“Darlin’, I’d look forward to it. But all we want to do is disappear somewhere they can’t find us. Can’t use us anymore. Die in peace and let this shit die with us.”
She nodded, watching as the four men walked down the corridor. Fredericks paused when the rest turned the corner and looked over his shoulder. He lifted his hand into a salute. One soldier to another.
With a heavy heart and a grim sense of determination, Toni returned the salute. Then turned and carried on up the corridor. Now she knew there were no more weird-ass RAs to run into, blood was going to be spilled.
Chapter Thirteen
That thought, the thought of blood being spilled and vengeance, wrapped up in the violence only a Blood was capable of, sustained Toni as she carried on along the corridor. It gave way to a larger area, opening up to reveal another holding room.
Long and thin, it looked seconded from its original purpose. It looked like a waiting room. She turned a semicircle. Yeah, there was an old coffee table and chairs stacked up in the corner, plastic, metal and cheap fabric with the desolate air of abandonment lay thick over them. A magazine lay underneath, pages curled with age, surrounded by dust and dirt.
The cages had been crammed up in the other end of the room. Jostled in together and packed like sardines, they’d all had their doors ripped off. The scent of blood hit her when she ventured farther. Wrong blood. Corrupt. Black and dead. She held her breath, everything within her rebelling against the smell, and forced herself forward. All but four cages held a body, or the remains of one. Something long dead and rotted. Decayed.
She slapped her hands over her mouth and tried not to breath, forcing herself to look. These were the RAs she’d seen in the ring, they had to be. She looked closer. Yeah…in the corner cage there was a skull, two more and a thigh bone over in another. And in the one nearest the door opposite the one she’d entered was a foot—just one, like Cinderella had taken the shoe but left something more important.
She walked down the center of the room, not bothering to check any of the bodies. They were dead, including the couple of guards by the door. Fredericks and his men were thorough, she’d give them that. She suppressed a shiver and headed for the door opposite. The broadcast room had to be back here somewhere. Wouldn’t make sense for it to be too far from the ring.
It took her a few minutes in rabbit warren corridors covered in dust, tracking the only scents that weren’t at least a decade old to find the broadcast center. Brave a**holes, keeping the new RAs between them and the ring and—more importantly—the lifts to the surface. Having seen what they were capable of, she’d have wanted them way below her. Encased in concrete. She wasn’t sure even that would stop them.
On the last corridor, she hit pay dirt. A blue rectangle glowed from under the one at the end.
“Bingo.”
She broke into a light trot, reaching the door in seconds. How long had it been since she’d trashed the holding room and opened the cages? She didn’t know, but time was running out. Hand on the door handle, she pressed down slowly. The latch gave with a small click, barely audible to her hearing, and the door swung open silently to reveal a hive of activity.
“Fuck, we’re four minutes behind and heading up to four ten. Speed it up guys, or the Colonel’ll have friggin’ kittens. You know the paying customers like their blood and guts on time.”
Screens filled the far wall, all showing Darce and Steele’s fight in brutal Technicolor. Three men sat in front of the desks, hands swift on keyboards while they sliced and diced the feeds from what looked like three different cameras.
“Rob, pick up the blood splatter from camera three on time segment five fourteen,” the one in the middle of the trio, obviously the man in charge by his body language, ordered. “Overlay in with the fall in slow-mo…then cut to Steele’s snarl.”
Toni winced as Darce took a heavy right hook to the jaw and went down. Hair hung over his face, but the camera zeroed in on the blood dripping onto the floor.
“Catch the blood guys…ratings go up the more of the red stuff we show ’em.”
Her eyes narrowed. Even with the obvious time delay on the feeds, there should be Lycans and Bloods tearing up the place like teenagers at their first college party pretty soon. Her gaze cut to a smaller monitor set off to one side. It showed a different view than the one on the main screens. The sound was off, probably to avoid distracting the workers.
The screen was half black, half white. She frowned. Was it off? Then she turned her head and realized the camera was on its side and she was looking at the floor. Clawed feet flashed in front of the camera, then something else. One of the guards dragged, wild-eyed and struggling, by his feet across the floor. He screamed silently, mouth stretched wide and clutching anything which came within reach, even the camera. Then he was yanked clear, disappearing from view.
“Okay…yeah, good. Focus on his face. Then get Steele coming in for the kill. Focus on the claws…”
She turned her attention back to the three humans. They were so engrossed in their work that they hadn’t seen her. As she closed the door behind her, a commotion started up in the crowd on screen. The camera wavered, the operator distracted, then a scream cut in over Steele’s snarl.
“Yeah…what the—fuck!”
Taking advantage of their surprise as they stared, dumbstruck, at the events on-screen, she moved in. But the guy on the left turned and caught sight of her. She hissed when he whirled and went for his desk drawer. Gun. She could smell the oil from here. Covering the rest of the distance within a heartbeat, she slammed the drawer shut on his hand and smiled at the sound of bone crunching. Palming the back of his head, she introduced his face to the desk. Blood splattered over the smooth surface and he slid off the desk to a crumpled heap on the floor.
