by Bec McMaster
He rifled through her pack. “Need a torch,” he grunted. More fabric rustled. The sound of his shirt sliding over his shoulders. “Hold this.”
He shoved the gun into her hands.
Two seconds later, flint rasped and fire flickered, highlighting Wade’s kneeling form. Riley caught just a glimpse of burnished skin and his tight black tank before it died, leaving her retinas scarred with the image of him.
One more flicker, and the light caught. Wade yanked a battered flask out of his hip pocket and tore his shirt into strips. He dampened the shirt, wrapped it around a stick, and lit the end. Fire bloomed. It wasn’t great, but it would do.
Stuffing the flint into his pocket, he lifted the homemade torch high, the muscles in his shoulder straining. Both of them peered down the passage.
“I assume you know how to shoot? Something more than a man’s foot?” he asked.
“I hunt,” she replied. The shotgun’s weight took away some of her fear. That and Wade’s brusque tone. He moved like a man who knew what he intended to do. That was almost as reassuring as the gun.
“Hold this,” he said, handing her the torch. Its heat scalded her skin, but she held it. Wade knelt and dragged the hem of his jeans up, revealing heavy boots and a knife sheathe strapped around his calf. The knife glided free with a steely rasp, and he spun it in his fingers as if learning the feel of it. Blue eyes met hers. “You see anything, you shoot it. Between the eyes if you can. Don’t go for a body shot. It barely slows ‘em, unless the impact knocks them down. If you can’t hit the head, go for the knees. Don’t leave one at your back, you’ll be amazed what they can survive. So a shot to the knee, then one to the head when it goes down. Stop shooting when it stops moving, not before. Don’t get within range of their hands. They’re faster than you think.”
“You’ve come up against a revenant before?”
“I used to hunt ‘em.” His gaze roved the corridor. Head cocked. Listening. He reached back for the torch. “Was a bounty hunter once. Out on the Rim.”
“Is that how you got clawed up?”
He shot her a short look. Question time over. “Only other way to kill a revenant’s by fire.” He gestured at the torch in his hand. “I don’t need to see. That’s there to make sure they stay down.”
“Got it.”
He gave her his back, standing lightly on his toes, peering into the darkness ahead. Tension rippled across his broad shoulders, and his grip flexed on the hilt of the heavy hunting knife. “You get bitten, and I’ll shoot you myself.”
A terrifying thought. Her mouth went dry. “Thanks.”
“Try not to get bitten though. I need you in one piece.”
Riley shot a hard glare at his back. Prince Charming in all his glory. “Won’t the wargs hear the shots?”
“Plan’s changed. Do you want the boy or not?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. They know we’re here,” he said. “The shot’ll echo through the mountains. They’ll think we’re coming from outside.”
“But they’ll still know we’re coming. We’ve lost the element of surprise.”
He shot her one last hot look over his shoulder, the flames glinting off the hard sapphire of his eyes. “Darlin’, your task is to survive the revenants. Then think about the job ahead.”
* * *
Damned foolish quest.
A frown tugged his brows down, and Lucius stared into the dark as he crept along the passage. The cause for the lack of light soon became clear – every fluorescent globe had long since been smashed, pieces of it littering the floor and crunching beneath his boots.
He didn’t even know why he was doing this. Why bother with the boy? He had what he wanted – a way to get at McClain. All he had to do was gag Riley, toss her over his shoulder, and head out into the desert. He’d never even give the boy another thought.
Riley swallowed hard behind him. And that, he thought, was his reason. Fear rolled off her in waves. Terrified of the dark, of being left alone, of the revenants, and she was still willing to risk this. If she could face her fears, then he wouldn’t stop her. An odd mix of admiration and frustration rolled through him. The woman was hellish tough, yet strangely vulnerable. A damned tempting combination.
Besides, he’d given his word.
Something shuffled in the dark ahead. Lucius held his hand up, and the sudden silence told him she’d frozen. A little rasp sounded as she sucked in a breath.
