His to Claim by Alice Cain

leave anything for his brothers to do.
    Which, ironically, suited
Kyle just fine. All he was interested in was
getting Alex to safety the moment their trap was sprung. Fuck, if they'd been
able to set this up without using Alex as bait, Kyle would have. He'd actually
been willing to let the whole thing drop and just get the man to safety, but it
had been Alex's stubborn insistence that he was trained for stuff like this
that had made Kyle swallow his objections and stay quiet.
    "He's not just some random guy, is
he?" Gavin asked, tilting his chin in Alex's direction.
    Kyle shrugged nonchalantly but knew he
wasn't fooling anyone. His brother knew him too well. Four centuries together
would do that to siblings.
    "I don't know what it is," he
finally admitted. "Just the thought of him being in danger is enough to
have me ready to tear something really big into teeny, tiny pieces."
    "He couldn't be more different to
Tyler."
    Kyle shook his head slowly and sighed. He'd
tried so hard to hide that from them all. It was kind of silly to hope he'd
succeeded, but instead of admitting out loud to an attraction that suddenly
seemed far less important than it had a day ago, Kyle turned the tables on his
brother. That sibling thing went both ways after all. "So when are you
going to make an honest vampire of Logan?"
    "Logan left," Gavin mumbled
without looking in Kyle's direction.
    "Left?" Kyle asked, completely startled by the news. Logan was Tyler's best
friend, and Tyler was Logan's blood donor. Surely where one went, the other
followed.
    "It wasn't serious anyway," Gavin
said, voicing a lie none of his siblings would ever believe. Kyle hadn't known
Logan very well, so he couldn't really know the vampire's thinking, but he'd
never seen his brother happier. It seemed pretty clear that whatever had
happened to cause the problem, breaking up hadn't been by Gavin's choice.
    Despite the discomfort at having his own
love life examined, Kyle let his brother keep his lie, for now.
    "Heads up," Derek said through
their earpieces in an almost gleeful tone. "Two cars,
four hyenas, and one terrified human coming your way."
    "Damn," Gavin whispered under his
breath. Kyle nodded in agreement. A human complicated the mission
exponentially. There was no doubt from Derek's description that he believed the
human to be a captive rather than part of the organization currently a threat
to Alex, so they needed to protect him as well. The best part was that they
didn't need bait anymore since the men coming for Alex were already breaking
enough laws.
    " Gav ,"
Derek said in a tone they'd heard from him countless times. Kyle couldn't help
but grin. He knew exactly what Derek intended.
    "I'm on it," Gavin said, already
undressing. He ripped the earpiece from his ear, winked at Kyle, and then
turned and ran toward the road, changing to his furry form midstride .
Kyle was already heading to Alex's location when he heard the window of a car
smash and the terrified screams of several human-sounding voices.
    As protection went it was effective—Gavin's
hide was as bullet resistant as the rest of the Alateeka siblings—just as long
as the poor human didn't have heart failure when a very large, furry-form
Alateeka sibling landed in his lap.
     
    ~*~
     
    "Kyle?" Alex asked into the mic on his collar. He was wired and wearing an
earpiece—they weren't planning to let the people after him get close enough to
actually notice—but they were supposed to be radio silent.
    He'd heard the "heads up" call,
and then " Gav ," and then a whole lot of
screaming. He nearly leaped out of his own skin when he heard a very loud
screeching noise come from the air.
    "Kyle?" he asked again, feeling
way more nervous than he'd expected. He'd faced human dangers many times over
the past ten years, but it apparently hadn't prepared him for being in the
middle of a paranormal fight.
    A part of him actually hoped he was
delusional. There was a sort of comfort to the suspicion that he'd hit