Flint grabs my arm. His fingers close hard. “We need to move. Do you have a basement?” he asks.
I start to answer when the other end of the hangar splits apart. A second dragon punches its way in, and a chunk of ceiling crashes down where one of the trauma carts had been parked five minutes ago. A nurse runs past us. Her eyes are huge. Her mouth is open in a long, soundless scream. From the other side of the building, more screams answer. The sirens keep going. The fighting overhead is getting louder.
“We need to stay together!” Flint tells me. “Let’s go. You need to hide.” He’s already moving us toward the wall, pulling me with him. “Try to cover your scent. You—” The floor shakes. I feel it through the soles of my flats.
Another dragon lands through the new opening, moving slow and deliberate this time.
“Shit!” Flint snarls.
The dragon starts to shift but doesn’t do it fully.
Flint pulls me away. My legs feel like lead. I can’t take my eyes off it.
It’s half male and half beast now, taller than any man I have ever seen in my life, easily ten feet of him. His skin is patched with scales over his shoulders, his thighs, the sides of his torso. His face is mostly human, except his nose is flatter and his lips are pulled back from too many sharp teeth. It, too, is half covered with scales.
His eyes are bright yellow and slitted down the middle. There are red markings along his arms and chest in twisting lines. His hands end in claws. His feet do too. He starts toward us.
“Run!” Flint screams at me. “I’ll hold him back. Go to Ridge and Robyn. Hide.”
He lets me go and runs back to the thing.
I want to run. I really, really want to, but my feet won’t move. They’ve turned to lead.
Where should I go?
Nowhere is safe.
The thing is walking toward Flint. His grimacing smile shows me a mouthful of pointed teeth.
“Female.” He sniffs the air. Sniffs it in long draws. He makes a sound deep in his chest, low and pleased, the kind of sound you’d hear from a dog that’s just been shown a steak. His slitted eyes are on me. “Mine,” he growls. The word comes out closer to a snarl than speech.
“Fuck off!” Flint shouts. “You can’t have her!” he growls, his shirt ripping across his shoulders. He is bigger than before but holding back from shifting.
He said that he still has the vaccination in his system, so he can’t shift. He will go completely feral if he does.
He’ll kill indiscriminately.
Flint steps in front of me. Unfortunately, the half-shifted thing makes him look small.
“Go back to your island.”
“Not without a female.”
My eyes widen, and horror fills me because between the creature’s legs is a huge, jutting erection.
My stomach turns over. I turn and run, making a sobbing noise. I bolt back the way Robyn went.
I glance over my shoulder. Flint is throwing punches that the creature absorbs like they’re nothing. He gets in one good hit to the throat and the half-shifter coughs. Then a clawed hand catches Flint across the side and rakes through his shirt, through skin, through whatever else is under there. Blood blooms across the white of his shirt in a sudden, awful flower. Flint goes down on one knee. He’s still trying, even on the ground. He grabs for the creature’s leg.
“Flint!” I scream it without meaning to.
He hits Flint, who goes flying.
The half-shifter’s slitted eyes find me again. “Mine,” he says. He starts after me. I run like my life depends on it down acorridor that branches into two. I take the left, shoving through a swing door into the diagnostic bay. The lights are out in here, and emergency strips run along the floor in red. On the far side is a row of imaging machines. They’re big and white and bulky. I dart between them, drop to my hands and knees behind a CT scanner, and crawl into the gap between it and the wall. I pull my knees up to my chest. I press my hand over my mouth so he can’t hear me breathing.
From the corridor, the swing door bangs open. I hear his claws scraping on the floor. He’s walking slowly. There’s a long, drawn-in breath, and I realize that he’s sniffing like an animal.“Cover your scent”Flint had told me.
Is he sniffing me out?
