by Anya Nowlan
Don’t think about it. Just move.
SEALs never left one of their own behind. Never. But this time, there wasn’t anyone to collect.
The frantic screams and shouts they’d heard over the first few seconds had died down fast, each voice being wiped out by another shot. Smoke grenades and damn fast legs were the only things that had gotten Prowler and his brother this far and he wasn’t stupid enough to discount a healthy dose of luck right along with it.
They weren’t any better than the men who’d died in that jungle. They’d just gotten luckier.
“Come on,” Prowler hissed, counting the steps he thought were separating him and Price from the choppers.
If there still were choppers, that was.
He wouldn’t have been surprised to make it to the clearing, some five clicks from where they’d been holed up, to find nothing but smoking wreckage in their stead. But that was a problem they’d tackle when they came to it. If they came to it.
Price was a couple dozen feet ahead of him, running at dead speed, his rifle up and his ears most certainly pricked just like Prowler’s. Prowler’s best guess estimate was that they’d been outnumbered two to one when they came into this little firefight at the beginning of the day. While they’d dropped a considerable number of their targets, that still left a fuckload of highly trained men after him and his brother.
Suddenly, something reached Price’s ears and he damn near stumbled all over his feet. A long, guttural howl went across the jungle, haunting in the depth of its cry. Several voices joined in. Prowler felt his eyes flashing gold once more, the wolf’s first reaction being to join in. When Price glanced back over his shoulder at Prowler, Prowler could see the gold in his brother’s eyes as well.
No wonder. It was almost impossible to deny the call of wolves.
But this time, both of them remained quiet and now the desire to survive mingled with a deep, boiling rage that bubbled within Prowler. There were wolves after them. Wolves. Their own fucking kind.
One of these days, I’ll come back and kill every fucking last one of you, he vowed darkly, pressing his lips shut tightly.
The adrenaline that had kept him going for most of the day had spiked hard the moment he heard and identified the call. Pure anger seemed to bristle through him and he felt himself moving faster, the round in his leg seemingly forgotten, though his body was working double-time to allow him to survive that shot.
“They’re wolves,” Price snarled, almost breathless as they came up to the last spot of brush that was supposed to separate them from the assault helicopters.
“I know,” Prowler responded, bringing his rifle up as well and taking aim now.
As soon as they hit the last few trees, their running slowed and they ground to a halt. The helicopters were still there, but there was movement around them. One glance at Price told Prowler that they were thinking the same thing.
They were going to have to fight their way to the birds or they’d die where they stood. Undoubtedly there was an army of wolves behind them, all more than happy to blow their heads off their shoulders like they’d done to their friends and brothers in arms.
Wordlessly, the two brothers exchanged glances and then took a breath each, knowing they had no time to stand, make a plan or study the situation. They had to go.
Now.
Price was the first to move, taking the left flank and Prowler took the right. They went in guns blazing, not a word uttered from their lips. Prowler was the first to get a solid hit, one of the men guarding the helicopters clutching his neck as he collapsed, gurgling out a warning too late. Price nailed another target a split-second later, getting him in the kneecap and then the face.
That made two out of six before the fire was returned.
Prowler gritted his teeth, diving into a line of low bushes and army-crawling forward fast, making himself a smaller target. Price took the opposite route, standing still for a moment longer and aiming carefully. He got another guard in the chest three times, the final bullet being the one that finally penetrated the armor he wore.
These fuckers are kitted out to the teeth, Prowler thought, enraged.
They were supposed to come wipe out badly geared yokels with a drug habit. Instead, they’d been met with overwhelming force and preparation nearly matching that of the SEAL unit. What they had lacked in prep, they had more than made up for in numbers.
One of the men barked something at the others and the three of them fell back behind one of the two large assault choppers. Price had taken cover as well now, much to Prowler’s relief. He could sense his brother, not with absolute certainty, but they always knew if the other was in too much danger. Or grievously injured.
Or dead, Prowler reminded himself.
A few years ago, Price had been clinically dead for about ten minutes before they brought him back on the sands in another Middle East country that couldn’t be named. It had been the worst ten minutes of Prowler’s life.
He wasn’t going to go through that shit again.
“You know, you’d almost think they’re afraid of us,” Prowler yelled across the clearing, receiving a laugh that was markedly Price’s in return.
“Almost, yeah.”
“So what are we gonna do?” he continued conversationally, crawling forward with his gun in his hand.
“Guess we just fucking eviscerate ‘em,” Price offered mildly.
A second later, the leftmost chopper, the one that the men had hidden behind, went up in flames. Prowler had caught the slight clink of a grenade plonking off the side of it just before the explosion. He hiked himself up on his elbows and then jumped up, his vision blurry from the sudden burst of fire, but that didn’t mean he missed the flash of motion heading further from the wreckage.
Taking a deep breath, he brought the rifle up, took aim and squeezed the trigger. The runner dropped into the tall grass with a wheezing scream.
Good.
“Move!” Price howled, sprinting across the field now.
