Prey (Shifters #4)(67)

I brought my knee up hard into his crotch, and he groaned miserably. His grip loosened in the face of intense pain, and I tugged my Shifted hand loose. Still wheezing in agony, Yarnell wrapped one hand around my throat and squeezed. Gagging, I unsheathed my claws and swiped them across his arm, shredding the flesh in one pass.
Blood sprayed my face, and I shoved Yarnell, then rolled out from under him. He howled, and clapped his good hand over the injury, trying to slow the blood loss.
I jumped to my feet just in time to see Kevin run at me. I dodged him to the left and dropped to the floor beside Marc. Dan stared at us in shock from the kitchen doorway, making no move to join either side of the fight. I ripped the tape from Marc’s arms, then rose into an immediate roundhouse as Kevin dove at me.
My boot hit his stomach, and he doubled over the blow, barely grunting because of the air he’d lost. But he grabbed my human wrist as I tried to run, and jerked me backward so brutally I heard a bone crack, and pain radiated from my fingers all the way into my elbow. His fist hit my back, and an all-new agony slammed into my kidney, so acute I couldn’t move. I clamped my jaws shut to keep from screaming and waking the neighbors as I breathed through the pain.
On the floor, Marc sat up and ripped the tape from his ankles. He leapt awkwardly to his feet, but Yarnell rammed him an instant later, dripping a trail of blood on his own carpet all the way across the room.
Marc went down on his back, with Yarnell on top of him. They alternated blows, grunting and wheezing as the fists flew.
Kevin tightened his grip on my broken arm, and I choked on a scream as he pulled his fist back for another blow. I twisted away from him and slashed my paw in a vicious arc. Blood instantly soaked his shredded shirt. He started to shriek, but I followed up with a breath-stealing blow to the gut, acutely aware that too much noise would lead to neighbor—and police—involvement. He knocked my feet out from under me and his weight crushed me to the floor. 
Across the room, Marc rolled over Yarnell, still throwing punches. A moment later, Yarnell was on top again. Then he suddenly lunged sideways, and took a punch to the ribs from Marc as he shoved one hand under an armchair. When his arm emerged, he held Dan’s framing hammer.
My heart stopped beating, and pain shot through my chest. I tried to shout, but Kevin’s hands closed around my throat. Yarnell raised the hammer. And out of nowhere, a denim-clad blur shot across the room toward him.
Kevin forced my cat’s paw to the floor. His free hand clenched harder around my throat. I gagged, and on the edge of my vision, Yarnell’s hammer thumped to the carpet. He made a horrible, wet, gurgling sound, and I froze, Kevin straddling me. I’d know that sound anywhere, though I’d only heard it once.
I jabbed Kevin in the throat with my free hand, gritting through the pain in my wrist. He gagged and let me go. I twisted my head as far as it would go, just in time to see Marc shove Yarnell off of him. Yarnell hit the carpet on his back, with a crowbar protruding from both sides of his neck, blood soaking both him and the carpet.
Dan stood over them both, his hand still raised from the death blow.
Kevin punched me in the gut. Paralyzing agony clamped around my abdomen. He scrambled off me and across the room, scooping up the hammer Yarnell had dropped. Dan never saw him coming. Kevin swung the hammer in a broad arc. It shattered Dan’s skull with a revolting crunch. Gray matter splattered one of Yarnell’s suede armchairs.
Dan went down like a felled tree. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Marc was on Kevin before Dan’s body even hit the floor. He put one hand on each side of Kevin’s face, and one last, sickening crack later, Kevin hit the ground on his knees, then fell onto his stomach, without uttering a sound.
I sank to the carpet in consuming pain and overwhelming relief, clutching my fractured wrist to my chest. The world was rendered one big blur by encroaching shock. Soft grunts and eerie bone crunches played over and over in my head as I forced my bloody paw to Shift back into the left hand I desperately needed, now that the right one was out of commission.
“Faythe?” Marc said, and my head swiveled toward him on its own. He stood over Kevin’s body, splattered with blood from head to toe. “Are you okay?”
“Broken arm. Bruised ribs. Sore throat. Busted lip. But I’ll live.” I tried to force a smile, but his reaction said it looked more like a grimace. “You?”
“Bruised ribs and a hell of a headache. And I suspect a concussion.”
