by Jessie Lane
Kent gave the girl a nod then calmly ordered, “Go catch up with your friends.”
The young woman nodded.
Kent and Jenna held their positions in the hall to make sure the girls got out safely. Then they started moving forward again, toward the library. They didn’t find any more people hiding in the next two rooms they cleared, but the more they moved forward, the louder the crying and screaming got.
Once they reached the end of the hall, they halted to peer around the corner. Jenna was directly behind him as Kent hid his body along the edge of the wall and quickly stuck his head out from the corner to see what was around the other side. Then he pulled back and motioned for her to kneel and look around him.
Jenna moved into position, casting her head out around the corner to see what Kent had seen. She would never forget the sight.
It looked like a fucking war zone. Tables turned over, people hiding behind or underneath just about anything they could. Bloody bodies littered the ground, and one man stood on a large table in the middle of the room, both of his hands held out, ready to shoot the pistols he held in each of them.
“Fuck all of you!” he screamed, enraged. “Fuck the admissions board who wouldn’t let me into this shitty college!” The perp looked left, saw a man scurrying to cover and, BAM!, shot him. “Fuck the professors who teach here!” BAM! Another shot fired, only Jenna couldn’t see if anyone had been hit.
The perp started turning to look in their direction, and Jenna had to duck back behind the wall not to be seen.
The man started shouting again.
“And fuck all you students who attend this school!”
BAM!
A feminine voice cried out in pain after the third shot, and Jenna could feel Kent tense, ready for action.
She placed a hand on his leg to stop him. They needed to have a plan before they ran out there and risked their lives.
Looking up at her partner, she telepathically spoke to him.
Can you make a distraction so I can step out and get a clear shot of him?
Kent knew she was the best shooter on their SWAT team, and that wasn’t bragging. The whole squad had dubbed her Annie Oakley her first day on the team because of how she had shot a perp’s hand to disarm him. Jenna could take the shot to take this perp out, too, but she needed him distracted so he wouldn’t run for cover when she did it.
Before Kent could answer her, the man shouted out again. This time, his words made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.
“AND FUCK ALL OF YOU HUMAN SCUM WHO THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME!”
This mission had just gone from critical to holy fuck, we need to shut him up.
Both Kent and Jenna stuck their heads out from around the corner again. Jenna concentrated, using her slightly better than human eyesight to zero in on the perp one more time. It took everything she had not to gasp in shock at what she saw.
The man wasn’t holding the guns with his hands. Instead, the guns were levitating in the air in front of his hands, making it look to everyone else that he was actually holding the two weapons.
He has to be a demon, she told Kent telepathically. He’s using telekinesis to hold those guns in the air. We need to take him out before he exposes anymore of his powers.
Kent cursed under his breath as he nodded. One distraction, coming right up. Get ready to shoot.
Jenna stood back up, still a little behind Kent to hide her form from the shooter, and readied her rifle. She only had one chance to get this right. Otherwise, Kent might die doing whatever it was he was about to do.
It would have been so much easier if he could use his own telekinesis to pull the guns from the young man, but they couldn’t take that risk with all the humans around.
Looking at her partner, Jenna wondered if she was doing the right thing by asking Kent to create a distraction. However, she couldn’t think of another way to get a shot off without the perp rushing for cover. All the same, she hated jeopardizing his life. Hell, Kent was more than her partner. He was her friend, and she would never forgive herself if something happened to him because of her.
Surely he wouldn’t do anything too stupid … right?
Honestly, she should have known better than to ask herself that question. Because, just as she did, Kent stepped out from around the corner, in plain view of the shooter, and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Hey, asshole, how about you shoot at a target that can shoot back?”
With no time to think, or cuss her partner out for that matter, Jenna stepped out from behind the corner and aimed at the campus shooter, who already had both of his weapons aimed to fire at Kent.
Her mind took in the whole scene in a matter of milliseconds. Two demons were facing off with guns pointed at each other. One was a crazed suspect and the other was her partner. Both ready to fire. Jenna could only hope that, as she heard the first shot go off, that her aim would be true.
She took a deep breath, sighted her target through her scope, and fired.
Chapter
3
Kent
And the award for the biggest fucking idiot in the world goes to … ME!
Kent knew that what he had done was careless, but what else could he have done? Jenna needed a solid distraction to take the shooter out, and he didn’t think throwing something across the room was going to work. Therefore, he did the only thing he could think of—he used himself. And why shouldn’t he? Other people had no problem using him. Like that devious little Amazon, Chloe Demos. He owed her a marker from an ill-placed bet, and Kent had a bad fucking feeling that he wasn’t going to like what she asked of him for repayment.
Perhaps that was a subconscious reason as to why he had just stepped out and yelled at the campus shooter. Part of him knew that he would rather be shot than do whatever it was that she had in store.
