Her voice trailed off as she struggled with that idea. Dylan tightened his grip on her wrist and bullied her along. Guilt nibbled at the back of his mind over the detective, even though she’d brought it on herself, but it wouldn’t help her if he got caught.
They reached the end of an aisle, and a Wolf jumped out from behind a shelf in front of him. Dylan tried to stop on a dime and lost his balance, going down on his ass on the slick tiles. Alice stumbled over him, and the Wolf grabbed her before she could hit the ground. His claws dug through the thick sleeves of her parka, and feathers poked out of the rip.
“You should have told us where he is,” the Wolf said. His voice was a raw-sounding rasp as he stalked forward. He dragged Alice with him. There was red on the stray chunks of down now. “It would have made this quicker.”
Dylan kicked his heels against the floor as he scrambled backward.
“I don’tknow,” he said. “I don’t know about any of this shit. I’m a paramedic. All I want is to help people.”
“Help us then,” the Wolf said and hooked his thorned fingers in the neck of his ‘Wolf Pack’ t-shirt. He pulled it down. There was a stain over his heart, dark green and deep as it spread through his skin. “Help this meat? Maybe they can still be saved? Don’t you want to do that?”
Dylan glanced over his shoulder. There was no help coming from Lund. She was backed up against the counter, gun swinging from one side to the other as the Wolves flanked her.
“Why them?” Dylan asked. “What did they do?”
The Wolf cocked his head to the side. He smoothed the T-shirt he had wrinkled back down.
“They called themselves wolves,” he said. “Now they are. Where is he?”
Dylan grabbed one of the heavy torque wrenches hung up for sale. He pulled it off the display as he scrambled to his feet and swung it in a low arc at the Wolf’s knees. It connected over the kneecap with a brutal crack. The Wolf staggered as the joint bent the wrong way, and blood soaked through its jeans. As it listed to the side, Alice pulled away, leaving a chunk of bloody sleeve in its grip. She clutched her upper arm in one hand as she backed up, her face white and eyes too wide for tears.
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” Dylan said. “Santa never did anything for me. He can rot for all I care.”
That, a stray thought noted as an aside, wasn’t going to help his reputation with Alice for hating Christmas. Right now, he didn’t care.
The Wolf snarled, thorn teeth bared and the rags of the man’s tongue visible, and lunged clumsily at Dylan.
He swung the wrench again and caught the Wolf across the throat. That hadn’t been what he’d aimed at, but the Wolf hadn’t moved the way he’d expected. Flesh gave, and then so did something else. The Wolf’s head snapped unnaturally far to the side, the now yellow eyes wide and shocked.
He fell into a display of jerky, body sprawled and graceless.
Regret snagged at Dylan, but for once, he ignored his professional instincts. The Wolf would be fine, he told himself as he scrambled over the top of it. He’d seen them heal from worse injuries than that.
Dylan gripped the wrench, its handle slippery in his sweaty grip, and gestured for Alice to come with him. She took a deep breath and a shaky step toward him. Then Lund fired her gun. Twice. The retort of it was painfully loud in the limited space, and Dylan flinched.
The big, plate glass window at the front of the store shattered across. A cobweb of cracks spread from the single hole punched in the glass. The Christmas decal that declared Good Will to Men in white vinyl held it together so it only sagged in the frame.
Lund made a noise.
It wasn’t a scream. People always expected screams when someone was hurt. It didn’t always work out that way. The strangled, wet noise that came out of Lund was desperate and wounded.
Alice stopped and looked over her shoulder.
“Alice,”Dylan hissed. When she glanced at him, he shook his head. They couldn’t help her. The best they could do was help themselves. “We need to go.”
“You can run,” the leader of the Wolves said, his voice filtering through the racks of shelves. It had been his wedding day today. Even if Irene had been willing to overlook the glittery bra and the bar fight, she’d probably draw the line at possession. “It won’t matter. We’ll take our time with your friend here, and we’ll still catch you.”
This time, the noise Lund made was a strangled whine.
Alice clenched her jaw and shook her head at Dylan.
Shit.
She turned and headed back toward the front of the store, her hands held up in surrender. Dylan dropped the wrench to the floor with a clatter and went after her.
Lund was sprawled on the floor under the counter, her arm braced on a toppled stool, and her legs stretched out in front of her. She had one hand clutched to her stomach, fingers clenched in her coat. It wasn’t doing a lot to stem the blood flow.
One of the Wolves stood over her, the gun he had taken off her shoved into the waistband of his pants.
