by Laken Cane
He was as huge as he’d always been, intimidating not only because of his size but because of the aura surrounding him.
Was he human, or was he Other?
She figured he was neither, and he was both.
But he seemed somehow diminished, and that was the fault of the unkind path. It’d stolen part of him.
“You need your spear,” she told him.
He shrugged as though the loss hadn’t hurt him, but no one there was fooled.
Jack pulled the strap of the Skyllian shotgun over his head. “I’ve got Will. You take the gun.” He pointed his chin at Rune. “Guard the fuck out of her.”
Strad caught the gun and a long breath slid from between his lips. “What does it do?”
Rune grinned, despite her worry. The shotgun would have helped keep Jack safe, but he was right. He had the assassin. “It does some crazy, crazy shit, berserker. You’ll see soon enough.” Then she sobered and stared around at her men. “Come back to me alive. Doesn’t matter what else happens.”
Jack strode to her, then leaned down to kiss her forehead. “Be safe, honey.” He turned, and with the assassin at his back, jogged across the road, jumped the ditch line, and went to meet the fight.
His roar, eager and somehow bloody, echoed back through the air.
The crew followed, and fifteen seconds in, Rune killed her first human of the evening.
He was the enemy.
And that night, the enemy would die.
Then, there was no more time for thinking. She ran into groups of men holding guns, and she had a second to pray she could get to the guns before the bullets got to her men.
Then there was only blood, pain, and death.
But not hers.
Oh, the fight.
For her, there was nothing so great, so satisfying, so perfect.
She screamed and raced over the ground, her claws out, and she became the killing machine she was.
When she fought, when the blood sprayed into the air and fell down upon her like crimson rain, she forgot everything else. She was not sad or scared or broken.
She was free. She was her monster.
Nothing else.
And that was everything.
Sometime during the battle she became dimly aware she’d accidentally killed an Annex op. Or two. She didn’t care. Not then.
Annex or Next or hunter—their blood tasted the same.
Maybe later she’d care.
She had become the darkness she was chasing.
Men fell—hunters all—and her heart lightened a little more with each kill. Their bodies flew through the air to crash against unforgiving, burnt Wormwood trees, then sank to the ground to allow the thirsty earth to soak up their blood offering.
And they owed it to the graveyard.
Occasionally she saw a shifted Other leap from the shadows to tear out a hunter’s throat, but mostly, they stayed out of it—even though the humans had come to kill them. They were few, and they were afraid.
Rune understood.
She whirled, moving so fast and filled with so much power that she alone could have taken down an army of humans.
Their guns didn’t matter. The bullets penetrated—she felt them, felt the punch, the pain, the millisecond of fear, and then her body expelled the metal and her fear became an ever deepening rage.
She ripped out enemy hearts, bit tender human throats, and drove her claws into vulnerable brains. The humans had no chance.
Not against her.
She was lost in her bloodthirsty joy, but still, something like an itch began to grow stronger on the edge of her mind.
Something was wrong.
As her stomach began to tighten, she rammed her claws into a human’s belly and when he dropped, she turned to face whatever it was sending such fear into her heart.
Raze.
He stood tall and still, and even from the distance she could see an unnatural paleness beneath the blood on his face.
He turned his head to look at her, slowly, carefully.
“Raze?” she called.
Even as she watched, he stumbled, and then, he fell.
All of Wormwood seemed to tremble when he hit the ground.
Raze fell.
He had no Skyllian shotgun, no super strength, no slingshot. He had no immortality. He was not Other.
He was only human.
Crazy talented, a mountain of muscle, fearless. He fought as though he were Other. He fought as though he were invincible.
But he was only human.
And he fell.
“Strad,” she screamed, but she didn’t know why. Strad couldn’t get to the man holding a gun to Raze’s head before she could.
Maybe she just wanted to make him aware.
