by Bec McMaster
Grunts sounded nearby. Jake swore, then a shotgun discharged.
Mia screamed a little, ducking down, even though the gun hadn’t been pointed anywhere near them. Jake punched Rykker, and then the shotgun hit the ground with a clatter. He slammed Rykker back against the cell door.
Surely someone would hear the noise. She didn’t know what to do. There was so much blood, and if Jake didn’t take Rykker down now, then there might be more of it.
"Let me out!" the warg in the cage bellowed, rattling the door on his cell until he could no longer bear the burn of the silver on the bars.
The two men staggered toward them, shirts tearing as they wrestled. Rykker was bigger, but Jake knew every trick in the book.
“Jake!” she screamed, curling over McClain protectively as they staggered back into her.
Both men went down, and she took a boot to the thigh. McClain’s hand curled around her wrist as though he was trying to protect her.
“Son of a bitch,” Jake swore, landing flat on his back.
Rykker pressed a knee to his chest, his hands curling around Jake’s throat.
“Jake!” Ellie screamed.
“G-get the gun,” Jake choked out.
Mia didn’t know what to do. She couldn't leave McClain. Beneath her hands his chest began to shake. He was still bleeding, still trying to breathe, a horrible rattling sound that made her feel sick.
But if Rykker took Jake down, then she and McClain were sitting ducks.
"On it!" Ellie scrambled for the spent shotgun. Gripping the hot barrel with her blood-slick hands, she slammed the heavy butt down across Rykker’s shoulders. It was just enough to break his grip on Jake’s throat. Jake slammed his palm up under Rykker’s chin, and went after him when Rykker rolled.
Ellie stood there with the gun raised again, as if she didn't know what to do. The two men grappled again. Jake drove Rykker into the silver-coated bars of the warg cell, and head-butted him.
There was movement within the cell. A shadow loomed behind Rykker’s shoulder and he made a shocked noise, his eyes shooting open wide as he gasped.
Jake slammed his forearm across the reiver’s throat, but the bastard slumped against him one fist curling Jake’s collar, as if to plead for help.
“What the…?” Jake stepped back, and Rykker hit the floor face-first, his back a bloody ruin.
In the cell, the warg withdrew bloody claws through the bars. "I'm McClain's friend, Johnny Colton."
Ellie turned the shotgun on him even though she had no shells. Jake’s shoulders heaved, and he took a limping step sideways, clutching at his ribs. Bethany and Sara cowered in the corner.
“Are you all right?” Mia gasped.
“Peachy.” Jake leaned against the opposite wall, as though, now that the fight was over, he could barely keep himself on his feet. "He never mentioned you."
"He wouldn't," Colton replied dryly. "When I say 'friend,’ I use that word loosely. But we... know each other."
McClain's chest gave a racking heave beneath her hands. She touched his face, leaving bloodied fingerprints there. "Is there a medical kit somewhere around here? Something? Anything?"
Ellie shoved Rykker with her boot, and his body rolled over like a slab of heavy beef.
Down. Glassy-eyed and dead.
Ellie looked up at Colton. “I don’t know whether to say thanks, or not.”
The warg's dark eyes met her own. “Don’t thank me just yet.” His gaze slid sideways, to where McClain gasped beneath Mia's hands. McClain's face was rapidly turning gray. "He's dying. Let me out and I might be able to help."
"Yeah, right." Jake crawled toward her, his face paling when he saw the damage. “Mia—”
“I know you’ve tended wounds before,” she broke in, ignoring what he was about to say. McClain’s skin felt clammy to the touch, and his eyes rolled back in his head. She pressed her fingers to his throat. The second she found his thready pulse, a wave of relief burst over her.
“Please, Jake,” Mia whispered in desperation. “I can’t lose him. I can’t!”
Not when she’d just found him. Not when she’d only just begun to open her heart to him.
She shot a look at Bethany. "Your mother's a healer...."
"I know a little, but not enough for this," Bethany cried, tears sliding down her cheek. "I don't know what to do."
