Nadia came to stand next to Dominick without an ounce of trepidation in the face of the nearly feral wolf, and studied Raven for a moment, before she tipped her head in a bow of respect. “Thank you. I’ll make sure he gets out of here alive.”
Without giving him more time to protest, Nadia grabbed Dominick’s arm and dragged him away.
As soon as they left, Durant stalked toward her, his eyes having turned a molten gold.
He was pissed.
She wasn’t aware of backing away until she slammed into solid rock.
He didn’t stop until he was right in her face. “You wanted this.”
The accusation stung…because he was correct. When she reached out to touch him, he caught her wrist, holding her hand away from him.
The rejection hurt more than if he’d smashed his hand into her chest and squeezed her heart. “I need to do this. I can survive anything. Rylan and these people can’t.”
He cupped her chin, his touch rough when he saw there was nothing that he could do to stop her. “You are more fragile than you realize. It’s too risky.”
“Please.” Raven leaned into him, trying not to care when he didn’t gather her close. “Trust me.”
His growl thundered in the confined space, not the possessive and pleased rumble she was familiar with and treasured, but the kind that said he was all kinds of pissed off. He kept his gaze trained on her, like she was prey, just seconds away from sweeping her up in his arms and taking her away, her wishes bedamned.
“I have a plan. I’m not doing this rashly.”
His face hardened further if possible, and he leaned in closer. “I don’t care.”
The snarl should have frightened her, but Raven wanted nothing more than to pull his mouth down on hers to show him he was just as terrified. “You need to let them take me. You and the rest of the pack need to escape. You’re the only ones who will be able to find me…afterward.”
When he opened his mouth to snarl more words at her, she placed a gentle finger over his lips. “Check the news for any unexplained storm patterns. Once you narrow it down, search for any place with abnormal energy consumption. Then come and get me the hell out of there. Understand?”
She was going to be thrust back into the hell she spent most of her life trying to escape, horrors that still gave her nightmares.
She was trusting her pack to come for her.
Durant leaned down, his forehead resting against hers, finally understanding that her plan was the best option. “You better stay alive until I come for you.”
Stark terror swelled in her chest with the knowledge she was finally going to have to face her past.
She just hoped she lived through it.
It took ten minutes to clear the caves of innocent shifters. The maze was now in place on the cave floor, so they would be able to bottleneck the soldiers and take care of them one at a time. About a dozen people remained behind.
Raven nodded to Nadia. “I can hear them coming through the tunnels. You need to collect the rest of your men and leave.”
Energy crackled along Raven’s skin as she struggled against the need to bring the fight to them and collapse the tunnels. Only the last time she did that, she ended up taking down everything. She couldn’t risk her people being crushed in the backlash.
No, she had a plan. She needed to stick to it.
It was the only way she could find Rylan in time.
That didn’t stop her stomach from twisting itself up in knots over the pain and horror awaiting her.
When Raven turned away from the entrance, it was to see that no one had moved.
One of them shouted from behind a boulder, “We’re not going anywhere. This is our home, and we’re going to defend it.”
The fools!
“You’re going to get yourselves killed, you idiots. I’m trying to buy you time to escape.” She didn’t need more deaths on her conscience. Her hands were already stained with enough blood.
“Not killed. We’re going to help delay them. If it looks like we can’t defeat them, we’ll retreat, and make sure the others aren’t followed.”
Raven didn’t like it. “Fine, but your group will remain behind me. If I go down, you leave immediately.”
Nadia nodded then gave a sharp whistle. Her wolves leapt and shimmied up the walls like monkeys—gravity not affecting them in the least—while others slipped into cracks and crevices so tiny, Raven hadn’t noticed them.
In seconds, they’d vanished.
It wasn’t good enough. “If they stay, they will die.”
The wolves had the innocence of children.
It hurt to know that they would be harmed.
“They volunteered, wanting vengeance against the people who did this to them. They might appear innocent, but they still remember their time in the labs. They know what they’ve lost. They want their vengeance.” Nadia held up her hand before Raven could protest. “If things get too bad, I’ll pull them back with us.”
“Promise?” Raven turned and confronted Dominick. “Promise you’ll get everyone out.”
She gave a tiny nod toward the rest of her pack. He seemed to understand her command. “Promise.”
A second whistle sounded.
All the lanterns in the cave went out at once.
No sense in giving the humans an advantage, when shifters could see in the dark.
The wait had to be nothing more than a few minutes, but it seemed to last an eternity. Durant took up a position to her left, while Griffin stood firm at her right. Though she didn’t like it, London and Randolph stood closer to the entrance of the cavern. They were the best fighters, and planned to use guerilla tactics, snatching the soldiers away one at a time, and thin the herd before they reached the rest of the group.
Both men promised to remain hidden, and fall back before they could be overwhelmed only when she threatened to wade into the battle and retrieve them if they didn’t obey.
Then all discussions ceased when half a dozen green flares were tossed into the cave.
Caustic chemicals seeped into the air, interfering with the shifters’ sensitive noses.
