by Amelia Jade
All the delay was doing was giving Cadia a better chance of winning.
So what the hell was it that he was missing? He focused once more on the faces of the Fenrisians, as their expressions changed. It was tough to read an animal, but in their eyes he could swear that something was replacing the confidence and hope he’d seen there. It took him a moment to realize what it was he was seeing.
Fear.
They were afraid.
Whatever miracle the Remnants had been expecting, it seemed it was no longer going to come. Gabriel wondered if things, now that they were already in a truce, could be called off peacefully. Without more death.
If that’s going to happen, someone needs to talk. And to talk someone needs to…
Oh fucking hell. Was he insane?
Even as he asked himself the question, Gabriel knew the answer was yes. With an effort that he was sure was probably visible, he harnessed his bear, and re-exerted his human mind’s control, pulling back the change. Fur disappeared, lying flat against his body and once again becoming human skin. His weight lessened considerably and his limbs shrunk back to normal proportions.
A moment later he stood and walked toward the edge of the Cadian lines, confronting the bulk of the Fenrisians gathered there.
“This doesn’t have to happen!” he called, his voice like a clarion call across the battlefield, ringing out over the thunder that rumbled constantly overhead.
There was no response.
“Why are you committing suicide? You fight strongly and without fear, I will give you that. But with the numbers arrayed against you,” he said with a gesture, “you clearly can’t expect to win this. I know you all aren’t insane. This is impossible for you to win.”
He paused, his eyes narrowing. “Unless you’re expecting aid from somewhere?” he shouted, taking a stab at what he thought might have been going on.
There were a number of nervous glances at that, confirming his suspicions. Gabriel wondered what other territory they had managed to gather up into their plans. He’d thought that they were all staying neutral, letting Cadia and Fenris duke it out amongst themselves. At least, that’s what he’d heard. Maybe that had been a lie?
There was no response.
“I don’t know who you were expecting,” he said, addressing the ranks of his enemies. “But it seems fairly obvious that whoever they are, they’ve duped you. They aren’t coming.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “Are you really willing to die for them? For whoever has lied to you so.”
A wolf shifter several rows back stood up abruptly, resuming his human form.
“No,” he said firmly. “I am not. The humans betrayed us, but even before that, I was done. This was not the way I wanted the war to happen.”
Gabriel tried to keep surprise off his face. The humans had been the ones the Remnants were expecting to come to their aid against Cadia? That was huge news. Not that he was surprised by their betrayal either. Why help Fenris when they could wait until the Remnants had killed as many Cadians as possible. Still, it was unwelcome news at the bluntness of how they were willing to intervene against his homeland. Something would have to be done about that, but what, Gabriel did not know.
“I promise you this,” he said, speaking with more authority than he probably possessed. “Anyone who crosses the lines now, in human form, will not be put to death. I can’t guarantee anything else, but you will live.”
He doubted any of his superiors would object to that. The Green Bearets would support him; he knew Garrin and the commandant himself would be in favor of those terms. It was the politicians in Cadia itself who he might have to worry about.
Not like any of them have shown themselves though. So fuck them.
“Works for me,” the same man said. “If you’ll give me the chance, I’ll prove that I can be a productive member of your society. But if you choose to leave me in a cell, then so be it. But anything is better than dying for a cause that should have been given up months ago.”
He started forward.
No other shifters joined him, though Gabriel could see a number of them watching intently, as if waiting to see that his word would be kept before they too joined them.
“We welcome any who would choose peace over violence,” he said, speaking to everyone once more. “I’ve had enough death today.”
The last words were spoken heavily, reflective of the innumerable bodies strewn across the battlefield around them. Too many shifters had died this day. Too many.
He fought a smile from his face as the wolf shifter crossed beyond the Fenrisian lines and into the ground between the two forces.
“TRAITOR!” a voice roared.
From deep within the enemy lines a gryphon came charging forward. It had one wing burnt to a crisp, the other mangled beyond repair, but it was still one of the most powerful shifters out there, and it was bearing down on the wolf shifter.
“No!” Gabriel shouted and charged, his bear already bursting through his skin.
Around him the two sides stood, frozen in shock.
Gabriel had to stop the crazed gryphon before he killed the wolf, else there would never be peace between them that day. None of the others would surrender if they were going to be killed by their own forces first. He had to ensure the shifter got to the Cadian lines, no matter the price.
Even if that cost was his own life.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Stephanie
The battle unfolded before her eyes.
From her vantage point she saw Gabriel’s bears strike deep into the one formation, penetrating almost a third of the way through the rectangular-ish block of shifters before their momentum slowed.
It was an impressive flanking attack, and one that struck their enemies what she thought was a mortal blow. She didn’t know military tactics in any way shape or form, but she saw the enemy lines waver, saw more shifters coming down the mountains from what she assumed was a path into Cadia. The numbers alone favored Gabriel’s side, and as she watched they began to tell.
