Jacks, Marcy - Taken by the Alpha Wolf [DeWitt's Pack 9] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic ManLove) (15 page)

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Ryan pointed his own weapon and picked the guy off before he could make the shot. He didn’t get a head shot, so the bullet didn’t kill him. The man did scream, however, and he was hurled out of his

perch by the force of the bullet that struck him, and he fell.

The landing was what killed him.

Nick actually managed to jump out of the way before the body  could land on him. Again, it was like he’d seen it about to fall on him.

The wolf then turned his dull eyes over to where Ryan stood, the  large nostrils flaring, taking in his scent, and Nick nodded at him.

Remembering that, despite how well the wolf was working, he  still couldn’t see, Ryan verbally replied.

“You’re welcome.”

The wolf growled and ran off to find another hunter.

Ryan only had eight bullets left in the clip. He needed to use them wisely.

A loud shriek sounded behind him, and Ryan turned in time to watch one of the hunters make a long swipe with his machete at a female omega who’d been running away from him.

He nicked her spine, and she went down, still crawling to get away from him. In a panic, her body began to change as she started to transform in her effort to escape.

Ryan fired his weapon before the man could raise his blade and bring it down on the female again. This time it was a head shot. He rushed forward before the dead hunter’s body,  and the huge machete he’d been carrying, could fall on the female.

He pushed it away and took the blade, then thought better of it and put it back down. When he ran out of bullets, he’d be using his claws and teeth, not a machete.

The female was by now fully transformed into a wolf, and the sundress she’d been wearing had torn into shreds around her body.  Only then did Ryan take note of the way her body shape was different from the other female wolves he’d seen on the property. This female

omega was pregnant.

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She whined when his hand gently touched down on her back, checking the injury. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

When he pulled his hand back, it was covered with blood. He wasn’t a doctor and didn’t know if anything had been compromised, but she  couldn’t see a physician like this anyway.

“Stay here and stay down,” he told her. He didn’t want to move her with that kind of slice on her back in case he made it worse. Old

Maggie might know what to do. She was the one who―

“Look out!”

Ryan spun around, his gun pointed just as one of the werewolves, a smaller one―an omega?―jumped onto the hunter that had been approaching Ryan from behind, knocking the man down and latching his jaws onto the guy’s face before he could shove the wolf off of him or start stabbing him with the hunting knife.

Not that it seemed to matter. In his panic the hunter had dropped the knife and was using his hands to try and fight off the wolf that was currently tearing his head off. He screamed and kicked and rolled, but then his movements got weaker, until he stopped moving altogether.

It had been a white wolf that had saved him, and now the fur was

almost entirely painted red from the blood that had spattered from the

man.

The body twitched on the ground as the wolf got up, but Ryan could smell the scent of death come over  the guy. He was definitely

gone.

The wolf shifted back into a person, and Ryan was stunned to see  that he was a kid, probably no older than twenty.

“You need to watch yourself better,” he said.

Not the words of an alpha. This was an omega, one who was too  young for James to have taken with him.

Ryan agreed with him, unable to help the way his eyes kept on  going down to the twitching body. “Yeah. What’s your name?”

“John,” he said, not offering a surname.

Ryan wasn’t much interested in it at the moment, all  things

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considered. “Good, watch over her until I can get your wise woman

over here.”

He expected the kid to argue with him about it, and was glad when John nodded and shifted back into his wolf form, standing guard over the whimpering, pregnant female.

Ryan ran back to the main house, ran up the porch stairs, and, shit! He’d forgotten that he’d locked the door. He was about to break it down when animal growls and human screams filled the air. Ryan ran around the side of the house, racing to the back, afraid of what he might find.

Corey and Maggie were in their wolf forms, he didn’t know how he could tell that it was them, but it was definitely them, and they were attacking the hunters that were trying to form a circle around them with all the ferocity of any alpha. There was a third omega with them, someone Ryan had not yet been introduced to, but he battled just as ferociously, snapping his jaws whenever a cocky hunter came too close for comfort.

With them was a group of no less than seven children, all under the age of twelve, and all of whom were crying, and more than one was clutching something on them that was bleeding.

With no alphas, the three omegas had no choice but to be the defenders of the pups. There was a slice across Corey’s forehead that bled into his eyes.

There were more hunters than Ryan had bullets for, but he needed to even out these odds.

He lifted his weapon, preparing to take out the only hunter who had a gun that was visible on him, until a bright light and a sharp pain got him from the back of the head.

Ryan crumpled, dropping his weapon and clutching the back of his head. He felt the warmth flowing between his fingers and then smelled his own blood.

Fucking perfect.

A hard, steel-toed boot came and shot up like a rocket under his

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ribs, kicking him hard and knocking the wind out of him. Luckily he  didn’t feel anything crack, but that didn’t make him feel any better for  it.

“Got us another one!” the hunter hooted, grabbing Ryan by his  hair and hauling him up. A blade was pressed to his throat as his head  was pulled back and neck was exposed.

“Don’t kill him,” a voice called.

“Wasn’t gonna,” the hunter whined. Seriously? Was this guy  behind Ryan whining?

He opened his eyes, his vision double for the moment as he tried  to figure out just what exactly was going on.

