The werewolves were waiting for her around the next corner.
They’d been expecting her all along and were arranged to catch her—one of them was even sitting crouched atop a tall cabinet, prepared to reach out and grab her with his paws when she flew by. That was what threw her off balance, sending her spinning through the air. A second werewolf batted at her. She careened off the closest wall, righted herself for the length of one wing beat, and was knocked out of the air by a third wolf, who pinned her to the ground.
A werewolf in human form strolled out of a room at the end of the hallway. “So you caught our little birdie? Good job.”
His voice had the kind of rumbling growl that many shifters took on when they spent too much time in their animal forms. Even dazed from having been knocked to the ground, Bron’s raven senses went on high alert at this wolf’s appearance. She struggled against the hold the wolf had on her, even though she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Even if she got away from this one, there were now three others in the hallway with her.
The man bent over and scooped her into his hands, which were surprisingly gentle. And cold, too. An involuntary shudder trembled through Bron. Everything about this werewolf terrified her, and she couldn’t even pin down why.
As he carried her back toward the room he’d come out of moments ago, Bron glanced around frantically, trying to take in everything she could about her captors. Her heart beat frantically inside her chest, and she did everything she could to calm herself. She would need to be able to concentrate in order to change back into her human form—and she was beginning to think that was the only way she would be able to get free.
The room he’d taken her into looked like a normal conference space, with a large table, a smart board at the front of the room and a second door at the back, presumably leading to a closet.
At least, that’s what she assumed until he opened the second door.
The space inside was small, not much larger than a typical walk-in closet, but that’s where the similarity ended. On either side, benches had been bolted to the walls, and manacles hung from loops similarly attached. A single, metal chair sat against the back wall. And on the right-hand bench, Jeff Watson sat slumped over and chained, those parts of his skin that she could see bloodied and bruised.
If she could’ve gasped she would have. Instead, she fluttered against her captor’s hands once again. But his grip tightened.
He strolled in and hooked one leg of the chair with his boot to pull it forward. Sitting down, he propped that same boot against the bench between Jeff’s legs. Jeff flinched but otherwise did not react.
“Stanley,” the man in charge called out. “Please bring in the supplies we discussed earlier.”
Bron worked to block out the sound of his voice, the feel of his hands ice-cold against her body. If she could ignore him, perhaps she could focus enough to shift.
She tried to concentrate on her breathing, but when Stanley walked in with a hammer and a handful of nails in one hand and a length of 2 x 4 in the other, that breathing froze. She didn’t even allow herself to consider what might be next until the man holding her stood up and stretched her wing out along the board.
When she began struggling in earnest, he shoved his knee down on top of her wing. The snap of bone reverberated through her body almost before the pain hit—but when the agony shot through her like a lightning bolt, she went perfectly still.
She could almost hear the raven colony’s teacher lecturing. When a raven is hurt, it will hide the fact to protect it from predators. But remember, we’re not only ravens. We are shifters. When you need help, ask for it.
“I’ve always loved that Edgar Allan Poe song,” the head werewolf said conversationally. “You know the one. ‘The Raven.’ I’ve always wanted to hear a raven say ‘nevermore.’” He pulled her broken wing straight, and the pain washed through her in waves. “Would you say ‘nevermore’ for me? No? Well, then. Stanley, go ahead.”
When Stanley drove the first nail through her wing, darkness flowed across her vision. She barely had any will to struggle when her captor stretched her second wing out along the board, too.
Then he leaned in close to her head, and whispered, “This is for my wolf’s eyes, bitch. Every ounce of pain he felt, you’ll feel tenfold.”
If she didn’t find some way to let Tomás know where she was, she was going to die in this room, nailed to a board by a sadist, victim of some war she didn’t sign up for and only barely understood.
The scream that echoed through the halls when Stanley pounded the second nail into her wing sounded almost human.
Chapter 9
Almost from the moment Bronwyn had left, Tomás had regretted splitting up. Normally, he would have trusted his intuition—he had been a part of enough ops to sense when something was going awry. This time, though, he could not tell if his anxiety was a true gut feeling about the plan, or of his attraction to Bronwyn was interfering with his usual instincts.
Let it go, Nahual, he told himself. She was a professional, too.
Steeling himself against his desire to race after her, he settled into his role of big spender, making sure to place his bets like any grifter as he began counting the cards.
By the time fifteen minutes had passed, he was beginning to wonder what was wrong with the casino’s security, and increased his bets, flaunting his absolute certainty that he would not lose. The dealer looked like he had an intractable case of indigestion.
At the thirty-minute mark, the dealer called over a pit boss and had a whispered consultation.
When the dealer returned to the table and continued dealing out the cards, Tomás knew that something was wrong. Folding his hand, he walked away from the table and toward the pit boss, who waved down a security guard as soon as he saw Tomás headed his way.
Ah, shit.
This whole thing had definitely just gone sideways.