And she'd been through too much in the past couple of days to pull herself together.
Jake shot Mia a look from where he had peeled back the shirt she’d used to staunch the blood. He swallowed visibly. “Mia….”
It was the kind of tone she didn’t want to hear. Words she knew she wouldn’t like. “No! Don’t you dare say it.” Even though her hands were covered with blood, she wouldn’t believe it. McClain still breathed. There was still a chance.
Her eyes pricked with tears.
“He’s got a punctured lung,” Jake said hesitantly.
“I can help him,” Colton’s voice insisted.
"I thought I told you to shut up?" Jake snarled.
But Mia looked up at the warg. "How? Are you a surgeon?”
“No.”
“Then how can you help?” Her eyes were hot. She didn’t think she could afford to give herself any false hope right now. “Don’t bullshit me. Not now. Can you save him?”
Colton tilted his head toward the wall and the ring of keys that hung there. In the distance someone screamed as the war games kicked into gear in the arena above them. “I can save his life. But you need to act now, or you’ll lose the chance.”
“Why should I trust you? McClain clearly didn’t,” she replied.
There was a long thoughtful silence, as he considered the prone man at her feet. “I have a lot of amends to make. Starting with McClain.” He met her gaze again. “I can save his life, Mia. But you won’t like it.”
"Jesus Christ, Mia!" Ellie snatched at the keys, trying to find the right one.
A chill sprang down Mia's spine as she eyed Colton's hands, still covered in Rykker's blood. Her mind caught up to what he was trying to say. Nobody deserved that fate. She'd rather see McClain die peacefully than turn his life into a nightmare. “I won’t let you make him a monster like you are. He wouldn't want that.”
Jake caught her hand. He swallowed. "He won't have to."
Colton’s lips merely twisted. “True. But the clock's running out, Mia. Time to choose.”
Twenty-Two
IN THE END it wasn’t a choice. McClain’s breath started to rattle in his lungs, and Mia met Ellie's eyes. "Do it," she whispered, feeling like an inmate taking that last long walk. "Open Colton's cage."
“Mia,” Jake warned, but she was no longer listening to him.
“You got a better idea, Jake?” Ellie put the key in the lock, listening to the metallic click. “You’d better not be lying to us, Colton. You'd better not make him a warg, or hurt him."
"What about me?" Zarina called from the cell next to Colton's. She'd spat her gag out and lay on the floor, still hogtied.
"We'll deal with you later," Ellie told her.
And then she unlocked the cell.
Colton moved fast, but Jake had the shotgun now and had reloaded with shells from Rykker’s belt. He pumped the shotgun, and Colton held his hands up in the air.
“I’m not going to hurt her. Or him.” Colton knelt by McClain’s side and rested a hand on his forehead.
“Is he…?”
“Still alive,” Colton murmured. “Though not for long.” Grabbing McClain’s shirt by the collar, he started dragging her man toward the cell.
“What are you doing?” Mia demanded.
Colton laid McClain on the floor in the middle of the cell. “You… Jake?” When Jake nodded, he gestured to the cell door. “Make sure you’re ready to lock it if need be.” He looked between the bars of his cell toward Zarina. "I'd roll a little further away if I were you."
Mia didn’t understand. But Jake nodded and handed her the shotgun before sl
ipping the keys in the lock. He held the cell door slightly ajar.
Colton looked up at her, and she saw some sort of message in his eyes that she didn’t want to understand. Then he started unbuttoning McClain’s shirt. “Be prepared,” Colton said softly.
There was something hanging around McClain’s throat. The wolf's head medallion he wore.
With a sharp jerk, Colton tore it from around McClain’s throat, then danced back out of reach.
McClain screamed, his spine arching off the floor. She’d never heard anything like that in her life.
Zarina's eyes bugged out of her head, and she swore and rolled across the floor away from him.
“What did you do to him?” Mia demanded, but Jake shoved her out of the way, and Colton slid back through the cell door, slamming it shut behind him.
