Here’s chapter 2 of Lost! I hope you all enjoy it!

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Chapter 2

Isaac Nazir
Right-Size Burger and Gas
Outside of Dallas, Texas

Ash started moving while I was still scanning the burger joint for threats. He grabbed all of the food he could hold in his left hand and started towards the door without looking back. Kristin was half a step behind him with a big fountain drink in her free hand, but I caught up with the two of them before they made it outside.

We were almost back to Ash’s car when the first bruiser stepped around the corner of the building. That was apparently the signal because other guys started appearing from behind trees and cars.

Ash was in the lead and he never even broke stride. The first guy, a heavily-tattooed Latino, tried to hit him, but Ash checked the blow, stepping into his opponent and driving an elbow into the guy’s throat. It was a killing blow against a human, but Ash didn’t take any chances. He followed his elbow up by spinning the first guy around and throwing him headfirst into the side of the building.

“Get into the car!”

Kristin didn’t look like she was happy about Ash’s order, but she already had her keys out and was only two steps from the car. I paced her, half a step behind as my mind finished processing the situation.

Three more guys had almost reached us, but none of them were giving off the characteristic energy surge I would have expected from shape shifters. Ash stepped forward to deal with the guy on his side of the car as Kristin threw herself across the passenger seat, and then it was my turn.

The taller of my two opponents, a skinny white guy with a mohawk, threw a jab at me, but everything about the attack was human-slow. I didn’t try to block it. I could have probably absorbed the blow without going down if it had come to that. Being a shape shifter made me strong and let me take a lot more damage than a human, even in this form, but there wasn’t any need to take the hit.

I lashed out with my fist, connecting with his strike and shattering his hand and wrist in a move that no trained fighter would have used, but that was okay, I’d never trained to fight as a human. There wasn’t any reason to waste time learning to fight in this form, not when there was still so much to learn about fighting as a hybrid.

A flicker of motion brought me around just in time to intercept an elbow strike from the next guy. I hit his arm with an open palm a split second before he would have connected with my throat and then stepped in and hit him in the ribs with the other hand.

He went down to one knee from the sheer shock of having the entire right side of his chest caved in, and then I spun back around and punched the taller guy in the throat with a blow that was carefully measured so that I wouldn’t break his neck.

My side of the exchange had taken less than two seconds. Ash’s car roared to life as I looked up just in time to see a new guy step up behind Ash and hit him in the kidney hard enough to shatter Ash’s floating ribs.

A normal human would have probably collapsed on the spot, but Ash was a shape shifter. He wasn’t particularly strong or fast as a wolf, and he’d never manifested a hybrid form, but he was still one of us. Ash blocked the next blow with his elbow, and then he stuck a knife in the new guy.

It wasn’t a very big knife, but Ash knew how to use a knife with the best of them. I expected the new guy to fall to the ground in a spray of blood, but he just backhanded Ash across the parking lot. It was the kind of thing you sometimes saw in a movie, but it was next to impossible for a normal human to hit someone that hard.

The pieces clicked into place. This last guy wasn’t just local muscle like the rest—he was a shape shifter, and based off of his tattoos and piercings, he was a Coun’hij enforcer. I’d already started forward to back Ash up. For all I knew getting thrown across the parking lot had been part of Ash’s plan all along. It got him far enough away to get his handgun into play, which was his best chance against a hybrid, but it was still a plan born of desperation.

Ash was on the ground, off balance and disoriented from the force of the blow he’d taken. He was fast, but a hybrid was faster. Luckily Ash wasn’t by himself, he had me.

Shifting forms in public went against everything I’d been taught since I’d first found out that I wasn’t like other kids, but I didn’t even think twice about it. My beast cut loose with a hammer blow of power and between one step and the next my human body exploded out into the hulking form of my hybrid shape.

The wash of power was unmistakable for one of our kind, and the other shape shifter spun back towards me to honor the greater threat that I represented. He shifted as he moved, and then I crashed into him.

In this form I was nearly six feet seven inches tall and I was several hundred pounds heavier than I’d been just a few seconds before, but I still gave up more than fifty pounds and nearly a full inch to the new guy.

I’d hoped to bowl him over with my initial rush, but he dug in and dropped his shoulder. We stumbled back away from each other, rocked by the force of the impact, and then he slashed at me with seven inches of razor-sharp semi-retractable claws that were harder than steel.

I moved forward, trying to get inside the arc of his attack, but he ducked under my arm and tore a long gash in my side. I reversed direction and checked his next attack, grabbing his left arm a split second before he could sink it into my back.

I didn’t try to hold onto him as he tore his wrist free, he was stronger than me, but I managed to nick a couple of the smaller veins in his arm in exchange. He darted toward me and I slapped his claws away, but he was even faster than I’d realized.

