by Natalie Grey
“What? Who?”
>>Tabitha.<<
“You’re kidding me. Right? Tell me you’re kidding me.”
>>No. She will join you at the castle.<<
“This is going to get interesting.” Stephen raised his eyebrows.
“Why?” Bobcat called back, over the whistle of the wind.
“Because Tabitha,” Stephen, momentarily broke off his explanation, “take a left here, we’re going around to the base of the cliffs—Tabitha is going to be joining me at the castle.”
Bobcat swore and shook his head. “I always wanted to see her fight in person! I wish I didn’t have to go to the drop point.”
—
“Sergio?” Hugo’s voice broke on the word.
Jennifer bared her teeth in a smile. The waves that had caused her transformation were gone—now she was just herself, strong, claws sharp against the floor, teeth ready to sink into flesh. She was a weapon—and she was no one’s but her own.
She could almost hear the other wolf’s thoughts. More to the point, she didn’t need to. The mewling, pathetic human in this room had enslaved their kind, tortured many and killed more than that. He had tried to become their Alpha without ever earning that title.
He had to die. And that death should be painful.
“Dr. Yordan?” Hugo managed.
Jennifer growled.
“Spare… spare the doctor.” Hugo was trying to give a command, but his terror was laughable.
How had this man ever thought he would be an Alpha? He wasn’t even smart enough to realize that she had transformed as well. Jennifer chuffed with laughter, and after a pause, she heard the other wolf give the same sound. His was creaky, as if he had forgotten how to laugh, but he joined in with enthusiasm.
“I want you to know, I did this for a greater purpose!”
Jennifer’s wolf eyes, far better in light and dark than human eyes, made out Hugo’s shape by the door. He was trying to open it, but was having no luck. The human part of her was thinking something about power loss and automatic door locks and whether the castle had been retroactively wired for defense. The wolf part of her didn’t care. Her prey was stuck in here with her. That was the important part. A thought appeared halfway, and was gone. She wasn’t supposed to kill him yet. She just didn’t remember why right now. It was very hard to remember when she had teeth she could sink into flesh and tear, rip…
“Let me explain!” He was almost crying with terror. “Look at the world, look at the chaos. Look at the wars. People moving everywhere as they see fit, countries clashing. It doesn’t need to be that way!”
Jennifer, pacing back and forth, tilted her head to the side. How this related to the torture of Wechselbalg, she could not imagine. What did this man think he could say to avoid his fate?
Sergio apparently did not care. His growl was easily understood by both wolves and humans: pure threat. His claws clicked on the floor as he paced ever closer.
“I will restore the glory of the world.” There was a weak rattling sound as Hugo pulled at a doorknob that wouldn’t open, and gave a hiccupping sob of terror. “Oh, God. Oh, my God. Mercy. Mercy!”
His fear was intoxicating, spurring them both onward, and both wolves crouched—
The other facilities. Jennifer’s human brain crashed through the wave of instinct. She gave a yip, telling Sergio not to jump, and his head whipped around in disbelief.
Wait.
“Jennifer? Can you hear me?” Stephen’s voice.
Jennifer gave a questioning growl.
“Tabitha will be there soon to get the locations from the computers, and Gerard’s phone gave us all but one.” Stephen’s voice was tight with fear. “You can kill Hugo if you see him.”
She snapped her jaws in pleasure.
His voice changed, softer. “Are you all right?”
She yipped.
“I’ll take that as a yes. I’ll be there soon.”
Jennifer turned to the other wolf and yipped again. Every fiber of her being wanted to tear Hugo apart, but it was clear even from a moment of seeing Sergio in that cage that he had endured more than she had. Sergio deserved to take his revenge. She took a step backward to make it clear.
“I know you’re intelligent.” Hugo’s voice filtered out of the semi-darkness. “Please—please. You must understand what you are.”
Dangerous ground. If Jennifer were in human form, she would have raised an eyebrow. Tread carefully.
Although, of course, she hoped he didn’t.
“You are blessed by God!” Hugo shouted. “You have been given incredible talents. When you know your place, when you learn obedience to my will, you will be serving God’s higher purpose!”
Sergio gave a growl that was almost a whine, and Jennifer chuffed. She instantly understood what Sergio meant: I am so done with listening to this shit. Can I kill him now?
She yipped, and Sergio leapt.
Hugo’s scream might have been short. It would have been easy to tear his throat out, after all. But Sergio didn’t want it to be quick. His teeth sank into Hugo’s shoulder and tore as his claws raked down the man’s arm. With a snap of his jaws, he crushed the bones in Hugo’s right hand.
The man’s scream was agonized.
Sergio took a step backward and nodded his head to Jennifer.
She didn’t hesitate. Her attack left him bleeding from scratches across his torso and down onto his thighs and she circled away as he fell to the ground, crying out in pain.
You did this to us. You made us do this to others. How dare you?
He didn’t deserve to live. And he didn’t deserve to die with dignity, either.
>>Jennifer, the guards are mobilizing toward your location. I have managed to seal some of them in the courtyard, but there are eight in the building.<<
God-fucking-dammit.
