Wolves that weren’t exactly wolves. Lost dhampir children. A sorcerer who’d bound his own tongue.
It was right there. Took knew the answer was right in front of him, but he couldn’t quite reach it. And time was up.
“My turn,” Gabriel said. “When are you going to learn not to always take point?”
There it was.
Gabriel meant it as a threat. Took’s grin caught him off guard, but that was the—well,partof the—answer Took was after. Now he had the who and the where. All he needed was the rest of the why… besides the obvious.
“When are you going to learn to duck?” Took asked. He swung the bottle around in a fast, hard arc. The heavy base connected with the side of Gabriel’s head. It dented the fine bones of his temple in and then shattered. Gabriel’s eyebrow split in a welter of blood that dripped down his cheek to his jaw, and he slumped backward as his brain rattled around his skull.
Took didn’t expect it would last. He kicked the chair out from under him and spun around to punch the broken bottle up into the face of a bearded, blond werewolf who grabbed at him with long, muscle-heavy arms. The shards of glass dug deep into the soft meat of his cheek, and then Took twisted his wrist hard.
The blond howled as Took shredded his face—most of the left side hung loose in long strips of ragged, raw steak—and staggered backward. It would heal, but not cleanly. Took grabbed the guy by his bloody shirt and threw his weight against him, the burly square of body a serviceable shield as Took charged the door.
A wiry girl, her blonde hair teased up like a wolf’s ruff, lunged at him from the side. She swung two knives in a practiced, crisscrossing pattern that flicked out to nick at his forearms and face. Actual training meant Took couldn’t just bull his way through. He had to alter his plan instead. He grabbed one of the knives in his hand as the girl slashed at him. The blade caught on his palm and slotted between his middle and index fingers.
The pain throbbed up his arm and into his throat, but he ignored it as he smashed what was left of the bottle against her head. The dregs of beer matted into her hair, and Took used his grip on the knife to yank her close enough to headbutt. Her nose popped like a crumpled plastic mug and blood sprayed over Took. He gagged in surprise. Her blood tasted acrid and had a bitter, herbal bite to it.
He pulled his gun while she lurched backward, eyes glazed as she shook her head. A hard blink was enough to focus her, and she tensed as she shifted her grip on the knives for another attack. Took shot her in the throat. She shrieked—or tried to around the open flap of her throat—and stumbled backward as she tried to plait the shreds of her throat together with her fingers.
Rule number one for fighting things that healed faster than you—messy and upsetting was sometimes a better choice than what would be a kill shot on a human.
Bones crunched behind him and flesh ripped as the body underneath it decided to be something else. Five minutes. That was how long it took for a werewolf to finish the change. Less for Gabriel.
A big man, head shaved down to an elf-locked mohawk and the sides tattooed like torn flesh, tackled Took from the side. They crashed into a table, and it collapsed under them in a welter of splintered wood and broken glass.
Someone laughed—a cackle of sound more like a hyena than a wolf—as Took went down. A clumsy roundhouse punch caught Took a glancing blow on the head. He squinted through the static blur that rattled his brain and drove his knee up between the man’s legs.
Bone cracked and a small, horrified sound squeezed out of the man’s throat. Something wet soaked Took’s leg—blood or piss. Some of them were human, Took remembered, but he didn’t have the luxury to discriminate.
He got his elbow under the writhing man’s shoulder and shoved him off, just in time to catch a foot to his ribs. The impact lifted him off the ground, and his ribs popped with that weird starburst pulse of pain and pressure. It felt like a safe assumption that whoever was on the other end of that foot wasn’t human. Took managed to hang on to his gun with numb fingers, but his arm wouldn’t cooperate when he tried to raise it.
The woman put her boot to his shoulder and leaned down to sneer at him. “Not so tough when you’re up against someone as strong—”
Took spat blood into her face. The dark liquid spackled over her eyes and dripped into her mouth as she recoiled in shock. His gun hand was still numb, but the other worked as he groped through the glass and wood for a chunk of something heavy. He came up with a chair leg, splintered where it had snapped off the seat.
“Never was,” he said as he rammed it underhanded up into the meat of her leg. It wouldn’t slow her down as much as it would a vampire, who wouldn’t heal around wood, but the raw, wet wound gouged into her muscle would hinder her for a while. “Tough doesn’t win. Mean does.”
She yelped in pain and lurched backward. The splintered stick of wood ripped the hole in her thigh wider as it pulled free. Took rolled over and scrambled to his feet, shook the buzz out of his ears, and broke for the door.
The wolf with her throat half stitched back together lunged at him. He spun and shot her in the head this time. It wouldn’t kill her. Biters got silver as standard issue, but Took had grabbed his stand-in gear from VINE. The impact did knock her back on her ass and she sprawled there, out of commission until her brain rerouted around the pulped gray matter.
He shouldered through two thugs who fumbled a grab at him. To his left he caught a glimpse of a vaguely familiar face in the crowd, a silver streak in dark hair longer than Gabriel would usually leave on his Hounds.
Took put the pieces together a second too late to dodge as Grey, Gabriel’s best friend, whipping boy, and second-in-command, braced his ever-present sawed-off shotgun against his hip and fired. The spray of silver-mixed buckshot caught a few of the Hounds on the way through and human squeals of pain mixed with the whine of silver-touched wolves.
The silver pellets caught Took as he twisted away from it. They ripped into his back in a rash of pain that spread and cramped through his muscles and caught his thigh. A couple punched through his throat, the scrape of poisoned pain like the world’s worst laryngitis, and peppered his side and stomach.
He coughed up blood, clots of it sour as they burst on his tongue, and he felt the ping of metal shot against the back of his teeth. His knees cracked against the ground a second before his brain realized he was on the way down.
“Wet-mouthed bastard,” Grey jeered. “This ain’t your hunting ground.”
Two shells in a shotgun, Took reminded himself. He threw himself the rest of the way to the ground and felt the force of the blast cut through the air over his shoulders. If he hadn’t moved, that would have taken his head off.
Not that it mattered.
Gabriel used Took’s vest like a handle as he hauled him up off the dirty floorboards. Without much effort at all, he tossed him across the bar. Took’s back cracked against the door and he slid down onto the floor.
