There were four other guards in various stages of lunch meat, the ones still on their feet soon to be on the ground, the ones on the ground soon to be immobile.
The immobile ones soon to be consumed.
Lowering his dagger hand and his pointy little steak knife, he stayed where he was, because why ruin somebody else’s party—but more to the point, holy fuck he was in pain. Getting blendered in a rollover was not conducive to being all hale-and-hearty, and as he took a deep breath, one side of his rib cage lit up like it was hooked to a car battery.
So yes, he stayed off to the side.
The gruesome deaths didn’t bother him. As a hired assassin, you better not be squeamish, and even though he’d been a prisoner for awhile, it wasn’t like that camp had been Shangri-La. If anything, it had made him even harder.
And then it was over. Nothing left to kill.
The aftermath of such violence was as always so quiet and strangely peaceful: Dripping. Subtle shifting. Twitches.
Like after a thunderstorm, nothing but damage and rain drops left.
Although in this case, there was a lot of panting. One by one, the wolves lifted their bloodstained muzzles and set their sights on him. So yup, hello, boys, he lifted his knife, such as it was, into position. Because by all means, face off against a pack of carnivores with something better suited for a hamburger—
“Now what, Cousin.”
Apex glanced over his shoulder. Lucan had come up behind him, and the male was making a show of keeping his gun down by his thigh. Good job only the pair of them knew that there was no lead left in the chamber of that autoloader.
When he looked back to the other wolven, he witnessed the change that he had heard about, but had never seen up close and in person—and it wasn’t anything that he’d expected. Instead of some agonizing contortion, the wolves assumed humanoid form in a sudden burst, their fur retracting into their skin, their torsos expanding, their arms and legs breaking out in a smooth series of shifts. And when they stood at their full heights, curls of white smoke released into the thin air off their shoulders as if the energy required to alter was the combustion kind.
What do you know, they were all still bloodstained.
Apex marked each one with his eyes, moving sequentially from right to left, memorizing them. No surprise, their features were cataloged more easily in this form. As wolves? They’d looked the same with their white, gray, and brown fur—
He stopped at the last one—and not just because there were no more to take visual impressions of.
The male at the end of the lineup was especially broad of shoulder and tight of waist, the inverted V of his torso balancing his powerfulthighs and calves. With white hair and what appeared to be pale blue eyes, he was both ethereal—and, with all that muscle, very, very corporeal.
And he was hung like a…
Well, yes, a horse, as the saying went. Which, considering the sonofabitch had just been a wolf, felt inappropriate. Too many farm animals.
Especially as Apex was staring at the guy’s cock.
To maintain a decorum he didn’t actually care about, he ran his stare back up over the abdominals, past the pecs… and to the face.
The male was staring back at him.
“Callum?” Lucan said. “You going to speak? Or is that blood all over you yours and you’re about to cardiac-arrest on us—”
Off to the right, one of the uniformed bodies twitched. It was such a small movement, the kind of thing that could just be part of the parasympathetic nervous system shutting down for good. But as Apex’s eyes shifted over—
“Gun!” he barked as he leaped into the air.
While everybody else took cover, he threw himself at the guard and led with the tip of his blade. Just as the male who was covered with blood sat up and pointed his weapon at where the white-haired wolven had been standing, Apex grabbed the wrist, slammed it into the asphalt, and struck the center of what should have been a corpse’s open wound of a chest cavity.
The steel went where Apex wanted it to, directly into the heart.
But he was a guy who took pride in his work. Always had.
And something about the idea that the fucker could have killed that wolven made him cranky.
Giving into his fury, and in spite of his busted ribs, he continued to stab, and stab, and stab—and then as he yanked the knife free again, he took that gun out of a very non-resistant grip.
After that, things got a little hazy, but he dimly noted the scent of gunpowder overpowered all the fresh blood in his nose.