They could both hear it now. The pounding of boots on the stairs, and the call of commands, along with the low flex and clank of body armor and weapons, a heavy sound.
Sergio, to his credit, was not obsessed with revenge over sense. His leap, and the snap of his jaws, ended Hugo’s screams forever. He and Jennifer tore the body limb from limb, and Jennifer bared her teeth at it. If she were human, she would have spit on him.
>>Should I unlock the door?<<
Jennifer yipped.
>>I need to learn how to understand wolves. Yip once for yes, and twice for no.<<
She yipped once.
>>Thank you. Door opening. The guards are climbing the staircase and should be turning into the corridor from your left in fifteen seconds.<<
Thank you, ADAM. She couldn’t say it now, but she’d say it later.
For now, the hunt was on.
—
“Goddammit!” Jamie yanked at the door to the outside.
This was the sort of thing he’d been worried about: that the various facilities had defensive systems his men couldn’t override. Things like doors automatically locking when the power went out.
If his men failed to protect their employer because of something like this, he was not going to let them take the blame. Rich people always thought they knew best. Especially people descended from the old nobility. Didn’t they understand? That world didn’t exist anymore! But resentment would get him nowhere, and he was obligated to do his very best to lock the place down. This was just a power failure, but it would serve as a good example of what he needed in a crisis. Hopefully, after this, Mr. Marcari would understand why Jamie and his guys needed to know more about the buildings they were protecting.
“Upstairs,” he ordered curtly. “We need to locate Mr. Marcari and form a defensive perimeter.”
The men knew why he was upset and they knew what purpose this response served. They didn’t complain, and they didn’t half-ass it. Their weapons were readied and they crept forward, covering one another as the group moved through the halls in a leapfrog pattern. Professionals practiced every training mission like it was live. That’
s why they were the best. They never just went through the motions.
And then the screams started.
The men exchanged a quick look and increased their pace. Fingers twitched near triggers.
“Lab actual, come in,” Jamie muttered into his radio. “Lab actual, come in. We have an incident at the castle. Commence lockdown.”
Nothing. No answer.
“Courtyard, come in.”
Nothing. The men broke into a run.
The wolf seemed to come out of nowhere. It hit Jensen at head height and bowled him backward. The man never had a chance before his life ended in a gurgle, and the wolf crouched as it looked up at them.
Jamie could swear that it smiled.
His mouth was dry with fear, but he reacted on instinct, drilled into his muscles for the past fifteen years of his life. He raised his weapon, and fired. The bullet caught the wolf in the shoulder, but it didn’t even seem to hurt the beast. It was huge, he realized. It should only come to his thighs at most, but its shoulder height was well above his hip.
“Fire, everyone fire!” He had to keep control of his men, some of who were staring at Smith’s corpse in horror.
The wolves were real. The wolves were real.
Or this was a terrible nightmare.
And then there was a growl from behind him.
Shaking, Jamie turned to see another wolf. It was slightly smaller than the first, but its teeth were also dripping with blood. Jamie knew the truth in an instant: their employer was already dead. And they were about to die. He raised his weapon firing wildly as the second wolf launched itself into him. There was a sharp pain at the joints of his body armor, and a burst of pain along his neck, and then the world went dark to the sound of screams.
—
ADAM watched the movement of the bodies through the facility. He was proud of the work he had done. Yesterday, he had sewn in a failsafe that would auto-lock any door connected to the main system as soon as there was a power loss. Even when the power came back on, ADAM would be the only one who could open the doors.
Now he watched as figures scurried around the courtyard, trying unsuccessfully to batter their way into the castle. They didn’t know what was inside, though. He’d made sure of that.
A combination of Pucks and manipulation of the electrical systems effectively blocked radio communications into and out of both the castle and the laboratory.
They couldn’t get out, and they couldn’t warn one another.
It was a perfect plan, ADAM thought with satisfaction—and unlike many plans that he thought were perfect until he saw the chaos of human responses to stimuli, this plan was actually going well. He had finally managed to use humans’ instincts against them.
>>Bethany Anne, a status update on the mission. It began early due to an unexpected transformation on Jennifer’s part. I’ve managed to lock the new soldiers inside their respective facilities and lock communications to the outside. Operations will take place in the dark to enhance fear in our opponents.<<
There was a long pause, and then:
ADAM?
>>Yes?<<
Just don’t turn into Skynet.
—
Stephen looked up at the wall stretching above him and considered his options. Behind him, the car was being lifted back over the cliff as Bobcat yelled instructions at ADAM, the car, the wind, and the cliff. Stephen’s mouth twitched as he tried to hold back a smile. Two Pucks hovered nearby, supporting a tiny ladder just long enough for Stephen to brace himself on.
No sense in waiting around, he supposed. He grabbed the top and settled his feet, and let ADAM lift him to the top of the wall. He hopped down into a crouch on the parapet. Shouts from below indicated that the guards in the courtyard were half-annoyed by their inability to get into the castle, and half-worried about causing property damage.
No one seemed sure if this was some sort of drill, or an actual encounter. Stephen smiled. None of them were going to know anything until it was far too late.
