by Selina Woods
“Defenseless,” giggled another.
I tensed, my rage rising as I realized they had watched the bar for a while and knew when Skyler was in there alone. Damn you, Jonas, never leave Skyler by herself! I sneaked forward a few more paces, then lay on my belly at the conjunction of an alley and a structure, invisible unless I moved.
“I’m already hard,” the first voice snickered. “I hope she wiggles a lot. Always makes it fun.”
I forced the growl that hit my jaws to remained locked behind my fangs. You think you’re gonna rape my girl? You’re gonna lose your cock and balls. I watched, silent, patient, observing them try to find a way in. The bars on the windows obviously deterred them, so the next best thing was the door. I guessed them to be three wolves and one lion, and the lion tested the locked door.
“Hafta knock it down,” he growled, backing away from it.
Then he charged, crashing through the wood, his heavy shoulders breaking the door off its hinges with a loud crunching sound. The wolves followed him in, their triumphant yips and laughing howls making my blood surge with renewed rage. Hoping they were wrong about Skyler being inside and alone, I hesitated a fraction.
Then I heard her scream.
Chapter Four
Lunging out of hiding, I charged through the door behind them, hearing them attack her in the back room. By the sounds, she had shifted to defend herself, yet she was small, a lioness, and no match for four drug-maddened predators. I caught a rapid glimpse of Skyler crouched, her fangs bared, her rear quarters in a corner, when I leaped over the couch I’d slept on, over the wolves, and struck the lion dead center.
He collapsed with my heavy weight on his back, my claws raking deep furrows along his ribs and rump. But he was strong, and he was crazy on opiates, and he recovered fast. Lifting himself, he flung me from his body and charged in for the kill while I bounced off the floor. As fast as he was, I was faster, and not crazed by drugs. I could think, and I did.
I dodged his slashing paws and ducked low as he rushed for me. Caught unawares by my simple disappearing act, he actually leaped over me and crashed into the wall. Dazed, more than confused, he gathered himself at the same time Skyler screamed, “Ragnor, look out!”
Seeing their pal under attack, the wolves did what came naturally to wolves—they tried to hamstring me. I spun around, and suddenly they faced my dripping fangs and exposed claws, not my vulnerable rear. The first died under my weight and powerful bite to his neck, his back and neck both broken. Another leaped aside to avoid me and slammed headlong into Skyler.
Small she may be, but she was a lion and had all the lion’s weaponry at her disposal. With a ripping snarl, ears flattened, she seized the wolf by his back near his hindquarters and shook him as a housecat shakes a mouse. The wolf howled in agony before his spine also snapped, and his scream as she flung him into the kitchen echoed forlornly.
I knew the lion had gotten himself together and leaped for my unprotected back. Jumping sideways, I crashed into a chair, lost my balance, and discovered the asshole landed squarely between Skyler and me. The remaining wolf skittered away, yelping, and then thought my unbalanced state meant I was weak. He grabbed ahold of my sensitive flank with his jaws and refused to let go.
Roaring in pain and rage, I spun around, trying to grab that despicable creature and crush him in my teeth until he spurted blood everywhere. Meanwhile, the insane lion missed me, and now stalked his newest target—Skyler. Even as I tried to grab ahold of the shit chewing a hole in my flank, I saw him lunge for her, his claws raking bloody gashes in her face.
I saw red.
Ignoring the fiery hot agony in my side, and the heavy weight that slowed me down, I charged for him. The wolf in tow, I did to him what the wolves tried to do to me. I seized his right rear leg in my powerful jaws and crunched down, splintering bone and crushing tendons. He roared in pain and fury, spinning on three legs to face me. His heavy paw cracked me across the face but did little to slow me down. Then he charged.
Snarling my rage, I leaped sideways, exposing my bloody flank—and the wolf who still clung there. The renegade lion hit the wolf broadside, ripping him from my flesh, and crushed him beneath his own weight. The wolf yelped his last breath as the lion, in his drug-induced madness, tore him to shreds.
“Ragnor,” Skyler cried, limping her way toward me.