Prowler’s head snapped back, hearing movement behind him. From the tree-line, he could see at least ten men heading for him. They were too far to hit him yet.
Or so he thought, when the first round bit into the dirt at his boots.
“Shit,” he hissed, breaking into a run as fast as he could with his wounds.
By the time he made it to the chopper, Price had already brought the engine roaring to life and Prowler had gotten another hit in the calf. It hurt like a bitch and he was beginning to feel more like a pincushion than a man by the second.
He hurled himself into the back of the chopper when Price was already taking off, the chopper hovering a couple of feet above the ground. Bullets clinked off the side of the helicopter now and the tension could be cut with a knife as Prowler whipped himself around and tore himself up into a seated position. He was already reloading his rifle as he was still getting on the chopper and by the time Price started building altitude, Prowler was playing shoot the wolf with the enemy soldiers below.
The two headshots he scored were especially delicious.
“Take that, you wolfy motherfuckers,” Prowler roared, Price meeting it with a snarl of his own.
A moment later, the chopper rattled with a familiar sound. Price had turned the nose to face the men that had come to claim them and was shooting at them from the railguns mounted on the chopper. Prowler grinned, a feverish smile that reached his eyes despite the gnawing emptiness he suddenly felt in himself, taking down his own kind like it was a goddamn sport.
They came for you, you go for them. Eye for a fucking eye.
The mental image of Mackey’s last gargling breaths struck him far too hard at that moment. Mackey had been a mountain lion shifter and a damn good man. Better than any of the guys whose heads Prowler was turning into empty vessels now, he could bet.
Price went over them like a meat grinder and when he turned around for another pass, Prowler cleaned up what was left. The last shots he unloaded went in
to already dead bodies, just making them jerk up and down. It was then that Prowler realized there were tears in his eyes.
Slowly, he crawled up next to Price, taking the seat next to him and buckling in, discarding his gun behind him. Where his team was supposed to be, on their way back home. Something made him look back at the empty space yawning behind the pilots’ seats.
Price seemed to be piloting the chopper more out of instinct than any current active thought. His hands were gripping the stick so hard that Prowler found himself wondering if Price might just rip it out of the floor at one point.
“Do you think there’s anyone left?” Prowler asked after a moment of silence that hung between them like a veil.
“No,” Price said. “I did a couple of hails over the radio. No one.”
“Figures,” Prowler answered blankly.
“Doesn’t it just,” Price agreed.
Prowler slouched into the seat. He hurt all over. Every fucking part of him seemed to have some sort of a wound, whether it was from a gunshot, a fall or something else entirely. All he wanted to do was get shot up with morphine and sleep as long as he could.
But he wasn’t going to do that.
“We need to go back. You know that, right?” he asked, not looking at Price.
“Yup,” Price said with a nod.
“When do you think?”
Price seemed to consider this, pursing his lips slightly.
“How about now?”
“Good of a time as any.”
“I thought so.”
When the US Navy finally extracted Price and Prowler Renard from the depths of the jungle, they’d taken out every single one of the werewolves that had set up there, destroyed all three compounds and given their fallen brothers in arms proper burials. While their enemies had known a SEAL team was coming, they hadn’t been prepared for what two wolf brothers on a warpath could do when they no longer had anything to come home for.
The investigation reports stated that some of the enemies’ bodies were so mangled and thoroughly beaten into pulp that it took cell samples to identify whether they were human, shifter, or something else entirely.
It was a few years later that the Renard twins learned that the men they’d gone up against would later be known as The Arctics, a fanatic werewolf purist terrorist group that everyone in the world would come to fear. By then, the US Navy SEALs didn’t want anything to do with Prowler or Price and frankly, they didn’t want anything to do with them either.
All that they’d believed in had died in that jungle and sometimes, Prowler thought that they’d buried their own corpses right there along with their brothers in arms.
One
Amy
The helicopter was dead silent.
There were six of them altogether, not counting the pilots. Those guys were more often than not company-assigned and not a part of the squad anymore, unless dealing with the elite crews. That wasn’t to say that Amy Marguiles’ crew was anything less than kickass, though.
They were all clad in black, not a single identifying marker anywhere on them. No badges, no insignias, no dog tags. They might as well have been ghosts for all anyone could tell about who they were and where they were coming from.
And that’s exactly how they prefer us. Expendable.
The thought was far more bitter than Amy intended it to be, letting her gray eyes roll over the men and women around her. Sirra was her medic and Tatiana was a wizard with tech. Both of them looked entirely tiny compared to the men around them, even though Tatiana was no small woman at 5’10’’, with the wide shoulders of a career shot-putter.
It was difficult to look anything near bulky when sitting next to Roy, Solder or Titus, though. The last of them in particular could dwarf most shifters, no matter how damn hulking they may have been.
The time to check their guns and prepare was over. If the intel was correct, they weren’t going to have to do much at all, other than all the shit-work that the elite squads left behind. That was the joy of running a mop-up crew like Shadow Two. You got to do all the stuff no one else wanted to.
