by C. P. Rider
"I won't let you do this to me," I said.
"You will." He pushed back his chair and stood, circling back around his desk to stand in front of me. "I've stationed a guard downstairs with the children. If you step out of line, he's been instructed to shoot them dead, starting with the little artist."
Someone had told him about Estie's drawing and, as expected, he was using it against me. I hoped Fiera hadn't gotten in trouble for bringing it to my cell.
"You're still capable of caring about them, aren't you?" The warden held up his cell phone so I could see it. A camera shone on a male guard with military-short blond hair, wide brown eyes, and pallid white skin. He stood outside the doorway leading into the children's room, shifting from foot to foot, sneaking looks at the kids with his hand on the butt of his gun.
"That guy is petrified."
"Barry hates and fears paranormals." Harris's mouth sloped into a sneer. "One call and he showers the room with bullets. You can tell that he'll do it. He won't even hesitate."
"You would murder children to get your way. My God."
I'd never wanted to spike him more. It would be so satisfying to see him hit the floor, screaming and making gurgling noises as his brain shut off function to his body.
But the children…
I walked across the room and sat on the sofa. Folded my hands in my lap.
"How can you still believe that we're the monsters here?"
After the warden finished his paperwork, he took me to a conference hall at the opposite end of the sanctuary, not far from where the children were being held.
The room was large enough to seat a hundred, but there were only a handful of guards and a couple of people in street clothes present. A banquet-style folding table was at one end of the room, with two slatted-back, stackable aluminum chairs behind it. Another ten chairs were arranged in front of the table, and behind those stood a video camera on a tripod.
It looked like the setup of a televised press conference.
"Remember what your insubordination will cost you," he whispered into my ear as he prodded me toward the table. "Or, rather, remember who it will cost."
My gaze snagged on my ex-fiancé. Julio dragged a hand through his short black hair and lifted his jeweled green eyes to mine. Shame didn't look any better on him than cowardice did, although, apparently, both came in his size.
Warden Harris and I took our seats behind the banquet table.
"Let's begin." He looked at the camera when saying this, so I assumed it was on and rolling. "Be seated."
At the warden's request, the guards sat. Julio and a woman in a white linen pantsuit planted themselves directly in front of the table. There was a chair between them, but no one took it.
The warden regarded the empty chair with barely contained impatience. He glanced at one of the guards and raised a questioning brow. The guard shook his head and shrugged.
The warden cleared his throat. "Thank you for coming, Alpha Roso and Alpha Gold."
Alpha Gold. I wasn't surprised.
The alpha was tall and slender, with pale white skin, and white blonde hair that draped down her back in a silky sheet. She conveyed an air of general boredom, looking for all the world as if she had something better to do.
"Thank you for extending the invitation, Lieutenant Colonel Harris." A scowl twisted the alpha's mauve-painted lips.
"Mr. is fine." The warden smiled and Alpha Gold smiled and neither one looked particularly friendly.
I figured this was as good a time as any to start drawing power. I opened myself the way the witches had taught me, allowing the energy from the alphas to flow passively into my body. No need to pull just yet.
Delicious energy streamed into me. Alpha Gold was powerful, far more powerful than Julio, and her energy felt like the first ray of sun on my face after a long winter storm. I skated across her thoughts, careful not to go too deep and alert her that I was in her head.
What I saw in there did not reassure me.
"Expecting another alpha, Mr. Harris?" She gave the empty chair separating her from Julio a disdainful glance. "Don't you trust me to get the job done?"
"It has nothing to do with trust," the warden replied coolly.
"Trust her?" Julio's brow dropped low over his eyes. "What the hell is going on, Harris? What is she doing here? We had a deal."
"What was your deal, Julio?" I stared straight into his eyes. "Why don't you share it with me?"
He blanched. "Neely, it's not like that. I—"
"And why didn't you take me to your pack?" I blurted at Alpha Gold. "Why have Sampson snatch me and then bring me here? I don't get it. You could have had me all to yourself."
