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Even Jackals were weak-kneed little pussies after all.
“You think that’s uncomfortable?” he muttered. “Discomfort is the first vivisection and you can’t scream. It’s feeling their fingers probing at your organs and innards and praying for death as you piss yourself.”
Silent screams. Silent prayers.
The Jackals stared back at him with cold, hard purpose, watching, waiting, searching for a weakness.
He smiled slowly, satisfaction rumbling in his chest at the flicker of unease in the biggest one’s pale yellow gaze.
“You know who I am, don’t you?” he whispered. “Do they still call me the bogeyman?”
“They’ll be pleased you’re still alive,” the Jackal rasped, barely able to speak. “As well as your mate.”
The monster, the freak without mercy, compassion or any semblance of warmth, jumped further into his senses; the sound that left his throat was demonic.
“I have no mate,” he growled. “I have only the obligation to protect those of my Pride, Jackal. My only purpose. My only reason for being.” Because the mate would suffer without them.
And in a way it was true. When the monster was free, all bonds, all affection, all respect was obliterated. Only one purpose filled him. Protecting the mate only Graeme could claim.
And he was convincing. He could smell it on them.
“I’ve made the strongest Council Coyotes piss themselves within ten minutes,” he observed then. “How long will the two of you last before the scent of your urine offends my senses?”
He’d give them at least fifteen minutes. These two looked pretty strong. And Jackals were tortured from childhood, their training a reign of terror designed to ensure only the most brutally strong survived. Before they reached age ten, only one littermate would still live. The only one strong enough to watch the others starve so he could eat. The one strong enough to murder all who stood in the way of his escape from the putrid, waste-packed cell they were locked into.
“She would have me know mercy,” he growled, and hope flickered in their eyes.
Graeme smiled. A curve of his lips that dimmed hope and brought the knowledge of certain death instead.
“She doesn’t know, they to
re the mercy from me the day they tore my heart from my chest . . .”
The monster ached, craved, hell, it salivated for the sounds of their screams.
Narrowing his eyes on them, he watched them, drew their scents into his senses, broke the markers down, noted the various differences and, as he’d learned to do in the research center, tracked every fucking gene that made them what they were. That was a Jackal’s weakness. Facing what he actually was, knowing his history and discovering that someone else knew it too.
“Do you know why they call me the bogeyman?” he asked softly, lazily, despite the sound of hell in his voice.
The strongest simply stared back at him. The weaker one, his gaze flickered for just a second. And Graeme knew why, just as the Jackal did. Because Graeme could sense far more than the Jackal wanted known.
He focused on that one. “Do you enjoy servicing your Council master?” he asked softly, the scent of the human’s domination over the Jackal still lingering on the creature. “I can still smell his release on you, despite your attempt to clean it. Do you pretend to enjoy having his release fill you, rather than the other way around?” Jackals could be driven to a maddened death by attempting to dominate them. The scent of humiliation was thick on this Jackal.
A vicious snarl, enraged and exhibiting a loss of control, escaped the creature.
The other still stared back at the monster that would kill him and his partner. But what Graeme sensed there was something far different.
“When will you kill his rapist?” he asked the stronger of the two, delving straight to the Jackal’s weak spot. “Do you enjoy sharing your lover?”
Jackals simply didn’t share. Anything. Not food, not loyalty or compassion or lovers. It wasn’t in their nature.
What they did do was form partnerships with their lovers. Strength and tactical advantage. And they formed lasting partnerships. The weaker Jackal was this one’s partner in all ways.
The stronger had decidedly more control over his possessiveness, though. He simply stared back, saying nothing, feeling nothing.
“Doesn’t matter,” Graeme decided. “You’ll both die here, so neither of you will have to face the Council’s indignities again. Will you?”
“What do you know of their indignities?” the bigger one asked then, his tone rather curious. “The bogeyman was once the favored child of his creator. Would you have been favored had you starved your littermates to escape a cell packed with the waste and decay of the dead?”
