“So are we going now?” Kade asked. “Time to go get your car?”
“Yeah—I don’t think it’s going to be a problem. We’re heading up to the strip mall by the highway. Do you know where that is?”
“Yep,” Kade said. “That’s easy enough.”
I hesitated for a moment, trying to decide if I should offer the front seat on the passenger side to one of them, and finally decided it would be too awkward. Anyway, they would probably want to sit together. I knew I would if I were in their position.
Kade managed to keep some semblance of conversation stumbling along as we drove through the suburban towns that ringed Fort Worth. But I could tell both Jeremiah and Shadow were anxious about this meeting, no matter how positive they had wanted to seem.
“Just tell her what you told me,” I said. Jeremiah nodded, but Shadow stared out the window.
As we approached the parking lot where we had left Shadow’s car, I glanced around carefully. All the other cars occupants did the same, albeit in different ways. It was, however, easy to tell that we were a group of wary creatures. In humans, I would call that kind of hypervigilance a sign of stress, or possibly PTSD.
I thought of Gloria’s recent attempt to arrange for an intervention.
She definitely had a point, though she didn’t really have any sense of the extent of the issue.
At any rate, none of us saw anything.
I don’t know how we missed it.
Chapter 21
KADE PULLED IN NEXT to Shadow’s car, and we all piled out. I was saying something supportive and probably slightly inane to the other two when the werewolves attacked.
We parked in a far corner, around the side of the building, with nothing but a field stretching away off to one side. I presume that’s where they had been.
As it was, they seemed to spring up out of nowhere, snarling, growling, and snapping, most of them in their animal form, but a few of them in some half-shifted state, like something out of an old horror movie.
I saw Shadow reach behind her as if going for her ax. When it wasn’t there, she crouched down and reached into the black motorcycle boots she wore, pulling two sharp, wicked-looking blades out of some hidden scabbards there. She spun around, her braid whipping out in a way that made her look more dangerous than ever.
The wolves had the jump on us. We would have to buy each other time if we were going to shift to fight them.
Instinctively, Kade and I put our backs together, providing cover for each other as the wolves ringed Shadow’s car. I concentrated long enough to let my vision gray out and my fangs to descend.
I couldn’t see what kind of shift, if any, Kade was doing, but as we turned slightly, our backs pressed against one another, I saw that Shadow and Jeremiah were moving together in a similar way.
The more I was around those two, the more I liked them.
I didn’t see any visible change on Jeremiah, but I heard a low-pitched growl coming from his direction.
I didn’t know how a hyena shifter would stack up in a fight with a wolf shifter, but it seemed like I had heard somewhere that natural-born hyenas were pretty fierce.
As we stood in the early morning light, none of us making the first move, I wondered for a moment what it would be like to live in a shifter world where I didn’t get attacked by werewolves periodically.
“Why don’t you tell us what you want,” I called out.
None of them specifically answered, but one of them laughed, an ugly sound in the sunshine.
Jeremiah answered him with a laugh of his own—an eerie, high-pitched sound that carried more menace in it than the wolf’s laugh had.
I knew I needed to pull on some of the earth magic in order to gather enough power to shift into a form that could really defeat these guys. But we weren’t anywhere near a natural point of magic. As far as I sent my questing senses out, I couldn’t feel anything.
If I was going to use that magic against the werewolves, I would have to punch a hole through reality to make it happen.
The last time I’d done that, I created some strange rift that still leaked magical particles into the hospital. None of us knew how to close it, or how to stop it. So far, it hadn’t shown any specific negative effects, but I was terrified that it would—that I had done something to damage my world. Serena’s world.
No. Before I attempted to draw on any kind of magic, we needed to try to defeat them with what we had on hand—our human forms, our shifter selves, and Shadow’s evil looking knives.
Just as I made that decision, the first of the wolves lunged at us, going directly for Shadow. She spun to face him, her knives flashing bright, and so fast that I didn’t even see them slide in and back out, and didn’t see her get close enough to cut the wolf—but with a yelp, he was dancing back, holding one paw up in the air as his leg dripped bright blood onto the parking lot.
That seemed to be the cue for all the other werewolves to join in.
But the one with a hurt leg was out, at least for the moment, breaking the numbers closer to even. I hissed and tasted the air, the acrid smell of their violent determination coating my mouth with a single overlay of the bright fresh blood just spilled.
Kade swung around to snap at the face of one who got a little too close to me, and I used that time to shift even more, allowing my lower body to slide into a constrictor’s shape. I kept my upper body mostly in its normal form—hands could be remarkably useful for grappling—and changed out my face so I could read everyone’s positions with the heat detectors of the viper pits to the side of my nose.
When they were formed, everything around me sprang up into something that my still-mostly-human mind translated as infrared. Hot red outlines showed me where everyone was. Kade stood behind me, as clearly visible as if I faced him. To my right, Shadow and Jeremiah moved as if they were one person, two-faced and many-armed. All around us, the wolves darted in and out, snapping at us and trying to take us down much as natural-born wolves did.
As one werewolf in full wolf form lunged toward me, I whipped my tail around and used it to grab her around the midsection and slam her to the concrete, where I pinned her as I began squeezing.
She snarled, turning her head back to try to sink her teeth in me even as she scrabbled against the asphalt.
I let her struggle for a moment more, my human sympathies still ascendant, before I allowed my serpent nature to rise to the surface. I felt everything go cold and still, and then I tightened that coil in one quick, convulsive motion. Her back snapped and she yelped once, then lay panting.
I stared at her dispassionately, considering whether to kill her.
I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I would regret it, no matter what I did—if I let her live, I would have to deal with her later, and my serpent brain would be angry with me for not dealing with the problem more efficiently. If I killed her now, I would probably feel human guilt for not giving her a chance at redemption.
I didn’t have to decide right then, though, because another werewolf, this one in wolf-man shape, leaped at me from above. I whipped out of his way, tripping him with my tail. Jeremiah, still in human form, jumped in to hold him down, and Shadow sliced his throat in one quick, decisive motion.
No hesitation there.
I couldn’t decide if I was envious or horrified.