When these men prepared for the possibility of a siege, they weren’t fooling around. She didn’t know if she was comforted by that or disturbed. The reality of their choices was beginning to hit home.
More quickly than she would have thought possible, they finished unloading the lorry. All told, she guessed it had taken them about forty minutes. The men converged again on the doorstep for a quick consult.
“I’ll get rid of the lorry,” Nikolas said. “Give me the keys. You all stay here and get dry.”
“No need, man,” one of the men said, holding up the keys to jingle them. “I got it.”
Nikolas turned to him. “Gawain, why don’t you take the bike and go with Ashe? You’ll both get back here faster that way.”
“You bet,” Gawain said.
Ashe strode outside, and Gawain ran his Harley out the front door. A few moments later, the lorry’s engine revved as it pulled away.
As she watched the exchange, her worry for Robin had grown. Where had the puck gone? How was he creating the storm, and why hadn’t he shown up by now? Pushing out of the armchair, she approached the group of men still standing on the doorstep just as one of them lit an oil lantern and held it high. As one, they turned to look at her.
Nikolas stepped to her side. “Gawain and Ashe are getting rid of the lorry on the other side of town. It shouldn’t take them more than an hour. We should be able to bar the doors well before midnight.”
She nodded as she studied the five tall strangers who were studying her with the same amount of curiosity. Like her, they were all soaked to the skin. There was a high probability that one of them would try to kill her.
Nikolas introduced them quickly, and one by one, they stepped forward to shake her hand. She received an impression of each one along with a flurry of names. Braden, Cael, Gareth, Rhys, Thorne, and Rowan.
All of them were taller than she was. Since their Power was muted with the null spell, she couldn’t get a sense of them magically, at least not yet, but every single one moved with the easy, predatory athleticism of an experienced warrior.
The last one, Rowan, was sex personified. His long dark hair fell in a wet tangle around a cynical, handsome face. He had a runner’s build, a sensual mouth, intelligent, brooding eyes, and a rock star’s innate charisma that she felt even through her exhaustion and the damp discomfort of her clothes.
His expression heated with interest as he lingered over shaking her hand.
“Thank you,” he said. “Seriously, for everything.”
“You’re welcome,” she told him. Color her crazy, and she could end up being wrong, but somehow she just knew this scamp wasn’t going to put his hands around her throat and try to choke her to death.
With a neat, decisive move, Nikolas cut between them. He slapped Rowan’s shoulder with a flattened hand, knocking the other man back a step. His hard voice carrying a warning, Nikolas said, “No.”
One corner of Rowan’s sexy mouth lifted in a grin as he looked at her around Nikolas. I could make you feel so damn good, his bedroom eyes said, while aloud, he drawled, “What do you mean, no? All I was doing was thanking her.”
This time using both hands, Nikolas knocked him back another step. “I said no.”
“All right, all right!” Laughing, Rowan held up his hands.
Was this merely discipline, or was Nikolas… actually jealous? Sophie couldn’t tell. All she knew was that she felt like smiling for the first time in hours. Hell, it felt like it had been days. She grinned at Rowan, who gave her a wink as Nikolas turned away from him.
When Nikolas glared at her, she tried to wipe the grin off her face, but she wasn’t fast enough.
What the righteous fuck, Sophie—no! he snapped telepathically. He looked genuinely infuriated as he growled aloud, “I’m putting my old-timey foot down.”
“Old-timey foot…?” one of the other men said blankly. Sophie hadn’t gotten all the names and faces sorted out, but she thought it might be Braden.
It really, truly could be jealousy. She probably shouldn’t feel so delighted since first of all that was insane. She and Rowan had barely exchanged five words together. And secondly, it was insulting.
What did Nikolas think, that she was going to instantly leap at one of his men for sex without even talking first, when they had just made love—had sex—themselves twice in the last twenty-four hours?
Rolling her eyes, she muttered under her breath at him, “You’re crazy,” and punctuated it with an emphatic nod.
