Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
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 others to 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.
He kept going to Lydia. And as he came up to her, her eyes fluttered.
“Are you okay?” she mumbled at him.
“Yes, but are you… all… right…”
Those were the last words he said before he lost consciousness from blood loss.
Guess he’d been hit somewhere more serious than just his shoulder.
But at least his wolf was with her kind.
THIRTY-THREE
AS SOON AS Lydia had recovered a little, she got back up on her feet, and even though she had a head wound that was bleeding and her vision was blurry, she managed to get herself together and pull the male’s body away from where the wolven attack had occurred. As she dragged him by the armpits, she met the eyes of the lupine predators who were standing around the soldier they’d taken down. The wolven had formed a circle around him, but they weren’t savaging him, as if they were determined to keep him alive.
She nodded in thanks, recognizing each of their faces, all of their coat patterns, every tilt of their ears. They would hold the soldier where he lay while she assessed the male who had come to find her. And then she would call Daniel. He would know what to do—
“Ow.”
She stopped and looked down. “You’re alive?”
The male she did not want to know glanced up at her. “Stop. Stop. You’re going to tear my arms off.”
“Oh, sorry. I—”
As she dropped her hold, he landed like a side of beef. “Ow!”
“Shit!”
One of the wolves angled its head as if inquiring whether she needed help.
“Please,” the male said as he sat up with a groan, “do resist the urge to help me. I’m already on the verge of passing out again.”
“Sorry. You’re bleeding.”
“Thank you, I had no idea.” Annoyed eyes struggled to focus on her as he put his hand up to the red rush at the top of his arm. “Now do us both a favor. Take my other gun out of my holster and flip the safety off. That thing over there is going to wake up again.”
“What?”
“Gun—now! You’re going to have to use it in—”
As he trailed off and listed to the side as if he were about to faint, she lunged down his body and grabbed the weapon from its holster. Releasing a howl into the air, she warned her brethren, even though surely that torn-apart soldier was well and truly dead—
Somehow, even though their attacker had been taken down and one of his legs had been ripped off, he sat up, turned his head toward her—and lifted his gun again.
“Fuck you,” she growled.
Rage at everything, at Daniel’s disease, at the death that was coming for him, at the male who had turned up in a blaze of light on this mountain—and at the goddamn soldier who had started shooting in the first place—came out in a shower of bullets. Lydia pulled the trigger over and over again until she was walking toward an enemy that she didn’t need to define or to understand.
To utterly hate them.
In the back of her mind, the pinging noises of metal hitting metal didn’t make a lot of sense, but she was too into her fury to care about anything. All of the built-up pressure from the previous six months came out until the magazine was empty—and when the clicking of the trigger was the only sound rising up from her spasming hand, she went still.