by J. R. Ward
Triangulating his position, Craeg decided that, for the moment, sticking with the pack was for the best, so he--
One by one, the Brothers raised their autoloaders, aiming directly at the trainees. And then the tallest of them stepped forward, swinging his muzzle in a slow, lazy circle as if looking for the best target.
Talk about herd panic. Candidates freaked out, running this way and that, fighting to get behind others, slipping, falling. A couple of them went down on their knees, blubbering and begging before there had even been any shooting.
Craeg was having none of that. If the trainees were going to get hit with some lead, it wasn't going to be anywhere lethal. There were too many precautions in place so far. And he was ready to take a bullet--if that was what he had to do to get to the next round?
Hit him. He wasn't afraid of pain.
Squaring his shoulders, he faced off--and was aware that there was probably another reason why he halted. But he refused to acknowledge it in any way.
Come on, he thought. Over here.
Over here . . .
But they didn't go toward him.
No . . . they went toward someone else.
Not her, he thought. Shit, not Paradise.
"Hey," he called out. "Hey, asshole!"
*
As soon as those males in black stepped into the pool area, Paradise recognized the Brothers. After having spent so much time working around them, their scents, their auras were well-known to her--and she had grown to consider them like protective pseudo-fathers of hers.
That was not the case tonight.
Especially as they came down into the now-dry pool, lifted their guns . . . and one of them settled on her as a target.
Rhage. It was Rhage who trained his weapon on her and then began to walk forward. She knew because his body was so much larger than the others'.
No, no, she thought. You can't do this. My father--
But he didn't hesitate. He came right up to her and Peyton, leading with that firearm, finger on the trigger.
"Hey! Asshole!"
From out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the recruits step forward and wave his arms.
It was her male--the male, that was. Craeg--
"Shoot me! Hey! Motherfucker! Shoot me instead."
And so the Brother did.
Without turning his head away from her, Rhage's arm swung to the side and he pulled the trigger, a bullet exploding out from the muzzle.
Paradise screamed and jerked against Peyton's hold as chaos went hog-wild, shrill voices echoing around like the panicked clatter of a thousand flushed birds. "No! Oh, my God--no!"
"Shut up," Peyton hissed as he kept her in place. "Just shut it."
NFW. As Craeg fell over, she broke free and lunged in attack at the Brother. It was like a bug hitting the windshield of a car, but none of that mattered. She just couldn't have anyone get hurt--especially not that male. Slapping, hitting, she clamped her hands on the muzzle and held on for dear life, trying to control the weapon. She failed. Before she knew what was happening, she was facedown on the damp concrete, and pinned at the back of the neck and small of the back. Turning her head, she looked frantically across the pool bottom to see if Craeg was still alive.
The male was down on her level, writhing while holding what looked to be his thigh. The only other female in the group crouched beside him, forced his hands away, inspected the wound. Then on a quick jerk, she pulled her shirt out of her waistband and ripped it off, exposing a muscled torso and a black sports bra. With a tear, she took the hem off all around the base, freeing a strip of cloth.
She tied a tourniquet on his upper thigh as if she had been trained.
"Let her go," Peyton demanded from behind her. "Let her fucking go!"
"Or what," came a distorted voice from speakers overhead--as if someone had spoken into a microphone with a synthesizer attachment.
That was when Peyton lost his mind. Craning to twist her head around, she caught the unbelievable sight of him in full aggression, fists flying at Rhage, feet kicking, his fangs bared in a snarl as he tried to get the Brother off of her. And then suddenly he wasn't alone--the male who had displayed such athletic ability on the pommel horse joined in.
Pop! Pop!
Both of them were picked off with bullets by another Brother. And so were another two males who likewise tried to get involved. Meanwhile, people were climbing the walls, using the stainless-steel ladders to try to leave the pool--only to be electrocuted and fall back down.
A door opened.
From overhead that voice announced: "Anyone who wishes to leave may do so. No harm will come to you. This can all be over--right now. All you have to do is run for that door."
At that moment, she was released, Rhage hopping off, stepping back.
She scrambled across to Peyton, rolling him over once again. "How bad? Where?"
"My arm--my fucking arm."
Paradise yanked her shirt up and followed the example of the other female, tearing a section with one of her fangs, ripping a strip free, and trying to tie it just above the bleeding wound on his triceps.
She glared up at the Brothers. "Are you out of your fucking minds! This is school, not war! What the fuck!"
"You may leave now," the voice from overhead droned on. "Just proceed to the stairs at the shallow end of the pool and let yourself out of this."
A sudden sharp rage had her seeing white, and before she knew it she was up and at the line of Brothers. "Shoot me! Come on! Do it, you bunch of fucking cowards!"
She had no idea what the hell she was saying. What the hell she was doing. She had never seen so many guns before, much less deliberately put herself within point-blank range of such weapons--but she had snapped and discovered a surprising surge of power came with the unhinge.
Not that the Brothers seemed to care. They just stood there, unmoving and unreactive, as if they were content to wait until she ran out of gas.
