Page 245 of Psycho Beasts

Steady. Get ready to shoot.

No one paid Lucinda any attention, just a young girl hurting herself in a stressful situation.

Her blood didn’t float in the air like mine did.

Like a snake, it gathered into a small stream and trickled up her arm.

Distract them.

“We’ll never let you out of this room alive,” I snarled.

The wolves focused their attention on me, mouths curling into smirks and gazes glaring. “You know nothing about how this city works,” said the man with his gun pointed at Jess’s head.

He had a black eye, and Jess’s face was covered in bruises. She’d put up a fight.

Get ready. She can’t hold him long.

Lucinda’s thin trail of blood crawled across the barrel of the gun and disappeared into the man’s hand.

She whispered something under her breath.

Everything happened at once.

Lucinda’s eyes glowed bright red, and the Black Wolf she’d infected swung his arm to the left and fired.

He blinked with awareness as his bullet traveled through the brains of his two packmates, who held Jala and Jess at gunpoint.

FIRE AT THE OTHER TWO.

I took the opening.

Pop. Pop. Two Ortega brothers fired their guns, controlled by my blood.

A smoking blue hole appeared in a forehead.

Three wolves crumpled to the ground.

The wolf Lucinda had taken over, had just killed his two packmates.

And I’d killed him.

Jess grabbed Jala and Lucinda and shoved them behind her as they scurried away from the dead bodies.

One wolf still stood.

The leader.

The bullet that I’d made one of the brothers shoot at him was embedded in a glowing wall of blue that shimmered in a circle around him and Jinx.

Enchanted shield device.

Extremely expensive and rare.

Behind it, he held the barrel to Jinx’s head as he stepped backward; the shield traveling with him.

She’s his only bargaining chip. He won’t kill her.

Fire.

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