Sabotaged (The Sundance Series Book 3)

by C. P. Rider

  He clamped down harder. "Mine."

  The only sounds in the room were Julio's chewing and the ticking of the wall clock. I focused on the clock. Tick, tick, tick. Exactly seven minutes had passed.

  This wasn't my first brush with becoming a crossbreed. I'd been in this situation before, when Saul Roso attacked me in Sundance. Julio's brother had been a strong alpha, and the only reason he'd failed was because of Lucas. He had dominated the Roso alpha because he was strong in ways Saul Roso had no idea how to be.

  Lucas.

  As his name whispered through my thoughts, I weakened. Not much, just enough for the pain to break through. Enough for me to give my ex a reaction he didn't deserve. I cried out.

  The pain had the effect of distracting me from Lucas, though, and the emotional numbness soon returned. Blood dripped freely down the sides of my throat as Julio worked his teeth into my flesh. It was uncomfortable, but I wasn't overwhelmed with pain.

  And I wasn't changing.

  With a groan, Julio let me go. I patted the back of my neck. The flesh on the edges of the bite hung in wet ribbons.

  "It didn't work." Warden Harris stood over me. "You didn't change her."

  "I-I can't. There's a block of some sort." Julio rose to his feet behind me. "I can't bind her to me."

  "My turn now." Alpha Gold's heels clicked on the linoleum as she approached me from behind. "All right Harris, our deal is she lives here, but I have free access to her day and night. You will continue to honor the threat, which is that the children's lives are to be forfeit if she doesn't cooperate. Are we in agreement?"

  "We've been over this twenty times, Gold. Yes, we're in agreement." The warden glowered at her. "How long will it take?"

  "How the hell should I know? If it's anything like a normal change, which would be human to shifter, the first part happens fast. Less than half the time ex-Prince Charming over there took to fail."

  Julio, who had retreated to the other side of the room, snapped his teeth at her.

  The alpha wrapped her hands around the back of my neck. "Pardon me, spiker, but I don't like sloppy seconds." Warmth emanated from her palms and heated my neck, easing my pain.

  Alpha Gold possessed the ability to heal. Something the coyote had in common with Lucas. Did all prehistoric alphas have this ability? I hoped I lived long enough to ask.

  The room quieted once again. The wall clock ticked off the minutes. Eleven had passed since Sampson left the room.

  When my injuries were gone, Alpha Gold grasped the neck of my blue T-shirt in her hands and tore it in a straight line down my spine. She pushed the material off my shoulders, leaving just enough to cover my bra, and put her hands on my bare skin. She then shifted further into hybrid form. I knew this because as she shifted, her claws sank deep into my shoulder muscles. The pain nearly reached me; it was that intense.

  "Such pretty brown skin. You're going to make a lovely coyote, spiker." She plunged her teeth into the freshly healed flesh on my neck and bit down.

  My body went limp. I was strong, but I was not stronger than a prehistoric shifter.

  She's going to change me. This is really happening.

  Her power roared through me, heating my flesh, my organs, even my breath. Blood oozed over my shoulders, pooling in my bra. My head went light and airy in a way it hadn't with Julio. Blood loss or alpha power? I honestly didn't know.

  "Is it working?" The warden stood a few feet away with his hands clasped behind his back. He craned his neck to see my wounds better.

  It occurred to me that this is exactly what had happened to his sister, Jocelyn. He'd been devastated when it was her blood on the ground, the back of her throat slashed by shifter teeth, but he felt nothing when he saw that same thing happening to me. Because, to him, I was less than human.

  Alpha Gold bit deeper, pushed harder.

  The clock tick, tick, ticked. Thirteen minutes had passed.

  "This makes no sense."

  The alpha pushed my shirt completely off my back. I crossed my arms over my chest to keep the fabric covering me. She fisted my braid and jerked my head forward, chin to chest. Then she sank her teeth into me again. Worried the back of my neck like a dog with a chew toy.

  A moment later, she shoved away from me. "This is impossible."

  "You can't change her either?" Harris's face flooded with color. His gaze narrowed. "You aren't strong enough?"

  "No." Alpha Gold snapped. "And it's not because I'm not strong enough, it's because someone has already changed her."

