They did not have time to second-guess things. To second-guess each other. But how could they trust one another in this when they didn’t even trust themselves? Maybe Joe could smell that accusation on her, too, because he shifted subtly, keeping Aleksei and the goons in his periphery while meeting her gaze. “I know I got you into this. I swear, I’m gonna get you out of it. If it’s the last thing I do.”
I don’t want it to be the last thing you do. I want it to be the first thing you do before promising you’ll stay. Before saying you love me. She couldn’t say that aloud for other people’s benefit. She could barely think it for herself. Wanting Joe to love her…wanting to love him back…how had she even come to that over the course of a few weeks?
A single gunshot brought her inner turmoil to a swift end and sent her instinctively to the ground…and Mack hit the deck right beside her. His sightless eyes joined by a bloodred third one in the center of his forehead. A scream froze in Neha’s throat as she crouched there, caught between scrambling away from the agent’s body and not making herself the next target. Poor Mack. He’d called himself a Star Trek Redshirt, and…ohgodohgodohgod.
Aleksei blew on his gun like a stereotypical movie villain, looking too pleased with himself. “I grow tired of this brokering. Why make deals for what is rightfully mine?” he demanded of Mickey Hands. The elderly fence had no response to that except to scramble backward toward the door sputtering apologies. Neha felt more than saw the henchmen breaking formation to grab him. She still didn’t dare rise off the concrete.
And that precise instant was when Joe snapped his cuffs and shifted. Fur burst through his clothes, his face rippled and elongated. A wolf on two legs. A man with a predator’s teeth and sharp-nailed paws. He moved in a blur, knocking the gun from Aleksei’s hand and claiming it for himself and then kicking out his legs from under him. Much like Joe, Vasiliev was shifting in an instant. Becoming a giant brown bear as he landed hard, scattering fancy suit buttons all over the place. Neha rolled out of the way as Joe squeezed off two shots at the men holding Mickey, breaking out of her own cuffs and grabbing Mack’s Glock from where it had fallen just a few inches from his outstretched hand.
Jackson Tate and Elijah Richter had leveled very specific instructions at her and Nate during their briefing in the hidden room. “You are civilians. You are humans. Your first priority is to get the hell out of the line of fire. Focus on evasion and defense. We don’t need you hindering the operatives who are trained for this.” It had been on the tip of her tongue to ask them why more operatives who were more trained weren’t taking their place. She’d kept the logical question to herself. Just as she kept her own counsel now, trying to shut out everything but the feel of the 9mm handgun in her fingers. It was heavy. An ill fit for her small hand. The kickback would hurt. And the huge henchmen, who were even now changing into their supernatural forms, weren’t paper targets at the firing range. But the KA-BAR in the sheath beneath her shirt wouldn’t do her much good right now. The unfamiliar gun was her only choice. She aimed, squeezed the trigger, and fired at one of the half-man, half-bear creatures. Blood bloomed at his kneecap, sending him stumbling. Mickey Hands took that opportunity to bolt out the warehouse door…and allow Grace, Finn, and Nate to rush inside.
Grace immediately dropped into a defensive stance, whipping two guns out of her shoulder holsters and opening fire. She finished off the man Neha had dropped and took out one more. Finn leapt at another, fangs flashing. Nate seemed to have Tate and Richter’s edict well in hand, because he came straight for Neha, helping her off the ground and then practically dragging her out of the fray.
It was chaos. A swirl of sight and sound and pain. More people burst in through doors at the far end of the warehouse. An East Asian man and a bear being chased by some kind of bird man and a bunch of other hairy shape-shifters. Danny Yeo and Yulia had saved themselves…to a point. Exeunt, pursued by a werebear, she thought with a lunatic giggle. Because if you couldn’t reach for your college Shakespeare when you were about to die, then what even was the point? As professional rescue plans went, this was a pretty shitty one. They were grossly outnumbered. Outmatched. Worst. Action movie. Ever.
