Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
OH LOOK! GUNS!
Guess they figured out that their tranquilizers needed an upgrade because I hit the ground like I was sliding into third base the second that fucking dart thing hit me.
That hadn’t scared me nearly as much as watching Hamilton drop like he had, though.
I wasn’t the one they wanted to experiment on.
Sure, maybe I was going to be his dinner later, but I didn’t mind that at all.
Knowing he’d been recaptured by the people who’d given a scary badass vampire bat shifter nightmares scared me a hell of a lot more.
I couldn’t let them break him.
That I woke up in a room the size of a closet with a white ceiling and floor—that had a drain in the middle {shudder}—with clear glass walls worried me. That there were two other naked men in the cell with me and three or four in the rooms around us worried me even more.
“Who’re you?” I asked as I sat up against one of the walls.
The two of them shared a look that I took to be hesitation to speak until they were on the same page. Well, the time to coordinate their stories had been when I was unconscious.
“Spit it out,” I said. “Whatever it is.”
Finally, the beefy blond with red cheeks said, “PFC Austin Kazinsky.”
“Sergeant Kendall Row,” said the bald guy with startling blue eyes.
“Oh, the fuck?” I snapped and tried to get to my feet. I wobbled, but I got up. “What are your fucking orders, huh? Because I’ll have you know I’m hopped up on vampire bat shifter jizz and I can paint this room with your motherfucking guts.”
Ew. Seriously, me? I swore I didn’t know who I was sometimes.
“That’s our mission,” Row said. “To get like you.”
“What?” I looked between the two of them, realizing they seemed equal parts resigned and terrified. “I’m not going to fuck you.”
“No,” said Kazinsky, “they want him to.”
I followed his pointing finger and ended up whipping around and nearly falling over. As it was, I hit my knees when I faced Hamilton in bat form in the cell behind mine. “Hammy!” I hollered and struggled back onto my feet.
He said something, but I couldn’t hear him at all. When he pressed his hand to the glass, I did the same. There was a gap between the panes so I couldn’t even feel the heat of his hand. I banged on it, frustrated, and he frantically shook his head.
“If you try to break the glass,” Row said, “they’ll make it opaque.”
For a second, I wondered how that fucking mattered, but then I realized I really didn’t want to lose sight of Hamilton. I couldn’t get to him, but at least I knew he was okay. He probably wanted the same with me.
Movement caught my eye, and I looked through the wall of Hamilton’s cell to see a gigantic wolf-man with gray and white fur. He showed his teeth at me but also finger waved like maybe we knew each other. Did I know a werewolf?
I gasped and looked to Hamilton, pointing. “Is that Quillan?” I tried to say that so he might read my lips.
I couldn’t read his lips at all, but Hamilton nodded.
There were two guys in the cell beside mine, opposite Quillan. Both humans were curled up like they wanted to melt into the floor and definitely not looking Quillan’s way.
Turning so I could see Hamilton as well as Row and Kazinsky, I tried to understand what was happening here.
“So the plan is to, what? Fuck you into being super soldiers? Like that’s what they came up with after having him caged last time?
That’s all they’ve got?” I looked up at the ceiling, hoping there was a mic hidden up there somewhere. “Losers.”
“They’ve done experiments,” Kazinsky said and hugged his knees to his chest. “God, they were awful.”
“I never saw one,” Row offered, “but the way they screamed was nightmare fuel.”
“It was almost worse when they suddenly stopped screaming. When you knew they were dead.” By the way Kazinsky curled up, it seemed like maybe he was afraid he’d be next.
“Well, there’s no way Hamilton’s fucking either of you. He would never.”
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure on that, but he didn’t seem like the type to fuck around. I got the feeling what we had was as new and special to him as it was to me. Plus, there was literally no way he’d obey somebody’s orders to fuck two guys who clearly had not consented.
“Seriously,” I said when they shared another look, “after what he’s been through, he’d never—”
Row stood up, angry. “They spritz him with something that keeps him in that form. You think they don’t have something that could make him just animal enough to not give a fuck if we say no?”
I felt the wall I was leaning on vibrate and looked to see Hamilton roaring. Row saw, too, and backed away from me, his face going pale.
“First of all, he might look like a giant bat beast, but he’s got his mind and all that.
He’s not human, sure, but that doesn’t mean he’s not intelligent and compassionate and everything else.
” A shiver went through me, though, at the possibility that Row was right.
“If they have something that strips away his consent, then know that I won’t let him hurt either of you because I won’t let them hurt him like that.
” Because he would absolutely never forgive himself and torture himself for what he’d done for the rest of his life.
“Right,” Row said before he sat down again.
The brief look Kazinsky gave me said he didn’t believe I could stop Hamilton either.
Yeah, well, they didn’t know how scrappy I could be. I’d literally punch Hamilton in his dick as many times as necessary, if that was what it took to stop him. I’d save him from himself in any way possible.
Suddenly, the walls separating us from Hamilton slid open in opposite directions. I nearly fell in but, of course, he caught me. And then I found myself hoisted up into his arms, one big arm around my waist and a hand covering the back of my head.
“I should have told you before,” he said urgently, “I love you and I’ll never stop fighting for you.”
Before I could say a thing in return—like OMG I’m totally completely in love with you, too—he practically dropped me, spun me away, and launched himself at the opposite wall.
I righted myself as Row and Kazinsky scrambled out of the way, the three of us standing there as Hamilton crashed into the glass over and over again.
