by Penny Alley
Neoma lay motionless, praying her eyes showed none of the heated burning igniting one internal knot at a time.
Jax eased the door open wide. Palming the blade in his uninjured hand, he reached inside, letting his hand rest a moment upon the soft fur of her head. “I’ll make it quick,” he promised with a nod. “I’ll even make it painless. He’ll know who left you flayed in pieces across his bed, but apart from a few tense words exchanged at the breakfast table, there’s not one damn thing he’ll—”
A sudden explosion of sound and light shattered the bedroom window, knocking Jax off his haunches. Neoma lunched, whacking her head on the underside of the cage, and they fell together, Jax landing nearly face-first into her in his ducking haste to escape the glass. Another booming crash, splintering wood and shattering windows, shook the house. The reverberation blew the louver closet doors open and popped the light fixture off the gaping crack that split the ceiling. The frosted shade crashed to the floor just inches from Jax, ducking him even deeper into the kennel and peppering Neoma’s muzzle with splinters.
Shouting erupted down the hall, but it wasn’t until Jax raised his head that Neoma realized she was halfway out of the cage and cowering against him. She’d moved, and he knew it.
Jax jerked backwards, both swinging with his knife and kicking to knock her back, but Neoma was already on him. Her teeth hit his cast when he threw up his arm to protect his face. Her wildly scrambling back legs hit both walls. Her claws tore on the wire floor. He was bigger, even unShifted, but he was also off-balance, and she bowled him over, the mouth of the kennel scraping a bloody furrow down her bristled spine from shoulders to hips. Once she was on him, she didn’t let go. It was a distant pain when he punched her side with his good hand. His cast protected his throat.
He punched repeatedly, battering at her ribs, but she lunged again and again, Ripping and tearing to get under both cast and chin. His shout broke under the snap of her teeth. Fragile flesh tore as she threw herself into a full-bodied shake. She didn’t stop until the hot copper spray of his blood filled her mouth.
He slammed his fist into her, the hilt of the knife she hadn’t realized was still in his hand glancing off her shoulder blade and cutting raw fire down her side. He convulsed in her jaws, his gaping gasp for air a bubbling wetness that spewed crimson into her eyes. Her muzzle and neck were soaked by it. The warmth ran down her forelegs, saturating the ruff of her chest. The cloying sweetness salted every snarling gasp she took, but she didn’t let go. Not until she felt Jax’s straining body ease. His arm fell, the cast thudding to the carpet beside her. Even then, she held on, teeth locked until the convulsions faded to disjointed twitches.
A heavy weight hit the bedroom door an instant before Joela burst in. She froze halfway over the threshold, blue eyes widening when she saw her brother, his blood-stained mouth gaping and eyes fixed sightless upon the ceiling. Neoma dropped Jax, cold stare now locked on her next target. Her fearless eyes narrowing, Joela grabbed at the doorknob, but managed only a single retreating step before two large gray wolves slammed into her side, knocking her partway behind the wall. She didn’t know what was happening, and she didn’t need to. All Neoma saw was the scramble of Joela’s sneakers digging furrows into the carpet until they abruptly stilled.
And then, firecracker-like pops as rapid gunfire filled the front of the house, punching through the bedroom walls to spray the bed, the bureau, the nightstands and everything on them. Neoma hit her belly, wood splinters, lamp shards, and goose-down pillow feathers exploding all around her. It didn’t last. The baying snarls of attacking volka wolves gradually diminished it the way the burning in her back and side diminished the initial swell of adrenaline now melting from her shaking body. The open bedroom door beckoned, but the stillness of Joela’s feet poking out from behind the wall, like ruby red witch slippers poking out from under a house, stopped her. A warm and gentle rain, her own blood fell pattering to the carpet, mingling in a pool of Jax’s and scenting every burning breath she pulled into her fiery chest.
Smoke thickened the air, pouring into the bedroom through the air vents and the open door. She had to get to Deacon, but she couldn’t do that. Not with Scullamy in revolt or under attack, with guns still going off, and now, a fire. The crackle of flames catching hold and spreading fast sounded like a dull roar coming up the hall. No, she couldn’t do this. Not when she was bleeding so badly, no matter how much she wanted to.
