She had both guns out and low at her sides. Then she stepped into the hallway. She saw them silently moving at her from both directions from the corners of her eyes. She raised both weapons and fired.
Two went down immediately. One kept coming. So she turned and fired, brain and skull splattering the walls.
“We need to get into Craig’s lab.”
“I’ve got keys.” Conridge grabbed her purse and put it over her shoulder. Miki re-traced her steps to head back up to the third floor where she could find Craig’s lab, Conridge right behind her.
She thought about Conall. She could hear the Pack fighting outside the building. The wolves would be outnumbered. Hyena clans could have up to 40 members. The thought of anything happening to Conall almost sent her skidding into full-blown panic. But freaking out now wouldn’t help him or her.
She knew what Craig kept in his lab. She’d put it there herself. She knew what it could do. Hell, she’d invented it. And if she had time, she’d probably realize that using her invention was the dumbest thing she could do. But she had the feeling she didn’t have time to come up with anything else. Time was something they no longer had.
She walked onto the third floor and stopped cold. Leucrotta. He had only shifted partially and was on top of one of the wolves. A female. She was out cold and it seemed that Leucrotta had been sniffing her.
He looked at Miki and smiled. An unbelievably sharp row of small but deadly fangs revealed. He stood and shifted almost completely back to human…except for the teeth. He walked toward her and she raised both guns.
Conridge was behind her. “He’s human.”
“So?”
“You kill him now, he stays human.” Well, that would be difficult to explain to the cops. And she wasn’t sure she was ready to actually blow a human away. That actually might bother her…at least for a little while.
“She’s right. You don’t want to kill me now, Miki.” His voice was like a hiss. The sound went across her skin and raised the hair on the back of her neck. If she had been wolf, her hackles would have been standing straight up right across her back. “Besides, don’t you like my little congratulations party for you, Dr. Kendrick?”
“Are you working with the Pride?”
“That’ll be a cold day in hell.” He kept moving toward her and she could feel Conridge’s hand gripping the back of her shirt. The woman was having a minor freak out.
“So then what do you want?”
He shrugged. “How should I know? This fight belongs to the females. They tell me what to do and I do it because I like doing it. And they told me to tear your Pack apart and to feed on your entrails.”
Miki snorted. “Melodramatic bullshit.” Then she lowered the gun and pulled the trigger. Twice. Leucrotta went down screaming. Both knees blown out.
She heard Conridge gasp behind her. “Oh, my.”
Miki glanced at the woman over her shoulder. “You said not to kill him. You didn’t say anything about his knees.”
One of them ripped a good chunk out of Conall’s thigh with their claws and he roared in anger. Especially when he felt the poison began to seep into his blood stream.
Fuckers.
He tore the bitch’s throat out and flipped it up and over his back.
He was lucky. The whole Clan wasn’t there. With a full Clan, he’d have been dead. But there were still twelve left. The five he’d already killed were lying in the building. Another three were lying on the ground at his feet. He could only hope that Miki grabbed the SUV keys out of his discarded jeans and made it to the parking lot where he’d left it. He could only hope she would be safe. That was all he cared about now.
Another set of jaws locked onto the back of his neck. Billy Dunwich tackled the hyena and ripped its leg off as he hit the ground. Conall faced another one and that’s when he smelled her. With her going into heat, it came to him a lot sooner.
“Hi. Am I interrupting anything important?”
They all turned to look at her. Conall gave a warning bark. She needed to move her ass. The hyenas wouldn’t be distracted for long. She just surprised them with her sudden appearance.
But it was the look in her eye that caught his attention. And the fact she had her hands behind her back. Plus she was standing just a little too cutesy for the Miki Kendrick he knew. With one leg cocked slightly in toward her other leg, her head tilted. Like a little girl.
Then it hit him. She was trying to look nonthreatening. But why? He decided not to wait to find out. He looked at the other wolves and, as one, they turned and ran.
Miki had their attention and it was damn scary. Those cold animal eyes staring at her. Sizing her up. Wondering what bits to eat first. But she needed Conall and the Pack to move. Now. But if she warned them then the hyenas would know, too. She knew from Sara that shifters could understand everything. They thought, heard, and saw as if they were still human.
Then, suddenly, Conall and the Pack hightailed it out of there. She didn’t know what clued him in, but she wasn’t going to worry about it. A few of the hyenas watched the Pack run. They weren’t a stupid breed. In fact, they were the exact opposite. They would know something was up, so she had to move now or lose her opportunity.
She raised her two guns. The hyenas stared at her for a moment and then began…laughing? It took every ounce of inner strength she had not to curl up into the fetal position and start crying for her grandmother. But, her grandmother had been a strong, mean woman and she would have told Miki to get her shit together anyway.
But Miki knew what they were laughing at. She didn’t have enough bullets in those two guns to take out all the Clan members in front of her. She may kill a few, but the rest would tear her apart.
She already knew that.
“Now!” The female wolf that Leucrotta had been sniffing stepped out of the shadows and tossed a mason jar, filled with the clear liquid Miki had created so many years ago, into the air. Miki raised one of the guns and fired. The jar exploded over the hyenas and, within seconds, flames covered their bodies.
A chemical flame that as soon as it touched the fur on the first hyena spread over the entire body within seconds. As the hyena tried to shake it off, it got too close to another clan member and the flame spread. That was the beauty of her concoction, and one of the reasons her government had tried to get her to produce it for them. It wasn’t like regular fire. It almost took on a life of its own, jumping from victim to victim as long as they were in a ten-foot range. It only went after flesh, fur, or skin, too. The buildings, trees, even the grass would be largely unaffected except for a few burn marks she never could figure out how to get rid of before she stopped working on the experiments all together.
The hyenas began to go up in flames as the wolf female tossed the other bottle on the opposite side and Miki shot that one as well. Then the female lobbed one to the right and left of the hyenas. Miki shot all of them without any problems. It was like skeet shooting. She only needed four bullets for that.
A ring of fire surrounded the hyenas. A fire that wouldn’t spread out but in. Once again, a little extra “thing” about her concoction. By the time the fire department showed up, they’d find a pile of hyena ash and a fire that would go out in about five more minutes without water or a fire extinguisher.
“Go!” The female took off running. Two hyenas, untouched by the flame, charged Miki. She fired both guns. One crumpled on impact. The other flipped head over tail.
Miki ran. Two hyenas still on her ass. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been close enough to the fire to get hurt. If she stopped to shoot, they’d take her down. She saw Conridge pull up in a minivan. A typical mom car. Thankfully it had automated doors that slid open at her approach. Miki dove for it but hyena teeth grabbed onto her calf.