Big Bad Bite (37 page)

Fifty feet away one of the men held the woman
down using one hand on her shoulder, and the other tangled in her
hair, tipping her head back so that her neck was exposed and
vulnerable. The other male stood in front of her with his hand
wrapped around that fragile throat, his claws punctured through the
skin causing little rivers of blood to drain down and pool in the
fabric of her shirt. The blonde’s tiny hands were wrapped around
his wrists, futilely trying to pull his hands away to end the pain.
The skanky brunette was on the far side of the scene, leaning
against the hood of a silver BMW, and watching dispassionately as
the blonde’s eyes overflowed with tears and obviously begging to be
let go. Jenna’s wolf was angered at the grotesque display of three
dominant wolves preying on an obviously weak submissive wolf. Of
course, now all of the Corvus’ wolves focus was on her since they’d
scented her and the others the moment they’d stepped into the
alley.

The brunette pointed her finger at them and
shouted, “Verpissdichvon hier!”

Jenna’s hands snapped up in the air as she
started to internally gather her telekinetic powers about the time
that Adam, Uncle Owen, and Logan stepped around her toward the
threat. In the blink of an eye, the male in front of the blond
backhanded her so hard that she flew several feet to the side to
land unconscious in front of the brunette’s feet. The two Corvus
males launched themselves at Owen and Logan as Adam headed for the
pitiful looking body of the submissive wolf. The nasty brunette
tried to launch herself at Adam when he got too close to the
woman’s prey, but Jenna used her powers to pick her body up and
throw her to the other side of the car and past the truck, where
she heard the harsh thump of her body landing on the hard pavement.
Adam closed the distance between himself and the inert woman,
scooping her up gently in his arms before heading back in Jenna’s
direction so that they could leave this place before more trouble
joined their impromptu little party.

Looking to her left, Jenna saw that her
little brother had his opponent on his knees already as he
delivered violent punches to the man’s face, causing a sick crunch
and squishing sound that kind of turned her stomach. Turning away
from the scene she looked right to see her Uncle stomp kicking the
other Corvus wolf repeatedly in his spine until there was an
alarming ‘snap’ heard. When the wolf lay there semi-conscious but
unable to move because Owen had snapped his spine in half, her
Uncle reached over, took both sides of the man’s head in his hands,
and gave a sharp twist until another awful snap could be heard.
Then Jenna heard a third snap back on her left, and she knew Logan
had snapped the neck of his opponent as well.

She’d been a trained Police Officer for a
number of years now and had seen some sick shit while on the job,
but she didn’t know if she’d ever get use to the sound of a neck
being broken. It took everything she had in that moment not to
upchuck the small dinner she’d eaten hours ago. Her only
consolation was that she knew the wolves weren’t actually dead,
just incapacitated until their regeneration process could kick in
and heal the breaks.

Adam had just made it to her side when they
all heard the sound of a gun chambering a round. Shoving the slack
form of the woman into her arms, Adam turned to face the potential
threat just in time to see that evil little skank hide her body
behind the driver’s side door of her BMW as she pointed a Heckler
& Koch MP5K submachine directly at Jenna and the blond, then
pulled the trigger. Adam roared in rage as the staccato of gunfire
sounded. He flung his body in front of hers, shoving his hand out
to push her in the chest, causing her own body to fall backwards as
she held onto her precious cargo.

The ‘pop, pop, pop’ carried on for agonizing
seconds as she landed on her back, rolled to the side to lay the
woman down, and then roll back to face the danger in front of her.
Adam was down on the ground covered in blood. His flesh sizzling
where several bullets had embedded in his chest and around his
heart.

Silver
.

The bitch was shooting silver bullets at
them! The sight of Adam lying motionless brought her wolf to the
front as their sanity snapped with their mate silent on the ground.
Blood pounded in her ears as she looked up the woman who had caused
her precious Adam so much damage, and she was laughing.

His flesh was
burning
because of her
and she was
laughing
.

