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I recognized the pair that I had chased off in the woods. One was a coyote who looked as scruffy and mangy in his human shape as he did on four legs. The other was the grizzly bear, a mountain of a man with long, shaggy red curls, and an angry scowl that matched his boss’s. The other two were of even less consequence, just more hired muscle.
The werewolf tossed back his wolf-shaped head and howled, a sound that morphed into a ferocious growl. “Stay out of this, Phoenix!” he snarled, his voice distorted by his half-shifted form. I spread my arms and made it obvious I was refusing to back down; fire dripping in sizzling splashes from my wings onto the cracked concrete below.
“Lucius, why are you here?” Ava whispered from behind me. She sidled closer and pressed her hands to my back between my wings without fear. She already knew my fire would not harm her, but itwouldharm the males that dared to threaten her. “Not that I’m not grateful, but eh… aren’t you worried about, you know?”
She was tactfully dancing around the truth, as she tried not to reveal my weakness to the enemy, but I could still see the cunning wolf's eyes sharpen. There was one more danger to worry about. Another male leaned up against my mate’s old car casually. That one did not answer to the werewolf, he smelled local, and he smelled powerful to boot.
“I’m here because you need protection, Ava. This is the werewolf you told me about, Calder?” I didn’t need to hear her reply, I already knew, and I pierced the male with a glare to warn him off. He was covered in streaks of blood from my claws, his shirt shredded to bits along his back, but the wounds had already healed. When the others started shifting, I was going to have to move fast.
“I’m warning you, firebird. Unless you want me to pluck your feathers, get lost! The female is mine. She owes me, big time.” I bared my teeth at him. They were not impressively sharp and fang-like the way his were, but the meaning was clear. I located Ziv perched on the roof of the motel, he must have relocated himself there when the fighting slowed down. He was licking a paw in a dainty manner, his fur ruffled by the earlier scuffle, but his golden eyes were laser-focused on our confrontation.
When he met my gaze, I knew we were on the same page this morning. The discord Ava’s arrival had caused between us smoothed away and our cause was the same: protect our female. Ziv would get her to safety as soon as he saw an opening, that was all I needed to know.
Tossing back my head, I laughed. The feathers the wolf taunted me with flared up around my shoulders and on my head in a proud display. “These feathers? You could try.” The darewas enough to set him off, and his pack of shifters followed suit. Clothing was shredded or flashed away depending on the skill level of the shifter. Fur erupted everywhere as their transformations completed. Even Calder completed his form to a full wolf, but I kept my two-legged shape. I wanted to keep my hands available in case I needed to pluck my mate from the ground and escape with her into the sky.
With a roar, they converged on me, and I met them. Adrenaline surged through my veins, a battle rage unlike any I’d ever felt before. I felt alive, filled with a purpose worth living for. A purpose that was worth dying for too. We clashed, fire and claws and fur. My fire roared louder than their voices when I pulled it out, raising it into an inferno all around me. Nothing could stop me, I would fight until each enemy was gone. Until Ava was safe.
Chapter 12
Ava
I thought I was done for, but I didn’t know if it felt any better to watch Lucius fight Calder. My heart was in my throat the entire time. Lucius had told me he could die, and I could see that unlike the bear, coyote, and wolves he was battling, he wasn’t healing from the wounds they inflicted on him.
I’d backed up when the fists started flying, but I couldn’t bring myself to run away. I wasn’t leaving Lucius’ side, and I had to figure out how to help him. He fought five opponents, and a sixth guy leaned against my car. What if that one decided to wade into the fray? I didn’t know who he was, but I was sure he’d been part of the kidnapping crew yesterday. The boss with the ball cap that had never left the truck. Who was he?
He’d caught my stare, and his eyes met mine across the raging fire that engulfed much of the battle. They gleamed silver, then glowed red before he turned his gaze back to the combatants, his mouth curling in a derisive smirk. Fear skated up my spine. A fear more powerful than the fear that had filled me when I’d been chased through the creepy woods near Lucius’ home last night. That guy was bad news, and he was Calder’s ally…
“Meow,” Ziv announced his arrival softly, his body curling against my legs. When he pushed, it was with a shocking strength that made me stumble back. Before I could gather my wits, he’d made me back up another half a dozen steps with insistent pushes. He was herding me away from the fight, toward the road.
“No, we’ve got to help him! I won’t leave him!” That was an all-consuming urge, one that had only gotten stronger after I’d gotten into that car this morning. I did not want to leave Lucius, he needed me, and I needed him. But what could I do? One measly human against all these powerful supernatural beings.
