Tommy was up, too, but he was about to launch himself at the grizzly. She caught his arm. “Run,” she said. And when he only stared at her, she screamed, “Run!”
They took off, getting back to their car in seconds. She got in the driver’s side, slamming the door and putting the still-running vehicle in reverse as Tommy got into the passenger side.
The car jumped back several feet, but the polar had it by the front, lifting the vehicle off the ground.
“Shit! Get him off!”
Tommy pulled his weapon and opened the window. He leaned out and started firing, hitting the polar in the shoulder and upper chest. It didn’t kill him but it sure did piss him off.
He roared and yanked, tearing off the hood. But it freed up the vehicle long enough for Gemma to reverse down the street half a mile. She shifted to drive and spun the car around, heading back the way they came. Tommy relaxed back into his seat, panting, his eyes shifting from gold to brown as he tried to calm down.
“Bears?” she demanded. “Goddamn bears?”
“Not our bears.”
She knew that. Although the Group had bear team members, the bear nation, as they liked to call themselves, still did their own thing. It was a very weird and very dangerous relationship between all the breeds. Yet as long as they were left alone, bears never bothered the other shifters. But piss them off or go after one of their own and all hell could break loose.
And, at the moment, it looked as if hell was running free in Brooklyn, New York.
Yuri Novikov looked up as one of his men stood in front of him. A fellow polar, bleeding from gunshot wounds. “Full-humans?” he asked as he crouched beside a dead one.
“Nah. Cats. Military issue weapons.”
He knew it couldn’t be the Unit. They didn’t get involved inside U.S. borders. That left the Group.
“What does the Group have to do with this?” Yuri asked.
“Don’t know.”
“Did you ask or just attack?”
The polar sniffed. “You know I hate cats.”
And wolves and coyotes and hyenas and anything else not bear.
“Your cousin?” the polar asked Yuri while trying to dig out the bullet in his shoulder with his own fingers.
“Heading home. They’ll take care of him. And leave that alone.” Yuri slapped the idiot’s hand away from the worsening wound. “You’re worse than my grandkids.”
“Those cats may have been looking for that wolfdog.”
Then the Group could take that up with Ursus County. The wolfdog, and whether she lived or died, wasn’t his problem.
“Look at this,” Yuri said, pointing at the full-human body. The polar crouched down.
“Nice cuts,” he said.
All strategic. Major arteries only. Neck, inside thigh, upper inside arms. I haven’t seen work like this since the military.”
“Your cousin?”
The kid’s a hell of a hockey player and a hell of a predator, but that’s about it. Ripped-out throats and torn-out thighs are probably more his style. This…this takes skill. And a coldness I’ve only seen among the Unit.”
“The wolfdog?”
“She has no tatts. No serious scars. Kinda tiny. And the Unit doesn’t take hybrids. Especially the canines. Too hard to handle. Too unstable.”
“Then who?”
“Don’t know. But,” he pulled out his cell, “I better call Grigori just in case. He hates surprises, and I think he’s had enough for one night, don’t you?”
Marci Luntz, M.D., watched the chopper touch down. She motioned to her medical team, and they rushed over with two stretchers.
Micah Novikov stepped out of the front passenger seat and closed the chopper door. Marci remembered when the boy came to visit every summer. He’d grown into a good-size polar, but like his own father Yuri, smaller than Grigori.
Feeling sick in her stomach, Marci impatiently waited for her team to bring Bold off the chopper.
Marci had grown up with Bold’s father as she’d grown up with Grigori, but she hadn’t met Bold until the ten-year-old was brought back to town by his uncle. Both his parents had died, and the silent little cub had very little to say those first few weeks and months. When he left eight years later to embark on his career, she knew she’d see him again. But not like this. She never expected to see him again like this.
Her team rushed him inside, one of them trying to help him breathe.
She started to follow, but Micah caught her arm, holding her back.
“The girl,” he said, and tilted his head toward the chopper. “She’s still breathing.”