A face was right in front of him, but it took Ryan a minute to  figure out who this man was, and he growled.

“You.”

Ryan didn’t know any of the men responsible for the previous attack on James’s pack, but he had gotten a look at them. The man standing before him had been one of the attackers, and therefore he was the one who’d survived that bloody battle, and maybe even killed  Decker.

The man’s lips lifted in a brief smile. “You’re that other cop.  Thought you were dead for sure.”

“They had to change me to save my life,” Ryan seethed.  Everything inside of him shifted, his skin tingled and itched, and  Ryan recognized those feelings as the transformation that was coming over him. His wolf wanted out. It wanted to rip the head off the man for what he’d done, and Ryan couldn’t agree more.

Screw prison. He was going to make this man beg him to kill him.

The hunter just looked him over as the hairs grew out from his pores, as though that was the most natural thing in the world.

“In a few hours, you’ll wish they hadn’t,” he said then looked at the other hunter holding Ryan by the hair. “Drug him and wait for him to make the shift. Then take the pelt. We need to get out of here before those other wolves figure out what we’re doing and get back

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here.”

Ryan fought against his transformation, as well as the man behind him still holding his hair. The man was wearing some kind of thick gloves, and no matter how much Ryan clawed, he couldn’t make the guy let him go, and he watched helplessly as those other hunters who’d been circling around Corey, Maggie, and the rest of their group started pulling out pistols and harnesses. They began shooting the werewolves with them and the children, too.

The pups screamed when they were shot with the darts, but they went down quickly and quietly. Corey was the last wolf to remain standing, though he wobbled protectively over the pups, as though he was intoxicated, and he’d needed another dart shot into him before his

body would go down.

“Will we have time to skin them before the others get here?”

The question made Ryan blanch, and he wanted to vomit. They  were actually going to do it, skin them alive and then leave them all  for dead.

The leading hunter looked around at all the chaos and seemed to agree that there were  too many wolves here to skin for the limited amount of time that they had.

“Fine. We’ll take them with us. Just be quick about it,” he snapped.

Ryan opened his ears, his hearing becoming better now that he was almost completely a wolf, and soon another hunter was forced to come along and help the one holding onto Ryan’s hair.

When he changed completely into a wolf, they had to wrestle him down onto his side, and then the duct tape came around his paws and snout, keeping him from scratching or from biting.

He heard the sounds and cries of the other wolves as they tried to defend themselves, but it sounded like they were also losing the battle.

Ryan thought of the pregnant female and the young alpha he’d left her in the care of. Ryan could only pray that the boy was the

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disobedient kind and had taken off the second he realized everything  was going to hell, otherwise they were sitting ducks.

When Ryan saw the long needle one of the hunters pulled out and  they started walking toward him with it in hand, he really began to  struggle, so much that he stretched the duct tape that was about his  paws. Three more hunters had to jump on him to keep him steady, and  more duct tape was pulled out.

Instead of thinking of ways he could possibly escape, trying to  work out anything that could be used to his advantage, all Ryan could  think about was Blasius and how much Ryan wished he’d handled  everything between them differently. His only comfort was that, at  least this time, Blasius would not be here to watch Ryan be murdered  with his own eyes.

Just as they managed to get him down and stop his struggles, the  hunters then screamed and scattered. Shots were fired, the booms of

shotguns and the loud pops of handguns, as though the battle for  James’s pack had suddenly started up all  over again.

Then there was a foreign hand on Ryan’s neck, belonging to a  werewolf he did not recognize with …

White hair? He certainly didn’t look old enough for it, but, no, he  was wrong, it was just an incredibly light shade of blond. He could  see the contrasting colors in the light.

“Easy friend,” the man said when Ryan began struggling again.

“You have the smell of our leading alpha on you. His mate is ours  to protect.”

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Chapter Eleven

Ryan lurched to his feet, his paws really, the second the duct tape had been cut away, and he shook himself off, loose hairs and grass coming free from his body.

The other man looked around at all the bodies lying about, his eyes wide for a split second before he inhaled deeply through his nose. Then he sighed with relief.

“They are not dead?” he asked, though he obviously already knew the answer.

Ryan shook his head. He wanted to ask where Blasius was, because there was no one else that this new werewolf could be talking about, but he couldn’t communicate with words to this other wolf.  They weren’t joined the way Ryan and Blasius were.

Luckily for him, the other werewolf already knew that Ryan would be wanting to join his mate. “Come, I will take you to him.  We’ve just gotten back and  ”…

Ryan ran off before the man could finish. He would sniff out  Blasius himself so he could be with him during any fighting that happened, and that new werewolf could take care of the fallen

omegas.

And fighting there was. The hunters were trying to retreat, some  with unconscious omegas slung over their shoulders, but James,  Andrew, Nick, John, and basically every other alpha that was still  standing were hunting them all down, knocking them over, or ganging  up on them in threes, forcing the hunters to drop their cargo to either  run for it or  defend themselves.

None fought with more ferocity than Phillip, the alpha whose pack

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was the one to be attacked in the first place. He was in human form,  but barely. His fingers had become claws, hair sprouted from his  neck, chest, and arms. A bushy tail had grown out from the bottom of  his spine and even his legs had the sort of look of the hind legs of a  wolf, only he was still standing on them.