The Werewolf Lawyer's Human Mate

5- Attacked

Jeremy Anderson’s POV

The first shot splits the air like a whip crack, and my heart almost jumped out of my chest. Too close. This is why I hated the cold; I should have smelled an intruder a mile away, but the air is frozen!

The animal in me reacts instantly, rising under my skin like heat, the ancient warning in my blood, alive and active and surging forward, towards my son and Claire, who are currently throwing snowballs at each other. I don’t think. I move. “Down!” I shout from the distance where I am at, chopping wood, the ax already beside my feet.

Claire freezes for half a second too long, and Daniel screams, both of them unsure of what the sound was. The second shot shatters bark inches from where her head was, and I almost faint because my son’s head was in her line of vision from the bullet.

“Daniel!” she cries when my son bolts, panic overrides training, logic, everything. He runs blindly, looking for me, sobbing, boots slipping on packed snow.

“Dad!” he screams. “Dad!” My heart slams so violently it almost hurts, and Claire lunges for him, grabbing his jacket and yanking him behind a thick pine trunk just as a round slams into the tree, splintering wood inches from their heads.

She curls over him instinctively, shielding him with her body, shouting, “I got him, Jeremy. We’re good!”

Time slows. Sounds sharpen. The world narrows into angles and trajectories and movement. I see where the shooters are without seeing them- I feel them- sense them. Smell the faintest trace of gun oil, sweat, and fear carried weakly through frozen air.

Three. Eyes closed, I sniff deeper- no four different smells.

My body surges forward, muscles burning, legs eating the distance faster than they should. I feel Claire’s eyes on me, wide, disbelieving as I clear twenty feet in seconds.

A bullet clips my arm. Pain flares, white-hot, but it doesn’t slow me down for more than a split-second. I slide into cover beside them, ripping Daniel out of Claire’s arms and crushing him to my chest.

“I’ve got you,” I growl, low and fierce, pressing his head into my shoulder. “I’ve got you. Don’t look. Don’t move.” He sobs into my coat, shaking violently while Claire stares at me.

Not at my face- at my body. In the way my shoulders seem broader- because they are. But now is not the time for that. She is trembling as well, eyes wide with fright- from me or the bullets- maybe both.

Another shot.

I pivot, placing my back between them and the gunfire, crouching low. A round slams into the tree trunk inches from my head. I snarl, the sound ripping out of me before I can stop it.

Claire cries out, and I pull her head into my shoulder as well. More like under it, and she grips my arm- now I can feel her body tremors. F#ck. My client was right. The people after him would be after me as well. I worry for him as well, because he’s in a cabin higher up.

Are they safe, or were they taken out, and then I was next? I scan the tree line, calculating. Snow crunches to the left- one of them repositioning. Amateur mistake. “Stay here,” I tell Claire, my eyes as a second warning, and she reads them. “Do not move.”

“I’m not leaving him,” she says, gripping Daniel’s sleeve, and I pull my boy’s nose playfully. “I’ll be back, Danny, stay with her, okay?”

Tears fresh in his eyes, he nods, hugging her.

The world blurs as I zigzag from one tree to another, my boots barely touching the ground. Another bullet whistles past my ear, close enough that I feel the heat of it. I duck, roll, and come up behind a fallen log, snow coating my glove-covered hands. I rip a branch free, hurl it, not to hit, but to distract.

It works.

The shooter turns, and I’m on him before his brain catches up.

My fist connects with his jaw, the impact sickening, bone crunching under my knuckles. Before he is on the ground, I kick at another and my fist in an uppercut towards the other one, who tries to point a Glock at me. He knocks out immediately, his body dropping sickenly, gun flying from his hands. They should die... I cuffed the second one, whom I kicked, on the side of his head, and he went down hard. I don’t stop to work out whether they're dead or not. I kick the weapon away and slam my boot into his ribs until he stops moving.

The fourth is not here.

Breathing hard, I turn. Two more shots crack through the trees, and Claire screams my name. F#ck, the shooter is positioned somewhere else!

I sprint back, snow spraying behind me. Daniel is hysterical now, crying so hard he can’t breathe. I drop beside them, dragging them deeper into cover, by rolling down a slight incline- a drain perhaps.

“It’s okay,” I murmur into my son’s hair, even as my pulse pounds and blood trickles down my arm. “It’s okay. Dad’s here.” To the woman I say, “Cover us with snow.”

Hurriedly, she reaches up and pulls in snow all around us, nearly covering us- we’re cold but alive. It’s quiet for a few minutes, and she whispers, “Jesus, you move like- like-”

“Like what?” I snap, but she knows I am not intentionally being rude. I’m scared for my son. To have put him in this sort of position of danger. Where do I go from here? I can’t go back to the cabin…

“…like the Terminator.” Claire looks at me like she’s seeing me for the first time.

Half-wrong. I mean, I am no robot. I am very real and in the flesh. A man with enhanced abilities that the world would never know. I hail from a pack. A pack with many like me- descendants of shapeshifters, according to legend. But it’s mostly legend- we can’t actually shift into wolves, but we can into a beast in between. And that’s very, very rare… and a horrific sight to a human.

Her lips part. “You’re such a skilled bodyguard. Maybe I should hire you to beat up my boyfriend.”