by Ellie J Duck
Still cursing about the timing of this intrusion and already suspicious that it’s a planned attack taking place while two thirds of the team is away from the base, I charge back down the hall to Hilton’s room. I’m surprised that he’s not already awake and snarling given the noise the alarm is making and the sound of many intruders attempting to force their way inside the building.
His door is thankfully still unlocked after earlier and I throw it open as I burst into the room hoping to hell he’s back to human by now. My concern grows when he doesn’t wake at the noise of my intrusion. The skylight on the ceiling allows the glow of the moon to shine through, illuminating Hilton stretched out on his back in his bed, the sheet strewn haphazardly across his lower half, his chest bare. I take a moment to notice how peaceful he looks in sleep before I stalk across the room. More than once since I joined the team, Greg has cautioned me on the best way to wake a Shifter. Which can either be done from a distance with loud noises, preventing vicious mauling; or by incapacitating the Shifter before waking them.
Since he didn’t wake when I threw the door open and I can’t afford the luxury of alerting the intruders to the fact that I’m awake, I go for the second option, tucking my guns into their holsters and taking care to close his bedroom door again before I cross to the bed. My feet are bare as I step carefully up onto the mattress and straddle his hips, my hands pinning his wrists to the bed.
“Wake up!” I demand of him in a firm but quiet voice.
The terrified squeak that comes from my mouth when he comes awake with a vicious snarl is one that I may blush about until I’m in my eighties. Before I can blink or even react, I find myself pinned to the mattress on my back, with a very angry werewolf laying between my spread legs. He has one hand wrapped around my throat and his lips are pulled back from lethally sharp fangs, a furious snarl rolling through them that makes me realize just how scary Tobias Hilton can be.
“Anna?” he asks, his eyes widening when he realizes it’s me as his sleep-fogged mind begins to clear. “What the hell are you doing? I nearly killed you!”
“The base has been breached,” I tell him before he can even begin to formulate ideas about the reason I’ve snuck into the room and straddled him in the middle of the night.
“What?” he asks, and I can tell from the golden hue in his eyes and the distracted way he leans in to sniff at my neck where the scars he left on me are visible, that he’s not heard what I said.
“We’re under attack!” I snarl at him, peeling his hand from my throat and shoving him, trying to get him off me. “The alarms are going off. There are ten or more Shifters currently breaking into the base, probably with the intention of killing us!”
I realize even as I say the words that for all that his eyes are open, and he looks to be awake, he’s not. He’s still asleep and clearly under the impression that he’s dreaming. That much is obvious when he leans in and captures my lips with his, kissing me hard. His hands slide under my shoulder blades on the bed, pressing me against him even more firmly and leaning into the tantalizing kiss he is giving me. I almost lose myself in the sensation of his mouth on mine and the idea of needing to push him away is like torture, but this really is not the time to be making out with him.
I don’t know which one of us is more surprised when I slap him across the face and attempt to roll him off me, flinging us both across his bed and right over the edge. We roll in a tangle of limbs, Hilton landing on his back with me on top of him before he rolls again, effectively trapping me under him once more.
“Cane?” He blinks at me in confusion.
“Are you awake now?” I demand, somehow still pinned beneath him though now on the floor rather than the much more comfortable bed.
“Why are you in my room?” he demands, and I can tell he’s awake now. “Were you in my bed? I told you to stay away from me unless you wanted to be a werewolf!”
“And that was before I came in here to tell you the base is under attack. There are ten or more Shifters currently breaking into the building with the intention of killing us.”
He stares at me and I catch the way his head tilts, listening to the sound of the alarm in the coms room.
“Fuck!” he snarls before looking back at me on the floor beneath him. “Why are we on the floor?”
I can’t help but smile at his confused and slightly concerned expression.
“I pinned you before waking you, hoping you wouldn’t maul me that way… You sort of woke up and rolled me off you before pinning me instead, but you must have been dreaming or something because I kept telling you we’re under attack, and you were more interested in kissing me…” I explain.
“Again?” he says, frowning and looking as though he has no idea what’s wrong with him.