Marci’s second team only needed one orderly to pull the girl out; Bold had needed four. There was less blood on the girl, but her body looked… wrong. The orderly placed her down on the stretcher, and his gaze met Marci’s. He shook his head, already giving up on her, but Marci wasn’t that easily dissuaded.
“Get her in and find Dr. Yu.”
“Marci,” Micah said next to her. “That girl… something’s not right.”
“Why? Because it looks as if every bone in her body’s been broken?”
“No. Not that. It’s something I heard—”
“Micah, we’ll talk about this later.”
She rushed off, following after the two teams, Grigori right beside her. By the time she reached the emergency room, Dr. Baxter was already working on Bold.
“I’ve got him, I’ve got him,” Baxter said before she could even walk inside. “Check on the girl. She’s circling the drain.”
“Got it.” Marci turned and saw Dr. Yu heading down the hall toward her.
“We have a black female, wolfdog, in suite two.” They walked in together, the nurses already prepping the wolfdog. “It looks like catastrophic damage to—”
Both doctors stopped and looked around the room, wondering where that noise came from.
“What was—”
“I don’t—”
They heard it again, and this time the nurses jumped back from the patient, one of them snarling in startled panic.
Marci and Yu looked at each other and then back at the wolfdog. Slowly, they stepped closer, each woman leaning in with their right ears close to the girl’s body to see if they could catch the sound again…
Snap!
“God!” Marci jumped back and right into Michah who stood behind her. “That noise. It… it came from her.”
Yu, a Harvard- and Princeton-trained surgeon and Great Panda, leaned in closer. More snapping sounds had her standing up straight, the wolfdog’s body twisting with each sound.
Eyes wide, black and white hair falling out of her sensible bun, Yu said, “I… I think her bones are…”
“Snapping back together,” Micah finished for her. He looked down at Marci, shrugged in a way that reminded her of Grigori. “I tried to tell you.”
“How fast can your uncle get here?”
Ric let out a sigh. When he’d gotten the call from the team watching Blayne, he’d split off from Lock and Gwen—not hard since Lock wasn’t speaking to him—and headed into the office. Not even on the elevator yet, and Dee was behind him and asking him questions that did not make him feel comfortable.
“Why?”
“Want the bad news, the worse news, or the good news?”
He sighed again. It did not help Dee-Ann sounded so…perky. “Bad news.”
“No clue if the wolfdog is dead or alive.”
Yes. That was very bad. “Good news?”
“I know where she is.”
Okay. That held promise. But still… “And the worse news?”
Without actually moving, Dee still managed to shrug her entire body. “She’s in Ursus County, Maine.”
And when he slammed his head into the wall, hoping to stop the panicked screaming in his brain, Dee-Ann didn’t seem at all surprised.
Grigori watched doctors, the boars and sows he’d grown up with, patch up his nephew. He never thought he’d be here again. Not in thi
s physical place, but back in this moment. The last time had been with Grigori’s brother, but then it had been full-humans trying to save the polar’s life, his feline wife already gone. There had been nothing they could do. Probably nothing a shifter doc could do, either. The damage had been too extensive. When it was over, all that had been left was the boy. His brother’s only child. Grigori had been in the Marines at the time, part of the rarely mentioned but well-known shifter-only Unit. He’d received immediate leave to go to his brother’s bedside, but Grigori had assumed his remaining older brother would take the boy in.
How wrong he’d been. His eldest brother had sworn he’d never forgive Bold’s father for some dumb argument they’d had years and years before, but apparently that had been true. He didn’t forgive him. And although he still lived a nice quiet life in Ursus County with four kids and a sow who could have easily handled one more kid who needed the man’s family, that would never happen.
Grigori knew that the options for a hybrid cub weren’t great. Foster care. Orphanage. Taken in by full-humans. Grigori couldn’t stand the thought. So he’d gone to his C.O. and been released from duty. Something that wouldn’t have been easy for the full-human Marines, but shifters played by different rules. Sometimes they simply had to when it came to caring for their young. So Grigori had taken on raising the quiet, neat little boy with time issues. It hadn’t been easy. Grigori was only twenty-nine at the time, and it was usually the sows who did the bulk of the raising when it came to cubs, but he wouldn’t let that stop him. The boy needed him. Because what ten-year-old folded his socks without a C.O. to tell him to? And the boy had that weird thing about time and Christ, the lists! There were so many lists. At first, Grigori worried that the kid had been mentally damaged by the accident. The first few months, he kept looking to see if the kid tortured animals or drew weird pictures that involved killing people. He was just too quiet. Too polite. Too solemn. Especially for a bear or lion cub.