She didn’t remember moving. One moment she was staring in agonized horror as Raze was about to die, and the next, she was at his side, holding the decapitated head of his attacker in her hand.
She flung away the enemy and knelt. Something kicked her between the shoulder blades and her back began to burn, but she barely noticed.
“Raze,” she said.
He stared up at her with an almost guilty expression. “No blood.”
“No blood,” she whispered. She’d learned her lesson with Z. Never again would she force feed someone to heal him. At least that was what she told herself. “But you won’t need it.”
She couldn’t tell if he was shot or cut, but it didn’t matter. Raze needed to get to a hospital.
He closed his eyes and went quiet, and the deep lines of pain on his face softened. He was so covered with blood she couldn’t tell how much of it was his and how much of it was the enemy’s, but the blood spreading on the ground from the back of his head belonged to him.
Strad knelt beside her. “Annex paramedics are outside the gates. Not safe for them to come to us.”
“Then we’ll go to them.”
A bullet whizzed by her face, ripped the bark off a skinny tree a few yards away, and almost immediately the crack of another gunshot sounded.
The fight had quieted, but there were still humans, and they still held their guns.
“Kill the rest of them,” she told Strad. “I’ll be back.”
She stood, grabbed Raze’s vest, and began to drag him across Wormwood. She hoped he’d stay unconscious. The trek to the gates was not going to be pleasant.
She spotted Denim, once. His eyes widened when he saw her and her cargo, but for only a millisecond. He knew better than to allow himself to get distracted.
All the way to the gates, she kept watch for the rest of her crew, for enemies slipping upon her, for humans in trees with rifles trained on her head. It wouldn’t kill her, but Raze had to get back to the Annex. She couldn’t let an asshole with a gun delay that.
She didn’t see any more of her crew.
Annex medics rushed through the gates when they spotted her, even though she waved them back. “Too dangerous,” she called. “Stay back.”
But they came anyway, pushing a gurney, and she didn’t argue again.
“Tell Eugene he is not to allow this man to die,” she said, her voice hard. She brushed Raze’s blood soaked hair out of his face. “Tell him.”
“We’ll tell him,” one of them promised.
She waited until they’d pushed him through the gates before she turned and ran back into the depths of Wormwood.
Now that Raze had been injured and her brain was no longer saturated with her monster’s fury, she wanted only to see to her people. Killing humans was secondary to that.
But there were still too many fucking humans.
Hatred drove them.
They had to know they had no chance against Annex crews, but even though they watched their numbers dwindle as their allies fell, they didn’t run away.
They just died.
And finally, the Annex and Shiv Crew stood silent and exhausted, surveying a ground littered with the remains of hunters.
The Annex crews had taken losses, as
well.
One of the other crew leaders had lost two of his fighters. The other crew leader had three injured and two dead.
Strad, Jack, Will, and Luciana stood with Rune. They were bloody, but most of it wasn’t theirs.
“You guys sure know how to have a fun time,” Luc said. Then she winced and put a hand to her ribs. “Bastards broke a rib.”
Rune hadn’t seen her arrive. “Leon come with you?”
“Yeah, but I lost sight of him once we came in.”
“Medics right outside the gates,” Rune told her. “Go get checked out. Jack, would you—”
“We’ll take her,” one of the crew leaders said. He looked at Luc. “Want me to carry you?”
“Want me to eat your face?” she growled. “Back off, bitch. Carry me. Fucking ridiculous.”
He shrugged, reddening. “Let’s go,” he told his crew. “Good fight, Shiv Crew.”
Rune gave him a nod, then turned to her crew. “Raze was injured. He’s been taken to the Annex. We’re missing the twins, Leon, and Roma. Let’s find them and get out of here.”
“There are Levi and Denim,” Jack said, and Rune watched as the twins loped toward her.
“You two see Roma?” she asked, when they reached her.
“No,” Levi said. He looked around. “Raze?”
