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The man on his left didn’t react as fast. The fireball engulfed him. He slapped at himself as he screamed, trying to put it out.

“Stop, drop, and roll, moron!” shouted the third person. She shoved her flaming companion to the ground, smothering the flames with her jacket.

Reuben hadn’t given her much of a look when she’d come in. Stark was a lot more interesting than the curvy black would-be biker chick at his side. But he couldn’t help but notice that she was hot, really hot—like the kind of hot where his wife would slap him just for looking.

He looked a little too long. He didn’t see retaliation for the fireball coming.

Stark smashed into Reuben.

His momentum forced both of them against the control panel, cracking the glass plate protecting all those blinking red lights. The sheer speed of it made Reuben’s mind whirl. He’d seen fast prisoners—they were all fast. But this guy was something else.

“Get off of me!” Reuben said, ripping another page out of his notebook.

Stark grabbed his wrist and slammed it into one of the security monitors. The protective glass shattered. Reuben’s knuckles scraped through and punched the plasma screen on the other side.

“Oh gods!”

Stark gripped Reuben’s jaw in one hand, surveying him coolly. The shifter was even more intimidating up close. He was so damn relaxed, even though one of his compatriots was still on fire behind him and he’d shot Reuben in the damn foot.

“I need keys,” Stark said.

The feeling was returning to Reuben’s foot. And it was
not
a good feeling.

“Keys?” Reuben asked. His whole body was drenched with sweat from the pain and adrenaline and the flow of magic.

“For every door in this place. Keys.”

Stark wanted to let everyone out of their cells.

This madman, this radical shifter who wanted to take over for the current Alpha—he wanted to release a few hundred angry prisoners on the night of the new moon.

“We don’t have keys,” Reuben said.

Stark reached into Reuben’s mouth. His fingers tasted like gun oil.

He snapped a molar out of Reuben’s gums.

Pain erupted up the side of his face. The taste of blood flooded his mouth.

This time, the string of curse words that came out of him were muffled by all the fluids on his tongue, which he spit onto Stark’s face. Not on purpose—Reuben wasn’t that stupid. But the shifter didn’t even flinch at the spray of blood.

“Keys,” Stark said.

Any loyalty Reuben might have felt to his job was gone. Long gone. Like, in the land of the dinosaurs gone.

“There’s another security room. It controls all the doors. We don’t have any keys!” He wasn’t certain that Stark could even understand him spluttering through the blood. Reuben could barely understand himself.

He was in so much pain, more pain than he’d ever felt in his life, even worse than when he’d fought the demons coming out of Hell’s fissure in 2014. And he’d gotten impaled on one of those awful blunt swords during that war, too. Still had the scar and everything.

Stark was setting a new bar for pain in Reuben’s life.

“Take my associate to the other security room.” Stark shoved Reuben into the arms of the female shifter.

She gripped his collar and held him at arm’s length, lip curled as though she found all the blood repulsive.

“Where is it?” she asked.

Reuben raised a trembling finger and pointed at the wall, indicating the hallway beyond.

“We’ll reconvene in the mine shaft, Tombs,” Stark said. He lifted the burned shifter off the ground with one fist and patted him on the chest, as if to tell him to man up and get on his feet. Weirdly, it worked. Probably because his melted flesh was already healing.

Shifters. Damage sponges, all of them.

As a witch, Reuben didn’t have the ability to heal rapidly without the assistance of magic. It would be weeks to heal his foot and jaw. He was feeling lightheaded.

The woman dragged him out of the security room.

Two of his coworkers were dead in the hallway, slumped against the wall with neat bullet holes airing out their brains.

Comfit and Lovejoy. The two of them had wives. One of them had kids.

Both of them were dead.

Oh gods. Oh gods. Oh gods.

“Point me,” the woman said.

Reuben tried to speak. His left leg warmed from the thigh down, and he realized that his bladder had released.

The indignity of it would have been bad enough if he hadn’t peed himself while such a smoking hot woman was inches away.

“Point me,” she said again, shaking him hard.