Ellie locked it.
Inside the cell McClain spasmed violently.
Mia couldn’t just stand there. She grabbed the bars of the door, but Jake wouldn’t let her open it. "What did you do to him?" She turned on Colton. "You promised! What did you do? Did you scratch—"
“No! He didn't scratch him.” Jake dragged her back, hauling her into his arms. “Mia, he’s… he’s changing. I told you about the medallion on that warg up north, didn't I? This is who McClain's always been. Or what. I—I should have told you the moment I realized what he was.”
And that was when she saw the horrible truth.
Muscle bulged in McClain’s thighs as if something moved under the skin. Fur sprouted along the backs of his hands, and his jeans tore as his body began to change. McClain screamed again, his mouth elongating and razor-sharp teeth erupting through pale gums.
A warg. McClain was a warg.
"The transformation can heal him," Colton murmured, watching sadly. "They tried to create something pre-Darkening that could win any war. A soldier with faster reflexes and greater strength than any other, one that could heal from almost any wound. Of course, it all went horribly wrong, and then the Darkening hit. Man shouldn't mess with nature."
Mia stumbled back as Jake dragged her away from the cell, her entire body numb with shock. The change continued violently, an enormous hulking monster tearing itself free of McClain’s clothes. The screams of pain faded, leaving behind the angry huffing of something… not human.
“Adam,” she whispered, letting Jake wrap his strong arms around her.
McClain rolled to his elbows and knees, still jointed like a wolf-man, albeit one with teeth and claws. Light glinted off his tawny fur. For a second she almost thought she saw something human in his eyes. Then his gaze locked on Jake, and he threw himself at the bars, the impact making them shudder.
Mia squealed as Jake hauled her out of the way.
“Let her go!” Colton snapped. “He’s reacting to you.”
Jake surrendered her with a hard swallow. “What do you mean he’s reacting to me?”
Colton shot her a look, one hand held out in a placating manner. “She’s his woman, no?”
No. Not like this. Mia's jaw dropped open. “He’s a monster,” she said, shock stealing her words.
And McClain lifted his muzzle to the sky and howled, a long, sad, echoing sound.
Jake and Ellie took the girls to see if anyone heard the ruckus in the cells, taking the shotgun with them. Colton showed the others another way out that nobody had seen, barred the main door, then knelt beside her to wait. McClain—or what had once been McClain—paced the cell.
“How?” Mia asked hollowly.
“Usual way,” Colton muttered, raking a hand through his silky black hair. “He got clawed up. Turned.”
She shook her head. “No. How does this… this amulet stop him from changing?”
She could remember Jake sitting in her bar, telling her about the warg up North who’d lived among a town unnoticed for years. Had that been McClain? She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around this. Wargs were monsters. That was an inescapable Badlands truth, one that little children learned at their parents’ knees.
But McClain….
She kept getting flashbacks to moments when he’d smiled at her. The night she’d fallen asleep in his arms, feeling not just safe, but… something else. As though nothing bad in the world could ever touch her again. The way he’d been drinking in her bar for that entire month, as though fleeing from something. That time he’d saved them all from the revenants at the tor, heedless of his own safety, volunteering to help virtual strangers save their people, when their friends in town wouldn’t even lift a finger.
How could she put the two together? Hero and monster. How did that mesh?
If you knew my truth, Mia, then you wouldn’t smile at me like that….
She felt sick in the stomach. With her history, she’d kept herself at arm’s length, especially when he’d admitted that he had secrets. But now she knew them… she couldn’t hate him for keeping them. He’d known she wouldn’t look at him the same way.
Ugh.
"I don't know." Colton shrugged. "I never needed one to keep me from shifting."
She eyed him sideways.
There was a stillness to the man that made him seem like he was always watching the world around him. "You control it?" she asked.
Colton scratched at the stubble on his jaw. "I'm different to him. I was born this way. It's never been a problem for me." Dark lashes shuttered over his eyes. "The first change happened during puberty. I was under Bartholomew Cane's thumb then, so maybe that's it. He was the warg who changed McClain, and another man named Luc Wade. He... he was—"
"A monster?" she suggested.