Neoma bolted for the shattered window. The leap to get over the sill was an unexpected agony coupled with failure. When she hit the wall, her scrambling feet left bloody claw lines from ledge to molding. What should have been an easy jump over, ended in a sagging flop back on the carpet. She panted, fire searing her ribs with each expanding breath. That scared her, but nowhere near as badly as what she saw when she looked back.
Back bristled, head held low between his shoulders and ears flat, a massive gray volka male stood motionless in the open bedroom door. Blood painted his muzzle. The amber shine of his lupine gaze locked on her and when he took that first halting step into the bedroom, the stalking danger of his approach put a fleeing panic into her ten times stronger than any fire could have. He wasn’t Deacon. She didn’t know who he was, but when he ventured a second step, coming all the way into the room, it renewed her flagging strength. She leapt the wall, cutting her paws on broken glass in the clamber to get outside.
The night felt hot, alive with the glow of multiple fires, not just within Deacon’s broken house but all over the compound. A fog of choking smoke burned her eyes and lungs as she ran through the bushes, around the side of the garage and headlong into a confusion of shouting, running chaos.
The barracks were burning. Men scrambled from first and second floor windows to escape the flames and it was to that hell that the majority of Scullamy’s soldiers were running, pulling comrades from the spreading fire, shouting for water, arming themselves against the impending wails of distant police and firetruck sirens. Few seemed even to notice the truck sticking half in and half out of Deacon’s collapsed living room. Of the handful who had noticed, the fight to get inside the house, where staccato bursts of gunfire could still be heard, was proving more difficult than their training allowed. Fallen soldiers littered the front porch, the bushes beneath the caved-in wall, and even the open garage, where three had tried to penetrate via the inner kitchen entrance.
Leaving a trail of blood on the cool cement behind her, she crept into the garage, keeping the car between her and open kitchen door. Billows of black smoke poured from it, rolling in clouds along the ceiling. Inside, she could hear coughing, residual shouts and growls, and her father, the Alpha Deacon, shouting for his men to close ranks, close damn it, around him. She almost went back inside. The need to find him and finish this, chewed at her. It was the other wolves, and the fear she might be captured or killed before she reached Deacon, that stopped her. She could handle being captured and she didn’t care if she was killed, so long as Deacon died before her. But if he didn’t, and she was, then he would never pay for what he’d done.
Beyond the compound walls, the wail of chevolak sirens grew louder. She had to get out. Now. While she still could. Bleeding as she was, though, she wasn’t going to get very far by running.
Neoma had to Shift to get the car keys, hanging on a hook board by the gaping kitchen door. Having left her dress in the bottom of the kennel cage, she striped the shirt off a body lying in the garage. That it was already blood-stained and torn from twin bullet holes hardly mattered; when she crawled into it, the painful gashes she found bleeding heavily along her ribs and down her back mattered even less. She left crimson smears on the car handle, the paint and the luxury leather seats when she eased in behind the steering wheel. Panting—her ribs killing her—she sat and stared at the array of buttons and knobs, and tried hard not to cry. The only similarity between this car and Gabe’s was the fact they both had four tires.
She fumbled to figure out the push button s
tart, but there was no clutch or gear stick shift. When she tried the gas pedal, the engine revved but the car didn’t move. The dashboard was alight with soothing green lights. How could anyone drive something so fancy that it required two sets of wiper controls, one on each side of the steering column?
Frustrated, her hand accidentally knocked into the right wiper control, dropping it down a notch. A tiny green ‘P’ on the dashboard changed to an ‘R’, and suddenly the car jerked into motion. Yelping, she grabbed the steering wheel as the car peeled straight out of the garage, running over a body at the doorway and bouncing so wildly that she cracked her head on the padded ceiling. She stomped the brake pedal with both feet, but not before the car veered off the driveway, mowed over a decorative shrub and smacked into the perimeter wall. Hugging her side, every breath a renewed torture of hurt, Neoma was still trying to figure out which ‘D’ on the digital display meant first gear when a figure staggered out through the smoky kitchen door.
