not really capable of sudden movements right now. She has to kind of roll herself around to get a look.
It’s a werewolf. Not Max, not Chris, not Kaylee; it’s white. There is another fucking werewolf at Hackett’s Quarry.
Laura starts laughing. It rasps and gurgles through the blood in her throat.
Yeah, fine. More werewolves. Fine, whatever.
She’s going to get torn apart instead of bleeding out, she guesses. By this point, it really doesn’t make much difference to her.
The werewolf creeps closer, and Laura’s laughter dies. It’s starting to sink in that this is real.
She tries not to breathe. If it’s any consolation, not breathing is probably about to get a lot easier.
The werewolf sniffs at her wounds. Laura’s trying to stay still, but she’s shaking; she think she might have been shaking since she woke up.
It’s so fucking close. She can’t handle this. She forces herself to close her eyes, but that’s almost worse: knowing it’s there, hearing it snuffling, feeling the heat coming off its body—
Teeth sink into her shoulder, and she screams. Lashes out with a strength she thought was already gone, and maybe that’s what saves her; maybe the werewolf thought it had come across a corpse and wasn’t prepared to get kicked. Whatever the reason, the wolf jerks away, runs into the forest, and Laura’s left lying there in the parking lot, breathing hard.
Fuck. She’d thought she had to be past pain by now. But her shoulder is burning where the—
Where the werewolf bit her.
Holy shit. She just got bitten by a werewolf.
It’s not how she was planning it. But it looks like she might survive this after all.
She lies on the gravel for a while, just breathing. Feeling her wounds knit themselves together, feeling her mind slowly beginning to clear.
There can’t be much of the night left. Maybe she’ll make it to dawn without turning.
She’ll still be a wolf next month, obviously. But at least she’ll have a little time to figure out what she’s doing about it.
A part of her wants to go back and find Travis, laugh in his face. He pinned her down, he plunged that glass into her chest fuck knows how many times, but in the end he’s the one dying on the floor.
The thought catches in her mind. He’s the one dying on the floor.
He’s the one dying.
She clambers to her feet.
Travis opens his eyes. Stares at her, a little vague and bleary, before his gaze sharpens. He scrambles backward across the floorboards.
“Scared of me?” Laura asks, straightening up from her crouch.
Honestly, it’s kind of satisfying. A part of her was terrified as she waited for him to wake up. This guy stabbed her repeatedly in the chest; he wanted her dead, and he came pretty fucking close to getting what he wanted. The wounds don’t hurt any more, but it’s hard to forget how it felt.
“How—?” His gaze darts between himself and her.
“How am I alive? How are you alive?” She runs her tongue across her teeth; she can still taste his blood. “You fucked up the stabbing. I got bitten again. Came back here, bit you.”
There is a very long silence.
“You saved me?” Travis asks. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“I don’t fucking know,” Laura says. “I broke out of jail and thought it’d be a great idea to go to Werewolf World instead of heading back home, so I guess I just make bad decisions.”
He stares at her for a moment longer. Opens his mouth, closes it again. Presses a hand to his chest, wincing.
“Oh, yeah, I didn’t know if you got shot with silver,” Laura says. “So, uh, I guess maybe you’re still about to drop dead.”
“It’s burning,” Travis says. “Kind of. Under the skin.” He lets his hand fall. “I don’t think it’s deadly.”
From Laura’s perspective, that’s not a bad outcome. A little lingering pain probably isn’t going to improve Travis’s disposition, but, honestly, he kind of deserves it.
There are still shards of mirror scattered across the floor. They keep catching her eye, the vicious glitter of them in the light coming in from the corridor.
It must be silver-backed, she realises. That’s why Travis was clutching a shard of it when she turned back; it’s a weapon that could kill a werewolf.
Or a human, of course. She guesses that was just a bonus for him.
“Are you still planning to kill me?” Laura asks.
“You’ve given me a hell of an incentive,” Travis says. He climbs to his feet; it puts her on edge. “You’re the one who bit me. If I don’t take you out before I turn, I’m not getting the chance again.”
There’s silence as they look at each other. Waiting for someone to speak, or maybe waiting for someone to lunge.
“Did you save me just to make me suffer?” Travis asks at last. “My family’s dead, and somehow we’re still not free of this curse. Even if Caleb’s still around, there’s gonna be no one left to do the hunt.”
“If we’re asking questions, why did you try to kill me?”
“You killed my parents,” Travis says. “You killed my niece. You got my brothers killed. You damn near killed me. Why wouldn’t I try to kill you? Why aren’t I killing you right now?”