The skies above parted before those on the ground, the aerial shifters pulling apart and simply circling their own lines as the ground-based shifters took longer to realize the makeshift truce between sides.
It was over.
But nothing more happened after they split, and Stephanie wondered if this was some strange shifter tradition, a mutually agreed upon break before they resumed combat. She doubted that was the case, but from there she couldn’t tell what was going on. Then she saw a shifter resume his human form. She stared in shock, knowing, despite the distance, that it was Gabriel. Something about the body language told her it was her baby-faced shifter standing there, facing the enemy lines and vulnerable as can be.
“What are you doing, you big idiot?” she whispered, desperately hoping he would shift back and stay safe. “You’d better not get yourself killed.”
Then a man opposite him, amongst the enemy, also resumed his human form. Perhaps they were talking? Arranging a peace treaty?
Her heart soared as the former wolf shifter began to walk forward. Were they beginning to surrender?
Even from the distance she heard the voice call out over the field.
“TRAITOR!”
A massive form emerged among the enemy lines and headed straight for the surrendering wolf shifter.
“No,” she breathed as Gabriel charged forward.
The three of them were the only moving forms on the entire battlefield below. Everyone else seemed rooted to the spot, as if awaiting the outcome of what was about to happen. To her eyes it happened in slow motion. Gabriel shifted into his massive gray bear even as he shot forward, interposing himself between the wolf shifter and the mad gryphon.
“GABRIEL!” she screamed as the gryphon snatched her love up in its beak and shook him contemptuously, like an angry child would a doll. Back and forth it whipped him around.
A brilliant flash of lightning slammed down from the sky, impaling the grypho
n in a ball of light that flung Gabriel’s form a hundred feet through the air. When her eyes blinked the brightness away she saw the gryphon lying still, a charred hole through its chest the size of a telephone pole.
Of Gabriel, she saw nothing, until some shifters moved to circle around him.
His body lay still.
Deathly still.
“GABRIEL!” she screamed, and without thinking, gunned the engine on her ATV. The little machine zipped down the hill, dirt flying out behind her in a spray as the wheels spun rapidly, seeking more traction.
Overhead, lightning split the sky so rapidly it was almost like it was daylight for a single instant. Around her she saw the aerial shifters diving for land, but they quickly became nothing but motion in her periphery as she focused on Gabriel.
The little roar of her machine penetrated the battlefield and shifters began to move aside, more in surprise and confusion than out of respect to her. But as she got closer to Gabriel, a path cleared, the bears nodding their heads toward her. Apparently some of these must be his men, the ones from Cloud Lake who recognized her.
She slid to a halt near his body and pushed her way through the behemoths to get to him.
“Gabriel,” she said, falling to her knees at his side, letting out an anguished cry at the sight of him.
Both legs were bent at wrong angles. One arm was clearly broken in three places, the bone sticking through his skin at two of them, jagged white pieces making her stomach roil. Blood was everywhere.
“Oh no. No no no,” she said, tears filling her eyes and streaming down her cheeks, little rivers of warmth. The temperature around her was dropping, she realized.
“Okay, now his left arm.”
There were several shifters working on Gabriel, having already returned to their human forms. She recognized Captain Klein, but not the others.
“Okay, Aksel, you take the wrist. Jarvis, the elbow. Garrin, you hold him still while I set this,” the captain was saying, barking out orders rapidly.
They moved his arm, and Gabriel screamed.
“Gabriel,” she said, repeating his name over and over as she worked her way toward his head.
The only thing she could think of then was that he wasn’t dead. And the shifters working on him didn’t seem concerned. They worked steadily and methodically to fix his body.
“I’m here,” she said as they turned to his hips and legs, giving her room near his head.
“Hey,” he said weakly, his face bunched up tightly in pain.
“You can talk,” she said, giving him a very tender kiss.
“Believe it or not, despite everything else that happened, my jaw stayed intact,” he said with a little laugh.
Stephanie frowned. “Why couldn’t he have broken that first?” she joked, drawing a smile from the man she loved mere moments before he screamed again as his leg was wrenched and jerked back into position, bones that were already healing incorrectly having to be rebroken.
“Are you going to live?” she asked, needing to know.
“I think so,” he told her honestly. “I think so. It takes a lot to kill me, though I’m going to be a wreck for several days. Any one of the injuries I could probably recover from in six hours or so. But with all of them, my body is going to quickly run out of energy to repair them all. So, it’ll just take time.”
She sagged to the ground next to him with relief, nuzzling her head up against his. “Oh thank God,” she said, feeling her tension depart with a sudden speed that left her tired.
The roar of engines from nearby had not only her, but all the shifters, looking up and around.
All around them, motorized vehicles were emerging from the forest, even as helicopters swung in overhead, already dropping men from lines. She stood up, seeing more humans piling from massive trucks, and armored vehicles encircling them, the men at the weapons looking grim and battle-tested.