Whatever his reasons, Kent stood there, holding his rifle in front of him, letting the shooter get a good look at him in his SWAT gear. He watched as the shooter moved his arms and used his hands to aim both of those handguns levitating in the air in Kent’s direction. He didn’t dare look over to see if Jenna was ready to shoot—that would give away his partner—but he sure as fuck hoped she was ready. Kent’s life was about to flash in front of his eyes as he watched, practically in slow motion, as the other demon in the room took aim.
Kent quickly pulled his rifle up, not that he didn’t trust Jenna to take the shot, but the shooter needed to think Kent was the threat here. He aimed at the young man standing on the table, between those two guns, right at the demon’s chest, and pulled the trigger, just as he heard two shots go off across the room.
Kent ducked down to a squat in the hopes that the bullets fired from the other demon would miss him.
As Kent heard the whizz of the bullets go past his head, another gun blast went off to his right where Jenna was positioned, and the whole room seemed to explode with the sounds of multiple shots being fired, one right after another.
Students in the library screamed in their hiding spots as Kent watched the demon standing on the table fall to his knees, coughing up blood as he went down. A dark stain spread across the young man’s chest.
With his rifle still pointed at the suspect, Kent held his ground as he heard his SWAT teammates storming into the room from all different directions around them.
The young demon fell to his front, his face moving only marginally to look from Kent’s position to where Jenna was, showing his surprise.
The distraction had worked, but Kent felt little satisfaction. What had driven this young man to go on a shooting spree here on the UNCW campus? He wasn’t sure how many had been hit or had died from their wounds, but what Kent did know was that it was senseless. Could no one have helped the young demon who was now dying right in front of his eyes?
Kent felt Jenna walk up to his side, and he started to drop his rifle, when he saw the tiniest of movements from the man dying on the table across the
room.
As if in slow motion, Kent took in the whole room and saw the disaster that was about to happen. Their SWAT teammates were still closing in on the table, Jenna wasn’t paying attention to the suspect, and the dying demon was using his powers to pick up one of the guns back off the table. He tried to push Jenna down out of the way, screaming her name in warning, but it was too late. The suspect got one last shot off, the trajectory in perfect position to hit his partner.
She fell to the floor underneath him, and Kent watched in horror as the bullet hit Jenna in the shoulder. He could only pray that the bullet stopped there instead of tearing farther into her body, possibly going through her chest and tearing into her heart or lungs.
The sound of multiple shots rang out. Kent didn’t need to look to know what was happening. Their SWAT teammates were firing on the suspect, making sure the man couldn’t fire another shot at anyone ever again.
Kent’s thoughts were no longer on the sad, desperate look on the young demon’s face. No, now they were on Jenna, who was lying on the ground beneath the cage of his arms, bleeding all over the floor, as she quickly went into shock.
“OFFICER DOWN!” Kent screamed with all of his might. “Get a medic right fucking now! O’Conner has been hit!” The message was relayed over the radio, which was now abuzz in on-air traffic about an officer being down.
Kent tuned all of that out as he forced his attention onto the woman gasping for air below him. She moved as if she were going to sit up, but Kent gently put his hand out to stop her.
“Stay still, O’Conner, until the paramedics get here to look at you.”
“Hurts,” she whispered back, gasping for air again.
He wasn’t sure what scared him more: the fact that his partner was shot, or that her mate Adam might kill Kent for not protecting her.
Chapter
4
Adam
There were very few things in this world that scared Adam McPhee.
And as often as the phone in his house rang in the middle of the night, one might think that would not be one of them. Jenna received calls at all hours of the day or night for her job, and he had quickly become used to the sound of the phone going off in the dead of the night. But when the phone was ringing and his mate wasn’t there to answer it …
Perhaps it was instinct, or maybe even intuition of some sort, but the sound of that phone ringing a little over an hour after his mate had left made his blood run cold.
Bounding up out of bed, he answered the phone on the second ring. “McPhee.”
A strangled noise came from the other end of the line before he heard Kent’s voice. “Adam, don’t panic, but I need you to get to the hospital now. Jenna’s been shot.”
Adam didn’t say a word in response. Instead, he smashed the phone back into its base as he jumped from the bed and ran over to the chair where his jeans from yesterday were still laying. Dressing quickly, he then ran out of his house and to Jenna’s truck, not bothering to lock the door since they lived on McPhee pack lands and no one would dare enter his den without permission.
It was a thirty-minute drive from his house to the hospital. Adam made it there in twenty, with three cop cars chasing him half the way.
He didn’t bother to stop and try to explain to the cops that screeched to a halt behind him in the emergency entrance of the hospital. He merely threw the truck into park, jumped out with the motor still running, and hauled ass inside that hospital like his life depended on it.
Because it did.
Jenna was his life, and if anything happened to his mate, he most likely wouldn’t survive it.
Kent and the rest of the Wilmington Police Department’s SWAT team were waiting for him in the waiting room of the Emergency Department.
With his sights set on his target, Adam ran right up to Kent and grabbed him by his bulletproof vest.
