Chosen: Gem Creek Bears, Book One Read online

  Chosen

  Gem Creek Bears, Book One

  Jennifer Snyder

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Thank You

  About the Author

  CHOSEN

  Gem Creek Bears Book One

  Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Snyder

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by Najla Qamber Designs

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Chapter One

  If I could tell the me from a month ago one thing, it would be to look the other way when Corbin Davis walks into the diner. Don’t jump at the chance to wait on him. Don’t flirt with him while pouring his lemonade or sweet tea. Don’t think it’s cute when he sniffs your hair as you lean in to take his empty plate away.

  It’s not cute. It’s psychotic. Know the difference.

  I would tell myself to see him for what he is—a criminal, a con artist, someone not worthy of my freaking time. I would tell myself only guys with ego complexes ride motorcycles as sexy as he does.

  The problem is: I can’t go back to the me from a month ago and tell her any of these things because life doesn’t work that way. There’s no rewind button. No do-over switch.

  Things that happen just are. You can’t undo them, and you can’t ever go back.

  If I could, I wouldn’t be trapped in the trunk of Corbin’s friend Ezra’s crappy Mustang with my hands tied behind my back while Corbin and his little brother, Chase, take me to who knows where to do God knows what to me.

  How the hell was I going to get out of this?

  My chest tightened as another rush of adrenaline surged through me. The car continued down whatever crappy road we drove on, and all I could do was kick myself for ever thinking Corbin Davis wasn’t wicked to the core like the rest of the hooligans he hung with.

  A metal bar dug into my hip as whoever drove—Chase, I think—hit another large pothole instead of avoiding it.

  Where were they taking me?

  Granted, most roads in Opal Pine needed repair, but this road was desolate. We seemed to hit another pothole every few seconds. I thought of all the backroads in town and where they led, but couldn’t think of a single place the Davis brothers might be headed with me in the trunk.

  Too much time had passed for them to be headed to Ezra’s shitty family farmhouse. It was a few miles away from the trailer park where I lived, which was in the center of town.

  No, they were taking me somewhere else.

  I struggled to move into a better position so I could resume picking at the rope that tied my wrists together. The last few potholes had jostled me into a weird position. One in which I was having to fight against gravity.

  You shouldn’t have let them take you to a second location, I scolded myself as a statistic I’d read, or heard somewhere, about survival rates dropping drastically after an abducted person was moved to a second location flashed through my mind.

  My heart hammered as my gut twisted with undiluted panic. My insides quivered, and I swore for a second my lungs forgot how to do their one and only job—breathe.

  Every sign I’d turned a blind eye to involving Corbin and his friends stabbed at me. I should have been more cautious of him and the others. I shouldn’t have given into Corbin’s dangerous vibes and sexy smile. I should have been stronger. I should have listened to my gut when it told me something was off about him. About all of them.

  Who was I kidding? Bad boys were my weakness, especially ones with beautiful gray eyes, perfectly tanned skin, and muscles galore accented by black leather jackets.

  This is what you get, Tris, when you ignore your gut. You get freaking kidnapped, shoved in somebody’s trunk, and hauled off to be eaten.

  My blood ran cold as an even more haunting thought surfaced: What if Corbin and the group he hung with were cannibals? There had been so many stories about them circulating through town over the years that involved weird shit like satanism and cults. The most recent accusations were that they’d been drugging girls at parties and drinking their blood. I’d written it off as crazy talk, but what if it wasn’t? What if there was truth to the rumors?

  I’d recently heard a story of a college-age girl who’d suffered an allergic reaction to tenderizer while overseas. The guy she’d been dancing with the night before had sprinkled it on her during the night in preparation to eat her later. She went to the hospital instead of his house, and that had been what saved her life.

  Crap. Corbin and the group he hung with could very well be cannibals. It would explain a lot of their creepy factor. My heart pumped faster and harder against my ribs.

  Chase went over another mondo pothole, jostling the car yet again. Instead of the metal piece digging deeper into my hip, this time I busted my face against the door of the trunk when I was slung forward unexpectedly. White hot pain radiated from my cheek to my forehead.

  “What the hell, Chase! Take it easy. Ezra will have my ass if we screw something up on his car,” Corbin insisted. “This thing is a classic.”

  “A classic turd,” Chase countered. “It’s older than dirt and barely runs. It’s like a rust bucket on wheels.”

  If I hadn’t been stuffed into a trunk on my way to be eaten or chopped into tiny pieces by my boyfriend and his groupies, I would have laughed at that. Chase wasn’t wrong—Ezra’s 1986 Mustang was a giant rusty turd. It was faded blue with trim missing, bald tires, and more than a few patches of rust eating away at its body.

  Still, the trunk was solid.

  I’d tried kicking it when I was first tossed inside, but the entire thing was metal. The only parts that weren’t were the sticky carpet beneath me and the wooden boards secured in place behind me where the backseat met the trunk.

