up the location of the money he’d stashed. She refused to believe he was smart enough to steal it back from the twins alone. He must have had some help, but he was protecting whoever that could be. Mairi knew it must be a woman. Some young thing too stupid to know what she was getting herself into, but smart enough to steal a hundred million and hide it from nearly everyone.
She had no idea how Uncle Freddy was smart enough to pick such competent women to help him—and get them pregnant—but so stupid he always managed to get his money stolen by someone else. That man . . . a walking disaster if she’d ever seen one.
But she’d worry about him later. She had other things on her mind right now. Like why they were pulling into this parking lot behind a closed shopping mall.
“What are we doing here?” she asked the full-human behind the wheel.
“Got orders to come here, ma’am. Not sure why.”
The first shot took the driver’s head clean off. The next few took out the men in the vehicle with her.
Mairi dropped down, hands over the back of her neck to protect herself.
More shots took out the ones in the second vehicle as well. Then silence.
She waited, not remotely surprised when the door to her vehicle was wrenched open and big hands grabbed her and dragged her out.
“Come on, lads—” she began to say but they simply shot, using handguns this time. The shots kept coming and coming. She thought they’d never stop. A few even hit her in the head. A couple quite near the heart.
Those hurt. A lot. She could feel them burning into her, searing past flesh and bone directly into organs.
These men didn’t speak. They were professionals. And she knew her twin aunts had sent them. Because her Scottish aunts would have made sure of one thing if they had arranged this operation: that she was shot in the back of the head where the neck bones meet the skull. These men didn’t do that. Well, they thought they had. One of them turned her over and shot her right in the back of the head. But not where it would kill her. Not there.
They burned the vehicles—with her men inside—but took her and dumped her into the plastic-covered boot of one of the Cadillacs. They drove off, and an hour or so later came to a stop. She heard the men standing around, chatting, laughing. Having a very nice time until they were ready. They opened the trunk and reached for her.
Mairi attacked then. Their weapons were holstered and they hadn’t expected much of a fight from a corpse so she had free rein.
She wrapped herself around the first, tearing his throat out with her fangs and spitting the blood and bits of artery into the eyes of the man next to him. That one had a big butcher’s knife in his hand to cut her up. She grabbed it and cut his throat before burying it in the head of another. She fell with the body of the man she was wrapped around and rolled forward away from him.
By now the rest of her assailants had retrieved their weapons. They started shooting, but those earlier shots—the ones that didn’t go straight through her—they’d already been expelled from her body or were stuck in her thick skin. These new ones didn’t do any more damage than the first. They hurt, but as long as they didn’t get her in that one spot, they couldn’t kill her.
She killed three of the last four quick and took a moment to watch the terrified young man who took off running. She got into the car, the keys still in it, and went after him. When she reached him, she slammed him with the front of the vehicle. Not enough to kill him, though. Not yet.
She stopped the car and got out; paused a moment to finally pull out a few of the bullets that were burning nasty holes in her thick badger skin.
Giving an all-over shake, she walked over to the man. Despite his battered legs and destroyed hip, he was desperately trying to drag himself away. It amazed her, the way full-humans fought for their lives. Even when they knew they were done for. It was the one thing their kind had in common with the weak bastards. The will to live.
“Now where you going, my lad?” she asked before grabbing his left