Her lips pulled back to reveal perfect, white teeth. It was less a smile than an aggressive smirk.
"I would never go after one of Alpha Blacke's people. That would be cause for a challenge and I wouldn't disrespect him in that way." Alpha Gold smirked at the fool one chair over. "Right, Roso?"
The muscles in Julio's jaw pulsed as he stared at a spot between the warden and me.
"You're both afraid of Lucas." My bracelet clinked as I rubbed the place where my heart hurt when I said his name. "Now it makes sense why you'd bring me here. You think he'll blame the warden for turning me into a crossbreed and only come after him."
The arrogant tilt of her chin told me my assumption was correct.
"Answer me this, Alpha Gold. What do you think he'll do when he finds out you hired a trancer to kidnap his girlfriend and bring her to a sanctuary?" I leaned back in my seat and laughed. "I thought about spiking you, but now I don't think I need to bother. With reasoning skills like yours, natural selection will take care of things for me. You can't possibly be this stupid."
Alpha Gold's eyes widened. Her already pale complexion went a shade lighter. "Girlfriend?" She turned to Harris. "You said she was his personal spiker, not his lover."
"So what?" Harris's upper lip curled. "Are you afraid of him?"
"I am afraid of no one." Alpha Gold's eyes flashed yellow and her canines lengthened. The guards nearest her moved to the next row.
"No one, Lisa? Because I heard differently." A low male voice that sounded as if it had been aged in a charred oak barrel, called out from the doorway behind the warden and me.
My stomach dropped to my knees.
Every head in the room except mine turned toward the new arrival.
"What the hell is he doing here?" Alpha Gold yelled.
Harris gave the alpha a mean smile. "Working for me."
"Are you insane?" Alpha Gold was livid. "There's no way he works for a place like this. He's so clean he squeaks when he walks. Everyone in our world knows that."
"No way?" Warden Harris's eyes glimmered with humor. "He's been on the payroll for longer than you two have."
"Six productive months." Juan Martinez of Austin Texas, alpha leader of the Martinez wolf pack, tipped his cowboy hat in my direction and shot me a sexy smile.
"Hello, Neely."
Chapter Twenty-Three
"Fuckers. Every last one of you."
"Watch your mouth," Harris grumbled.
"Nope." I whipped my head from side to side and pointed at Alpha Juan. "Nope. I've decided. Lucas isn't allowed to make friends anymore. They all turn out to be traitors and murderers."
Warden Harris shot Alpha Juan a long-suffering look. "She thinks we're going to kill her."
Even though I'd read his mind the instant he walked into the room, I continued glossing over Alpha Juan's brain, hoping against hope that I'd read him wrong. That the backstabbing bastard standing in front of me was all an act and he was really here to help me, not kill me.
"No one will be murdered," Alpha Juan drawled. "You're very valuable to us. Why would we kill you?"
"Because you think you might get a weapon out of it. But you won't. You'll just end up with a dead me. You have no idea what you're risking. I'm not some random human you're trying to change, Alpha Juan. I'm not a shifter,
or a simple telepath, either. I'm something entirely different."
That emotional numbness dropped over me again. I could have spiked the alpha dead and not felt a single shred of guilt about it. The only reason I didn't was because the warden chose that moment to set his cell on the table, and the phone reminded me of the children—and a twitchy, armed guard with a fear of paranormals.
"You're not only something different, you're something special," Alpha Juan said.
"You're sentencing me to death."
"God, does she ever shut up?" Alpha Gold flopped back in her chair.
"I find it kinda charming." Alpha Juan took the empty chair between the other two alphas. A dangerous seating arrangement if ever I saw one.
"If we might continue." Warden Harris signaled to a female guard standing behind the tripod. She made an adjustment to the camera and nodded back at him. The other guards watched silently at the scene unfolding in front of them. Some leaned forward in their seats, gazes darting from alpha to alpha, while some lounged in their chairs and surveyed the proceedings with interest, if not enthusiasm.
