by Odessa Lynne
“How the fuck did you get mixed up with these people?”
“I was having a drink with Lavi one night, got him to talking about how he was making all that money he’d been throwing around. Rock got pissed, but I said the right shit and before I knew it, I was walking the perimeter every day. A few weeks after that, I was allowed inside—that was when these—” His voice cracked before going hard. “These poor bastards started dying. Knew something was up then. Stopped going home because I didn’t know what was going on and was scared as hell I would take it back with me. I think Lavi had it too, maybe Stan. Lavi was sniffling and complaining that day it all went to hell. Swore there was no damn way he had it though. Delusional bastard. He had it, he just didn’t want to face the fact that he was about to die.”
Without waiting for Mason to react, Marcus raised his knife and jabbed it into the wall where the panel connected. A spark shot out and a loud pop followed. The door hissed slightly, coming open a fraction of an inch to let in a painfully bright line of sunshine.
Mason barely kept himself from jumping. “Goddamn, Marcus, you should’ve warned me.”
“No time.” Marcus jammed his fingers in the opening and pulled. The door started to open.
Mason reached for the door with his left hand to help.
Marcus pushed his arm away. “Don’t be a stupid fuck. You can barely stand.”
Mason grimaced and raised his hand. “Okay, okay. I’ll stay out of the way.”
“Just use the time to get stronger. We won’t be pussyfooting around when we get out of here. It’ll be a dead run at least part of the way.” Marcus pulled harder and the heavy door moved another few inches.
Smoke wafted on the air, tickling at the back of Mason’s throat. “Good thing the alarms don’t work.”
“If the generator wasn’t off line, we’d be completely fucked. This door would’ve never opened. They locked it. That backup battery was the failsafe. I don’t think they had half the systems in this fuckhole working.”
“So good thing then.”
“Yeah. Good thing.”
“The plan is to stop these motherfuckers, right? Because I’m not leaving without Five and his pack. They’re not dead until I see proof they are.”
Mason’s glance was a little too full of pity for Mason’s peace of mind.
Mason clenched his fist. “He’s not dead.”
Marcus’s response was just a cold, hard, “We’re going to stop these motherfuckers, and we’ll find the wolves, whatever they’ve done with them.”
“Good, because I’d hate to think we weren’t thinking the same thing here.”
“Don’t worry, we’re not leaving until this is done, one way or another.”
“Is that why you came back? To stop these people?”
Marcus peeked down the bright corridor, speaking much more quietly, “I was fine letting the wolf and his pack handle this. I had plans. You know why I’m here.”
Mason was silent for a moment, staring at the back of Marcus’s head. “You knew I was in trouble.”
It wasn’t something they talked about much, that feeling they sometimes got when trouble came around for one or the other of them. It just was, the same way they sometimes managed to finish each other’s sentences or knew what the other was thinking before he’d opened his mouth.
Marcus pulled himself back in but kept his voice low. “They believed me. Didn’t even make me explain why I was so sure.”
Mason thought about that feeling in his chest, the one that wouldn’t go away. He didn’t believe Five was dead. He hoped the others weren’t either, but there was a strange little hiccup that kept jolting through him every time he thought about Jordan, Gray, Lake, Cord, and Francis. Something was wrong. He knew that. He just didn’t know what. But it answered one question pretty clearly as far as he was concerned.
“I could tell you why they didn’t ask questions, but we should probably get our asses moving, so—” Mason ruffled the hair at the back of Marcus’s head. “Love you, you fucker.”
Marcus glared suspiciously at him. “We’re going to be fine.”
“Just in case, shitbrain.”
“Alright, asshole.” Marcus caught Mason by the neck with the crook of his elbow, almost pulling Mason off his feet. “I love you too. Now let’s go.”
Marcus released him, then braved a step into the hallway, confident as always that Mason would follow.
Mason said a silent prayer for the people he was leaving behind, already dead but not buried, and stepped out after Marcus.
The brightly lit hall stung his eyes, making them water, but the fresh air was more welcome than he could express with his careful exhale.
They hurried past the wide windows but saw no one outside watching, and instead of heading for the open stairs, Marcus led him to the opposite end of the corridor where a door stood closed.
“Maintenance,” Marcus said. “I dug up the old plans for the building after Rock showed me the place. Had a feeling I might wish I had someday.”
Mason nodded and followed Marcus into the stairwell. The dark engulfed them.
The door closed with a creak behind them.
“Shit,” Mason said under his breath, but even that small sound echoed off the walls he couldn’t see.
“Keep your hand on the rail.”
“Already there.”
They climbed slowly, carefully, Mason fully aware of the fact that his right arm was useless and that if he tripped, he would be in serious trouble.
“Landing,” Marcus said. Then, “Shit. Spider webs, I hate those goddamned things.”
Mason eased onto the landing. “Stop being a chickenshit. Most spiders are—”
Something raced across his fingers, and Mason jerked hard and let out a startled breath. “Goddammit!”
When his heart settled enough that the blood wasn’t rushing in his ears, he could hear Marcus’s quiet laugh.
“Shitbrain,” Mason said. “Get moving.”
