Nightshifter

by L. E. Horn

  I stood and ran to the sink, turning the hot water on full.

  “I need my suture kit. It’s red, about ten inches long, left side of my bag.”

  As Josh dug into it, I glanced at him.

  “Other side,” I said, and he found it.

  “See the sterile suture packets? Dump them on the floor.” Josh did so, and I ran my eyes over them. “Third from the left. Open it—don’t touch anything and dump it into the tray.” Like doing this on a kitchen floor is sterile. Peter has worse worries than infection. “Put the scissors in there too. I’ll need another two kits—the ones on the end. That’s it.”

  Josh set the other two packets near the tray. His movements, like his gaze when he looked up, were sure and steady.

  “Other side of the bag from the last bottle, can you fetch the surgical soap? It’ll be in a sterile packet.”

  Josh brought it, and I scrubbed the blood off my arms and hands, as hard and fast as I could. I glanced at him. His face was pale but composed. “The blue box in the back of my SUV has my IV kit. He needs fluids or his heart might stop on us.”

  Josh vanished out the door. By the time I finished scrubbing, and inserted my hands into gloves, my assistant was prepping the IV.

  “I’ve done this before,” he said through clenched teeth.

  An image of Chris’s scars flashed before my eyes. I bet he has.

  Josh had the IV set up in record time. I left him to it and crouched over the wound, turning Peter’s head to take advantage of the overhead light. Then I pulled the suture out of the disinfectant and started in. I’d been right about the veins—the claws had caught the internal jugular in two places, creating jagged tears, and the exterior had received a glancing blow. Stitching for all I was worth, I paused to remove the clamps and test for leaks, before stitching again. I’d decided they were good, when the distinctive pulse of the blood through the veins slowed—and ceased. Peter’s heart had stopped beating.

  Dammit. I abandoned everything and began chest compressions. I’m not equipped for this. He’s lost too much blood. His heart stuttered and started, but his pulse was so weak.

  “He needs a transfusion,” Josh said.

  I looked at him.

  “Doc Hayek will have plasma. Until he arrives, you can use me.”

  “No. I don’t know Peter’s blood type and transfusing with the wrong one could kill him.”

  Josh clenched his jaw. “I’ve done it with Chris.”

  Shaking my head, I kicked myself back into gear, peeling off the gloves contaminated by contact with Peter’s chest and pulling on new ones. I grabbed a fresh needle and went to work closing the neck wound.

  It didn’t take long. I pulled clippers out of my bag and shaved around the gash in his hair.

  “What the hell did that?” Josh asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “But I’m worried he has a skull fracture. It had to have been something blunt and hard, swung with force.” I changed gloves again and sterilized the wound before stitching it closed. That part done, we rolled him, and I worked on the slashes across his back.

  “Just do the deepest,” Josh said. When I glanced at him, he added, “Trust me, the others will heal fine. See? The edges have already sealed.”

  He was right. With a grunt of acknowledgment, I focused on the ones where bone showed through. The ribs had done their job and protected the vital organs from the vicious claws.

  Josh appeared beside me with a bowl of hot water. I grimaced when I identified it as the same one Chloe had used to wash Peter’s wounds the day I’d found out I was a wulfleng. Dillon will pay for this. The thought gave credence to the rage within me, and I had to close my eyes and wrestle it back down.

  “Liam!”

  “Yeah, I’m here.” Together, we washed off the worst of the gore. Peter looked white as a sheet, because too much of his blood lay beneath him. “We need something strong to carry him,” I said. I took Peter’s vitals as Josh went along the hall and into the closet, returning with a quilt. With infinite care, we eased Peter onto it and carried him on the makeshift stretcher to the living room couch.

  I stood over him for a moment, and the anger I’d buried deep while I tended him forged to the surface like magma in a volcano. My fists clenched and the claws emerged to dig into my palms. I embraced the pain and growled.

  “Liam, Doc Hayek should be here any minute, he’ll bring the plasma. Peter will be fine.”

  “But Chloe is out there.” My hands tightened and warmth dripped from my fists as claws penetrated my flesh. “With Dillon.”

  “Leave Dillon to Chris.”