He turned and made his way quickly toward the stairs that led into the palace itself, a yawning doorway into the black. Castles could be exceptionally dark when they lost power, and Stephen smiled. Any humans locked in the darkness would be subject to a primal sense of fear.
In this case, their fear was entirely warranted. A guard burst out of the darkness. He was splattered with blood, running for his life, and as soon as he was in the sunlight, he started to scream.
“Wolves! Wolves!”
His voice carried, annoyingly, on the breeze. There was a sudden silence from the courtyard, and then the attacks on the door redoubled. The guard barely had a chance to notice Stephen, and he was dead a moment later, sliding off Stephen’s claws and onto the ground with blood pooling from his neck. “ADAM, tell Jennifer to expect more company. The alarm has been sounded. And tell her I’ll be there soon.” Stephen sprinted into the darkness toward the scent of fear.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As he plunged into the darkness of the castle—dark, at least, to human eyes—Stephen could hear the distant snarling of wolves and the terrified screams of the guards.
Once, he might have felt sad for these men. It was their first encounter with the Queen’s justice, and they had lived for a long time in a world that did not punish them in the same way.
But those who had been here for years had made the choice to stand by as their employer tortured hundreds, maybe thousands, and those who had just arrived had either made the choice to do the same or made the choice to protect Hugo without learning why someone would want to kill him.
Willful ignorance was no better than willful blindness, and neither would be forgiven.
“ADAM, how many enemies?”
>>In total, there are thirty-seven left in the building. One of the new guards is trying to short out the electrical system on the doors, there are fifteen servants, and sixteen of the other guards—they’re not as well trained, but they do have guns. Seven have barricaded themselves in the server room in the subbasement.<<
“Excellent. Thank you, ADAM.”
Stephen’s eyes registered movement down the hallway and he dropped to a crouch as his assailant fired a wild shot. He muttered, “Let me guess, one of the old guards.”
The man deserved to die for stupidity alone. In the darkness, his human eyes could not possibly see if he was firing at an ally or an enemy. He was terrified, trying to use a weapon poorly against an enemy he could neither see nor understand.
He turned to run as Stephen stood, but he didn’t get very far before Stephen slapped the man and grabbed his gun. The last thing he saw was the barrel of his own weapon. Stephen fired, dropped the pistol, and kept walking.
Those who didn’t understand their own weapons would die by them. That was one of his personal rules.
Deep down, he found himself somewhat disappointed.
Wasn’t anyone here going to pose a challenge?
—
It wasn’t very nice to toy with your prey, but Jennifer was far past the point of caring whether or not she was nice. She and Sergio pursued the seventh of the guards down the hallway, stalking him, making a show of peeking into the wrong rooms as he sobbed quietly with fear and tried to evade them.
He didn’t have the first idea how easily they could kill him if they wanted to. Hopefully, he would lead them to the original guards who had attacked them.
Without silver bullets, these guards weren’t so much a real problem as a massive inconvenience. They could heal through semi-automatic weapons fire, they just didn’t particularly want to. It stung like hell, and then it itched, and all in all, it was best not to let that guard sneak up on them.
The question, of course, was where had he gone?
There was a stampede of footsteps drawing closer and Jennifer and Sergio looked at one another with interest. Voices called out commands in Catalan and faltering English, and the soldier screamed something about wolves. The sudden rush of fear in the newcomers rolled dow
n the hall. The new guards with their fancy gear clearly hadn’t known about the Wechselbalg, but these other guards knew.
They’d walked past the cages any number of times, and from her lab, Jennifer saw the flash of both satisfaction and fear in their eyes. Humans liked seeing animals caged, when they knew those same animals could rip them limb from limb.
As she and Sergio loped toward their prey, they heard the order to stay, and the other shouts to run. Discipline was breaking down, no matter how the guard captain screamed for them to hold ranks.
It doesn’t matter, Jennifer wanted to assure him, you’re all going to die anyway.
Their first kills were the guards who had obeyed orders, pointing guns down the corridor with shaking hands. They fired wildly as Jennifer and Sergio approached.
These might be silver bullets, and Jennifer had no desire to find out. She wove and leapt, staying under and over the line of fire, and as the burst of firing ended, terrified men fumbling for magazines, she launched herself into the air to take them out.
They surrounded her, but they did not have the first idea how to use that to their advantage. Circled up, none of them wanted to use their guns anymore, and they realized—within a second or two, but still far too late—that none of them could grapple with a wolf. Humans liked to hunt in packs, too, but these had never learned how. Jennifer chuffed, and took the opportunity to rip an arm off the human directly in front of her. The hysterical screams were almost funny. Hadn’t they always known this was going to happen? Hadn’t they realized that a human shifter could only be caged for so long before it outsmarted you and escaped?
Apparently not. Jennifer left the first man to bleed to death as she raked the second with her claws. He was trying to run. He really should know that wouldn’t help him. The back of his head caved in with a snap of her jaws. The next target was the man who’d successfully managed to reload his pistol.
She dodged sideways as he brought the gun up and took him down with her jaws on the back of his neck, shaking until he went limp. The other two tried to run, and just as Jennifer’s muscles bunched to leap after them, a figure in all black kicked one of them from a side corridor.