His other hand came out of nowhere and buried itself in my stomach. Even my hybrid body couldn’t continue to take that level of damage for much longer. Every nerve I had lit up in agony, but I ignored that and threw myself backward.

The Coun’hij guy didn’t want to let me go, he tightened his grip and tried to pull me closer, but that just provided me with the leverage that I’d been looking for. I walked up the side of his body, sinking the talons on my feet into his legs and chest as I extended his arm all of the way out.

His claws pulled free of my gut and then I heaved against his shoulder with every ounce of strength I had. I’d seen Carson do something similar in a sparring session back at the estate before everything had fallen apart. Done right, it dislocated the other guy’s shoulder, but either I hadn’t managed to execute the technique correctly, or the other hybrid was just too strong for it to work.

For one long second I thought I had him, but then he started reeling me back in. I would have said that nobody was strong enough to lift me by one arm like that, but this guy didn’t just lift me, he whipped me through the air and slammed me into the side of the gas station.

I initially thought that the popping noise I was hearing was my vertebrae, but as I stumbled away from the wall I realized that the other hybrid hadn’t stayed around to finish me off.

Kristin had screamed to a stop a couple of feet from where Ash had landed and they both had their guns out. The Coun’hij enforcer had disappeared behind the detached car wash in an effort to avoid the hail of bullets that they’d sent his way, but there was too much blood on the pavement for it all to be mine.

I started after the other hybrid, but Ash yelled at me before I could make it more than a step or two.

“Get to the car, they wouldn’t have been waiting if they didn’t have more people coming, and the cops are on their way!”

Part of me wanted to argue with him, but he was right. I turned and sprinted towards the car, huge hybrid legs devouring the distance. Ash climbed inside the vehicle as soon as I started moving, but Kristin sped up her rate of fire to compensate. It only took her about a second to shoot herself dry, but that was all that Ash needed to get into position behind her and he picked up firing with hardly any break at all.

Kristin was on the move now, the car was already doing twenty, but Ash managed to space his shots out just enough to keep the enforcer pinned down for the extra second it took me to catch up with the car.

I managed to shift back to human form on the run without stumbling, and then threw myself into the car just before Kristin cranked it up to forty.

“How did they find us? My phone wasn’t on for long enough to track.”

Kristin didn’t look away from the road. “Are you sure of that? It’s the logical explanation.”

Ash shook his head as he scanned our surroundings for somewhere we could lose the cops. “No, Isaac is right. Those guys had to be moving into position even before Isaac turned his phone on. One hybrid and a car full of hired muscle—they’d been tracking us before we even stopped for gas, it’s the only explanation. It was an opportunistic hit; they knew where we were and happened to have one guy and some contacts in the area where we stopped.”

“That means that they have something other than cell phone tracking in play then. Alec needs to know that, every single one of his people could be walking into traps as we speak.”

Ash didn’t look happy, but this time he couldn’t argue with me. “Fine. Get your phone powered on. You have one minute before it needs to go back off and this time just pull the battery. It’s going to be anyone’s guess as to whether or not we’re going to be able to lose the police.”

I fished my phone back out of the compartment inside my ha’bit where I stored it and pushed the power button. It was going to take forty-five seconds to boot up, so I reached back into the back seat for the first-aid kit next to Ash. If we ended up on foot at some point over the next hour or two then I needed to not look like I’d just finished fighting for my life.

I slapped a big square of white gauze over the hole in my stomach and then used half of a roll of tape to hold it in place. I finished right as my phone finished booting up. Alec picked up on the first ring.

“Isaac, I thought you guys were going to stay dark for the next few days.”

“Yeah, not that anyone bothered to tell me that before we left.” I wanted to say more, but I knew it wasn’t the time or place for recriminations. “We just got jumped. One hybrid, who was probably hoping not to have to get involved, and a bunch of local thugs. It looked like they had someone else on the way.”

There was a second of silence as Alec digested the news. “So they were tracking you. You’re positive that you all had your phones off the entire time?”

“Yeah, I had mine on for about fifteen seconds, but that isn’t long enough to run any kind of trace on it.”

He cut me off before I could finish explaining. “Then we don’t have proof. Are you guys going to be able to help if another team in the area runs into the same kind of problems?”

Ash responded before I could. “No, we have to go to ground in the next five minutes or we’re going to end up in a jail somewhere. Is there anything you can do to take some heat off of us?”

“No. The Chicago pack just went silent, and I suspect that all of the rest of our people are in hot water up to their necks. I’ll let you know as soon as I can shake someone loose to help out, but for now you guys are on your own.”