  Whatever they were about to do to me, it had been planned. Those boards were proof.

  I wished I hadn’t called Corbin to go out tonight. I wished I’d told him I was staying in when I saw him pull up in Ezra’s beater with Chase instead of alone on his bike. If I hadn’t been so pissed at my mom I probably would have.

  Hindsight was a real bitch.

  “You should’ve let me drive, like I said,” Corbin insisted. Frustration rolled through his voice. His deep, sexy voice.

  God, I was a lost cause.

  This guy had freaking hit me, kidnapped me, and was probably about to eat me or drink every drop of blood in my body, and yet I still had the hots for him. Something was seriously wrong with me.

  I blamed it on my mother.

  Stella Abbott was the type of woman who could be beaten to a pulp by whatever man she was currently seeing and still be hopelessly in love with him after. Sometimes I prayed that she would see the light and realize she deserved so much more than the losers she picked to date and the crappy way they treated her. My prayers were never answered, though. Mom always stayed and the guys she dated always left.

  It was a vicious cycle. One I’d been hellbent on not repeating.

  I’d sworn to myself that I wo
uldn’t stay with someone who hit me. I thought I’d learned all the signs. I thought I’d be able to spot a guy with anger issues and fists that liked to fly, but apparently, that wasn’t the kind of guy I needed to look out for.

  Apparently, I needed to watch for the guys who tied my wrists behind my back and shoved me into trunks too.

  “If you’d drove, we probably wouldn’t have been able to get her in the back,” Chase said.

  Corbin chuckled. It was low, deep, and rich. I ignored the butterflies bursting into flight through my lower stomach and focused on Chase’s words. They made me smirk.

  He’d confirmed that I’d put up one hell of a struggle against them. I knew I had—my knuckles were still tender from sucker punching them both—but it was nice to hear someone say it.

  “Is she too strong for you, little brother?” Corbin teased.

  “Damn right. She might be small, but that chick is feisty. Scrappy too. My eye still hurts from where she slugged me when I tried to grab her.”

  More satisfaction slivered through me. Both of the Davis brothers would have shiners come tomorrow.

  Too bad I hadn’t been able to knock them out with my blows. Making contact was awesome, but being able to get away would have been even better. Corbin had come up behind me and wrapped his arms around my middle during the struggle, gripping me in a vice-like hold that had squeezed the breath out of me and made it hard to move even a tiny amount. That was when Chase tied my wrists behind my back. Before I knew what was happening, I’d been shoved into Ezra’s trunk.

  “She was a feisty one, for sure. That was what I liked about her. She had fire inside her,” Corbin said, surprising me. “I really thought we could have been something. She was different. In a good way.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Corbin had thought we could be something? Then why the hell was I in a damn trunk?

  “Yeah, too bad she fit the bill,” Chase insisted. “She would have been cool to turn and initiate into the pack.”

  Fit the bill? What did that mean? And, turn? Oh, crap. Were they vampires?

  They couldn’t be. I’d seen each of them out during the day. Unless that was a myth.

  Sweet Jesus, I needed to get out of here.

  “I know,” Corbin said, his voice heavy.

  Silence built inside the car. I pulled at the rope around my wrists, trying my best to get some slack into the tight knot.

  “I felt the same about Leanne,” Chase said. “After Ezra bled her, I was depressed for days. It sucked that she wasn’t the one, because it meant we could have continued dating. Maybe it would’ve gone somewhere.”

  His words twisted my stomach, and I paused in what I was doing. I knew that name. Leanne. She’d gone missing a few weeks ago. I didn’t know her well, but I’d seen her around. She was a year younger than me. We went to a few of the same parties, and once she’d complimented me on my outfit. She lived on the same side of town as I did—as we all did—the side where if you went missing, it would be a good while before anyone tried to find you.

  Everyone thought Leanne had ran away. Her dad was an alcoholic who barely was sober long enough each day to run his mechanic shop. I never knew what the story was with her mom and why she’d left town, but I knew she had when Leanne was around eleven. Leanne running away made sense. No one had questioned the rumor because her life wasn’t the best.

  Now, I knew the truth and I couldn’t help thinking how many others had been kidnapped by these freaks before Leanne—before me—to be bled.

  Shit. What did that even mean? My mind circled back to what I knew of vampires. If that was what they were and they could go out in daylight, then maybe books and movies had it wrong.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Humans are unpredictable, especially the women,” Corbin insisted. There was humor in his tone. Typically, I would have been pissed he’d said something so sexist, but all I could focus on was the fact that he’d said the word human as though he wasn’t one. Ice chilled my blood. “If Tris is who we’re looking for, then spilling her blood will be worth it.”

  My breath hitched. What. The. Hell?

  I needed my hands free. Now. Picking at the rope wasn’t doing any good. I needed to figure out a way to cut it. Then, I needed to find a weapon. There was no way I’d let them spill any of my blood if I could help it.