  I glanced up at the old clock on the fireplace mantle. My operation had taken less than an hour. Chris is still at least an hour away. “Not soon enough,” I said, and looking into Josh’s eyes I saw grim acknowledgment.

  “All right. We wait for Doc, then we’ll go together. Track him, save Chris time.”

  Wulfan mate for life. Chris’s voice echoed through me. I couldn’t let anything happen to Josh.

  “There are three more IV bags in the truck,” I said.

  “You’re not going after Dillon.”

  “I need you to stay with him, Josh. If he comes around, he’ll kill himself trying to get out there. Disconnect here to change the fluids,” I showed him, “and reconnect . . .”

  “I’ve done fluids before, remember. You stay—I’ll go. I can shift—you can’t.”

  “I’m taking Peter’s gun. When Chris gets here, he’ll come after me. It might take me a while to find them.”

  “Let me go,” pleaded Josh. “You can’t win against Dillon.”

  “Look at me and tell me you can.”

  He couldn’t and he knew it. Josh was wulfan, but he wasn’t an enforcer. Dillon would make mincemeat of him.

  Of course, I wasn’t an enforcer either. Or a wulfan. But I knew how to fight, and damn it, Dillon and I were meant to do this. I couldn’t explain it, but this was right.

  “I’ll do everything I can to stall until Chris gets to me. But I can’t leave Chloe with him. I have to try.”

  The bleak look Josh gave me said it all. “Chris will skin me alive.”

  “No he won’t. He loves you.” I fished fresh ammo from the drawer and shoved it into my pocket before fetching Peter’s gun from where he’d dropped it on the deck. Whatever had happened, Dillon hadn’t given him the chance to use it. “The worst he’ll do is lock you in the cage for a day.”

  “Dammit, Liam.” Josh grabbed me by the shoulder and forced me to stop moving long enough to meet his gaze. “Don’t let the wulf cloud your mind. If Dillon has lost it, his wulf is in control. That’s his strength, but also his weakness. You can’t outmuscle him, but you can outthink him, if you get the chance.”

  I nodded, and on impulse, hugged him. “Don’t tell Chris, he’ll be jealous.”

  “Just survive, please,” Josh said.

  “This is my fight.” I let him see the commitment in my gaze. “Dillon and I have been heading for this since he arrived.” I grinned at him and affected a deep, accented voice. “I’ll be back.”

  Josh groaned. “Oh, God, you’re so much like him. Heaven help us all.”

  I didn’t have to ask whom he meant. I turned away from him and passed through the kitchen door, closing it behind me. Then I jogged into the darkness.

  * * *

  I smelled Dillon the moment I stepped off the deck. Sniffing, I walked to the steps leading to my cellar door. The entire entryway reeked of him, and I snarled when I realized why.

  Dillon had pissed all around my doorway. He must have been doing it for days—likely from the time I left.

  The rage rose within me, primitive and wild. I spun, took a step, and my foot kicked something in the grass—a baseball bat. Peter’s bat, the one he kept behind his kitchen door. I bent to lift it and saw blood on the end. It smelled of Peter; someone had belted him with it. Hard. My stomach twisted, thinking of the way the bones had shifted beneath my finge
rs.

  Why would Dillon bother with a bat? The man’s fists were weapons all on their own.

  My second discovery was another shock. Just outside the entrance to the trail lay a half-eaten body. My heart stopped when I saw the shapeless, crumpled form surrounded by a metallic scent cloud of blood. Peter’s, but most of it belonged to something else. I stepped closer, and my brain continued to make olfactory connections. An image popped up—the body was a sheep, or what was left of one.

  I clenched my teeth as I entered the woods and sniffed. Every branch along the trail was rank with Dillon. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that madness had a scent, but it did. It caused me to curl my lip back over my emerging fangs and made my heart pound until I thought it would leap from my chest. For the first time that evening, I could unleash the wulf that had been shredding me from the inside out. The truth was, I could not have stayed behind without losing more than just my mind. I’d held on by a thread while Peter needed me, but now, the wulf wanted Dillon.