So she turned on the trainees who were leaving. "Where are you going! You need to fight! This is wrong--"
Just like that, the door was closed and the unmistakable sound of a bar being clamped into place ricocheted around the space.
"You will now be required to complete First Night," the overhead voice stated. "The final session begins in three . . . two . . .
". . . one."
And that was when the illumination went from incandescent to the purpley-blue of blacklight.
Also when the Brotherhood opened fire on all of them.
Chapter Ten
Rubber bullets hurt like a motherfucker.
As the first of a countless number of rounds hit Craeg in the pecs, he rolled away and offered his back instead of his more vulnerable front. Down below the waist, the one real bullet wound was like a firebrand in his skin--just as he'd predicted, though, the expert shot had done nothing but graze his flesh so that tourniquet was unnecessary. No time to take it off--he grabbed Novo's hand and yanked her into a belly-flat on the pool's bottom. Keeping their heads down, they crawled away from the barrage, heading up and over the hump that took them to the ten-foot end.
Glancing behind him, he found that the Brothers, who had realigned themselves to block the steps at the shallow part of the pool, had begun to walk forward like they were driving cattle into the chute of a slaughterhouse. Fucking hell--the metal ladders mounted up high on the pool walls by the diving board were juiced with electricity--and those warriors seemed to have an endless supply of the fucking dummy bullets. Even though the impacts were more like exaggerated bee stings through his clothes, with enough of them, his pain threshold was going to get triggered to a point that incapacitated him.
Wrenching around again, he measured how fast the Brothers were coming at them.
Fast enough so that he had maybe sixty seconds to figure this out.
"Dematerialize," he said as much to himself as anyone else who would listen. "Only chance."
Freezing his forward motion, he cl
osed his eyes and started to breathe. The first vision he had was of that slender blond female attacking that impossibly large Brother with a gun.
To defend him after he'd been shot.
"Stop it," he hissed.
Control. He needed to get control of his mind and his emotions, focus himself, and dematerialize up and out. Focus . . . focus . . .
Pain in his body: in his thigh, in the other impacts along his shoulders, his spine, his hip. His head was thumping. His ribs were tight. His elbow still throbbed from when he'd been nailed by the electricity on the scaffolding.
All around, people panicking, crying, cursing. Tripping. Falling.
And still those bullets, driving into him. Into all of them.
The harder he tried to ignore the fear and panic, the louder the chorus of discomfort and distraction became.
He needed a target image, a place to train his brain to.
From out of nowhere, he pictured that receptionist when he'd first seen her. She'd been sitting behind a neat little desk in a majestic sitting room. Everything had intimidated him--the silk wallpaper, the fancy rug, the clean smell . . . her.
But she hadn't treated him like the scrub he was. She had looked up at him with eyes that had stopped his heart in his chest--and then she'd said her name.
Paradise.
Her voice had been so beautiful, he hadn't even heard her properly. And then he'd blown things completely by not shaking the hand she'd offered. The trouble was, his brain had frozen because she was so . . .
His body dematerialized without him being aware of it. One moment, he was suffering and stuck in his corporeal form . . . the next he was flying out from the pool. With no destination in mind, he tumbled through the air as he had the first few times he'd tried the trick after his transition--and then he got hold of himself and projected his form into the far corner, against the wall.
As he re-formed, Novo was already there, braced and ready, but massaging one of her shoulders as if she were either rubbing pain away or assessing if the damn thing had dislocated.
One by one, four more dripping and damp trainees made it out of the pool: The athletic male from the pommel horse. The one who looked like a murderer, who had piercings and tats on only one side of his face and neck. The guy who'd had his arm around Paradise. Another male who was tall and strong.
He had no idea what happened to--
The receptionist was the last to re-form, and Craeg had to turn away or exhibit an emotion that was unacceptable. To distract himself, he tried to see what was happening in the pool to the five who'd been left behind--
A door opened right beside them all, and as a stiff, cold breeze came at them, he smelled the outdoors.
Whatever was on the other side was dark.
"Who goes first," Paradise asked.
"I will," the pierced, Goth-looking male answered. "Nothin' to lose."
Craeg frowned as the sudden silence around them began seeming like a bad omen: The shooting had stopped. Which could mean that that part of the test was over . . . or the Brothers were taking aim again.
No, they were gone--all that was left in the pool were a couple of trainees who had broken in half, the soaking wet, sobbing figures sitting on the damp concrete with their heads in their hands or their bodies in the fetal position.
Shit. Where were the Brothers now?
"I'll go with you," he said to the Goth.
The pair of them were the biggest of the group, the tip of the spear, so to speak--and though he'd gone into this thinking about solo survival, he was beginning to reconsider that strident position. At least for the short term.
If an attack came at them, two were better than one.
Novo spoke up. "I'll take the rear."
The athlete fell in beside her. "I can help cover that, too."
"You three," Craeg ordered the blond female and her . . . mate? BF? And a guy who was good looking in a pretty-boy kind of way. "In the middle."
At least that way, he wouldn't worry about her.
Not that he was.
"Move out," Craeg said.
