Blood Mate: The Project Rebellion, Book 2 (14 page)

Nothing.

Body coiled for action, she spread her hand flat against the surface of the door and pushed. No shouts, no gunshots. In a rush, she shoved the door the rest of the way open and slipped through. The doors to the elevator were next to her and a corridor stretched out in front. It was concrete like the stairs, lined either side with doors. Offices? Storage? She trotted along, trying to keep her steps light and skirted to one side in case someone came around the corner ahead. Quite what she planned to do if that happened, she didn’t know, but it felt better to hug the wall as she scooted along, trying the handles on the doors.

The first door was locked, but the second opened to reveal an empty office, the desk and shelves covered in a thick layer of dust. Same with the third and fourth. The fifth looked to be some kind of staff room. Her frown deepened. Neglect lay thick the dust. What had this place been used for? The depth and construction would indicate a bomb fallout shelter. Perhaps an operational center back from the Cold War, to be used in case of a world nuclear war?
 

Heavy footsteps and a deep male chuckle warned her a couple of seconds before a group of soldiers turned the corner up ahead. Heart speeding up, she slid into one of the empty offices.

Flat against the wall behind the door, she listened while the group headed toward the stairs and lift. Another deep chuckle reached her ears as ribald comments were thrown back and forth. Nothing interesting, just the usual male crap.

She held position for a few seconds after she heard the doors slide shut. When the mechanism whirred, she opened the door a crack. Once that elevator was in motion, it was a one way trip to the hangar. She hadn’t seen any other levels on the way down and in her experience, elevators and stairs operated in tandem. With this being the Project though, a level accessible by elevator alone wouldn’t surprise her.

No,
she reassured herself and slipped out into the main corridor. Foster’s scent was strong here. They’d wheeled him this way. She followed her nose, noting the Lycan’s scent got stronger and more feral the farther she went.

A mark on the floor caught her attention so she knelt, rubbed her fingertip over it and lifted her hand to sniff. She recoiled with a grimace. Sweat with a hint of silver nitrate. The sweat wasn’t so bad, but the silver made everything in her want to turn inside out. Project doctors used the stuff, knowing it burned but not caring. She’d never seen anyone push the stuff out through their skin like Foster though. Is this what they’d done in the hospital?

Turning yet another corner, she found a second set of double doors in front of her. Shit, this place was a damn rabbit hole, and her name sure as hell wasn’t Alice. She approached the doors with the same caution she’d approach a downed soldier in the field. One never knew if those on the ground had a grenade or mine hidden underneath. There were two small windows around head height. She slid along the wall, eyes level with the nearest before twisting to take a look.

“Shit…”

Like the hangar above, the room contained row upon row of cages. But this time the occupants weren’t sleeping. Most dripped with blood, and the guy in the cage opposite stared right at her, the white column of his spine visible through the ruined mass of his throat. She shivered at the expression on the corpse’s face. Easy to see he’d died in agony.

No guards in sight.

Toni pushed the door open and slipped into the room. The smell of blood, terror and fouler things washed over her. Low level moaning covered her movements as she shut the door and sidled behind the nearest cage. The occupant, a Lycan, was curled into a small ball in the corner. He was shivering and naked, blood ran from vicious claw marks across his back and shoulders to pool under his body. Even her presence didn’t rouse him.

She scooted behind the rows, making sure to stay out of the main walkways, her disgust and sympathy mounting with each step. Working her way along, she checked the cages for Foster, but each revealed a fresh horror.

More Lycans with horrific wounds, but these weren’t like the ones above ground—the ones who watched her with suspicion and threw themselves against the bars to get at her. Instead, sensing someone outside the cage, some tried to scoot away and hide under whatever they could. Others were too far gone to care, staring at things she couldn’t see.

She scooted around the edge of the last cage, noting another corpse. Sprawled on his back, his ice blond hair stained scarlet, his black eyes staring up at the ceiling. The air left her lungs in a rush, recognition rushing through her.

“No…” She dropped to her knees next to the cage.

