You can’t outmuscle him. But you can outthink him. Thanks to my childhood, I had a lot of experience with brain over brawn.
Dillon knew he had the advantage. He advanced on me, long tongue hanging from jaws that opened to a snarl. “Lium, yu die.”
He can speak? There must have been some human left in there. His eyes tracked me as I stepped toward open ground. My body bristled with rage, muscles trembling, eager to do battle. But my mind raced, casting about for a plan and, to my surprise, I found one. A straight-out fight would be suicidal. I had to lure him away from Chloe and buy Chris time to find us.
My sideways jump into the trees surprised him. In a flash, he was after me, but his larger size made it difficult for him to use the forest as a highway. After a few attempts to spring between branches that snapped under him, he dropped to the ground and snarled up at me. His next leap forced me to leap again before he could drag me out of the trees.
In our haphazard progress through the bush, his powerful leaps often carried him ahead of me, but my quick changes of direction were beyond him. I didn’t know yet how to coordinate my legs to run but leaping from tree to tree used the same techniques I had used when I trained as a human, and the tremendous power in my hind legs enabled me to travel longer distances with each bound. It wasn’t graceful. Several times, I miscalculated, overshot my intended target, and crashed to the ground almost at his feet. Only his forward momentum saved me, giving me precious seconds to twist out from under his bounding form, to scramble once again into the trees.
“Lium,” he growled. “Ure yu ready tu die?” A demented chant, more like something from an exorcist movie than from anything human. It made the muscles along my spine twitch, bristling my hackles erect.
As I flung myself between branches, my wulf expressed displeasure with my plan. Dillon wanted a direct fight—tooth and claw—and so did my inner predator. Every surge of rage or fear threatened to tip the scales in Dillon’s favor. Only the knowledge of what losing control to my wulf would mean—my certain death—kept the human on top.
I smelled my goal. The recent snowmelt might be my savior, that and the gravel deposits so often mined in this area. My brain struggled to track our progress on my mental map as I followed the scent of dampness, angling off the trail, luring Dillon with me.
Trees lined the hilltop above the gravel pit, and I vaulted into them, then turned to face him, panting hard. Dillon paused, tilting his head to follow my movement. The moonlight filtered through the branches, striping his fur gray and black. I planted my feet flat on a branch to stand human tall, and as I did so, something howled in the distance.
It carried on the wind and my heart soared. Chris. My relief almost overwhelmed me; the enforcer had picked up our trail. Another howl, higher pitched, told me he wasn’t alone. My lips parted in a lupine grin as I looked down on my enemy.
“Beast.” I forced my lengthened tongue around the words. “They come for yu.” All I had to do was stall and I might survive. Keep him talking, my human half thought.
Unbidden, thoughts of what he’d done to Chloe and Peter flashed through my mind. No, my wulf snarled. He’s mine. While I vacillated between common sense and my wulf’s desire for revenge, Dillon turned to head back the way we’d come.
He’s returning for Chloe. Like something out of a dream, I snarled behind him. “She's mine.”
He twisted to look up at me, flattening his ears and snarling as he showed his long white fangs.
“Cuward,” I growled.
He leaped straight for me. The impact knocked me flying out of the tree. Snarling and snapping, we crashed into the ground hard enough to drive the air from my lungs with a horrible, searing pain. We slid and rolled down the steep incline, our claws scrabbling but finding only loose gravel. Part way down, we collided with a ridge that scooped us up and sent us airborne. There came a moment of free fall, and then we hit the bottom.
Well, not bottom, exactly. Water, deep and cold as ice. Dillon had his body wrapped around me, his claws embedded in my back. I drove my head up under his jaws as hard as I could, snapping his mouth shut on his tongue. His grip loosened in a swirl of blood, and I twisted in the water, punching my legs into his gut and pushing myself away, toward the rippling moonlight.
I broke the surface with a gasp, able to kick, but my arms windmilled, unable to either paddle or stroke to keep me above water. Just as Chris had warned me, the top-heavy wulfan physique threatened to drag me under. Dillon surfaced near me—snarling and snapping—too far gone into madness to fear drowning.
Holding my breath, I let the water take me, diving low to pass beneath his thrashing form and kicking hard to come up behind him. I wrapped my arms and legs around his body, using my claws as anchors, and sank my teeth into the massive muscles along the side of his neck.
From my angle of attack, I couldn’t reach the throat. The blood vessels I chewed toward were buried deep in the tissues. We’d drown before I found them, but the tremendous strength in Dillon’s legs kept bringing us to the surface, even as my weight pulled him under. Whenever we surged upward, my nostrils flared to suck in air. My jaws had to keep working, choking on blood, burrowing through tissue to find the artery beneath.
Dillon’s long