“Get back,” I commanded as the lion flung what remained of his friend and comrade against the wall and spun toward us both. He somehow managed to use his intact rear leg to spring from, for he leaped with power and agility. Skyler obeyed me and held back as I met the marauder face to face, chest to chest, fighting on our rear legs.
His fangs slashed gashes across my muzzle while mine tore one of his eyes and an ear, my weight slowly pushing him back. My front claws raked his shoulders as he fought not just me, but to remain upright. I knew that if I kept the pressure on him, his single useful rear leg would collapse, and he would go down.
And when it did, I’d rip his guts out.
He fell, still trying to fight as I threw him onto his back, his vulnerable belly exposed to my fangs. My heavy mane protected my neck from his teeth as I bit deep into his vitals. He roared, screaming, as I tore chuck after chunk of his guts from his abdomen. His rear leg sought to slash me, but I ignored it as I blooded my muzzle to rip his purple-white intestines, burrowing in under his ribs for his heart and lungs.
Determined to kill him, I reached with my paw to snag something, anything, in his protected chest that would help me achieve that goal. I hit his lung tissue, and snagged it, tearing a hole. Blood gushed from his wounds, splashing me, pouring onto the floor under us both. He struggled to breathe, his air pumping from his torn lung rather than into his bloodstream.
The lion collapsed.
Gasping, his eyes wild, he fought to breathe, to live, his guts strewn across Skyler’s home. At long last, he died as I stared down at him, his upper lip still curled back in a defiant snarl. Panting ragged breaths, I finally turned toward Skyler.
“Ragnor.”
Back in her human form, she lunged for me, weeping, her arms flung around my heavy neck. She buried her face in my mane, sobbing incoherently, crying my name over and over. “Easy, baby,” I murmured, holding her close with my foreleg around her back. “It’s all good. You’re okay now.”
Sitting on my haunches, I held her to me, scenting her fear, her vulnerability. While she had natural courage, she was not a lion bred for fighting. She hadn’t the size, nor the weight, and no doubt lived a sheltered life. And I loved her more for it. “Hey, baby,” I muttered, “let me look at you. Are you okay?”
Skyler nodded in the depths of my mane. “I think so.”
“Come here.”
She released me and backed up so I could examine her. The wounds on her face were mere scratches, and would no doubt heal without scarring. “You’ll be fine, baby.”
Skyler wiped her hands over her face, sniffling back her tears. “I’m useless in a fight.”
“Hey, that’s not true.” I jerked my muzzle toward the kitchen where the wolf whose back she broke still screamed. “You took that asshole out.”
A voice bellowed her name. Skyler turned in time to see her father, Jonas, appear in the doorway, his face pale, panicked. “Skyler? What the hell?”
She ran to him, embracing him as his arms swept her in close. I met his gaze evenly as he stared at me over her shoulder, then saw the bodies, the blood, the destruction. He knew, without being told, what had happened. “Skyler,” he muttered, near tears, burying his face against her shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I never should have left you alone.”
It wasn’t my place to agree with him. Standing on four legs, I tried to take stock of my injuries. The hole the wolf chewed in my flank was the worst, but he had gotten only my hide and none of my internal organs. At long last, the screams of the wolf in the kitchen faded as he either died or fainted away, offering us a much-needed respite from the noise.
Jonas nodded to me, and I nodded gravely back.
“I see that, honey,” he told her, swiping her hair from her face. “We owe him a lot.”
Sitting on my haunches, I gazed around at the broken and overturned furniture, the corpses, breathed in the stench of death. “They had been watching this place, Jonas,” I said, no accusation in my tone. “They knew she was by herself.”
“I thought she was safe here,” he confessed, his expression bleak as he, too, took in the devastation. “I’ll never leave you alone again, Skyler.”
Wiping her face with her hands, Skyler turned from Jonas to stare at me. “While I’m happy to see you, Ragnor, why didn’t Kanata kill you?”
I laughed. “He saw the wisdom in what I did and why, and also the need to keep me around.”