“Trying to find the—” A low clank interrupted him. “There we go.”
“You know this is dumb, right? Anybody could be on the other side of that—”
“No one bothered with this stairwell. Trust me.”
Mason clenched harder at the rail. “I hate it when you say that.”
“I’ve got my knife.”
In a furious whisper, Mason said, “It’s a goddamned pocketknife, Marcus.”
“It’s got a blade, shitbrain.”
“Call me shitbrain again—”
“Okay okay okay. We’re just nervous. With all the wolves—they’re going to be too busy to pay attention to a maintenance stairwell. Let’s just do this.”
“Where are we supposed to go when we—”
“There’s an old supply room just to the left. Door was open last time I was here, room has some crates in it, don’t know what, but—”
“Weapons?”
“I said I don’t know.”
“You say that a lot, but usually you’re lying.”
“Not this—well, it might be weapons. I saw Rock go inside once and come back out with—”
“If there are weapons there, it won’t be a good hiding spot.”
“Or it’s the best we can hope for, because like you said, all I got is a goddamned pocketknife.”
Mason released the rail and rubbed the back of his head. “Shit.”
Because Marcus was right about that. They couldn’t just walk up to the gun-wielding bad guys with a pocketknife and ask them to surrender.
He lowered his arm and fumbled for a good grip on the rail again. He hadn’t wanted to face the question earlier, because there’d been no answer for him, only a cold, hard will. But it was time. “How are we going to do this? You have a plan, right? I only have one working arm at the moment, and I’m not thinking running out of here and getting shot to death is how I want this to end. It ends like that and Five won’t be any better off than if we’d stayed in that damn room.”
/> “We’ll still be better off. I wasn’t looking forward to them torturing you to get me to talk.”
Mason was quiet for a second. “Good point. Now you going to answer the question?”
The quiet was broken only by the sounds of their breathing.
“You don’t have a plan. Goddammit, Marcus.”
Marcus exhaled harshly. “I do have a plan. Remember when I said I ditched my phone? It has all the information I was able to get hold of about the changes they made to the virus. We send it to the right people and nobody’ll be unprepared if one of these motherfuckers gets away. But we have to get our hands on it first.”
“And it’s in that room, isn’t it?” Mason pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why the fuck—”
“I didn’t have time to find another place for it.”
“You hid that EP display so how can—”
“What? No, I didn’t. Someone must have left it behind.”
Mason remembered the blood that he’d been sure belonged to Marcus. “You didn’t hide it?”
“No. Let’s move on. We go out and—”
“No, we don’t.”
A deeply indrawn breath sounded in the dark. “We have to do this, Mason.”
“Come on. Think. You’re the goddamned smart one, you know there’s a better way. I don’t want anyone spreading this thing, not if it’s truly the 2060 flu, but right now, we need to find Five, if he’s here, and the others—before we get ourselves killed. Where would they be keeping the wolves? If the bullets are doing the same thing to them as that one was doing to me… We have to get those bullets out of them if they’re going to have any chance of healing. And if they can heal, they can help us.”
“Mason…”
“Don’t you fucking tell me not to get my hopes up, because I’ll punch you in the goddamned face, Marcus.”
The silence lingered before Marcus’s hand landed heavily on Mason’s shoulder. “You like him.”
“Fuck you. This is about stopping those goddamned monsters, not about—”
“He made you think, didn’t he? That was how it started for me.”
Mason pushed Marcus’s hand off him. “When we get out of here, I’m going to kick your ass.” There wasn’t much heat there, though, and they both knew his words weren’t a promise so much as an admission of guilt.
He breathed tightly through his nose. An idea came to him, and he looked up. Of course, the darkness didn’t abate, and there was nothing to see, but—
“Hear that echo?”
Marcus shuffled closer. “Yeah, I do.”
“It keeps going up.”
“There’s another couple floors. No one messed around in them as far as I know.”
“Then we go up and see what we find.”
Chapter 30
The spider webs got thicker as they went, and by the time Mason had reached the landing of the next floor, his hair was standing on end. But he couldn’t blame it entirely on the spider webs that were stuck to him. Something in his chest had started squeezing tighter, a burn that didn’t want to abate, a sense of wrongness that he couldn’t shake.
“This was a bad idea,” Mason whispered, so low he wasn’t even sure Marcus would hear him from his position ahead.
Marcus’s response wasn’t anything Mason expected to hear. “I see light.”
Mason strained through the darkness, and sure enough, the faintest pinprick of light shone in the distance above them.
“Let’s keep going,” Marcus said. “The light’s coming from the top floor.”
“You sure it’s the top?”
“Three stories above ground, one partly below.”
He recalled how Lake had climbed in a broken window on an upper floor. “Okay.”
As soon as he heard the quiet sounds of Marcus moving again, he followed.
They were halfway there when the low sound of a wolf growling sent prickles of fear racing across Mason’s entire body. His spine stiffened, and his chest squeezed the breath right out of his lungs. He heard Marcus’s stumble and the slap of his hand against a step and a tight gasp.
The growl stopped as quickly as it had started. But before Mason had time to wonder if he’d been hearing things that weren’t there, he heard a soft whine and a scrabbling sound, like claws on concrete.
