Wolves. Low on their bellies, almost hidden by the spikey, dry grass on the other side of the fence.
Wolves.
Two of them. Wolves.
Looking straight at her.
“Shit,” she whispered. “Shi—”
“Katy!” Cam’s shout cut the air behind her, just as Wedge Grayson stepped directly in front of her.
She blinked. Grayson smirked at her. “Hello, kitty cat.”
“Katy,” Cam shouted again, closer this time. “Run.”
She smashed her fist into Grayson’s jaw—a woeful punch that detonated excruciating agony in her hand, and made Grayson laugh—and then fled.
He grabbed her, wrapping his arms around her ribs, hauling her off her feet.
“You’re not going anywhere, Katy-Lin,” he grunted, squeezing her tighter as she thrashed in his arms.
She bucked, kicked. Slammed back her head. Pain exploded in the back of her skull as she struck something—his chin? His teeth?
He let out a roar, the pressure of his arms slackening. A little.
She wormed out of his hold like a frenzied weasel, the bones of her knees and ankles crunching as she hit the ground.
“Run, Katy!” Cam bellowed.
She did.
Grayson grabbed for her, his hand swiping through her hair a heartbeat before Cam sprinted past her, running toward Grayson. Charging at him.
She didn’t stop.
The wolves had cleared the glass perimeter fence.
She bolted for the house, for the living room doors.
They gaped wide open, no doubt from Cam’s hurried exit. God, he’d saved her. She’d tried to get away from him, hadn’t trusted him, and now he was out there, fighting with Grayson, and she’d left him.
She threw herself through the doors. Flung them shut. The glass rattled in the frame, but she didn’t pause. The kitchen. She had to get to the—
Claws scraped at the glass behind her. And then it wasn’t claws but fists.
She shot a glance over her shoulder, her breath choking her.
Mr. Beefy stood—naked—at the door, reaching for the handle, feverish stare fixed on her.
Their eyes connected. He stopped for a second, long enough to smirk at her, and then he slid the door open.
Fuck.
Katy scrambled around the kitchen counter, desperate for…for…
“Yes!” she cried, snatching a butcher’s knife from the knife block on the counter.
Steel sung as she whipped the blade from its sheath, a gloriously cold, scary sound.
She spun around, just in time to see Mr. Beefy run at her.
If she hadn’t been so terrified, she would have gagged at the sight of his hairy, droopy bulk jiggling with each thudding stride he took.
But she was terrified.
Terrified and furious and not fucking ready to give up.
Mr. Beefy lunged at her.
She swiped the blade in a swift arc.
He screamed, staggering backward, as beads of glistening blood erupted from his hand.
“Get the fucking cunt,” he cried, grabbing at his hand as the other man—the man she’d first seen at the Longyard who looked like Danny DeVito with carrot-orange hair—ran at her.
Also naked. Though nowhere near as flabby.
These guys need to cut back on the carbs.
The ludicrous thought floated through her head just as her new friend shoved past Mr. Beefy, sneer locked on her.
She swiped the knife at him, jerking her stare between him and Mr. Beefy.
Both men stood before her, watching her face, the knife, her face, flicking each other uncertain glances, and looking at her again.
God, she wished they weren’t naked.
“Put the knife down, bitch,” Mr. Beefy said, “and you won’t get hurt.”
“Get out of Dean’s house and you won’t get hurt,” she shot back, tightening her grip on the knife.
Carrot sniggered. “Like her guts.”
Mr. Beefy raked a lewd inspection over her. “Like her tits. Pity they’ll soon be shredded to bits all over the floor, like her guts.”
She ground her teeth. “Try it.”
They flicked each other a quick glance. “Grayson wants her alive,” Carrot said.
Mr. Beefy looked back at her. “She’ll still be alive. She’ll just have a wolf pinning her to the ground by the throat. Bet her blood will be hot in my…”
He trailed off, his eyes widening as his gaze shifted to something behind her.
A low growl rumbled in the kitchen. A familiar growl.
Before Katy could look over her shoulder, the dingo attacked.
