Page 81 of Hot Blooded

“We won’t hurt you,” the woman clarified. “The strigoi will be dispatched.”

“Don’t trust her,” Amos growled, pushing himself and Tessa another step deeper into the water. Phillipe gasped as Tessa’s grip on his arm dragged him along with them.

“We’ve never done anything to you!” Tessa objected. “Why are you doing this? Just leave!”

Amos shifted restlessly, head turning to keep a constant eye on all of the wolves. “I’m going to distract them,” he said in a low voice. “I want you to run back to the street, screaming at the top of your lungs the whole way.”

“Amos, I’ll get winded before I get past the harbor.”

He let out a low, frustrated growl.

“I swear to you,” the woman said earnestly, “you can trust us. Wolf-kin are protectors. But the man you’re with? He is a monster. The strigoi are killers. He may be kind to you now, but eventually he will kill you, just like he’s done to countless others.”

“You’re wrong,” Tessa said, equally earnest. “You don’t understand what you’re talking about. Please listen to me. I love him, and he has never been anything but kind. And the only people he’s killed have been predators of his own kind.”

The wolves howled in a shrill, discordant symphony, clearly disbelieving.

“It’s true! Please, just leave. Let us go. We won’t harm you or anybody else!”

“You’ve been enthralled by strigoi magic,” the woman said sorrowfully. “You have to see—your thoughts are being controlled.”

Tessa scowled, her fear abating minimally in a sudden flash of annoyance. “Fuck you.”

The woman sighed. “The harm two strigoi can do far outweighs the cost of a single human life. The devastation they wreak is catastrophic. If you will not come to us, we cannot offer you protection. It is our duty to destroy strigoi. If you will not abandon the monster, if you are caught in the crossfire, then so be it.”

Amos snarled, a sound so vicious, several of the wolves went still. “If you harm a hair on her head, you will all die.”

Tessa wrapped her arm around Amos’s torso, hanging onto him for support as she struggled to keep Phillipe hefted above the water. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “Just leave.”

The woman on the shore rolled her shoulders back, expression grim. “I’m sorry it has come to this.” As swiftly as she’d shifted before, her body rolled into that disorienting transformation. She fell forward onto fully formed wolf’s paws, lifting her canine head to howl a battle cry into the night.

At once, the wolves surged, a synchronized mass of claws, fangs, and muscle. Amos pulled away from Tessa so quickly, she didn’t realize he was gone until she dropped into the water. Her ass hit the sand as the water closed over her head. She coughed as she surged back up, struggling to haul Phillipe up with her.

On the shoreline, Amos was a blur, surrounded by snarling wolves. Tessa could only track his movement by the reactions of the wolves. Massive canine bodies went flying back from Amos’s strength, skidding over the sand like badly-thrown frisbees, before leaping to their feet and returning to the fray. Blood sprayed the sand, and canine yelps punctuated vicious snarls. The blur of Amos’s movement sometimes disappeared entirely—slipping into the shadows cast by the wolves’ own bodies, only to emerge from a different shadow and resume the battle from a different vantage point.

Tessa clutched Phillipe’s arm, her back and shoulders burning with the effort of keeping his head above water. She stared at the fight on the beach, terrified for Amos, desperate for something to do, but paralyzed by the knowledge that there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t even see Amos well enough to know how badly he was hurt. He was an enraged tornado at the center of too many enemies.

The wolves were showing signs of injury—deep wounds revealing blood and muscle, limping gaits, broken limbs. Tessa hated to wish harm onto someone else, but she prayed that Amos would hurt them enough to drive them away. That he would survive.

Her breath came in rasping sobs as she watched the carnage unfold, the possibility of losing Amos becoming all too real. Abruptly, his unfathomable speed paused as he was knocked to the ground. The wolves surged onto him, becoming a single snarling mass of fur that boiled and churned around their quarry.

“Amos!” Tessa screamed, a shrill, broken sound that shredded her throat like shards of glass.

A canine head lifted at her cry, ears pricked, tongue lolling, eyes wild with hunting frenzy. He broke away from the mass surrounding Amos and bounded towards Tessa. She struggled backwards, still holding Phillipe, trying to drag them both to deeper water. But the wolf was too fast and too strong. Tessa’s feet slipped over algae-slick rocks and soft sand as the wolf closed in on her. Fangs flashed bright white in the moonlight.

Phillipe suddenly jerked out of Tessa’s hold. She flinched, instinctively raising her arms to shield herself from the wolf.

The wet, tearing sound of tooth on flesh assaulted her ears, but the pain of impact never came. She opened her eyes to see Phillipe’s wasted figure standing her front of her, hoarse snarls emanating from his throat as he grappled with the wolf.

He was losing—badly.

And then Amos was there, big hands closing on the wolf’s ruff, ripping him bodily away from Phillipe with terrifying ease. The wolf’s fangs had been closed on Phillipe’s throat, and they took a mass of blood and gristle and bone with them.

Tessa cried out as she caught Phillipe’s limp body. His head lolled back, eyes blank, long, snarled hair floating in the water. His throat was an unsalvageable pulp. Blood flowed from it into the water, a rapidly spreading dark stain.

“Are you alright?” Amos demanded.

Tessa looked up at him. His face was covered in a red mask of blood. As always happened in emergencies, cool detachment made her emotions remote, her reactions measured. “I’m alright,” she answered.

---