Gavin Hurst. Lieutenant. Damn good soldier. But he hadn’t been Lycan, he’d been a Blood. One of hers.

“Fuckers!” she snarled and slammed her hands into the bars, denting them. She’d been told Hurst had bought the farm on mission. They’d lied to her. Taken one of her men and…what? What had they done to him? She looked down, concentrating on the state of the body rather than its identity.

Vicious slashes had opened him from sternum to pelvis, his guts exposed to the air like pale, pink sausages. The blood on the floor was still warm. His heart could only have stopped beating a few seconds before she found him. The residual energy—the fanciful might call it his life force—wrapped around her before it faded from his body. She watched the black of his eyes fade.

“Holy shit.”

She sat back on her heels, dumbfounded. He’d been a Blood the first time she’d met him so she’d never known what color Hurst’s eyes were. Blue. A beautiful clear, light blue. They turned back to human after death. She’d never seen another Blood die. Oh, she knew that they could die, had even seen them fall, but she’d never seen the bodies. They were always reclaimed by the labs for tests. That is unless they’d taken the one way trip into the desert, then no one saw them again.

A door opened on the other side of the room, blasting a brief burst of male laughter and a howl from beyond it. Toni’s head snapped up and she moved in that direction, ignoring the caged prisoners for now. She couldn’t help them until she knew what was going on. And whatever it was, answers, and Foster, were through those doors.

Chapter Ten

Darce hit sand and knew he was in trouble. Trying to force the fog of sedatives from his brain, he rolled to his feet with a roar. Talons exploded through the skin of his fingertips as he dropped into a defensive crouch, swiping at the air around him with part-shifted hands. Anything to keep the bastards away from him.

The sand was a bad thing. Sand meant he was on a one-way trip into the desert and a slug in the back of the skull. If he could keep them away, make them take anything but a headshot, then he had a fighting chance.

Lights shone in his face, blinding him whatever direction he turned. Not the sun, something else. Spotlights. Fuck, they had trucks around him. His heart pounded, pouring more adrenaline through his system while his wolf raged and snarled. Ready to fight. Ready to kill.

Survive. He had to survive. Had to find her—his mate.

He backed up and collided with something hard. A metal post. He made a grab for it, hoping for something he could break off and use as a weapon and found his fingers caught in mesh instead. He recoiled with a hiss, pain lancing through his palm, like acid eating his skin. Lips curled back, he looked down. Criss-cross burns covered his hand. A snarl escaped as he squinted to try and see around the lights blazing in his face. The fuzz receded from his brain. Tall fences of chain-link surrounded him. The Project special stuff—links bonded with silver alloy or sprayed with something similar to keep in him and his kind.

Pain raced through his system, sharpening his awareness and more clues crowded in. Lifting his head, he dragged air in over his tongue. He was inside, somewhere big. Echoing. A faint fusty smell indicated disuse but was almost hidden by newer smells. Equipment, metal, the hot, electrical scent of electronic kit. The smell of people. Humans. Sweat, deodorant…someone had had onion for lunch.

Darce moved on, filtering information from the air. Worse scents. Blood. Terror. Pain. The smell of piss and opened bowels warned him that the sand at his feet wasn’t someone’s attempt to bring the beach into their workplace. Since gladiators had battled in Roman arenas, possibly even before, sand had been used to soak up blood and worse. Much, much worse. A fetid gust of air warned him a second before a Reanimate barreled out of the darkness. Corrupt flesh almost black and its eyes were white all over. It chattered, moving sideways in a crab-like motion, and drool flowed from the corner of decayed lips.

“Fuck!”

Darce dropped and swept a leg around in an arc to take the creature’s feet from under it. It hit the sand hard but Darce didn’t give it a chance to get back up. Couldn’t afford to. He slammed a large, twisted paw into its throat and bounced its head off the sand a couple of times. It screamed in fury, dead eyes rolling as it tried to look at him.