Dust stirred. One. Two. Maybe three creatures. More behind them. Dull cataract-filmed eyes reflected the firelight. No sound of breathing – they didn’t as a rule. Which meant they couldn’t make a single noise. Silent predators that haunted the dark depths of the borderlands. More a soulless construct now, rather than a personality. All they felt was hunger.
His grip on the knife eased. Come on, you bastards. It had been a long time since he’d hunted revenants. Out on the Rim, when he’d ridden as a hunter, they’d earned fifty credits a scalp. A man could feed his entire settlement on that kind of money. Course, the risk was greater than the reward, and he’d been human then. Indestructible. Young and fucking stupid.
Lucius took a step forward, knife held defensively. He wasn’t stupid anymore. He knew the monsters bit back now.
It didn’t take long for them to overcome their wariness. Wasn’t much to eat out here in the desert, besides the odd coyote or rabbit. Human flesh was just too irresistible, even if the scent of him warned them off.
The lead revenant loped out of the shadows with an odd shuffling gait. It moved quickly, despite the shamble, and the stink hit him full on. Lucius twisted out of the way, sinking the knife into its throat and slicing through the thick, corded muscle. He spun on his heel, torching the straggly ends of the creature’s ratty hair. The stink of burnt hair made him gag, but the fire spread like a lightning strike on dry tinder. Leapt from the dreadlocks to the rough shirt the revenant wore, turning into an inferno.
The creature’s mouth opened in a silent scream, and it tore at its burning hair.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” Riley panted. She worked the shotgun with both hands, her eyes showing far too much white as she pumped it. Strain tightened her mouth, but she aimed into the shadows and pulled the trigger.
The shotgun roared.
Lucius stepped back, kicking the creature in the chest. It staggered back into the oncoming rush of revenants, and three of them went down in a twitching, burning heap. Decaying flesh melted like wet sludge as the cleansing flames leapt from creature to creature.
The one Riley had shot twitched on the ground, a hole blown clean through its forehead. She stepped up to his side, pumped the shotgun, and blew the rest of its head off.
Good girl.
“Come on,” he growled, shoving her in the back. “Keep moving. We’re only drawing attention here. There’s more coming.”
A pair of them shuffled back in the darkness as he stepped forward, waving the torch in a threatening arc. Keeping an eye on the burning heap, he stepped past and gestured Riley after him as she frantically reloaded.
The torch was slowly dying. Lucius reached down and ripped the smoldering femur off one of the revenants before discarding the torch. The sticky flesh and rotting clothes burned a sickly green at the end of the bone, but it was light.
He arched a brow when he saw her sickened gaze. “What?” he mouthed.
He’d seen a hell of a lot of worse things in his time. He’d done worse things. The urge to survive had driven away the last of any squeamishness he might have had.
The corridor was littered with bones as they stalked down it. Mostly squirrel and coyote, but the occasional human skull gleamed in the shadows. Revenants hovered just out of sight. They hunted in packs because they were cowards at heart. One sign of weakness though and they’d be upon him, burying him in numbers, their blunt, stained teeth tearing at his flesh.
A shadowy figure swathed in rags lunged at them from a niche in the rock face. Riley shot it in the face, s
tepping forward grimly as she blew holes in its head. Her expression was stark, her eyes panicked. But her hands never shook.
“You’re gettin’ the hang of that,” he said.
She gave him a thin-lipped smile, reloaded, then jerked the barrel to her shoulder and aimed at him. Lucius swung his arms up to cover his face, but the shot went wide.
Something hit the floor behind him. He looked down at the twitching creature that’d dropped from the ceiling and was silently screaming. One sweep of the improvised torch and the revenant started burning, its body writhing in sickly green flames. Lucius looked up. Son of a bitch had been waiting for him.
“You get bitten and I’ll shoot you myself,” Riley threw his own words back in his face, stepping past him with the gun held warily.
“That’s one of the benefits of being a warg,” he replied, following her. “Immunity from certain infections.”
