Page 53 of Wolf Reborn

Miles only had a few seconds to make a decision, and it was no decision at all. The boy had to be his priority. He rolled to one side—toward the downslope, and when he’d gotten a little distance from the bear, he hopped to his feet and dashed toward the child.

Somehow, he sort of got the drop on the bear.

So now he was standing between the boy and danger.

“If it jumps on me, I want you to run,” he calmly told the wolf cub, thinking he would look like a madman to anyone watching, maybe including the cub himself.

The cub whined, and the bear roared again, confused and growing more irritated with every passing moment.

“I’m serious...”—he huffed and shook his head—“I’m sorry, but I can’t remember your name. You should go to Gavin and the Kismet wolves. They’ll take care of you.”

At that, the boy pressed against Miles’s legs and stared up at him, deep brown eyes searching and scared. He wished he had the time and ability to convince the kid, but he was no Gavin. His voice didn’t resonate with sincerity. All Miles had was the truth.

He reached down and stroked the boy’s head. “I promise you, they will.”

He considered stripping and changing now, since, when separated from his gun, it was his best chance at defending himself. But really, the bear was enormous. It outweighed him as a human easily, could doubtless maul him into oblivion with little effort.

The wolf could fight better, but it was barely more than half Miles’s size. The best he could hope to do as a wolf was slip away and run for his life. He certainly wasn’t going to do that to young, um... the cub.

What he wouldn’t do to have enormous, terrifying Dez there to back him up. The bear would think twice about attacking him.

28

Blackbird

The sound of a gunshot chilled him to the bone. What could that have been for?

If his growing suspicion proved true, Lyndon had been the squatter, and Miles was chasing him.

Miles would never shoot at a child, or even at a wolf cub, even if the kid were trying to play at threatening.

Had there been someone else too? Was there someone else now?

Miles wasn’t the kind of man who discharged his gun recklessly. He’d once admitted to Gavin he’d never been forced to shoot a person. He’d said it like he worried Gavin might think less of him for his relative lack of experience, when the truth was so far from that.

Gavin would be happy if no one in the world was ever forced to take up arms again. The last time Gavin had done so, just under a year earlier, had been an awakening of sorts. He’d managed to spend the better part of a decade in the army, fooling himself into believing his cause was noble.

But then the army had sent them to hunt the East Wind.

The military had known precisely what it was sending them into when they’d been sent to retrieve the elder alpha from their protected compound in the mountains. Codename Scirocco. Gavin still didn’t know why, or if, the army had believed he and his men could handle the wolf named for the East Wind.

The fact was that most of his men had died that day. Scirocco had laid them to waste. Tearing Smith’s arm off. Throwing Akerman out a third story window like he was a rag doll.

The sound of Ash’s head hitting the wall outside that room still made Gavin wake in a cold sweat sometimes. The creature had crushed Dez’s leg with nothing more than its enormous clawed fist, and when Dez had persisted through the pain, pulling out his utility knife and stabbing it in the side, it had bitten into his shoulder and tossed him aside with only the muscles of its neck and jaw.

And there had been Gavin. The only man left alive, he’d thought at the time. It hadn’t been about completing the mission anymore. He didn’t give a damn about taking Scirocco in to his superiors. He had watched it kill his men, and he wasn’t going to allow them to be dead for nothing.

So when it towered over him, yanking him up by his arm to dangle him above the floor, dislocating the shoulder with ease, he’d used the only weapon he had left and clamped his blunt pitiful human teeth onto the thing’s throat with all the strength he had left.

It had felt like biting into a particularly rare steak, but the blood hadn’t been thin, no, it had gushed over his face, hot and red and sticky and horrific.

He’d torn a creature’s throat out with his teeth.

Then worse, he hadn’t died. Fortunately for him, Dez had lived. And Ash. Three of their men on the outside, too, who hadn’t seen what they had. Who hadn’t been bitten.

Or been the ones doing the biting.

When the Martingales had called Gavin the wolf who made himself, they had been wrong. Gavin had been a desperate child, reaching for the only weapon he had left.

---