“And probably a fractured skull,” I added. “You were gone for two days. They thought you were dead.” I pushed myself to my feet and limped toward him, eyeing the gash over his ear in the light from the fan fixture overhead.
“I almost was. I passed out in a storage shed at a ranger’s station.”
I reached out for him, and he folded me into his arms, careful of my broken one, his heart racing. “You probably would have frozen otherwise.”
He nodded, and wiped blood from my face gently with the hem of his shirt, which wasn’t much cleaner. “I almost did anyway. I’ve never been so cold in my life.”
“How much do you remember?”
“Nothing, from the time I passed out until I woke up with my mouth taped shut, when Kevin and that other asshole threw me into his trunk.”
“Bastards.”
He grinned, but then his smile faded abruptly as concern wrinkled his forehead. “But that’s not all. They have some kind of tracker. I found one implanted in the tom who tried to bury me alive. And I think Dan has one.”
I nodded, and put one finger over his lips. “I know. They’re GPS chips, and we never would have known a thing about them if you hadn’t left that body with a hole in his back.”“You found him?”
I smiled. “Yeah, and for the record, I never doubted you were alive. But once he figured that out, Kevin found you by tracking the chip you took from Adam Eckard. Dan did have one, but Dr. Carver removed it. And there’s a lot more.” I closed my eyes, and he pulled me closer, rubbing my back with both hands while I tried to figure out how to best explain everything he’d missed. But there was no easy way.
“Marc, Ethan’s dead.” I blinked and wiped away the fresh tears with my good hand. “Malone’s men breached the border to take Kaci, and Ethan was killed defending her.”
His heartbeat hitched, and he closed his eyes as his arms tightened around me. “We’ll get them.”
“I know. You’re coming back home. Screw the council.”
Marc started to protest—or maybe to agree—but then froze when a thump sounded from behind the living room wall. “Shit…”
“Wait!” I grabbed his arm when he reached down for the bloody hammer at our feet. “It’s Jace and Carver. One of them woke up.” His brows arched in surprise, and he dropped the hammer, then followed me down the hall. “Can you get the doc? He’s in the bathroom. And have him look at your head. And his own. He took a pretty good hit with your tire iron.”
He nodded and jogged down the hall while I opened Jace’s door, warning him with a single look to stay quiet. I peeled the tape from his wrists, then leaned in to whisper in his ear, ignoring the hitch in my pulse as I inhaled his scent.
“We’ll deal with this later,” I said, and he knew what I meant. “This isn’t the time.”
Jace nodded, either in compliance or agreement, and unwound the tape from his feet. Moments later, Marc appeared in the doorway, behind Dr. Carver, who looked disheveled and pale, rubbing a big lump on the side of his head. But he was alive. We all were.
But as we waited for Vic and Parker to arrive, I looked around the living room in horror. We’d won this fight, but at what cost? How many more had to die before Malone gave up his bid for control of the council? And would one of us be next?
Because the truth was that though we’d won this battle, the real war was still to come, and I couldn’t begin to imagine the cost of such a victory, for either side.
Much less a loss.
Twenty-Nine
“People are starting to ask about you. Are you ready?” Marc asked, and I looked up to find him watching me from my doorway, just like old times. Except that the old times were gone for good, as was the golden sparkle in his eyes, at least for now. With Ethan gone and war on the horizon, things would never be the same again, and at the moment, finding happiness in my new reality looked about as likely as werewolves making a miraculous comeback from extinction in the early twenty-first century. 
My only option for moving forward was to patch together my future as best I could with the scraps of my past. Which were looking rattier and less substantial with each passing day.
I smiled sadly at Marc and shook my head. I would never be ready for this.
We’d buried Ethan an hour earlier, and now we had to put on stoic faces for our guests, in the aftermath of the most devastating tragedy my Pride—as well as my family—had ever faced.
“Come on.” Marc took my good hand, pulling me gently out of the desk chair, and my pulse jumped the moment he touched me. He’d come back to the ranch with us two days earlier, after we’d spent the remaining hours of darkness cleaning up the mess at Pete Yarnell’s house. Even with Vic and Parker there to help, it was a big job, and had to be performed very carefully and quietly to avoid waking the neighbors, or being spotted carrying corpses across the suburban backyard.