“Didn’t ever think there’d be a benefit,” she muttered.
He bared his teeth in a smile. “Silver linings and all, darlin’.”
They reached the stairs with no further mishaps. Something had carved a tunnel just past the stairs into the cavern systems. A revenant hissed at him from the shadows, and Lucius stepped forward threateningly. It scurried backward, its milky-white eyes gleaming. He flung the femur after it, and a wall of flame surged up as it struck the creature’s dry clothes and flesh, revealing a whole horde of the damned zombies in the cave beyond.
Dead eyes watched them hungrily, making even him take a step back. The skin on their faces had tightened and drawn back with death, so their stained teeth looked longer and their eyes bulged. There was nothing left of the men and women they’d once been. The pathogen that fueled their cells and made them viable again existed only to feed, to spread the revenant disease.
“Jesus.” Riley wet her lips, easing up the stairs backward, one foot at a time.
Lucius eyed the pack, then followed her. “You don’t usually see so many together.”
“A lot of folks went missing here, years back.” She took another step. They were moving deeper into the shadows now. One of the revenants crept out of the cavern, watching them with hungry eyes. “Folks from Haven,” she murmured. “I keep wondering if I’ll recognize faces.”
Lucius grabbed her arm. “Come on. Let’s move. Save the sentiment for later.”
Riley yanked her arm out of his grip. “You’re a cold-hearted bastard, you know?”
He looked at her. Just looked.
He knew.
“You want the boy back or not? Keep your focus. Don’t let me down now.”
“I won’t,” she snapped.
* * *
The stairs led to the basement levels of Black River. Wade flipped a switch and the emergency lights hummed to life, revealing stark white walls that were almost ghostly in the faded light. The heavy iron door slammed shut behind them, blocking the entrance into the caves... and keeping the revenants locked down in the darkness.
Each cell was sealed, the dusty door slits hiding the blackened interiors. Riley looked at them nervously. Any one of them could be hiding a revenant or two, though the majority downstairs had seemed content to wait in the caves. Something about their knee joints and stairs that didn’t mix well. They could get up them, but it would be a slow progress.
“What the hell were they doing here?” she whispered. “With all these cells?” They’d passed a medical examination room, with the steel chains still hanging from the examination table. Rusty stains marred the white linoleum.
Wade’s vivid blue gaze speared her. “Experiments.”
“I know that. But on what?”
He shrugged, but his voice was quiet when he answered, “Wargs. The government wanted to know what they were, where they come from. And how to use them as weapons.
“They were also performing gene splicing. Trying to mix breeds. That's how they created the shadow-cat – half wolf, half cougar, a hint of something else. They thought that might have been how we came about. Who knows if they were right? Some say wargs have been here for centuries, we just hid it better then. But you can't chain a monster down for long."
The eerie cells took on a new meaning. “You think that’s what happened here? The wargs got free?”
“Most likely.” A bleak smile. “Bet that scared the hell out of ‘em.”
“You find that amusing?”
A hot look that froze the blood in her veins. A look that spoke of a lot of hurt, of pain. Of vengeance. “Yeah,” he said. “I find that amusin’. Look around you, Riley. Just because we're monsters doesn't mean that we don't feel it when you cut us open. I don't like wargs none, but that don't mean I think much of humans either. Or the type of human that did this,” he said, looking around.
Wade strode ahead of her.
Riley settled into a considering silence. The more she learned about him, the more she began to question everything she knew. Wargs were monsters. Everybody knew that. But Wade was an exception she simply couldn’t define.
A cold-hearted prick who’d straight-out told her he planned to use her to kill a man. He was the first to tell her what a monster he was. There was no sympathy, no softness. Just the occasional moment when she wondered if there was something more to the man than he professed.
A strange yearning filled her. A need to know. To understand him. Riley glanced at his broad back, wondering if the stress was doing funny things to her mind.
