He loomed over the two humans who screamed and tried to scramble away from him. The man’s leg was obviously broken from where Emin had pushed him down. Good.
He raised his paw to strike them from the earth when a flash of orange lightning streaked in front of him. Glory.
She brushed Emin aside as she loomed over the two humans, swatting them with her enormous paws and crushing them together. The man yowled in pain. But not in terror. Emin watched the two familiar faces and didn’t see terror. He saw smugness. He’d seen it there before. He realized that these were two of the people who’d held Anton captive all those years ago in Belarus.
“You’re too late!” the man screamed, reaching out for the woman and dragging her with him as he crawled away. He laughed as a sickeningly recognizable sound echoed through the air.
“Helicopters!” Danil’s voice sounded in his brothers’ heads.
Emin’s blood shrank. Reinforcements.
Anton let out a roar of rage and pain at the noise. He’d originally been kidnapped by men in a helicopter. He damn sure wasn’t going to let it happen again. Emin watched as Anton scooped up the still unconscious AJ in his arms and scrambled for the door.
Emin swatted the two humans aside once more for good measure before lunging at the metal crate that held Glory’s mother. With a tremendous grinding and screeching, Emin ripped the door of the cage off its hinges. Glory’s mother huddled in the back corner of the cage for a moment but then slinked forward, limping out of the open door.
She and Glory exchanged one sweet bumping of heads before Emin knelt, picking up the mother in his arms like a baby. He could see that she was too weak and injured to escape on her own.
Glory and Emin dashed out of the dwelling. He was immediately dismayed to see a helicopter quickly losing altitude in the air, lunging toward them.
His brothers raced for the cover of the trees but he could see men with shiny weapons starting to lean out of the chopper.
Suddenly, Glory yowled and screeched. They all turned and Emin’s heart was in his throat. Had she been hurt?
But no, she was getting their attention. Streaking around the other side of the building, the bears all followed her. Emin watched in amazement as she scuttled around a small rock face and disappeared.
Stumbling after her, he realized that she’d gone down into a cave opening. Something whizzed past Emin’s face, barely missing Glory’s mother in his arms. He realized it was a tranquilizer dart, shot by the men in the chopper.
Now or never.
He lunged after Glory, screaming in his head for his brothers to follow.
They plunged into the damp wetness of the cave and the thunderous sounds of the helicopter quickly thinned.
They trudged through the cave system for almost an hour before Glory streaked toward a thin strip of light ahead of them. The cave spit them out about a mile from their campsite.
Blinking into the light, the bears bounded out of the caves, looking around for any sign that Navuka knew where the cave had led. But they were alone.
Silence beat down on them.
Maxim was already barreling through the woods toward the van. The rest of them, hobbled with Dora, AJ, and the injured tiger, followed along behind. The second the van came into view, Maxim driving like a madman, they shifted, jumping into the van and screaming down the road.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
There was a lot of panting, a lot of swearing, and a lot of nakedness. Oh. And one tiger who refused to shift.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Glory crooned, stroking her mother’s muzzle. “We’re safe. We’re safe.”
Emin grabbed one of the blankets from the back and tossed it over the tiger. “Serena,” he said, knowing her name from Glory. “I swear you are safe.”
Dora crawled over, a bottle of water in her hand. They all braced as Maxim screamed onto the highway, checking around for any followers. There were none.
“Serena,” Dora said. “We need you to shift so that if we get pulled over we aren’t smuggling a tiger across country lines, okay? It’ll also be easier to take stock of your injuries.”
Looking her daughter right in the eyes, the tiger shifted.
It wasn’t quite the same life-altering smack in the senses that Emin had experienced the first time that he saw Glory shift.
But damn. Serena was a good-looking older lady. Glory’s face, aged by 25 years or so, peeked out at him through a curtain of jet black hair, shot through with a few laces of silver.
Her eyes were ice blue where Glory’s were green. But they were both stunningly beautiful. Serena gratefully took the bottle of water from Dora’s hand and gulped. Behind them, AJ groaned and rolled over in Anton’s arms.
The collective attention switched to her. She sat up, blinking, and shielding her eyes from the light.