"Do it,"Sebastian said through our link. "End this."
I spit out the finely tailored wool and stalked my prey, my back right leg still not cooperating. It didn't matter. Ivan Paska had hurt us for the last time. With him gone, we would end this imprisonment, the experiments, and the daily threats on our lives. The world would be a better place without him in it.
A growl caught my attention, and suddenly Sebastian was beside me, wolf jaws clamped around his dad's right arm. The man held a utility knife with the same paint scheme as the rifle. He must have broken it loose from the weapon before Sebastian kicked it away.
Sebastian was magnificent in his wolf form, and he seemed to have more energy. He ravaged Ivan's arm until the bone poked through his skin and blood poured onto the white floor.
While it would have taken longer to let my former idol bleed out from the grievous wound, I wanted him dead. Clamping my teeth around Ivan's neck, I bit down, snapping through arteries, veins, and tendons until enamel met bone. With a hard wrench, I snapped his neck and kept pulling until it came free from the rest of his body.
"I think I'm gonna be sick."In his human form, Sebastian dry-heaved a few feet away, in a spot somehow still clean after I'd tracked blood from body to body.
I spit out my gruesome souvenir and padded over to him, rubbing my good flank against his shoulder and accidentally painting him with blood. The sight made my head reel, and I fell onto my wounded side, my breaths too shallow to give me any relief.
"It's okay, Gunnar. It's going to be okay."
I shook my head. I wasn't ready to be a dad, but our babies were coming. The lower back pain I'd felt all day returned with a vengeance, even as my injured flank healed from sharp pain to a dull ache. I whined and placed my front paw on his foot.
He petted the top of my head. "Can you shift?"
I whined.
"You'll feel better."
"The babies are coming. I can't have them here. We need to leave."
A clank at the door startled us both. Sebastian slid through some blood as he crossed the lab. My back leg burned with each step, but I made it to the wall behind him, where the gigantic door would shield us from view long enough to surprise the new arrivals. Sebastian crouched on his knees, and fur rolled his skin under from ears to tail. His wolf was bigger than mine, but after all the times we'd raced each other over the snow, I knew I was faster.
"I feel better now,"he said."Shifting helped me heal. I could eat a whole caribou, though. Or a bison."
Shifting would heal my leg, but my wolf was afraid. I was still in labor, and some unknown danger was at the door.
The crank swiveled, and my whole body tensed, ready to pounce on the new arrivals. With a metallic clank, the lock opened and the door swung toward us.
"Fuck me, is that Ivan?" A familiar voice echoed off the walls. "What the fuck were they doing down here?"
"I knew he had them in a secret lab." Dr. Amber Monroe's alto soothed my beast. "I fucking knew it."
Her boot heels clacked against the stone as sheapproached my enclosure, and then Sebastian's with the blown-out walls. Something on Dr. Bunting's computer screen caught her attention. "Gunnar's pregnant."
"Gunnar? That little slip of a thing?"
Sebastian's growl was the only warning Lonnie had before he was knocked prone on the floor with the giant wolf standing over him. Amber screamed, and screamed again when Sebastian partially shifted, keeping only his tail, ears, and giant claws. He twisted his wrist, and the sharp points dug further into Lonnie's tactical suit.
"Seb, is that you? Get off me, man. We're here to rescue you."
My mate's high laughter echoed off the remaining glass. "You're four months and five dead people too late."
"Yeah, well you still owe me a birthday party, asshole," Lonnie answered. When he pushed up off the floor, Sebastian let him up. "We did our share of cleaning house. Three dead guards and a couple dead scientists upstairs, too. Nothing like this, though."
"I'm so sorry," Amber said. "You've been here since we lost contact with you?"
"I guess?" Sebastian sank to the floor beside Lonnie and released his wolf until he looked human again. "I don't even know where 'here' is."
I crawled up behind Sebastian with my belly brushing the ground, careful not to alarm him when I placed my head in his lap. He rubbed the fur between my ears. I wanted to curl up in his lap and lick him until I'd claimed every inch of his body. It was socomforting to feel him beside me after so many months separated by glass.
"We're in the dead zone around Chernobyl." Lonnie glanced at Amber. "That's why it took us so long to get to you. It took us three months to find you, and another for Amber to develop an antidote for the radiation sickness."
"No guarantee it'll work," she said. "Is that Gunnar?"
