Page 2 of Nightshade

Why send one behind the place?

He was trying to cut off any escape attempts. Well screw that. Escape attempts were my whole life plan.

I followed behind Barry as he nonchalantly wandered behind the building, hands in his pockets. I had the sudden urge to bash him in his smug annoying face, even though he hadn’t specifically done anything yet. He was almost as bad as Marcus with his superiority complex and his inappropriate attention to younger members of the pack, and if he gave me the opportunity to punch him in the mouth, I was not going to turn it down.

As it turned out, I was greatly underestimating just how much opportunity Barry was going to give me.

Halfway down the building, right around the same spot as the door Grant and his assholes had been headed toward on the other side, a screen popped out, followed a moment later by a dark head. Evie. The window was small and high up, I thought maybe a bathroom window, and she struggled to push her body through it.

The single chuckle Barry gave sent a chill through me.

Evie didn’t seem to notice it, too focused on getting her body out the high window and falling, surprisingly dexterously, to the ground beneath it, where she landed on all fours. She popped up a second later, but before she could choose a direction or start moving, Barry was upon her.

Unfortunately for Barry, I was right behind him.

Before he could even get his hand gripped around her tiny wrist, I’d grabbed his shoulder and given it a shove, hard, with the intention of him landing on his ass on the ground.

He caught himself and didn’t fall, but he did spin around, letting go of Evie and glaring. When he realized it was me, he squinted for a second in confusion but then rolled his shoulders back and lifted his chin, ready for a fight.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“You’re not supposed to put your hands on people without invitation,” I offered right back.

His eyes narrowed, and even though he was still off balance, I could see the moment he made up his mind. His stance firmed and his fingers flexed, claws growing out from the tips.

Funny, I hadn’t summoned mine up yet, even though I’d known I was starting a fight. But . . . it was just Barry. He was middle-aged, out of shape, and almost paunchy. I was half his age and in the best shape I’d ever been, from long years of helping Cash build houses. Maybe I wasn’t much of a fighter, but neither was Barry.

“I’m taking her back to Grant.”

I grinned at him, letting every bit of the malice that lived in my soul show in that moment. Everyone thought I was weak. Soft. Viktor was the soldier, and Aleks was the leader, and what was I? Just little Leo, the tagalong. The one who smiled easily and talked too much and always had a kind thing to say to anyone in need of it.

None of them knew that under it all, I was the one most like my mother. Ekaterina Ilyina wasn’t a tiger like Viktor or a lion like Aleks. She was a wolverine. Small and unassuming and absolutely lethal when provoked.

“You are not,” I told him, each word calm and measured. My accent had been mostly smoothed over by more than a decade living in America, but for some reason, that hint of Russian seemed to make everyone hesitate. Made them think twice before truly stepping in front of me, even if they underestimated me in every other way. “Evie will be coming with me. Whether you walk back to the front to tell Grant, or he follows the scent of your blood to find you back here and guess what happened, is up to you.”

Barry took half a step back, but then he visibly steeled himself, drawing himself up to his full height—almost a foot shorter than me and easily fifty pounds lighter. I’d have given him credit for the fortitude, but it wasn’t courage; it was lack of intelligence. Because I’d always been just Leo, the sweet happy kid no one paid attention to, he thought I was bluffing.

He lunged toward me, claws out, stretched toward my vulnerable belly, seeking to gut me before I could defend myself.

Barry couldn’t know that I’d fought for my life before. On the night my father died. Again on the night my mother died. A third time, when they had taken my brother. It didn’t make me terribly experienced with combat, but it meant that I knew this feeling. The metallic tang on the back of my tongue, followed by a moment when everything seemed to slow as my body reacted to the immediate threat.

I crouched down slightly, not to make myself smaller, but to gather energy in my legs. To make a lunge of my own as he reached me, my own claws growing in the instant they were needed as I pushed up and forward, punching my hand out and hitting him in the same sensitive spot he’d been aiming for on me.

My aim was better.

I punched a hole right into his gut, then pulled my hand back, slashing as I went, letting his guts spill out onto the ground between us as he stumbled back, stunned, uncertain of what had just happened.

Pressed against the stucco wall of the motel building, Evie whispered breathlessly, “Bad ass.”

Barry turned to look at her, still confused. His hands were no longer ready for a fight, held in front of himself, his intestines hanging on his fingers like some kind of macabre decorative garland. I remembered how it felt, to be in a situation like that. Losing blood as fast as your body could make more. The way things seemed to happen in spurts, without rhyme or reason. Wondering if you were dreaming, or perhaps already dead.

“Grant will—” Barry managed to say, before the words cut off, interrupted by bubbling blood from his lips, which seemed to confuse him even more.

It would have been merciful to kill him, then. Wolves could heal from a lot, but this? It wasn’t likely any wolf could heal from this, let alone one who drank too much and smoked cigarettes and hadn’t once in his life met a form of exercise he enjoyed. Barry was a dead man, his brain just hadn’t caught up to that fact yet.

Instead of worrying about leaving him confused and dying, I turned and reached out to Evie with a blood-covered hand. “We have to go. Grant’s got a squad of ass monkeys around the front, and I can’t fight them all.”

She looked up at the window, clearly thinking about Cash, which was also where my mind had gone, but I couldn’t help Cash now, least of all by dying. Grant and his assholes would likely beat him half to death and take him back to Idaho, but if I let them get to Evie . . . well, Cash would never forgive me. I would never forgive myself. And Evie wouldn’t recover from what Grant had planned like Cash could recover from a beating.