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Harris stood before me, slack-jawed and bleary-eyed. He looked like a man who had just received some very bad news about his retirement fund.

  "So, you're saying the Las Vegas alpha changed her after all?" Alpha Juan had apparently strolled in halfway through Alpha Gold's gnaw-a-thon on my neck, but I was too busy to notice. My mind was racing with possibilities.

  Was I really changed? If so, who had changed me? Roso? Why didn't I feel any different?

  "How should I know?" Alpha Gold dragged her forearm across her now-human, blood-covered mouth. I was hunched over on the floor in a pool of my own flesh and blood, because once she saw she couldn't change me, the alpha hadn't been all that inclined to heal me again.

  The warden nodded to Alpha Juan. "Your turn."

  "No, Harris. Call this off." Julio stomped over to the warden. He was still in hybrid form with my blood smeared across his mouth. "It's not working and she's losing too much blood. She's part human. If you don't stop, you'll kill her."

  "Oh, shut up," I croaked. "You didn't give two shits about me a few minutes ago."

  Julio gave me his patented earnest look. "I'm trying to help you here."

  "Trying to help yourself, more like." I shuddered as pain flooded my nerve endings. I couldn't feel it, but my body reacted as if I could. "I hate you. Shut up."

  "Looks like she's really got it bad for you, Roso." Alpha Juan chuckled to himself as he sank to his haunches on the floor beside me. He lifted my hair and whistled. "An artist you are not, Alpha Gold. Were you changing her or having her for dinner?"

  "Changing someone is not an art. It's grisly, it's brutal, and it's usually fatal." She shot the warden a snide look, and I realized she knew about his sister and didn't care. Folding her arms across her chest, she looked down her nose at the Austin alpha. "There's no point in trying. She can't be changed."

  "Forgive me if I decide to see for myself." Alpha Juan gently tilted my neck, I assume for a better look at the bite.

  "Why do you guys have to chomp on my neck?" I asked between shudders. "Can't you just kiss the magic into me? It would be less violent, though no less disturbing, I admit."

  The warden's brows dropped low, and two vertical lines appeared between them.

  Uh-oh. I shut my mouth and glanced at the clock. Tick, tick, tick. Fourteen minutes now.

  Alpha Gold wiped her mouth on her sleeve. The front of her white outfit was smeared with my blood. "Doesn't work that way. We have to bring you into our pack before we can make you a crossbreed—"

  "Phoenix genus transmutation," The warden corrected.

  "Whatever. If we don't do it properly, you could turn rogue and lobotomize us all." Gold punctuated her words with an obnoxious laugh.

  I could spike them whether I was part of their pack or not, the dumbasses. At least, that's what Lucas had told me about his friend Suyin, a crossbreed spiker who had eventually lost her mind from the change and tried to kill her alpha and pretty much everyone else around her.

  Lucas.

  Oh no. Not now. I braced myself as emotion flooded into me, and with it, pain. A whoosh of breath escaped my lungs and I went to my hands and knees, the sun and lock charms on my bracelet jingling against the cold linoleum floor.

  "Get on with it, cowboy," Alpha Gold sneered.

  Alpha Juan let out a low, ticking growl that sent the prehistoric coyote back a half-step. "That's Alpha cowboy to you."

  Fra
ntic, I tried to think about anything but Lucas, breathing through the pain as my mind careened from subject to subject, always boomeranging back to him. I focused on the clock. Sixteen minutes had now passed on the slowest clock in the universe.

  "Come on over here, darlin'." Alpha Juan tucked his hands beneath my arms and pulled me away from the others, set me upright on my knees, and squatted behind me, the way Julio had.

  The pain hadn't receded into numbness, so when he moved me, my vision doubled, and my breath came in lung-slicing little pants. I whimpered as my head rolled to the side.

  "Here." There was a series of soft pops and then warm cotton draped around my shoulders. He'd given me his shirt. It was rust-colored and had snaps instead of buttons. I let my ripped and bloodied shirt fall to the floor by my knees and worked my arms into the sleeves. My fingers shook so badly I couldn't fasten it, so Alpha Juan reached around and did it for me. I watched his deft brown hands move over my breasts and down to my belly. He didn't linger in any one spot, which was gentlemanly of the betraying jackass.