And Joe was still battling Aleksei Vasiliev. He’d long since tossed aside the vor’s gun in favor of his partially shifted claws. Doing Wolverine proud. They were grappling hand-to-hand, like he’d done with Yuri Medvedev in the cage. And just like then, it was horrifying to watch. But this wasn’t a forced spectacle for a crowd. It wasn’t for a show of the Vasiliev organization’s strength. It was purely for Joe’s survival, purely to put an end to Aleksei once and for all. His head was bleeding. Raw, red, scratches crisscrossed his chest. It sounded like Aleksei was laughing at him. Taunting him in growls. She didn’t even realize she was trying to go to him—to stop him, to help him, to do something—until she registered Nate’s strong grip clamping down on her upper arm and his voice in her ear. “You have to stop. Let him do this, Neha. You’re only going to get in his way.”
“Then why are we here?” she cried. “We can’t just stay on the sidelines.”
“We won’t,” he said grimly. He nodded toward Yulia and Danny, who were still fighting off the supes from the other room. “Come on.”
Neha handed Nate the Glock and retrieved her combat knife from its sheath. They stuck to the perimeter of the warehouse, keeping their guards up and their attention on all of the skirmishes around them. She had no illusions about being able to take a shifter down in a fight. She’d greatly exaggerated her knife skills to Grace. But she could get a few cuts in, slow some of them down. Give Yulia and Danny some room. It was hard to believe the sweet, quiet young woman from the club was the glorious bear shifter swiping at the raptor man. She was powerful, furious, roaring at the bird of prey as she ducked his talons. The way she moved in a circle pattern made it clear that she was trying to protect Danny, who’d swept up a fallen semiautomatic to use against the other bear shifters around them but was missing more shots than he made. His ammo went wild, nearly hitting Neha and Nate as they closed in.
“And I thought we were bad at this.” Nate grimaced, dropping into a crouch with a groan of protest.
Neha took Mack’s Glock back from him. “We are bad at this. If we survive, I’m buying you Krav Maga classes for Hanukkah.”
“Aw. I was going to get you Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes for…uh…Guru Nanakkah.”
Guru Nanakkah. Inappropriate laughter for the win. Neha wiped ill-timed tears of mirth from her eyes with the back of her hand, gasping for breath. “His birthday’s in November. Please do not call it that in front of any other Sikh people,” she begged.
Their moment of levity was short-lived. An actual polar bear, with dirty white fur, wheeled away from his stalking of Danny and came barreling toward them at top speed. Neha raised the gun with shaking hands and fired three times in quick succession. It barely made an impact. Might as well have been thumb tacks. The bear shifter rose up on two legs, snarling, ready to pounce…
And then the ceiling caved in.
Actually, only a small part of the ceiling. As if it had been lasered open or blown with explosive charges. Tile and timber rained down on the floor…followed by a massive lion. Terrifying. Beautiful. He landed on all fours on top of a tarp-covered vehicle of some kind, shaking his tawny mane and whipping his tail. A white man floated down to the ground below him, and Neha easily recognized the tall, thin figure as Jack Tate. He’d barely touched the floor before he was conjuring huge fireballs that danced just above his palms, and he threw one at the polar bear like he was a starting pitcher for the Yankees. The bear howled, flickering from human to animal and back again, before throwing himself to the ground in an effort to put the flames out.
The cavalry had arrived—“You’re on your own in Brooklyn” mission specs be damned—and Neha couldn’t say that she was sorry. They’d been woefully out of their element with her and Nate on the tea
m against so many supernaturals. They needed all the reinforcements they could get…and they’d received the very best. If Jack was throwing fiery fastballs, it was a reasonable assumption that the gorgeous and ginormous leonine creature leaping toward one of the werebears was Elijah Richter. Third Shift’s leaders had come for their people.
Chapter 34
He was too damn tired and too damn old to be fighting like this. He’d already had his bell rung a couple of times by that bear shifter in the cage, and now he was on the defensive with Aleksei Vasiliev, who didn’t have the decency to be at all winded. This furry motherfucker was a couple years older than him, pouring blood from several different wounds, and still coming back for more. He must’ve been running on some special supervillain juice. Or a full eight hours of sleep and decent health insurance. Joe couldn’t remember the last time he’d had either. No. Not true. You slept just fine in Doc’s arms. He couldn’t think about that, though. Not right now. It was enough to know she was still up and moving somewhere in the warehouse. That was as much distraction as he could allow himself—occasionally clocking her location as he kept wrestling the Russian. They’d been going on five minutes. Maybe longer. It felt like the world’s longest, most miserable prizefight.