He and the hard-core male went over the threshold together, their combined shoulders nearly filling what turned out to be a tunnel--and once they were in there, a distant flickering light became a guide they slowly progressed toward.
"What's your name?" the Goth whispered.
"Craeg."
"I'm Axe. Nice to fucking meet ya."
*
Paradise expected anything to happen as they made their way as a group through the tunnel. Tight quartered, anxiety ridden, slow moving and wrung out, she waited for another shoe to drop, something to jump at them, fall on top of them, knock them down.
When they simply emerged outside by a bonfire, her jangling nerves didn't know how to process the lack of attack.
And then her brain really couldn't grapple with the fact that there was a table set up with bottles of water on it and energy bars and pieces of fruit.
Was this the end? she thought as she looked around at the pine trees, the underbrush, the stars above.
"I'm thirsty as hell," Peyton said, beelining for the Poland Springs.
The male she couldn't help but keep track of stopped him. "It could be a trap," Craeg said, going over.
"You're paranoid."
"Did you try the food before? You like throwing up?"
Peyton opened his mouth. Closed it. Cursed.
Craeg measured the setup. Tapped the earth with the toe of his wet boot. Moved forward from the side in a crouched position. When he got close, he bent down and put his eyes on a level with the orderly array of bottles. He lifted the skirting on the table and looked underneath.
Then he picked one of the Poland Springs up slowly.
Paradise's heart thundered. She was dehydrated, too--even after feeling like she had swallowed half that pool. But she was scared to get poisoned.
God, she had never been in this situation before--consumed by thirst, confronted by drink, and yet frozen from getting what she wanted.
"This is not sealed," Craeg announced.
He picked up another one. And another. On the third, there was a crack! as he freed the cap. Taking a sniff of the open neck, he tested a sip.
"This is good." He passed it back without looking--and as soon as Peyton grabbed the thing, Craeg kept going, inspecting more tops, weeding out the unsealed ones. Peyton was the one who divvied them among the group until everybody had water.
Craeg kept a bottle for himself, but didn't drink much, tucking the thing into his belt. Then without any comment, he moved on to the energy bars, tossing out the ones that had rips in the wrappers, sharing those that were okay.
Paradise ate even though she wasn't hungry, because she didn't know when they would stop again or how much effort was going to be required for the next stage--and talk about food as fuel and that was it. The energy bar was a nasty mix of cardboard, fake sweet, and goo, but she didn't care. She was going to need the calories.
If only to stay warm, she thought as a shiver went through her. November night and wet clothes. Not good for your core temperature if you were standing around.
Or stuck out in the elements for very long.
"What do we do now?" she asked everyone and nobody at the same time.
Behind them, the door to the facility slammed shut and locked.
The serial-killer guy, Axe, drawled, "That's okay, I wasn't looking for a reboot of that pool action anyway."
"There's a fence over there," the other female said, pointing to the left.
"And over here," the athlete chimed in.
"Bet it's electrified," Peyton muttered. "Everything else that's metal has been."
The question was solved when someone picked up a stick, threw it at the chain link--and the thing got toasted in a shower of sparks.
With some further exploration, they discovered they were in a chute of some kind, one that offered them a single outlet: straight ahead, into the dark woods.
"We go together," she said, staring past the flickering orange light of the bonfire. "Again."
"I hate teamwork," Axe muttered.
"And I'm so excited to be doing this with you," Peyton drawled back.
Without talking about it, the group fell into the lineup order from the tunnel. And then they were off, moving forward as a unit, mindful not to get too close to the chain link as the fence narrowed in on both sides.
Twigs cracked under their wet trainers. Someone sneezed. A breeze blew in from one side that turned Paradise's arm to ice.
But all that barely registered. As she walked along, her body was a live wire, energy coursing through her veins, her instincts prickling and ready for input from somewhere, anywhere: She was on the razor-sharp lookout for anything that was wrong, a snap on the ground that was too loud, an awkward shift of Peyton's body beside her, a creak from a tree branch over on the left . . . and that which she couldn't immediately sort into the non-threatening category made her twitchy muscles and her bouncing brain want to freeze and assess. Or break out into a run to escape.
And yet they kept going. And going. And . . . going.
Time was passing, she thought, glancing up at the position of the stars.
And still they kept on, their ragtag group schlepping along, shuffling over the ground, limping, lurching, everyone injured in their own way and yet remaining on their feet.
Several miles later--or was it more like a hundred?--nothing had come at them.
But she wasn't fooled.
The Brothers would be back. They had a plan for all of this.
She just needed to stay tight, keep with the group, and--
Up ahead, Craeg and Axe stopped.
"What is it?" she said as she grabbed for Peyton's arm.
Why did she smell . . . fire?
"We're back where we started," Craeg replied quietly. "This is where we began."
When he pointed to the ground, she saw footprints, their footprints, in the loose dirt. Except the table with the water and the food was gone . . . and the bonfire had been put out--which explained the scent . . . and the fence had been moved into a different position.
It had been closed off to form a loop or a track.
"They have us going in circles?" Peyton demanded. "What the fuck?"