"Yes, but you think a warg is a monster." Colton looked at her. "A warg is a beast. It's hungry, it's thirsty, vicious, and violent, but... that is the nature of the beast within. It thinks of survival—of food, and water, and fucking—and it has no concept of human things, like revenge or sadism. That's the human inside it, not the beast. Cane was pure, cold evil. He did what he did because he liked to. Seeing people suffering... he got off on it."
"Why can none of the others control the shift?"
In the cell next to McClain, Zarina sat up, her arms still bound behind her. Somehow she'd slipped the ropes around her feet, but she seemed more interested in what Colton was saying than in escaping.
Colton shrugged. "Maybe they could if they taught themselves to? It's not easy, but if you have the right motivation.... Well. Last year Bartholomew Cane meant to bring McClain and Luc Wade to heel, so he captured Luc's kid, Lily. Used Lily to draw Luc and his woman, Riley, into a trap. When Luc got there, Cane forced him and Riley into a room together for the night. Took Luc's medallion off him. Cane wanted Luc to tear her apart with his own claws. Luc turned, but he didn't hurt her, and in the morning, during the middle of the fight, I shot Cane."
Mia drew back in horror. She couldn't even imagine wishing such pain on another person, warg or not—to force them to kill someone they loved. Colton was right. That was pure evil.
"I can force a partial shift," Colton said, and lifted his hand. It began to shift, hair crawling up the back of his hand, and claws erupting through his nail beds. "The only other man I've met who could do this was Luc, but he couldn't seem to stop himself from transforming when night falls. I can." He tipped his head toward McClain, then shook his hand and watched as it began to revert. "And he doesn't seem to be able to control it at all."
Zarina cursed under her breath. "That's impossible."
Colton wiggled his human fingers at her. "Sorry, sweetheart, but it's not."
The color bleached from Zarina's face.
It was too much to take in. Mia wrapped her arms around her legs and drew them in to her chest. "What do I do?"
She'd been trying to tell herself that there was no future between her and McClain, but the second he'd been shot in the chest, she'd felt the weight of that loss threaten to crush her. She'd begged—prayed—that he wouldn't be taken from her, and now her prayers had been answered.
In a way.
Mia buried her face in her hands. McClain still paced the cell, watching her and growling every now and then if Colton got too close to her. She was so grateful that he was still alive, but she couldn't bring herself to look at him. Everything she'd thought about him had been blown to ashes.
"What were you planning to do," Colton asked carefully, "if you hadn't found out?"
Nothing. Walk away. Maybe. She didn't know. She knew what she'd been telling him, and herself. Loudly. Vocally. One night and all that bullshit. But something inside her had known that there was something different about McClain. He was not the sort of man she'd have ever forgotten. And maybe there'd been the occasional thought of "what if" that lingered in her heart.
What if he didn't walk away at the end of this?
What if they rescued Sage and the other girls, and survived?
What if there could be more than just one night?
He was it for her. She might not have accepted it just yet, but she knew what she felt for McClain was like nothing she'd ever felt before. Mia's shoulders slumped. "My people will never accept this."
"I don't think it matters if your people accept it or not." Colton watched her with wise eyes. "You've clearly spent some time together, and all this time you never realized what he was hiding."
That's because she'd thought it was impossible. Wargs haunted the desert nights. They tore people apart and killed indiscriminately. Or at least that was what she'd always believed, even though Jake hinted that they could pass as human. It just seemed inconceivable.
But here sat Colton, and he seemed human enough.
"I thought the two of you were enemies," she said. "You almost sound like you hope I stay with him."
Colton shrugged. "It'd be nice... to know that the dream could come true, you know?"
And she realized that it wasn't McClain he was speaking about at all.
Her heart gave a sideways shift in her chest. She hadn't been thinking about this from McClain's perspective at all.