He reached down blindly for Marcus, patting from his back to his arm. Neither spoke as Marcus rose to his feet just one step up from Mason.
Finally, his nerves stretched so taut he should’ve been vibrating, Mason said, “Who’s there?”
Marcus made a strangled sound in his throat, barely audible.
“You… go…”
That voice.
Without much thought, Mason climbed the next step. “Jordan? Is that you?”
A gasping breath answered him. “Go… away.”
Mason dug his fingers into the rail and climbed another step. He felt Marcus grab at his arm. He pulled free.
“You’re injured. I can help. Marcus says they shot everyone. Is that what’s—”
A heart-stopping growl cut him off. Goose bumps raced across his skin. His chest tightened to painful levels. He felt something. He just couldn’t name it. Not pain, not anger, not fear.
Despair. The thought came to him in a sudden rush, and he could almost taste the sweet sorrow of it on the back of his tongue.
“Jordan. I can help.”
“Mason, don’t,” Marcus said.
Mason climbed another step, pulling free of Marcus’s tug at his shirt, his eyes straining so hard to see what couldn’t be seen that they burned.
“Jordan?” he tried again.
Another scrabbling sound came from somewhere on the stairs above, followed by the distinct sound of shuffling.
“I’m going to help you.” Mason started a careful push forward, feeling his way up the stairs.
“No!” Then, just as fiercely, “You belong to—ahhhh!” His groan was pained, his word an agony of fire.
Mason knew because he felt it. Not as an agony of his own but as a curious wash of cold through his body radiating from his chest outward. But he understood the agony, even if he couldn’t explain it.
His foot bumped into something solid and he stumbled. His white-knuckled grip on the rail was the only reason he didn’t fall.
“Jordan?”
But Jordan’s voice came from further up. “Stop. Do not… please…”
A crazy worry tightened Mason’s body as he tried to go around the large object—the person—blocking his way up the stairs to Jordan. “Where’s Five?”
Only the harsh rattle of breathing answered him.
“Where is he, goddammit? Is he alive?” His voice echoed violently in the stairwell.
The scratch of claws came again. “I… your scent is… I can’t…” The growl that followed raised the hair at the nape of Mason’s neck.
And then it all made sense. Mason stopped with his foot already on the next step up and the fading growl of Jordan’s voice in his ears.
“Shit,” Marcus said behind him.
Mason clamped down on the adrenaline racing through his veins, took a deep breath, and resumed his climb. “I’m not leaving you here injured when I can help.”
Marcus’s quiet footsteps followed him up the stairs.
“No,” Jordan said again, and the sound of movement became louder.
A quiet thud followed and a short cry. Jordan’s movements stopped.
Mason was there, finally, and he eased down to his knees, forcing himself to release his tight grip on the rail so he could reach out his hand.
His fingers slid in wet warmth.
Jordan cried out again.
“I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but that bullet… it did something to me. When it came out, I started healing again. I’m going to get those bullets out of you. Then you’re going to get better.”
“Your… scent,” Jordan said. “Please… Alpha will—”
“Hush,” Mason said. “Ju
st hush. This is hard enough with only one arm. Marcus—”
He didn’t have to finish because Marcus was right there, waiting. Mason heard Marcus lower himself beside Jordan on the stairs.
“Can’t see a damn thing in here,” Marcus said with a huff.
“I need your knife.”
Silence greeted him.
“Marcus—”
“If he attacks—”
“I’ve only got one arm that’ll work right now. I know. And he might. But I have an idea.”
Jordan tried to push Mason away, but he was so weak his claws couldn’t even break through the denim of Mason’s jeans. “Don’t touch me…”
A faint rustle came from beside Mason. “The idea any good?”
“It’s probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever come up with.”
“Shit.”
“We’ll just see if it works and if it doesn’t—”
“Won’t much matter anyway. Unless you’re thinking you’ll—”
“No. I won’t. I want to find Five.”
“Don’t really want to fuck on the stairs here, either.”
“Nobody’s going to—”
Jordan let out a choked growl and made a grab for Mason’s arm.
Mason quickly straddled Jordan and used his knees to hold down Jordan’s arms. The very fact that what he was doing was even possible told him how dangerously close to death Jordan must be. Jordan was so weak he couldn’t even fight off an injured human who had only one good arm.
“You sure you can do this?” Marcus asked beside him, his breath stirring the sweaty strands of hair by Mason’s ear.
Mason shook his head even though there was no way Marcus could see it. But it was Marcus. He would know.
Mason reached out, and Marcus fumbled the pocketknife into Mason’s hand.
Mason used his teeth to pry open the blade.
* * *
Ten minutes later, Mason sat back on his knees holding both the bloody pocketknife and his blown-out shoulder and feeling the slick slide of blood drizzling down his arm from multiple gouges in his bicep. He turned his head to swipe his chin over his other shoulder and wipe away the blood there too.
Under him, Jordan was breathing raggedly, unconscious for the moment, his body already twitching with the first sign that he might be healing from the terrible injury Mason had inflicted upon him after digging numerous bullets out of Jordan’s body by feel alone.
