Go Fetch

Chapter Eighteen

Conall didn’t know what happened. One minute he was arguing with the crazy woman he secretly called “wife” and the next he was wolf and making mad dashes over railings.

As he sunk his teeth into a throat, he briefly wondered what happened to his Pack. Then he heard them. Growling. Snarling. Fighting. It sounded as if they were kicking some ass, too, but there were so many of the hyenas. As soon as he destroyed one, another two were on his back. Mostly females, vicious beyond anything he’d ever experienced before.

Then he remembered Miki. Last he saw she was ducking and covering. Had she actually thought he’d hurt her? He was the least of her problems.

Still, Conall wasn’t worried about Miki as much as he was worried for her. Because the one thing he knew about his woman—she could take care of herself.

Miki charged down the stairs on the opposite side of the building. She heard the hyenas coming for her. They had the most disturbing howl she’d ever experienced, like brutal, mocking laughter. She had to force her body to move. All she really wanted to do was hide in a corner and cry. Anything to block out that sound.

She took two steps at a time, and stopped on the second floor, running down the hallway until she hit Conridge’s office. By then they were snapping at her heels. She had barely enough time to get into Conridge’s office and slam the door. She held her body against it and could feel them throwing themselves at the hard wood.

Seconds later Conridge was beside her, adding her weight against the door. The woman had thankfully changed clothes. She now wore a pullover sweater, jeans and running shoes. It seemed she would need the running shoes.

“What the hell?”

“Hyenas,” Miki panted out, her mind scrambling for what to do next.

Even as Conridge locked the door, the two women continued to keep their bodies against it. But it wouldn’t last much longer. With every hit the hinges became weaker.

“We’ve got to get out of here.” Conridge’s eyes began to search the room for some escape. She didn’t have a window, but she had a vent. But Miki wasn’t about to get trapped in that with hyenas on her ass.

Her amped-up Stop the Bark tragically still sat in her backpack with her house keys, and there was no way to get to it without heading back toward the hyenas. No way. Plus she needed to kill these things, not incapacitate them.

“Is there any chance in hell you have a gun?”

“Bottom drawer on the left.” When Miki just stared at her, “I don’t have claws, Ms. Kendrick. So I had to find other ways to protect myself. You know the world does not revolve around the Magnus Pack. The Van Holtz Pack has its own enemies.”

Fair enough. Miki left Conridge to hold the door while she tore through her drawer. She almost cried when she found two loaded Sig Sauer P239s. The P239s were compact and fit her hand pretty well. Both were .357s, so there were only seven rounds per magazine but, bless her, Conridge had extra clips already filled with ammo. She liked this woman more and more.

Miki stuck one gun in the back of her jeans and several already loaded clips in her front jean pocket. Then she stood in front of the door and dropped to her knees. She leveled the weapon in both hands and watched the door as the hyenas on the other side relentlessly pounded away trying to get to her. She watched the movement of the door. The way it buckled and where it buckled. She listened to the sounds they made when they made contact with the wood. Then she waited for that “click” inside her head.

Conridge watched her but didn’t say anything. When Miki finally spoke, she was ready.

“Move.”

Conridge took several quick steps back and covered her ears. Miki took one more second to clear her mind and body and then she shot three rounds through the door. She heard yelps of pain and surprise and then nothing.

After a minute, Conridge stepped forward and listened at the door.

“I don’t hear anything.” She put her hand on the doorknob. “Be ready,” was all she said before she eased the door open and glanced into the hallway.

“Holy shit.”

Miki looked at her professor. It was the first time she ever heard the woman utter anything except “hell” and the occasional “damn”.

“You’re a hell of shot, Ms. Kendrick.”

Miki stood and went to the door. She pulled it completely open, the gun out but at an angle so she didn’t accidentally kill someone important. There were three hyenas dead on the floor. Miki frowned.

“There were six on the stairs that Conall wasn’t fighting,” she whispered. She pulled the other gun out of her waistband. She offered it to Conridge, but the older woman shook her head. “I’m not the best shot.” She gazed at the hyena corpses. “Not like you.”

Miki shrugged. She’d been smart enough to learn to shoot with both hands. Amazing what you can get done when you’re under house arrest.

She had both guns out and low at her sides. Then she stepped into the hallway. She saw them silently moving at her from both directions from the corners of her eyes. She raised both weapons and fired.

Two went down immediately. One kept coming. So she turned and fired, brain and skull splattering the walls.

“We need to get into Craig’s lab.”

“I’ve got keys.” Conridge grabbed her purse and put it over her shoulder. Miki re-traced her steps to head back up to the third floor where she could find Craig’s lab, Conridge right behind her.

