by Sadie Moss
My men and I scattered, Rhys and Sariah helping West to his feet and diving away as the creature’s strange paw-like hands slammed into the rock where they’d been standing seconds before.
Rhys fired at the Doctor Shepherd thing again, striking his arm, but this time, Shepherd barely seemed to register the shot. He rocked back on his haunches slightly before leaning forward, snarling and salivating. The creature had to be close to ten feet tall, broad and solid.
Turning with an uncanny grace, he leapt toward the assembled wolves, slashing and biting. They yipped and growled, dancing out of the way, but the creature’s second swipe caught a she-wolf broadside, sending her flying. She hit the ground hard, yelping in pain.
“His legs! Go for his legs!” I screamed, racing toward the fight before shifting back to wolf form. Hurling myself toward the giant half-man, half-wolf, I sank my teeth into his leg, my sharp teeth piercing thick hide.
He kicked, sending me hurtling through the air as if I were no bigger than in my human form. I hit the cave floor with a whump, sliding toward the blue pool as my claws scraped against the damp rock. A flash of white bounded toward me, and Noah threw himself in my path, using the weight of his body to stop mine.
I scrambled to my feet, shooting him a grateful glance before both of us dashed into the fray again.
The thing that had once been Doctor Shepherd screamed nearly unintelligible words as he fought viciously against the attacking wolves—ranting about gods and miracles, power and sacrifice.
Whatever had been left of the doctor’s mind, whatever shred of humanity he’d had left after all the lives he’d twisted and ruined, it was gone now. The Source had worked its way into his bloodstream through all his open wounds, turning him into something my worst nightmares could never have conjured up.
My mates and I joined the pack, working as a team to attack him, some distracting him while others darted forward to lash out with teeth and claws.
Rhys growled loudly when Sariah lunged for the monster’s back leg, sinking her teeth into his flesh and pulling hard. Her back bunched up, her paws digging for traction in the slick surface of the rock, but she managed to wrench the thing off-balance.
The Doctor Shepherd creature roared, stumbling sideways. The grotesque, hairy arms that were almost legs reached out for something to break his fall, but momentum pulled him downward. The monster fell into the shimmering pool of the Source again with a massive splash, sending blue liquid flying through the air.
I yipped a warning, and the wolves all leapt back, avoiding the worst of the splash. Little droplets spattered their coats, and panic flared within me. That wouldn’t be enough to affect them, would it? To turn them into monsters too?
At Strand, the doctors had given us small doses of the serum mixed with other drugs to help our bodies withstand its effects. But Doctor Shepherd had just fully submerged himself in the pool of supernaturally charged liquid—three times.
As if summoned by my thoughts, the newly made beast unfurled out of the water once more. He had grown again, rising to nearly twenty feet tall. And there was nothing remotely human left in his features. He looked like a werewolf on steroids, with dark brown fur, reddish eyes, and an unnaturally long muzzle stuffed with sharp teeth. He leapt from the pool, spraying more droplets in every direction.
His body twitched and rippled, even as his jaws snapped around a large, dark-haired wolf, tearing the shifter apart with one bite. My stomach clenched with nausea as the Lost Pack wolves scattered, no longer able to keep up a coordinated attack on the massive monster.
The thing was just too big. Too fierce.
Doctor Shepherd’s body shivered again as the sound of bones cracking joined his ceaseless roars. He lunged for another hapless shifter, nearly killing that one too—but several others darted forward, sinking their teeth into the monster’s fur-covered flesh. The injured wolf slipped away, panting and whining.
“Motherfucker.” Jackson had shifted beside me, pressing a hand to a gash in his arm as he stared up at the thing. “He’s like Julie. His body won’t let him shift back, and it keeps trying to shift into something new. I doubt he could turn human again if he wanted to.”
He was right. It didn’t seem to be slowing the monster down, but the thing’s bones were constantly shifting and breaking, reforming larger and larger each time. Just like Julie, the test subject we’d found in Salt Lake, whose body hadn’t been able to handle the shift.