At least the other thugs weren’t his problem anymore. His new vampire pal and the scary surgeon had drawn them away. But there was no question they were still losing this fight. Too many supes, not enough people trained to take them down. Why was Feinberg here? What was Joe’s lawyer going to do, for fuck’s sake? Argue a pissed-off shifter to death? But Nate had dragged Neha out of Aleksei’s path, so Joe could spare a second to be thankful. The same second he spent ducking a paw. Then he rose up to slam his fist into the side of Aleksei’s muzzle. He wasn’t fully shifted, his human vocal cords still worked, so he growled out, “Would you just fucking die already?” like the vor might actually listen and drop dead on the spot.
That was when the roof fell in…and distracted Vasiliev long enough for Joe to swing upward and get in three more head shots in quick succession. Bam. Bam. Bam. He added claw to the last blow, ripping away a chunk of ear and cheek. The mobster screamed, his control finally snapping…forcing a shift back to his human form.
“You are a fool, Joseph Peluso,” he hissed, holding his bleeding face as he staggered backward. “You really think this is the end? That my people will not keep coming for you and yours?”
“Look around. You’re not the only one who has people.” It felt strange to say that and realize it was true. To take a breath, too, for the first time in several minutes. Because a huge lion and some kind of sorcerer or warlock had joined the fray—on his side—and a polar bear shifter cornering Nate and Neha suddenly went up in flames like a campfire marshmallow. “You can keep ’em coming, Vasiliev. We’ll keep stepping up. This city doesn’t belong to you or your kind. You can’t kill our brothers and sisters and neighbors and get away with it. You can’t make us live in fear.”
Kenny’s body on that morgue slab. Mrs. C crying her eyes out. The four shifters in that back room. Neha screaming his name at the club. A dozen memories flitted through his brain like a movie montage. He had plenty he needed to pay for, too. Just add one more sin to the tab.
Joe charged forward with a bone-chilling howl, took Aleksei Vasiliev’s face between his hands, and snapped his neck. But it wasn’t like the movies…where killing the head bad guy brought a hush across the set and all the other goons dropped their weapons. No. The only thing that fell was the vor’s corpse. There were at least three hostiles still active. And as exhausted as Joe was, he wasn’t done yet. So, he found the closest battle and waded in, grabbing a werebear by the arm and dragging him away from Grace, who was nearly out of ammo and cussing up a storm in every language she knew.
The sorcerer, or whatever the fuck he was, stunned the shifter with a spell, knocking him out cold. “Jackson Tate,” he called to Joe, like they were at a cocktail party. “You can thank us later.”
“You can fuck off later,” he shouted back. It wasn’t the most charitable response—especially after accepting that he had people willing to defend him—but Joe figured he’d earned some salt tonight. A whole damn truck’s worth.
He did a quick assessment of the rest of the warehouse. The lion shifter was finishing off one last bear. One last evil bear. Because another seemed to be on the right side, and it took Joe precious seconds to realize it was Yulia, the girl who’d brought him food and smuggled in the operatives. Hunh. Who knew she was such a badass? And the avian shifter she’d been tangling with for however long finally figured that out, too. Because he changed targets. Swooping toward Nate and Neha. Fuck, it was like everybody in a ten-mile radius knew they were the most vulnerable people in the room. And Joe was too far away to do anything about it.
Finn wasn’t. The vampire moved so fast it was almost impossible to see him. But he knocked the birdman out of the air, going in on the guy’s neck at the same moment that Neha fired her gun at him. They both hit the concrete with a sickening thud. Joe was still only halfway there, but he was close enough to see the talons slicing into Finn’s stomach before falling away. And the blood. So much blood.
Fuck. The big moment where the hush fell across the set? This was it.