For a moment Nikolas himself looked like he might be the one to choke her. Half amused, half angry, and totally exasperated, she stepped into his personal space and stood toe-to-toe with him, daring him silently with her eyebrows up to make good on the fierce warning stamped on his taut features. What are you going to do, Nik? Just, what?
Much to her shock, he snaked an arm around her, blanket and all, which trapped her hands and arms against his chest. Angling his head, he gave her a short, fierce, scorching-hot kiss that flatlined her thinking and wiped away both the anger and the amusement.
When he lifted his head again, his eyes were glittering. What a load of primitive crap. He had not just staked a claim on her, had he?
By God, he had.
She ogled Nikolas before she remembered to shut her mouth with a snap. A quick, sneaky glance around told her what she already knew—the other men were staring at them with varying degrees of surprise.
Rowan looked decidedly disappointed. She shrugged. Ah well, if the other man had persisted, she would have just had to turn him down anyway.
He shook his head at her. I would have made it so good for you, the sultry look in his eyes said.
I know, she blinked at him in resigned reply. It is all so very sad.
One of the other men—she thought it was Cael—had turned away from the exchange to look out into the night. “We might have gotten rid of the lorry, but the lawn is so soaked it still left some pretty definitive tracks.”
They all gathered at the door to look. Nikolas hadn’t removed his hold on Sophie. Instead, he just shifted his arm to circle her shoulders. While she wasn’t sure what his actions implied other than he was behaving like a dog with a bone, she wasn’t annoyed enough to shrug him away.
The weight of the lorry had torn through the turf, and it had left deep tracks with high ridges. “How much of a problem is that?” she asked. “All that the tracks reveal is that a truck has been here tonight. No one will be able to say why, only that some kind of activity took place here while the ground was wet.”
While her tired mind tried to tease out if there were any further potential problems, Nikolas’s arm dropped from her shoulders. He said, “It creates a question and leaves it unanswered, which points to more reason to scrutinize you. We want them to leave you alone if we can possibly manage it. Everyone else has a null spell painted on their hand, so I’ll take care of it.”
He strode out into the storm, a lean, pantherish, imperious man who carried as much Power as the lightning. Something about seeing him out in the elements brought a lump to her throat.
When he reached roughly the middle of the lawn, he went down on one knee by the tracks, placed his hands on the ground, and bowed his head. Something she didn’t know how to define rippled out from him. The tracks melted back into place, and the torn turf knitted back together. By the time he stood, the sodden lawn looked unscarred again.
Sophie bent her head, hiding her mouth in a fistful of blanket as she watched. He could literally reshape the earth. This time she didn’t even bother to run around in her own head to stamp out all the sneaky bits of awe.
As Nikolas turned back to the house, a creature appeared behind him, emerging out from under the nearby tree line, and raced toward him. It was a huge, werewolf-y looking monster, and it was followed by several more.
Many more.
Dread sucker punched her in the stomach as they kept pouring out of the woods.
The Hounds had arrived.
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The men shouted a warning at Nikolas and lunged for weapons. Nikolas spun, saw the danger hurtling toward him, and sprinted toward the house.
He was fast, but the Hounds were too, lethally so. Other than his own inherent Power, Nikolas didn’t carry a weapon. Along with the others, he had set his sword harness aside to work on moving furniture and supplies.
Sophie was still wearing all her weapons, both the magical ones painted on her arms and the Glock, which gave her precious seconds on the other men. Dropping the blanket, she lunged into a sprint, pulling the Glock out from the waistband of her jeans. How far away would she have to get before the gun worked?
She reached ten yards, eleven, twelve. Nikolas was roaring at her in fury, but she couldn’t make out his words. That was okay; she probably didn’t want to hear them anyway.
Watching the Hounds bounding forward while she raced toward Nikolas was one of the most terrifying things she had ever seen. Every moment stretched into an intolerable infinity. As she ran, she aimed at the nearest lycanthrope at the head of the pack, and she started pulling the trigger.
