43. Chapter Forty-Three #3
Knox moves in front of us, clearing any lingering enemies using disciplined bursts of force, but he's moving slower, worn down by the constant fight. Shade steps in on my open side and shoots over Viper’s shoulder, his face cold and tight as he picks off anything that gets close enough to touch us.
I still can't stop myself from trying to dig my heels in.
Viper swears, shifts his grip, and hooks an arm fully around my waist this time. The strength of it steals the fight from my body. He is not asking me to come. He is taking me.
"Please, Viper. Blaze is still out there," I gasp. "We can't leave him."
"I know." His voice is rough with strain. "I know, pretty girl."
The answer hurts worse than if he had argued because he sounds resigned. I don't want him to lose faith, because without it, we're doomed.
Knox shouts for the line of Alphas at the barricade to part as we reach it.
A massive accumulation of bodies has formed against the barricade, almost reaching its summit and providing a ramp for us to climb over.
Viper lifts me effortlessly as he scrambles over the wall of corpses, tossing me up and over the steel barrier at the top.
I stumble as I land on the other side, but Viper is right beside me to catch me, his hand locked around my waist like he thinks I might bolt straight back into the crush.
I yank once out of pure desperation, then stop struggling because the sight in front of me steals the strength right out of my body.
From inside the barricade that I can barely see over, the road looks worse.
Up close in the middle of the fighting, all I could see was what was right in front of me — movement, blood, targets, the next threat.
From here, with one layer of steel, a growing mountain of the dead, and a group of weary Alpha soldiers between me and the crush, I can finally see what is bearing down on us.
Humans pack the road so thick it hardly looks like separate bodies anymore.
They jam the narrow climb shoulder to shoulder, climbing over the fallen, pressing uphill in a mass so dense it seems to breathe as one thing.
The front ranks keep dying. The rows behind them keep filling the gaps before the bodies even hit the ground.
My stomach twists.
This isn’t a charge. It’s a grotesque tide that will never stop rising.
And Blaze is still somewhere inside that.
An Alpha beside me braces his shoulder against the steel and fires point-blank over the top of the barricade at a Human who has crested the wall.
He drops, and his dead body tumbles over the barricade and sprawls at our feet.
To my right, medics drag a wounded soldier, missing a foot from a grenade, backward by the straps of his vest while he keeps shooting over his own boots.
Somewhere farther down the line, Knox has dashed off to roar orders now that he is back in the midst of his troops, his voice cutting through the gunfire.
But even he cannot turn the tide of this battle.
Cold fear grows in my chest.
I knew that there would be too many, but I never really let it sink in because I still believed my Omega Command would work. That it wouldn't matter that we are outnumbered a hundred to one. My Command would make that null and void.
I swallow thickly to keep the rising panic from bubbling up my throat.
The barricade screams against stone as the weight against it becomes too much to hold up, and it causes the whole line of Alphas shooting and fighting to jolt backward.
My stomach drops, but I force myself to breathe.
This has spiraled out of control, and I can't stop thinking about Blaze. If he were dead, I would know.
I would know!
He’s my mate. The bond might be ragged with battle, but his death would tear a gaping, bleeding hole in me that I could not mistake. But I don't feel that, so he’s alive.
He has to be.
An ugly thought springs forward like a cobra, and I try to shake it off, but the thought lands anyway.
Blaze might have died for nothing.
Oh frack. The thought lodges in my skull and will not move.
I stand there with blood on my hands and my pulse hammering in my throat, and for the first time since arriving at this battle, doubt overwhelms me and my unyielding flame of faith flickers out.
I was certain.
Not hopeful, or simply trying to convince myself to overcome a dire situation.
Absolutely certain it would work.
That's what stings the most.
I trusted my instincts, my Omega, and the strange knowing that carried me through death and back into this fight. I believed the Command would work if I got the right opportunity.
And it did work.
That is what breaks me.
The officer obeyed. He carried my order into the Human line exactly as I gave it to him, and I know if he'd only had the chance, something miraculous would've happened.
But then they killed him.
And now Blaze is gone, the officer is dead, and the road to Blackgate is full of Humans climbing toward us with no intention of stopping until we're all dead.
All I can think is that I asked my Pack for their trust, and I broke it.
I didn't save anyone.