“I’m lost,” Jonas complained. “What happened?”
“I stopped an enforcer from killing the owner of that café down the street,” I told him, turning my head to examine the bloody hole in my flesh, “and expected the boss to kill me.”
“He’s losing enforcers almost as fast as he is his citizens.”
While I had suspected that to be true, I never asked my brothers questions when I noticed a familiar face gone. Shifting forms, I grimaced in pain. “I sure hope that asswipe doesn’t have rabies,” I muttered, pulling my torn shirt up to inspect the ragged tear.
“I hate to ask your help after what you did,” Jonas said, diffident. “But would you mind helping us clean this place up?”
“I’ll help. If I can have Skyler take a look at this.”
Her brows furrowed, she came to me and peered long at the wound on my side above my hip. “That’s nasty, Ragnor. I’ll stitch it as best I can, but the worst part will be the risk of infection.”
With the adrenaline rush finally fading, the pain of that injury, as well as the cuts from my battle with the lion, really started to hurt. “If we dump these bodies in the alley to rot,” I commented, my hands on my hips, “their pals will know they were killed here.”
“And will come back for revenge,” Jonas finished. “I know. I can get my hands on a truck, and if we put the bodies in it, we can take them out and dump them in the lake.”
“Papa, you shouldn’t go out there,” Skyler told him, “not at this hour.”
“I’ll be all right. We can’t have the smell of blood and death in the bar when we open in the morning. It’ll scare the customers away.”
“Get the truck, Jonas,” I said. “It’ll give Skyler a chance to fix me up.”
“Right.”
He obviously now had no qualms about leaving me alone with his daughter, for he left the room to head out. “I’ll close the door as best I can,” he said as I followed him. “It’s splintered pretty good.”
Together, we fitted the door back in place, but the lock was busted, and it wasn’t held in place by the hinges. “I’ll shore it up from the inside,” I told him, “but you’ll have to let me know it’s you before I open it again.”
“Excellent. You’ll find nails and a hammer under the bar. Just let me out first.”
I held the door so he could slip out, then put the door back, discovering Skyler behind me with said hammer and nails. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I secured the door against most anything except a charging, drugged-out lion. Taking my hand, Skyler led me back to the living room, but I hesitated.
“I need to check on that wolf.”
“Oh, he’s dead,” Skyler informed me, clearly unconcerned that she had taken a life.
I peered into her eyes. “It doesn’t bother you that you killed him?”
“Should it? He came to kill me, and—other things.”
“Rape, yeah. But, Skyler, you’re not like me. I don’t want you to become like me.”
Setting her hands to her hips, she smiled, looking me full in the face without flinching. “Somehow, I no longer believe that is a bad thing.”
Turning, she strode on into the back room, leaving me to gape. “Do you want me to look at you or not?” she called.
Heaving a sigh, thinking that her outlook on life may have rubbed off on me, just as my killer’s ways may have now neatly transferred themselves to her. I followed her into the bathroom, where she pointed to the toilet. “Sit there and take your shirt off,” she ordered.
Stripping off my bloody shirt, I sat down and watched her ready her needles and silk, as well as that bottle of stuff she used to disinfect my wounds earlier. I began to sweat. “Uh, you’re not gonna use that shit on me again. Are you?”
“Yep. Have to. You’ve got saliva, and who knows what else, in there after being bitten.”
I groaned. “That shit hurts, you know?”
“It does,” she agreed, her eyes filled with amusement. “But it’s just pain. It won’t kill you.”
“Oh, it’s just pain she says,” I grumbled, eyeing her with trepidation. “Easy for you to say.”
“Quit complaining. Are you a lion or a damn mouse?”
“Squeak, squeak.”
Laughing, she turned to me with that wretched bottle in her hand. “Does it help that I feel bad that I have to hurt you to heal you?”
“Not one frigging bit.”
“Lean over; I need to see what I’m doing.”
