Chapter 33
Tyler
The front doors to the sanitarium crashed inward, flying from their hinges. More wolves turned their weapons on us. A primal roar shook the air, ripping from Emery’s throat as he tore ahead, fully shifted and on the warpath.
I leapt over Emery in a single bound, setting my newfound blood lust free as if it were as simple as breathing, hands morphing back into claws and fangs elongating over my lips.
I’d never felt so alive, and all it took was dying.
The men aimed their guns high, letting loose with their rifles, only to leave holes in the flaking plaster walls of the front lobby. With a single thought, I whisked through the space, ripping out one of their throats with a swift slash of my hand.
Gage bolted in behind us, diving behind a battered structural column and taking cover.
Emery barreled through the lobby, flailing his claws and gnashing his teeth with unchecked ferocity, tearing one wolf apart before turning on another and snapping their head clean off with a deadly bite.
Huffing through his snout, he turned to me, dropping the severed head with a thud.
“Pick up the pace, puppy dog.” My voice came out in that deep, hellish tone that made even my hardened skin prickle.
I danced across the chipped tile floor, whipping both claws outward over two more of the men’s chests and dropping them to the ground.
I turned back to Em, jerking my head toward the lot behind us with a grin. “You’ve got some catching up to do.”
“Move, move, move!” A shout came from the balcony at the top of the stairs, more of my father’s weakling militia men aiming useless weapons down over the railing.
Rolling my eyes at Emery, I waved a hand at the balcony permissively. “Sic em, boy.”
Emery shot forward, giving me a shove to the chest as he went. I belted a laugh, the sound eerie and wicked without even intending it. Em leapt up to the balcony with a murderous growl, crushing the banister to splinters as he tore into the men one by one.
Whirling around, I sniffed the air, trying to remember what Hudson smelled like. Cool lake water and clean soap. Sweat and sex and everything that made my heart race.
I had to get to him. I had to wash away that devastated, utterly broken look in his eyes that was seared into my skull. I had to make him smile again.
But everything smelled like blood.
“Don’t move!” Another man appeared from a corridor on the ground floor, using Malik as a human shield with an arm around his throat and a gun pressed to his temple. “I’ll kill him! I’ll fucking—”
I was behind him before he could blink. I swear I’d only meant to twist his arm and make him drop the gun, but the whole limb came off.
Oops.
The wolf screamed as blood poured from his shoulder.
With a snarl, I sank my teeth into his neck, making him shut the hell up.
He fell to the ground with a thud, red pooling on the floor beneath him.
The nasty taste of wolf blood offended every one of my heightened senses, and I wretched, spitting what I could from my mouth. “Oh, fuck, it’s like… swamp water.”
“T-Ty?” Malik shrank against the wall, staring at me in horror as Gage ran up behind him. “Is that you?!”
“No time, Mal.” Emery dropped from the decimated balcony with a crash, shifted halfway so he could speak. “Where did they take Hudson?” He lifted his head, sniffing sharply.
“Hudson?” Malik shook his head, his lips parted as he stared between me, Gage, and Em. “I-I’ve been in a room back there the whole time. I didn’t see him.”
“They’re using the residual energy here to jump-start their spell,” Gage said, glancing around. “Wherever the worst of whatever went down here to make this place so haunted, that’s where they’ll be.”
“That doesn’t help,” I said, fisting my claws in my hair as I darted around the lobby, trying to catch anything that screamed Hudson. “Too much bad shit happened here for any one room to be worse than another.”
“Ty, spread out,” Emery grunted, leaping back up to the balcony. “His scent has to be hanging around somewhere.”
“Guys…” Malik said softly, staring at the floor.
“It won’t help, Em!” I snarled, waving a hand around. “We’ve been here before. This place is like a maze, and I can’t smell a damn thing other than all this fucking blood!”
“We have to do something, Ty! We’re running out of—”
“Guys!” Malik shouted, making us both whip around to find him staring wide-eyed at the floor.
“What?!” I roared right before my sharpened vision honed in on what he was fixated on. “Oh.”
“Ho—ly shit…” Emery breathed, inching down the stairs in awe.
All of the blood we had spilled, every single drop that soaked the floor of the lobby and every splatter I’d left in the parking lot, even what still remained in the fallen bodies of the wolves we’d massacred—was moving.
Droplets crept along the broken tile, coalescing into one another as they touched.
The crimson pools swelled, spreading across the floor.
I backed away as the blood neared my feet, right before small cascades of red swirled upward in fine ribbons, spiraling up and over the shattered banister and down the corridor.
A swell of hope filled my chest, prickling over my skin as I turned to Emery. We locked eyes, and without a word, we bolted after the floating tide of blood as it picked up speed, every fine ribbon crashing into another and growing to the size of a small airborne river.
We darted down a long, dark hallway. The blood slammed up into the ceiling tiles, pooling above us as it vanished into the cracks.
Emery grabbed my arm, hauling me into a decrepit stairwell, up the busted concrete steps and out into another corridor.
“There!” he shouted, leaping forward and fully shifting again to hurtle down the hall on all fours after the spiral of blood.
“We’re coming, Hudson.” I tore after him, my dead heart in my throat as distant voices caught my ears. “We’re coming, baby boy.”