splintering wood came out of
nowhere just before the front door to her townhouse burst open and hit the
wall. Someone snarled, and she didn’t think it was Ivan. When he growled back
it was a deeper rumble, like it was shaking the whole apartment. Dazed by her
own paralyzing fear, Holly didn’t understand how Dustin had gotten into her
apartment, or why he looked…somehow taller. Was he the other one snarling?
The black-haired
shifter spun toward the door, even as he effortlessly tossed Holly against the
opposite wall, like she was a doll. Her head struck the textured surface with a
dull thunk ,
and she slumped against the oddly comforting plushness of the carpeting while
listening to male voices she couldn’t quite make out. Seconds passed. Was it
minutes? If she could just rest….
Holly opened her eyes
as her brained stopped sloshing inside her skull and her daze cleared. At
least, maybe it had. It was harder to tell now that she recognized the man
facing down the black-haired shifter in her living room.
“Dustin?” she muttered
and winced. Talking hurt her head.
At the sound of her
voice, a great black wolf’s head on a hulking man’s body swung around to glare
down at her, and she shrieked. It was him. It really was the werewolf who’d
attacked her.
Dustin snarled. “Don’t
mind the little girl, blackie . You need to worry
about me.” The challenge might have urged the dark were to turn back toward her
neighbor, but Ivan was still stalking backward step by step toward Holly.
“Seriously? You have to tell me, blackie . Is it true
that the only black wolves are the ones mixed with dog?”
The taunt made Ivan
lunge at Dustin, who met the were with his own guttural cry of rage.
“I’m not seeing this,”
Holly muttered to herself even as she clearly watched Dustin’s skin take on the
same sheen of sweat and, in his case, brownish fur. He grew right before her
blinking eyes, muscles swelling, canine ears and teeth sprouting. “This isn’t
happening.” But it made so much more sense—that Dustin Berg was another shifter
tracking her because of her scent rather than a sexy male human flirting with a
heavy girl. What a world she lived in, what a sad world, where werewolves
tracking possible she-wolves were the more believable option.
More pressing, however,
was the fact that no matter how large Dustin grew as he shifted, Ivan was
bigger, heavier, more powerful. Her gaze raking the room, Holly’s attention
settled on a crystal vase holding pathetically faded and dusty silk flowers.
Because not only did she have trouble committing to pets but couldn’t even
justify fresh roses to herself. Now she scrambled unsteadily and ungracefully
to her feet and grabbed the glass container off her low bookcase. She flung out
the contents of the vase, scattering fake flowers across the room in a forlorn
plastic rain. Behind her, Ivan and Dustin grappled, bodies thumping against the
wall, teeth gnashing. In lieu of fangs of her own, Holly needed something
sharp, and this would have to do.
The vase was surprisingly
easy to smash against the heavy bookcase, leaving a pointy glass shard in
Holly’s hands. Don’t hold back , she
cautioned herself before she hurled all her weight at the struggling weres and
sank the thick sliver of crystal deep between Ivan’s shoulder blades. It
pierced him right through his coat and his sweater and all that black fur.
Stumbling backward until she tripped over the sofa, she left the weapon buried
several inches into Ivan’s flesh. He howled in pain and released his hold on
the brown shifter that was Dustin.
The pitch of Ivan’s
agonized yowl mounted as he felt onto his side, bleeding all over the tan
carpeting. Holly sucked in her breath, distressed by the sound at some deep,
instinctive level she couldn’t have explained. Putting her hands over her ears
didn’t block it out. It was like she could hear it from inside her head, from
inside her gut, at a blood and bone
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley