I Don't Need No Alpha Brothers novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Three at the Door

I didn't wake Lorne gently.

I put my hand over his mouth and pressed, and his eyes flew open above my fingers.

"Three," I whispered. "Out front. One has gas."

He went white.

Then he nodded once.

I took my hand away.

"My hands are useless," he breathed.

"Your teeth aren't."

I went to the back of the cabin, where the bedroom used to be.

The burned wall was open to the night.

I stepped through the black beams onto the grass, pulled my shirt over my head, and let the shift take me.

It came fast this time.

It came angry.

On four legs I could hear all three of them.

Boots on the porch boards.

The glug of liquid sloshing out of a can.

Somebody laughing under his breath.

I went around the side of the cabin low and quiet, the way the twins had taught me.

The biggest man was on my father's porch, pouring gasoline over the steps in a long careless line.

He was huge, bald, with a beard to his chest.

The second stood at the bottom of the steps with a lighter.

The third was at the corner of the cabin, watching the trees toward Black Fork.

None of them were watching the burned side.

Nobody ever watched the side that had already burned.

I put my head back and howled.

It went up the creek.

Then I hit the man with the lighter from behind before he could turn.

He went down on his face in the grass and the lighter flew into the dark.

I didn't stop for him.

I went straight up the porch steps at the big one.

He dropped the can and shifted in the time it took me to climb three stairs.

He was bigger than me as a wolf, too.

Brown and scarred and heavy, with a torn ear.

He hit me in the chest and we went off the side of the porch together into the woodpile.

Logs came down on both of us.

His teeth found my shoulder.

Pain went through me white and clean.

I twisted out of it, left skin in his mouth, and came back in low.

He was strong.

I was smaller, and I knew every foot of this ground.

I'd known it since before I could read.

I drove him backward over the fallen logs.

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