Shrapnel flew across the barn, thick pieces of wood slicing through the air. Levi opened his eyes just in time to duck, throwing Harper to the ground underneath him. He felt his body changing, and he did nothing to stop it. Her reaction to his nature was far less important than surviving the next few minutes, and with his gun out of arm's reach, his best chance of doing that was as a wolf.
The girl made a squeal and rolled for the cover of the car as he bound away, the shift finishing midair. As the remains of the doors fell to the ground, it revealed Mortensen's men-four of them only, and human from the smell of them.
Fools. They'd thought that with their weapons, they'd be able to take him alone. They were wrong.
He covered the distance between them in seconds, even as the idiot with the M79-a grenade launcher? seriously?-let off a shotgun round that whizzed by his head. Levi barreled into the man, his jaws closing around the thug's throat with a satisfying crunch and ripping it open as Levi continued past and the man's body did not. The tang of hot blood filled his mouth, and the wolf tried to take over.
The other three whirled, letting loose with a hail of bullets. Levi kept going into the open air. The sudden afternoon light blinded him for an instant until his pupils constricted. He was already falling into the thought-patterns of his wolf form, the men becoming no longer human in his mind but merely targets, enemies, things that had to be eliminated because they wanted him dead.
He whirled and bounded back, yelping as one wild shot slammed into his shoulder, the same one that Harper had shot. But he kept charging, taking another of his opponents down under his weight. The wolf in him wanted to stand over the body to make sure that he was disabled, but the man knew that to do that would be to invite death from the two still standing. So he streaked past, back into the darkness to dive into the vast tangle of furniture that filled a third of the barn.
Cursing, one of the survivors scrabbled for the dropped single-shot grenade launcher. Levi's muscles twitched. The man was too close to the barn to shoot another grenade-the M79 needed thirty meters in the air to arm, a precaution that kept morons from blowing themselves up with their own weapons. At a closer range, the grenade was no more than deadly than a rock.
But if Levi tried to rush him, the M79's shotgun round was perfectly capable of disabling him, instead. Surprise had been on his side the first time. This time, the goons were ready for him.