The response comes instantly:
Minutes out. Hold them.
I move silently through the cottage toward the bedroom. Catriona wakes the moment I enter, her cop instincts firing even in sleep. She reaches for the weapon on the nightstand.
"Russians?" She's already moving, pulling on clothes fast.
"Multiple hostiles approaching from the south." I cross to the weapons mounted above the fireplace in the main room, grabbing firearms loaded with ammunition designed to kill supernatural threats. "The brotherhood is coming, but we need to hold until they arrive."
She joins me, checking her service weapon with hands that don't shake despite the fear I smell rolling off her. "How many?"
"Half a dozen. Maybe more." I hand her a rifle. "They're moving like trained operatives."
The first gunfire shatters the dawn quiet.
Bullets punch through the cottage walls, ripping through stone and wood with the distinctive crack of military-gradeweaponry. I push Catriona toward the floor as the windows explode inward in a spray of glass and wood splinters.
"Stay down!" I'm already moving, returning fire through the shattered windows, driving the attackers back toward cover.
They advance anyway.
The front door explodes inward with enough force to tear it off its hinges. Multiple operatives storm through the entrance, weapons raised, moving with coordinated precision.
I drop the first one with a shot to center mass. The second takes Catriona's bullet through the throat. The third gets close enough that I can see the cold calculation in his eyes before I put him down.
More gunfire erupts from the south side. They're hitting multiple entry points simultaneously, standard breach protocol.
Then I smell something that makes fury surge through my tiger. Shifters are among the human operatives. The syndicate brought supernatural muscle to this fight.
A wolf crashes through the eastern window. It's not one of ours. It's Russian, judging by the smell, but wrong. It's been enhanced somehow. The wolf is larger than natural, faster than it should be, eyes glowing with an unnatural light that has nothing to do with normal shifter biology.
I shift.
The transformation flows over me. Human to tiger between one breath and the next, hundreds of pounds of muscle and fang and lethal intent. My senses explode outward. Every scent becomes a story written in molecules. Every sound sharpens to crystal clarity.
The Russian wolf lunges. I meet it mid-leap, jaws closing around its throat before it can land. The vertebrae crack under the pressure. I taste twisted magic, the essence of a shifter warped by syndicate enhancements. The wolf goes limp in my jaws.
I drop the corpse and turn to face the next threat.
Another shifter bursts through the back door—a bear, unnaturally large and wrong in ways that raise my hackles. It's too big. Too fast. Its eyes burn with an unnatural glow. The syndicate has been experimenting on their soldiers, creating monsters from what should be natural predators.
The bear roars, the sound rattling windows that haven't already shattered. The floor trembles as it charges, each paw strike cracking stone. I can smell the wrongness radiating from it, the chemical stink of whatever the syndicate pumped into its veins mixing with bear musk and rage.
I dodge left as the massive paw swings where my head was a heartbeat before. The displacement of air whistles past my ear. I rake claws along its flank as I pass, feeling them tear through thick hide and muscle. Hot blood sprays across my face, metallic and bitter on my tongue. Gore splashes the cottage walls in wide arcs.
The bear wheels with shocking speed for something that size, agility that shouldn't exist in a creature that massive. A paw catches my shoulder before I can fully clear the strike. Claws like curved knives slice through fur and muscle, parting flesh down to bone. The pain detonates white-hot through my nervous system, but I don't stop moving. I can't stop. Catriona is behind me, and this monster is between us, and stopping means dying.
I go low, beneath its guard while it's overextended from the strike. My jaws find the soft belly where his vital organs are vulnerable. I tear upward, claws joining teeth, ripping through hide and muscle with every ounce of strength I possess. The bear's roar turns to a shriek as its intestines spill across the floor in steaming coils, blood flooding the stone in a hot rush that reeks of death and corruption.
The bear collapses, thrashing in death throes that crack furniture and gouge deep furrows in the walls. Its claws scrapeagainst stone hard enough to throw sparks. I leap clear as it writhes, the massive body convulsing with the last firing of dying nerves.
"Kian!" Catriona's shout comes from near the window where she's taken cover.
I turn to see more operatives advancing through the front entrance. These ones move with supernatural speed, faster than humans should be capable of. Shifters in human form, judging by the scent. The syndicate sent an entire squad of enhanced shifters to this isolated cottage.
Then I hear it. The thunder of paws on earth. The crash of bodies moving through underbrush at impossible speed.
The brotherhood has arrived.
