FULL NOVELXO Taken: Chapter 8
Shrapnel flew across the barn, thick pieces of wood slicing through the air. Levi opened his eyes just in time to duck, throwing Harper to the ground underneath him. He felt his body changing, and he did nothing to stop it. Her reaction to his nature was far less important than surviving the next few minutes, and with his gun out of arm’s reach, his best chance of doing that was as a wolf.
The girl made a squeal and rolled for the cover of the car as he bound away, the shift finishing midair. As the remains of the doors fell to the ground, it revealed Mortensen’s men—four of them only, and human from the smell of them.
Fools. They’d thought that with their weapons, they’d be able to take him alone. They were wrong.
He covered the distance between them in seconds, even as the idiot with the M79—a grenade launcher? seriously?—let off a shotgun round that whizzed by his head. Levi barreled into the man, his jaws closing around the thug’s throat with a satisfying crunch and ripping it open as Levi continued past and the man’s body did not. The tang of hot blood filled his mouth, and the wolf tried to take over.
The other three whirled, letting loose with a hail of bullets. Levi kept going into the open air. The sudden afternoon light blinded him for an instant until his pupils constricted. He was already falling into the thought-patterns of his wolf form, the men becoming no longer human in his mind but merely targets, enemies, things that had to be eliminated because they wanted him dead.
He whirled and bounded back, yelping as one wild shot slammed into his shoulder, the same one that Harper had shot. But he kept charging, taking another of his opponents down under his weight. The wolf in him wanted to stand over the body to make sure that he was disabled, but the man knew that to do that would be to invite death from the two still standing. So he streaked past, back into the darkness to dive into the vast tangle of furniture that filled a third of the barn.
Cursing, one of the survivors scrabbled for the dropped single-shot grenade launcher. Levi’s muscles twitched. The man was too close to the barn to shoot another grenade—the M79 needed thirty meters in the air to arm, a precaution that kept morons from blowing themselves up with their own weapons. At a closer range, the grenade was no more than deadly than a rock.
But if Levi tried to rush him, the M79’s shotgun round was perfectly capable of disabling him, instead. Surprise had been on his side the first time. This time, the goons were ready for him.
Damned if you do, blown up if you don’t.
The other survivor backed up, away from the barn doors, reaching for the gun in his holster as he tapped frantically at his phone.
“It’s Kowalski. We found him, sir, in a barn just north of mile forty-one.”
Levi’s ears, sharper than any human’s or ordinary wolf’s, picked up the reply.
“Good. Don’t move in until backup arrives.”
“We already did. Reynolds’ call.”
The first goon had the grenade launcher now and was retreating slowly, step after step, into the open dirt space in front of the barn as he reloaded the grenade round. There was nowhere to hide there, not even shadows.
“What? The idiot. Put him on,” said the voice on the phone.
“Can’t, sir. He’s dead.”
The other voice snarled a curse. “Of course he is. Have you got the target pinned?”
“I can’t say for sure, sir,” Kowalski said cautiously.
There was another sound, one from inside the barn, a soft metallic noise. Levi jerked his gaze over, but from his vantage point, all he could see was the driver’s side of the gold car. What the hell was the girl doing over there?
The man on the phone spoke again. “Just—hold on. Backup’s coming.”
“ETA?”
“Half hour. Keep him there.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.” Kowalski hung up.
This was bad. It was very bad. Even in his wolf-form, he understood that. He was fast, but fast enough to close distance on the one with grenade launcher before he could shoot? He didn’t think so. At least it wasn’t an RPG—that would have blown clear through them to the other side of the barn—but what the hell was Mortensen thinking, arming his men with that?
He was thinking he was facing a werewolf. Levi answered his own question. And really, as far as that was concerned, the M79 was a pretty damned good choice. It was small enough to shove in a car, and it wouldn’t take down a house, but its stopping power was something that not even Levi wanted to test.
If they hadn’t wasted their first shot on the door, this might have already been all over. Lucky for him that good help was hard to find.
Levi couldn’t even see the patch of barn floor where he’d set his gun from his vantage point behind the bulk of the Skylark. Not that it mattered. With the man with the grenade launcher peering through the doorway, he wouldn’t want to take bets on whether he could make it to the gun and shift back to his human shape before he got blown away. Hell, the man could get tired of waiting and just start letting loose. Grenades weren’t exactly precision weapons.
There was a click in the darkness, loud enough that the men jumped from outside the door.
“There’s nowhere to go, Levi!” Kowalski called out as the jumpy one with the grenade launcher swept the weapon back and forth across the interior of the barn. Levi’s hackles rose as it crossed where he was hidden, deep in the pile of furniture.
How the hell had they learned his name? Someone, somewhere had blabbed. Or someone had recognized him. He’d been found somehow, so there was a good chance that the steps he’d taken to disable Mortensen’s surveillance had fallen through. If his face had been recorded, it would have taken someone with the vampire’s resources a matter of hours to identify him.
If the stakes hadn’t been high enough before….
“Why don’t you come out now, nice and easy?” Kowalski continued. “We don’t want to hurt you. We just want the knife back.”
Levi swallowed the growl that rose in his throat. Mortensen wanted him dead. It was the only kind of response the bloodsucker could have, if he wanted to save face among his kind.
A small movement at the corner of Levi’s eye attracted his attention. There, over the trunk of the car, the black snub end of his nine mil slid slowly upward.
If Harper was going to have any chance of hitting the guy, she was going to have to aim. And to aim, she’d have to stick her head into view. Then the thug with the grenade launcher would see her and fire, and it would all be over.
Unless the man was looking somewhere else….
Levi crouched, muscles bunching hard under hide and fur, and then he leaped, propelling himself up the tottering pile of furniture. A chair, balanced precariously, wobbled under his weight as he landed, and he slammed it down the pile as he jumped again, starting a slow avalanche of wood and upholstery behind him.
The man with the grenade launcher shouted, whirling. Levi could see his finger on the trigger even across the distance, tightening….
But the nine mil barked first, and the man fell to the ground, the launcher falling from his hands. Kowalski shouted, firing a burst of rounds wildly into the barn.
“Get in the car!” Harper’s voice pierced the reverberating aftershocks of the gunfire.
He crested the top of the collapsing mountain and half-ran, half-tumbled down the other side, paws dancing on the shifting furniture. He could see her through the front windshield now, scooting over the bench seat in nothing but her bra with her keys clutched in one hand. He hit the ground with all four paws, claws biting into the dirt as he took the corner around the front of the car. He shifted as he lunged for the door handle, dragging it open and flinging himself inside.
“My pants,” he managed. The SD card was still in the pocket.
She didn’t even look at him as she slapped the gear stick into reverse. “In the back.”
Never before had a nearly naked woman seemed as beautiful as Harper did just then. He slammed the door. The car was already moving, jumping backward even as Kowalski fired at them again. The Skylark hit the hole in the barn doors and burst through, wood splintering in every direction.
Kowalski jumped back, hitting the ground as the rear bumper narrowly missed him. Next to Levi, Harper yanked the car through neutral into first and floored it.
“Told you I’d find out your secrets,” Harper said as she moved up through the gears, the car accelerating down the dirt road. “But I didn’t expect one of them to be that you’re a goddamned werewolf.”