Sanders lay on his back, looking up at the sky. They had enough eyes on the place to know whether a mouse broke cover. They didn’t need him watching too. Idly, he counted the stars but his attention wasn’t on the task. Instead, it was on Leon, lying less than ten feet away—that lean, hard body on the same dirt as him.
Sanders lifted his hands and studied them. They were large, with a wide palm and broad, blunt-tipped fingers. Working hands, his dad used to call them, before Sanders had joined up. Killing hands more like. Reaching inside, he opened the door between himself and his wolf, thinking about sex and feeding the creature a bolt of pure lust. Not Richards. Even Sanders could see letting his change become dependent on someone—anyone else—was a disaster waiting to happen…but pure, raw lust. Fucking in its most base, primeval form. That worked.
He watched the change in his hands. Skin slid, sprouting fur as bones snapped and popped with what had once been sickening sounds. Now, they were normal, even verging on comforting. His fingers elongated and changed shape, his fingernails growing with a speed any manicurist would envy and sharpening into hardened claws. Fur spread over the skin, racing halfway up his forearms.
“Hey, you’re getting good at that,” Nic said with approval, smiling at him over her shoulder.
“Yeah. Had a bit of a breakthrough.”
He couldn’t help the pride lacing his voice. He’d figured it out. Him, Sanders. The runt. Oh, none of the others had ever said anything, but he’d felt that way anyway. He was the smallest in the pack when shifted, and had been the slowest to master the change. Hell, Jack had even said they’d been surprised he’d survived the infection—he’d been out of it for three days after they’d all been injected.
So sure were they he was going to die, the medics hadn’t even kept him under observation in the lab. Instead, he’d been thrown into a corner of the barracks to shiver and sweat through the fever with only the pack to watch him. Survive or die. Rule of the jungle. And he’d just kicked its ass big time.
Over to the side, Leon grunted and hefted himself to his feet. Sanders reversed the change, letting his hands revert to normal while the sergeant disappeared into the scrub-land. No doubt for a piss.
Yeah, Leon always seemed to have a new girl on his arm, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t…maybe bi? Then there was that look. It must have meant something, surely? Sanders worried at his lower lip and contemplated going after the bigger man, the expression in Nic’s eyes when she spoke of her feelings for Jack uppermost in his mind. Time was short, and each battle could be their last.
He had to find out.
Muscles galvanized with both fear and the need to know, Sanders rolled to his feet in one lithe movement and strolled the way Leon had gone. The straggly bushes parted under his hand as he followed Leon’s scent trail. The wind shifted for a second, bringing the fullness of Leon’s scent and the sharp stink of urine, but just as quickly it shifted again. Sanders slowed his steps. Not too fast. He didn’t want to disturb the guy taking a piss.
The bushes ahead rustled and Leon emerged into view. He paused for a second when he registered Sanders’s presence in the darkness.
“Hey Joe.” His shoulders relaxed a little in recognition. “Might wanna go on up a bit farther. More cover. You know what Nic’s like and I dread to think what the boss-man’d do if one of us flashed Lilly.”
Sanders snorted. The pack spent a good proportion of their time nak*d, but since he’d found his mate, the alpha had turned into a prude and fussed about them all being dressed around Lilly.
“Mind you,” Leon carried on. “You’d probably be okay. It’s not like you’da meant to do it, what with you being… Might save you an ass-re—ahhh…ummm…might save you from him ripping you a new one.”
If Sanders wasn’t so keyed up, he’d have chuckled at Leon’s verbal acrobatics to avoid the phrase “ass-reaming”. As it was, he managed a small smile, ducking his head and looked up at Leon through his lashes. How could one man be so frigging hot?
“Yeah, there is that.”
He paused and lifted his chin, looking directly at Leon. God, it wasn’t fair. Leon had such gorgeous lips. Full and bow-shaped, Sanders ached to claim them. Taste them. Ached to nibble along the full lower curve before nipping and pulling it into his mouth to suck on. His brain made another leap. Those lips wrapped around his cock, his fingers tangled in Leon’s hair while he bobbed up and down, sliding along his…
“Joe? You okay, man?”
Leon’s voice brought him back to the present with a crash. Sanders dragged a breath in, dispelling the fantasy roughly as he looked at the object of his desire. Now or never. You didn’t know if you didn’t ask.
“Leon.”
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”
Okay. Jokey. Jokey was good. Sanders scuffed at the dirt with a bare foot for a second before he pulled himself together. Alpha male. Be the man.
“Okay…you know I’m…”
Leon beat him to it. “You prefer dudes. Yeah, I know man. It’s cool. I know most…yeah, well there are some a**holes. But you’re pack. We ain’t got no problem with it.”
Fuck. No. He didn’t want the solidarity speech. The “you’re different but we’re cool. We got your back” thing.