It doesn’t feel good, hearing it listed out like that. But. “That’s a good question.” She spreads her arms, trying to ignore how hard her heart is beating. She’s playing with fire, she knows, but she can’t let him see that she’s scared. “Why don’t you kill me?”
“You don’t want to tempt me,” Travis mutters.
“Why did you try to kill me then? I know it wasn’t your first opportunity.”
Travis groans, quietly. “You were a wolf. You were coming at me. I had the shard in my hand.”
“And then I turned back,” Laura reminds him.
“I know. I’m not gonna pretend I didn’t know.” He pauses. “All that time trying to keep you alive, and I was just gonna have to kill you anyway. I figured maybe it’d at least give me closure for my family. And then you turned back.”
“And you realised you weren’t going to get that closure,” Laura says, realising it as she’s speaking. Fuck. What do you say to that? “Did it help?”
He’s silent for a moment. “Everyone’s still as dead as they were before I stabbed you,” he says at last, dropping his gaze, “so I guess it didn’t make much of a difference.”
Laura rests a hand over the now-healed wounds, reliving that moment: Travis’s hand on her shoulder and his breath on her face and his weight pinning her down, the white-hot bite of glass in her chest as she screamed. “It made a difference to me.”
He looks at her again. Doesn’t say anything for a while.
“Why are you still here?” he asks at last. “You didn’t just turn me. You waited for me to wake up.”
“I don’t know,” Laura says. “I guess maybe I need closure as well.”
His gaze feels uncomfortably searching. She looks away, around the room.
One of the larger mirror shards is covered with blood, or more blood than the others; there’s not much that isn’t covered with blood in this room. Looking at it is making her feel kind of sick.
She crouches down to touch it, draws her hand back with a hiss; it’s like touching a hot iron. Fuck, she forgot about the silver.
There’s a tattered, bloodied strip of dark fabric against the wall; when she touches it, she knows from the texture that it used to be part of her T-shirt. She wraps it around the glass blade, careful not to touch the backing with her bare skin.
She looks up. Travis is watching her.
She can’t blame him for wondering what she’s doing. She’s not sure what she’s doing herself. But she meets his eyes with a challenge anyway. “What?”
“Is that a souvenir,” he asks, “or are you planning to slit my throat with it?”
“Apparently this camp is full of fucking werewolves,” Laura says. “You don’t think it’d be a good idea to have a weapon?”
“There a reason you chose the one I used on you?”
Fuck him for asking. “I’ve tested it out.” She taps her chest with two fingers. “I know it’s sharp.”
She’s not actively planning to kill Travis. She saved his life, after all, whatever the fuck was going through her head when she made that decision.
But he tried to kill her. It seems like a good idea to keep a way to return the favour to hand, just in case.
She could do it right now. She could hurl herself at him, right now, and plunge the glass into his throat. The possibility seems to revive the burning, throbbing pain in her chest, like just the thought is reopening her wounds.
Maybe he’d beg her not to; maybe he’d fight back, maybe he’d pin her down or turn the glass on her. Maybe they’d both die, locked in a fucked-up embrace, and everything Laura’s done since regaining consciousness would just be a total waste of fucking time.
Maybe she could kill him without any effort at all. He’s distracted; he’s not looking at her, he’s looking at his arm. The place where she bit him, and the memory makes her teeth itch.
“Who bit you?” he asks, looking back at her.
“I don’t know, a werewolf,” she says. “Just outside the house, where the cars are parked. Uh, it was white.”
His eyes widen. He grabs one of the mirror shards, bare-handed, and Laura jerks backward.
But Travis just leaves with the shard, even though the silver must be burning his skin, and in an instant Laura is standing alone in the room.
With everything that’s happened, it’s almost hard to remember why she came here in the first place. But Laura heads down to the lake to take a boat across, let Max know that he’s no longer a werewolf.
She’s a werewolf now, of course. Feels like she’s left a trail of corpses behind her for a net gain of zero. But they can deal with one thing at a time.
Max is already here.
Max is already fucking here.
Max crossed the lake to meet the wolf pack, and now he’s lying dead at her feet.
She washes the worst of the blood off in the lake. Sits next to Max for a long time, her eyes closed. She kind of needs a moment to process everything.
Eventually, when the pre-turning hunger subsides and the beginnings of daylight start to glow through her eyelids, she opens her eyes.
She undresses Max’s corpse, which is a pretty fucking hideous experience. But he’s in her spare outfit, for some reason, and the clothes she’s been wearing are a shredded mess.