“You might as well take me to wherever you’ve got her,” Tomás called out conversationally as soon as the guard was close enough to hear him.
The guard, a shifter, gave a slight nod. “Right this way, sir.”
Yeah. This was bad.
He should have followed his instincts.
The guard escorted him to the bottom level, and then into a back hallway access designed for employees—in this case, probably shifters only, since as soon as he stepped inside, Tomás was surrounded by werewolves in both human and wolf form.
At that moment, a scream echoed through the hallway.
Tomás froze, certain it was Bronwyn. Every part of his being screeched at him to go to her, and it took every ounce of his human self-control to restrain himself, to keep from shifting and attacking everyone around him in his frenzy to get to her.
As much as his inner cat wanted to leap up and save the woman he suspected might be his mate, it was going to take both sides of his shifter self to get them both out of this alive.
And then, he promised himself, I will make sure that whoever hurt Bronwyn like that spends the rest of his very short life in perfect agony.
The werewolves led him to a conference room, where the guard in human form indicated he should wait.
If it hadn’t been for his shifter hearing, Tomás would have been facing the outer door when the inner one opened. As it was, he had heard the man moving around inside what he had initially assumed was a closet, and was prepared for someone to enter when that door opened.
What he wasn’t prepared for was the sight of Bronwyn in her raven form, nailed to a board, like some stuffed bird on display.
In the space between one breath and the next—without planning, without thought, without even the normal time it took for a shift—Tomás burst out of his human skin and launched his jaguar self across the space separating him from his target before the other man’s words penetrated the dark red haze that covered his vision.
“Unless you want her to die, you’ll need to hear me out.”
At the last instant, To
más managed to turn his leap sideways and sheathed his claws. He landed awkwardly, taking a few stumbling steps along the top of the conference table, and jumping to the floor before entirely regaining his balance.
Without giving any indication that the near fall bothered him at all, he sat on his haunches and stared unblinkingly at the werewolf who lounged in the doorway leading to Bronwyn.
Tomás could smell her blood in the air, and the scent made him snarl his fury at the other man.
“I know, it’s distressing, isn’t it?” The werewolf said. “I lost my mate in a similar way. And now I need your help to get my revenge.”
The werewolf in the other room was talking. Bron could tell that, though the pain reverberating throughout her body kept sliding in between her consciousness and what he was saying.
But she knew Tomás was out there. She felt him, sensed his nearness through something that wasn’t any of the usual five senses.
It wasn’t anything she had experienced before, either, but she was sure it was real.
With an effort, she raised her head up off the board and realized that Jeff had lifted his drooping head enough to make eye contact with her.
“I’ve been waiting for him to get here.” His whispery voice rasped out, barely loudly enough for her to hear it. “Waiting for Tomás. They blackmailed me. I let them think I had agreed, but I hired Tomás to come in so he would figure it out…” His voice trailed off and he slumped forward again.
It was a relief not to listen any longer, to let her own pain wash over her.
But she wasn’t just a bird shifter. She was also a person. And there was a jaguar out there waiting for her. She didn’t know what it meant to have a mate, but she knew that whatever this connection might be, she wanted to explore it. The only way to do that was for the two of them to get out of this.
The only way she was going to get out of this would be to get free of this damned board.
One step at a time.
First, concentrate.
Second, remember what it looked like when Tomás partially shifted. She was a raven. Her sense of sight was better than almost any other shifters’.
The sunlight had glinted off the cuffs that held him. He’d closed his eyes, concentrating, then flexed his hands until his claws had popped out the end of his fingertips.
The sunlight had glinted off the cuffs. Bron followed that image, focusing on the bright spark of light in her memory. She honed in on it, recognizing it as the light she’d found earlier when she realized Tomás was her mate. She concentrated, allowing it to fill her inner vision, growing brighter and brighter, dazzling her eyes until there was nothing else.
And at the very center of that diamond-bright fire, she found what she was looking for.
A darkness there, at the heart of the shiny things that created her raven self.
She drew on it, allowing it to grow larger and larger as she dove into it, pulling it out of the center of her being and into the rest of herself.
It filled her entirely, overcoming the dark pain with a blackness even more complete.
One of her wings remained unbroken—Stanley had missed the bones when he drove the nail through it, so as she shifted that wing into a human arm, the metal ripped through flesh, burning and tearing, but leaving her able to use the limb.
Her other wing was damaged beyond her body’s ability to repair it with a simple shift, and as that wing shifted, the ends of broken human bones scraped against one another, while Bron bit down against a scream.
The darkness washed across her vision, and she welcomed it, pulling it in and using it to fuel her shift and her fury.
When she stood on her own two human feet, her left arm dangled uselessly beside her. But in her right hand, she carried a length of 2 x 4 board, studded with three nails.
The entire process couldn’t have taken more than two minutes.
Still infused with the darkness, she stepped out into the conference room behind the werewolf who had so foolishly turned his back on her.
