Marco and I scrambled out of the pond. No time for clothes. No time to even try to dry off. Droplets trickled down my back and over my chest as we raced along the path toward the door. Any heat that had still been in me fled. All I felt was a chill piercing straight through the middle of my chest.
Another shot rang out, one that sounded as if it was coming from inside the mansion now. My muscles clenched. Memories flickered by in the back of my head. The clean pale halls of the dragon shifter home, splattered with blood. A sister, a father, another, sprawled on the floor. The click of a rifle being reloaded.
A coppery flavor rose in the back of my mouth. No. I wasn’t going to witness another slaughter. The rogues wouldn’t take my alphas from me. They wouldn’t take any one of the kin here.
But the thud of my heart and the shots still reverberating in my ears told me they most likely already had. And to barge onto the estate in the middle of the day, guns blazing, they must have had help.
Not from Julius. We’d left him locked in that holding room.
I glanced at Marco as we reached the door. “There’s another traitor among your kin,” I said. “That must be why Julius was being so dodgy. He really didn’t know that much. He was someone else’s puppet.”
Marco jerked open the door. “So it seems,” he said, his voice tight. “Which just means someone else here needs to feel my fangs in their jugular before the hour is over.”
If he could get close enough before he took a bullet. My lungs clenched. I grabbed his arm. “We’ll hurry, but we can’t go rushing right in there. They have weapons. We don’t. We’ll have to be smart.”
Marco shot me a sharp smile. “I know how to fight smart, princess. Don’t you worry about me. Didn’t you see me last night?”
He took my hand, squeezing it tight, and we ran together down the hall. Voices clamored and a scream echoed from up ahead. My nerves twitched to shift, to rain a furious fire down over everyone who threatened my kin, but I didn’t dare give in yet. I needed to save every bit of that energy for the actual fight.
Marco didn’t have the same concerns, though. He gave my fingers another squeeze and then let go. A second later, he was leaping forward in jaguar form. Within a few bounds, he’d completely outpaced me.
I couldn’t let him run into the fray alone. I pushed my legs harder, drawing on all the dragon strength I held even in my human body.
We turned a corner, and the main foyer with its expansive staircase came into view up ahead. A body was slumped at the base of the stairs. Three others ran past the hallway, their faces white with panic. A lion bounded forward and jerked to the side as one of the guns boomed. Blood boomed on his tawny shoulder.
“There’s no point in fighting!” a vibrant voice called out. Something about it struck me with a twang of recognition. “We’ve got no quarrel with the regular kin. Bring forward the alphas and the dragon shifter, and the rest of you can go about your business as usual.”
Another voice reached my ears from farther away: Nate’s rich baritone. “Away into your rooms, feline kin,” he was hollering. “Lock your doors. This is for us to deal with.”
Were the other alphas already there too? My pulse stuttered. I threw myself forward even faster, the muscles in my legs burning. Marco dashed on ahead of me, his paws thumping against the heavy pile of the rug.
The lion charged again, even with its limp. The air crackled with gunfire. There was a thump out of my view, but I could imagine all too well what had happened: the great cat slumping and sinking back into his human form. Blood pooling under his slack body.
Another memory flashed through my mind, so sharp and stark I lost my sense of the hall around me. I was five, clutching my wolf father’s arm. Sobbing so hard my stomach lurched. Hands tacky with blood. That click of the rifle. Then my mother’s fingers snatching my arm and wrenching me to my feet.
Away. Away.
I stumbled, and suddenly the foyer was right there in front of me. The body I’d imagined lay just a short distance from my feet—Coreen’s husband, his eyes unblinking. I jerked myself back against the wall.
Chaos reigned all around the staircase. The feline shifters hadn’t listened to Nate’s call, at least not most of them. Even in a crisis they apparently weren’t willing to listen to a bear. Panthers and tigers, lions and lynxes, snarled and lunged at animal foes of all sorts beneath and on either side of the steps. Several other bodies were slumped in its shadow. I couldn’t tell which were our people and which rogues. There seemed to be a hundred enemies battling us.
My alphas were in the middle of the fray, Nate’s bear and West’s wolf looking as though they were trying to urge the other shifters down the central hall while fending off the rogues, Aaron’s eagle swooping around the stairs to tackle a weasel about to leap at the others from above.
Alice was there too—in human form, pushing Kylie behind her in one corner. My pulse hiccupped. I didn’t know how they’d ended up in the room, but they were trapped now unless they ran through the fighting. My best friend braced her back against the wall, her arms hugged tight around herself. Her wide eyes were fixed on figures at the other end of the foyer.
Across the thick runner by the mansion’s double doors, the rogues still in human form were standing. Two held pistols and three others rifles. They’d gathered more weapons than the other groups had carried for previous attacks. My gut twisted at the sight—and then twisted tighter when I spotted a familiar face in their midst as they marched forward.
I’d counted wrong. There were three pistols, but the guy holding the third wasn’t a rogue. It was Phillipe, the patchy haired snow leopard shifter who’d made such a show of praising Marco last night.
As if he’d felt my gaze on him, his eyes darted to the side and found me. The woman beside him raised her rifle to take a shot at Aaron, clipping him in the wing. Phillipe smiled thinly and motioned to the others.
“There’s our dragon shifter,” he said, his jovial voice turned cruel. “Take her down.”
Three of the guns snapped toward me. I threw myself back toward an open doorway down the hall. At the same moment, Marco hurtled forward.
The jaguar slammed into the nearest rogue, knocking her over just as she fired. The guy next to him flinched, his shot going wild. Phillipe swore and pointed his pistol at Marco.
“No!” I reeled forward again, pushing off the floor as I did. The shift ripped through me faster than it ever had before. My muscles screamed, and my skin stung. A stabbing pain shot through my bones. But I was there, with a draconic roar, plowing straight into Phillipe before he could pull the trigger.