Sawyer bit his tongue to keep from asking Jake how that was possible. There wasn’t time for talk right now, but the American werewolf had to know the only way the bad guys could have gotten the explosive charges in the ceiling placed properly for something like this was if they’d known exactly when MI6 and STAT were coming and which route they’d be taking. And for those bad guys to purposely split up the teams meant they would have had to know there’d be two groups to start with. The only way they could have gotten that kind of information was if they’d sat through the joint MI6 and STAT mission briefing a couple of hours ago.
The implications of that were so stunning, Sawyer nearly missed it when Erin spoke. “Jake’s right, Sawyer.”
She was frantically digging through a desk by the wall, searching for keys she almost certainly wasn’t going to find. If these two kids had been left behind as bait, there’d be no reason to make it easy to get them out. And those bars looked thick enough to need explosives to get through.
Explosives they didn’t have.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” she added. “This room is a completely crappy place to try and defend.”
He opened his mouth to agree when he picked up the combined scents of a large group of people heading their way, along with one he couldn’t identify. Jake was right. The shit had hit the fan.
“Company’s coming,” Sawyer shouted, turning to head back toward the door, both so he could deal with the bad guys and avoid the questioning look he’d be sure to find in Erin’s eyes as she wondered how the hell he knew someone was coming. “Get those kids out of there. Now!”
“There aren’t any keys,” Erin snapped, ripping a drawer out of the filing cabinet near the desk and emptying the contents on the floor. “How are we supposed to get them out?”
Sawyer would have suggested trying to pick the locks, but right then a group of heavily armed men came around the corner into the hallway from the direction they’d just come and started shooting. Cursing, Sawyer ducked back into the room, then quickly leaned out to lay down suppressive fire with his MP5. He wasn’t as concerned with hitting them as he was with making them reconsider an all-out assault.
Harley was at his side in a moment, dropping to one knee and peeking around the door with her handgun to start picking off whoever was dumb enough to expose themselves. But there were a lot more bad guys behind those who went down. Definitely way more than he wanted to deal with.
“Anytime you get those kids out of there would be good,” he called over his shoulder. “We need to leave.”
But instead of a snarky answer from his teammate, all he got was a loud growl in return.
Sawyer snapped a quick look over his shoulder to see Caleb striding toward the little girl’s cell, claws and fangs fully extended, eyes glowing so blue they nearly lit up the darkness around them, muscles twisting and spasming along his arms and shoulders. With another growl, he grabbed the bars of the cell door and yanked like a man possessed.
Erin stood there, eyes wide in disbelief as Caleb lost it, snarling so loud it echoed off the concrete walls. Sawyer couldn’t imagine what the werewolf thought he could accomplish until he saw the bars start to bend. A split second later, the concrete along the ceiling and floor began to crack and crumble.
“We got trouble!” Harley shouted, drawing his attention back to the crowd of trigger pullers in the hallway.
Sawyer didn’t even have to ask what kind of trouble. There was no way to miss the mountain of a man coming their way. Well over seven feet tall, he had to be as wide as a sodding doorway. But it wasn’t the size and muscles that worried Sawyer. Or even the earthy, reptile scent coming off him. It was the fact that the guy had brownish-green, scaly skin, which the bullets from Harley’s handgun were bouncing off at the moment.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered.
Stepping out from the doorway, he unloaded the remainder of the magazine from his MP5 straight into the thing’s chest. While the hail of gunfire shoved the creature back at least ten feet, it mostly seemed to piss him off.
Sawyer heard Harley shouting into the radio as he reloaded, saying they’d run into another supernatural—a shifter maybe—who was big, green, mean, and apparently impervious to gunfire.
Sawyer barely got his MP5 reloaded and ready before the shifter came at them again. He fired slower this time, aiming at different weak points—or at least what he hoped were weak points. It was hard to tell when all the thing did was grunt occasionally.
Harley joined in with her handgun, sometimes aiming for the shifter, other times focusing on the human attackers who weren’t as bulletproof. But even after seeing men go down and not get up and forcing the shifter back across the floor again and again, Sawyer knew they couldn’t keep this up forever. He’d brought a lot of ammo, but not that much.
“We need help here!” he shouted over his shoulder in time to see Caleb rip the second cell door completely off its hinges, chunks of the lock plate bouncing off the walls.
Before Sawyer could even rationalize how that was possible, Caleb charged past him, one of the twisted bars from the cell door in his clawed hands, snarls reverberating from his throat. The omega werewolf didn’t slow as he rounded the corner of the doorway Sawyer and Harley were taking cover behind, but ran straight into the middle of the group of bad guys like a runaway truck, the metal bar swinging left and right like an oversized mace.
The scaly shifter went down under the onslaught—along with several other men—but Caleb continued to smash anyone within reach. When the bar got embedded in one of the bodies and dragged out of his grip, the omega didn’t slow. He simply scooped up an abandoned assault rifle from the floor and used it like a club.
The big shifter got back on his feet and crashed into Caleb, almost crushing him through the concrete wall, but the omega shoved right back, trying to rip the thing’s throat out with his claws.
Sawyer had never seen anything like it. The two supernaturals were fighting without hesitation or thought, like feral animals. The shifter was insanely strong, but Caleb was like a berserker.
Sawyer stepped out into the hallway, closer to the fight, ready to shoot. Harley was right there with him, trying to get an angle that would help Caleb, but he and the shifter were moving too fast. An errant shot was as likely to hit Caleb as the creature. The best he and Harley could do was keep the human bad guys from getting involved.
Caleb and the creature were bleeding heavily now. Bullets might not penetrate that brownish-green skin, but werewolf claws obviously did. It was hard to watch as they continued to slash and punch at each other, but harder to look away. Sawyer was about to say the hell with it, launch himself into the middle of the battle, and hope for the best when Erin appeared at his side.
She grabbed his shoulder. “You and Harley get the kids out of here. I’ll take care of Wacko Wolf and slow these guys down until you get away.” When Sawyer looked at her doubtfully, she gave him a shove. “Go. You know I’m not good with kids. I’ve got this.”