She could hear rustling and low murmurs in the other room, so she went to check on the cubs.
There were only three kids there. Her heart dropped. She’d really thought they were starting to come around.
“Where’s Sarah?” she asked.
John sat up and yawned. “She went outside to pee.”
“By herself, in the middle of the night?” Dakota said, exasperated. “I told you guys I need to keep an eye on you. She should have woken me up to go with her and stand guard.”
Sailor looked at her scornfully. “She’ll be fine.”
Dakota stuck her head outside, but didn’t see anything. The night was very windy, which interfered with her ability to scent, although she caught a faint whiff of Sarah from the west side of the cabin, in the woods.
“It’s not safe out there,” Dakota said. “Miles said there are lots of attacks in this territory.”
“I heard you say that Miles was a stubborn, stupid, pig-headed, stuck-up derpface,” John pointed out.
Oops. She might have expressed that opinion to Naomi a little earlier. “You weren’t supposed to hear that. And it doesn’t change the fact that he’s right about the danger, and if anything happens there’s no cell phones and no way for me to call for help.”
“Sarah told me that if a girl says lots of insults about a guy, it means she’s in love with him,” Sailor observed shrewdly. “You said…” she counted on her little fingers, “five insults. So you must reeaaally be in love.”
The children immediately started chanting. “Miles and Jamie sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G…”
All of a sudden, they heard a scream of terror ripping through the air.
Chapter Eight
Dakota and the cubs raced out of the cabin, dashing towards the sound of the screams. The rain from earlier had soaked the forest floor, and the leaves on the ground clung to their feet. Dakota shifted as she ran, her clothes splitting and tearing, and the colors of the forest dimmed but a million smells swirled through the air.
Fear. Lust. Rage. The coppery scent of blood.
Two male shifters in human form had Sarah in a net, in wolf form, and they were dragging her through the woods. She was snarling and snapping and thrashing. One of the men was bleeding from the arm. So Sarah had bitten him; good.
Dakota leaped through the air, tackling one of the men. Sarah’s siblings shifted as well, and swarmed over the other man.
Naomi, in coyote form, came racing up and nipped at one of the men’s heels. He tried to kick her, but Sailor, John, and Mary were tearing at him with their sharp little teeth, and he fell to the ground, screaming.
There was a sudden sharp yelp as he kicked John, sending the little pup tumbling through the air and landing among the wet leaves with a pained whimper. Still tangled in the net, Sarah growled ferociously and struggled like a mad thing.
Naomi bounded over to where John was tottering back to his paws. She nudged him gently with her nose to help him upright, nuzzling him as she checked him over for injuries and he shook his fuzzy little head to clear it, ears flopping comically. Naomi practically had to pick him up by his scruff to keep him from running back into the fight.
Dakota had her teeth at the other man’s throat, where he lay sprawled on the floor. When he tried to sit up, she growled softly but commandingly in the back of her throat. She was disgusted but satisfied when the pungent scent of urine met her nostrils. The coward had wet himself. He’d come to snatch a thirteen-year-old girl, and hadn’t been expecting a fight with a fully grown, mad-as-hell she-wolf.
The big man, the one who’d kicked John, had dropped the net holding Sarah and scrambled to his feet. He was backing away from the snarling cubs. He lashed out with his foot again, but failed to make contact. Sarah shook off the tatters of the net and bounded across to stand in front of Sailor and Mary, hackles raised and snarling. The harmonics of her growl thrummed through the air, an unmistakable message. You hurt these cubs, you die.
A sharp scent met Dakota’s nostrils and her head whipped up. Silver. The smell took a bite out of her brain, like a vicious ice-cream headache. Fear clutched her as she saw the man pulling something from his pocket. She heard a sharp, panicked intake of breath from Naomi. Moonlight flashed on the length of a razor-sharp blade. There was no way she could get to him and disarm him before he used the knife on one of the pups.
Dakota shifted back into human form and stood there, naked in the chill night air.
“We are under the protection of the Fenris Pack!” she shouted.
Both men froze where they were, and they glanced at each other uncertainly.
“No you aren’t,” one of them protested.