Echo approached the side of the house with Elijah. They were faced with a side door entrance. It blasted open when they were about five feet from the property.
A mammoth guy, as tall as Conall but even broader, burst from the entrance. His canines were down and his eyes gleamed with malice as he scented them with a deep inhale.
Echo looked at her mate and sensed his plans. She nodded. And then in a blink of her eyes, he disappeared using his nifty newtravelingskills.
Elijah reappeared behind the wolf and punched his fist right through the male’s chest.
The huge wolf bellowed in outrage and whirled out of Elijah’s grip with a grunt before her mate could rip his heart from his chest.
He made the mistake, however, of thinking Elijah was the threat.
With her vamp speed, Echo bridged the distance between them and jumped onto the wolf’s large back. She placed his head between her palms and held on with supernatural grip ashe tried to shake her off. When she rolled over him toward the ground, she twisted his head in her grasp with all her strength, breaking his neck before she tumbled into a perfect somersault.
Popping up to her feet, she caught Elijah’s admiring look a second before he pressed a foot to the wolf’s broken neck and severed his head from his body.
He winced and turned to her with a sickened grimace. “Well, that was bloody disgusting.”
Echo’s lips twitched, but her smile halted as their supernatural hearing picked up Astra’s voice.
“We’ve been breached. Take out the humans!”
Elijah’s eyes flew to hers in horror as Astra’s screech of outrage hit their ears.
“She’s warned the guards!” Niamh shouted from the other side of the house. “Echo, Elijah, Conall, Thea … Go! We’ve got this!”
Echo didn’t wait around to argue with anyone. She and Elijah were a streak of supernatural speed. She could hear Thea and Conall changing into their wolf forms in the distance, but she concentrated on the obstacles in her paths. The trees. The bracken. Rocks. A stream. She wound her way through them as if Odette’s life depended on it. Because it did.
They lunged over a low stone wall that brought them into a field with several barn-like buildings, and Echo strained to hear ahead of them. Instead, all she heard were Conall’s and Thea’s racing heartbeats as they caught up to them as wolves. They skidded to a halt as a door in the long, white stone building before them was thrown open. Echo shot a look at her wolf companions.
Thea was smaller than Conall, though still larger than a normal wolf. Her fur was beautiful—dark brown with flecks of caramel. Her eyes gleamed gold as the light began to fade across the land. Conall MacLennan was twice the size of an ordinarywolf, his fur so black it almost shimmered blue in the setting sun. In fact, the sun was low enough behind the trees for the vampire to step out of that building before them.
With an automatic weapon in each hand.
Their preternatural senses detected the release of the bullets from their chambers just in time for all four of them to swerve to avoid the assault. Disgust fueled Echo as they weaved around the spray of bullets. There was a time for weapons, and there was a time to fight with honor.
With a scream of rage, Echo launched herself feetfirst toward the vampire, a bullet winging through her arm with a sting seconds before she slammed into him. He soared at speed into the stone building, the crack of his head a sickening noise through the field. Echo had landed on her ass but quickly got up from the weak position.
“You’re okay?” Elijah asked, grabbing her arm.
She nodded. “Already healing.”
Her mate nodded and then waved a hand at the guns. They melted into the ground as the vampire groaned, coming to. A stake suddenly appeared in Elijah’s hand, his magic tingling the air. He held it out to her just as a wolf came bounding around the corner of the building. Conall and Thea intercepted the enemy wolf as Echo quickly took the stake and drove it through the vampire’s chest. He burst into ash, and Elijah tugged her up, leading her past the fighting wolves and into what was an old farmyard.
All three of the utilitarian buildings faced onto it.
Echo focused, trying to drown out the sound of the fight between wolves behind the stone building. “I hear eight heartbeats other than ours.”
“I smell two wolves and two vamps.” Elijah pointed toward the wooden building that looked like stables. “The two vamps are in there with our family.”
The vamps were going to kill them.
Echo buried her fear and raced toward the barn. Just as suddenly, she was hit with a ton of weight at her back and found the ground racing toward her. She smacked into packed dirt just as burning, tearing, excruciating pain exploded from her shoulder down her back. She screamed as the wolf’s scent mingled with her blood.
An unworldly roar reverberated around them, and suddenly the weight was gone. Fighting against the agonizing pain, Echo scrambled to her feet in time to see Elijah hold the huge gray wolf in a crippling bear hug. The wolf whined, his eyes widening in shock as Elijah crushed his ribs seconds before he snapped his neck. With that, he dropped the wolf, panting with outrage, his eyes a gold so bright they were almost blinding.
“Are you all right?” His voice was deep and echoing … not of this world.
It was his roar she’d heard.
