He shucked his jeans as his legs started to bend to the wolf’s, fur swiftly erasing his human flesh. Once Ellison’s four wolf feet hit the ground, the struggle ceased, and the wolf took over.
He pinpointed Broderick’s rank smell right away and ran past it, Broderick a smudge in the darkness. Up ahead, Olaf was still growling, throwing off agitated bear cub smell.
Ellison also scented Tiger and Maria behind him. Tiger was the musky male at the top of his strength. Maria was the gentler of the two, like the cinnamon and honey she put on her buñuelos. She smelled of home and things of light, a beacon in the darkness.
Ellison knew she’d hesitated following Olaf because the underground reminded her too much of her captivity. Ellison and she shared that hatred of the close darkness, which represented to both of them imprisonment, slavery, and terror.
Another odor assaulted Ellison’s nose and had Broderick growling. Humans. Human men not as afraid of confronting a polar bear Shifter as they should be.
They weren’t afraid yet. Ellison sped up and charged around a corner into a second culvert.
Three human men stood inside the tunnel, blocking the way to daylight behind them. LED lanterns threw pale shadows on the ceiling and over the polar bear cub who stood defiantly before them. One man had a tranquilizer rifle, pointed at Olaf, and the other two held a large net between them.
Ellison took this in with rapid calculation before he gave in to his wolf’s rage. He charged, his Collar sparking hard.
The scent from the men changed to panic. Facing a full-grown Shifter wolf was a different thing from facing a bear cub, though they’d have found Olaf a handful. But the gunman still had the tranq rifle, and he raised it to point it at Ellison.
Ellison let his body hit the ground, under the rifle’s aim. He slammed himself at the gunman, sweeping him from his feet. The man yelped as Ellison ran into him, and dropped the rifle, which went off as it spun around, the tranq dart flying. The dart hit nothing, clattering to the floor to be lost in the darkness.
In the next moment, Broderick came running in, in the form of his timber wolf. He hurtled toward the men with the net, his Collar snapping sparks, but Broderick didn’t let the Collar slow him down. The net men spun with quick reflexes, ready to snare him.
They’d done this before, Ellison realized. The three men worked as a well-practiced team, the rifleman rolling to pick up the rifle and reload it while the men with the net regrouped. In a second, they’d have the thing over Broderick.
Ellison went for the gunman again. His heavy wolf body crushed the man into the nearest wall, making him drop the rifle once more, and Ellison heard a bone snap.
Sparks zapped Ellison hard, and pain ran like fire through every nerve. Fucking Collar. Ellison could control the Collar when he fought in the rings at the Shifter fight club, because his brain knew then that he didn’t really want to kill the Shifter against him.
But these humans had threatened a cub, and Ellison wanted them dead. The Collar sensed his need to kill and went to work trying to stop him. The Collars evened the odds, in spite of the gunman’s broken wrist, and the net had started to tangle Broderick.
Olaf ran back and forth between the men, growling up a storm, grabbing legs and heels, biting.
“Shoot him!” One of the net men yelled. “Grab that damned bear, and let’s get out of here.”
“He broke my arm!” the gunman shouted back.
“Sixteen million! Think about sixteen million.”
Sixteen million dollars? Did they mean for Olaf?
Screw the Collar. Ellison slammed his body into the human’s again, letting his Collar’s sparks strike the man’s flesh. The man screamed, another bone or two definitely breaking.
Broderick fought and writhed, but the net, which appeared to be barbed in places, had closed around him. One of the men dropped his end of the net and dove for the rifle, coming up with it and the dart full of tranquilizer before Ellison could stop him.
And then the tunnel filled with noise, a roaring sound with death in it. The man who’d grabbed the gun executed a practiced roll, got to his feet, and shot the tranquilizer dart straight at the giant tiger that hurtled in from the darkness end of the tunnel.
The tiger was so big that he broke off pieces off the wall as he charged. The dart hit Tiger in the chest . . .
. . . and didn’t slow him a step. The rage in Tiger’s eyes escalated to madness as he kept on coming.
The man trying to contain Broderick dropped the net and fled. The first gunman squirmed out from behind Ellison and ran up the tunnel toward daylight, staggering and cradling his broken arm.
The man who’d shot the tranq at Tiger stood frozen in stark terror. Tiger was going to kill him.
Tiger had killed once before, Ellison knew, though the Shifters were keeping it quiet. Not Tiger’s fault, Liam had said. Human scientists had created Tiger to be a killing machine, and Tiger didn’t yet know how not to be.
But if Tiger were arrested for killing a human, the Shifter Bureau might find out who Tiger was and what he was, and take him away. Back to a lab, or maybe they’d just outright slaughter him. And Liam and the rest of Shiftertown would pay for harboring him.
Ellison morphed back to his human self, landing panting, upright on his feet. “Run, you idiot,” he said to the remaining man. “I can’t stop him.”
The human remained rooted in place, staring in horrified wonder as Tiger unfolded from the giant Bengal and became a giant human, his eyes still yellow with fury. The dart stuck out of Tiger’s muscled chest, and Tiger contemptuously yanked it out.
“Leave. The cub. Alone.” The words were guttural, harsh, inhuman.
The man blinked, gulped a breath, and finally turned to flee. Ellison grabbed the tranq rifle out of the man’s hands as he ran by. Ellison raced after him but stopped inside the shadows of the culvert while the man sprinted after his friends into the bright light of morning.
Ellison watched him scramble into a waiting high-end SUV, a cage obvious in the back. The vehicle squealed away, leaving the faint bite of exhaust in the warm spring breeze.
Tiger ran a few steps past Ellison and stopped, not bothering to keep his large, naked body out of the sunlight. “You let them go.” He turned back and bent his angry gaze on Ellison. “They were going to hurt the cub.”
“No, they were going to steal the cub,” Ellison said. He leaned against the cool tunnel wall to catch his breath. “I don’t know what that’s about.”
“I would have killed them first.”