The sand was a bad thing. Sand meant he was on a one-way trip into the desert and a slug in the back of the skull. If he could keep them away, make them take anything but a headshot, then he had a fighting chance.
Lights shone in his face, blinding him whatever direction he turned. Not the sun, something else. Spotlights. Fuck, they had trucks around him. His heart pounded, pouring more adrenaline through his system while his wolf raged and snarled. Ready to fight. Ready to kill.
Survive. He had to survive. Had to find her—his mate.
He backed up and collided with something hard. A metal post. He made a grab for it, hoping for something he could break off and use as a weapon and found his fingers caught in mesh instead. He recoiled with a hiss, pain lancing through his palm, like acid eating his skin. Lips curled back, he looked down. Criss-cross burns covered his hand. A snarl escaped as he squinted to try and see around the lights blazing in his face. The fuzz receded from his brain. Tall fences of chain-link surrounded him. The Project special stuff—links bonded with silver alloy or sprayed with something similar to keep in him and his kind.
Pain raced through his system, sharpening his awareness and more clues crowded in. Lifting his head, he dragged air in over his tongue. He was inside, somewhere big. Echoing. A faint fusty smell indicated disuse but was almost hidden by newer smells. Equipment, metal, the hot, electrical scent of electronic kit. The smell of people. Humans. Sweat, deodorant…someone had had onion for lunch.
Darce moved on, filtering information from the air. Worse scents. Blood. Terror. Pain. The smell of piss and opened bowels warned him that the sand at his feet wasn’t someone’s attempt to bring the beach into their workplace. Since gladiators had battled in Roman arenas, possibly even before, sand had been used to soak up blood and worse. Much, much worse. A fetid gust of air warned him a second before a Reanimate barreled out of the darkness. Corrupt flesh almost black and its eyes were white all over. It chattered, moving sideways in a crab-like motion, and drool flowed from the corner of decayed lips.
“Fuck!”
Darce dropped and swept a leg around in an arc to take the creature’s feet from under it. It hit the sand hard but Darce didn’t give it a chance to get back up. Couldn’t afford to. He slammed a large, twisted paw into its throat and bounced its head off the sand a couple of times. It screamed in fury, dead eyes rolling as it tried to look at him.
Finger bones broke through rotting flesh to scrape at Darce’s arms. He ignored them and drove his claws through the throat. The skin gave easily, too easily. His stomach churning, Darce threw the gobbet of ruined flesh aside. It hit the chain-link with a wet splat then slid to the sand. Cheers and catcalls, evidence of an audience he couldn’t afford to pay attention to, erupted around him when he rolled away.
But the dead didn’t need to breathe. Sickening, wuffling sounds wheezed from its lungs as the thing crawled sideways across the sands to get at him.
Shitshitshit.
Darce went aerial, flipped to his feet and jumped out of the way just in time. Sharpened finger bones sliced through the air where he had been. He swore, twisted and slammed his leg down with an axe kick. Bone cracked. A new bend appeared in the creature’s thigh. It howled—in either pain or frustration, Darce couldn’t tell and lashed out again. He danced away, around it. The f**ker was quick. Quicker than he’d ever seen a Reanimate, especially one in such an advanced state of decay.
“Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill!”
Darce ignored the chanting and tested the borders of the enclosure, digging his bare feet in the sand when he reached the end of one panel and moved along the next. Three sides. The Reanimate tracked him all the way around, tilting its head at an odd angle to look out of the corner of its eye. It must have some residual vision on that side.
Darce swept his hair back out of his face. Five…six panels…
The Reanimate chattered, and twisted to lunge at him again, pure hunger on its face. He was ready for it though, body coiled with lethal energy he unleashed in a vicious kick. His foot slammed into the side of the Reanimate’s face, snapping its head around. The jaw gave with a sickening crunch, black blood and spittle spraying over the sand.
Pulling his leg back in a practiced move, Darce landed lightly on his feet. Guard up, he bounced and carried on circling. Seven… Eight panels. Fuck. He was in a damn cage fight with the undead. Talk about shitty luck.
“Stay. The. Fuck. Dead,” he snarled when the creature picked itself up, jaw shunted so far to the left that the skin the other side had begun to split. He knew it wouldn’t stay down. It wouldn’t stop until he’d removed its head from its neck.
“Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill!”
Darce roared and launched himself to the side. His toes dug into the sand, and he ran at the side of the cage to bound up it. Metal rattled and his feet burnt on contact as he twisted and fell to land on the creature. He wrapped it up before it could react, clamped his hands around the skull and wrenched. His wolf roared within him, his connection to the creature complete as he tore the Reanimate’s skull clean off its body.
The crowd exploded with cheers, covering the dull thud as he dropped the decapitated head next to the now permanently dead body. Darce swallowed back his nausea and lifted his arm to shield his eyes, trying to see beyond the spotlights. What the f**k was this? Amusement? Sport? What kind of sport was it to put a Reanimate in with him? This one had been fast, but most were easy to deal with if you knew how. It was just killing though. Not sport.