Click. Click. Click.
Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
Chapter Seventeen
When Sophie sprinted toward Nikolas and the Hounds, he couldn’t believe it. It was every bit as insanely courageous as when she had run into the pub, and by gods, when he got his hands on her, he was going to fucking murder her for it.
“Go back!” he roared. “Go back, you crazy goddamn woman!”
But she didn’t stop. Behind her, the other men exploded out of the double doors with weapons, and they raced toward him too. They would overtake Sophie within seconds, but Nikolas didn’t know how close the Hounds were behind him, and in this instance, fractions of seconds mattered.
He spun to face the threat racing up to him. Just then, Sophie’s Glock fired, and the lead Hound, the one closest to Nikolas, dropped like a stone.
Chest heaving, he stared at it. She was as good as she had said she was. She hit what she aimed at. Even at night, in the middle of a pounding storm.
More Hounds poured out of the woods. It was too late to formulate any kind of sophisticated strategy. Gathering his Power, he flung a morningstar, straight and hard, at the second closest Hound.
Like a bolt of horizontal lightning, the morningstar split the darkness and exploded in the Hound’s broad, furry chest. The force of it lifted the Hound and spun its body in the air before it slammed into the ground. It didn’t rise again.
Not many warriors could cast a morningstar. Morningstars were one of the deadliest weapons he had at his disposal, but they were a hellish drain on his energy and they took seconds to amass. Whirling back around, he raced toward Sophie.
Now she strode forward. She didn’t run. Sighting down the length of her arm, she held the Glock in a two-handed grip and fired repeatedly at the approaching Hounds. Even as he came up to her, he was counting her bullets, and he knew the exact moment she went out.
“You’re out!” he shouted in her face. “Go back to the house!”
Unbelievably, she dug in her jeans pocket. She told him, “Just need to reload.”
He cast a quick look around. Thanks to his morningstar and her marksmanship, there were four bodies lying on the lawn, but there were at least twenty or twenty-five more Hounds racing across the lawn while his men sprinted to meet them.
Gods damn it, he needed his sword.
“Nik!” The shout came from behind him. As he looked over his shoulder, Braden tossed his sword harness at him.
Nikolas snatched it out of the air. “Get behind me,” he snapped at Sophie. “Get down, low to the ground, and stay there!”
Miraculously, this time she did as he ordered, jumping to crouch low behind him. He pulled hard on his Power to amass another morningstar and flung it at the next closest Hound. It sizzled through the air and hit the Hound broadside.
Behind him and low to the ground, the Glock spat multiple times. Sophie had finished reloading, and he remembered what she had said when she had shown how she could assemble and load a gun without looking. Because you should be able to do it in the dark, if need be.
He was so furious at her for risking her life, but at the memory of that cocky, sexy little lift of her mouth, he felt a fierce grin break over his face.
At his best, he could amass four morningstars, perhaps five, before he was tapped out. And morningstars were no good at fighting in close quarters. Around him, Braden, Gareth and Rowan were armed with guns too, and the flat, erratic percussion of their firing punctuated the ominous roll of thunder from the storm. The rest of his men slammed into combat with the Hounds, so he drew his sword and dropped the harness to the ground.
He said to Sophie, “For the love of all the gods, do as I said and get your ass back to the house. If you shut the doors, the Hounds can’t get inside. Nobody can get inside unless you let them.”
“You are such a sexist boor,” she snapped. “Look around—did any one of your men make that choice, and are you bitching at them for it?”
I’m not in love with my men. The thought sprang, sizzling and white-hot, like a morningstar in his head.
He shouted, “My men follow orders!”
“I’m a consultant!” she snapped. “Not your foot soldier. I don’t take orders from you.”
“You’re fired!” he growled.
He didn’t have time to say any more or hear if she argued. Not ten yards away, Cael was facing off against two Hounds. Moving forward rapidly, Nikolas engaged the closest Hound.
