Chapter Twenty-Five
A couple of hours later, I slammed into the lobby at HQ, still boiling mad.
I’d have been there earlier, but I’d run farther than I’d realized, and Cyrus and I had taken almost half that time just getting back.
And then I’d had to find some clothes and eat something, because he had all but shoved a sandwich into my mouth—ham and cheese, my favorite, but I didn’t want it.
I’d just had dinner, damn it!
But I’d eaten it anyway, because I wanted a full belly for this. It kept the wolf down, kept her quiet, and I needed calm. I intended to very calmly rip Hargrove’s freaking head off!
The pack was on my heels, even though I’d snarled at them to let me handle this.
They hadn’t argued, because one did not argue with one’s Lupa when she was on a tear, but they were tagging along nonetheless.
Cyrus had come, too, hanging back, letting me take the lead, but there as backup if I, I don’t know, Hulked out and ate my boss’s goddamned head!
Which was a distinct possibility.
I don’t know what I looked like, but people scattered out of my way as soon as I burst through the front doors, as if I had a boiling black cloud around me. Which... yeah. Honestly, it would have matched my mood.
But there weren’t many people here tonight.
It was after ten P.M., and the day’s rush was long since over, with only a few scattered souls at the service windows on the right-hand wall, getting weapons permits or whatever.
I barely noticed, because I was headed for the doors to the lower levels, where the boss was holed up.
Caleb had told me that much when I got back to the house. He hadn’t wanted to leave until he knew I was okay, and then he definitely hadn’t, because I was not. He was back there somewhere, too, tagging along to try to salvage my career or maybe to protect the boss, I wasn’t sure, and didn’t care.
Because fuck Hargroves, I was going to—
Stagger back from the door to the main staircase going down, which had just been flung open hard enough almost to knock me over.
At first, I thought someone was being careless, maybe a clerk working late and tottering under a mountain of paperwork.
But no. That had been deliberate, like the gun now being pointed in my face by some suicidal asshole, who seemed surprised when I grabbed the barrel and squeezed, rendering his weapon useless.
“Corps!” I snarled at him, although I wasn’t sure he understood, as my voice was almost completely in wolf speak.
For once, my wolf and I were on the same page, and she was so close to the surface and so hopping mad that it felt like I might Change at any moment.
I’d worn old clothes this time, just in case, but my badge was clipped prominently to my waistband, so this unobservant asshole was about to—
Change, but not into a wolf.
It took me a split second to realize three very bad things.
One, the asshole wasn’t some clueless trainee or civilian adjutant, failing to see my badge because it was late, he was tired, and probably clandestinely watching a game on his phone.
Two, the bastard wasn’t alone, because I could scent the others now that I’d shoved my way into the stairwell, what smelled like a whole pack of the rank bastards, none of which should be here, none of which should be anywhere, because nature had selected them for extinction millennia ago.
And three, that my little pack had just stumbled straight into a Relic raid on HQ and was about to be—
“Run!” My wolf and I snarled together, right before I was grabbed by a giant maw and dragged down into the gloom of the stairs.
And it was gloomy, so much so that even with my owl tat, I couldn’t see the walls I was painting with my blood as whatever-it-was banged me back and forth in between them.
I would have already died if not for my shields, which had slammed into place a split second before the teeth did, because my training was just that good.
But it wasn’t good enough, because this Relic wasn’t based on a wolf; the best I could tell, it was based on a crocodile, if one five times the usual size, with that huge maw trying to close on my head and shoulders and trying hard.
And crocs, even the regular old boring variety, have an unbelievable bite force, and this one was an order of magnitude above that.
Maybe several orders, because my shields were already buckling, my wolf was howling and coming out, and my hugely elongated and hideously distorted hand was grabbing the bastard off me and slamming it into the wall and floor and ceiling for a change, because it wasn’t my wolf who had just emerged.
It was its big sister, and she was pissed.
For a second, the croc creature and I looked at each other, and its tiny eyes widened. And then I ate them, along with the rest of its head, sans the teeth. Not that my alter ego couldn’t have digested them, too, but she needed her mouth free—
For that, I thought, as another Relic jumped me.