He gestured weakly up the hall. It was in the opposite direction from where Stark was walking.

She marched him along the path he’d indicated. Reuben tried to keep up with her despite the limp, his rapidly cooling left leg, and the throb of pain diffusing through his skull.

As soon as they got past the boiler, the woman shoved him. His back slammed into the wall. Her elbow dug into his throat.

She pressed a forefinger to her lips, indicating that he should be silent, and leaned around the boiler to watch the other members of her team walk away.

As if Reuben was stupid enough to draw Stark’s attention to him again.

Stark and the other shifter headed to Cellblock A as if they’d been there before and knew where they were going. Once they rounded the corner, the woman’s elbow eased up on Reuben’s throat.

“Is there a security override in here somewhere, Reuben?” she whispered, reading the name off of his badge. “Can we reengage the electricity on the individual cells?”

He stared at her. Was she insane? Wasn’t that the exact opposite of what Stark wanted?

“Don’t kill me,” he said.

“My name’s Deirdre,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t be afraid.”

It was one molar and a busted foot too late for that. “What do you want from me?” Reuben asked. His gums were clotting, but blood still trickled out of the side of his mouth when he spoke.

“I want a security override,” she said patiently.

Surprise dawned over him, slow and unpleasant.

This woman was a traitor to Stark. Not just a shifter—one of the most worthless creatures on the planet—but a
stupid
shifter, and probably suicidal to boot.

“There isn’t one in here,” Reuben said. “I don’t even know how you disengaged everything in the first place.”

“Stark has an ally in your maintenance crew and there’s a separate electrical system for your security defenses. All it took was a well-placed EMP on the right generator and…” She snapped her fingers. He flinched at the sound.

“If you’ve fried the generator, then there’s no override that can bring it back.” It took Reuben’s brain a second to catch up with his mouth. “Oh my gods, there’s nothing to bring the power back. Everyone’s going to break out. All these filthy silver-suckers—”

She slapped him.

It was probably a light slap, considering how strong shifters were. But it made his head ring. Fresh blood flowed through his mouth.

“Lucky for you, there’s no death penalty for being a prejudiced dill weed,” Deirdre said through gritted teeth. “That means I want to get you and the rest of the staff out of here alive. What’s the escape plan when things go south?”

There was a disaster recovery plan. Reuben had reviewed it recently. He couldn’t think of any escape routes or meeting points where they might be able to convene with surviving guards.

But he thought of something else.

“Magical overrides,” he said. “There’s a magical override separate from the main system. It locks all the cells permanently by engaging these charms—melts the locks into sludge, keeps everyone inside—”

“Can you still feed the prisoners when they’re melted in?” Deirdre asked.

“Yeah, of course we could,” Reuben said.

They wouldn’t need to, though.

The magical overrides would also incinerate the prisoners.

When the Office of Preternatural Affairs detained people, it didn’t plan on ever letting them escape again.

Those charms were a worst-case scenario thing, so terrible that only a few witches on staff knew they existed, much less how to engage them. But Reuben was one of those witches, and now he was pissed as hell. He’d be happy to turn them on.

“How do we activate the charms?” Deirdre asked.

“They’re in the same room as the unlocking mechanisms,” Reuben said.

“Take me there.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, of course.”

And then they were going to burn these bastards to the ground.

Maybe it was going to be a good new moon after all.

Deirdre Tombs dragged the guard behind her, cursing every dead god for the luck that had landed her with such a sorry excuse for a witch.

Surely she was due good karma for trying to prevent a massive jailbreak. It was the latest in her string of attempted good deeds: saving the werewolf Alpha from assassination, trying to save her would-be boyfriend from himself, getting herself in good with a terrorist so she could bring him down.

But she’d been failing hard at life, so getting saddled with Reuben probably was karma.

Silver-suckers
.

He’d actually said those words to her face.

A few years earlier, some werewolves had been found strung up in trees with silver ben-wa balls jammed in their throats. They’d suffocated from the swelling and nobody had ever been prosecuted for the hate crimes. The only people who called shifters silver-suckers were the ones who thought that it was right to kill werewolves like that.