He cracked it, the glass splintering in every direction like a windshield about to explode. It also turned opaque, but like, not completely. Sort of like the cracks were messing it up because whole sections were still clear, letting me see Quillan’s surprised face.
I refocused on my man. “So when he gets through there, do either of you know where to go to escape?”
They both looked at me, but I only had eyes for my wickedly strong and fiercely determined mate.
“Uh, yeah,” Row said before clearing his throat. “But if you haven’t noticed, we’re at sea.”
I clutched my throat and cocked my head at him in horror. “I beg your pardon?”
Hamilton paused and actually shifted into his human form. “It’s a ship,” he said as he rolled his shoulders. Maybe he’d hurt one and the shift was healing it? Because he immediately shifted back into formidable bat form and kept ramming that glass.
In the room next door, Quillan was doing the same thing now. The opaque thing was failing all over the place, letting me see a lizard-looking dude on the other side of Quillan and… Huh. There was a centaur to the left of us who was mule kicking his glass.
All of a sudden, the lighting went from surgical white to rolling red as those beacon things descended from the ceiling in the hallway out front of the cells. So they knew we were being bad down here. I had a feeling soldiers were about to appear.
“Get behind me.” I stepped in front of Row and Kazinsky.
“Why?” Kazinsky asked.
“Can either of you heal from a bullet wound in under a minute?”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, fuck.”
They lined up single file behind me, and I glanced back to see that Row was even ducking a bit since he was taller than both of us. I could heal from a head wound, too. Yeah, that would be no problem. Uh-huh.
The wall shattered like car glass, in chunks and not completely, and Hamilton shifted again before stepping out into the hall.
Quillan’s glass, the lizard guy’s, and the centaur’s popped right after.
Swear to god, if I wasn’t terrified, this whole thing with a colossal man-bat, snarling werewolf, fucking mini-Godzilla, and very angry half-horse man would’ve been so cool.
And then a whole lot of other supernatural dudes stepped out of their cells all along the hall. Feathers, fur, hooves, scales— “Goddamn, is that guy a whole fucking snake?” Because he had a human upper body but he was one long danger noodle after that.
“Wiley, stay behind me.”
“Yeah, sure. Get me a gun, though. Then I can really help.”
“Us, too,” Row said from behind me.
They could choose to flip on us, but it really didn’t look like they were going to.
I didn’t know how long I’d been in that cell before I woke up, but they could’ve been in there a lot longer.
Just stewing with the idea that a monster was going to come along and fuck them whether they were okay with that or not.
I was pretty sure that would switch anyone’s loyalties.
Hamilton looked over his shoulder at me, big brown eyes giving me a once-over. I could tell it wasn’t because I was naked and he appreciated that. Nope, he was thinking something like he was not about to hand me a weapon.
I smiled. “If you don’t hand me a gun, I’ll just take one off a corpse.” He sighed right before elevators started dinging from either end of the hallway. I patted his butt. “Go kill the bad guys, baby.”
He did. Hamilton went right, others went left, and it was a bloodbath.
Part of me was like yurp, so many severed limbs but the rest of me was mentally cheering on every single supernatural badass who was plowing through our captors.
Thank goodness you wore your helmet so your severed head wouldn’t get a concussion!
Claws, fangs, and whip-like tails were showing these brainwashed morons just how dissectible the human body actually was, kevlar and all.
And then I fucking got shot! Just below my last rib on my right side—I didn’t know what the fuck was inside me there, but it bled a lot more than my thigh had last time.
I bumped backward into what was left of the glass wall and it gave completely, sending me sprawling into the cell.
Kazinsky rushed to my side, putting pressure on my wound and making me howl.
“Fuck, man, I thought you said you couldn’t be hurt!”
“I can be hurt, but I heal really fast.” I could feel it happening and freaked out that his hands on me might stop it, so I smacked him away from me. “There. There, see?”
I didn’t want to look at it, but Kazinsky’s multiple expressions of holy fuck told me everything.
While guns fired all around us and people snarled and snapped, I waited until my wound stopped feeling weird.
Sitting up, I ran my hand over my back and looked at the complete lack of a hole in my front. “See? Good to go.”
Kazinsky’s mouth opened a closed a few times, and I guessed he just couldn’t find the words.
“Oh, look!” I pointed. “Guns!”
Row already had one and it looked like he was watching Hamilton’s back, firing on his fellow soldiers.
So part of me was glad someone had my man’s six and the rest was pissed it wasn’t me.
But then Kazinsky grabbed a gun and handed another to me and…
Could I actually kill someone? A fellow human?
A guy standing right in front of me and aiming his own—
Oh. Yes, apparently, I could. Got him right in his throat actually. Don’t point a gun at me when I have one, too. Lesson learned for both of us. Ew, fuck, look at it spurt. That was so gross!
The next guy, though, he put his hands up. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his eyes, and he was freaking right the fuck out. And surrendering.
I tucked the gun into my armpit, which fucking hurt, and yelled, “Stop eyeballing me and get on your knees, motherfucker!”
“Christ, Wiley,” Row said as he came around me. “Give me that.”
“I’ve got him.” But I handed the gun over anyway.
“It’s done. We’re going up.” He pointed behind me, and I realized it was eerily quiet. “Go get your…bat.”
Hamilton stood there, heaving for breath, covered in blood, and reaching for me. I didn’t care if he was gooey with the ick of our enemies, I ran over to him and held his hand with a smile.