the car, looked at the deep bloody grooves in Paige’s right arm and sniffed. When he raised his head again, he was smiling. “Right you are, luv.”
Paige couldn’t tell what sort of gun was being fired, but it was raising hell among the Half Breeds. Before she could become too happy about that, the sound was wiped away by snarling howls and ripping metal. More gunfire preceded the flaring of the engines.
Hunkering down as if in prayer, Liam shifted into a vaguely human form that was covered in thickly matted fur. “They’re leeeavin’ on a jet plane,” he sang cheerfully. “Don’t know when they’ll be back again.”
There was no more pain from getting hit in the face by the air bag. Paige felt no more panic from the ambush or the notion of being abandoned in a town that appeared to be overrun by werewolves. She simply reached for her shoulder holster, drew her Beretta, and fired two shots into the mess of scar tissue filling Liam’s right eye socket.
The Full Blood recoiled and made a sound close to a shriek Paige thought she would never hear from one of his kind. She propped herself up, steadied her aim, and continued to fire. Just as she was starting to get into it, she was knocked down by something that felt like a piece of the car that had come alive to make her pay for all the reckless driving that brought her to the airport. Now that she’d stopped shooting, she could hear the other snarling voices, as well as the wet ripping of flesh being torn asunder.
The Gulfstream was moving away from the hangar and taxiing toward the runway. Half Breeds scrambled across its fuselage, some of them gnawing at the landing gear while scraping madly at the ground, others tussling with lean figures that could have been one or more of the Amriany. Gunari leaned out the side door, firing his assault rifle until it was time to pull his head inside and shut the door behind him.
Liam rolled away from the dented remains of the Mazda and pulled something off his back. It was another shapeshifter, but not a werewolf. Paige had seen enough of the feline creatures to recognize them as Mongrels. Minh was preoccupied with a cluster of blurred figures that could only be seen as a disturbance in the air surrounding her. A familiar scent caught Paige’s attention then. To confirm her suspicion, she pulled in a deep breath that was thick with traces of oil secreted by certain Mongrels, which allowed them to bend light around them until they were all but invisible. Now that she knew what to look for, she spotted at least three blurred figures attacking Minh and the Half Breeds. She didn’t know who they were or where they’d come from, but if Mongrels wanted to take the Full Bloods off her hands, they were more than welcome.
Paige struggled to stay on her feet as she ran from the swarm of flailing claws and teeth behind her. She kept her eyes fixed upon the Gulfstream, hoping one of the Amriany would look back and find her. If the engines let up for only a moment, she knew she’d be able to catch up. Then, like a true miracle, the engine noise died down.
The jet pivoted around at the end of the runway to line up with the strip of pavement. A surge of energy flowed through Paige’s body, carrying her forward until the wind whipped through her hair. Suddenly, her body was dragged to the ground as Kawosa’s lean four-legged form passed directly above her. His claws had been stretched out to sink into her back, but they only caught empty space before he touched down again. Like any shapeshifter, he was more than fast enough to adjust his body for a smooth landing. The moment his paws gripped the concrete, he turned and snarled at his fallen prey.
“Stay down and she’ll get to you,” someone said to Paige.
The voice wasn’t familiar, but she recognized the lithe feline shape as one of the Mongrels that had attacked Liam. It stalked forward, twitching a short tail and letting out a steady flow of snarling obscenities that seemed distinctly suited to its jagged, misshapen mouth. It didn’t take long for Kawosa to set his sights on the Mongrel, and when he did, he was blindsided by another one that was cloaked in the oily sheen of near-invisibility. The blurred shape came