“Injured. He’ll be okay.” He couldn’t not be okay. “Let’s spread out and find Roma and Leon.” She frowned and put a hand to her stomach.
“Rune?” Strad asked.
“My fucking gut,” she whispered. “I don’t think it was all about Raze. Find her.”
Then she left them staring after her as she raced deeper into Wormwood.
An eternity later—she had no idea how much time had passed—she still had not found the girl. She thought she caught a teasing trail of her scent, once. But that might have been wishful thinking.
She stopped running and stood on a small hill in the middle of Wormwood, and clenched her fists. “Roma,” she screamed. “Roma!” She punched her thigh but the pain barely registered. “Roma! Roma…”
But Roma didn’t answer.
Someone did, though.
Leon slid through the darkness, darkness eased by a fat, white moon. “You,” he said, then stood still as a statue with his hands up as she started toward him.
He didn’t meet her eyes, treating her like a wild animal he had to be careful not to challenge. “They take her, Rune Alexander.”
“Show me,” she snarled.
He held his fingers to an oozing gap on temple, and when he walked, he limped.
She didn’t ask him if he was okay. She cared only about Roma.
“They take her.”
She didn’t have to ask him what happened. After a couple of steps, he began to tell her. “I’m fighting when they surround me. Only five people.” He shrugged, then winced. “I get cocky. I have a gun but…” He took his fingers from his temple and showed them to her. His entire hand was dripping blood from the wound on his head. “So do they. They are there for one reason—to take one of yours. They would take me but…maybe they think she’s more important. Maybe they think they kill me. They take her.”
“Who were they?” she asked. But she knew Roma was in the hands of Ben and Sylvia. She was alive, though. They would have had no use for a dead Roma. “All human?”
He pressed his fingers back against his bleeding wound. “Human? Not all, Rune Alexander. At least one of them is a monster.”
She blinked. “Fuck.”
He gestured toward a knot of twisted trees. “When I come here to fight, I think we’ll fight human hunters.” He turned his head and spat onto the ground. “I can handle hunters. But they’re professional, these attackers. And the lady who leads them…she’s desperate. And she don’t care. She has a weapon. Crazy weapon.” He widened his eyes.
“Gun?”
He nodded. “A peculiar gun. She would shoot me but your girl—Roma—she comes out of nowhere, I swear it, nowhere, and shoves me out of the way.”
She shut her eyes in a long, slow blink. Oh Roma. “So she got hit instead.”
He nodded again, soberly. “But the gun is not to kill. It shoots silver—I swear it. Lines of silver, right into your girl. Then a net, and she falls. She saves my life, this girl who barely knows me. I don’t forget.” He took his hand away from his head. “This mess up the ink, yeah?”
“She fought alone,” Rune said, quietly. “She had no backup.”
“Oh she has backup,” he said, grinning. “I told you I can do bad things. Two of her attackers…” He drew his fingers across the front of his throat. “One lives, one doesn’t. It was cat and mouse. It was fun. But your girl, she’s taken.” He shrugged. “It’s life, yeah?”
Chapter Ten
Rune paced in front of the large observation screen, stopping occasionally to watch when the prisoner gave a particularly intense scream.
“Talk,” she muttered once, her palms on the glass. “Talk, you fuck.”
But he didn’t talk. Eugene had sent his torture experts into the room with the man Leon had tracked and caught, but he would not talk.
No matter what was done to him.
“Come away, Rune,” Jack said, taking her arm. “You need to eat.”
“They have Roma,” she replied, as though he didn’t know or maybe hadn’t grasped the gravity of the situation.
“Yeah,” he answered, “and we’re going to get her back. But not by watching the useless torture of an ex-Next op. He won’t talk and we’re wasting time.”
Denim slipped into the dim room.
“Raze?” she asked him.
“He should be okay.”
“Should be?”
“He was shot, Rune. In the head. It’s going to take a minute.”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her eyes. “God.”
