Oh crap.
She cautiously entered the room, ready for anything, only to conclude she needed to get a new definition of the wordanything.
The kitchen was completely demolished, the trestle table smashed to smithereens, the brick around the wood-fired oven broken and lying on the floor in pieces, blood covering the walls. Caleb was in the middle of it all, the jacket he’d been wearing when she’d last seen him nowhere to be found. His T-shirt was shredded from the multiple bullets he’d been hit with, blood staining the fabric an even darker hue. If she hadn’t seen how much damage a werewolf could sustain and keep going, she would have assumed he was a dead man standing.
Four bodies—some no longer possessing all their limbs—were scattered around the kitchen, one hanging from the opening of the oven, throat torn out. Caleb’s long claws were extended, covered in blood and bits of stuff Jes didn’t want to think about. Even more disconcerting was the fact that his fangs had blood on them, too. Glistening red droplets ran onto his shirt as he stood there holding the body of a man he’d killed mere moments earlier.
At the sound her footsteps on the kitchen’s tile floor, Caleb let loose a savage snarl, his eyes glowing vivid blue. Jes was pretty sure the man she’d come to know over the past few days wasn’t home at the moment. Jake had said something about omegas having control issues. This must be what losing control looked like for a werewolf.
She took a deep breath, wondering how to handle this situation. She didn’t think Caleb would actually attack her, but she wasn’t sure.
Jes took a cautious step toward him when she heard Misty’s urgent voice in her earpiece.
“I hope everything is okay on your end, guys, because we could seriously use your help back in London. Damien has three members of the Bilderberg Society and is trying to get them out of the hotel now. I have no idea where he’s taking them.”
Jes cursed, earning her another snarl from Caleb. He hunched down over the last man he’d killed, dragging the body closer to him like it was his favorite blanket she was going to try to steal from him. He seemed ready to kill anyone who got close to it. Either that or jump out the window with it.
“We’re on the way, Misty,” Jes said softly.
Moving carefully, so she wouldn’t spook Caleb, she took out her cell and called the support team, telling them they could come get the kids. Jes would have preferred to stay, to make sure all the children were indeed as okay as they appeared, but that wasn’t an option. Unfortunately, neither was waiting around for Caleb to snap out of omega mode.
Holstering her gun and hoping for the best, Jes marched straight up to him and smacked him across the face. When he growled at her, she did it again—harder.
“Snap out of it,” she said. “Our teammates are in trouble and we need to help. Let’s go!”
Caleb growled again, softer this time, the blue slowly fading from his eyes. Frowning, he looked down at the body he was still holding before letting it fall to the floor.
“I’m not even going to ask what I was doing with that,” he murmured. “But I’m gonna need a new shirt before we go unless you want people staring at us all the way back to London.”
Chapter 14
The people in the lobby screamed and scrambled out of the way as Jake and Harley raced through the crowd that had formed there after Damien and his men stormed through only seconds earlier. Several men lay on the floor bleeding heavily from the wounds they’d sustained from either getting in the way or trying to stop them. Jake wanted to help the wounded, but he couldn’t—not if it meant letting Damien and his crew get away. So he shoved his way to the automatic glass doors and headed outside, careful to make sure his claws and fangs were safely stowed, Harley on his heels.
Once on the sidewalk, he slowed long enough to see four large SUVs squealing out of the hotel’s parking lot and onto Grosvenor Place, heading south. Damien and the three men from the Bilderberg Society he’d kidnapped were in the first vehicle, which was the only one Jake cared about.
Knowing it was probably insane, he took off running down the sidewalk with a growl, refusing to let Damien get away that easily.
Keeping his claws and fangs hidden from people was easy, but no way were they going to miss how fast he was running as he cut across the major intersection south of the hotel, darting around moving cars and leaping over the ones that stopped right in his path. Hopefully, no one had their cell phones out or this was going to be difficult to explain.
The traffic was fairly heavy, which slowed down the four SUVs a little, but they drove like psychos, not stopping for lights, and slamming into any vehicle that had the nerve to get in their way.
Jake was only fifteen feet behind the last vehicle in the escape convoy at the intersection of Grosvenor and A3214. He thought for sure he was going to catch up when the back window of the SUV exploded.
Even though he knew what was coming, Jake barely avoided the bullets as they slammed into the asphalt around him. Cars squealed and jumped up onto the sidewalk to get away, pedestrians screaming as they threw themselves down behind anything that would protect them.
Still ducking bullets, Jake pulled his Glock, waiting for the right moment to surge ahead and get close enough to put a bullet in one of the vehicle’s back tires, not to mention one of the shooters. He could tell from the stench coming out of the broken rear window that the guys with the MP7s weren’t normal humans, but shooting them in the stomach wasn’t an option from this angle.
Jake was less than half a dozen feet away when Damien’s vehicle suddenly turned down a side street near the post office just as a woman with a tiny toddler in her arms was crossing the street. Eyes wide with panic, she quickly backpedaled, only to nearly get hit by the second SUV. She stumbled forward to avoid it, her arms wrapping desperately around her child as she fell. The third vehicle missed her by inches and the fourth clipped her just enough to send one of her shoes flying.
The woman had somehow avoided getting run over, but when the two men in the last SUV started shooting at him again, Jake knew the woman’s luck wouldn’t hold.
Taking the turn at a sprint that would make an Olympic runner seem slow, Jake ducked down to scoop up the woman and kid even as bullets kicked up fragments where she’d just been. The woman and her little boy weren’t much in the weight department, but when you’re trying to take a turn at thirty-five miles an hour, it was still enough to throw him off balance.
Jake went down hard, protecting the woman and her kid as he took the impact on his shoulder, then rolled violently, trying to stop his momentum. And after running as fast as he’d been, there was a lot of momentum to lose.
He ended up slamming into the side of a parked van, hard enough to leave a deep dent, but when he finally stopped and rolled onto his back, the woman and her little boy were fine. Well, maybe they were a little scuffed up and rattled, but they were mostly undamaged. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake caught sight of several Metro foot patrol officers coming his way, staring at him intently as they spoke urgently into their radios.
“Sorry,” he muttered, setting the woman on the ground as gently as he could as she stared up at him in disbelief. “I gotta go.”