This one was a wolf, and it was huge. And savage. And just as blinded by fury as I was, and there were more behind it.
But there were more behind me now, too, flowing down the stairs in a stream of matted, ugly, patchy fur; my own little pack of Relics, whom I had drawn out of their skins.
I could feel the tethers binding us to each other, and knew I had helped with their Change, although I didn’t know how. But I hadn’t forced it.
They had decided to wake up and come out to play, all on their own. And while my human side was busy screaming for them to go back, to get out of here, to run! My other half, or other third, or whatever the hell was going on, was bellowing a welcome.
And then the fight was on.
It was sudden and horrible and brutal, and my alter ego loved. Every. Minute.
We tore a path through the howling fury on the stairs because most of the Relics were wolves, just like us, only not like us. They were massive and vicious and strong—God, so strong! The stolen pelts or whatever had made them damned effective.
But they were also new to this, weren’t they?
They didn’t know how to fight like a pack, how to work together, how to gang up on one of their enemies as we did—three or four at a time—while the others kept going, pushing back the rest of our opponents and keeping them at bay, while behind us, their friend was ripped apart.
And then we did it again, and again, and again.
It sounds painstaking. It wasn’t. The speed with which we carved through the mass of untrained and probably newly turned monsters would have to be seen to be believed, but no one would have been able to see it because the lights were all out now, victims of the carnage.
I could see—my wolf eyes worked just fine in the dark—but it didn’t matter much, for my third didn’t go on sight nearly as much as scent.
It was easy to distinguish pack from prey by smell alone, but one scent was missing.
The Circle’s fearsome wards, with their vaguely potion-y stench and vicious bite, one even worse than mine, should have been impeding everyone’s path.
And that included me, as I doubted I would read as a Corps member like this.
Yet, they were nowhere to be seen.
I raised a gory maw and felt my lips pull back from my teeth, because yes.
That answered the question of whether we had a traitor, didn’t it?
Those wards were some of the best in existence, but they didn’t work when switched off, and no Relic had known how to do that, or would have had the clearance to reach them if he did.
My fury communicated itself to my wolf, or whatever you wanted to call the creature whose head was brushing against the ceiling of the hall.
And for a moment, the emotion overrode whatever tenuous grip I had on sanity, and instinct took over.
And instinct seemed to have one and only one mode for her.
“Lia!”
I looked up sometime later, vaguely aware that I had a body dangling from my mouth, and saw a Relic looking back at me from a few inches away. I snarled and dropped my latest prey, ready to go for the new one’s throat, and then paused at a familiar smell. Very familiar.
Good.
Pack.
Mate.
Cyrus.
“Lia!” he said again, and dared to touch me. But it was a gentle touch, and he acted like he had a right to it, which drew my human mind closer to the surface.
He seemed to know it.
“Hargroves,” he growled. “Come.”
He turned and started down the corridor, and I followed; I wasn’t sure why. The name he’d spoken meant nothing to me, but the scent—the pack, forming up around me, brushing me with their sides, telling me through touch and the scents on them that they’d fed and fed well...
Yes.
Good.
And Cyrus, up ahead... his scent was the strongest of all, and she approved. Strong, male, ferocious. Yes.
She followed him down the hall that was so full of bloody fur that it was almost solid, with little room to maneuver. But the pack let her through easily, with no shoving required. Of course they did.
She was Lupa.
We had already passed down the stairs, now running with gore, as slick underfoot as a waterfall, and littered with the remains we couldn’t be bothered to consume. Ahead were some more doors that didn’t last long, and more people who thought they knew how to fight. And then some that actually did.
She felt the change ripple through the pack when they encountered real resistance for the first time.
The stairs had been stuffed with cannon fodder; the real soldiers were down here.
But there weren’t so many of them. Most were in the next room, busy savaging the tiny knot of war mages clustered around—
Hargroves. The name echoed through my mind again. So that was him?