“It’s not that. I—I…” He swallowed to moisten his throat and went for broke. “Leon…I like you. Like really like you. And the looks you’ve been giving me…”
He trailed off, aware that Leon was looking at him in dawning horror. His heart stuttered, then stopped and all hope crumbled into dust.
“I’m sorry,” he babbled, stumbling away. How could he have been such an idiot? “Forget it. I—I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Fuck…no. Joe, wait!” Leon called out after him, but he shoved through the bushes the way he’d come, desperate to get away.
He raced back along the path, only slowing when he reached where the pack was hidden. He slowed his pace, striding across to where Nic lay and hitting the deck in a bone-jarring flop. She looked at him, concern written over her features but he shook his head. Screw this, screw f**king men. If he could, he’d go straight. Nic was much easier to frigging work out.
Leon emerged from the darkness to loom over him but Sanders turned on his front, ignoring the bigger man.
“Oh come on, Joe. That’s real mature—” Leon started, but was cut off by Jack.
“Quiet. Something’s going on down there.”
All attention snapped to the base below them, which was lit up like a Christmas tree. Alarms blared and guards streamed from the buildings. Within seconds the numbers on the perimeter doubled, grim-faced soldiers looking out into the darkness and waiting for an attack. Instantly, Sanders dismissed thoughts of the pack saddling up and storming the base in their stolen truck. They’d only get cut down by the machine guns in the towers.
“What the f**k is going on?” Jack muttered, using the binoculars to get a closer look. Without the visual aid, Sanders squinted and tried to bring more details of the base below into focus. No hordes of anyone storming the gates, so he shifted his attention to the labs. Nothing doing there either. They looked quiet and unoccupied, locked down for the night even though he knew they wouldn’t be. There would be experiments running—always were. Some of the guards milled about in between the buildings, small like ants, confusion evident in their movements. Around them, everything looked to be quiet. So what had triggered the alarms?
The answer came seconds later. A large explosion split the air as one of the hangars at the back of the base erupted into flames.
“Shit…”
Jack fiddled with the binoculars, bringing them into focus but Sanders could see pretty clearly what was going on without any visual help. The doors and windows of the hangar were out, smoke and flame billowing forth. Figures poured from every possible opening. Running from the doors, and leaping from every window, even those high up on the side of the hangar walls. Some didn’t make it—the fall too much for them—and lay unmoving. Others were cut down from behind, claws flashing and feral howls indicating revenge had been taken on the human guards. Three more explosions rocked the hangar, blowing the main doors open.
“I thought the hangars were all disused,” Jack muttered. “What the f**k are they doing…wait, hold on. We got runners.”
Sanders winced when the gun-towers went into operation, turning from the non-existent threat outside to that within the perimeter, the fleeing Lycans and Bloods right in their sights. The plink-plink-plink of the bigger guns firing was closely followed by the booms when the shots hit, drowning out all other sounds. Covered the howls and screams of pain as Lycans, Bloods and humans alike were cut down. That was the Project all over. They couldn’t run the risk of any of the subjects getting loose into the human population, so if there were any humans in the line of fire, then it was tough shit.
Sanders couldn’t bring himself to feel sorry for them. If they hadn’t known what they’d signed on for, then they soon found out when they got on base. Those that chose to stay only perpetuated the Project machine.
He tracked two runners—one a Blood and one a Lycan. The differences between the two were obvious. The long, loping run of the Lycan with its animalistic bursts of speed contrasted with the smoother, more graceful gait of the Blood next to it. Then his eye was drawn to a different movement…
“Whoa. Jack, third type.” He waved to attract the alpha’s attention. “Middle gun tower. One o’clock and closing in fast.”
“Got it.” Jack’s deep rumble answered him. “Holy shit, what is that? Never seen anything move that way.”
Sanders shook his head in the darkness, awed by what he was seeing. Jack was right. He’d never seen anything like it either. Not a run and not a lope—which cut out both Blood and Lycan. And one thing was for certain: it sure as hell wasn’t human.
The machine gun on the nearest tower fired, taking out the Lycan in an explosion of blood and guts. A pair of legs managed a step or two more, like they were unaware that the rest of their body was gone, then they too dropped. The strange figure slid to the side to avoid the hail of bullets, in a movement almost arachnid in nature.
Sanders frowned. That didn’t make sense. What the hell was the Project breeding now? Fucking spidermen?
The hangar chose that moment to explode again, but it was a smaller blast than before. The exodus from the doors and windows had stopped now, the building surrounded by emergency vehicles putting out the flames. Armed squads swarmed around them, through the doors that were clear. They didn’t seem interested in the fleeing hordes, which meant that whatever they were doing in there was more important.
“Got another one. Coming up on the left flank.” Jack kept up a running commentary as he tracked this new development. “Whatever they are, they’re fast as—holy shit.”