She still has Travis’s car key, and the wrapped blade of glass he tried to kill her with. Should be easier to carry them now that she doesn’t just have to tuck them into her remaining clothing scraps.
She looks for a moment at the key in her hand.
She falters to a halt as she makes it to the parking area outside the Hackett house. Travis is already there, walking slowly from the direction of the woods.
They look at each other.
“You left pretty quickly,” Laura says.
“Looking for the white wolf,” Travis says, after a moment.
To cure himself? But he could have done that by killing her. It would have been easier; she wasn’t a wolf yet, and he knew where she was, and it’s not like he hasn’t shown willingness to take her down.
“Did you find it?” Laura asks.
He shakes his head. “That was our last chance. Not exactly gonna be in a position to hunt next month.”
She guesses she might have to resign herself to living as a werewolf. Still, it’s not the first inconvenient, bloody monthly occurrence she’s learned to deal with.
Travis walks over to a nondescript black car. Digs into his pocket, pauses.
“Looking for this?” Laura asks, producing his key.
“When did you take that?”
“Plan A was just to get to a hospital and let you bleed out,” Laura says. She keeps finding her eyes drawn to the shredded front of his uniform, dark blood against darker fabric. “I guess that’s not how things worked out.”
She tenses up as he approaches her. But he just takes the key, with a small nod.
If she’d kept trying to unlock the cars while she was bleeding, Laura vaguely registers, she’d probably have tried his last; it was the furthest from the door. She’s not sure she’d have made it that far.
Travis unlocks the car, pauses. “You got somewhere to go?”
Laura raises her eyebrows. “You’re offering me a ride? You tried to stab me to death a few hours ago, and now you expect me to get into your car?”
Travis scowls. “I don’t expect anything. It’s an offer. Take it or leave it.”
She’s losing her fucking mind. He’s just going to throw her back in that cell, or take her somewhere secluded and fill her with silver. But the car she came in is at the bottom of the lake, and she’s too exhausted to think of alternatives.
She opens the passenger door.
She doesn’t feel great about leading Travis to her parents’ house, so she gets him to leave her at a nearby motel instead, with enough money to stay for a couple of nights. It gives her time to gather her thoughts, keep an eye on the headlines, figure out what her story is going to be when she sees her family.
She ends up pinning her disappearance on the Hacketts who are too dead to contradict it. They arrived at the camp a night early, she says, and that psycho family grabbed her and Max, locked them up in cages in the basement. It’s come out in the news that the family were up to some shady shit, that their house was sitting on some kind of dungeon.
She was released in the aftermath of the massacre. She’s careful to specify that. The Hacketts abducted her, and the Hacketts mostly ended up dead. But she couldn’t have had anything to do with it; she was in a cage the whole time.
She already talked to the police, she says, and an officer drove her home. Technically true. She asked the cops if she could be kept out of the news, and she’d really appreciate it if her family could stay quiet about her experiences as well.
It doesn’t occur to her until later to wonder why she didn’t tell the truth. The werewolves would probably be too much, but she could have said that Travis Hackett was the one who locked her up. It’s not like she has any reason to protect him.
She can’t get back into a routine at home, and it’s kind of fucking her up. She’s always been a person who sets her sights on a goal and goes after it; when she came back from camp, she thought she’d have her upcoming studies to focus on. After everything that’s happened, though, it’s kind of hard to stay focused.
She should probably have seen it coming, but her experiences with the Hacketts have left her with problems beyond a dead boyfriend and the fact that she’s a fucking werewolf. Some pretty messed-up things happened this summer. You know, the kind of thing you might want to talk about.
But a lot of those things would get the police asking questions. And you can’t really talk about your trauma from losing an eye or getting stabbed seven times in the chest if you don’t have a scratch on you.
She lies on her bed, thinking. Resting a hand where the wounds should be.
She knows where to find one person who’d believe her.
Travis’s eyes widen when he opens the door to her. She shoulders past him into the sheriff’s office without waiting to be invited.
Why the fuck is she back here?
Travis closes the door. It sends a spark of adrenaline through her. They’re shut in a room, they’re in an enclosed space together, and historically the outcome of that has not been great.
“Why are you here?” he asks, turning to face her.
She’s restless, shifting on her feet. “That is a great question.”
“You here to kill me?” Travis asks. “I couldn’t blame you.”
Is she here to kill him? The whole drive up, she was asking herself what she was actually going to do when she saw him, and the answer just wasn’t coming.
It seems like she’s spilled enough Hackett blood already. But she still dreams about Travis stabbing her, pretty much every night. Maybe, as long as he’s out here, she’ll be haunted by the idea that it could happen again.