* * *
It went from total chaos to complete silence in an instant. Too fast, too loud, too frightening…and then slow motion. Neha felt the Glock slip from her suddenly limp fingers. Her vision swam, full of feathers and thirty-odd years of her life flashing before her eyes, and Finn’s body on the ground. No. Oh, no. For a split second, she thought she’d done it. Missed the raptor and shot the rakish vampire instead. And then she saw the blood-soaked talons. The slashes in Finn’s belly. It wasn’t you, Neha. You didn’t hurt him. Relief and horror hit her in a double whammy.
Nate was already scrambling to the vampire’s side, dragging the bird shifter’s corpse off of him. Grace came up from the other direction at a near sprint. She was shaken. No, she was as undone as the woman probably got. Dark eyes stricken, hands clenched into fists…loosening only when she knelt by him and began prodding his wounds. “Finian Thomas Michael Conlan.” The words were enunciated clearly, emphatically…and laden with a combination of fury and anguish. “I am not saving your life again. If you don’t get your useless ass up right now, I will nail you to a cross at midday…and I don’t mean a St. Andrew’s one.”
For a long stretch of seconds, there was nothing but quiet work. Grace demanding Nate’s shirt. Using it as a field dressing. With nary a twitch from the supine form on the ground, soaked in the bird shifter’s blood and his own, too. And then the vampire’s foot twitched. His hand. And he moved his head on the concrete with a rusty groan. “The middle name and the confirmation name? For fuck’s sake, woman. You could just say you love me.”
“I can’t stand you,” she said automatically…but the tears choking the words revealed her lie just as much as the gentle way she put two fingers to Finn’s throat to check his pulse.
“That actually works? You can get a heart rate?” Nate wondered softly. He still looked vaguely stunned from when Finn had knocked the shifter away from them and taken the brunt of the body blow. But not so out of it that he couldn’t reach out and mimic Grace’s motion, placing his fingers alongside hers.
Finn coughed violently, pale and bloodless, but still managed to choke out flirtation. “I’m full of surprises, darlin’,” he assured with a half-strength eyebrow waggle. “Anytime you want a personal anatomy lesson, give us a ring.”
The collective groan of relief/annoyance at his swift return to form was almost audible. And then Grace was lifting her wrist to his mouth, shutting him up by giving him the sustenance he desperately needed to heal. Neha instinctively turned away, as if that would give the trio some kind of privacy in the middle of all these onlookers. And the motion put her right in Joe’s sight line. He’d stopped several feet away from the ta
bleau, his features as grim as they were streaked with blood and dirt. His clothes were in tatters. His exposed limbs and fur not much better. He was still one of the most stunningly beautiful people she’d ever seen in her life.
It didn’t matter that she was still furious with him. It didn’t matter that her heart still felt as though it had been pulverized. Neha lurched toward him, polarized like a magnet, wanting nothing more than to snap to him, because as opposite as they were, they somehow belonged together anyway. Joe caught her before she could crash into his chest…and then he hauled her against it, crushing her in his embrace with the same frantic intensity that he used to bring his mouth down on hers. The kiss was like their first and their last wrapped into one explosive package. Everything tentative but also nothing held back. One hand palming her ass while the other tenderly cradled her cheek. He tasted like smoke and copper and light and hope.
Their completely reckless passions had brought them to this place, to this wild moment. Neha could only credit one thing with them surviving it. “Joe… I…” The words clung to her tongue, still unwilling to let go. To take that leap across the divide.
“Love you,” he whispered, meeting her halfway. “I am a fucking asshole for not telling you that before. For not telling you a million times. For forcing you into all of these decisions without letting you know that I am all in. I am so damn in love with you, Neha. And if I’d lost you today…” He choked, unable to finish the thought, his brown eyes nearly black with emotion.
“You didn’t. And I didn’t lose you.” Her heart hurt again. Not because it was pulverized but because it was knitting itself back into one piece. Neha relearned the harsh planes of his face with her fingertips. She reclaimed the hollow of his throat with her mouth. And she gave voice to the things she hadn’t dared say before. “We never would’ve gotten this far if I didn’t love you, too, Joe. That’s why I made every choice I made. I wasn’t forced. I did it willingly,” she assured him fiercely. “I love you willingly.”
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