Finger bones broke through rotting flesh to scrape at Darce’s arms. He ignored them and drove his claws through the throat. The skin gave easily, too easily. His stomach churning, Darce threw the gobbet of ruined flesh aside. It hit the chain-link with a wet splat then slid to the sand. Cheers and catcalls, evidence of an audience he couldn’t afford to pay attention to, erupted around him when he rolled away.

But the dead didn’t need to breathe. Sickening, wuffling sounds wheezed from its lungs as the thing crawled sideways across the sands to get at him.

Shitshitshit.

Darce went aerial, flipped to his feet and jumped out of the way just in time. Sharpened finger bones sliced through the air where he had been. He swore, twisted and slammed his leg down with an axe kick. Bone cracked. A new bend appeared in the creature’s thigh. It howled—in either pain or frustration, Darce couldn’t tell and lashed out again. He danced away, around it. The fucker was quick. Quicker than he’d ever seen a Reanimate, especially one in such an advanced state of decay.

“Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill!”

Darce ignored the chanting and tested the borders of the enclosure, digging his bare feet in the sand when he reached the end of one panel and moved along the next. Three sides. The Reanimate tracked him all the way around, tilting its head at an odd angle to look out of the corner of its eye. It must have some residual vision on that side.

Darce swept his hair back out of his face. Five…six panels…

The Reanimate chattered, and twisted to lunge at him again, pure hunger on its face. He was ready for it though, body coiled with lethal energy he unleashed in a vicious kick. His foot slammed into the side of the Reanimate’s face, snapping its head around. The jaw gave with a sickening crunch, black blood and spittle spraying over the sand.

Pulling his leg back in a practiced move, Darce landed lightly on his feet. Guard up, he bounced and carried on circling. Seven… Eight panels. Fuck. He was in a damn cage fight with the undead. Talk about shitty luck.

“Stay. The. Fuck. Dead,” he snarled when the creature picked itself up, jaw shunted so far to the left that the skin the other side had begun to split. He knew it wouldn’t stay down. It wouldn’t stop until he’d removed its head from its neck.

“Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill!”

Darce roared and launched himself to the side. His toes dug into the sand, and he ran at the side of the cage to bound up it. Metal rattled and his feet burnt on contact as he twisted and fell to land on the creature. He wrapped it up before it could react, clamped his hands around the skull and wrenched. His wolf roared within him, his connection to the creature complete as he tore the Reanimate’s skull clean off its body.

The crowd exploded with cheers, covering the dull thud as he dropped the decapitated head next to the now permanently dead body. Darce swallowed back his nausea and lifted his arm to shield his eyes, trying to see beyond the spotlights. What the fuck was this? Amusement? Sport? What kind of sport was it to put a Reanimate in with him? This one had been fast, but most were easy to deal with if you knew how. It was just killing though. Not sport.

Metal squealed. Darce whipped around, fists up to face a new threat. Tasers sparked and another wolf was shoved through the door into the cage. The Lycan rolled to his feet, his eyes wild, gaze frenzied as he looked from Darce to the Reanimate’s corpse and back to the closing door. He snarled, dropped into a defensive crouch and to circle Darce.

Darce’s instincts kicked. He studied the other man, who padded lightly around him. He was taller and heavier than the newcomer, and uninjured. Vicious claw marks ran down the other man’s side, oozing blood. With injuries like that, he was surprised the guy still stood, let alone moved.

“Look man.” Darce dropped his guard a little, his voice low and calm as he tried to reason with him. A brother in arms. “We don’t have to do this.”

“We have to.”

“Or what? They kill us?”

“They’re not that kind.” Sadness and resignation filled the other wolf’s eyes. “Just promise me one thing?”

“Anything, man.” Darce nodded, already trying to figure out how they could get out of the cage, take on the guards with the tasers and whatever armed guards he knew lurked in the audience. He didn’t get the chance to develop those plans. The other Lycan’s eyes wolfed out to the max—bright amber—and when he spoke, his voice was deep with his beast.

“Just don’t let them eat me alive.”