Julie…
An idea occurred to me—a stupid, crazy, possibly suicidal idea—and I shifted to human form alongside Jackson, raising my voice to a yell as I ran toward the fray.
“The pool! Force him back into the pool!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“What?” Jackson sprinted alongside me, turning to gape at me as we ran. “Are you nuts? He gets bigger every time he goes in there! One more dip and he’ll fucking murder us all!”
“Trust me.” I shot him an intense look that I hoped convinced him I knew what I was doing, then turned back to shout at my pack. “Herd him toward the pool. Force him in! Don’t let him out!”
Trusting them to follow my command, I slipped back into wolf form quickly, darting in to nip at the giant wolf-like monster’s leg. He swung his head around, moving unnaturally fast for such a massive creature. Fangs that were nearly a foot long missed my face by inches, and I squashed my panic, turning to dart out of the way, dragging his attention after me.
Other shifters nipped as his heels or joined me in front of him, attacking and dancing away as we drew him closer and closer to the shimmering blue liquid of the Source. The water level in the pool had gone down several inches, gallons of it displaced the last time the giant monster had submerged himself in its depths.
His fangs flashed toward me as I glanced over at the pool, and Rhys and Noah threw themselves at him, leaping up to bite at his shoulders. I whirled around, my heart hammering in my ribs as I teased him forward, moving slow enough to present a tempting target to the monster, but fast enough to keep give myself a fighting chance at escaping his fangs. On the far side of the pool, the large rock formation rose high, forming a cliff face that met the liquid after a sheer drop.
There! Get him up there!
The pack continued to swarm around the morphing, howling giant. He must’ve already grown five more feet tall, and his skin and fur strained against the pressure of his swelling form.
Wolves fell to the side, injured and dazed, as he clawed, bit, and batted them away. But we were making progress. He was slowly but surely following us up the stone rise.
The rock formation was narrow and uneven, and more wolves had to drop back as we neared the peak that overlooked the pool, gathering behind the monster to make sure he didn’t double back. My mates, Sariah, and Elijah drew him onward, yipping and howling to keep his attention on us. The stone was slippery, and my muscles shook with the effort of keeping my footing while darting out of the way of his attacks.
Finally, I caught sight of clear blue water below me as we neared the drop-off. Cloudy pockets of brownish-red liquid hung suspended in the strange water, as if Doctor Shepherd’s blood couldn’t fully mingle with the Source. Bracing myself as my heart hammered out of control, I stood before the cliff’s edge, waiting.
The massive, shifting beast swung his head in my direction; his red eyes widened with triumph as he lunged for me. At the last second, I dove forward, slipping under his enormous paw as he overbalanced and tumbled over the side of the drop-off.
But I’d misjudged my own agility in this form.
As Doctor Shepherd’s monster wolf splashed into the water forty feet below, my slick paws scratched uselessly at the wet stone. My back legs slipped over the edge, and a panicked, helpless whine escaped my mouth.
“Scrubs!” Noah shifted to human form in a heartbeat, throwing himself toward me.
My other mates followed, sprawling over the rocks and grabbing my large front legs with bruising grips. Elijah and Sariah grabbe
d them, stabilizing us all.
A screeching roar echoed from below me as Doctor Shepherd’s beast thrashed in the water, and my wide, terrified gaze latched onto Noah’s.
“We’ve got you, Scrubs. We won’t ever let go.” His voice was low and soft, but somehow it drowned out all the sounds around me, filling my ears the way his eyes filled my sight, until it was like nothing else existed. “But you’re too heavy like this. Shift. You have to shift.”
But in the shift, wouldn’t they lose their grip on me? My limbs would shrink, and I would slip right out of their grasp into the waiting pool below.
I tried to shake my head, but his eyes wouldn’t let me. They drew me in, giving me strength I didn’t think I had, promising me everything would be all right.
With a low, mournful whine, I let my wolf sink back inside me.
