Hidden (Shifters Unlimited: Clan Black Book 1)

by KH LeMoyne

  Lips pulled back in a snarl, he kept his gaze locked on hers as first one, then the second paw slapped to the floor. She winced as he struggled, but he lifted his head and, with a brutal whine, managed to push upright.

  Two more metallic pings rang out.

  She sucked back a sob as a mangled bullet rolled her way.

  Slowly, and with obviously painful, bone-wrenching movements, Chisholm’s fur shimmered and muscle mass transformed from heavy to sleek. Colors changed, fur disappeared, and skin flashed as bones retracted and shaped. With his face turned toward the roof, the lion uttered one final torturous cry before he disappeared. From his hands and knees, head hanging down, Chisholm lurched to his feet and staggered.

  A wolf in dappled gray, white, and black emerged from the shadows behind him and brushed by his side. Deacon’s wolf nosed beneath Chisholm’s armpit, bracing him with his wolf shoulder as Chisholm made his way to her. One red mark remained in the center of Chisholm’s chest before a sweatshirt and jeans suddenly covered him.

  She brushed Cabot’s hair from his forehead, and he blinked. “See, your dad’s okay. You will be, too.” The half smile he returned sucked the breath from her lungs.

  “He’s awesome.” Cabot’s cough racked his slender body.

  As Chisholm dropped to the other side of his son, Dani looked toward Maggie and Charlie’s hiding place. Both stared at her from behind a silver wolf. “Stay with Wharton, both of you.”

  Practicality worked its way back into Dani’s priorities. “Give me your belt.” She gestured to Chisholm to hurry and bound her shirt and jacket more firmly around Cabot’s wound. Silence curled around them as she took the boy’s pulse. “There was a small hospital about a half mile back.”

  Chisholm stared at her, his brows knit.

  “They’ll have anesthesia and sterile facilities to stop the bleeding. We just need to get him to the car.” She kept rambling, expecting him to get moving.

  “Snow’s falling too heavy, and the car’s too far back and blocked in,” Deacon added over her shoulder, back in human form. “Chisholm can run him across the field faster. It’s less than half a mile that direction.”

  Dani nodded, puzzled at Chisholm’s silence. “Either way, it’s his best shot.”

  “I’ll take him.” Chisholm had Cabot in his arms and crushed against his chest. Before she had a chance to ask more, he’d disappeared through the barn doors into the heavy snowfall.

  Wharton moved into the dim light. “I counted five down here. Plus the single sniper above.” He glanced at the open door to the barn and turned, wiggling out of his leather jacket. He draped it over her shoulders and it registered that she was standing in only her bulletproof vest and bra.

  “It’s actually closer to a quarter mile, and the snow’s not more than an inch or two so far,” he said. “You have the badge, Detective. The hospital’s going to need explanations.”

  He had a point. She walked to the circle of light and grabbed her gun and her badge. Tucking her weapon in her waistband, she glanced at the others, hesitating.

  Deacon’s hand landed on her shoulder, and she jumped. “We’ll take the kids to town and guard them. I’ll leave the information on your phone.”

  “What about these men?” Priority or not, the police officer part of her needed to ensure no one came to further shifter justice until officials could take stock of the situation.

  Deacon raised a brow. “The sniper solved three of our problems. Another one shot himself in his frenzy to get away.” He shrugged. “Trim got the fifth one. But that was outside, and wild animals are known to attack sometimes and drag their prey for miles.

  “The one above us is incapacitated.” He glanced up. “Evidently, no one else was intended to come back from this job alive. I’ll deal with him.”

  “Deacon, I can’t let you just kill him.”

  He paused, waiting for her to finish. When she couldn’t make herself say what she knew she should, he nodded once. “I promise none of us will touch him. Your people will find him, but he’s not going free.”

  Dropping her gaze, she took a deep breath. “I understand.” She pressed a quick kiss to Maggie’s and Charlie’s heads. “Be safe.”

  Praying the night would end without more tragedy, she took off following in Chisholm’s footprints.

