the trees instead of standing her ground to take the Full Bloods on. Even the certainty of that being a death sentence didn’t make the retreat any easier to swallow. Bill, it seemed, was having an even more difficult time restraining himself.
“Fuck you!” he shouted while firing his shotgun again.
Liam walked over to Al’s body and nudged it with his foot. The shotgun rounds ruffled him slightly, but didn’t do much more than that. Once he was satisfied that Al was dead, Liam picked him up and sniffed his bloody torso. “Randolph was right. It is in them!”
Minh tore apart the last of the Half Breeds to come after her and then leapt over the truck in order to take off after Paige.
When Liam looked toward the retreating humans, he caught sight of the polished steel in Nadya’s hand. “Gypsy trickery!” he snarled while dropping to all fours and exploding into a bounding run. “You want me to follow you? I’m happy to oblige!”
“Come on,” Paige said, running toward the large body of nearby water. “We’ve got to keep moving!”
Nadya held the metal tube in one hand, which she extended as far in front of her as her arm would allow. Now that she had both Full Bloods’ attention, she turned her back to the werewolves and ran at full speed to keep up with Paige and Bill. The only problem was that neither of the creatures was running directly after them. Both had split away from the path to circle around on either side.
“You’d better have a real good plan, lady,” Bill grunted once they broke through the tree line to find themselves facing a wide expanse of standing water. “We’re lucky to have made it this far and we sure as hell can’t swim fast enough to get away.”
“We won’t be swimming,” Paige said.
Liam emerged from the trees and stopped so his hind legs were still lost in the shadows. “You got that right,” he snarled in a voice that could barely be heard through the fangs that prevented his mouth from closing all the way.
Minh was nearby as well. Paige couldn’t be certain where, exactly, but the burning in her scars was intense enough so that she knew it was coming from two sources. Now that she’d calmed down enough to focus on what the scars were telling her, she could feel a cold prickly moving beneath the heat like an underlying current of jagged ice.
As if sensing he’d been detected, Kawosa spoke in a voice that drifted through the air like another wandering breeze. “Now this is interesting,” he said.
Despite being able to hear him, Paige couldn’t pin down the shapeshifter’s location. Judging by the way Nadya, Milosh, and Bill looked wildly around at the trees as well as the standing water, they weren’t having any better luck.
“Watch your step, young ones,” Kawosa said. “The hunters have set a trap for you.”
Liam bared his fangs and retreated just far enough into the trees so his single eye was the only thing that could be seen. As he clawed and snarled, he shifted into a shape that raised his face up several feet. When he leaned forward again, he was in his hulking two-legged form. “There is no trap they can set that will do them any good,” he growled.
“Can you be so sure? Why are you holding the others back?”
Liam glanced in the direction of the low growls emanating from the Half Breeds that had followed them this far. Shifting his eye to Paige, he growled, “Because they’ve had all the fun tonight.”
A rustling of branches announced Minh’s arrival. Unlike the other two, she wasn’t content to remain hidden. She exploded from the trees and landed about ten paces from where Bill stood with his shotgun. The Skinner reflexively fired a shot at her when Minh leapt at him. At the apex of her jump, the Full Blood was intercepted by a lean figure that barely disturbed a leaf when it pounced to wrap his arms around her upper body. Both of them landed in a heap, and Minh scrambled back up to all fours to knock Kawosa aside. He hit the ground, stopped his slide with an outstretched leg, and then used his other leg to push forward so he could clamp his jaws around her throat. Minh grunted with surprise, and by the time she swiped a paw at the elder shapeshifter, Kawosa had already moved out of her reach.
Unlike the Full Bloods who