“You promised to keep her safe!” he roared in the demon’s face, barely holding in his wolf who was frantically trying to claw out and get to their injured mate. He could tell that Kent saw his beast there, knowing that Adam was on the edge of losing it. “Where is she?” Adam needed to see her before he lost all control.
The cops that had been following him to the hospital rushed into the room, only to be stopped by Jenna’s fellow SWAT members. Adam could hear them explaining why the officers shouldn’t arrest Adam and that his girlfriend was an officer who had been shot, but he tuned them all out to get the answers he needed from Kent.
Jenna’s partner pointed to a pair of double doors that said “No Admittance.”
“They took her back to surgery already to remove the bullet from her shoulder.”
Adam wanted nothing more than to howl in rage. It felt as if his wolf was raking claws down the inside of his body, trying to get out to get to their mate.
Kent saw his internal struggle and whispered, “Don’t lose your shit in here, man. We both know it would be a death sentence.”
And that was the truth. If Adam lost control of his wolf and shifted in front of the humans, the Pack Master of North America, Jenna’s own uncle, would hand down a death sentence for the crime.
Breathing deep through his nose, he loosened his grip on Kent’s bulletproof vest and let his hands fall to his sides. “Just tell me she’s going to be okay.”
Nodding, Kent replied, “She’s breathing, Adam, and that’s what matters. Hell, she cussed me out in the ambulance the whole way here. The only reason I couldn’t give you more information was because, when the bullet hit her shoulder, it threw her into such a state of shock she had a hard time breathing. For a minute there, I was afraid the bullet had traveled far enough into her body to clip one of her lungs. I should have known my partner wasn’t going to let one little measly bullet take her down.” Kent gave him a sad smile.
Tilting his head back, Adam closed his eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks. He had always known his mate’s job was dangerous, but the thought of losing her had never truly crossed his mind other than the time in Germany when they went on a mission together. Sometimes he forgot that even though his mate was a shifter, an Other, she wasn’t as strong as other wolves such as himself. With her being a wolf/demon hybrid, she lacked certain traits other shifters had, such as rapid healing. Plus, with the way the woman was with a gun, it was easy to fall into a false sense of security that nothing could touch her. Hell, Jenna could shoot a freckle off a flea’s ass from a football field away. Why in the world would he think she would ever be in danger?
But today proved him wrong. Jenna was strong, but still vulnerable. Which meant Adam didn’t know how he felt about her working such a dangerous job anymore. He knew without a doubt that his mate would not appreciate him asking her to quit. That was an argument for another time, though. For now, the most important thing was that Jenna was alive and he would hopefully be able to see her soon.
Kent waved to the number of chairs and loveseats in the waiting room. “Why don’t you have a seat, man? They’ll come get you when she’s out of surgery. You’re her emergency contact, and I already told the nurses you were on your way, so they know to look for you when she’s done.”
Adam shook his head and prowled over to the wall of windows. He couldn’t sit right now. There were too many thoughts running through his head. The one that scared him the most as he stalked back and forth in front of the glass was enough to make a chill run down his spine.
If anything happened to his mate and he lost her, he didn’t even have her mating mark on his body to remember her by. The very mark she had promised to give him when they had been courting during their trip to Germany. Had she forgotten that declaration the morning after the night they had made love for the first time? He certainly hadn’t.
As Adam stopped to stare out one of the windows, he thought back to that morning as they had bathed together, while he explained what a Mating Mark was and how much her response had meant to him.
“You see, when t
wo shifters mate, the male gives his female a Mark. It’s kind of like the shifter’s version of a wedding ring.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous.”
Adam’s voice grated, “Ridiculous?”
She replied, “Yeah. It’s ridiculous. And sexist! Why should only the male get to give a Mark? Why can’t the female do it, too? I think there needs to be some equal opportunity working here. If it were me, I’d give a Mark to him, too. That shows we’re in it together, instead of branding me like I’m some kind of property. Wait. What is the Mark? It’s not actually a branding or anything, is it?”
“You’d want to give me a Mark, too?”
Without thinking, she answered, “Well, yeah. Why should I have to walk around with your Mark like I’m your property? A marriage should be on equal ground. If I have a Mark, you’re damn well going to have one, too!”
Yet, here he stood, months after giving her a Mating Mark, with none of his own. It might seem trivial to any other shifter, or alpha for that matter, but it wasn’t trivial to him. He wanted Jenna’s mark for the world to see that he belonged to her as much as she belonged to him.
So, why hadn’t the woman he loved given him one?
Chapter
5
Jenna
The Next Day…
The smell of antiseptic filled her nose, and the sound of a heart monitor beeping urged Jenna to open her eyes. She didn’t need to open them yet, though. She knew she was alive and safe in the hospital. More importantly, she knew Adam was there with her, his big, strong hand holding hers.
Jenna took a deep breath to inhale his comforting scent, and Adam squeezed her hand at the action, more than likely sensing she was awake.
There was nothing more Jenna wanted right then than to be held by her mate. But the sound of someone knocking on the door to her room, followed by footsteps coming in, kept her from telling Adam that.