  10

  The grating from the bullet still buried in Chisholm’s chest kept him alert. Pain and fatigue were excellent reminders of life and priorities. Unlike the cold, dark tunnel he’d traveled down before Dani’s adamant command jerked him back. When he’d jumped in front of Dani and the kids, he’d anticipated damage from the sniper bullets. With his family in danger, neither the man nor the beast cared. But the blood loss, torn flesh, and targets keenly chosen to shut down his organs didn’t respond to his shifter magic.

  However, his beast had responded to Dani’s voice. In a flash-fire reaction, his blood had seized and muscles doubled their efforts, knitting and healing with excruciating speed, precision, and pain. She awakened the man from the beast’s losing struggle and forced them both to survive. Not something an uncommitted mate pair should have been capable of, but he hadn’t questioned her power or her personal commitment. He’d just obeyed.

  And he’d give away his remarkable comeback to save the son, whose lifeblood leaked away in his arms.

  Although Chisholm intended to make a quick run through the field, Cabot’s groans forced him to slow his pace. Alternating between inflicting more pain with his speed and risking Cabot’s life through more blood loss in a slow approach, he finally jogged through the brightly lit emergency room doors and bypassed a startled woman at the front desk.

  “Wait, you can’t go back there.”

  Like hell. Back there were doctors, medicine, and sutures, not seats and clipboards. “My son has been shot.”

  “Call security,” she said to someone behind him.

  Chisholm ignored the whispers, searching the shocked faces around him for one who appeared confident and in charge. Instead, two security guards bore down on him. To be fair, they hadn’t pulled their guns on him yet and weren’t blocking his path. But he did wonder why a hospital had so much security and not enough doctors in this room.

  “Put the boy on the gurney, sir.”

  He gently laid Cabot down and covered the small hand when it clutched his arm for a brief second.

  “He’s my son. And he’s AB negative.” He took a step toward the nurse, who made a move to approach, then frustratingly moved backward as he spoke to her. Shifters had special needs. Cabot’s system couldn’t tolerate their normal procedures. “O negative blood will kill him. Write it down.” The guards flanked him, still in his peripheral vision.

  “Sir, step back.”

  Five more people in green scrubs rushed into the room and cautiously edged their way past Chisholm and the guards. Intent on their jobs, they ignored him as they began tests and rolled equipment forward.

  Rubbing his chin, Chisholm noticed the stares from others and glanced down at his hands. Cabot’s blood soaked him in a horrid shade he wished were paint. He looked at the deathly pale boy on the gurney, already hooked to tubes, his eyes closed. His son wasn’t moving and neither was the monitor beside him. “Why isn’t that thing beeping or something? What’s wrong?”

  “Just relax, sir.” The guard reached for his back pocket.

  Fortunately, he seemed to have some problem slipping something free. Handcuffs? A phone? God, please not more guns. What was he supposed to do? He’d never felt more helpless in his life.

  Crackling echoed. “We’ve got a car stuck in the snow at the emergency drop-off area.”

  The guard clicked the walkie-talkie he finally unstuck from the back of his belt. “Got it. We’ll be right there.”

  Radio, right. Not handcuffs. Logic center of his brain fried, Chisholm mutely watched the scurrying activity in what had minutes ago been an empty room. But he also noticed only one guard went to help extricate the car. The
second remained planted at his side.

  A commotion behind him caught one nurse’s attention. “Wait,” shouted the same annoying woman from the front desk. “Everyone isn’t supposed to just go back there.”

  A voice rose above all the other, making everything settle back into place.

  “I’m Detective Leggett.” Bent over, one palm on her knee as she gasped for breath, Dani crouched, covered with snow and holding out her police badge for all to see.

  “It’ll be okay.” Wharton pressed a hand to Maggie’s shoulder and wrapped Trim’s jacket around her.

  “I need to see Sam.” Where she got the courage to demand anything from the wolves who had just saved her, she didn’t know. But watching her dad go down in a shower of bullets and almost losing him and Cabot toughened some part of her.

  “Sam is in our SUV outside,” Trim added as Deacon disappeared back up into the darkness of the barn. “We’ll walk out with you.”