Underneath, the smell of humans swept through the cave, along with the oil they used to clean their guns. Raven prayed they weren’t an extermination team. The labs had learned by experimentation what kind of bullets would do the most damage to shifters.
The first soldiers slipped into the cavern, staying low to the ground, wearing full tactical gear and body armor, including night vision goggles.
They came prepared.
The first few men darted forward, seeking shelter behind boulders and stalagmites, kneeling to lay suppressive fire, while more and more men poured from the crack like a swarm of cockroaches.
Static from their radios was a constant undertone, every sound amplified in the confined space and absolute darkness only found in caves.
The soldiers split up in smaller teams of five, the leaders using hand signals to direct their men. None of the shifters so much as twitched until the soldiers were more than halfway through the cavern. When they made their move, she almost missed it.
One shifter reached out of his crevice and yanked the last soldier in the group inside with him. Besides a small scuffle, there wasn’t a sound.
Another shifter inched down from the wall, grabbed a soldier by the throat to cut off all sound, and hoisted the man clear up in the air, so it appeared that he’d just vanished. Soon dead bodies littered the cave.
It only took seconds for the soldiers to notice their missing men.
“Back-to-back, people.”
The soldiers immediately partnered up, leaving no side unprotected as they continued to push forward.
A small burst of gunfire came from the right, tiny flashes of light from the muzzle giving away their positions. The concussion from the gunfire was deafening. A man screamed, and more gunfire erupted.
“They’re in the bloody walls. Look up! Look up!” The frantic cry had all the s
oldiers tipping their guns and flashlights toward the walls, and the real fighting began.
Raven hated sitting on her hands doing nothing. When she tried to stand, Durant grabbed her arm and yanked her back down. “Wait.”
The wolves were no longer being stealthy. They would streak past a soldier, their claws extended, slashing and hacking at anything they could reach. The side of one soldier’s face was filleted, his skull clearly visible as he screamed and fired his gun at anything that moved, not caring if he hit his own men.
Another streaked behind a second soldier, cleaving the flesh from the back of the man’s leg.
The soldier crumpled with a scream and bled out within seconds.
Body armor protected most of the soldiers, a special neck guard blocking the claws from penetrating, so the shifters used force to crush the armor.
One shifter picked up a man and slammed him into the cave wall, ignoring the bullets riddling him, and cracked the armor open like a walnut.
Blood began to flow freely on both sides.
Randolph and London were nothing but shadows as they moved through the cavern, disposing of men quickly and brutally. London picked up one man who had a litter of shifter bodies piled up around him and squeezed. A terrified scream escaped the soldier, while blood began to pour out of every orifice. Even from the distance, she could hear bones crack as London literally crushed the man into a ball. There couldn’t have been any bones left unbroken when he dropped the corpse.
“They’re not even bothering to capture them.” Raven was appalled as the soldiers began to systematically exterminate the rogues one by one.
“If they wanted to capture the wolves, they could have come in at any time over the years and taken them.” Durant’s eyes were grim. “They are after bigger fish.”
Bile rose at the back of her throat at the senseless loss.
This was all her fault.
If she had never come here, they would have gone on surviving for years.
Raven turned toward Nadia. “Call them back.”
Tears crowded her eyes, then her chin firmed and she shook her head. “They won’t listen. Their hatred is too strong.”
Nadia had known this would happen.
Though Raven understood the tactic, she’d hoped Nadia was different from other alphas.
London darted forward, pulling back some of the wounded, finishing off the soldiers who were injured. When a sniper began picking off the wolves from a protected spot behind a column, London lifted a boulder the size of a horse and threw it at them.
The resounding crash shook the cave. The shooting halted as men shrieked in pain.
“Fall back! Fall back!”
The soldiers darted toward the entrance. A few of the wolves yipped in excitement, and gave chase. But the soldiers didn’t leave. They flattened themselves against the wall, weapons at the ready, when a second team entered the cave.
“Shifters.”
These men were armed with nothing but teeth and claws.
Worse, they were healthy, and twice the size of Nadia’s rogues.
Though Nadia’s wolves were well trained, these guys were better.
The wolves didn’t stand a chance when the shifters began to use their senses to track the rogues down one by one and systematically tore them apart.
They were vicious and brutal, not hesitating to rip out throats with their claws and teeth, or plunge a hand in a man’s chest and rip out his heart.
There was no healing from that.
They seemed to take pleasure in the hunt, yipping and howling, instilling terror in the younger wolves. They would chase down any rogue who tried to run to safety, no compassion in their expression, just the pure, wild joy of an animal taking down its prey.
Raven couldn’t sit back and do nothing, not anymore.
Dodging away from Durant, she darted forward, wincing when he swore viciously. Knowing she only had seconds before he caught up with her, she dropped the shields she’d spent her whole life building. The air around her began to crackle, and she gathered the energy in the center of her palm until a sphere formed, then lobbed it at a shifter who lifted his foot to crush the wolf he’d just beaten to a pulp.
