That was all he could manage as his pistol slipped out of his nerveless fingers and thumped to the ground. A few seconds later, he fell to the dirt next to his weapon.
Darkness was closing in. He was about done for. It wouldn’t be long now.
Then he felt hands on his body.
“Hold on, Jayson!” Landon shouted. “Just hold on!”
Jayson was vaguely aware of someone doing something to his back. That would probably be Derek. SF medics were pretty frigging amazing, but they weren’t magicians. Jayson tried to tell him there wasn’t anything he could do, but he couldn’t make his mouth work.
“I’m here now, and you’re not going anywhere. Do you hear me?” Landon said. “Don’t give up on me, Jayson. That’s a fucking order!”
Jayson tried to fight his way back to his friend, to say good-bye if nothing else. Even though he could see Landon’s face just above him and feel his friend holding his hand as if he were trying to pull him out of the darkness, it didn’t help. The tunnel was so long, and he was so tired.
He felt his hand slip out of Landon’s, and then the darkness swallowed him.
Chapter 1
Fifteen Months Later
Jayson Harmon hated Powell and Moore. They were two of the most irritating field agents in the Department of Covert Operations, and whenever they came to the shooting range where he worked, he couldn’t help daydreaming about both of them suffering from an accidental weapon discharge at the same time—preferably through really important and sensitive parts of their anatomies. It was a horrible thing for a weapons officer who ran the DCO’s ranges to think, but the two men were such frigging asshats.
The DCO provided an unlimited supply of ammo for their field agents to maintain their weapon proficiency, and most of them took advantage of this generous job perk. Then there were Brian Powell and Aaron Moore. Both were average height and dark-haired with perpetual I-couldn’t-give-a-flying-fuck expressions on their faces, and these two were the reason the DCO also had a minimum monthly ammunition consumption requirement. Asshat One and Asshat Two barely fired that minimum. It showed, too. They were the worst shooters he’d seen in the DCO by a mile. Jayson couldn’t help but wonder how the hell they had even survived in the field as long as they had.
He’d tried to give them a few pointers the last time they’d come to the range, but they hadn’t been interested. Fine with him. He couldn’t care less about the fact that neither of them could shoot their way out of a wet paper bag. But the way they loved making nasty cracks about every shifter and hybrid in the organization was something he had a hard time overlooking.
“Can you believe that hot chick Kendra let herself get knocked up by a freak like MacBride?” Powell cracked before blazing a few rounds downrange and missing his target by nearly three feet.
Moore snorted. “As big as she’s getting, I wouldn’t be surprised if a full-grown bear cub claws its way out of her.”
Jayson ground his jaw. It took everything in him not to pull his sidearm as they continued insulting training officer Kendra MacBride and her bear shifter husband, Declan. As the weapons officer, Jayson had to be on the shooting line whenever the range was active. If not, he would have walked off a long time ago. Even though he suspected these two assholes were only saying this crap to get a rise out of him because his girlfriend, Layla Halliwell, was a feline shifter, it still pissed him off.
He took a deep breath and tried to rein in his temper. To be fair, it wasn’t every day you learned some people were born with animal DNA that allowed them to sprout claws and fangs, see in the dark, run faster than a horse, survive a fall off a three-story building, or any of the other amazing things he’d seen shifters do since he’d started working here. But just because shifters and their man-made counterparts called hybrids could do all these things, it didn’t make them freaks. And it sure as hell didn’t give people like Powell and Moore the right to call them names. It was like they were good enough to go into battle with but not good enough to treat with any kind of respect once you got back home.
“I bet those shifter bitches are absolute animals in bed,” Powell said as he reloaded a magazine. “Can you imagine what that Ivy Halliwell chick would be like? It’d almost be worth sleeping with a freak like her to get some of that.”
At the mention of Layla’s older sister, Jayson smothered a curse and pushed away from the wall he’d been leaning against, ignoring the way the sudden movement jarred his injured back. He didn’t care if he got his ass fired. There was no way in hell he was going stand around and put up with any more of this shit.
“Unload and clear your weapons, then get the fuck off my range,” he ordered.
The two assholes were still laughing as they turned to look at him. Did they think he was joking?
Jayson pulled his Berretta 9mm from its holster and held it down at his side. He wasn’t pointing it at them yet, but the message was abundantly clear.
Powell and Moore stopped laughing but didn’t move. Instead, they both stared at him like they thought he was crazy.
“You can’t throw us off the range,” Powell finally said. “We haven’t finished our qualification requirements yet.”
Man, he’d like nothing better than to wipe that sneer off Powell’s face. The guy had supposedly been in the military, but Jayson had no idea what kind of work he’d done. All he knew was that the army had kicked the asshole out for some reason. No shock there.
“I can do anything I want on this range. I run it,” Jayson said.
Moore glared at him. “What the hell is your problem? Just because you’re sleeping with one of those freaks doesn’t mean we can’t talk about them in front of you.”
Jayson balled his free hand into a fist, more frustrated than ever that his shrapnel-shredded back kept him from walking over and punching both of the stupid fucks in their big mouths.
“Damn right it does. You come out here talking crap about people you don’t know anything about,” he ground out. “If I ever hear either of you making a crack like that again, it’s going to be the last thing you ever say.”
Jayson prayed theywouldsay something. He had a bucketload of hostility and anger inside him that had been building for well over a year now, and he was just itching to empty it all over these two idiots. But after a few more moments of silence, Powell and Moore unloaded their weapons and walked away, muttering under their breaths.