Choking, disheveled and wounded and stained with soot, Deacon made it halfway across the garage before he noticed he was awash in the brightness of her automatic headlights. Blinded, he raised his arm to shield his eyes. When he recognized her through the windshield, he froze.
Neoma’s inability to breathe now had nothing to do with the pain chewing up her back and into her ribs. In a rush, the rage she thought she’d abandoned in Deacon’s bedroom seized hold of her once more.
Slamming the car into gear, she stomped the gas pedal flush with the floor mat. The tires threw rocks and grass, leaving muddy ruts all the way back to the garage and the alpha trapped within it. The bump as the tires scaled the pavement smacked her into the roof of the car again. Neoma didn’t care. She kept her aim on Deacon as he turned, bolting for the kitchen just as a large volka wolf appeared in the smoking doorway.
Her feet recognized that wolf before her brain did and stomped on the brakes. The leather beneath her slick with blood, she slammed into the steering wheel chest first. She gasped at the impact, then recognized the wolf too late—Gabe!—and screamed.
It happened so fast. Focused on Deacon from the moment he emerged from the house, Gabe noticed her only seconds before they collided. He jumped, but the force of that impact carried him right over the car in a tumbling legs-over-body roll that crumpled the metal from bumper to windshield, and up onto the roof before he bounced off the trunk and landed hard on the unyielding cement floor directly behind the stopped car.
“Gabe!” She twisted, grabbing her side and searching all the mirrors and windows for any sign of him. The only movement, however, came from directly in front of her, and the second she saw it, it reclaimed all her attention.
The bumper just inches from crushing him into the built-in work table, Deacon flattened himself against it. His eyes on her were wild, shock and fury in the white-rimmed depths. Her hands tightened on the wheel, white-knuckled, squeezing and twisting at the hard plastic until her fingers hurt. The urge to take her foot off the brake and hit the gas again was as strong as it was murderous. Without proper distance to build up speed and force, hitting him now wouldn’t kill him. At best, she’d only pin him to the cheap plywood counter, crushing his legs under the press of the bumper and grille.
Nostrils flaring, head bowed, Deacon bared his teeth.
So did Neoma. She was fine with crushing him slowly.
Shoving back off the table, Deacon held up both hands. There was no surrender in him. He beckoned instead. “Come, girl. Neoma, my ever obedient. Come on.”
Everything about him blurred. Swiping at her eyes, Neoma fought to keep him in focus, but they refused to obey. She tried to shift gears, to throw the car forward and hit the son of a bitch, but her body wouldn’t do that either. She didn’t realize she was crying until he smiled.
“Come on,” he said again, forcefully now. “You get this from me, too. Come on!”
Her shaking hands gripped and re-gripped the steering wheel.
Deacon’s smile spread, the anger in his eyes turning it ugly. “That’s my blood inside you. No matter what you do, you’ll never get it out.”
“Maybe not,” said a voice to her left. “But I can get it out.”
The muzzle of an assault rifle came even with the driver’s side window, pointed straight at Deacon. She saw that before she saw the two men standing just outside her door. Cords of hard muscle wrapped around a lanky frame, hands stained with smoke and motor oil, the first man held the rifle. The other—taller, thicker in build, and much hairier—carried Joela over his left shoulder. Bound hand and foot, her eyes spat fire above her duct-taped mouth. Apart from a few bruises and the indignity of being carried with her face unavoidably positioned over a naked stranger’s hairy behind, she hardly seemed the worse for having been attacked by two volka wolves.
“I can get it out, too,” Colton said, stepping out of the house through a door not just smoking now, but on fire. He was naked. So were the other two men. Everyone must have come into this fight Shifted.
Deacon’s smile faded, leaving only ice seething in his eyes. Lowering his hands, he didn’t surrender to them either. For some reason, that didn’t make Neoma feel any better.
She caught her breath, smoking burning her throat as she fumbled to get out of the car.
