by Dean Murray
Chapter 26
James Wright
Three miles outside of town
Sanctuary, Utah
We all watched Vincent vanish down the road leaving Jess, Jasmin and me with two of Vincent's bruisers. Doug and Randy would have outclassed all three of us even if I hadn't been broken and two hard kicks away from death.
It shouldn't have surprised me that the two of them were well-versed in cheap tricks, or that they were completely unthreatened by Jasmin and Jessica. They'd spent their entire adult lives bullying people. It didn't particularly matter whether you matched them up against the girls as hybrids versus wolves or if you left all four in their primary forms. Either way the girls didn't stand a chance.
I was the dominant here, it was my job to put myself between jerks like this and submissives like Jessica and Jasmin, but I just didn't have anything left to give. I tried to move and nearly passed out from the pain.
I looked up to tell Jasmin that I was sorry and when our eyes met I could see her plan in her eyes. We'd been through a lot together, but I never would have guessed that we'd be able to communicate so much without using words. I looked over at Jess and she seemed to be on the same page, so I took a deep breath and tried not to cough.
"You know, it really is too bad."
"What's that, Wright? Are you talking about the fact that you chose to back the wrong horse or that you were dumb enough to think Vincent would honor a challenge match when there weren't any witnesses around?"
I shook my head slowly. "No, it's too bad that we didn't have this conversation before you killed all of those people in Naco."
I could see the wheels turning in their head for the split second I gave them before I shifted into my hybrid form in the biggest, noisiest show of power I'd ever managed.
The two of them had been standing so that they could watch the girls over by the SUV and me off on the side of the road. Even though they were both a half beat slow from trying to solve the riddle of how I knew that they'd been responsible for Naco, they still turned towards me to honor the threat of a fellow hybrid.
It was exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect them to do, exactly the kind of thing that their beasts would demand of them, and it was exactly the wrong response.
They never even saw the girls shift and spring towards them. Jasmin and Jessica timed their jumps perfectly and they ripped out both of the guys' throats a split second before either of them managed to shift to their hybrid forms.
Shifting into a hybrid had healed some of the worst of the damage to my body, but it was still more than I could do to pull myself to my feet. After a couple of seconds, the girls shifted back to their human forms and cleaned the blood off of their mouths.
"Just shift back and we'll carry you, James. It's time to get back on the road or we're going to miss Alec's timetable."
"All right, but I was kind of looking forward to freaking out the next people to drive by here. As long as we're going to be outlaws we really ought to get the full enjoyment out of the experience."