Page 10 of Wild
“Okay, but I can’t help you. I don’t really live here, and I have no idea where here is.” Every radar in my body went off, telling me this wasn’t right. “Please go. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Liz.”
I stepped away from the door. “How’d you know my name? What do you want?” I’d not seen a single weapon in the house, so I went to the kitchen and rummaged through the knife drawer.
“Open up and listen to what I have to say. There’s no reason to be scared.”
“Says the naked man on the other side of the door. You need to leave before Sam, and the others return.” I really wasn’t afraid. When it came right down to it, I could protect myself, even against a shifter.
“That’s what I wanna talk about. Do you really know who and what you’re dealing with? Sam isn’t who he claims to be. You can’t trust him.”
I did know but didn’t need some asshole knocking on the door reminding me.
I heard the man walk across the front porch, heading toward the large windows.
“You need to leave,” I said through the front window. “Let me deal with Sam and the others the way I want to.”
He stepped back. “We’ll do this the hard way.”
His transformation took only a few seconds, and when it was done, the grizzly bear in front of me stood as tall as the windows.
The bear charged the window, and the shattering of the glass stung my ears. I fell back over the coffee table and landed with a hard thump next to the couch. The bear tossed the table to the side and roared like nothing I’d ever heard before. It raised a clawed paw into the air, scraping the ceiling as he brought it down.
The paw, inches from my face, suddenly jerked backward. I controlled my own rage and made sure of what was happening around me.
“Sam!”
Sam, still in the form of a man, had jumped on the bear’s back, throwing the bear off balance. Through the broken window, I could see three other wolves bounding toward the house.
“Get out of the way!”
Just this once, I did as Sam ordered and scooted to the wall, restraining myself from helping him.
The bear found its footing and then growled angrily, throwing Sam to the side.
Sam landed hard against the floor and looked stunned. The bear wasted no time attacking him, slashing Sam’s chest with his claws. He lifted Sam by the throat from the floor, and that’s when Rogue, Mani, and Flux leaped through the broken window, dragging both bear and Sam outside.
Sam landed on the porch, clutching his chest.
The bear roared in pain as the wolves dragged him to the trees, ripping him apart. In moments the bear, or what was left of him, changed back into a man.
“Sam!” I climbed through the broken window and went to my knees beside him, carefully examining his wounds. “Sam, can you hear me?”
Sam moaned and tried to open his eyes. He groaned something I couldn’t understand
“We need to get something on those wounds,” Rogue said and jumped through the window.
Flux moved to the opposite side of Sam. “There’s poison in that bear’s claws. It’s now in Sam.” He nodded at Mani. “Help me get him inside.”
“Take him to the master bedroom,” I said and followed.
Rogue joined us in the bedroom, carrying bandages and a dark bottle of liquid. “Someone who knew of the gypsy gave us this long ago in case we were ever attacked by a rabid shifter.”
I cleaned Sam’s wound and then dabbed the liquid from the bottle along the claw marks. “Why didn’t he change the way you guys did?” I looked at each of the naked men and saw that Rogue was hard. I guessed he stayed that way.
Flux helped me with the bandage. “Sam has never accepted what he is. He’s accepted us because he knows there’s nothing we could have done to prevent it from happening.”
“Sam’s wife and daughter were killed by a shifter a long time ago. Sam swore revenge on the shifter that killed them. He found the gypsy woman who had cursed a man days before the murders. She’d turned the man into the shifter.” For the first time since meeting Mani, he was being serious instead of his playful self. “He strangled the gypsy woman but not before she could curse him as well. Two days after she died, Sam changed into a black wolf, the deadliest of all shifters.”
