Chapter 29
ZARBIUS
I spat a couple of broken teeth out of my mouth, the red spittle staining the grass an ugly brown color, as the pieces of off-white enamel tumbled between the blades.
I groaned, the sound an unpleasant gurgle rattling around in the back of my throat.
Everything hurt. My face throbbed relentlessly, each pulse stretching the already swollen skin.
One eye remained persistently closed, stinging with the trickle of fluid seeping between the tumescent lids.
Each breath was a sharp pain cutting through my chest from one side to the other.
I kept each breath shallow, the muscles of my face spasming with each painful inhale.
Deep in my guts, a concerning pain troubled my insides. And when I tried to move, it felt like a thousand knives stabbing in the region of my hips. Something was broken. I was so fucked.
I closed my eye, waiting for the killing blow. My head pounded, the lightning strikes of a headache threatening to explode my skull, confounding my senses. As if from the end of a tunnel, I recognized the familiar sensation of a migraine.
In the distance, there was shouting, the sound of an engine. A whisper of warm air swept over my bare skin, the heat from the afternoon sun on my already overloaded nerve-endings adding to my distress. I writhed - a mistake! - and a bubbling moan escaped my mouth.
Finally, I forced my one good eye open.
From where I lay, all I saw was the tall summer grass wavering in the slight breeze, the trees at the edge of the forest, the blue of the almost cloudless sky tinged yellow at the edges as the sun slipped towards the horizon.
The Alpha was gone. Talius... the omega-stealing double-dealing prick of an alpha was gone.
It was just as well.
I tried to blink away the confusion, but the pounding in my head was taking up most of my attention.
I'd been fighting. I was sure I'd been in wolf form, but something had made me shift.
There had been sirens and shouting. Maybe it was a conditioned reflex, knowing that at all costs, the humans must not find out about us wolves.
Maybe that was what had saved me, because I knew I'd been losing that fight.
Talius had been so enraged, his eyes bloodshot, the flare of his nostrils exposing the red mucosae. ..
He hadn't killed me. Probably couldn't bring himself to kill a human. He was weak...
Two hands grabbed me, twisting one arm behind my back.
I ground my teeth together, my eyes nearly rolling back in my head, stifling my scream as they rolled me over to grasp my other hand and bring it up behind my back.
Something cold and hard and burning snapped around my wrists, and when I tried to pull my arms away, I did scream as the metal burnt into my wrists in a way no regular metal should.
Silver.
"I know what you are!" hissed a low voice in my ear. "Get the fuck up, you piece of shit!"
Someone yanked at the cuffs cruelly, almost dragging me to my feet.
I fought to hold back another scream as I was hauled painfully upright.
The metallic taste of blood flooded my mouth as I bit down on my tongue.
I shook my head, trying to clear the fog of nausea sweeping through me, but there was no escaping the combined effects of the silver and the migraine.
I gagged, retched, and then relieved the entire stinking contents of my stomach all over the grass as my knees buckled.
Silver was poison to shifters anyway, but I'd always been unusually sensitive to it, perhaps because of certain... events... in my youth, or maybe I was just naturally that way. Either way, I was a gagging, spewing mess and my world had dissolved into a nightmare of pain.
"Get up!" the insistent voice of my tormentor snapped. I screamed as the cuffs were yanked upwards, and I staggered to my feet again.
"Check out the cabins, the office if you can find one. There's bound to be paperwork. If you find a laptop, bring it. We'll get the tech team to grab any data off it."
"We got most of the others, but a couple ran off into the bush."
The voices seemed to be coming from far away, reality swimming into and out of focus.
"You sick fuck," a deep voice laced with scorn seemed to be addressed to me. Someone kicked my leg. It barely registered over the agony caused by the silver cuffs. I turned my head searching for my assailant with my one good eye.
The heel of a hand slammed into my back, pushing me forward.
This time the cuffs came with me, so there was no extra agony above the baseline pain that consumed my entire being.
Fuck this. The guy restraining me must have been a shifter, because he knew precisely what this was doing to me.
I inhaled, trying to scent him, to recognise him later when I'd get my revenge, but the blood bubbled in my nostrils, drips still leaking onto my naked chest.
He propelled me forward, the world swimming around me, as I struggled to stay conscious and on my feet.
My eye continued to swell. My lower body screamed silently with every halting step.
I desperately needed to shift to heal myself, but with the silver around my wrists, that wasn't possible.
I gritted my teeth and struggled on, unsure which was worse - the pain from the silver cuffs on my bare skin, the agony of weight bearing on something that was very clearly broken or the relentless pounding in my head.
Eventually the white shape of a van loomed over me, and I was being shoved inside, careless of my injuries. Excruciating pain enveloped me, a myriad of stars spun in a sea of darkness, and the world dissolved.
When I came to, a circle of fire shackled my hands to an overhead bar on the inside of the wagon, every jolt and bump over the uneven ground sending new waves of agony slicing through me as they took me away.