Sometimes, it was straightforward enough. Complexes had been leveled, men had been killed in gruesome fashion and it all had to ‘go away.’ So that was exactly what Amy and her people did. They’d organize the recoup efforts, oversee the cleanup and handle the little things, like disposing of a few dozen bodies.
Other times, though, the work was a lot darker than that.
If a mission had gone awry, it still needed to be tied up. That could mean anything. Maybe one of the Shifter Squads had gotten wiped out – it was rare, but it had happened before. Amy had been there when the previous Shifter Squad Nine had to be all but scraped off the walls at Haygrove, after a particularly vicious bout with the newest supersoldiers that The Arctics had at their disposal.
It hadn’t been pretty, and it had also not been by far the worst thing she’d seen over her six-year tenure with The Firm.
Every year, it seemed to be getting a little bit worse.
And the world’s sure going to hell in a handbag now, she mused with a dark smirk, her hand moving up to flick down the black visor on her helmet, knowing that they had to almost be at their target location.
Just then, the pilot turned toward her with a frown, speaking into the headset.
“Um, lead, you better come up here for a moment.”
This can’t be good.
“What, we got lost on our way to the ice cream shop again?” Tatiana asked with a quirked brow.
“Naw, it’s just the fly-boys dicking around with us. I mean how hard is it to fly straight over Montana anyway, right?” Roy asked with a thunderous chuckle.
Sensing that the banter was two seconds away from getting out of hand, Amy got out of her seat.
“Quiet,” she said, and everyone settled down.
She might have been the only non-shifter in her squad, but that didn’t mean her soldiers didn’t know to shut up when they were told to. A woman didn’t do two tours in Afghanistan without learning a thing or two about controlling big egos and keeping them alive at the same time, after all.
“What is it?” she asked, leaning an elbow on the seat of the main pilot. “Oh.”
“Yup.”
The problem was clear enough, visible through the cockpit windows.
Amy flicked the headset off and motioned for the pilots to change channels, so they wouldn’t broadcast their conversation to her whole squad.
She frowned slightly, watching the giant flames lick up the thick forest up ahead. That was definitely not something that was supposed to be going on currently.
“I’m guessing you guys didn’t hear about this either,” she asked, quirking a brow as the chopper climbed higher to escape the cloud of smoke that was drifting their way, thick and black.
“No, ma’am. As far as we heard, this was a simple clean-up mission, just making sure Squad Nine didn’t leave anything behind.”
“It doesn’t seem like they’re quite finished, are they?” the co-pilot added wryly, having to alter the course some more because of the rolling smoke.
“Not quite, no,” Amy agreed with a stifled sigh. “Could you call them up on the radio?”
“We tried a couple of times. I could get a burst of static twice, so someone was hitting the comms, but the signal wasn’t coming through or their headsets have gotten busted up. I can keep trying.”
“Please do. So get us as close as you can and we’ll take it from there. Meet-up in an hour, alright? Let the bigwigs at the office know that we’re going to need fire control down here, fast,” Amy said, feeling the migraine that was going to hit her at the end of the day coming from a mile away.
“Already on it,” the pilot concluded, giving her a commiserating glance over his shoulder.
Not that he cared. He was going to get to turn around and head back to safety. It was Amy’s people that were going to go into the thick of things and see whether or not they were going to retur
n with all their limbs still attached to their bodies this time.
Amy inclined her head and was about to turn around and return to her seat when a large explosion plumed up, tearing ancient trees up by their roots and tossing them tens of feet into the air, along with dirt and bushes. For a moment, the sky turned from blue to black and green and Amy’s fingers dug into the plush seatbacks of the pilots as the helicopter jerked left suddenly, having held a fairly low course over the forest so far.
They narrowly avoided getting an oak tree thrown into their rotor, but her squad was thrown all over one another from the sharp maneuvers.
“What the shit?” Solder snarled, catching Sirra with one arm from slamming her face in the fuselage wall.
“My sentiments exactly,” Roy added, hauling himself up on the seat while smacking one hand to his ear.
Amy hadn’t even noticed yet that her ears were pitched with a high, painful whine from the explosion. Her throat was dry and her gaze steely now as she exchanged another look with the pilots, one far less amused.
“How about you set us down a little further than we intended?”
“My sentiments exactly,” the pilot agreed, the helicopter making a wider arc over the destruction.
So it’s going to be one of those days.
Two
Price
“Oh look, the cavalry’s here,” Price commented mildly, hauling himself up on both elbows.
Once again, he was stuck in a damn foxhole and once again, he was having none of it.
The sound of the helicopter had made the remnants of Squad Nine tense up all over, as much as they were currently capable of going through another wave of trepidation, anyway.
Rio had been knocked out cold a few hours ago and Ryker was busy keeping him from bleeding out from the trio of bullet wounds in his chest. Thor hadn’t been heard of for hours, but considering that most of the gunfire still sounding through the forest was coming from somewhere in the North, it was Price’s theory that their resident sniper was keeping The Arctics busy up there.