I nod affirmatively.
“Then why are we on the floor?” he asks, looking worried now.
“I slapped you and rolled us both off the bed to wake you up. This isn’t really the time to be making out,” I supply helpfully. “Could you get off me, so we can go and kill the intruders?”
“You’re being flip now?” he asks me, perplexed even as he gets to his feet and offers me a hand up.
“Now’s the best time. Moments from death and all that,” I reply, grinning and feeling slightly hysterical. I’m very much aware of the fact that the only reason the base is being invaded is because they all have a problem with me being on the team. If it wasn’t for me being human, neither of us would be in danger right now.
I follow Hilton out of the room and down to the coms room, noting idly that he hasn’t bothered to arm himself. I open my mouth to ask him why he hasn’t, before realizing he is armed, with fangs and claws because he intends to transform to fight the invading Shifters as a wolf.
Before I can offer a plan of attack, he presses his phone to his ear, dialing Greg.
“Tobias?” Greg’s voice sounds strange through the phone. “Is everything alright?”
“They’ve come for her,” Hilton growls into the phone.
“What? For Anna?” Greg’s voice changes through the phone, sharpening and sounding suddenly deadly serious.
“Yep, there’s at least ten Shifters breaking into the base right now. I can see seven wolves, a bear, and a couple of cats on the cameras. They’re here for her,” Hilton confirms.
“Can you handle them?” Greg asks seriously, and I can hear the muffled sounds of him getting dressed in the background, something that’s confirmed when I hear the rasp of a zipper through the line.
Hilton glances at me, assessing me, taking in the number of weapons I’m carrying on me despite being only dressed in red silk bed shorts and a black tank top. Including the rifle that I’ve picked up from one of the tables in the coms room, there's a pair of hand guns, and an array of knives hidden on my person. He can probably also see the funny bulges of the grenades I have stuffed in my bra, too.
“Maybe. I need you to get the team here. Tranquilize them if you have to,” Hilton says.
“I was going to, come dawn, anyway. There’s no way I’m going to leave them running loose and horny on a full moon. I’ll have to track them down and drag them from their respective bed partners… Can you hold them off until dawn?”
“We’ll try,” Hilton says, and that statement alone lets me know how dire the situation really is. “Gonna lure them all into my cage and tear them apart.”
“Okay, well, let Anna fill them with silver. I know you doubt her ability but trust me when I tell you that she can and will slaughter them if she needs to. Keep her safe, Tobias, or Magnus will have all our heads.”
“Got it, Boss,” Hilton replies in a clipped voice before he hangs up the phone.
“Did you hear all that?” he asks me, and I see a flash of curiosity in his gold eyes behind his serious expression.
“Down to the fact that he was dressing and not alone, wherever he is,” I confirm, scooping up more and more ammo and making sure all my guns are fully loaded.
He nods his hea
d before going to a huge safe on the wall and digging out some more weapons, all of which he hands to me.
“A sword, really?” I ask when he tries to hand me the medieval weapon.
“You’ve already got a bunch of knives. This is longer than they are,” he argues.
“And I’m more likely to cut myself with it than be able to effectively wield it. Put it back,” I tell him, laughing despite the danger we’re both in.
“You’ll carry live grenades but not a sword?” he asks skeptically, still trying to hand it to me.
“Grenades do more damage and can be thrown.”
Hilton growls at me but puts the sword back where he got it from.
“We’re going to lure them all into my cage,” he tells me when we both take another look at the monitors. “I want you to shoot as many of them as you can, and you better make every single shot a kill shot, little human.”
He looks at me seriously before going back to the safe on the wall, where he removes several more guns, all of them loaded with silver bullets, and hands them all to me, watching me tuck them away into my clothing one at a time.
“Shouldn’t we…. I don’t know, try to incapacitate them rather than killing them. Aside from breaking into the base, they haven’t done anything wrong,” I say, feeling uncomfortable over the idea of people being killed by me for doing something they believe in.