  “Wait. Did you say the one who shot my dad and Cabot is still alive?”

  Wharton rubbed his jaw with a sigh, and Trim frowned. Hesitation and reluctance weren’t the responses Maggie expected.

  “I want to know what’s going to happen to him. I know Dani’s a cop and wants to do the right thing, but he almost killed my family.”

  With a shrug, Wharton gestured with his chin toward the rafters. A low growl vibrated around them, growing until the timbers around them trembled. Short strangled noises moved closer. Something heavy bumped above, followed by several loud cracks and tight moans.

  “Wait for it,” Wharton murmured.

  At the edge of the light’s circle crawled a thin, bald male. From the angle of his bent left calf, it was broken in one—maybe, two places. A similar condition affected his right arm. Blood ran from his nose and cheek. Maggie couldn’t muster an ounce of pity. And while she wanted justice in a way that fired her blood and almost blinded her with anger, she didn’t want Charlie to see. She pressed his face closer to her neck. “Don’t look. This is like those movies Dad won’t let you watch.”

  Instead of arguing, he clung tighter. And Maggie wanted payback for killing the innocent joy in her little brother. She gritted her teeth and stared in challenge at Deacon as he walked from the shadows, assessing her reaction.

  At her look, he crouched beside the man. Deacon’s face changed, his muzzle growing and elongating, his hands forcing themselves into foot-long paw pads with razor sharp claws. Instead of a complete shift, he remained in partial phase, bent toward the man on the floor and spoke.

  It wasn’t the volume of his voice, though that pulsed without cessation against Maggie’s skin. Nor was it the rough, rasping timbre of Deacon’s command. Physically paralyzing, his words compelled submission.

  “You have one chance. If you reach the highway before I catch you, you live. If not, I will tear you limb from limb and gnaw the flesh from your bones.” Deacon stood. “To the count of ten. One.”

  The sniper spider-crawled his way to the barn door, gasping sobs accompanying his every move.

  Too angry to think straight, Maggie snapped, “You’re letting him get away because you promised Dani you wouldn’t touch him?”

  Deacon turned his black stare her way, his features still midway between wolf and man. “How refined are your senses, Margaret? What do you sense in the man?”

  She flinched at his purposeful use of her full name, one that held only memories of her mother and no love. As he ordered, she closed her eyes and focused on the retreating killer. His respiration didn’t take any effort to hear, he was still gasping. Though he slowed as he crawled through the snow. His heart rate beat in triple time compared to those around her.

  Puzzled, she opened her eyes and looked at Deacon, who still waited, now back in human form. She was missing something, and like a midterm exam, he expected her to deliver. Fine. She focused again the way her father had always instructed.

  Listen for the surroundings. Only Deacon’s team and her family maintained live body rhythms. With the exception of the field mice burrowing in the barn walls to keep warm from the snow, no other animals registered in her search.

  Target your prey. Again, the sniper’s rapid heart rate echoed in her eardrums. A staccato thud-thud, that—wait. Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Who—whoosh. Thud-thud.

  Deacon’s grin widened as she glanced back. “Good work. It’s called an arrhythmia. In humans, especially those who don’t know they’re at risk, it can be fatal when exposed to overly stressful conditions—pain, injury, terror.”

  Clarity dawned, and she smiled. “You don’t need to touch him.”

  “I always keep my promises.” Deacon shifted. His change, a disorienting flash from flesh to fur, left her stunned. His wolf stood almost tall enough to look her in the eye. Impressive, given her dad could do the same thing. But Dad was a lion, king of the beasts.

  Deacon lifted his muzzle for a long howl, then sprang out the door.

  Maggie was almost to the car, within sight of Sam’s frightened face through the windshield, when a curdling scream cut through the night. It continued for several seconds and trailed off as if swept away by the wind and snow.

  Somber but satisfied, Maggie climbed in the backseat and made room for Sam beside her. She agreed with her father. It was time to join a clan with a strong alpha.

  “I need to know how Cabot is,” she asked quietly.

  Trim nodded. “Next on our list, after we get you guys safe in our hotel.”

