He growled.
“That’s enough,” I snapped. “Listen.”
The growl cut short, and he glanced at the other two men as if he might prefer to take his chances with them.
Fairfax, in his wolf form, was noticing the change in Ben’s behavior as well because he’d stopped baring his teeth at Desmond and was now whining nervously. Wolves, pack animals that they were, reacted to the actions of those around them. I just needed to get one of them to stand down and the other would follow suit.
“Okay.” What now? I gnawed on my lip and started to lift out of my crouch.
Big mistake.
Ben gnashed his teeth together and lunged at me, his full weight colliding with me and knocking me back into the wall of the barn.
“Well then,” a voice overhead rang out. “Now we’re having some fun.”
I stumbled to the ground, and the last thing I saw before Ben’s teeth blocked my view was my mother looking down from the exterior door of the barn’s upper loft, smiling like a maniac.
Chapter Thirty-One
I’d never punched a werewolf in the throat before.
Evidently it worked just as well as doing it to a human. Ben yelped and rolled off me, rubbing his snout into the ground and wheezing like he’d been tasered.
Damn, a taser would actually be a rea
lly good idea for nonlethal confrontations.
Since I rarely had to consider nonlethal means of defending myself, it had never occurred to me to invest in anything else, but I made a mental note to visit Leary Fallon, my weapons guy, when I got back to New York to see if he might be able to hook me up with something.
If I got back to New York.
That was a big qualifier right now.
I undid the snap on my remaining holster, withdrew my pistol and without hesitating I disengaged the safety, loaded a bullet and fired directly at my mother’s head.
If she’d been human, she’d be dead.
Alas, she was a werewolf, and a wily one at that. She must have figured out what I was up to within the milliseconds it took for me to complete the action, and she darted back inside the barn. I half-expected her to be cackling like a cartoon villain, but she was quiet once she vanished.
Holden helped me to my feet and observed, “Guess we know where she is now.”
The gunshot had done double duty in making my mother disappear and spooking Ben and Fairfax. The two wolves were a good ten feet back now, their ears perked up on high alert as they danced from paw to paw.
“So much for our nice, quiet approach, eh?” I mused.
“You’ve been back in Canada for three hours, and already you’re dropping eh-bombs?” Desmond teased, tracking the movements of Fairfax with his shotgun.
“Shush.” Since it no longer mattered if we were being stealthy, I turned my sword on the padlocked door, slicing through the metal links of the chain with no effort. The chain and lock fell in a metal heap at my feet. I briefly considered bringing the chain along, since it might be a useful weapon in hand-to-hand combat, but thought better of it. The weight would be cumbersome, and if Mercy had used silver as an added bonus, I’d be in for a nasty surprise when I picked it up.
I slid the door open, and it shrieked in rusty protest. Once it was ajar, the distinctive odors of a barn wafted out to greet us. It must have been years since anything alive had called the barn a home—the owls, mice and other squatters notwithstanding—but still the pungent odor of pig manure and sweet straw filled the air. Some things didn’t vanish with time, they just became less obvious.
Beneath the animal scents was the distinctive cooper tang of blood. So much blood even I could pick it up without a problem. But this was old blood. My spirits lifted slightly, hoping this meant there was still a chance of finding Grandmere alive.
And in one piece, I amended.
“Are we just going to leave them out here?” Holden asked, indicating the two wolves.
“Do you have a better idea? Should I ask them to sit still while I rig up some collars and leashes from the leftover tack in here?” We were far enough out of town I wasn’t worried about the wolves making a break for Elmwood. They were obviously more interested in hunting us than looking for an alternative snacking option, and besides that, wolves wouldn’t gravitate towards populated areas. I didn’t care what they’d been dosed with, they wouldn’t make a run for town.