“I misjudged you,” he tells me, his expression softening from the serious, stern one he so often wears to one I’ve never seen before, one that makes me think he almost believes we’re equals. “But no, little human. Not this time. They’re here to kill you for the simple fact that you’re human and they won’t stop until you’re dead or they are.”
I nod my head, biting my lip over the idea of killing them. Sure, when they shift they might look like animals, but they’re human too. They’re as human as the man standing in front of me. As human as Brody and Tara and Mitch. I realize in that moment how much I’ve come to care for my team in the short time I’ve known them and before I can ponder the fact that they’ve gotten through my defenses, Tobias hands me a very big knife. It’s not quite the same length as the sword he tried to give me earlier, but it is long enough to penetrate all the way through a human body and poke out the other side.
“Don’t hesitate to kill them, Cane. Shoot these fuckers in the head and keep shooting until they stop twitching…. Try not to hit me in the process,” he says, and I watch in a fascinated kind of horror as his smile stretches wide and wicked with an animalistic gleam in his rapidly brightening eyes. “Lure them all to my cage and help me kill them all. And when it’s done, I want you to get out of that cage as fast as you can and lock me inside. Got it?”
“Why?” I ask him, confused by this plan.
“Because the full moon is on the doorstep and once I shift I’ll have until dawn to hang onto my humanity before the wolf takes over completely. And when that happens, you’re fair game,” he tells me, tapping me lightly under the chin and causing my heart to skip a beat at the contact as he commands: “Don’t get bitten. Don’t die. Just kill.”
I watch in fascination and more than a little horror as his body begins to change shape. It starts with the easy things first. The hair on his body lengthens and darkens, thickening into the thick pelt of wolf skin the beast within him must wear. His nails lengthen into long sharp claws, his fingers and toes shortening and widening.
“Lure them to my cage,” is the last cohesive thing he can say before his face buckles and his ears begin to travel up the side of his head, lengthening into long pointed wolf ears. His body hunches in on itself and there are a sickening set of crunches as several bones break and re-shape themselves into the form of a wolf rather than a man. The whole process takes no more than a minute and when he is finished there is a very large, very formidable dark brown wolf with a vivid silver stripe down his back standing before me.
I marvel at the sight of him. I’ve seen the other three Shifters on the team shifted before, having been confronted by them the night of my arrival at the base, but this is the very first time I’ve seen Tobias completely shifted. At least, shifted and not trying to tear my throat out. He makes an odd sound at what I assume must be my gob smacked expression before head-butting me in the stomach with his big wolf head and jumping up to put his paws on the table, taking one last look at the location of the Shifters invading our home.
He narrows his copper eyes on the screens for a moment before he glances at me, nods, and bounds out the door. I follow him at a run, making a beeline for his cage like he instructed, knowing the invaders will follow us. I wonder as I run if they knew we were here alone before vaguely wondering if maybe they thought that I’d been left here completely alone.
The sound of snarling alerts me to the first attacker in the building and I spin toward the sound, my weapons already raised and my finger squeezing the trigger of the handgun I’m clutching. The white wolf goes down with a silver bullet lodged squarely in between its blue eyes. I continue shooting it until the face of the creature is barely recognizable as a wolf, making sure it’s good and dead and trying not to gag at the sizzling scent of its flesh as the silver burns it.
When I turn back to Hilton, he is wrestling with another wolf, this one sandy brown and much smaller than him, making me think it must be female. He bats the poor thing around with his huge paws, seeming like he’s playing but for the gouges he’s causing across her nose. Narrowing my eyes, I lift my handgun and empty five rounds into her head, watching her fall dead at his feet. He turns to me with a comical expression of surprise on his wolf face.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I feign innocence. “Were you having fun with the intruders here to kill me?”
He rolls his eyes at me, making me remember that for all that he looks canine, he’s still human in there. At least for now.
I’m too busy focusing on him to notice the tiger that creeps up behind me and I cry out in agony as I am thrown forward. The bastard pounces on me from behind and the feel of a fully-grown male tiger landing on my back is not a pleasant one. It’s a favorite attack of Tara’s so I’m not totally incapacitated by it, though the feel of his huge jaws wrapping around the top of my left shoulder and almost tearing my arm off has me screaming in pain.
