Page 79 of Furever Loyal
Kincaid hit it like a dump truck. They went down in a tangle of paws and jaws. The wolf might be tough and quick, but this was a fight Kincaid won every time. His massive foreleg batted aside the feeble defense of the upended shifter, and a second later he ripped its throat out in a welter of blood and gore.
The wolf was dead and didn’t even know it, trying to get to its feet to follow as Kincaid kept going, only pausing to clear his mouth of the nasty fur.
Three down, three to go.
A huge creature leaped onto his back out of nowhere. Kincaid trumpeted in pain as claws dug deep into his fur. Shaking violently, he managed to dislodge the beast, realizing then that the wolf he’d just killed hadn’t been the massive black wolf from earlier, but a smaller one.
The white wolf that rivaled the huge midnight furred beast came at him from the side and worried at his flank. Kincaid spun to drive it off, but the third and final wolf hit him from the other side, staining its brownish-gray coat with his blood.
The trio worked flawlessly. No matter what Kincaid tried, they were ready for it, always one step ahead of them. He was bleeding from a dozen wounds within seconds. In his haste to dispatch them all, he’d inadvertently moved into an open area on the floor. That was a killing zone for the wolves.
His eyesight penetrated the dark, picking out the nearest machinery. The massive off-white bear moved as fast as he could make it, but his strength was fading, aided by the trail of thick red liquid he left behind as he moved, his blood spilling onto the floor, making it slick.
“Kincaid you had better not lose!” Haley called out from her hiding place just as he made it to the relative safety of the machinery. He wasn’t safe, but it provided him shelter from their constant attacks, buying him a respite as he sought to recover, to come up with a plan for dealing with this last trio.
I’m working on that part.
“I didn’t escape and crawl through the damn ventilation shaft like some sort of super-spy just to fall this short of being rescued. Now, you send these rabid pups running, you understand me? Are you going to let these ass-licking motherfuckers take you out?”
Energy coursed through him anew. Kincaid had never heard his mate talk like that. The anger, thefurywas so palpable he could feel it radiating off her.
I can’t let her down.Winning was the only option, the only way forward. There was no time for games. Haley was still in terrible danger as battle raged all around her. Theonlyacceptable course of action was to take out the trio of remaining Canim. Nothing short of complete and total victory would stop him.
Because only after he was done with that, could he tell Haley how he truly felt. Andthatwas what mattered most. Her.
Kincaid bellowed his challenge to the Canim and went on the offensive. He charged at every wolf, scattering them, never allowing them to let up as he chased them halfway across the warehouse. Over machinery, through makeshift walls and even into a sunken pit. There was no rest, no respite. One of them would make a mistake eventually. When it did, he would capitalize on it.
Plain. Simple. Deadly.
The first wolf to screw up was the white one, its fur so bright it was nearly albino. Even its eyes were tinged with red. It darted in at Kincaid from the side, but as it lunged forward, it planted its rear leg on something on the floor. The metal tube, perhaps two inches in diameter, rolled back under the weight and spilled the wolf to the floor.
Kincaid pounced. Literally. His mighty paws came down with nearly a thousand pounds of weight behind them. There was nothing the wolf could do. Its bones collapsed under the blow and it died instantly.
Wasting no time, he dug the claws of his left paw in deep, gripping the corpse and whipped it around, letting it fly at the tawny beast, the smaller of the two remaining Canim. The corpse missile glanced off the side of the smaller wolf, knocking it back, but outside of Kincaid’s immediate reach.
It didn’t matter. Kincaid hadn’t been after that one anyway. He was after the huge onyx wolf. It was the leader. He would be thinking of Laurent when he took it down. The former Canim Title Holder would probably go free after all this. It would look too bad on Ursa if they killed him so quickly after stripping him of his position. That bothered Kincaid, and he took it out on the leader of the men who had abducted Haley.
Or he would, once he caught the slippery fucker. Whoever the wolf was, he was agile, faster than Kincaid and seemed to instinctively know which way to go to avoid the massive bear. Their fight took them all across the factory floor, neither one able to land any serious strikes against the other.
His break, when it came, wasn’t anything groundbreaking, no huge trap laid by Kincaid that he’d slowly been working toward. Instead, it came from the simple method of Kvoss showing up at the hole he’d blown in the wall and calling his name.
The wolf’s head snapped around at the sudden, unexpected noise. Kincaid’s didn’t. He kept laser-focused on the matted black fur, and the instant he realized his foe was distracted, he charged right at him. He only had a split second, no time for anything fancy.
Ursidae met Canim and the pair slammed into a piece of heavy machinery. Kincaid had expected the huge block of steel to give way or slide across the floor like the others, but this one was firmly rooted, and he came to a sudden stop. Unfortunately for the wolf, it was between Kincaid and the metal, acting as a cushion.
All it took was a casual swipe of his paw to open the wolf up and spill its life fluid onto the floor, a mortal wound the instant it was struck.
Kincaid backed away, just in time to hear another wolf charge across the concrete. He readied himself to meet the charge of the tawny gray-brown werewolf, but it wasn’t coming at him. It was going at Kvoss. The Assassin saw this, judged the distance, and at the last moment angled himself to the side in a crouch, whipping his sword out of its sheath and around in an arc that followed his body.
The uranium-coated blade sliced open the wolf from neck to mid-stomach, the radiation emission canceling out the shifter’s altered DNA. The corpse hit the ground in a squishy mess, sliding to a halt just at the foot of the pile of debris that marked where Kincaid had burst through.
He barely noticed, too busy going through the shift to even care. His body blazed with agony, from dozens of cuts to the usual pain of the change that was always amplified after a fight. It didn’t matter. None of it did.
All that mattered was Haley.
He stumbled forward even before he was fully human once more.
“Haley!” he called, looking around wildly. “Haley!” She was there somewhere.