Whatever the brunette saw in Jenna’s face
caused her to stop her malevolent chortle, and pause in
uncertainty. Fear flashed in her eyes. Jenna climbed to her feet as
the world around her disappeared in a haze of red. Glancing back
down at the man she had denied less than an hour before something
so treasured as his Mark, she saw the veins in his body start to
turn black from the poison the silver bullets were causing. The
poison that was centered and strongest around his barely beating
heart. Looking back up to the-one-she-would-kill, who was hiding
back behind her car door, she watched her raise the submachine gun
again, aiming it for Jenna’s chest this time.

This time, she wouldn’t get the chance to
pull the trigger. Jenna jerked her hand out and a tidal wave of
power swept from her body. A look of horror spread across the
brunette’s face because she was now held motionless from the neck
down. Jenna manipulated the woman’s arm to drop and point the gun
at her left knee cap, and pulled the woman’s finger that still
rested on the trigger. The short staccato of gunshots sounded again
as the bullets ripped through her knee, but she couldn’t collapse
with her screams to the ground since Jenna still held her body
upright.

Jenna moved the gun over to her right knee as
the woman wailed in agony. Her screams became frantic the second
before she felt Jenna manipulate her finger to pull the trigger
again, causing another short burst of gunshots now in her right
knee. When the alley stopped ringing from the burst of gun fire,
the only thing that could be heard was the brunette pleading
hoarsely in German. Too bad Jenna didn’t care enough to ask what
she was saying.

Other voices were talking to Jenna as her
Uncle bent over Adam’s still form to check his pulse, but the roar
of anger in her ears drowned the voices out. Letting the Corvus
female drop to her ruined knees, she kept the woman frozen as she
used the majority of that surge of power to lift the shiny BMW that
bitch had been so proud to hide behind. The tires cleared a foot of
air before the female realized what was happening and started
screaming bloody murder.

Of course, it wasn’t bloody murder yet, but
it was going to be.

Jenna smacked the brunette forcefully in the
face with her own car door that still hovered in front of her, to
shut her up. Then, while the woman was stunned stupid, she
catapulted the car up in the air, shut the door all the way so
she’d have room to maneuver it around in the alley without hitting
a wall, and shifted that silver monster of a vehicle until it was
hanging in the air over the stupid woman’s head. Clarity returned
to the Corvus female’s eyes just in time for her to look above her
and open her mouth to scream again, but whatever sound she would
have made was cut off when the car landed on top of her.

Jenna wished the thump-thump-thump of her
heartbeat in her head would have stopped so she could have heard
the sound of death from the brunette when the car snapped all of
the bones in her body, and the sharp edge of dangling metal from
the front bumper had sliced through her neck to sever her head from
her body, but she’d missed out on it. At least she’d gotten to see
the end of the female who had possibly taken her mate from her.

Black closed around the edges of her vision
as the blood pounding in her ears got louder. She’d thought that
sound should have started to dissipate by now, but the numbness in
her body and her declining vision trumped out the worry of her loss
of hearing. Then she realized there was something hard digging into
her shoulder and hip.

She’d fallen down?

When had that happened?

A shadow fell over her hazy darkened sight,
but before she could make out what it was, everything went
black….

Chapter Seventeen

Eleven hours later in an Other friendly
hospital outside of Wilmington, North Carolina…

Beep.

Beep. Beep.

Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep.

Somebody stop the fucking beeping!
Jenna peeled her eyelids open as far as she could, which apparently
wasn’t very far. Hell, she didn’t think she’d actually cracked them
open a millimeter, but that was okay because now she realized there
were voices in the room. Angry voices that were arguing in hushed
whispers.

“If you’d close your trap for a damn second,
woman, I could explain what the hell happened! You need to calm
down. You’re agitating Adam in case you couldn’t hear the heart
monitor speeding up, you infernal pain in the ass.”

That was Uncle Owen, now who was the infernal
pain in the ass woman?