My limbs shivered and morphed, fur retracting as my body shrank. Four sets of hands slipped away from my skin, and my heart lodged in my throat before all four of them grabbed me hard, their fingers tightening like vises.
Slowly, carefully, my mates pulled me up over the edge of the wet cliff until I was curled between them, shaking and shivering. We stayed like that, clinging to each other as though we might somehow become a singular entity, as we stared down into the pool where Doctor Shepherd had fallen.
I had been right.
He and the other Strand doctors had spent so much time trying to get the dosage right, to figure out how to support the human body through such a drastic alteration to its basic makeup, because the raw power of the Source was too much.
It’d started working on Doctor Shepherd as soon as he fell into the pool the first time, and every time he’d re-entered the water, his body had shifted even more, straining itself at the seams as the cells divided and changed.
His massive, hairy form thrashed in the deep pool, but his cracking limbs could no longer support his weight as he tried to haul himself out. The Lost Pack backed farther away from the water’s edge as he grunted and howled. His skin split, tearing away from bones that grew too fast, as new arms, legs, and even a second head sprouted from his torso.
With a sickening, reverberating crack, his body pulverized itself from within. He jerked, one last harsh shriek tearing from his mouth, before he finally went still.
The echo of his scream died, and the sudden quiet rang in my ears as he sank slowly beneath the surface of the cool blue liquid, like an offering to the gods he had worshipped so much.
“Fucking hell.” Jackson’s voice was a rough whisper, and his breath tickled my ear. “Let’s blow this place up and never, ever, ever come back here again.”
A shuddering gasp that tried to be a laugh fell from my lips. “I like the way you think.”
West, methodical and careful as always, took over directing the placement of the explosives. We wanted to bring down the entire cave, which meant placing charges in key weak points to destabilize the entire thing.
My gaze kept drifting over to the pool as we worked, but Doctor Shepherd didn’t rise again. A part of me wondered if the Source would be viable anymore even if we didn’t destroy the entire complex—had the doctor’s body contaminated it somehow? The faint smell of lilies still hung in the air, but his blood had finally begun to mingle with the water, turning it cloudy and ruddy.
Not that it mattered. We weren’t going to take the risk.
After we finished placing the charges below, we worked our way through the upper levels, finding points that would bring down the man-made structure.
My skin was raw and chafed, and I had dozens of fresh cuts and bruises to go along with my old ones. As I cooled down from my exertions, goose bumps popped out all over, and I began to think Jackson had been right—maybe it would be nice if we could sprout fur in human form.
Elijah and Sariah took over tending to the most severe injuries in the pack, recruiting other shifters to help them carry the wounded outside. We had lost six of our number, and I visited each body before we left the compound, whispering soft words of gratitude and sorrow.
They hadn’t had to come.
But if they hadn’t made the choice they did, we would all have died here today, and countless others would’ve died in future Strand experiments.
“It’s over,” I whispered as my mates and I gathered outside the heavy doors leading into the bunker. The rest of the pack spread out behind us, and the rising sun warmed my chilled skin. “It’s over, right?”
“Yeah, Scrubs. We did it.”
West looked beat-up and nearly dead on his feet. The wound on his chest where the bullet had almost pierced him was red and angry, and his body was decorated with a collage of injuries. But the smile as he wrapped an arm around my shoulders was happy and peaceful, and his dimples were the best damn things I’d seen all day.
Rhys stepped toward me, holding out the detonator and flipping the top off. “Here. You do the honors.”
I shook my head, leaning into West’s embrace as Noah held my other side and Jackson rested his chin on my head. “No, you should do it.” My gaze shifted back to the imposing walls of the fortress, a spark of anger reigniting in my exhausted soul. “Light that fucker up.”
Rhys’s smile was positively bloodthirsty, and he leaned down to kiss me hard before turning away. I licked my lips, tasting the copper of blood—I honestly wasn’t sure whose.
