Page 17 of Kings of Sherwood

Still, I resent his bossiness.I’veneverfelt unsafe at night here, I want to say. But then again, I’ve never really been out in any meaningful way like this before, and now that I am, well, I have the four of them. We round the corner to where we parked, and I try another tack.

“I just don’t think any of you are good enough drivers,” I chatter on. “I know some of you can’t drive manual.” I take a long, meaningful look at LJ. “And the rest of you ride the clutch way too hard.”

“Sometimes a little hard riding is a good thing,” Will remarks.

I scoff. “Can it, rich boy. Just because your dad let you burn all the gears on his Mercedes doesn’t mean—”

“What the fuck are y’all doing?” interrupts Rob’s voice.

My vision spins and swivels back front to where we parked, and it takes me a minute to realize what I’m seeing: a pair of legs on the ground, behind the front wheel. A figure with a hood over his head. A mechanical buzz, and the burning sound of metal grinding on metal.

“Shit,” the hooded figure mutters.

Then all at once, like ice cubes slamming forward in a glass, reality hits me cold.

These guys are stealing the car.

Or, no, not the car.

“It’s the cattalick convurber,” I yell, my body way ahead of my brain and my common sense and my words all garbled. “The—you know. They’re trying to cut it out. Hey! You!”

I lurch forward, but Tuck’s arm catches me in the solar plexus.

“Get the fuck away from my car,” Rob barks.

The guy under the car slips out, his multi-tool still jittering. “I don’t want to hurt you, man,” he says. His own hood slips back from his head, revealing pale skin, buzzed hair, and a flinty gaze that darts around to all of us.

“Then back the fuck up from my car,” Rob says.

The guy shifts his weight, like maybe he’s going to. Then he ruffles around in his pocket, and—

I don’t even register that it’s a gun.

“Get down,” LJ barks, yanking me, and I’m slammed down to the concrete, only his forearm breaking my fall and preventing my skull from cracking open.

Adrenaline and alcohol surge through my body, and I don’t know what I’m feeling—surprise, desperation? I wait for the wave of dizziness, but it doesn’t come, at least not the kind that comes from my powers.

Beside us, Tuck crouches, putting his body between me and the thieves. Rob and Will stay standing, with Rob taking slow, measured steps toward the car. “What do you want?” Rob says. “Cash? Here.” He pulls his billfold from his back pocket, flicks out four, five, six $100 bills. “Take it. Thing’s not worth that much.”

The first guy looks to the second, then they both look back at us, at me. All too quickly, I see a look travel from Rob to Will to Tuck and LJ. It’s a question, an impulse, an instinct—should we shift?

You can’t unring that bell, I guess. And two meth-head car thieves aren’t exactly going to be reliable witnesses if they claim to have seen some kind of werewolf shapeshifter shit. But still, I...

“Give us her,” says the second one. He’s bigger, uglier, and leering at me in a way that churns my stomach.

“What the fuck did you say?” Will says, taking a step forward. But Rob grabs his biceps.

“No,” Rob says. A wave of emotions flicks over his face—realization and something like disappointment. “Cash, take it.”

“Oh, come on, man, we’ll bring her back in one piece,” says the first guy, parting his lips to reveal a straggle-tooth smile. “Besides, from the look of it, she can handle more than one.”

An explosion of sound and motion surges at my right. LJ, shifted, a hulking bear, charges them, swiping with a claw so fast that the guy doesn’t have a chance to react. His tool clangs to the street as LJ drops back, and crimson drops spatter around them.

“Holy fucking shit,” says the bigger guy. The smaller one hits the deck, clutching his face, which is soaked in blood and spurting, almost like his ear was torn clean off. But I don’t see any more because Tuck grabs me and buries my head in his shoulder. “Don’t look,” he says. “You don’t want to see.”

“It killed him!” comes the guy’s voice. “That thing fucking killed him!”

I press the bridge of my nose into Tuck’s shoulder, inhaling the soap and cotton smell of him.

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