I bent sideways, exposing my side, my jaws already clenched tight in anticipation of the burning to follow. I was not disappointed. If I hurt earlier, the red hot agony that followed quadrupled it. I barely managed to keep the scream locked in my throat, my head spinning hard enough to make me think I would pass out.
“There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I growled at her. “You are evil.”
Clicking her tongue, Skyler knelt beside me, her needle and silk ready to sew me up yet again. The agony faded away at last, leaving me exhausted and sweating. I gazed down at the top of her bowed head, her nimble fingers deftly pushing the needle through my flesh, tying the knots that would enable me to heal faster.
The ragged edges of the wound closed together under her skills, yet I would remain with a long curving scar there for the rest of my life.
“I should cut the jagged edges off,” Skyler told me. “But that would really hurt you.”
I studied her handiwork. “Looks fine to me.”
Rising, she washed my blood from her hands and picked up the dreaded bottle again, then picked up cotton batting.
“Oh, no,” I said, drawing away.
“This won’t be so bad. But these other cuts of yours could get infected, too.”
Dabbing the soaked cotton on my other wounds, she smiled as she worked. “Your injuries from the other night are healing well.”
Lightly touching her previous sewing job on my cheekbone, she said, “Another few days and I can yank those out.”
Her face, dangerously close to mine, tempted me into kissing her. I gazed deep into her eyes, seeing there the humor and growing affection I had once thought I would never see. Skyler leaned toward me—
A heavy pounding at the front door announced the return of Jonas.
“Shit,” I muttered, getting up and striding out to open it for him.
He brought not just a truck, but another lion shifter to aid us. “Ragnor, this is Barney, a friend of mine.”
I gave Barney, a heavy-shouldered shifter in his early thirties, a quick nod of greeting. “Thanks for coming,” I told him as we headed in to start dragging corpses out.
“Thanks for saving Skyler.” Barney sized me up as much as I did him, grinning in such a way as to make me think he liked me. “We’re all very fond of her.”
“Yeah? So am I.”
Baffled by his apparent easy acceptance of me, and how he even seemed to like me, I helped them lug the corpses out to the back of the truck. The lion was a heavy bastard, and by the time we got him out, I feared I’d pop Skyler’s handiwork and spill my guts out all over the place.
Panting, sweating, I leaned against the side of the truck, my head bowed.
“You all right, Ragnor?” Barney asked, eying the wound on my side as I hadn’t put my shirt back on.
“Yeah.”
“For an enforcer, you sure are a good guy.”
Jonas brought Skyler out with him, closing the door behind them. “We need to get rid of them fast,” he said, opening the rear door of the truck. “Someone might see us.”
We all piled in as Barney started the engine and pulled away from the curb. I held Skyler’s hand as he drove through the dark silent streets, no headlights on to expose us to anyone watching. “Kanata will be happy to know these guys are dead,” I commented. “He might even reward us.”
“But their pals won’t be.” Jonas glanced over the seat. “They may even know they’re dead and who killed them.”
“Probably not,” Barney replied. “They aren’t organized, at least not yet. If they find out, they’ll come for you, but none of us will snitch to them.”
New Orleans was surrounded by lakes and the closest one was well within the city limits. Had we tried to leave, Kanata’s road guards would have stopped us and asked too many questions. While Kanata would approve of the killings, we didn’t need guards gossiping about who had four corpses in the back of a truck.
The stars gleamed down on us as Barney backed the truck to the edge of the water, the black glassy surface broken by a few fish snatching bugs from the air over it. By the time we consigned the bodies to their watery grave, exhaustion and pain nearly swamped me. Leaning against the door on the ride back, I closed my eyes and jumped when Skyler rested her fingers on my forehead.
“Ragnor isn’t looking too good, Papa,” she said as though I weren’t awake and watching her.
“Once we get back, he can rest.”
Except I didn’t. After Barney drove away, and Jonas and I nailed the front door closed again, I helped them clean the gore up with buckets of cleaner, mops, and rags. By the time it was done, the place scenting of disinfectant, the furniture righted, I was weak, trembling, and sweating hard. When I staggered, Jonas caught my arm and guided me to the sofa.