prevent her from speaking, then her vision went dark as she felt rough cloth go over her head. Her brain’s synapses shot off, trying to make sense of what happened because this was not a joke. She was getting kidnapped.
She struggled to get free, but the grip around her tightened. Her body bounced as her kidnapper picked up his pace. It was difficult to get the air back in her lungs as an obstruction blocked her nostrils each time she tried to breath in. They put some kind of hood over my head. It was disorienting, to have her vision impaired while being upside-down, but she managed to unsheathe her claws, then raked it over the first thing she could reach.
“Oww!” Her kidnapper screamed as her claws dug into flesh. “Bitch!” The bouncing halted.
“Goddammit, Murray, why the hell are you stopping? We gotta get—”
“Damn bitch has claws!”
You’re Goddamn right I have claws!
“Tie her up!”
Oh no you don’t! Her only escape was to shift into her cat.
“Get away from her!”
There was a shout, followed by the sound of a scuffle. She was preparing to shift when she felt her body drop to the ground. Her elbows and knees hit the ground, shooting pain up her limbs.
“Bitch! You’ll pay for scratching me up!” A booted foot slammed up into her face, sending her reeling onto her back.
“Bastard! Get the fuck away from her!”
She was still in a daze, but the pain in her jaw slowly brought her back. It took her another second, but she finally oriented herself. Whipping the hood off, she got to her feet and spit out the fabric stuffed in her mouth. “Blech!” Blood tasted like iron on her tongue.
“J.D., are you all right?”
Lifting her head, she stared up into the familiar face of Roy Jorrell. “R-Roy? What are you doing here? Oh my God, you’ve been hurt!”
There was a deep cut on his cheekbone. “’S nothing,” he snorted, rubbing the blood off with the back of his hand. “Are you all right? I thought I saw you back there, and then those guys came out of nowhere and—” Anger blazed in his eyes. “Those fucking bastards hurt you.”
Her entire jaw was on fire, and she spit out the blood pooling in her mouth. “Oh … fuck!” Adrenaline seeped out of her system, and her muscles went limp. Roy caught her as she staggered forward. Her cat didn’t like that and swiped its claws at him. “Th-they tried to … what did you see?”
His arms tightened around her as he pressed his cheek to hers. “I was on my way to check out the Christmas tree when I thought I spotted you. Then these two guys come out from nowhere and picked you up, then ran off. I thought … I went after them and tackled one of the guys.”
“Thank God you saw me.”
“Why would they do that?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But—” A thought popped into her head.
A couple weeks back, she and Dutchy had unwittingly stumbled upon a shifter poaching operation in the mountains. The perpetrators captured her and Dutchy, but she was able to escape by shifting and got help. Krieger had killed all of the poachers, and Jason and Christina, who ran the Shifter Protection Agency of Blackstone, found the rest of the shifters they had kidnapped. “I need to go find someone.”
“Go find—J.D., you were almost kidnapped!” Roy’s grip tightened on her. “Why don’t you let me help you get calmed down, and then maybe we can—”
“Look, I appreciate you coming to my rescue, I really do, Roy.” She pried herself away from him. “But there could be bigger things at play here.”
“B-bigger things?” His expression became inscrutable.
“Yeah. Again, thank you, but I need to go find Jason and Christina Lennox. You go and enjoy the carnival.” Her cat very much agreed with that, wanting to get away from him and clean off the stench of his feathers from their body. Why are you such a drama queen? she scolded her cat. He helped us, for crying out loud.
The feline wrinkled its nose and let out what sounded like a hmph sound as it whipped its tail.
Weirdo.
“I’ll help you find them,” he offered.
She very much wished he had said otherwise, but she couldn’t waste any more time. “All right, let’s go.”
It turned out her kidnappers didn’t get her very far. They had veered off the main path, into the thicket surrounding the park. Hmmm. Where would they have taken her, though? They couldn’t