She thought about Conall. She could hear the Pack fighting outside the building. The wolves would be outnumbered. Hyena clans could have up to 40 members. The thought of anything happening to Conall almost sent her skidding into full-blown panic. But freaking out now wouldn’t help him or her.

She knew what Craig kept in his lab. She’d put it there herself. She knew what it could do. Hell, she’d invented it. And if she had time, she’d probably realize that using her invention was the dumbest thing she could do. But she had the feeling she didn’t have time to come up with anything else. Time was something they no longer had.

She walked onto the third floor and stopped cold. Leucrotta. He had only shifted partially and was on top of one of the wolves. A female. She was out cold and it seemed that Leucrotta had been sniffing her.

He looked at Miki and smiled. An unbelievably sharp row of small but deadly fangs revealed. He stood and shifted almost completely back to human…except for the teeth. He walked toward her and she raised both guns.

Conridge was behind her. “He’s human.”

“So?”

“You kill him now, he stays human.” Well, that would be difficult to explain to the cops. And she wasn’t sure she was ready to actually blow a human away. That actually might bother her…at least for a little while.

“She’s right. You don’t want to kill me now, Miki.” His voice was like a hiss. The sound went across her skin and raised the hair on the back of her neck. If she had been wolf, her hackles would have been standing straight up right across her back. “Besides, don’t you like my little congratulations party for you, Dr. Kendrick?”

“Are you working with the Pride?”

“That’ll be a cold day in hell.” He kept moving toward her and she could feel Conridge’s hand gripping the back of her shirt. The woman was having a minor freak out.

“So then what do you want?”

He shrugged. “How should I know? This fight belongs to the females. They tell me what to do and I do it because I like doing it. And they told me to tear your Pack apart and to feed on your entrails.”

Miki snorted. “Melodramatic bullshit.” Then she lowered the gun and pulled the trigger. Twice. Leucrotta went down screaming. Both knees blown out.

She heard Conridge gasp behind her. “Oh, my.”

Miki glanced at the woman over her shoulder. “You said not to kill him. You didn’t say anything about his knees.”

One of them ripped a good chunk out of Conall’s thigh with their claws and he roared in anger. Especially when he felt the poison began to seep into his blood stream.

Fuckers.

He tore the bitch’s throat out and flipped it up and over his back.

He was lucky. The whole Clan wasn’t there. With a full Clan, he’d have been dead. But there were still twelve left. The five he’d already killed were lying in the building. Another three were lying on the ground at his feet. He could only hope that Miki grabbed the SUV keys out of his discarded jeans and made it to the parking lot where he’d left it. He could only hope she would be safe. That was all he cared about now.

Another set of jaws locked onto the back of his neck. Billy Dunwich tackled the hyena and ripped its leg off as he hit the ground. Conall faced another one and that’s when he smelled her. With her going into heat, it came to him a lot sooner.

“Hi. Am I interrupting anything important?”

They all turned to look at her. Conall gave a warning bark. She needed to move her ass. The hyenas wouldn’t be distracted for long. She just surprised them with her sudden appearance.

But it was the look in her eye that caught his attention. And the fact she had her hands behind her back. Plus she was standing just a little too cutesy for the Miki Kendrick he knew. With one leg cocked slightly in toward her other leg, her head tilted. Like a little girl.

Then it hit him. She was trying to look nonthreatening. But why? He decided not to wait to find out. He looked at the other wolves and, as one, they turned and ran.

Miki had their attention and it was damn scary. Those cold animal eyes staring at her. Sizing her up. Wondering what bits to eat first. But she needed Conall and the Pack to move. Now. But if she warned them then the hyenas would know, too. She knew from Sara that shifters could understand everything. They thought, heard, and saw as if they were still human.

Then, suddenly, Conall and the Pack hightailed it out of there. She didn’t know what clued him in, but she wasn’t going to worry about it. A few of the hyenas watched the Pack run. They weren’t a stupid breed. In fact, they were the exact opposite. They would know something was up, so she had to move now or lose her opportunity.

She raised her two guns. The hyenas stared at her for a moment and then began…laughing? It took every ounce of inner strength she had not to curl up into the fetal position and start crying for her grandmother. But, her grandmother had been a strong, mean woman and she would have told Miki to get her shit together anyway.

But Miki knew what they were laughing at. She didn’t have enough bullets in those two guns to take out all the Clan members in front of her. She may kill a few, but the rest would tear her apart.

She already knew that.