The battle turned into images he saw in microsecond snapshots. The Hound turned its slavering jaws toward him, and they feinted with each other, pacing in a circle as the driving rain made every step a hazard.
Naturally, Sophie hadn’t gone back to the house. Instead, she calmly walked up behind the Hound while its attention was fixed on him. As he watched in incredulity, she tapped it on the haunch.
He thought he was beside himself before. This time he nearly levitated out of his body.
“What the fuck are you doing now!” he roared.
The Hound spun to face her, then kept turning. It looked skyward, then down at the ground, and turned around the other way, head tilted.
“Confusion spell,” Sophie told Nikolas breathlessly. “He’ll do that for hours. I’ve got one left.”
Even as he lifted his sword to behead the creature, Nikolas filled his lungs to lambast her with everything he had. Then he paused. “It’ll be like this for hours?”
“Yep.” Lifting the Glock, she shot one-handed at the second Hound that Cael was fighting. It was a headshot, clean and true. The Hound was dead before it hit the ground.
She was so limited and fragile. She wasn’t nearly as fast as his men and not half as big or strong as the Hounds, yet in spite of that, she was one of the most dangerous fighters on the field that night, and he adored her for it.
“Keep an eye on it,” he said, watching Cael salute her and race off to engage another Hound. “I want to question it if I can. If you have to, shoot it in the head.”
“Got it,” she said. While she kept her attention fixed on the incapacitated Hound, she quickly reloaded.
Abruptly, rage surged over him in a scalding wave again. He snarled, “Now you take my orders?”
She speared him with a brief, sparkling glance. “I accept your suggestions. You can stick your orders up your ass.”
He would not laugh. Not while he was this furious. Spinning, he leaped into battle, amassing another morningstar to fling at a Hound that tried to flee the field.
It was a sloppy, ugly battle. Nikolas was able to amass two more morningstars before he tapped out. Aiming the last one strategically, he was able to take down two Hounds at once, and then he had to rely upon swordwork. Never moving too far away from Sophie, he kept on the defensive in a broad circle around her.
Within a half an hour, the battle was over. As Nikolas drew his sword from the throat of his last kill, h
e surveyed the field. A full thirty bodies littered the ground. When the Hounds had first appeared, the numbers had been decidedly against them, but now almost all of them lay dead, strewn across the clearing. Some of the bodies had already shifted back into human form.
They had gotten so damn lucky. If Sophie hadn’t acted so quickly and been such a good shot, if Nikolas hadn’t been able to amass the morningstars, if the other three men hadn’t been armed with guns and silver bullets, this battle could have gone entirely the other way.
The sound of shouting had him spinning on his heel.
Sophie and Rhys confronted each other over the body of a dead Hound. She was swearing, sounding as furious as Nikolas had ever heard her. “What the hell is the matter with you? I told you to back off and leave it alone! I had it under control!”
Rhys advanced, moving his body like a weapon until they were face-to-face. He backhanded her in the chest, pushing her back as he shouted hoarsely over her, “You don’t fucking tell me what to do, woman! He was an enemy! I cut him down like the murderous dog he was!”
Nikolas lunged over and slammed into Rhys so violently the other man skidded on the wet grass and went down on his ass. Breathing hard, Nikolas brought the tip of his sword to Rhys’s throat.
“She was doing what I told her to do,” he growled. “I wanted to question that Hound.”
“I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen!” Sophie exclaimed as she reached Nikolas’s side.
Rhys’s face distorted with rage. “You get a piece of tail, and now you’re holding your fucking sword to my throat? Is that the kind of commander you really are?”
Ice took over Nikolas’s molten rage.
“Yes.” His voice turned stone cold. He pressed forward until the tip pressed against the skin at Rhys’s throat. “That’s the kind of commander I am. You touch her again like that, and I will cut your fucking hands off.”
Beside him, Sophie had gone still. Nikolas grew aware that the other men had joined them and were bearing silent witness to the confrontation.