The man standing beside her with his rifle trained on Deacon stepped back enough not to be bumped by the door, then held out his hand. “Keys,” he said. Neoma shut off the engine and gave them to him.
A low groan issued from the rear of the car. She’d hit Gabe the wolf, but it was a very human foot she saw now, sticking out from behind the rear tire, calloused sole turned up, gingerly trying to reposition itself to help its owner stand.
“Gabe,” Colton called, his amber gaze locked on Deacon. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Gabe groaned. “Just fine. Hardly…felt that at all.”
She hadn’t killed him. Strange, how she couldn’t make herself feel one way or the other about it. In the absence of anger, all she felt now was bereft.
Leather creaked as she slid out of the car. Bumping her left side against the doorjamb sent shocks of absolute hell stabbing through her chest. She hugged her side, ignoring Joela and the armed men as she slipped past them, and staggered the length of the car until she reached Gabe, ripples of flesh still undulating his spine as the Shift returned him to his human form. A thin line of blood dripped steadily from a cut on his chin. He must have whacked it either in his tumble over the car or when he landed. Other than testing his jaw, he didn’t acknowledge the injury. Hers, on the other hand, he noticed the second she sagged down the side of the car to sit leaning heavily against the back tire.
He swore, his widening gaze taking in the cuts, the bruises, the knife wounds she felt like fire when she moved or breathed.
“Son of a bitch,” he swore again and scrambled to reach her. He caught her cheek, tilting her head back to sweep her features, tallying every wound both the major and the minor. She could see the anger, turning his green eyes dark as a storm. She could feel the trembling in his hands where he touched her, trying to assess the damage. All she could think about was Scotty, and how was she going to tell Gabe he was dead.
Her shoulders convulsed, a jerking spasm that made the pain flare hot through the cuts that wrapped her chest. How was it possible to cry so much in one day and still have tears left over? But she did, and when they began to fall, Gabe stopped prodding at her wounds to catch her face in his hands.
“We found Scotty. He’s safe. Sweetheart, he is absolutely safe.”
He had to repeat himself twice more before it finally sank in exactly what he was saying. Even then, Neoma had trouble making herself believe it. “Where?” she gasped.
“With a…a friend,” Gabe said, glancing past her to the man with the rifle. “They’re at the car, just outside of town.” He stroked her cheeks. “Let’s go get him, sweetheart. Let’s go home.”
“First things first,” the man said, cocking his rifle. “We�
��re not leaving until this is finished.”
Gabe all but rolled his eyes. “Sebastian…”
“He’s right.” Approaching Deacon, Colton stopped at the head of the car to keep him pinned where he was. “Your Bride, Gabe. Your blood right. If you want it, the honors are yours.”
Trapped between the car and the tool counter, Deacon gave each of them a defiant stare. Gabe he glared at hardest of all, lifting his chin in open challenge.
Needing the car to help himself stand, Gabe glared back for a long minute. In the end, he shook his head. “I have what I came for. In about three minutes, this place is going to be crawling with chevolak cops. Let’s get out of here before we end up in jail with him.”
“This is a mistake,” Sebastian argued. “For all we know, he owns the cops. If we don’t do this, he’ll have an entire army of chevolak chasing us all the way back to Hollow Hills. And then what? Don’t stand there and tell me you’re going to let him bring Waco to our doorstep!”
Amber eyes narrowing, Colton studied Deacon, a thin smile tugging at the corners of his hard mouth. “He won’t do that. He won’t send a chevolak to do a volka’s job. He’ll wait and do it himself.”
“Like my brother said—” the hairy man hupped Joela higher onto his shoulder, cupping the back of her thigh and giving her a resounding swat when she tried to knee him in the chest. “—it’s a mistake to leave that one alive.”
Breathing in, Colton took another step, closing the distance between himself and Deacon. “That’s two votes to kill you, and two to let you live. What do you think? Shall we give the deciding vote to your daughter?”
“Which one?” the hairy man scoffed.
“Which ever one hates him more,” his brother said.
“I killed Jax,” Neoma said, without thinking and so softly that only Gabe heard her.
“Maybe we should have them draw lots,” Sebastian suggested.