A shudder seemed to rip the air and suddenly Carrot was no longer a man, but a wolf. Before the animal’s fur finished forming however, the dingo—Dean. It’s Dean. Oh God, it’s Dean—sank his fangs into the wolf’s throat.
Blood gushed over fur. The wolf yelped, paws scratching and clawing for traction on the tiled floor.
Katy gasped, a second before throwing herself at Mr. Beefy, knife raised.
The sweaty, naked man lurched backward, the blade slicing at his already bleeding hand. Fresh blood spewed from the new wound. He squealed.
She lashed the knife at him again.
Growls and yelps and whines rent the air. She wanted to look at the wolf and the dingo fighting, but couldn’t risk not attacking Mr. Beefy.
He scrambled away from her, gripping his hand, the blood flowing through his fingers dripping to the floor. “Fucking bitch. I’m going to kill—”
A high yelp cut him short, a split second before the wolf slammed into the kitchen cupboard beside Katy. A cracking thud tore through the air as the wolf’s side hit the cupboard door. Blood sprayed from the puncture wounds in its throat. It dropped to the floor, and—as Katy stared, stunned—scrambled to its feet and bolted for the open glass doors.
Mr. Beefy jerked his stare from the fleeing wolf back to her, his entire body shuddering, and then he turned back into wolf form, and ran from the kitchen, leaving a trail of bloody paw prints in his wake.
“Fucking cowards,” Grayson’s bellow came from outside. “Get back here.”
With a growl, still in dingo form, Dean ran for the door.
Heart racing, her grip on her knife knuckle-aching tight, Katy followed. And stumbled to a halt as her feet hit the grass outside.
“Oh God,” she breathed.
Grayson straddled Cam, pinning him to the ground. Cam thrashed beneath the Russian. Fought against the bigger man’s weight, his face a bloodied mess. Almost as beaten and bruised as Grayson’s.
Terror filled Grayson’s face as his stare locked on the dingo charging for him. “How can you be—”
The dingo leapt, changing into Dean mid-air.
He crashed into Grayson, knocking him off Cam, who immediately clambered upright and ran to Katy. “Are you okay?”
She tried to push past him. Tried to get to Dean.
“He’s okay, Katy,” Cam said, snaring her wrist. “Out here, in this part of the Outback…this is Dean’s world. The ancient force that powers the magic of the dingo shifter is at its most powerful here. That force dwells deeply in Dean. Trust me, Grayson won’t be able to beat him here.”
She couldn’t tear her stare from the sight of the two men fighting. And then it wasn’t two men, but two animals. Who shifted first, she didn’t know, but she watched the dingo and the wolf fight, their teeth flashing and dripping blood, their growls guttural and savage.
“Oh God, Cam,” she whispered, tugging at his grip. “What if Grayson…”
“Katy,” Cam said. She jerked him a quick look, her pulse a deafening hammer in her ears. “Trust him. This is what he wanted.”
She looked back at the two animals, now one animal, one man.
Dean—in human form—faced down the massive gray wolf snarling at him.
“You’re done, Grayson,” Dean said, his voice flat and cold. The declaration was beyond menacing, a p
romise filled with pain. It charged the air. The world around them seemed to thrum, burn with an energy Katy couldn’t fathom.
The wolf lunged at him.
Dean caught it, tumbling back a step under its weight, and then rammed it to the ground. Hard.
A shudder rippled over the wolf a heartbeat before Grayson, the man, glared up at Dean. “I’m going to fucking kill you, Singleton.”
Dean grinned, his eyes cold. “Didn’t you just try that?”
A car engine roared over Grayson’s growled response.
Cam released Katy’s wrist. “Ah, here’s the missus,” he said, not a hint of tension or worry in his voice.
Katy blinked, head spinning.
The sound of a door slamming made her flinch. She turned, just in time to see a stunning redhead striding across the yard toward Dean. The woman smiled at Cam and Katy before pulling something silver from the back pocket of her jeans and stopping beside Dean.
She said something to Dean Katy couldn’t hear. Something that made Grayson thrash against Dean’s grip.