  My gaze skimmed the contents of the trunk. There wasn’t much light filtering through the cracks, but I could make out a few things. Filthy clothes that looked as though they’d been shredded by an animal piled near my feet. Food wrappers, soda cans, and various other items littered the area around me.

  I wrinkled my nose. This car was disgusting.

  Chase went over another bump, sending me into the air. My cheek bounced off the floorboard, causing more pain to slice through my face. Warmth trickled from the area, sliding down my chin.

  Great. Just great. Oozing blood was the last thing I wanted while trapped in a car with potential vampires. They could probably smell it.

  Something long and cool to the touch rolled around by my hands as we rounded a sharp corner. I grabbed hold and gripped it tight with one hand, then moved my fingers along the length of its surface, trying to figure out what it was.

  A screwdriver? This I could work with.

  While it wasn’t sharp enough to cut through the rope, I could use it as a weapon. I held it tight in one hand while I resumed pulling and picking at the rope with my other. I squeezed the rope. Twisted my wrists. Worked the rope between my fingers. Wiggled.

  Knots were complex, but they weren’t un-tieable.

  I continued to pull on my wrists, while fingering the rope. Time ticked away, and I was rewarded with a little give but not enough to slip my hands free and sore wrists. I wasn’t about to give up, though. Determination pulsed through me.

  I would not end up like Leanne.

  I continued to pick and pull at the rope until finally one of my hands was able to slip free. A squeal of triumph built inside my chest, but I refused to let it out. Instead, I pulled my arms from behind me and lay flat on my back while I pried the rope off my opposite wrist.

  Chase eased over another bump in the road, jostling me. My shoulder slammed into the boards along the back wall of the trunk hard enough to make me wince.

  That would leave a bruise.

  The car slowed, and I worried we’d made it to wherever they were taking me. My heart galloped inside my chest. I tossed the rope aside and gripped the screwdriver tighter. In my mind, I thought through how I wanted this situation to play out. I knew I needed to bolt from the trunk the instant it opened and then run.

  Easier said than done.

  I licked my lips and released a shaky breath. My muscles tensed. I listened, waiting for one of them to say something about where we were or what they planned to do next. I needed to know when they were getting out so I could prepare to come out swinging. My grip on the screwdriver tightened, causing my fingernails to dig into my palm.

  When the car came to a full stop, and the engine cut off, my limbs tingled with adrenaline.

  “Ready?” Chase asked.

  I heard a door pop open. Was that Corbin’s door or Chase’s?

  “Yeah,” Corbin said a second later.

  My heart thundered, becoming the only thing I could hear. This was it. This was the last chance I would have to get away from them. Once I was inside wherever we were, I doubted I’d be able to do much of anything.

  The door slammed shut, shaking the entire car frame. Corbin said something to Chase, but I couldn’t hear it over the roaring sound of my blood rushing through my ears. My palms grew clammy, but I still held tight to the screwdriver.

  Gravel crunched beneath Corbin’s boots as he made his way to the back of the car. Someone shouted something in the distance and my teeth sank into my bottom lip. I squeezed my eyes shut as I pulled in a slow breath and waited for the trunk to open. Keys jingled, before the sound of one being inserted into the trunk made its way to my ears. Someone shoute
d again. A guy. Was that Ezra? Something sounded off with his voice. It was stuffy, like he was sick.

  “Yeah, I’m coming,” Chase shouted back. “Can you handle Tris on your own?”

  His question was directed to Corbin, I knew it was, and it was riddled with amusement.

  “Always,” Corbin said.

  “Cool, let me go help him,” Chase insisted. I heard him walking away, but that was all I heard. I’d expected Corbin to turn the key and open the trunk right away, but he didn’t.

  Time seemed to tick away excruciatingly slow. I wasn’t sure how much passed before Corbin turned the key fully and opened the trunk, but it was enough to leave me waiting on pins and needles. The instant the trunk opened, I launched myself out wielding the screwdriver like a knife and slashing at the air. The screwdriver hit something and stuck. Corbin stumbled back, surprised, and I released my grip on the screwdriver. It was in his palm. I took that as my chance and ran for the woods behind him. A few choice words flew from Corbin’s mouth as I took off, but all I was focused on was the woods and pushing my legs faster.

  Run, run, run!

  The word echoed through my skull as I pushed myself harder. Branches slashed at my arms and legs while I forced my way deeper into the woods. I had no clue where I was going. All I cared about was putting distance between Corbin and me. I could hear him behind me. He shouted at the others as he ran, telling them I was getting away. I weaved through the thick foliage, grateful it was summer instead of winter. There were more places for me to hide and more leaves to hinder his view of me through the growing distance between us.

  Where the hell was I?

  My heart felt as though it was about to explode as I continued forward, my Converse sneakers digging into the ground as I ran. More branches slapped at me, cutting my skin, pulling my hair, and tearing at my clothes, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t.