He relented. “The bullet skimmed the back of his skull and took off his left earlobe, but he’ll be roaring at them to let him out of here tomorrow. You know Raze.”
He’d been shot by a 9mm handgun, and he’d been lucky. They were all lucky.
“And Luciana?” she asked.
“They tried to keep her overnight for observation after they patched her up, but she left with Leon after he was debriefed.”
Eugene walked into the room and strode to the window. “From now on, full uniforms when you come to work. And that means wearing the bullet resistant beanies. Or the caps, if you’d rather. But you will wear them.”
It was stupid not to go into battle as protected as they could be, especially since battles involving guns were becoming more common. The days of fighting claws, fangs, and blades were becoming fewer because there were fewer Others.
Shiv Crew had always been sent to Other involved fights while the other Annex ops had taken on more of the gunfights.
But that had changed.
And they’d wear their fucking beanies.
“All right,” she said.
He glanced at her, as though surprised for a second that she’d capitulated. Then he clapped her on the back. “Raze will be okay, Rune.”
“What about Roma?” She looked at him. “Will she be okay?”
He turned back to the glass. “We need to make this man talk.”
“He won’t talk,” Jack said. Once again he urged her toward the door. “Call us if anything changes. I’m taking her home to get some food and sleep.”
He nodded. “Go. I’ll call if I hear anything.”
So she left the room, bracketed by Jack and Denim. They had to eat and sleep, whether they wanted to or not.
Leon had taken on two of Sylvia’s men—one had died. Having his throat cut might have had something to do with that. The other was currently being tortured for information he refused to give up.
Next ops—ex or not—were not rookies, and they were not weak. Rune knew as well as the others that he wouldn’t talk, but he was the only link they had.
The only chance of finding Roma before Ben kil
led her.
Most likely she was being tortured at that moment.
Rune shuddered. “Fuck, Jack.”
He nodded. “She’s a strong kid. She’ll…” But then he stopped talking, unwilling to speak the hollow, useless words. “We have to find her before they kill her,” he finished, instead.
“They won’t kill her,” Rune said, stepping into the elevator.
“They’ll want to trade her,” Denim agreed. “Ben will want to trade her for Rune, and Sylvia will want to trade her for Lee.”
“We’ll make those trades,” Rune said, grimly. “The bastards need to fucking call me.” She slid her cell from her pocket and looked at it for the hundredth time.
It mocked her with its quiet darkness.
They mocked her.
She needed them to call.
Ben would know that. He’d know the worst thing he could do was take Roma and then go dark. And that was exactly why he was doing it.
“Ellie said he’d have dinner ready by the time you get home,” Denim said. “Levi is downstairs. I texted him to meet us at your car.”
“Berserker?” she asked. “And Will?”
“I couldn’t get either one of them on the phone,” Denim told her. “But Will disappears all the time. He’ll turn up.”
That was true enough.
And the berserker…who knew what he was doing, or where he was doing it. He’d be busy for a while getting his life straightened out.
They all—even Luc and Leon—knew they could go to Rune’s house and get something to eat, some coffee, or to sleep.
She wouldn’t sleep. She’d touch base with Ellie, kiss Kader, and eat. Then she’d hit the streets looking for a trace of Roma and her captors.
She rode home with Jack, and Denim and Levi followed.
Ellis, his eyes rimmed with red, pulled her into a hug when she walked into the kitchen. He said nothing.
There was nothing to say.
“Where’s Kader?” Rune asked, glancing around the kitchen for the baby.
“It’s four in the morning,” Ellis replied, gently. “She’s asleep, honey.”
She went to the sink and splashed cold water on her face and into her dry eyes, then poured a mug of coffee and went to sit at the table.
She was…numb.
Tired, but numb.
After the twins walked in, they all sat at the table and began to eat the food Ellie had cooked. Grim padded to her and nudged her shoulder, and after a mournful look into her eyes, he went to the door and waited for Ellis to let him out.
