I pulled the trigger.
After taking a second to regain composure, I darted around the apartment, looking for any sign of life. All I found were more bodies. Where the hell was Wyatt? My teeth were chattering with a mix of cold and adrenaline. I went out into the backyard area. All I found was a huge mess of melted, disturbed snow that led in a clear path out to the woods.
I tried to “reach” through our connection, but felt nothing.
The phone was still at my waist, still on the call. “I killed three of them.” My voice shook.
“Nice! I’m jealous.” Nyria was far more cavalier about it than I was.
“There are no more wizards in the cabin, counted nine bodies. I can’t believe Wyatt killed them all. I think he’s with whoever is left out in the woods.”
“Don't go after them,” Nyria said in a voice that told me that she wasn’t going to hold her breath about me listening.
“If this were your mate, what would you do?”
“I’m trained in combat,” she pointed out. “Besides, Wyatt will probably circle back to the cabin in order to make sure you’re okay. If you go off into the woods, could be a trap, or you could mess with his plan. Can you feel him over your connection?”
I tried again. “Nothing. He’s completely sealed me off.” I picture him somewhere out there in the woods, hit by a fireball, dying with no one there to help him. Tears rose. Angry ones. It made me want to set the world on fire if that’s what it took to save him.
Perhaps there’s some serious truth to this whole mate thing after all…
I was pissed as hell at him, but the last thing I wanted was for him to die. I cared about Wyatt. More than I ever thought I would care about another person. And if someone out there was trying to kill him, I wanted to kill them first.
There was that rippling feeling again. That twisting of muscles that I felt a hundred times before. This time, it didn't go away after a few seconds. Five seconds. Ten. A pain I’d only ever felt secondhand tore through me. With a surge of elation, I tossed the gun I was carrying to the side and started to tear at my clothes.
Before I could finish doing so, I felt my entire world flip inside out, and the next thing I knew, I had four paws, shittier color perception, a human shirt tangled around my torso, and Wyatt’s scent so clear the snow that it blew my mind that as a human, I’d never picked up on how much nuance it had.
I heard Nyria's voice on the phone, asking if I was okay, and I tried to make some sort of noise. A bark came out. There was a pause, and then I heard her say a tone of wonder, “Did you just shift for the first time?”
I made the weird barking noise again, picked up the gun between my jaws, and set off after Wyatt's tracks, leaving the phone behind in the bloody snow.
***
My plans to lure the last wizards out into the woods and hunt them down had worked fantastically until I heard the roar of the last thing I wanted to hear–snowmobiles. I let go of what had once been a screaming wizard and started to sprint back to the cabin. I could hide in the basement with my mate and wait for reinforcements to arrive. Any minute now.
But my ears picked up two, three different sounds heading toward me, and I realized that they not only were they all now faster than me, but were in the perfect position to corral me off from Cara. I picked out the closest-sounding machine and sprinted through the snow toward it, my regular speeds hampered by snow sometimes piled taller than I was. I thought about shifting back to human form and hiding, but I couldn’t leave Cara defenseless. The wizards knew damn well she was hiding somewhere in the cabin, and while the basement was well-fortified, that place was supposed to be a hideout, not a nuclear bunker.
What I could do was…
I quickly shifted to human form, climbed a nice, sturdy tree nearby, and shifted back to wolf form while perfectly balanced on a low-hanging, wide branch. Gold star to me. I waited until the first wizard tried to zoom past me, eyes focused on the ground level. I dropped down on him and took him out almost instantly.
Another soon followed, and I could smell that he wasn’t a wizard, but a human male. He raised his gun when he saw me standing over the dead body of his buddy, and I dodged out of the way just in time. In his terror, he kept pulling the trigger, and it wasn’t long before the telltale hollow clicking noise was all that happened. I made my move, leaping at him.
He pulled a knife, but didn’t angle it toward me in time.
Dead.
One left…
A fireball shot past me, and momentarily, I thought the third enemy had missed. Then a huge wall of heat hit me. Fucker. He'd been aiming for the abandoned snowmobile. My side burned, and I rolled in the snow, smelling scorched flesh. Not good.
The last wizard stood knee-deep in snow, hands up toward me. “There's no way you'll be able to run fast enough to avoid getting hit,” he sneered.
My hackles rose and I growled, showing my teeth. He wasn't wrong. Chances of my being able to avoid getting hit were low, especially as the pain started to build as the shock wore off.
“I'll let you go if you tell us where the necklace is.”
I didn't move. On the bright side, that meant that these guys didn't have it. So… who did? Was it connected to the statues?
The wizard shrugged. “If you won't tell us, we’ll get that dark-haired girl to crack.” Another fireball came my way, and I threw myself to the side, body screaming in pain. The wizard chuckled. “I can do this all day. Can you?” He shot several more fireballs, the last one hitting my back leg.
Was this how I would die? I should have hidden in the basement with her. My foolishness, my underestimating the enemy, just destroyed the one thing on this whole planet I’d wanted more than anything else.
You don't know that. If you had done that, they would have just burned the entire place down, found a way in, and killed both of you instead of just you.
It was a cold comfort as I painfully twisted in place as the wizard slowly circled around me, clearly anticipating the killer shot. Shouldn’t my pack’s fighters be landing soon? In another minute, it wouldn’t matter to me.
I’d never see Cara again. That hurt more than any fireball. I opened up the connection between us and poured every single ounce of the way I felt about her into it. In response, I got the sense of something intense and determined.
And nearby.
What the hell was she up to?
I let out a long, loud howl that would reach the cabin and anyone who might have reached it already, and the wizard paused, clearly confused and wary about the odd noise. There was a movement just beyond the wizard’s shoulder, and I tried to not shift my attention to it. It looks like a dark, slinky form. It had to be West. Nyria had told me that he left to go after his mate hours before everyone found out I was in trouble. Had he come back?
The wizard clearly decided that time wasn’t going to be at his side much longer and stepped forward, every line in his body promising me death. I backed up sluggishly in the snow, dragging my injured leg behind me. “You shifters might be able to defeat us in all-out war, but we know better now. We have the time and numbers to pick you off, one at a time.” A fireball shot out and I threw myself to the side, knowing that even though this one would miss, the next probably wouldn't.
But there was no second fireball. A sleek, dark wolf with huge gray eyes had tackled the wizard, teeth deep in his shoulder, front paws scratching hard at anything she could reach.
That wasn't West. It was Cara.