"Many of you here are aware of the spiker's dangerous abilities. However, there are a few of you who might not understand exactly what she's capable of. Or, if you understand, you might not be aware of how deadly she is."
A door opened behind and to the right of us and a burly male guard dragged a half-dead hybrid wolf shifter in front of the table and slammed him to the floor. The hybrid's face hit the linoleum with a wet smack near my feet. Slowly, he rolled onto his side. Blood drooled down his snout and mouth.
Julio didn't look at the wolf. He continued staring at a spot between the warden and me. Alpha Gold examined her French manicure. Alpha Juan peered straight into my eyes. His gaze dug into me like claws.
I dipped my head under the table to address the battered wolf. "Tellis?"
The young shifter's hair was no longer ash brown but had gone completely silver. His eyes were yellowed, tufts of fur were missing on his chest and face, and he was rail thin.
The guard's lips crooked into a snarl. "Get up." When Tellis didn't move, he kicked him. "Get up."
Tellis moaned in pain.
I stared at each alpha in turn, ending with Julio. "They're killing a wolf shifter in front of you. So, you know, just keep sitting there. Keep doing nothing. "
None of them responded.
My bracelet clanked against the table. The numbness inside me faded and in flooded pins and needles pain, my nerve endings on fire as when blood rushes back into a limb cut off from its blood supply. Anger set in. I was furious—with the alphas, with the guards, with the world.
I brushed over the guard's mind. His abuse of the young wolf and countless other paranormals would have had me in tears if there was any room inside me for sadness. But there was no place for sorrow because I was already filled to bursting with dangerous, heated rage.
"I present to you a demonstration of the spiker's abilities. Please note that this is before her transformation." The warden's smile was wide and smug as he regarded me.
"What?" I looked from the guard to Tellis to the warden. "You're saying you want me to spike him dead? To prove that I can?" I twisted my hands in my lap. The energy I'd pulled from Alpha Gold roiled around inside me, blindly searching for an exit.
"Yes." The warden slid his phone in front of me. The implication was clear.
Spike or the children die.
My hands shook, my teeth chattered, and I fidgeted in my seat as I looked from the picture on the phone to Tellis's broken body and to the warden, who reached over and tapped the phone's screen.
I shifted into actively drawing energy from the three alphas, battling with the urge to nosedive into the exquisite sensation. Alpha Gold touched the base of her throat. Her gaze snapped to mine and narrowed. I was shocked it had taken her this long to notice what I was doing, and I really didn't care that she did. There was nothing she could do to stop me.
Nothing any of them could do.
Energy flowed through me, sweet and intoxicating, and bursting with power.
"Now, Neely," the warden commanded.
The guard, who outweighed the half-dead shifter by a hundred solid pounds, kicked him again. I was in the guard's head, felt his satisfaction at hearing the young wolf's leg bones splinter. He enjoyed it so much, that sound. He especially liked the way the crunch had echoed off the walls of the cell today.
Tellis cried out, the pain within him so immense that it made the room seem heavier. I couldn't take another second of his pain. Not one more second.
I spiked.
Without so much as a blink of my eyes or a twitch of my head to indicate I'd struck, I arrowed straight to the center of his brain. I convinced myself that it was a mercy, really. He would never recover from what he had become, and it was best to put a sick animal like that down.
There was a high amount of energy in the room, in me, and I was primed to strike. A fast, deadly spike would be virtually painless.
I made it hurt anyway.
The guard screamed, clutched his head, and went down like an axed redwood.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. "Timberrr."
Warden Harris's eyes bulged, and he opened his mouth to say something, probably something like, "Stop, Neely," but he was too late.
The guard hit the floor face first, and with a much louder smack than Tellis had made. Blood pooled under his face, indicating that the fall had likely broken his nose, maybe jaw, possibly split open his skull. It was hard to tell, but all three were likely.
"Shit-no-Neely." Julio said all this on a single gasp.