  So I ran while the blood dripped from my gums and my toes pushed against the confines of my runners. My skin itched all over, and I paused long enough to pull off my shoes. My claws clicked against the steel of the gun as I pulled the strap over my shoulder, letting it drop down my back. For a second, I stood, spreading my toes into the trail’s soft mud, and sniffed. I tracked Dillon to the entrance of the six-miler. Then I ran.

  This time, the wulf came with me. I embraced it. My jaw ached as it lengthened, the teeth sliding into place with what seemed like relief, my tongue licking the blood from my lips. My head shifted forward from my shoulders, the muscles expanding, arching from my skull to my back. Coarse hair in all the shades of blond tossed in the wind of my passage.

  I battled to stop the changes there, and won. Even long-fingered paws could not handle a gun, and I needed to be able to run. I knew nothing of running on four legs, and now was not the time to learn. But as I ran, I pushed harder, channeling the willing wulf, envisioning the muscles of my limbs growing stronger, adding length to my strides. With each fallen tree I bounded over and every branch I ducked, I seemed to navigate more smoothly, gracefully, with economy of motion. Not like a human. Like a creature of the wild.

  Everywhere smelled of Dillon, as though he’d rubbed himself on every surface, taunting me. And then I caught another scent, almost smothered beneath his. Chloe. And blood.

  My rage fueled me. I sprang into the air, rebounding off tree trunks and swinging from branches, not awkwardly like before, but with precision and power. Faster and faster, until I moved as a blur, my senses filled with the smell of beast and blood. My anger howled through and burst from my lips, starting high-pitched like a pup’s but deepening, until it became a hoarse roar.

  Somewhere ahead, Dillon answered, his howl laced with madness.

  I almost passed her by. In mid-leap, I caught her scent, strong beneath the surrounding rankness, and crashed to a halt against a trunk, my claws sunk deep. I held my breath, and my sensitive ears picked up the softest of moans.

  Chloe lay curled in a fetal position, huddled in a hollow formed by the branches of a fallen tree. In human form, naked, her body showed the assault of a madman. Fang marks everywhere, including ones at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. Covered not only in blood but in urine and another smell—distinctive —that pulled my lips back from my teeth.

  I knew at that moment what had been done to her, and the wulf in me raised my head to the sky and howled in rage and despair. Too late to stop him from destroying her world, but not her life. I wrenched the gun strap off my shoulder, then my shirt to tuck it around her. Her eyes flickered but remain closed. I would have liked to think she’d been unconscious for it, but the blood on her claws said otherwise.

  Not all of it was hers—I smelled Peter there too. Where had she been when Dillon attacked him? My hands tightened on the gun. Chloe had been a fool to believe in Dillon, but she didn’t deserve this. No one did. Dillon deserves to die.

  The thought brought with it a fresh wave of rage that snapped my collarbones loose from my shoulders. I dropped the gun from nerveless fingers. I grimaced as the muscles twisted beneath my skin, accommodating the bones that shifted into new positions. My jeans ripped at the seams. With a frisson of agony that shot up my spine, my tail burst free, trapped by fabric until I finished the shredding with my claws, staggering on one leg as the tendons writhed.

  Panting with pain, I dropped to four legs to see Dillon standing among the branches, watching. His breath steamed in the cool night air and his eyes danced with madness.

  The wulf screamed for me to pounce, to reach for and tear out his throat. My hind legs twitched, trying to drive me forward. But although my wulf’s heart leaped with joy to find the enemy, my human brain recognized how screwed I truly was. I’d seen what he’d done to those bison—the brute strength within that massive frame. I stood no chance against him as a wobbly wulf. I pushed back at my predator and snapped on the leash.

  My cell phone decided to ring from the pocket of my shredded jeans. “Clap for the Wolfman”—Chris. Josh had obviously spent time with my phone. I longed for the enforcer’s presence, but I knew he was too far away to help now.

  The sound distracted Dillon. He tilted his broad skull, looking toward my discarded clothing, giving me a moment to try something desperate.

  It was the human in me that made a grab for the gun. My thickened, clawed fingers scrabbled at the grip, but before they could close, Dillon’s attention snapped back, and he knocked it away. The movement threw me off balance and I went sprawling across the ground. I rolled back to my feet and faced him, snarling.

