Boarlander Beast Boar (Boarlander Bears #4)(52)

Everything was so clear now. So bright. So obvious. He’d been wrong about what Esmerelda had been doing here. She hadn’t been telling him to let her go. She’d been warning him against the people who had cut her heart wide open when she’d been alive. She’d been warning him, not because she couldn’t let go, but because she wanted him to protect what he’d found—Beck and Ryder. The Boarlanders. He ran for the woods, peeling off his shirt as he went.

“Mason,” Beck shrieked. “Is it IESA?”

“No!” He called back at her. He gritted his teeth against the hatred that welled up inside of his chest. “It’s the boars.”

Emerson ran by as Bash and Harrison melted into the woods in front of him, a deep snarl in their throats. She bolted for Mason’s trailer with a gun in her hand. “I’ll take care of them!” she called out. Her eyes were full of terror, but her voice was steady, determined.

Good Emerson. Brave human, knowing just what to do so he could focus on the blood he was about to let. Fuckin’ Robbie for outing him, and f*ckin’ Jamison for not being able to let Mason go.

A sick feeling twisted his gut as his boar roared to be set free. Now, he had everything to lose.

Another gunshot boomed through the valley, and the drum of a silverback beating his chest echoed through Boarlander woods. His people were going to war, and their pain would be on him. Their blood would be on his hands.

He could smell them now as he wove through the trees. The thick, dizzying, musty scent of dominant boars tainted the air and filled his senses. The deep-throated squeal of a battle cry blasted through the forest. There would be no talking them down. They weren’t here to negotiate his return. They were here to steal everything he loved.

His body broke, bones snapping, muscles stretching, bottom canines elongating into thick, sharp tusks as his body exploded into something monstrous. He hit the ground running on sure-footed hooves. He was fast in this form. Faster than a lightning strike as the trees blurred past him. Harrison and the others had cut them off in the firefly meadow. The raw violence of the bears, the tiger, the silverback, and all the boars pushed fury through his chest. There were too many.

Jamison’s giant red boar stood off to the side, eyes blazing the blue of his people. Mason wanted to gut him. Wanted to run his tusks through his belly and watch him die in his own entrails for trespassing in his mountains. Bash was in trouble, though, under a pile of four razorbacks. None of the boars could touch Mason or Jamison’s size, but frenzied by bloodlust, they had the numbers and single-minded killing instincts that made them bold and relentless. Mason shifted his stride and hit the back of a boar head on, gouging his thick hide with his long tusks.

He shook his powerful neck, stabbing, battling, protecting Bash’s weak side—his back. The air smelled like iron, and the boars grew in number, as if Jamison had called another wave. He lost his mind. Lost his thoughts other than kill. Other than defend them. Other than save them.

Flashes like photographs punctuated brief moments between battling. Kirk slamming a white boar against a tree trunk. Harrison’s massive grizzly clamping over the thick neck of another. Bash’s claws…too close. Audrey’s white tiger leaping onto a boar slashing at Harrison’s back, her canines open and ready, her claws out, her eyes full of fury. Ally, legs splayed over her four-wheeler, tattoos black against her pale skin, lips pulled back in a battle scream, she popped round after round at the boars that surrounded her.

Pain ripped up his back leg, and Mason went down hard, skidding in the dirt. The second he hit earth, Jamison charged him, the coward. He’d watched from the side until Mason was tired. Until he was down and wounded.

Adrenaline surged through his body, and he struggled to his feet, catching Jamison’s full force. The brawler boar had broken off one of his tusks since Mason had last seen him, but his brother was skilled at protecting his weak side, slashing the other like a long blade. Jamison wanted war? He could have his mother f*cking war. Mason wasn’t the same broken shifter he was when he’d challenged Jamison before. He wasn’t depleted and weak. In his time away from his people, he’d spent his efforts logging, putting on muscle, and battling for these mountains beside Damon and the other crews. He wasn’t wishing for death anymore. Now, he had so much to survive for. So much to defend.

Jamison hit him like a wrecking ball, but Mason was ready. His legs braced, he skidded through the dirt, locked his tusks with Jamison’s and jerked his neck, throwing his brother off balance. Stupid f*cker had been brawling with lesser boars, but Mason was a dominant Croy like him. He was a rip-roaring war machine.

Searing pain flashed up the nerve endings in his side as other boars joined Jamison. Assholes didn’t know how to fight with honor. They didn’t care if it took a hundred of them to kill one, so long as they won. So much ache, so much warmth, but Mason couldn’t unlock with Jamison, or his brother would have him gutted in an instant, just like the first time.

Something white blurred by, and the shriek of a pig sounded from behind him. The weight on Mason’s body lessened, and in an instant, another white streak dove and lifted. Beck. She was going for their faces, keeping the others off his back. Distracting them.

Clinton’s blond bear roared an oath of death and slapped another boar off the pile, then clamped his massive jaws on another. Crazy Clinton was buying him time.

A battle cry sounded as a set of long, curved, black talons raked across Jamison’s left eye. With a grunt of pain, Jamison stumbled, and Mason used his body weight to charge him against a tree.