She took one heartbeat to drink in the sight of Tomás’s jaguar form, his shining black fur a perfect match to her own raven feathers and the darkness that now permeated her entire being.
With a single step and a twirl, she slammed the board around toward the wolf’s human face.
As soon as she had swung, she knew her aim was true. The 2 x 4 crashed into the werewolf’s nose with a satisfying crunch, and one of the nails that had been driven through her broken wing plunged deep into the wolf’s eye.
He screamed and dropped to his knees, as Bron leaned forward and spat out, “Nevermore, motherfucker.”
Tomás was already leaping through the air, reaching for the werewolf, claws out. With two powerful swipes, he slashed first across the werewolf’s torso, and then his throat, even as Bron finished a partial shift that allowed her to slam her beak into the wolf’s remaining eye.
The werewolf gurgled in his own blood, and Bron held Tomás’s gaze with her own, a deep, unholy satisfaction settling in her stomach.
Sometimes, it took beaks and paws and hands, all working together.
And sometimes, that was perfect.
The old crows had been right—there was a darkness deep inside her.
One she needed.
One that made her the perfect match for the jaguar shifter in front of her.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Tomás watched in admiration as Bronwyn slipped into the tattered remains of his dress shirt and suit jacket, gathering them around her and using one of the sleeves like a sling to hold her damaged arm.
Her willingness to do anything necessary to save them all made him want to shift back into his human form and kiss her thoroughly.
But that would have to wait.
She tossed his ruined pants over her good shoulder. “I assume there are other wolves still out there?”
Tomás nodded, and she drew herself up to her full height. Taking a deep breath, she bent over to rifle through the werewolf’s pockets. Coming up with a ring of keys, she went back into the small cell and unlocked the manacles and chains around Jeff’s wrists. “Come on, boss. Time to go.”
With her arm around his waist, they limped out. At the door to the conference room, Bronwyn paused. “Where’s Fred?” she asked her former employer.
“Dead.”
She winced, but didn’t ask for any elaboration. “Then there’s no reason not to do this.” She propped Jeff up against the wall and with one elbow, broke the tiny glass pane and pulled the fire alarm.
“Let’s go,” she said, gathering Jeff again, with a nod at Tomás.
She opened the door, and Tomás took out both guards before they even knew what had hit them.
The rest of the casino security wing was in chaos, with people—human and shifters—running to reach their destinations.
The one werewolf who headed toward them backed off again when he saw his dead colleagues.
Tomás chuffed in satisfaction.
Yeah. Their leader might’ve been devoted to the cause, but that one? He was merely a lackey.
At the exit toward the garage, they found Bronwyn’s pile of clothing, kicked to the side of the hallway. She pawed through it until she came up with the small evening bag she had carried, and dug out the burner phone Tomás had bought what seemed like days ago but had only been that afternoon.
With a push of a button, she called the limo driver to come pick them up. Then she scooped up the rest of her belongings from the ground and led the two men out to the parking area.
“Here,” she said, tossing Tomás’s pants so they landed on his back. “Our ride is coming. Go find a place to change.”
Chapter 10
By the time the limo pulled up, Tomás was back in his human form and wearing his tattered pants. While he had been behind a nearby car shifting, Bronwyn had used the high-heeled shoes she had been wearing earlier to jam the doors shut.
“It won’t
keep the wolves away indefinitely, but it should slow them down long enough for us to get a head start,” she explained. Jeff nodded wearily from where he leaned against the cinderblock wall.
“You are glorious,” Tomás announced, planting a hard, fast kiss on her lips.
When they all tumbled into the backseat of the car, Bronwyn reeled at the accidental brush of her injured arm against the upholstered seat. Tomás wanted to wrap her in his embrace and comfort her, but the barest twitch in her direction elicited a head shake and a terse, “No. Not yet.”
Tomás nodded, though it made his heart ache to do so.
“Are they evacuating the building?” he asked the driver, who had rolled down the glass partition to the front seat.
“Yes, sir.” He tapped an earpiece he wore. “Sounds from the reports like they’re almost done.”
“You have a full arsenal here?”
The man’s eyes assessed them all seriously, taking in their bruised and bloodied state. “Everything you might possibly need,” he said flatly.
“Come on, then.” As they moved around the back of the vehicle, Tomás carefully evaluated the garage and its structural attachments to the riverboat.
Opening the trunk, he began pulling out the supplies they would need.
“We’ll have to hurry.”
Bron didn’t even bother to ask where Tomás and the driver were going. She trusted him to do whatever was necessary. Inside the car, she began pressing Jeff for answers. He would have to shift soon to heal his wounds, but he would probably need food first—and in the meantime, she needed answers. She rummaged around in the side compartments until she found a water bottle. Opening it, she offered him a drink.
“What did those werewolves want?” she asked.
Jeff gulped down several swallows before he answered. “Money. It’s always about money.”
“Why now? The red wolves and the gray wolves have never fought over money before. What’s changed?”
Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 8