“I don’t know,” Laura says. “Maybe, uh. Maybe to fight you?”
“To fight me,” Travis echoes, flat and frowning.
That could be the answer. If she knows she could at least fight him off—
“Don’t hold back,” she says.
“Is the winner spilling blood in this fight of yours?” Travis asks.
She draws the blade of glass out of her purse, unfolds the bubble wrap she keeps it packed in. She’s washed the blood off and wrapped one end heavily in electrical tape; she can hold it now. She’s been carrying it since everything went down, which is obviously an insane thing to do, but she’s given up questioning it. “We’re gonna find out.”
Travis’s eyes linger on the glass. “Do I get a weapon?”
“You’ve got a fucking gun,” Laura reminds him, gesturing at his holster with the point of the glass.
“We both know that’ll just slow you down.”
“Slow me down, then,” Laura says.
She lunges.
It’s clear that he’s not braced for it, and he goes down hard underneath her. She’s barely braced for it herself; she’s faster as a werewolf, stronger, and she keeps surprising herself with the way her own body moves.
In seconds she’s got him pinned between her knees, the blade almost biting into his throat. He drops his head back to get clear of the silver, hissing between his teeth.
For a long few seconds they just stare into each other’s eyes. She can feel the shallow rise and fall of his breathing beneath her.
She could kill him. She could kill him the way he tried to kill her; she’s got the same piece of glass in her hand right now. She could finish the job he couldn’t manage.
The image of stabbing him is too intense, overwhelming somehow. Maybe that’s why she’s not prepared when he brings his hand up and grabs the blade. That and the fact he’s touching silver barehanded, again, because he is fucking insane.
He wrenches it out of her hand in an instant, and, oh, yeah, he’s a werewolf too. She’s not the only person with superpowers here.
She freezes up. He has the blade, and in her mind she’s suddenly back in the Hackett house, screaming her throat raw as he stabs her. Reliving that instant of knowing she’s about to die.
But he doesn’t stab her, doesn’t push her down; he doesn’t even push her off him. He stares at the blade in his hand for a long moment, and then he holds it up, its makeshift handle facing her. It takes her a bewildered moment to realise he’s offering it to her.
“What the fuck,” Laura whispers, “are you doing?”
“If you want to kill me, kill me,” Travis says. “Pretty sure I earned it.”
She stares at him for a moment longer, and then she slams his wrist down, as hard as she can. The blade of glass jolts onto the floor and shatters.
She had to remove the temptation before thinking too much about it. If she’d lingered any longer, she might actually have killed him, and she already has enough blood on her hands.
“Ouch,” Travis says, dry. “Could’ve just said you didn’t want it.”
No weapons, and he’s not struggling. Which means this isn’t a fight any more; this is just Laura holding him down.
She’s very aware, suddenly, that she’s still pinning his wrist to the floor.
She doesn’t want to kill him. But she can, she can—
She can take control of this situation. She can get the upper hand, she can make him lose his composure. She can tell herself she has too much power over him for him to harm her again, and maybe then she’ll be able to leave her near-death behind her at last.
When she kisses him, all she can think about is biting into his arm. The taste of his blood is so clear in her memory that it feels like she’s tasting it now.
He kisses back at first, clutching at the front of her jacket. Moves one hand up to her face, into her hair. But then she makes a move of her own, reaching down between their bodies, and he breaks away; it feels like he’s shivering, almost feverish.
He presses a hand against her shoulder, like he’s trying to hold her away from him. The touch brings back vivid images. He held her by the shoulder while he was stabbing her, too.
“How old are you?” he asks. It sounds a little breathless.
“Twenty-two,” Laura says. “You tried to fucking murder me. Don’t pretend you have morals now.”
Her thumb finds the button of his pants.
“Laura.” He’s grabbing at her hand. “Laura. Laura. Think this through.”
It cuts through the fire in her head at last, and she goes still above him, breathing hard.
“If this is what you want, tell me,” Travis says. “But you were trying to kill me a moment ago, so I have a feeling you didn’t plan this out.”
Her arm is starting to shake too badly to support herself. She collapses against him, buries her face in his neck.
God. Fuck. What’s wrong with her? She came here to confront the man who tried to kill her, and now she’s trying to fuck him?
“I was a normal fucking person before I met you.” It comes out like a sob.
“I don’t know if you’ll believe me.” He rests his hand on the back of her head. “But I’m sorry.”
They lie there for a long time, just breathing, among the shards of broken glass.