It had been so long since Deirdre had spent time around non-shifters that she’d almost forgotten some people felt that way.

But here was living proof that people really were that ignorant. He was dripping blood and piss as Deirdre carted his wimpy butt up the hallway, and he’d still said that to her face. He probably hadn’t been thinking about what she was when he said it, but he’d certainly been thinking about the prisoners he guarded.

How many times had he flung those words like daggers into the hearts of the prisoners?

Silver-suckers
.

What a scumbag.

“In here,” Reuben said, swiping a keycard through a reader on the wall. It beeped and blinked.

Deirdre tried the lock. The door wouldn’t open.

“Why is this stuck?” she asked.

Reuben slapped a hand to his sweat-soaked forehead. “Double verification. Need two key cards, and one of them with supervisor access. I’ve got the highest level access, but we still need a second card.”

She pulled a key card out of her back pocket.

“Like this?”

He paled. “Where’d you get that?”

Stark had entered the detention center with guns blazing. The end result had been a lot of dead security guards. She’d had her pick of keycards.

Deirdre swiped it without answering Reuben.

The lock beeped, blinked, and unlocked.

Reuben leaned his weight against the door to shove it open. He winced at the movement.

The second security room was on the other side of the underground compound, overlooking one of the cellblocks with a reinforced window. Deirdre could watch all the way up the row of cells and see dozens of hands thrusting through the bars. Everyone was antsy, ready to erupt with the moon.

“No staff in here?” Deirdre asked.

“No point during night shift,” Reuben said. “Nobody’s supposed to be let out of their cells after lockdown. We only use the master control security room to let people out during the day for mealtimes, labor hours—that kind of thing.”

“Okay. So how do I open the interior doors?” Deirdre asked. “Not the cells. Just the ones in the hallways.” If she didn’t let Stark into the cellblock, he’d get suspicious and come looking for her.

Reuben’s eyes were wild. “Why?”

“Because I told you to,” she snapped. “You going to question everything I do?”

“You came in with Everton Stark!”

It did make her kind of look bad. “Just show me.”

He took her to a row of switches. “These ones along the top do the interior doors. You can tell which ones because they’re numbered to match the icons on the map.” He pointed to the blueprint of the detention center above the panel.

The numbers did match. It was a very neat system. Easy to figure out.

“What about these doors?” she asked, touching a part of the map without any lights.

“Solitary confinement. Those have to be unlocked at the hallway itself using a double keycard system, just like this room.”

“Awesome, thanks,” Deirdre said. She snapped her fingers at him. “Magic. Locks. Go.”

Reuben rounded on the lockers against the opposite wall. He fumbled with his keycard, struggling to open them.

Deirdre started flipping switches along the top row, watching the lights switch from green to orange. Maybe some employees would get a chance to escape before Stark found them. It would also help her beat a hasty retreat when the time came.

“You’re crazy,” Reuben said. “You’re all crazy.”

“Probably. But I’m the crazy who isn’t killing you, so your night could be worse. Trust me.” She flipped the last of the switches and stepped back. Deirdre jerked a thumb at the cellblock that the security room overlooked. “What kind of prisoners are kept in there?”

Reuben was sweating as he opened the cabinets, revealing the charms dangling inside. He mopped at his forehead with an arm. “Uh…those are the nonviolent offenders. Like, you know, minor misdemeanors done so many times they had to get charged for a felony.”

The back of her neck prickled. “Misdemeanors?”

“Trespassing, theft, use of lethe…”

Her hand reflexively went to the opposite wrist, where Everton Stark had inserted a needle only a few hours earlier, injecting lethe directly into her veins.

He was using it to see if she might shapeshift under the influence. So far, it hadn’t happened. But he kept offering and she kept accepting.

It was no big deal. A short high, a few visual hallucinations, and no appetite for days.

These people were imprisoned for it. They would never see sunshine again.

Just because they had been chasing a high.