He’d bring the boy in to see Marci Luntz, and she kept telling Grigori not to worry. Then, one day, the boy had walked in on Grigori watching a hockey game on TV. For the first time, the kid sat down beside him without being asked to and watched along with him. He hadn’t bothered before with TV, always more a fan of reading, something Grigori had always found boring. But the kid had watched every second of the game, almost smiling when it was over.
The next day, on a hunch, Grigori came home with a pair of hockey skates, stick, and a puck, and took the kid to one of the ponds near his house. Without saying a word, the boy put on his skates, expertly tying them up, wrapped up the handle of his stick with tape, and hit the ice. That’s when Grigori saw what the kid had been missing for the few months they’d been living together.
Then, after watching him for a good hour, Grigori realized something else.
The kid would be a superstar. For someone so young, who he guessed hadn’t been on the ice in months, Bold Novikov had the most impressive moves Grigori had ever seen, and the kid was only doing drills.
At first, Grigori was the only one who saw it. Even for a ten-year-old, Bold was smaller than any of the other cubs. Quieter, less playful. Grigori worried that pressure from the other kids would make Bold give up, especially when they started calling the kid “Speck.” Grigori should have known better. That kid didn’t give up on anything. Always smaller than the other bears he played with, Bold never let that hold him back. He never let the reaction he got from the rest of the town for being tough and mean on the ice get to him. The kid had a goal and he went for it with the methodical planning of a war-time dictator.
It was almost a shame the kid had no interest in the military—he’d be a general by the time he was thirty. Or killed by his own troops. It could really go either way.
Dr. Karl Baxter walked out of the surgery. “Okay. We got the bullet out and sewed up what we could and put a cast on his arm. Now we wait and see.”
Grigori nodded. “Okay.”
The Yellowstone grizzly patted his shoulder. “Why don’t you get some coffee? You’ll probably need it. By the time you get back, we’ll be able to let you in to see him.”
“Okay. Thanks, Karl.”
“Of course.”
Grigori headed down the hallway toward the elevators that would take him to the cafeteria, but he paused at the doorway of the room where the wolfdog was being treated. While the nurses had refused to go back into the room with the “poppin’ and lockin’ canine,” as she’d been named by the orderlies, Betty Yu and Marci had refused to leave her side. Fascinated by every snap, crackle, and pop coming off the little girl.
“How’s she doing?”
Marci glanced up at him and then away, pushing the girl onto her side and focusing on her back. “She’s alive but still unconscious. To be honest, I have no idea if she’ll ever come out of—” She pointed at the wolfdog’s back. “Betty…what is this?”
The panda walked around the bed. “What’s what?”
“This? It doesn’t look like a laceration.”
“More glass?” Betty looked at Grigori. “We found glass imbedded in her flesh. Probably from the accident.”
Accident. Yeah. Right. From what he’d heard about thirty minutes ago from his cousin, the crash of that van was not a simple accident. Far from it. Especially since Yuri didn’t even think that most of the full-human victims had died from the crash. They were dead before it.
“I thought we got all of it,” Betty explained after grabbing a clamp-looking thing with long handles and placing it against the wolfdog’s flesh, “but we may have missed a piece or two.”
She tugged and pulled something from the wolfdog’s flesh. It sparkled in the harsh emergency room light, but it wasn’t glass.
Yu held it up. “What in holy hell is this?”
Yeah. Grigori would like to know that, too.
CHAPTER 16
Something was choking him. Choking him to death. He grabbed at it, trying to pull it from his throat. Strong arms grabbed his hands, pulled them away. He fought back, struggling against them, knowing they were trying to kill him.
