He didn’t hesitate to attack, charging forward with a snarl that made fear spike in the air around him. The hunters tightened their fingers on the triggers, but Jono was on them both before the silver bullets left the gun chambers. He clamped his jaws on one hunter’s right arm, teeth ripping through skin and shattering bone, swinging the man to the side to knock over his partner.
The hunter screamed, a sound that was choked off by something else. The taste of sulfur exploded on Jono’s tongue, blood tainted with hints of hell, the same way the hunter’s soul was. The demon the man carried in his soul looked out of human eyes, black veins pulsing in his face.
“You won’t win,” the demon hissed.
Jono gutted the hunter from throat to navel with one deep swipe of his left forepaw even as he twisted his head to snap the hunter’s arm off at the elbow. This time the hunter broke through the demon’s control to scream in agony as Jono spat out his arm. Blood poured from the hunter’s ruined elbow even as his guts slipped through the ragged holes in his torso. He fell to his knees, blood trickling out of his mouth as the demon fled the dying body with a thunderous flash of negative light.
Leon had engaged the second hunter, who had gotten back to his feet with supernatural speed. Leon’s wolf form was smaller than Jono’s but no less lethal in a fight. He’d bitten off the other hunter’s hand holding the gun, but the demon riding the hunter’s soul had pulled a silver-and-aconite-coated knife from his belt.
Jono leaped on the man before the knife could find its target in Leon’s neck. His weight drove the hunter to the floor with a loud crash. The hunter swung his arm around, looking to sink the knife into Jono’s side, but Jono twisted around out of range. He kept one paw on the hunter’s head, pressing his weight onto the man’s skull in a threatening manner. He wouldn’t mind killing the bloke, but Jono had listened to Patrick whinge about leaving someone alive to question plenty of times.
Another flash of negative light meant the demon riding that hunter’s soul chose to flee rather than attempt to fight. The smell of sulfur dissipated, fear and pain replacing it in Jono’s senses. He eased up on the pressure on the hunter’s skull, listening to him breathe wetly. The stump of his arm dragged through the spreading pool of blood beneath the bitten-off wrist. They’d need to tie the limb off so he didn’t bleed out.
Jono tilted his head to the side, dialing up his hearing. He didn’t hear any calm heartbeats, only the frantic ones of people on lower and higher levels of the building panicking from the sound of gunshots. He didn’t take his eyes off the entrance to the private dressing room, the door riddled with bullet holes. The air smelled like blood and aconite, but not sulfur. The two hunters appeared to be the only threat.
Leon knelt in front of Jono, back in human form, skin streaked with blood that thankfully wasn’t his. “I’ll deal with him. Shift back. The cops have been called. We don’t want them to shoot you on sight.”
Jono moved off the hunter, and Leon took his place, keeping the man on the ground. Without a demon riding his soul, he was swearing and crying from the pain of losing a hand, shock most likely settling in.
Jono shifted back to human, body twisting and breaking from four legs back to two. He shook his head to clear it, vision settling into normal human parameters. He crouched there for a moment between the two hunters, one dead and the other bleeding out, and tried to choke back the fury.
“They tracked us,” Jono said.
Leon nodded grimly. “Yeah. I need a belt if you want this one to live.”
“Rather he didn’t.”
“You know what your other half would say about that.” Leon paused. “Well. You know what he’d say if he wasn’t advocating murder.”
“Fine. I’ll get you a bloody belt.” Jono craned his head around. “Marek? Are you all right?”
The seer had knocked over the chaise lounge he’d been sitting on and had dragged two people behind it with him. He raised his head over the top, hazel eyes wide. “We’re fine. Are there any more hunters?”
Jono got to his feet. “Not that I can hear or smell.”
“Doesn’t mean more might not come.” Marek stood, gaze raking up and down Jono’s naked, bloody body. He made a face. “You ruined your wedding suit. Sage is going to be so mad.”
“She’s going to be bloody pissed about the hunters.”
“Well, yeah, that too, but you aren’t the one responsible for organizing a wedding.”
“You have a wedding planner for that.”
“And who do you think oversees the wedding planner?”
Considering Sage ran herd over the pack the same way she ran her cases at Gentry & Thyme, Jono wasn’t surprised.
“I need a belt,” Jono repeated.
Marek immediately undid his and handed it over. “You need some clothes, too. Both of you do.”
“I can…find you some,” Terry said hesitantly, looking a little glassy-eyed as he stared around his destroyed and bloodied fitting room.
His assistants were all huddled on the floor crying, none of them moving. Jono tossed the belt to Leon, who used it to create a tourniquet around the hunter’s arm to stop the bleeding. He screamed when Leon tightened it down, and Leon growled a warning that sounded more wolf than human to Jono’s ears.
The cops arrived a few minutes later. In that time before their arrival, Terry managed to locate a pair of trousers and shirts for both Jono and Leon from one of the adjacent workrooms. He’d even come up with a pair of shoes for each of them before he finally took a seat with his back to the room and started to shake.
Jono couldn’t help him, not when faced with police entering the fitting room. He’d ordered Leon off the hunter and to stand with Marek behind him. Jono kept his hands loose to his sides as the police came in, weapons drawn, stepping around the dead hunter and the savaged one.
“Hands where I can see them,” the first cop into the room barked out, his gun never moving from Jono’s chest.
“They attacked us,” Marek said loudly before Jono could speak up. “I’m allocated personal protection by the United States government. My friends performed that function in lieu of a security detail.”
The moments following the police officers’ arrival were tense and loud as the officers cleared the floor and called for an ambulance for the wounded hunter. Marek’s statement of federal protection was ignored by the police, and Jono allowed himself to be separated from the group and ordered up against the other wall. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t dealt with before, but the anger and embarrassment churning in his stomach was difficult to ignore.
His eyes, along with the firsthand account from Terry and his assistants, eventually required the officers on the scene to radio the PCB and request their presence. The crime was preternatural in nature, and the NYPD as a whole was aware of the hunter problem in the city. Any crime that dealt with magic or the preternatural community was run through the PCB.
Jono was glad for the change in officers because it meant people stopped pointing guns at him.
The pair of detectives out of the PCB who arrived first managed to diffuse the tension in the fitting room between the other officers and everyone else. It wasn’t the first time Jono had dealt with the police after a hunter attack, but the dead body probably wasn’t helpful.