Ziv meowed again, more stridently, and another shove came against my legs. The wrong direction. But for a small feline, he was inhumanly strong, too strong for me. I should have known that his cat was as magical as he was. Unfortunately, I was drawing attention to myself by fighting Ziv’s directions. When I gave in and started to walk down the road, the way Ziv wanted me to go, I heard the patter of paws on stone as they chased after me.
The cat spun around just as I did, he hissed, and I raised my fists instinctively. It was the mangy coyote from the woods, I recognized him instantly, even with streaks of blackened, burned fur. Beyond him, I could see the battle still raged, with Lucius at the center of it. Fire rose in a column into the sky, smokeless but bonfire-bright. The shaggy shape of the grizzly bear shifter lay to one side, not moving, but the others kept converging on him, my phoenix.
I should be watching the danger approaching, but I only had eyes for the blood that streamed from Lucius in rivulets. His t-shirt was shredded to pieces, barely clinging to him in strips. His jeans were holding up, but they were definitely not in one piece and stained with blood. My phoenix couldn’t keep up much longer, and from the careful way Calder was edging around him… I had a feeling the sneaky wolf shifter expected him to do that phoenix rebirth thing at any moment. Only Lucius couldn’t.
What had I done? He was right to try to stay out of this. I’d led death right to his door with my stupid troubles. They were scared of his fire, but they kept getting around it to strike him with blows. While they healed, he didn’t. How could he possibly defeat them? Soon they’d figure it out, and then move in for the kill.
A sob welled in my chest at the thought of his light snuffed out. I had no time to process how much I cared for what should have been a stranger. We didn’t even know each other for an entire day, but already, I felt like I’d shared a lifetime with him. The coyote reached me, his howl forcing me to focus on self-preservation, rather than Lucius’ survival.
Ziv was between me and the snarling beast, a tiny cat against a huge hound. He was fearless, as he swiped his front paw across the beast’s nose with a hiss. It sent the coyote a few stumbling steps back, sparks clinging to his nose that he frantically tried to shake off. Then he was back, chasing after the two of us.
Fire erupted beneath Ziv’s paws, creating a barrier between us and the monster. That cat had more tricks up his sleeve, fur, than a seasoned magician. It was protecting us, slowing the coyote down, but it wouldn’t last. I searched around me for a weapon, for something to take him out, once and for all. Where was a silver bullet when you needed one? Or did that only work on werewolves, not a werecoyote? I should have asked Lucius more questions.
I spared him one glance, relief filling me when I realized he was still hanging in there, and it was just Calder and him now. The others all lay in smoldering, smoking piles scattered throughout the parking lot. Were they defeated? Or just healing?I didn’t know anything, and it was starting to piss me off, anger outweighing the mind-numbing fear that filled me. Fear for Lucius, rather than me.
The coyote was getting closer. I was running out of time, and Ziv was running out of tricks. I’d kept on backpedaling, creating distance between myself and the threat, but also between me and Lucius. I stepped onto a crossroads with my back foot and froze. There was a broken traffic sign lying on the side of the road. That jagged metal pole, could I use that?
I definitely could. When my fingers closed around the cool, rust-stained metal, a surge of adrenaline-fueled power washed through me. I’d always considered myself a pacifist, but those kinds of thoughts went out the window when it came down to kill or be killed.
The coyote roared as he leaped over Ziv’s flickering barrier of flames. They winked out beneath the beast’s paws right as I raised the jagged end of my pole toward him. The coyote collided with the broken steel, I stumbled but held strong with an angry scream. Blood splattered across my face, dotting my glasses with a fine mist.
With numb hands, I let go of my weapon and the metal clattered to the ground, heavy with the coyote still pinned on it, growling and snarling. It was growing weaker by the second, blood spreading from the wound in its belly in a rapidly growing pool. It was the most horrible thing I’d ever done, but not the worst thing I’d seen. That was reserved for Lucius as he thudded to the pavement in the distance, Calder triumphantly looming over him.
The werewolf was back in his human shape, blood-coated but dressed in fresh clothes somehow. A gloating expression on his face as he stood over Lucius’s prone form. “I know you!” he crowed. “You’re that cursed bastard. You can’t rebirth, can you? Idiot! Why would you sacrifice it all forher? She’s nothing.”
I stepped forward, certain I had to save him, and my feet landed in the spreading blood of the dying coyote. “You can save him if you want to.” The voice that drawled those words from my right seemed to appear out of smoke. They curled around my head insidiously, tempting me. “Don’t you want to save your mate? You do know he’s your soulmate, silly human?”
