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“Watch out,” the stranger said, “you’re about to fall off the rocks—stop!”
“I don’t want you!” she screamed at him. “I won’t have you!”
Just as her foot twisted out from under her, the discharge of a gun, high-pitched and alarming, sounded right behind her.
The last thing she saw, before she stumbled to the ground and hit her head on something hard, was the male who had taken off his robes to protect her modesty getting shot in the shoulder.
Disorientated, she forced her eyes to focus.
The man who came up on them with the gun was also dressed in all black, but the uniform was different—and there was something about his face that didn’t make sense. Then again, she’d been knocked in the head pretty badly—
As the soldier stepped over her, with his weapon still pointed at the male who had fallen to his knees, it dawned on her that she had seen him before. Back in the spring. When she and Daniel had been in the woods, up in the deer stand. He was the one who had been stalking them, who Daniel had taken down to the ground.
She couldn’t forget that face.
With that connection going through her mind,her eyes narrowed on the attacker, who was clearly taking for granted that she had lost consciousness. Just as that gun took aim at the mysterious male again, she lunged up and threw herself onto the shooter. She had no idea what she was doing, but she had the sense that if she could just get that muzzle angled away—
Somehow, she nailed things exactly right, pile-driving into the soldier, knocking him off-balance just as he pulled that trigger. As the bullet sailed harmlessly into the view, he shoved her free of him with such force, she went flying, her body airborne and then some.
This was going to go very, very badly, she thought in mid-flight.
Sure enough, the soldier steadied himself in what seemed like slow motion, rerouted the gun back toward the other male…
… and pulled the trigger—
They knew who he was. And he knew about them.
That was what was going through Blade’s mind at the moment the soldier came out of the pine trees right behind Lydia while she stumbled. He barely had time to turn away from the gunshot, and even as he did, he was caught in the shoulder, the bullet entering the meat of his upper arm. But he didn’t give a shit about that.
The wolven. He had to save the wolven.
As he landed on his knees, the soldier with the gun stepped over Lydia and retargeted that weapon in Blade’s direction.
Going for his own weapon, he fumbled and dropped it because of his injury—
From out of nowhere, Lydia threw herself at the soldier, hitting the uniformed fighter at precisely the right moment, not a second to lose, and in exactly the right place, not an inch to spare. She knocked that aim off, but not for long. The soldier swung his arm and sent her pinwheeling through the air, her body cast away as if it weighed next to nothing.
And then the gun was back, like Blade was its home.
Death, he thought. Finally. After all these years… it had come to find him.
“Not tonight, motherfucker,” he said out loud.
Barging into the soldier’s mind—
He got nothing; it was the strangest thing. There were no thoughts behind those eyes, no impulses, no emotions.
Oh, fucking hell, it was one of those—
A wolf attacked from over on the right, leaping from an outcropping of boulders, tackling the biomechanical nightmare off its feet—and then there were more of Lydia’s kind, too many othersto count, a swarm of the lupines covering the male form, biting, protecting their own.
Blade looked over at Lydia. She wasn’t moving as she lay in the dirt.
Groaning, he crawled over uneven rocks to get to her, terrified about what he was going to find. His robes were heavy, he told himself; they would protect her.
Bullshit they would protect her.
Behind him, a series of yelping stopped him, and he looked back. The wolves were rearing away and shaking their heads as if they’d been stung. But of course… the electrical current. They’d breached the skin and gotten into the volts of the thing.
