Yet he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d caused this when his past was so fresh in his memory. A memory he’d not shared.
Ducking his head beneath his wing, he remained huddled against Taggart’s chest, his mate shaking as hard as he was, until Taggart’s knees buckled and they crashed to the floor, Soren tumbling out of Taggart’s hands when they landed, just as a shadow shape appeared in the doorway.
The scent was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Nasty.
Filthy.
He knew it well. From home and all the horrors that had taken place there.
With all the courage he could muster in his tiny, fragile body, he hurled himself at the door, trying to slam it in the stranger’s face to keep them from coming in there. Only they were way too strong, and the hardwood flew back at him, smashing him into the wall behind it, stunning him as he tumbled to the floor.
In a daze, he tweeted once, trying to focus, watching so that this time he could report everything that happened if he survived. That’s when he saw the meerkat rushing up the smelly man’s leg and heard the man’s cries. Tiny sharp teeth and clawed paws hit at the swirling mass of motion. The thing batted, slapped at Taggart, but his meerkat was too fast and kept eluding the nasty thing.
A trumpeting roar, like a freight train, smashed into the room, followed by a second, massive form.
Daddy!
Daddy is here!
Daddy and his big friend Bash will protect them.
The smelly man turned to smoke and started wrapping around Arlington, but Bash had something red in his hands. Bright. A different kind of smoke came out of it, blotting out Soren’s view of the room.
Everything grew hazier then, bent and warped and wavering around the edges. The last thing he truly saw before the world went gray was his meerkat mate racing to his side and wrapping around him.
Arlo
They had him, son of a bitch, they had him. The squirmy bastard had turned to smoke several times while Arlo was wrestling with him. He’d seen nothing like that before. Then Bash had blasted him with the contents of the fire extinguisher, and suddenly he was solid and beatable again. They issued a thrashing he’d never forget. Stomped a muddy wallow in him. But when Arlo went to kill his ass, Bash pulled him off and held him at bay, despite the swings Arlo took at him. He just absorbed them all and stayed between Arlo and their fallen foe as the rest of their rhino brethren stomped into the destruction of Taggart’s office.
The construction crew had tried their best to help in the fighting, but they weren’t trained warriors, and the smoke had turned them into as much of an obstacle as help. Breathing heavily, he tried to clear his head and noticed Bash having a little difficulty as well, though he hadn’t wrestled with that thing for as long as Arlo had.
How much of it had they inhaled and what the hell was it doing to them—that was what Arlo wanted to know as he doubled over and coughed up his guts. His lungs felt as if they had shards of glass in them.
“You good?” Bash asked, keeping an eye on their enemy.
Arlo hoped like hell he’d stomp the asshole again if he so much as twitched, though at the moment it didn’t seem like he was going anywhere.
“Not… sure yet,” Arlo rasped, vision still spotty as another coughing fit kicked in.
Arlo worked on getting his bearings while Bash called their crash alpha to let him know what the fuck was going on.
“Two of you go wait out front, the rest of you circle the house and keep watch for anything headed in our direction. Arm yourselves with your tools and any wood and stone you can grab and don’t hesitate to use them if anything smells or feels off about anyone, understood!” Bash instructed the moment he’d gotten off the phone.
“Yeah, yeah, moving,” someone murmured, other voices chiming in with the affirmative.
Arlo was grateful to Bash for taking care of security, because now that he was breathing easier, a new kind of panic set in. Whipping his head around, he scanned the destroyed room, searching for his boys and seeing nothing, not even a hole in the window to suggest they’d fled into the yard.
The bathroom.
He nearly bounced the door off his forehead as he ripped it open so hard. Judging from the way the knob wiggled in his palm before he released it, he’d have to repair that too. The light was off, the bright bulb nearly blinding him when he turned it on. Spots danced in front of his eyes, and the room tilted as a wave of vertigo washed over him.
Okay, maybe he still wasn’t all the way okay after dealing with all of that foul smoke. It took a moment for everything to settle and for his vision to clear. When it did, he saw the room was empty, with no sign showing that they’d been in there. Charging back into the office, he saw Bash still keeping watch over the vicious thing, but his boys were still nowhere to be seen.
Then he heard a little burring sound, like a whimper, coming from behind the door, and stomped down on the shadow bastard’s head on his way to get to it. What he saw, when he carefully pulled the door away from the wall, was a meerkat huddled against the dented plaster, whole body covering all but the tip of a tiny bird’s wing.
Oh no.