“Bold!” He heard the voice. Recognized it. “Bold! Listen to me! It’s Dr. Luntz! Open your eyes, sweetheart! Open them and look at me!”
He did, but it wasn’t easy.
It was Dr. Luntz hovering over him, her hands on his face, brushing his cheeks with soft, cool fingers. “You’re safe, Bold. You’re safe.”
He tried to answer, but he choked and coughed, his body trying to expel whatever was trapped in his throat.
“Let’s get this out of him,” she said to someone off to his left. “Easy, Bold. Easy. You’re going to be fine.”
Tape was removed from his mouth and the tube pulled from his throat. He quickly rolled to his side, the coughing getting worse as mucus and saliva poured out of him.
“It’s all right, Bold. You’re fine.” She stroked his back, his neck, while someone else wiped his mouth. After the coughing subsided, he was again rolled onto his back.
Marci Luntz smiled at him. That warm smile she used to always give him anytime she saw him in town. “Hi, Bold.”
He had to admit he was glad to see her, but there was just one thing…Marci Luntz didn’t leave town. Not since she’d returned from her residency at Johns Hopkins. To quote her, “What’s out there for me? Full-humans? Snobby cats and cranky wolves? Thank you, but I’ll stay right here.”
Bo looked away from her and around the room, gazed out the window with all that bright morning sun that shed light on all the snow and ice covering the trees. Those trees with the deep gouges ripped into their trunks from hundreds of years’ worth of bears.
Christ, he was back. Back in the town he’d moved to after his parents died. The town he’d left eight years later.
He was back in Ursus County, Maine.
But why? Why was he back? And why was he hurt?
He moved his gaze to his arm. He had on a cast, the pain as bone and muscle repaired itself radiating up
his arm and throughout his body.
Christ, his arm. He’d broken his arm. When? How? And, more important, would he still be able to play?
Fear shuddered through Bo, helped along by feeling hot and cold all at the same time. The fever. He had the fever. Rationally, he knew that was a good thing. The fever would help repair him. So would Dr. Luntz.
He returned his gaze to her. She smiled. It was that warm smile he remembered so well. He focused on it, immediately feeling calm and centered when he did. He was about to return her smile, something he rarely felt the need to do for anyone when Dr. Luntz was pushed aside and a big, fat, stupid face he remembered all too well moved in close. Too close.
“Speck!” he screamed in Bo’s face. “How ya doin’, Speck? How ya feelin’, buddy?” The polar looked Bo over, grinned. “I see you finally hit your growth spurt, huh? ‘Bout friggin’ time, I’d say. Right, kid?”
“Fabi—”
“It’s okay, doc! Speck here’s my cousin, right? You know that. Speck adores me! Don’t ya, Speck? Don’t ya adore your cousin Fabi?”
Uh…no. No, Bo didn’t adore his cousin. As always with the idiot, Bo wanted to bat him around like a tennis ball. Yet he could almost hear a voice telling him that wouldn’t be right. He’s family, the voice insisted. You’ve gotta have family!
He knew that voice…and that ridiculous sentiment. Blayne. That was Blayne’s voice.
Blayne…
With his right arm in a cast and still healing, he used his left to grab Fabi Novikov around the throat, his fingers squeezing until his cousin’s eyes bulged from his head.
Dr. Luntz grabbed his arm, trying to pry him off. She screamed out the door, “I need help in here! Grigori! Somebody! Now!”
Bo leaned up while pulling Fabi in closer. “Where is she?” he asked, his voice not more than a ragged sound torn from his damaged throat. But that pain didn’t stop him from bellowing in Fabi’s terrified face, “Where’s Blayne?”
Grigori walked down the hallway toward his nephew’s room. The kid was doing okay. Marci seemed real sure he’d be just fine, and Marci wouldn’t lie to him, even if she wanted to. The fever hit the kid hard but that was to be expected. Bold had tossed and turned all night, his big body shifting from human to animal every few minutes, leaving his sheets soaked in sweat and the need to replace the cast on his arm twice. It was hard fitting anything to his shifted form. He’d taken a lot of both his parents and came up with something pretty damn new.
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