The impact knocked the shifter back, his eyes nearly rolling up in his head as the voltage jolted through him. Without the ability to shift, the extra energy had to be sheer torture. When the creature finally straightened, there was nothing human in him remaining. He snarled, his inch-long fangs bared, and he charged directly toward her.
Raven braced herself, refusing to retreat, gathering more current. Griffin leapt between them and tackled the beast to the ground. The fight was brutal, bones cracking with each blow as they struggled for dominance. Griffin took a beating, but didn’t pay any attention to the injuries as he grabbed the shifter by the throat and twisted. Blood gushed, bones snapped, and vacant eyes, so full of hate just moments ago, now stared up at her blankly.
When a second shifter darted for his back, Raven didn’t hesitate and launched another sphere. It hit him square in the face, nearly flipping the man head over heels.
Griffin whirled, but Durant was there. He reached down, yanking the shifter’s head back. The shifter snarled and tried to heave the tiger off him, but it was too late. Durant gave a vicious twist, snapping the man’s neck.
The violence sickened her, but something in the darkness of her core woke, reveling in the mayhem. She barely resisted the primal urge to let it loose, not sure she would ever be able to pull it back if that happened, afraid it might consume the last of her humanity.
Movement at the far side of the cave caught her attention.
Randolph and London were cornered, fighting back-to-back, giving some of the younger wolves time to retreat. That they could kill this time evened the odds, but there were just too many of them.
Only a handful of the rogues managed to retreat, darting past Raven at full speed and disappearing in the escape tunnels, but far too many were left behind to be slaughtered.
Randolph finished off his soldier, nearly ripping the man’s head from his shoulders. Instead of helping London, the bastard disappeared into one of the hidden crevices, where Raven knew he would remain hidden until the fight was done.
Chapter Eleven
No matter what she threw at the soldiers, her small group was too outnumbered to win.
A vicious blow caught London right in the spine, slamming him forward into the cave wall. He turned, snapped off a three-foot stalagmite and launched it through the air.
The shifter tried to jump out of the way, but even with his advanced reflexes, the missile was a blur. It impaled the beast, cracking ribs and shoving out most of his internal organs as it ripped through his body. She could see through the man’s torso as he crumpled to the ground.
“London. Retreat.”
Even whispering, she knew he heard her when he hesitated for a few seconds, the muscles of his arms straining as he held himself back. Then, with a final nod, London followed Randolph’s example. He leapt in the air, grabbed a small shelf in the wall, and vanished from sight, leaving a small trail of blood behind him. Raven could only sigh in relief.
There was so much blood and death in the cave, she hoped it meant the remaining shifters wouldn’t be able to catch his scent and follow it back to him.
But there was one way to make sure they would be safe.
Eliminate all the shifters.
If she pumped them full of enough voltage, they would forget about their prey and come after her. Raven gathered more current, pulling it from her bones, ignoring the way her body ached like she’d been out in the cold too long. She tossed it at the nearest shifter, hitting him in the shoulder.
It didn’t even slow him down.
Durant shot forward, aiming low, knocking the shifter clear off his feet.
Only three more of the creatures remained.
The soldiers shoved away from the walls and began to push forward after the shifters. They’d switched gun
s, pulling the smaller sidearms from holsters strapped on their thighs and began to take aim at the few remaining shifters. “Head toward the female. We want her and any purebloods taken alive.”
Darts winged through the air, targeting every wolf they encountered. One dart slowed the rogues down, leaving them vulnerable, two darts left them disoriented, a third dropping them to the ground unconscious.
As the shifters advanced, they took malicious pleasure in stomping on the wolves who were shot so full of chemicals they couldn’t move, snapping as many bones as possible while they searched for their next target.
One shifter hesitated as a young wolf cowered before him, trying desperately to pull his broken, mangled leg behind him. In response to his reluctance, a soldier lifted a black remote. The shifter immediately grabbed the collar clamped around his throat and gave a yip of pain. His eyes went wild, and he reached down, slamming the rogue’s head against the ground repeatedly until the fallen wolf stopped twitching, his skull almost completely incinerated.
Sweat actually beaded on her brow while she formed another sphere, then slammed it into the shifter’s back. The beast bellowed in pain, his back arching at an impossible angle. When he whirled toward her and snarled, Dominick drew back his arm and knocked the shifter back a few feet. Nadia worked in tandem with him, darting forward, using her claws to rip up whatever flesh she could reach, slowly whittling him down until bones gleamed in the dim light.
Bile rose in the back of Raven’s throat as she sought to gather more energy, but the thickness of the rocks blocked her attempts. Even if she could push through the stone, there were no power lines for hundreds of miles, no source for her to use. It took twice as long to gather enough current from her abused body to form a small globe, and pain seared along her veins like she was being shredded from the inside out.
Only a few shifters remained, the soldiers forcing them to advance.
Raven held the sphere, allowing the current to sizzle in her palm. “Retreat.”
Her throat was dry as she spoke the dreaded words that would leave her at the mercy of the labs once again.
Electric Night (A Raven Investigations Novel Book 5) Page 12