Maybe that would always be one of the things that bonded us, the rage that lived inside us both. But I was okay with that. Our rage had made us stand up and fight, had made us keep fighting until we won.
And maybe now we could find our peace together too.
Lifting his fist in the air, my mate jammed the button, and unlike at the Salt Lake complex, there was no moment of doubt as to whether it had worked. Loud booms rose from below, and the ground shook beneath our feet as plumes of fire burst through the door. The wolves behind us whined unhappily, backing up even farther.
But I didn’t move.
I let the warmth of the flames bathe my face, closing my eyes as the booms of the explosions echoed and faded.
To my ears, they didn’t sound terrifying at all.
They sounded like freedom.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Are you sure you can handle this?” Jackson asked, open skepticism coloring his voice.
“I’ve driven a car before, young man,” Elijah growled.
“Yeah… but, when? And have you ever driven something this big?”
“How do you think we all got here?”
“Sure, but where’s that truck now?” my mate insisted. “Crashed by the side of the road somewhere?”
“It ran out of gas. We made the last several miles on foot.”
Elijah’s injured lip curled, and I laid a hand on my mate’s arm, tugging him toward me gently. He slipped a roughly bandaged arm around my shoulder but kept his gaze on the old alpha.
The grizzled man blustered for a moment longer before running a hand through his wild brown hair. “I’m certain I can handle it. I wouldn’t offer if I wasn’t.”
After destroying the bunker, we had found a fleet of trucks in a separate structure tucked against one of the cliff walls. Between those and the van we’d arrived in, we would have enough vehicles to transport all the Lost Pack members out of the compound—but we were a little short on drivers.
“Hey, Jackson, will you go help Rhys and West organize the rest of the transports?” I asked, craning my neck to look up at him.
His gaze lingered on Elijah for another moment, but my mate’s posture wasn’t aggressive. He looked more amused and curious than anything.
Then he turned to me, dipping his head to brush his nose against mine. “For my alpha? Anything.”
He winked and sauntered away, leaving me to try to tame my blush as I met Elijah’s perceptive blue eyes.
“I see where your strength comes from,” the older shifter murmured, glancing after Jackson. At my furrowed brow, he held up a hand. “I don’t mean it like that.
You’re plenty strong on your own, Alpha Alexis.” His fingers brushed the healing gash on his lip. “I can attest to that. No, I mean your strength comes from trusting them, from allowing them to help you.”
My chin dipped. The old alpha wasn’t wrong. Without the love and support of my mates, of our friends, of the whole pack, we never would’ve made it here.
“I was never very good at that,” Elijah admitted, running a hand over the smooth siding of the truck as he glanced away from me. “I thought I wanted what was best for the pack, but I lost sight of what exactly that was. And I didn’t allow anyone into my inner circle, so I had no one to challenge me, no one to correct me. Except you.”
His smile was stiff and a little awkward, but genuine.
“Elijah?” I bit my lip, watching him carefully. “Why did you come today? Why did you convince the others to come?”
He sighed, gesturing at the Lost Pack members as they gathered around the other vehicles. “Val and her team left us in the woods. She wasn’t angry or bitter when these shifters declined to join the attack on Strand. She was… resigned. And it struck me as the group of us wandered through the woods with no real plan, no destination, that resignation is worse than anger. Worse than bitterness.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, nodding thoughtfully. Every one of us was naked, and we’d have to do something about that before we re-entered civilization, but for now, it didn’t matter.
“As alpha,” Elijah continued, “I had allowed myself to become resigned. I wanted to live, and I wanted my people to live, more than anything. But when I looked at the shifters around me in the woods that day, I realized that if we continued as we were, they would all succumb to their wolves before too long. They would be alive, but missing an entire part of themselves.”
He dipped his head, letting out an amused grunt before he lifted his dark blue gaze to me. “We were on a shitty path. So I chose a different shitty one.”
A smile tugged at the corners of my lips as I remembered our conversation back at the hotel. “Well, coming here was definitely a shitty option.”