The doors behind and to the right of the warden flew open and more guards piled into the room, guns trained on me. I read them all. Their orders were to shoot to stop, not to kill. I was too valuable to kill.
That gave me a little wiggle room.
Julio dragged a hand over his face and sprawled in his chair. "What did you do?"
As I regarded him now, I wondered how I'd ever wanted this weak man. Chalk it up to capricious youth? A lifetime of tragic loneliness? Or was my reasoning darker, more sinister? Had I wanted a weak partner because I could overpower him if necessary? Had I feared being involved with an alpha stronger than me to that extent? Is that why it had angered me when Lucas used his alpha voice when I tried to read him? Because it was a reminder that he was strong enough to stand up to me?
I stomped down on the pain that thoughts of Lucas brought forth. Some of the power I'd taken from Alpha Gold had dispersed when I spiked the guard, but there was still a great deal of her succulent, bewitching energy twisting and turning inside of me and I could not afford to lose control. I had to battle not to lose myself in her power, not to spike someone else just to feel it move inside them.
These were my roiling thoughts as I sat behind a banquet table in a room filled with guards, alphas, and a camera awaiting my transformation into a paranormal weapon, with a dying hybrid wolf shivering at my feet, a dead guard bleeding on the floor in front of me, and the only emotion connecting it all a cold, restrained fury.
The warden's jaw muscles tightened. "Damn you."
I bent my head to his ear and whispered, "The wolf shifter is too weak. Wouldn't have been much of a demonstration of my ability if I'd killed him. That guard, though. He was strong. Good idea having him come out."
"This is a violation of our agreement," he whispered back. "You know what I have to do."
He reached for his phone, but I snatched it up first.
"Watch yourself, Neely."
"Think it through, Warden." I tapped the table with the edge of the phone. "Do you really want to leave me with no reason not to spike you and everyone else here?"
"These guards will shoot to kill. These alphas will rip out your throat." Dark furious eyes stared a hole in me. "Do not threaten me."
We both knew he'd lied about the guards, and probably the alphas, but it would not be smart to push him too far—for the children's
sakes.
"No, sir." I set the phone face down in front of him and clasped my hands in my lap. "I would not want to do that. I apologize for my actions. Won't happen again."
I skated over his thoughts. He wouldn't kill the children. Not yet. But it wasn't off the table. Any sign of me turning on him or the other guards, Milton, Leah, and Esther were dead. I'd need to be very careful from here on out.
"Watch yourself, spiker."
I nodded solemnly. It was best he believed he had the advantage.
Warden Harris turned away from me and faced the room as one of the guards set his gun down, grabbed the dead guard's feet, and slid him across the linoleum, leaving behind a crimson trail of blood.
Alpha Gold watched dispassionately as they dragged the dead man off. Julio stared at his shoes. Alpha Juan continued to look directly at me. He wasn't smiling, but then, neither was he frowning. The guards stared angrily at me. The camera was still rolling.
The warden turned to the camera, forced a smile. "As you can see, our resident spiker is quite deadly."
After spiking the guard, I was led from the conference room to a locked holding area, where I sat in an uncomfortable chair until a blank-faced female guard—who'd obviously drawn the shortest straw—entered the room. The guard kept her gun pointed at me as she held open the door for Alpha Juan and Sampson Ibarra.
I gritted my teeth and clamped down on the urge to spike her. It wasn't easy. The second I saw the guard uniform I wanted to hurt her the way she and her ilk had hurt Tellis, Fiera, and the other paranormals. It occurred to me then that I was changing, sliding down a slippery path of blind retribution. Two weeks ago, I wouldn't have had to clamp down. A month ago, I would have been ashamed of even thinking of spiking her. A year ago, I wouldn't have had the impulse at all.
Absently, I played with the lock on my bracelet, bringing Lucas to mind. With him came thoughts of the children, and I was flooded with an enormous relief that I hadn't provoked the guard and, in turn, Garrett Harris.
Alpha Juan strolled in. "Spiking the guard was an interesting move."