Dean grinned at Cam’s wife and nodded. “Go for it.”
As Katy watched, Cam’s wife leaned forward and looped what she held around Grayson’s neck.
“Is that a choke collar?” Katy frowned at Grayson’s renewed thrashing. Her ears hurt at his wails.
“It is. It’s an insult. The ultimate insult,” Cam said. “Dean letting my wife put it around Grayson’s neck…it tells Grayson Dean knows he’s no threat to anyone anymore.”
As if to prove the point, Dean released Grayson. Who promptly charged at Dean.
Katy screamed his name.
A surreal stillness fell over Dean, a frozen second of absolute calm, and then a soundless pulse blasted out from him, as if the world detonated with his rage, and he smashed his fist into Grayson’s jaw.
The Russian crumpled to the ground, twitched a few times, and was then motionless.
“You can go over there now, if you…”
Katy didn’t wait for Cam to finish. She ran to Dean.
She stumbled to a halt a few feet away, unsure what to do. He looked at her, naked, bruised, blood trickling from various puncture wounds—bite marks—on his shoulder, side, and throat.
“Heya, woman,” he said. “I’m a bit gross to hug at the moment, but when I get cleaned up, you wouldn’t fancy to give me one, would—”
She closed the distance between them, slid her arms around his sweat-slicked waist, and kissed him.
Softly. Tenderly.
He growled into her mouth, snagged her ass cheeks and deepened the kiss until her knees began to shake.
“Okay, okay,” Cam’s wife laughed beside them. “Remember you’ve got company.”
Dean pulled his lips away from Katy’s. A little. He looked down into her face, his eyes glowing that exquisite amber gold. “As if I’ve never had to watch you and Cam make out before, Luce,” he said, without breaking eye contact with Katy.
“And,” Lucy continued, “Grayson isn’t going to stay knocked out forever. You’re a force to be reckoned with, Singo, but you’re not Superman.”
With a ragged sigh, Dean touched his forehead to Katy’s, and then straightened, slipping his arms from her.
“What shall I do with Grayson?” Cam asked, appearing at his side. “How final are we making this confrontation?”
Dean studied the unconscious Russian for a long moment, his expression unreadable.
How final? The question sent a shiver up Katy’s spine. She didn’t need to ask what Cam meant by the word final.
If they killed him—and something told her a part of them wanted to do just that—she would never learn what Grayson knew about Uncle Martin.
Chest tight, she caught her bottom lip. It wasn’t her place to tell them how to deal with what had just gone down. It was beyond her human understanding; who knew what the laws of their kind were? She sure as hell didn’t. But she needed to find her uncle. She needed to know where he was…or at worst, what had happened to him. Grayson knew something. Her gut told her that.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t kill him.”
Chapter 6
Three sets of eyes turned to her. Surprise pulled at Lucy’s eyebrows. A frown did the same to Cam’s.
Dean regarded her. Nothing in his face told her what he was thinking.
“My uncle,” she said. “He knows something about my uncle.”
“Give me a sec,” Dean said, before striding away.
Katy watched him disappear into his house. She frowned. What was he doing?
A distant part of her mind noticed Cam’s wife was fussing over Cam’s wounds, scolding him as only a concerned wife could.
Katy shifted her feet, pulling at her thumbnail.
“Let’s get this bastard chained up,” Cam muttered, jerking her stare from the house.
He hooked his fingers under the choke chain linked around Grayson’s neck and dragged him towards the house, face down.
Lucy sighed, her lips twitching. “God, I love that man’s style.”
She touched Katy’s arm. “We’ll get to know each other better later; for now, I’m going to go give Cam a hand with the wolf.”
She followed her husband, leaving Katy to stand there alone.
The setting sun bathed Katy in searing heat. The cries of distant crows sounded on the air, high and lonely and somehow mournful.
She frowned, turning back to study the house. Give me a sec, Dean had said. How long was a sec?
Grinding her teeth, she frowned harder at his house. If he didn’t come out soon, she was going in after—
He walked through the glass doors, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with the words A Dingo Ate My… printed on the chest in white.