“Now!” The female wolf that Leucrotta had been sniffing stepped out of the shadows and tossed a mason jar, filled with the clear liquid Miki had created so many years ago, into the air. Miki raised one of the guns and fired. The jar exploded over the hyenas and, within seconds, flames covered their bodies.

A chemical flame that as soon as it touched the fur on the first hyena spread over the entire body within seconds. As the hyena tried to shake it off, it got too close to another clan member and the flame spread. That was the beauty of her concoction, and one of the reasons her government had tried to get her to produce it for them. It wasn’t like regular fire. It almost took on a life of its own, jumping from victim to victim as long as they were in a ten-foot range. It only went after flesh, fur, or skin, too. The buildings, trees, even the grass would be largely unaffected except for a few burn marks she never could figure out how to get rid of before she stopped working on the experiments all together.

The hyenas began to go up in flames as the wolf female tossed the other bottle on the opposite side and Miki shot that one as well. Then the female lobbed one to the right and left of the hyenas. Miki shot all of them without any problems. It was like skeet shooting. She only needed four bullets for that.

A ring of fire surrounded the hyenas. A fire that wouldn’t spread out but in. Once again, a little extra “thing” about her concoction. By the time the fire department showed up, they’d find a pile of hyena ash and a fire that would go out in about five more minutes without water or a fire extinguisher.

“Go!” The female took off running. Two hyenas, untouched by the flame, charged Miki. She fired both guns. One crumpled on impact. The other flipped head over tail.

Miki ran. Two hyenas still on her ass. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been close enough to the fire to get hurt. If she stopped to shoot, they’d take her down. She saw Conridge pull up in a minivan. A typical mom car. Thankfully it had automated doors that slid open at her approach. Miki dove for it but hyena teeth grabbed onto her calf.

She had on jeans but those strong jaws went right through to the flesh beneath. “Motherfucker!” Miki kicked with her free foot, but the hyena wouldn’t let go. It yanked and dragged her out of the van, flipping her to her back. That’s when she fired. She couldn’t get a clean head shot without shooting herself in the foot, so she shot it in the ass. It yelped and danced away. The second one came for her. She aimed the gun, her finger about to pull the trigger. Then suddenly the female who had been helping her shifted back to wolf in mid-flight and took the hyena down. She twisted its neck and snapped it.

Miki struggled to stand, but strong hands grabbed her from behind and lifted her to her feet. She looked over her shoulder and frowned. She’d assumed it was Conall but it was another Pack member.

“Where’s Conall?” He didn’t answer her, but lifted her and threw her into the van. The rest of the Pack, some human and some still wolf, followed in behind her. He slammed the door and Conridge moved. The woman drove like she taught. Dangerously.

“Wait! We’re not leaving without Conall!” She had the guns and they all knew she’d use them in a heartbeat.

“He’s back here.” One of the females motioned to her.

Miki clamored over the seats and around the Pack members, doing her best to ignore the pain in her calf. She could hear sirens blaring as cops headed their way. They’d probably gotten out just in time.

As she stumbled to the back, she found Conall in the rear boot. He was still wolf. His shoulder torn open. His struggle to breathe obvious.

“It’s poison,” the female next to her explained. “We need to get him someplace safe.”

Conridge spoke from the front, “You’ll come to Van Holtz territory. You’ll be safe there. And our doctor can help him.”

Miki slid into the back with Conall. She petted his head.

“Miki? Is that cool with you?” Miki looked up. The female, Patty was her name maybe, stared at her. Waiting for an answer. It took Miki a second to realize the Pack waited for her decision. When Zach and Sara weren’t around, Conall was in charge. With Conall down that meant the next strongest was in charge. She suddenly realized that was her.

“Yeah. Yeah. That’s cool.”

She focused back on Conall, running her hands over his flanks, avoiding the bloody wound on his shoulder.

“Conall. Can you hear me?”

He rubbed his snout against her arm. “I’ll take that as a yes.” She searched around her for something to wrap his wound. “Baby, can you shift back for me?”

He whined and she took that as a no. At least not yet.

“That’s okay, baby. That’s okay.” She grabbed a kid-sized bottle of water from a box lying next to Conall’s head and a small T-shirt she found. She tore the shirt into strips and drenched the strips in water.

She wiped the wound with the wet cloth, sniffed it, but couldn’t recognize what they’d used on him.

Taking him to a hospital was out. Taking him to the vet equally so. She could only hope the Van Holtz Pack would help.

She leaned in close to him. “Conall, will you be able to hold on for a bit?” He licked her arm. “Okay. Good. We’re going some place safe.”

He licked her face. “Don’t worry, baby. I’ve got ya, okay?” He made a soft sound and she rubbed the fur at the back of his neck. “I’ve got ya.”