They climbed through the next two levels without incident. Wade moved slower, leaving the lights off. They’d reached ground level, and enough moonlight gleamed through the windows to see. Outside, the reivers had manned their gun turrets and were sweeping the flat field with their spotlights. Wade was little more than a shadow amongst shadows.
He grabbed her arm and pressed her into the corner suddenly. One hand clapped over her mouth.
Riley froze, the gun pressed between them, and every hot, hard inch of Wade forcing her against the wall. The sweeping lights outside washed over the pair of them, highlighting the very-blue of his eyes, and the stark shadow under his cheekbones. A heavy graze of stubble lined his jaw.
“Reiver,” he mouthed.
Slowly, he removed his hand from her mouth and held a hushing finger to his lips. He took a step back, urging her to stay where she was.
The shadows swallowed him. Riley held still, her heart thundering in her ears. Every sweep of the lights lit up the stark furniture in the room. A meeting room, by the look of it. Twelve chairs around a table, and an old projector half-torn from the wall.
A quiet scuffle caught her ears. She licked her lips, shifted her grip on the gun. She was out of shells, but she could still use it as a club.
Wade reappeared in the doorway and gestured to follow him. His breathing raced, chest rising and falling in a quickened rhythm. From the look on his face, he’d enjoyed the kill just a little too much. The silver charm around his neck winked at her as he turned.
The reiver lay in a twisted heap on the floor, a puddle of dark liquid soaking across the linoleum beneath him. He probably hadn’t even known what had grabbed him.
Riley paused then knelt beside the body, yanking the gun from its cooling clutches. Wade was watching her when she stood, then nodded as she tossed him the spent shotgun.
He stopped beside a closed door, pressing his ear against the heavy steel. His hand slid over the curve of her back, holding her there. Pressing his lips against her ear, he whispered, “I can hear movement. The boy’s whimpering.”
Her chest squeezed. Jimmy. The poor kid.
Riley nodded, quietly cocking the hammer back on the handgun. The click echoed in the empty hallway.
Wade shook his head. “Stay here,” he murmured. “I’ll get him.”
She caught his arm as he started to ease the handle open. Wade met her gaze and shook his head slowly.
“I’ll bring him back to you,” he promised. “Just watch my back.”
Then he vanished through t
he crack in the door.
Leaving her alone with a cooling body on the floor.
* * *
The reiver was standing over the kid, swigging from a bottle. He started undoing his belt, completely oblivious to the danger that stalked him from behind.
Lucius stepped up behind him silently, grabbing him across the mouth and tilting his head back. One quick slash of the knife and the body kicked feebly, the bottle tumbling from its hand.
He caught it with his boot – thank God for lightning-quick reflexes – then eased it onto the pile of blankets the reiver had obviously taken over. His own goddamn blankets. The warg cage gleamed silver in the night, and his packs had been rifled through, his supplies scattered and torn.
The kid, Jimmy, was hog-tied and gagged. He shivered in the dark, the scent of urine staining the air. So frightened he was almost oblivious with it.
Cocking his head, Lucius listened intently. There were shouts from outside. Curses. Someone sprayed a few warning shots into the gulch beyond from the gun turret. No doubt that’s where Colton and his friend would be, hunting for him.
Certain they were alone, he let the body drop and knelt beside the kid. A rough jerk and the gag was free. Before the kid could scream, he clapped a hand over his mouth and leaned close, whispering in his ear. “Riley’s waiting for you.”
The skinny frame collapsed in relief. A sob caught in his hand. Wade ground his teeth together; the kid was near hysterical, a mess. No use trying to sober him up, or shake some sense into him. No time either. Looking around, he lifted the hilt of the blade and dealt Jimmy a neat blow to the back of his head.
It took mere seconds to fetch everything he needed, stuffing it in one of his duffels. Then he hoisted the kid over his shoulder and headed back the way he’d come.
Riley was waiting for him as he made it through the maze of rooms. As he stepped through the door to where he’d left her, he was greeted with the barrel of the handgun. Her eyes widened when she saw the boy slung over his shoulder, and the gun lowered.