“What the fuck is going on here?” one of the men working on Gabriel said, standing up.
It was the one Luther had called Garrin. She looked at his sleeve and noted that he had the most ranking markers out of all of them.
A human, in response to the question, strode confidently through the lines of shifters, now a mix of human and animal, until he stopped short of Garrin. Stephanie almost laughed. For a human he was a big man, perhaps six two, and fully decked out in combat gear.
Next to Garrin, however, he looked like a pint-sized play toy. The massive shifter had half a foot easily, and probably a hundred pounds of muscle on the man. He would be stupid to try anything.
Still, she saw more and more humans emerging from the forest. All of them holding interesting weapons that didn’t look like normal machine guns.
Must be something special for dealing with the shifters.
The heavy caliber guns on the armored vehicles, cannon and machine gun alike, looked perfectly deadly however, and the shifters were showing proper respect, which must mean that they knew the humans had them fair and square.
“I’m looking for the following people,” the human said, reading off a piece of paper.
“Luther Klein.”
“Aksel Muller.”
“Jarvis Eidelhorn.”
“Garrin Richter.”
“Kiefer Hartmann.”
“And Gabriel Korver.”
Stephanie whirled as she recognized some of the men on the list. They were all Green Bearets.
“What for?” Garrin asked, without revealing he was one of the ones named.
“You have all been identified as shifters who have taken a human for your supposed ‘mate,’ and somehow have infected them with a biological weapon that has turned them into someone like yourselves without express permission.”
“Excuse me?” Garrin asked, his voice icily quiet.
The human sighed and pulled a tablet from a pocket in his vest, opening up a video app on it and pressing play.
Stephanie rocked backward in shock as an image of her boss Andy appeared on the screen.
“And as discovered by our intrepid field reporter Stephanie Holmes, the shifters in Cloud Lake have actually begun kidnapping women and somehow infecting them with their DNA. Apparently this can cause them to be changed into shifters, just like themselves. Or, if not used on a woman they have chosen to become their bedroom slaves, this process apparently kills the human in question. That’s right folks, all they have to do is bite you, and if they don’t want to sleep with you, you die.”
Faces around her were turning to look at her.
“I…” she protested.
That bastard! He’d had a copy of her story somewhere, and had run it anyway, throwing her name out there simply to implicate her and throw her under the bus.
“I didn’t…” she said, starting to shake. “I tried to stop it.” She was babbling.
“Stephanie, did you really do this?”
She looked down at the ground where Gabriel, his voice so weak it barely reached up to her, was staring up at her. The pain in his eyes was no longer that of his injuries. No, what she was seeing now was much deeper, much more profound.
It was the pain of betrayal.
“I didn’t give any names,” she whispered. “I didn’t give any names…”
Gabriel closed his eyes and looked away from her.
“No,” she said, choking up as she tried to speak, to tell him what she’d done, that she’d tried to stop it.
But words wouldn’t come, and Gabriel was no longer listening anyway.
“Where did you get those names from?” Garrin asked, staring angrily at her, but directing his question at the human officer.
“A source,” was all the man would say.
“Well, your sources are wrong,” Garrin replied. “Captain Korver hasn’t done anything wrong. The rest of us haven’t either, though we have taken humans to be our mates, but nothing was done against their will. It was all consensual.”
“My orders are for the six of you,” the human said.
“Why is that?”
“Because the only woman he might have taken is the same one who wrote that story,” she said.
The officer looked at her in surprise, then down at Gabriel, and then back up.
“I see. Well, the other five will have to come with me. You’re outside of Cadia, and human law rules here. You will also be responsible for cleaning up this…mess,” he said callously, waving at the bodies piled everywhere. “And probably a hefty fine to be levied against you as well. Just be lucky no humans were harmed out here.”
Garrin snarled, and some of the other shifters tightened in a circle around the human.
Guns snapped up and were cocked, the metallic noises echoing in a vast circle around all the shifters as the humans on the far side became aware of what was happening.
“I wouldn’t try that, if I were you,” the human said.
As if to emphasize his point, the sky flashed bright and shook with a sharp bang from the lightning strike.
Garrin growled, but then he motioned to the others, and five shifters began a slow walk behind the human leading them back to his lines.
“Rest easy, Cadians,” Garrin said. “This will all get worked out.”
Stephanie had a really bad feeling that that wasn’t the case. She couldn’t think of a good reason for the humans intervening like this. They were trying to provoke a fight, to get the massed shifters to come after them. They couldn’t just let five good men be taken away like that!
“You’re just going to stand there and let them do that?” she asked at the assembled group.
“Lady, we wouldn’t stand a chance against that many heavily armed troops,” one shifter said with a snort. “Besides, if you’re so against it, maybe you shouldn’t have gone to the press.”
“She is the press!” another voice shouted from farther back.