“Come with me,” he said, holding out his hand.
“What’s going on?”
He gave her a small smile. It didn’t, she noticed, reach his eyes. “C’mon. Before Cam realizes I’m stealing his beloved Range Rover.”
He led her to his beta’s car, opening the passenger door for her.
“What’s going on, Dean?” she repeated.
He flicked her a look. “We need to hurry.”
“What about Grayson? He knows something about Uncle Martin. I want to talk to him. I want to find out what he—”
Dean touched his palm to the side of her face. “Trust me, woman.”
She climbed into the Range Rover.
Katy had no idea what the speed limit was on the open roads outside Kangaroo Creek, but she suspected Dean broke them. By a lot. Thank God she’d had the good sense to buckle up.
They didn’t drive into the town itself, instead skirting it on dirt trails that had no resemblance to roads. Red dust spewed from behind the SUV like a cloud of billowing fire. The roar of the engine, the constant reverberation of the tires on the ground defeated any hope she had of finding out what was going on.
Every time she tried to get Dean to talk to her, he pointed to his ear, shook his head and shouted “I can’t hear you!”
She wasn’t one hundred-percent convinced he was telling the truth. He was a dingo shifter, after all. Didn’t that mean he had dingo-level hearing?
Her agitation intensified with every minute. She glared at him. Scowled at the empty landscape. It wasn’t until he took a sharp right, dropped back a gear, and then floored the accelerator that she realized they were approaching a ridiculously ostentation house, surrounded by a towering, razor-wire topped security fence.
“Where are we?”
Dean didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed the SUV faster towards the house. Closer.
Just when Katy thought he was going to ram the gate, it swung open.
He sped through it, shifting down gears until the SUV screeched to a halt outside what looked like a big storage garage at the rear of the house.
Katy twisted about in her seat. Where were they?
A man ran toward them from the gate. A man who looked like…
&nb
sp; Katy shrank back in her seat, her stare locked on him.
Dean. It’s Dean.
The man drew closer, and as he did, Katy frowned. It was Dean…but not.
“Messes with your head a little, doesn’t it?”
She jerked around at Dean’s dry laugh.
He shoved open his door, and looked at her. “Take another look, Katy.”
She turned back to her side of the Range Rover, finding the man she’d spoken to in the Longyard now striding past her door.
“Rat’s a skin walker,” Dean said. “He can mimic anyone’s appearance.”
And with no other explanation for what was going on, he climbed out of the SUV and followed Rat through the open door of the large garage.
Katy scrambled to do the same, her heart wild.
Her stomach churned.
Once again, the heat attacked her as she ran the short distance between the SUV and the dim interior of the building into which Dean and Rat had disappeared.
“Dean?” she called, stepping through the cracked-open door.
Her voice echoed around the cavernous darkness. The stench of animal feces and urine assaulted her senses, along with the dank ripeness of rotting meat.
Katy stumbled to a halt. Oh God, why had Dean brought her—
“Back here, Katy.” The distinct rectangle light from a smartphone’s screen shone at her from deeper in the bowels of the garage. “Quickly.”
She hurried to Dean, the concern in his voice making her stomach knot more. Did she really want to be here? Did she really want to see? Did she?
A low moan—barely audible over the creaking of the garage—wafted from the darkness.
Katy blinked. A tingling pressure began at her temples.
“Hurry, Katy,” Dean urged again.
She did, moving towards the floating rectangle of white light, heart thumping, stomach twisting.
Another moan, this one louder, sounded as she drew closer.
And then it wasn’t a moan, but a voice. A familiar one. Low and croaky and scratchy, but familiar all the same.
A man’s voice…
“Kitty…cat?”
“Uncle M?” she breathed, her stare falling on a thin shape lying on the ground, covered in dirt and caked blood.
The shape moaned once again, pushing at the floor with narrow arms. “Kitty cat,” her uncle said, his eyes finding her in the darkness. “Oh, my Kitty cat…”
Dingo Wild (The Dingo Pack Book 1) Page 9
