Cry Wolf (Wolves of Angels Rest #7)(35)

Though the blackness had all but engulfed her vision, dimly she heard the professor call a halt.

“It’s not going to change on its own,” he said. “Strange. I’ll have to trigger the mutation. Hold it down.”

A boot on the back of her neck joined the noose. As if she could do anything with her muscles jangled by the shock of the hotshot. The stink of burned flesh—hers—singed her nostrils. Her stomach lurched but nothing came up. Just as well since it would have choked her.

Between her internal turmoil and the bite of the noose, she almost didn’t feel the sting of the injection just below the wire.

Until a spreading heat washed through her.

She felt like she hadn’t been warm in forever, but the initially comforting sensation seemed to hit the outer limits of her extremities and then bounce back, amplifying like waves.

The warmth blazed from fire to inferno. When she gasped, even her lungs burned. She curled into a fetal position, tearing at the few scraps of clothes they’d left her that now seemed to burn on her sensitized skin. Flesh melted, bones cracked. She could only scream helplessly in her head.

And then the first pale hairs sprouted from the backs of her hands. Her nails blackened and thrust out.

The shock of seeing her own body twist was a thousand times worse than the electricity zooming through the cattle prod. Despite the feverish heat cascading through her, she froze. Her eyes rolled back, anything not to have to look at the bizarre changes.

“I think it’s unconscious,” Junior said shakily. “I’ll get the—”

Desperate to escape the nightmare, she exploded off the floor.

The motion should have pushed her to her feet, except… Now she had four feet! And the strange configuration of her muscles launched her vertically into the air. She felt completely out of control, like those rare, transcendent moments that she hadn’t felt in far too long when the music took her over and swept her out of herself into some other self.

This was that other self.

They wanted her on the table? She cleared the stainless steel trap in one bound and came down on the other side in a splay of too many legs. New muscles ached, half pleasure, half pain, and the catch pole clanged hard on the table.

The reverberation of the heavy metal rang through her skull when the end of the pole rammed into the back of her head.

And jolted the other end right out of Enoch’s hands.

He shouted and scrambled across the table to try to recapture his end. She twisted backward along her own tracks, nearly impaling herself on the pole in her frantic zigzags.

But the noose around her neck loosened, and the nylon wired slipped along her silky fur. She shook her ringing head hard, and the catch pole clattered away.

Her four legs. Her fur. Her unfamiliar strength and speed.

She was a f*cking werewolf!

Fear and fury and some riotous ecstasy of freedom burst inside her, destroying every consideration except one: get away.

Her vision had expanded on the sides so she saw Junior hesitantly jabbing toward her with the hotshot, even as the rest of his body leaned backward. He wasn’t so brave now.

She shouted a warning at him, but the sound came out as a vicious snarl from her ruined throat.

He flinched back, the cattle prod crossing his chest defensively. Out of fight.

Well, she was just getting started.

She whirled.

And recoiled just in time. The boom from Enoch’s pistol left her ears ringing, but a faint whish through her fur told her he’d missed.

She grinned at him, hard.

To her surprise, he blanched, and it took him another instant to pull the trigger again.

That instant was all her sleek muscles and sturdy bones needed.

She dodged the second bullet, running toward the crash cart. But instead of running into it, she ricocheted off it. Somehow she knew that little wheels would give, but it held just enough inertia to let her rebound toward the open doorway.

And the cart itself spun across the room and smashed into the professor, knocking him into the cabinets against the wall. Glass shattered.

She was on Enoch before his finger tightened a third time.

Her teeth—her teeth!—slashed across his hand, slicing up his wrist. He cried out as the pistol flew out of his grasp.

Her momentum slammed them into the ground, and her back claws dug into his chest as she pushed herself toward the doorway.

“It bit you!” Junior screamed. “Enoch, the bite broke skin!”

What, like she was supposed to play nice when they started it?

Still, the terror in Junior’s voice made her glance back just as she hit the open hallway.

And she saw the professor, blood streaming over his white lab coat where he must have cut himself on the cabinet glass, pick up the gun Enoch had dropped.

She tensed, ready to fling herself away. But he never looked at her.

Instead, he aimed at Enoch, cowering on the floor, and fired twice into the man’s chest and then once into his head. The professor’s vaguely irate expression never twitched.

Confused shock might’ve held Willow motionless, but the triple percussion galvanized her and she fled down the hall. Not the way they’d brought her; she already knew what was that way. She’d have to hope she could find a way out—

Louder than the gunshots, a klaxon went off. No words, but she could guess what that warning meant.

Werewolf on the loose.