The slide opened again with a satisfying snick.
"You saw a tiger? When?"
"Please let me in and I'll tell you all about it."
There was a pause. A long one. And then the door creaked open and AJ slipped inside.
"I don't like this," Anton said for the hundredth time from where they all watched in the woods.
"It's the only way to get in there, okay?" Dora snapped back, as tightly wound as the rest of them. "I would have done it except they know my face from the article."
"Hush," Glory interrupted, staring resolutely at the high thin windows at the top of the building. They were waiting for a signal from AJ. If her mother was being held in there, then AJ was going to find a way to flash the lights. Once. When it was time for them to storm the castle.
If not, she was going to come back out.
Simple as that. So all they had to do was wait.
But in their tense state, each second felt like it lasted a week. She'd only been in there a minute before all of them started shifting their feet.
The door to the cinder block dwelling opened. Glory felt twin shoots of relief and disappointment. AJ was okay, and leaving. Which meant her mother wasn't in there.
But it wasn't AJ who was walking out of the house. It was the woman. The woman on the picnic blanket who had lured Glory into capture all those days ago.
“That’s her,” Glory whispered to the group. “The woman who tricked me.”
They all watched as the woman slunk around the side of the dwelling, her eyes staring into the forest as if she were watching for something. She went around the back of the building and after a moment, they heard the roar of a truck start up.
The truck screamed around the side of the building and backed up immediately to the large metal door that AJ had just gone through.
The woman jumped out of the truck and around to the back where she flung up the back hatch. She opened the door to the building and disappeared inside.
“What the fuck?” Danil whispered, voicing what they all felt.
And then the truth hit Emin like a ton of bricks.
“They know we’re coming. They’re taking Glory’s mother right now.”
He was ripping off his clothes, shifting and racing forward even as they all heard it.
AJ’s voice sirened over the noise of the running truck. “Anton!” she screamed, just once, before she fell silent.
And then the clearing where they all stood exploded into a cloud of roars and fur and enormous animal bodies.
Dora stood alone, a second later, as she watched four bears and a tiger sprint through the woods to the dwelling.
“Holy shit,” she whispered in a single second of awe before she took off after them.
Danil went for the tires of the truck first. Even if they got that thing loaded, there was no way they were driving it out of here.
Maxim, the largest in his bear form, took a shortcut to that and just jammed one enormous shoulder into the side of the truck and tipped it with a loud, dusty bang.
Glory and Anton led the way. Glory’s lithe, dexterous body slid easily through the entrance of the building. Meanwhile, Anton had to tear at the bricks to fit through.
Emin caught up to him immediately and did some tearing of his own. There was no fucking way Glory was going into that building alone.
The two brothers tore a car-sized hole in the wall in seconds, jumping through with an earth-shaking roar.
The inside of the dwelling was one large room. There were cots and tables. Computers and some lab equipment. But it was obviously more of a prison for the tiger in a cage in the corner than anything else.
AJ lay in an inert heap in the corner, a trickle of blood on her forehead and Anton was there in a less than a second, standing over her.
Glory was on her back feet, her paws up on the metal cage that held her mother. A small, sick tiger. Laying on one side, barely able to lift her head.
Glory let out a horrible roar, ripping at the door of the cage with one paw.
Emin, meanwhile, looked on in horror at the two humans in the room. A man and a woman. They looked familiar to him. They both held long, thin rifles, one pointed at Glory and the other pointed at Anton.
Well. That made this decision easy for Emin. He rushed them, swallowing the guttural roar that threatened to tear him in two. He wanted nothing to distract him from destroying these two people.
With a sleek and sinuous move, Emin streaked across the room and swatted them both aside as if they were rag dolls.
The rifles slid across the floor and in the back of his mind, Emin was aware of Anton shredding them with his claws.
He didn’t care. He cared about the people who had trapped Glory. The two who had delivered her to the lab in Spokane. Where she’d been tortured and experimented on. An image of Anton as a young boy flashed in Emin’s brain. Happy and light and athletic. They’d stolen that boy just as they’d stolen Glory.