  As my emotions floated closer to the surface, an instinctive form of terror poured into me. Julio was a strong alpha. Gold was a prehistoric alpha. But Juan Martinez was a mystery.

  My gaze lifted to the clock again. Eighteen minutes.

  The alpha settled himself behind me on the floor and the warmth from his inner thighs seeped into my hips. He pressed his bare chest to my covered back and I shivered. There was something else between us, something other than a thin layer of cotton. Something hard and cold. A necklace?

  He lifted my hair to the top of my head and stroked a finger around the wound on my neck. My body reacted to the touch with goosebumps, but it didn't reach the part of me that could truly feel. The numbness was coming back, thank God.

  "Ever the gentleman," Alpha Gold jeered. "Hey, what's that around your neck?"

  "Good luck charm," he murmured, and something got through to me.

  Charm?

  His lips ghosted over my ear. "Stay calm, darlin'."

  "Charm," I whispered. "The witches?"

  "What's she saying?" Julio stomped over to us, his face flushed with anger. "And what are you doing? You're supposed to change her, not seduce her."

  "Some things just come natural to a man," Alpha Juan drawled. I wondered if his simple way of speaking was an affectation, maybe a defense mechanism, the way Lucas's sarcasm got worse when he was anxious about something.

  Anxious?

  I was on the cusp of figuring it all out when Alpha Juan shifted into wolf form. Not hybrid—wolf. His hands dropped off my head and to the ground. I peered behind me and spied a pile of discarded clothing, a very large paw, and a red-brown bristle of fur. Teeth gripped my neck around the wound, and white-hot energy roared into me.

  I had been right to fear him. Alpha Juan was far more powerful than Julio or Alpha Gold, and if the man wasn't a prehistoric, then he was something I'd never heard of that was ten times worse.

  Julio took several steps back until he was standing beside the warden, who looked pleased. Alpha Gold took a tentative step toward us. She wasn't a coward, but she wasn't a fool, either. She knew Alpha Juan was no ordinary wolf.

  Alpha Juan shifted his grip and I cried out, not from pain, exactly, but from an overload of sensation. He wasn't biting, he was holding my neck the way a wolf held a pup, and sending fiery power straight into me. Without taking anything in return.

  It hit me then. The alpha wasn't trying to change me. He was trying to help me. By filling me with energy.

  "He's not saying anything. He's not doing it right," Julio huffed.

  The warden spared my ex an annoyed glance. "Even so, something's happening for him."

  Alpha Juan released me and backed away. He'd left me stuffed with power, but I was still badly injured. Joint-twisting tremors wracked my body and I was weak from blood loss. I forced myself to sit up. Standing was going to be a no-go, though, which I knew because the only way I could hold up my head was with my hands.

  I craned my neck enough to see the clock on the wall. Twenty minutes had passed. The children were safe.

  It was time.

  Being a spiker meant keeping secrets. It was how I had survived for so long living among paranormal beings who feared and distrusted my ability. I'd never liked having to play my cards so close to the chest, but I was very, very good at it.

  To the warden and anyone else who would listen, I'd intimated that Sampson's commands lost power over time and eventually wore off. Nothing overt—I'd simply dropped an offhand comment here, a murmured threat there.

  Perhaps that was true, and his commands did eventually lose effectiveness, but the ones the trancer had given to me had proved to be remarkably sticky. They hadn't worn off; I had pried them off. It had taken a lot of time and a tremendous amount of power—which I had siphoned from the alpha shifters the warden had forced me to spike—but I'd managed it.

  Once the commands were gone, I was able to reinforce my defenses around the access point the trancer had used to get inside my head. Sampson had underestimated me. He didn't think I was capable of blocking him and had used the same point of entry into my head today. And I'd played along. How dare he tell me I wasn't strong enough to do what had to be done to save the children? He had no clue how strong I was. No one here did.

  "It didn't work, damn it!" The warden kicked a chair, sending it skidding into the wall.

  "Told you," Julio huffed, as he folded his arms over his chest. "He wasn't doing it right."