The situation isn’t exactly helped when Hilton hurls himself at the tiger and they are both thrown away from me with his momentum, causing the tiger’s teeth to be torn from my skin, shredding the muscles and tendon in my shoulder. I can barely move as I lay there on the ground, blood pouring from my wound, pain rendering me close to unconsciousness.
Gritting my teeth and steeling myself, I feel my whole consciousness slip into the zone I learned from Dad, an area of my subconscious which allows me to distance myself from the pain. I can hear his low, gruff voice inside my head, telling me to roll over and shoot the fucker in the head. To push through the pain. To toughen up.
Gritting my teeth, I do as his voice instructs me, thankful for the long grueling training sessions he put me through every time he saw me. When I’m on my back I try to lift my left arm and whimper in agony and almost drop my gun before lifting the next one. The tiger has wrestled Hilton to his back and the snarling is already drawing the others. Exhaling slowly despite the throbbing in my shoulder and the rapidly dampening floor beneath the wounds as the blood gushes out, I let my gaze zero in on the tiger who caused me this pain.
When he pins Hilton down, I squeeze the trigger, watching the bastard jolt and almost drop as I plant a bullet in his temple. Frustrated when he doesn’t go down but instead fixes bright green tiger eyes on me, I keep squeezing until my gun is empty, groaning when he falls down dead on my legs after trying to pounce on me again before I filled him with bullets. Like the wolves both did, the tiger’s flesh sizzles with the silver eating through it and I realize just how susceptible they are to it as it chews right through one part of his skull, causing it to fall away from the rest with a wet thwack as it hits the ground.
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br /> “Gross,” I wrinkle my nose, trying desperately to kick my legs from beneath the beast and having trouble under his dead weight.
“Ouch!” I howl when Hilton comes up by my head and wraps his own muzzle around the already torn wound on my shoulder. He uses the grip to pull me from beneath the tiger.
“What the hell are you doing? You told me in no uncertain terms not to let you bite me?” I demand when his teeth close over the area a second time, better gripping me and lifting me this time into a sitting position. He lets go of the bleeding hole in my shoulder and nudges his head against my back, pushing me to get up, to keep moving.
When I’m on my feet and moving again he stops and looks up at me, and there is a glitter in his eyes that worries me. It’s almost regretful and I hold his gaze for a moment, wondering how bad things are going to be. After all, he told me that until the full moon had passed, if I was bitten by him, I’d wind up a werewolf. I wonder what bearing being bitten by a tiger first will have on that possibility. From his expression I get the feeling it’s not good news.
Pushing the entire idea from my mind I follow him as we race through the building, pausing to shoot another wolf we come across before Hilton can even tackle the bastard. I leave it lying on the path that leads to the entrance of Tobias’s cage and follow him inside it.
“Now what?” I ask him, glancing down at him. His canine eyes are scanning the area and his low growl alerts me to the danger when two more wolves come racing through the gate. I shoot one, a huge grey one, but the bullet grazes its shoulder and though it yelps, it doesn’t stop running. Hilton pounces at it, meeting it in a snarling fray of clashing fangs and fur. The other one, this one a russet shade of reddish brown that glows in the moonlight, fixes blue eyes on me and growls low, baring its teeth. I can’t tell at a glance if it’s male or female, but as I lift my gun and fire at it, it jumps out of the way of the bullet, skidding in the dirt before making a run at me.
I fire again and again as it races toward me, all my bullets missing the mark and hitting its shoulders or long body rather than its head. Each yelp tells me they hurt, and the smell of sizzling flesh tells me it’s burning, but the wolf keeps coming. I drag up the huge knife Hilton gave me, cursing foully at the way it makes the wounds on my shoulder ache and throb torturously. Just as the wolf lunges at me, diving for my throat and somehow managing to seize my shoulder instead, I feel the sword collide with its flesh and sink into its body even as its momentum throws me to the ground again.