“Holy crap!”
The two other men scrambled out of their chairs. One went for a gun on the other side of the desk, and the other for the door. Body and blood singing with adrenaline and the sheer joy of combat, she grabbed the first thing she could reach. A coffee mug went flying, hurled with lethal accuracy at the back of the fleeing man’s head. It hit with a clunk, dark liquid cascading over the man as he fell. Toni snorted. She’d always said the coffee on base was kill or cure.
Rounding on the last man, she found him pointing the gun at her with shaky hands.
“Stay right there, or else!”
His voice shook more than his hands. She took a step toward him.
“Or else what?”
“I—I’ll kill you.”
“Too late, sunshine. Been dead for months.”
Heart thundering so loud that she could hear it, he pulled at the trigger. The gun didn’t fire. Toni grinned and smacked it out of his hand, closing her other around his throat, claws and all. “You forgot the safety catch. Now, talk.”
Perhaps seeing his own death in her eyes, the guy started to babble.
“We-we just work here. Take the feeds, edit and stream them out. I dunno where, we get given the routing data for each session before we come down here. T-that’s all, I swear!”
Toni growled and slammed him against the wall. “What about the ‘ratings’? Is that what this is to you? Enter-f**king-tainment? What about those who die?”
“What about them?” He struggled against her hold, so she shoved him a little higher. Couldn’t kill him yet, not when she needed information. “They’re just animals that would have been put down anyway. Might as well make some money out of them.”
She paused, fury making her muscles freeze even as they ached. “Money? This is all about money?”
The guy laughed, a gurgling sound with her hand wrapped around his throat.
“Of course it’s about money. It’s always about money. Do you know how much we all make from this little gig?” He pulled at her hand on his throat and looked at her again. “I’ve never seen a Blood female up close before. You don’t look as dangerous as they say.”
“Oh, I’m not dangerous.” She leaned in until her mouth almost touched his. “I’m f**king lethal,” she whispered and ran her lips down his neck, hearing the blood in his veins singing to her.
“Oh, f**k yeah.” He groaned, arousal and lust rolling from his skin in sickening ways.
Toni smiled. She had him right where she wanted him. Then she snapped his neck.
Minutes later she emerged from the broadcast office, leaving a trail of sparking monitors and trashed electronic equipment in her wake. She’d managed to cull the address of a management company and a domain name, but there had been nothing useful on the computers. Nothing that she could get to, anyway. She wasn’t the most able when it came to computers and the internet, she never had been. Smartphones? Way too many buttons.
But a physical address—that was something she could use.
She stepped out into the corridor at the same moment all the lights snapped off. Amusement rolled through her. Standard operating procedure. Yeah, like that was going to stop any of the Project’s creatures. Vampires and werewolves—Monsters of Myth and Legend. Typical Project. Perhaps they’d send down the traditional RAs too, before the human forces. Something to give the guys down here an appetite before the main course.
She made it past the new RA holding area, through the corridor where she’d met Fredericks and his men, and almost to the main holding room before she ran into trouble. A Lycan burst through the doors ahead, fully shifted, his eyes amber and feral as he bounded toward her.
She flattened herself against the wall just in time to avoid being flattened by rampaging wolf. But he wasn’t interested in her, racing right by. The doors crashed open behind him. Smoke grenades followed, bouncing once, twice, three times over the shiny, industrial floor. One rolled to a stop in front of her, spewing noxious purple-gray smoke into the air. She coughed, smoke stinging her eyes and lungs. Soldiers in gas-masks poured through the door and the world took a sharp tilt to the left. She stumbled, realizing she had one shoulder against the wall and was sliding down the vertical surface.
What the fuck?
Shots fired, the muzzle flash blinding her. She reached the deck, bracing herself against the floor. Behind her, the Lycan yelped, and something heavy crashed into the wall. Poor f**ker. She lifted the pistol, but her hand wavered in the air. She blinked, mouth open, wiggling her jaw to make her ears pop and relieve some of the pressure. She tried to aim at the shadowy figures which emerged from the smoke. It was no good. No sooner had she focused on one figure, then it split into three, all dancing around her.
Fuck. What was in that stuff?
It couldn’t be the usual sedative. She’d led most of the suppression missions so she’d long since built up immunity to the stuff. Fire ate at her lungs and her eyes streamed with tears. She coughed, doubled over on the floor while her body tried to expel the smoke choking her, lungs and all.
“One down. Someone pick the Blood bitch up. The colonel will want to see her.”
The base was locking down for the evening and quiet. As a group, the wolves hunkered in the undergrowth and watched the activities. They’d parked the truck up off the road and hidden it behind scrub brush. From the patrol notes they’d recovered, the vehicle wasn’t expected back until the early hours of the morning. Perfect. The base would be on the graveyard shift, and if they picked their time right the guards would be sleepy but not close enough to the end of shift to be alert and looking forward to changeover.