up to tearing through another wall.”
“I’ll go.”
“You’re bleeding. A lot. There’s macho and then there’s dumbass. Don’t be a dumbass.”
The animal rose up inside him, fast and violent, and he ground his teeth against the primal urge to shift. He’d probably die of blood loss if he did, but instinct didn’t care. “I can’t watch you get shot, Zoe,” he growled. The sight would kill him faster than a bullet.
“Yeah, well, I can’t stand here and watch you get shot again. The one who isn’t injured gets to take on the bad guys. Those are the rules.”
“Together.” The word was painful to push out, but Zoe was right, he wasn’t much protection shot up and unable to shift to his more powerful form.
“Together? Bonnie and Clyde style?”
Tyler winced. “Maybe pick a couple who didn’t die.”
“Can’t think of any. Butch and Sundance… Thelma and Louise…”
“Zoe. Stop.”
“Together is good,” she said, a catch in her voice.
He squeezed her wrist gently, looking away from the door to study the curves of her face he’d long since memorized. Dark circles smudged the smooth skin beneath her eyes, lines of stress bracketed her mouth and her eyes were glassy, but her hands were steady. “Zoe,” he whispered.
She swallowed thickly, looking up to meet his eyes. “Yeah, I know. I love you too.”
His heart lurched. He’d run from her, from this, for months. He’d known from the second he laid eyes on her that Zoe King was his, and he’d done everything he could to keep from falling for her. He’d seen her as another duty, another weight of responsibility, but Zoe wasn’t an obligation, she was his whole heart. He didn’t just need her or want her, he loved her with an intensity that made the rest of his life small by comparison.
What kind of fool saw that truth only when their life together might last only a few more minutes?
Tyler wrapped his uninjured arm around Zoe and held her against his chest, pressing a kiss on her forehead, breathing in the scent of her—even if it was overlaid with the thick tang of his own blood.
A muted thud from behind the door to the lab called them back to the task at hand.
Zoe pulled away, straightening to stand on her own. “Let’s do this.”
Zoe crouched on her haunches beside the door, trying to shake the woozy feeling that had accompanied her latest shift. Tyler hunched to the left of the doorway, ready to throw it open so Zoe could leap through—a plan she’d feel much more confident with if he didn’t look like he was about to pass out from blood loss.
They made a great team. Dizzy and dizzier. If surviving came down to a race to see who could lose consciousness first, they were set.
But the situation wasn’t going to get better if they waited. There was nothing in the office to stitch Tyler up and nothing for her to eat to get her energy level up. They were never going to be in better shape than they were in right now.
Zoe nodded once—the gesture always feeling oddly foreign in her feline form—and Tyler reached for the doorknob.
She darted through the opening as soon as it was wide enough to fit her body, belly low to the ground, teeth bared, claws out—and drew up short, paws scrabbling to stop her momentum on the smooth tiles of the lab.
Two bodies lay prone on the floor, unmoving, white foam dribbling from their mouths and a sickly sweet smell rising off them. Zoe hissed, instinctively backing away from the too-sweet death scent.
Ponytail guy and a younger, even thinner man with a military-style haircut weren’t going to be a problem anymore.
“What the hell?” Tyler stood in the doorway, frowning at the bodies on the floor.
A clicking sound brought Zoe around sharply, and she saw the girl, huddled in the corner between an exam table and a metal cabinet, sobbing silently and shaking so hard her teeth were rattling against one another. “I c-c-couldn’t,” she moaned, holding something clutched tightly in her fist. “Please don’t h-h-hurt me.”
Zoe closed her mouth to hide the sharpness of her fangs, rising out of her hunting crouch.
“A suicide pill?” Tyler bent over the bodies to check for pulses, his nose wrinkling at the sweet-and-sour scent. He turned his head toward the girl. “Why?”
“B-B-Ben said the bullets didn’t stop you. We didn’t have s-s-silver,” she explained, somewhat calmer now that she wasn’t being snarled at by a few hundred pounds of pissed-off lioness.
Silver