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We do just that, leaping over the tables like a scourge of wolves as they stumble back. Some fire blindly, and there’s a wolf’s cry, but I cannot spare a glance to see who it is. Pain fills my heart at the idea of losing one of our own.
Instead, I double my efforts, knocking a hunter back with my paws on his chest, digging my claws in. He attempts to bring his gun up, but I knock it away. Snarling, he buries a knife in my side. Ignoring the pain, I bite down on his neck and tear backwards.
Blood gushes across me as I turn to reach the blade, but it’s stuck. Ignoring it, I leap at another hunter. He avoids me, grabbing the blade as he whirls around and yanks it free. I cry out.
Lucien is near me, and he hears the noise. Turning with a growl, he shifts, and with more strength than I realised he had, he grips the back of the hunter’s neck, lifts him kicking and screaming into the air, and then throws him against the wall. He hits it with a sickening crunch, but Lucien grabs the discarded blade and rushes over, stabbing his chest multiple times. He’s so focused on defending me, he doesn’t see the hunter moving into the hallway, aiming a gun at him.
I lunge at him, smashing him into the wall as the gun goes off. Jerking my head around, I see Lucien is fine. Snarling in thehunter’s face for daring to shoot what is mine, I bite his head clean off.
I growl down at him as I glance back to see my wolves holding their own. Jai has two bodies around him and a hand in his mouth still attached to a human who is punching him with his other fist, trying to get him off. As I watch, he spins rapidly, throwing the human across the room and right into the waiting muzzles of two other wolves.
Vale is backing towards me, dodging blades, so I hurry over to him.
Circling around the back, I split their efforts so they have no choice but to choose between him and me. They chose him because he’s bigger. They think he’s more of a threat.
They are wrong.
Faster than they can react, I clamp my mouth on one’s leg, yanking him down. I rake my nails across his front, gutting him then leaving him there to die a painful death while I leap at the second. He jumps out of the way and right into Vale’s mouth. Vale crunches his windpipe, and the hunter drops to the ground.
“Stop!” The human yell has me and Vale whirling around to see a young hunter, barely older than eighteen, wielding a shotgun. It’s aimed at a human Lucien, where he was assisting in patching up a hurt wolf. Slowly, Lucien stops his ministrations.
“Lucien, please,” the boy cries. Shit, he knows him.
I forget sometimes that these are people they fought beside.
How many people have they killed tonight that they knew?
“Ara, go,” Lucien commands.
“You know I can’t do that.” He raises the gun. “You’re one of them. You’re a monster. You need to die.”
“Ara, you’re just a kid. I know you don’t want to kill anyone—” The gun goes off, and Lucien ducks.
“Fuck, man, don’t make me,” the guy cries, aiming at Lucien as he walks towards him.
Lucien grabs the gun and jerks it to the side as it goes off again, and I watch in worried silence as he bends the barrel so it no longer works before he chucks it away.
“Go, Ara, now,” Lucien orders and turns to the wolves behind him with a growl. They part, and the kid throws us a look before running through the throng and up the stairs.
Lucien sighs and glances at me. “He’s just a kid.”
I nod in understanding and look around, seeing all the other hunters are either dead or dying. Turning back to the hall, I prowl down it, only for Jai to throw me into a wall, stopping me. Growling, I nip at his side, and he nips back, jerking his muzzle down to an almost invisible wire I didn’t see before.
A trap.
Fucking hunters.
Vale steps over it and makes sure everyone else does as well, then we proceed more carefully, our eyes peeled for traps, just as the lights go out. A emergency light turns on, bathing everything in shadows and bright red light.
Red, the colour of their blood splashed upon the walls. Red, the colour of my soul when I fill it with their deaths for what they did to my people.
They had no mercy. They had no rules when they killed my people.
Neither will I.
The corridor ends all too soon. All the doors are shut, and I smell nothing inside, so I don’t even think to check. Too late, I realise my mistake when the doors open and hunters pour out.
Their smells are masked by herbs and magic, and they attack us from both sides.
