Come Out Swinging (Reach for the Moon Book 2), Sam Hall [leveled readers .TXT] 📗

jolted in our seats as we drove through soft, powdery limestone dust, over tree roots, and through mounds of pine needles, nowhere near as fast as before, but still. Light flickered rapidly as we passed, filtered by the straight pine tree trunks, while butterflies and grasshoppers splattered the windscreen, unable to get away from the car quickly enough. My body wound tight, and my claws emerged from my hands, flexing at the ready.

“You need to stay with the car,” Mason said.

“The fuck I do,” I shot back.

“You’re the one who’s important, not us. You can’t get hurt.”

“What? Like Bridge can’t? Being a precious fucking Spehr doesn’t mean shit, does it? We still bleed, hurt, scream…”

My speech was curtailed as a clearing appeared, complete with a crumbling old shack. My eyes took in every fucking detail as we approached, including the beat-up Toyota parked just out front, and then I registered the sound of her scream. My fingers wound the windows down as we rolled up, then I was shoving the door open as we slowed.

“Paige, Paige! Fuck, girl…!”

I was up and out of my seat, over Zack’s lap and through his hands, then shifting into my wolf form as I landed on the grass. As I padded closer, I heard every muffled shout and protest, the yelps of pain, the stupid fucking diatribe the men recited, telling Bridget what they intended to do to her. I slunk forward with the wind in my face, whisking my scent away, my jaws open. There were three of them, and they were spreading her out on some kind of old rotting table outside the shack, her face a swollen mess. A whine escaped my throat when I saw how effectively they’d removed everything that was my cousin.

When I thought of Bridget, I always saw cheeky smiles and her saying outrageous things, filled from within with this almost defiant happy go luckiness that Nance had always sought to squash. Well, she’d finally succeeded.

“She does her own wetwork.” Gary’s words ricocheted around in my head. Somehow, some way, Nance had done this. With Peters’ help, maybe Aidan’s? Perhaps not Aidan, as he was with me, or was it afterwards? Had they waited until he staggered home and then handed him a crow bar? My lips pulled back in a silent snarl as I crept closer, trying not to let her little muffled cries of pain distract me.

Thankfully, this was a body that knew where to put its paws so prey did not hear our approach, caught up in their own bloodlust as they were, their eyes alien balls of silver and completely devoid of humanity as they considered what to do with her. This was a body of instincts, that knew the snap of iron trap jaws, the rending of flesh, and how sweet their blood would taste. This was a body that felt others in the same form as mine fan around me, a pack ready to strike, that watched the big, meaty hand of Baz Engels rise when Bridget spat a mouthful of blood at him, about to break her face and produce more.

But it wasn’t her that was to be broken.

Our hindquarters coiled, the muscles clenching tight, building, building.

“Stop fighting the bitch and stick it in!” Marty whined.

“Fighting bitches makes me hard,” Baz snarled. “You’ll get what’s left, don’t worry. Won’t he, Spehr bitch? Walking past me all the time with her fucking nose in the—ARRGH!”

I was glad we were in the forest. They’d hoped to muffle or hide Bridge’s cries, but the trees did the same for theirs. Sharp, visceral screams cut through the verdant quiet, animals and birds, even the trees falling silent to witness. When our claws rent their flesh, when our jaws closed around their limbs. When their blood gushed. When fingers and hands hung limply, half torn away from bodies. When we partially shifted forms, slashing our claws through them, too fast for them to make their own shifts.

And then finally when we stood over them, blood dripping from our human skin, our wolf fangs and claws at the ready.

I knew what thrill killing was. For a predator, making a kill, ripping out the prey’s throat, feeling that hot rush of blood, there was nothing like it. In the presence of gentle, domesticated animals, it could be a hard impulse to control. Everything that made them strong, able to fight their way free of our grips, was bred out carefully over generations. The Engel brothers were no cows or sheep, but after the blood singing struggle that wasn’t one, they lay beneath our collective gaze as if they were.

“You… You… Dad…” Baz panted out, blood leaching sluggishly into the dirt.

“Your dad told us where to find you,” Lorcan said. “He knew what was gonna happen. That’s the thing with being a fucking Engel. In the city or anywhere else, you’d be flunkies and thugs. Low level shit kickers directed at enemies by someone with a fuck load more brains than you. Instead, you languish in Lupindorf, protected somehow, but no one protects you from each other. That’s why they hate us—we’ve no loyalty and none of the sense the Mother gave a cat, just an uninterrupted desire to survive. You were sacrificed like pawns on a board. This way, Gary appeases both powers in town. You followed Nance’s orders, and now you’ll be executed for doing exactly that.”

“Fucking…cunt!” Jim strangled out, but his and his brothers’ words all became mangled as Lorcan and I stepped forward, dropped to our knees, and took wolf form again for one final strike.

For a moment, I just panted, my jaws and fur matted with blood. I was fucking drowning in it. But it was Bridget’s broken pants that had my wolf eyes flicking up, then over she went, falling heavily to the ground and vomiting into the white dirt. I was up and rolling into my human form moments later, then shoving a finger down her throat to clear airways that