“You’ve done enough, Owen Davies! I let my
daughter into your keeping for just a couple of bloody days, and
she comes home tiptoeing on Death’s doorstep. If she manages to
pull through this I’m going tae find the darkest, scariest fecking
hole on this planet, and I’m going tae hide her there from your
mangy ass, so you never get your paws on her again!”

And that angry Irish tirade was her Mama.

“You just try and take her from Adam.” Her
Uncle replied with a confident tone. “He’ll not only find her, but
then he’ll hide her so that
you
never find her. So I suggest
you don’t try to separate the two. She may not have a Mark on her
neck yet, but I assure you the two of them are as good as mated.
The proof of that claim lays there in the hospital bed struggling
to live. She landed herself in this condition because she flipped
her shit went Adam was severely injured in Germany.”

A feminine huff, then, “You don’t understand,
Owen. She didn’t just use her powers; she tapped into her life
source of energy and drained that too.” A sniffle. “It’s why I
can’t answer your questions as tae if she’s going tae make it. She
damn near snuffed out her own spark of life. Between that and her
hybrid genetics, I don’t know if she’s going tae bounce back or
not. We’re just going tae have tae wait and see.”A strangled sob,
“What the feck did she do to drain her body like that?”

“Your daughter crushed the woman who shot
Adam with silver bullets with her own car by levitating it above
her head and then dropping it on her.”

Strained silence.

Owen’s worried rumble sounded far away, “We
barely kept them both alive on the emergency flight back to the
States, Kelly. If that nosy ass tiger hadn’t been around with that
fancy medically equipped plane of his, and his highly trained
extraction team on standby, then we might not have gotten them home
alive at all.”

Jenna’s eyelids felt loaded with sandbags.
She tried to fight it so that she could tell her Mama she would be
okay, but her lips wouldn’t move, and the black was closing in
again.

Beep
.

As Jenna slipped under, her last conscious
thought was that beeping was the most beautiful thing she’d ever
heard. It was the sound of Adam’s heart beating.

*****

Two days later…

His wolf was frantic; rabidly trying to get
his attention so that he could do something about that harrowing
noise that was pulling him out of his sleep. Was it his alarm? He
didn’t remember setting it. No, whatever it was, it was much more
dire than his alarm clock, because his wolf was seconds away from
breaking those inner cage walls he’d always stayed in to keep them
sane to get out for that noise.

Adam took a deep breath and winced at the
pain in his chest. Jesus, had he tried to set himself on fire from
the inside out? Every muscle he had felt charred somehow. The
discomfort quickly dissipated though when he paid closer attention
to the noises in the room. There was yelling. Shouted instructions.
Something about a defibrillator? Over it all though, was that god
awful alarm that wouldn’t shut up.

He opened his eyes and turned his head
towards the noise. There were at least six people crowded around a
hospital bed on the other side of the room from his.

He was in a hospital?

Those bodies occasionally shifted this way
and that way as they worked on the patient, but Adam thought it was
a lost cause because he realized that the alarm was the heart
monitor. That alarm clearly said the heart had stopped. He wondered
who the poor soul was that had just died.

Bodies shifted again. A gap opened up enough
for him to see a small pale feminine hand. The small gap of a view
closed as bodies shifted again. Panic lanced through his body. He
jerked to a sitting position and craned his neck to wait for the
opportunity to see the woman’s face. It couldn’t be. Fate couldn’t
be that cruel to him to take the one thing for which he wanted to
live for the most.

The doctor ordered the nurse at the head of
the bed to go get something Adam couldn’t pronounce from the supply
closet in the room. As nurse moved away, that gap of vision finally
came. His lungs seized in his chest. The air evaporated from the
room. There was a roar echoing in his head. When the first set of
hands landed on his body to push him down, trying to restrain him,
he realized that roar wasn’t in his head.

That was his roar filling the room.

Because that was
her
on the bed.

That was his sweet tart lying in the bed
across the room from him.

That was his Jenna that the heart monitor was
saying had no heartbeat.