  11

  Two large orderlies and two security guards stood between Chisholm and the stretcher holding Cabot. Dani didn’t bother for breath but leaned over and held her badge high. “I’m Detective Leggett.” She sucked in air. “I was with Mr. Barduc and his family when we were attacked. Please, follow his instructions for the boy’s care.”

  The nurse in charge frowned and searched over Dani’s shoulder.

  “There are no more wounded coming, and I will fill out the necessary paper—” Just a minute more to breathe, she pleaded silently.

  An older woman marched in through the swinging double doors during Dani’s explanation. She bore a no-nonsense attitude with her seasoned expression of calm. She took one look at the situation and pointed to a male nurse. “Take the boy to operating room one.” After assessing Cabot, she turned to Chisholm, giving one brow-raised glance at his blood-soaked shirt. “Is any of that blood yours?”

  At Chisholm’s shake of his head, she gave a brusque nod. “Mr. Barduc, we’ll do our very best.” Then she marched off in the direction Cabot’s gurney had taken.

  Stunned, Dani waited for some details as Chisholm pushed around one orderly, only to have the next one grab his arm.

  “Can you confirm that they know about his blood-type restrictions?” he asked.

  The nurse didn’t respond but passed a worried look to another nurse who’d been beside Cabot’s gurney.

  Dani pressed forward. “Is there a problem?”

  After evasive looks, the nurse gestured toward the hospital entrance. “Ice storm hit fifty miles south of here. It caused a huge pile-up on the interstate with multiple victims. Our AB supply went by helicopter to them. We’re giving the boy what we have, but with the snow, we don’t expect to get more here before morning.”

  That was the helicopter she’d seen leaving. Digging in the back of her badge pouch, Dani pulled out a card. “I’m AB negative. I give regularly, so I’m in the database. You can use mine.”

  A slender young man in scrubs joined them and grasped Dani’s donor card. “The boy’s losing blood faster than we can wait for you to donate.”

  “Transfuse it directly, then.” Dani felt a hot, sick wave of desperation slicking down her back. She hated hospitals. She’d spent too many months visiting her mother in them, but she fought back her reaction. Hell, she’d trained for this. Police had enough emergency training, and she’d taken extra courses. If she didn’t think about it too much, or the fact that it was Cabot in the operating room, she’d b
e fine. Don’t let it get personal.

  Right.

  At the uncertain look on the man’s face, she discarded the conciliatory approach for no-nonsense. “Look, I’ll sign whatever you need. I’m a cop. I’ve seen enough to know the risks. It’s my choice.”

  He glanced at his pager and shouted toward a nurse as he jogged back toward the operating room. “Fine. Verify her record and, if she clears, get her ready. I need her in there now.”

  Chisholm pulled her around to look at him as the others disappeared. “Transfusions can be dangerous?”

  “He’ll be fine.”

  “And you?”

  She smiled at the irony of his question. He stood before her, his shirt repaired from whatever magic Deacon possessed, but still covered in Cabot’s blood. No wonder they thought he was a madman. Or was that Chisholm’s blood? She lifted her palm to his chest where she’d seen the bullets enter. He caught her wrist before she made contact.

  Unable to stop staring at the blood, she clenched her fist. “Those didn’t all come out, did they? You can die from a bullet left in. You know that.”

  He cupped her head and leaned his forehead against hers. “My chest will eventually repair itself. My heart, if something happens to either of you, won’t.”

  “You jumped in front of us without backup. Without thinking.”

  “Yes. And I’d do it again.”

  “You can’t expect any less from me. Here, take my phone. Your team is going to call you once the kids are settled at their hotel.” She turned and followed the nurse who’d stood silently waiting behind her.

  Nothing would erase the image of Cabot’s damaged body cradled in his father’s arms. But while she wasn’t a fan of blood or hospitals, it would ease her mind to be beside Cabot and fight this fight where Chisholm couldn’t.

  She disappeared from sight as the phone in his hand buzzed without a name registering. “Detective Leggett’s phone.”

  “Are you her personal answering service?”