  Dillon towered over me. It was the closest I’d been to his wulf since he’d bitten me, and my heart pounded. His entire frame rippled with muscle—his shoulders so broad you couldn’t see the rest of his body past them. His forearms were huge, leading to front paws with thickened fingers spread wide and ending in vicious hooked claws. He was bigger, heavier, and stronger than I was. He knew how to use his wulf body, I didn’t. But as I looked into his eyes, what I saw wasn’t human. It wasn’t entirely animal either, but the human he’d been no longer existed in that massive head. And I remembered what Josh had said.

  You can’t outmuscle him. But you can outthink him. Thanks to my childhood, I had a lot of experience with brain over brawn.

  Dillon knew he had the advantage. He advanced on me, long tongue hanging from jaws that opened to a snarl. “Lium, yu die.”

  He can speak? There must have been some human left in there. His eyes tracked me as I stepped toward open ground. My body bristled with rage, muscles trembling, eager to do battle. But my mind raced, casting about for a plan and, to my surprise, I found one. A straight-out fight would be suicidal. I had to lure him away from Chloe and buy Chris time to find us.

  My sideways jump into the trees surprised him. In a flash, he was after me, but his larger size made it difficult for him to use the forest as a highway. After a few attempts to spring between branches that snapped under him, he dropped to the ground and snarled up at me. His next leap forced me to leap again before he could drag me out of the trees.

  In our haphazard progress through the bush, his powerful leaps often carried him ahead of me, but my quick changes of direction were beyond him. I didn’t know yet how to coordinate my legs to run but leaping from tree to tree used the same techniques I had used when I trained as a human, and the tremendous power in my hind legs enabled me to travel longer distances with each bound. It wasn’t graceful. Several times, I miscalculated, overshot my intended target, and crashed to the ground almost at his feet. Only his forward momentum saved me, giving me precious seconds to twist out from under his bounding form, to scramble once again into the trees.

  “Lium,” he growled. “Ure yu ready tu die?” A demented chant, more like something from an exorcist movie than from anything human. It made the muscles along my spine twitch, bristling my hackles erect.

  As I flung mysel
f between branches, my wulf expressed displeasure with my plan. Dillon wanted a direct fight—tooth and claw—and so did my inner predator. Every surge of rage or fear threatened to tip the scales in Dillon’s favor. Only the knowledge of what losing control to my wulf would mean—my certain death—kept the human on top.

  I smelled my goal. The recent snowmelt might be my savior, that and the gravel deposits so often mined in this area. My brain struggled to track our progress on my mental map as I followed the scent of dampness, angling off the trail, luring Dillon with me.

  Trees lined the hilltop above the gravel pit, and I vaulted into them, then turned to face him, panting hard. Dillon paused, tilting his head to follow my movement. The moonlight filtered through the branches, striping his fur gray and black. I planted my feet flat on a branch to stand human tall, and as I did so, something howled in the distance.

  It carried on the wind and my heart soared. Chris. My relief almost overwhelmed me; the enforcer had picked up our trail. Another howl, higher pitched, told me he wasn’t alone. My lips parted in a lupine grin as I looked down on my enemy.

  “Beast.” I forced my lengthened tongue around the words. “They come for yu.” All I had to do was stall and I might survive. Keep him talking, my human half thought.

  Unbidden, thoughts of what he’d done to Chloe and Peter flashed through my mind. No, my wulf snarled. He’s mine. While I vacillated between common sense and my wulf’s desire for revenge, Dillon turned to head back the way we’d come.

  He’s returning for Chloe. Like something out of a dream, I snarled behind him. “She's mine.”

  He twisted to look up at me, flattening his ears and snarling as he showed his long white fangs.

  “Cuward,” I growled.

  He leaped straight for me. The impact knocked me flying out of the tree. Snarling and snapping, we crashed into the ground hard enough to drive the air from my lungs with a horrible, searing pain. We slid and rolled down the steep incline, our claws scrabbling but finding only loose gravel. Part way down, we collided with a ridge that scooped us up and sent us airborne. There came a moment of free fall, and then we hit the bottom.