Metal squealed. Darce whipped around, fists up to face a new threat. Tasers sparked and another wolf was shoved through the door into the cage. The Lycan rolled to his feet, his eyes wild, gaze frenzied as he looked from Darce to the Reanimate’s corpse and back to the closing door. He snarled, dropped into a defensive crouch and to circle Darce.
Darce’s instincts kicked. He studied the other man, who padded lightly around him. He was taller and heavier than the newcomer, and uninjured. Vicious claw marks ran down the other man’s side, oozing blood. With injuries like that, he was surprised the guy still stood, let alone moved.
“Look man.” Darce dropped his guard a little, his voice low and calm as he tried to reason with him. A brother in arms. “We don’t have to do this.”
“We have to.”
“Or what? They kill us?”
“They’re not that kind.” Sadness and resignation filled the other wolf’s eyes. “Just promise me one thing?”
“Anything, man.” Darce nodded, already trying to figure out how they could get out of the cage, take on the guards with the tasers and whatever armed guards he knew lurked in the audience. He didn’t get the chance to develop those plans. The other Lycan’s eyes wolfed out to the max—bright amber—and when he spoke, his voice was deep with his beast.
“Just don’t let them eat me alive.”
Fuck! Darce leaped back as the injured wolf part-shifted faster than he’d expected and charged. The bestial roar rattled the chain-link enclosure and then the fight was on in earnest. He was forced backward, blocking hard and fast to avoid being gutted on the other wolf’s razor-sharp claws. Despite the promise he’d extracted from Darce, there was no leeway in the Lycan’s face—just murderous intent. In those amber eyes, Darce read his own death.
Snarling, he forced more and more of his own wolf through his veins until his hands and feet were huge, twisted, paw-like monstrosities. Claws on his toes dug through the sand, driving him forward. He met his opponent head-on in the middle of the cage. Claws flashed. Skin tore. Blood flew. Darce kept moving, staying one step ahead and chipping at his opponent’s guard.
The other guy was shit-fast, but he was wounded and favoring his side. So Darce hammered it, slamming his fist into the guy’s side whenever he could get between the solid blocks and around the lightning-fast blows.
Sadness wrapping around his heart, Darce gave in to the inevitable. He hated it, hated the extremes the Project had forced them to—fighting for dominance in a pit like animals—but some things were a matter of survival. It was kill or be killed and he wasn’t ready to meet his maker yet. He had a life to live and a mate to find.
Determination lent wings to his feet and steel to his tired body. Turning, he faced the next attack and this time he didn’t block, simply roared and charged, the change ripping through him as he met the other wolf in the middle of the cage. A clash of the titans that only one of them would survive.
The crowd roared. Cheers and whoops from the mostly male audience loud in her ears, Toni slipped through the door. The room was dark, which helped conceal her when she slipped into the shadows just as the guard— obviously stationed to watch the door but who had drifted forward to see what was going on in the center of the room—glanced over his shoulder.
Too late, dipshit.
She hooked a hand around a steel bar and swung herself up, scaling the wall and moving out of sight. The room had a high ceiling. Looked like some kind of storage facility originally. Now the space was dominated by a large MMA style cage surrounded by seating and…were those cameras?
Her eyes widened. What appeared to be a professional level recording outfit rolled and slid around the steel cage, intent on the action inside while the crowd hollered.
A roar split the air when one of the combatants stood up, his bleeding and battered opponent held high above his head. Then he slammed the moaning form over his knee. Toni winced as the sound of breaking bones snapped through the air like a gunshot.
“Shit.”
Foster rolled the body off his knee and stood, amber eyes bright with defiance and roared at the crowd. A sound of challenge and anger that deepened when the guards yanked open the cage door and poured through the gap. Toni schooled herself to remain where she was. The guards forced him to the ground with tasers and shocked him into unconsciousness.
Body shaking and sweat pouring down her spin, she fought the urge to go to him, to rip the guards away and stand over him to protect him. To wrap him in her arms and make sure he was unhurt. Cold rage joined the party, surging through her veins to meet the anger at her core in a melting pot of emotions. Steel twisted under her hand, mangled by her grip as she watched them carry him from the cage, other guards dragging the broken body of his opponent from the sands.
She shifted through the darkness, skirting the edge of the crowd high above their heads to keep Foster in view. Her lip curled at the callous laughter of the guards as they dumped him in a cage in the darkness beyond the lights. He groaned when he rolled over.
She needed to get to him, to check that he was okay. Fear for his wellbeing sliced through her. He’d been drugged, interrogated, beaten, drugged again, forced to fight and kill, and now shocked…how much could one man take? She’d never seen anyone take so many belts from a taser before and survive. She shimmied down from her perch, eyes on him.
Clumsy in her haste, she dropped to the floor and froze, expecting the lights to snap on at any second and catch her. But another roar from the crowd announced a new competitor. Releasing a sigh of relief, she scooted forward, running low and fast to the back of the cages.