  Alpha Gold scowled. "It's not us, it's her."

  Behind me, the red wolf growled and paced. Alpha Juan was playing it up now, pretending he'd actually tried to change me and was as angry as the others that he'd failed. Only I knew the truth about what he'd done. I just didn't know why.

  "You're all going to die now," I rasped, and then giggled because I sounded like a villain out of an old movie and also because I was woozy from blood loss.

  "Neely." The warden strode to where I was hunched on the floor. He thumped his phone screen and thrust it into my face. "Control yourself. I will not hesitate to use deadly force, and neither will my people."

  The warden had intended to show me Leah, Estie, and Milton. But there was no one on the screen, only a blackened smear on the wall outside the children's empty room. It looked like Fiera had taken care of Barry, the guard with the itchy trigger finger.

  When I didn't react the way the warden apparently expected me to, he turned the phone around and cursed under his breath. "You—" He gestured toward two guards standing by the nearest double doors. "—get to the lower floor. There's been an escape attempt."

  "Looks like less of an attempt and more of an escape." I managed a smile. "And don't go anywhere, guardsh. Shtay put." Oh great. I was losing my hard s's. I was farther gone than I had previously thought.

  Because I knew they'd run—sometimes you can tell that about a person by looking at them, even without telepathy—I locked onto the guards' brainwaves. The children weren't in their room, but that didn't mean they were off the premises, and I'd be damned if I was going to let these monsters track them down.

  "If you move, I will spike you." Blood trickled down my arms to my hands, coating my bracelet, then dripped from my fingertips and formed a puddle on the floor. I saw this from the corner of my eye, but my gaze stayed on the guards.

  The warden thrust out his chest, faced his people. "She won't."

  "She will." Although it was weak and rough, my voice echoed through the unnaturally silent room.

  The guards glanced from me to Harris, and when he nodded, they ran for the door.

  I spiked.

  The guards were a good thirty feet away from me, but it didn't matter. I'd practiced a lot over the last few days, I was filled with Alpha Juan's energy, and my control was much better than it used to be.

  They toppled sideways, falling into each other as they crumpled to the floor and were still.

  I surveyed the othe
r eight guards huddled at the back of the room. They stared at me, mouths open, eyes wide. Speechless. Terrified. "Who'sh next?"

  One of the males in front reached for the gun at his hip.

  I smiled. "Do it. We'll see who's fashter."

  The guard shook his head and put his hands up.

  "Enough." Warden Harris made an angry gesture with the flat of his hand. "Return to your room, Neely."

  "It's the damndest thing." I spoke slowly so as not to slur as I threw his words to me in his face. "You seem to believe you have the upper hand here."

  The warden took a step back, fear etched into the creases around his mouth and eyes.

  I locked onto his brainwaves, gave him a firm nudge. Not a full spike—no, a quick death would be too good for him. I wanted this to last.

  "Stop." He put up both hands as if to shield himself from me. "Don't do anything you might regret. You're surrounded by guards and alphas, you have nowhere to go, and no one is coming for you."

  Hold on a little longer, sugar cookie. I'm coming.

  Lucas's words from my dream. They were beautiful, but they were the last thing I needed. The detachment began to fade and pain from my neck wound sliced into me, sudden and fierce. I fumbled the warden's brainwaves, then lost them completely.

  "You killed them." Julio jabbed his finger at me. "Jesus, Neely."

  Alpha Gold shrugged. "Good riddance, if you ask me. I won't cry over two less humans in the world. They're like fleas. Powerless and irritating—and there are way too many of them."

  The prehistoric coyote gave no indication that she was going to attack me. She appeared bored and annoyed and had turned away as if to leave. Meanwhile, I was attempting to grasp the warden's brain while fighting off the urge to pass out.

  "Neels," Julio yelled.

  Alpha Gold whirled around, shifting to hybrid as she moved. She flicked out claws like knives and vaulted in my direction. It all happened in microseconds, leaving me enough time to lock onto her brainwaves, but not enough time to spike.

  Alpha Juan leapt when Gold did, his powerful body slamming into hers and interrupting her aim so that she swiped her paw over one side of my head instead of knocking it off my shoulders.