Jenna moved forward and knelt beside them again. It might have been intrusive, but, dammit, if her store was in any way being targeted then she needed to know. “Are you serious about the claw thing? That’s not, like, some military macho-guy version of a fisherman’s tale?”
Jon raised a brow at her.
His friend barked out a laugh that ended in a groan. “Shit, that was good. Jon, she has a better sense of humor than you.”
Jenna felt her face burn. “I wasn’t making a joke!”
“We tell plenty of tales,” Jon said while his friend chuckled again. “But not about this shit. The tall tales come later when we’re trying to one-up each other.”
Jenna rolled her eyes. “That makes so much sense.” But that also meant the claw thing might be real. She looked again at Jon, and another thing he’d said replayed in her mind.
“My buddy would be losing that leg if he were anyone else.”
Was Jon’s friend like him, then? Did he have some kind of random, amazing superpower?
In all her life, she’d never knowingly met anyone else with anything like that. But she didn’t live under a rock. She had access to the internet, and the internet had blown up in a big way on the subject of what defined a human, and whether or not those in so-called questionable categories had rights or were little more than animals in humanoid form. All of which she thought was asinine. Surely enough people had known that‘others’ existed for a long time. But that was the world they lived in, she supposed.
Jon’s friend groaned as he pushed to his elbows, as if he disliked being on his back, and said, “Bastard didn’t fully shift, so I can’t be too specific. But feline, for fucking sure.”
Feline. Cat. He was saying some kind of cat person—no, shifter—some kind of cat-shifter had delivered the wound to his leg.
Jenna tried not to look directly at it. Jon had covered the worst of it, and the bleeding did seem to have either stopped or notably slowed, it by no means lookedgood. Someone with the ability to do that had come and attacked her bakery.
No. Her bakery had been shot up, but the assailants had never gotten out of the truck. Was that because of the Marines who, apparently, had been doing basically all of the fighting back? Or had that always been the plan?
Jenna pursed her lips as the sounds of approaching sirens finally pierced the air. She watched Jon turn to glance down the road and forced herself to push out the words while she could. “Do you think they’ll come back?”
Jon’s friend tipped his head in an effort to glance her way. “Hard to say.”
Jon exhaled. “Their target today wasn’t the bakery. They were here to silence the two who’d tried to rob you, which means those two weren’t just a couple of bored punks or junkies.”
The ambulance screamed into view, cutting across the intersection and rolling up into the parking lot. It swerved wide to avoid them and came to an abrupt stop. More sirens echoed further back, so Jenna assumed more emergency services had been dispatched this time.
Jon kept talking. “The point of concern is whether or not they’ll be worried about what could have been said between the botched robbery and the shooting. We don’t know enough, which means too many assumptions are dangerous.”
Jenna swallowed hard.
Someone she didn’t recognize—which was frankly reassuring—rushed up to them. “There’s another ambulance on the way. I assume you’re the one we’re transporting first?” She directed her question at Jon’s friend with a pointed glance at his glaringly injured leg.
He managed a smile. “Only because this is my driving leg.”
The afternoon passed in a blur.
Jon had been torn about the notion of leaving Jenna behind, at her own bakery. It felt like choosing which person to abandon in a firefight. But at the end of the day, Lance’s eyes were glazing over no matter how hard he tried to hide it and he had no one else. Jenna had resources, and she’d been fending for herself without him for years. He hated having to make her do that under the possible threat of a secondary attack, so he’d made a point of hunting down the next deputy on-scene and informing the man of the concern. It was little consolation, but it was something.
He hadn’t been to the hospital in the city since maybe a year before he’d left for boot, when they’d learned his grandfather’s cancer had relapsed. That was far from a happy memory, and yet part of him thought he might have preferred sitting and reflecting on it rather than spending his share of time being patched up, and stuck filling out paperwork for two. Regardless, by the time everything was done and he was changed out of his bloody clothes—mostly for the sanity of the civilians in the lobby—he barely had enough time to worry about Jenna before Lance was out of surgery.
Lance didn’t have a private room, but he was the only one in it for the time being. Jon figured when they realized how obnoxious the man could be if they kept him bedridden and on accurately dosed pain killers, they’d either release him or move him just to let everyone else rest. In the meantime, Jon took advantage of the privacy and dropped into the single guest chair, letting their nearly identical seabags hit the floor at his feet.
It’d been a long fucking day.
He never would have expected coming home again to mean winding up in a damn shootout.
Somehow, that was still less jarring than seeing Jenna—hearing her voice, breathing her in, making the fucking stupid mistake of touching her skin. Barely an hour in her presence and he struggled to think straight. Putting distance between them felt a hell of a lot worse than the bullet that had torn a fresh hole through his side. Granted, he was also more used to that.
The door to Lance’s room opened with a quiet click and a woman stepped inside, closing the door immediately behind her.
Jon cut his eyes to her and a frown dipped his lips. She wasn’t dressed like a nurse or a doctor. This woman looked perfectly ordinary, if not a bit too pretty for a hospital. She wore dark casual clothes and smokey makeup. A black layered top with a solid cropped piece beneath and a full-length, long-sleeved lace number over that, paired with short-shorts and black thigh-highs that disappeared into heeled ankle boots. In contradiction to her golden halo of hair and glowing blue eyes, she almost looked like a caricature.
