by S. M. Reine
“This is your last warning,” she said, bracing the shotgun against her shoulder.
Sancho lunged.
She fired.
Silver buckshot chewed through the side of his face. Blood and fur and skull fragments splattered to the door behind him.
It didn’t stop Sancho. He smashed into the agent and his teeth closed on her thigh. His momentum carried both of them through the doorway into the office, carrying her toward Stark.
She screamed as she fired straight down into his skull.
Niamh buried her face in Deirdre’s shoulder so she wouldn’t have to see Sancho’s head blast apart.
The other survivor—the combat witch—hurled silver flame at the leopard through the admissions window. His fur caught. It engulfed him.
The spell melted his flesh away, exposing bone.
Deirdre’s stomach lurched. She still had the Sig and the Ruger but there was no way in hell she was going to try to take that witch. She dragged Niamh back under the cover of the desk. It wasn’t much cover at all. Not if the witch could toss fire around like softballs.
Stark ran across the room at a crouch, dodging the witch’s next volley. The magic punched into the wall behind him.
He dragged the agent behind the desk with Deirdre.
The shifter’s name was Agent West, according to the badge on her chest. Her hair was tawny red. She was a tough-looking woman who wore her age well—probably at least forty, forty-five judging by the skin on her hands, but her face could have passed for thirty.
Her leg was a shredded mess of blood and muscle. Sancho may have crippled her. Even shifters could only regenerate so much tissue.
Agent West groaned as she fumbled for her secondary firearm. Stark pulled it out of her holster before she could grab it.
“Shapeshift, Agent West,” he said. “And kill the remaining OPA agent.”
It was painful to watch her slow change. Much slower than Sancho’s shift into the leopard. Fur blossomed over Agent West’s body, overtaking her tanned flesh. Her shredded thigh spasmed as fresh muscle grew within—not much, not enough to fix the leg, but enough to make blood flow fresh from the wound.
“Drop your guns and come out with your hands up,” said the combat witch from the lobby. “And no more shifting.”
Agent West wailed. The human tones turned to a howl.
Even before she was done shifting, she got to all fours and staggered toward the lobby. Her bones kept popping. She stumbled, but slipped through the door and out of Deirdre’s sight.
“Hillary?” whispered the witch.
Deirdre’s hand twitched for her gun. Stark shook his head.
A moment later, the witch started screaming.
“Now we leave,” he said.
When Deirdre got up, the sight of all the dead bodies was nearly enough to make her faint. The three humans Jacek had shot were going cold in the back. The agents Sancho had attacked weren’t moving anymore. And Agent West was ripping out her coworker’s throat.
So much blood.
The front door hung open halfway, broken sofas pushed to the side to clear a path. Stark led the entire team around the still-feasting werewolf. “Don’t follow us,” he told Agent West. To everyone else, he said, “Get ready. There are still police outside.”
Jacek and Geoff moved up to flank Stark, drawing their guns. Deirdre followed suit, gripping the Sig tightly.
She wasn’t shaking anymore. She had gone beyond numb to whatever horrible emotion lurked beyond that.
“What about me?” asked Andrew, the last of the surviving staff members. He was still sitting against the wall, miraculously unhurt, though he’d been splattered with the doctor’s blood.
“You can come with us,” Stark said.
“And what about Sancho?” Niamh asked, hugging the box of files tightly. The leopard wasn’t moving. But there was a chance he’d survived—a very small chance, given the silver buckshot cratering his flesh and his exposed skull. Deirdre didn’t feel optimistic.
Stark didn’t either. “Leave him.”
He slammed through the front door.
Deirdre moved to the right, aiming her Sig into the blinding light of morning outside. It wasn’t just sunlight—spotlights blazed at the front door.
“Get on the ground or I’ll shoot!” Jacek roared. But Stark grabbed him.
“Hold your fire,” he said. “All of you, hold your fire!”
Deirdre shielded her gaze. “Why? Why shouldn’t we shoot?”
“Because this is what we want.”
The spotlights redirected toward Stark, allowing Deirdre’s eyes to adjust. They were surrounded by news crews. There were at least three men with large cameras and two petite women wearing skirt suits.
Reporters. They were filming the hostage situation.
And now Deirdre’s face was going to be seen worldwide, right next to Everton Stark’s.
The reporters weren’t alone. They were being held behind a police line where multiple cruisers waited. The cops themselves were using their doors as shields, aiming their guns at the shifters who had just emerged from the benefits office.
“Excellent,” Stark said.
Deirdre realized how they must have looked to outsiders: a team of five standing in front of the benefits office with a hostage. Two of them wore more leather than the average biker; many of the others were visibly pierced and tattooed. Niamh could have been a model. All five were tall, strong, and beautiful in a frightening kind of way.
They looked majestic. More than that, to Stark’s target audience—young shapeshifters—they would look sexy. An impressive contrast to Rylie Gresham’s press conferences at the White House.
It was all part of Stark’s marketing plan. He wanted everyone to see how cool his pack looked.
The reporters were shouting questions at them. Stark seemed more like an actor advertising his new movie than a man who freely killed people to meet his goals.
“What you plan to do once you’re in charge?”
“Do you want to kill all humans?”
“How do you plan to reform the system?”
Deirdre was the first to see the movement. One of the reporters broke through the yellow tape, trying to get closer for a better picture. Deirdre lifted her hand, trying to tell the reporter to stay back. “Wait!”
The motion must have been too sudden. The police officers shouted, swinging their guns around to bear on Deirdre.
“They’re going to shoot!” shouted Jacek, lifting the machine gun.
“No!” Stark growled. He reached for Jacek and for Deirdre. He couldn’t stop both of them—so he settled for Jacek, the nearer of the two.
She only made two steps before the officers opened fire.
—XII—
Sometimes Deirdre thought that there had been something between death and rebirth.
Most people accepted that everything had come back immediately after the Genesis void destroyed the world. That was the story that they’d been told in school. Deirdre had no recollection of anything happening in between, so the general assumption seemed to be true enough.
And yet she had a sense that much more time than that had passed. Like it had been years between the end of everything and the beginning of everything else.
She fantasized about what could have happened if that were true. She liked to imagine that she’d gone to Heaven. She had been a child after all, a good girl, someone who hadn’t lived enough life to have ever done wrong.
In her fantasy, Heaven unfolded below a vast, open sky suspended in the moments before sunset, when stars began to emerge from the velvety darkness. It would always be warm and never rain.
There would have been forests, grassy fields…and her father.
It was probably pure fantasy. But there was no proof that any of that wasn’t true. Deirdre had mentally relived those fantasies so many times that she was starting to believe it deep within her core.
And sometimes, Deirdre wished that she h
ad never come back to life so she could have stayed with her father.
Dying would’ve been far less painful than reality.
Deirdre woke up screaming.
“Oh my gods!”
The fabric of the world was spun from sheer agony. Shattered glass packed her flesh.
“Just a couple more,” said a voice. It sounded like Niamh, but Deirdre didn’t want to open her eyes to confirm that. She wanted to succumb to the darkness. She wanted to sink into the nothingness of oblivion where there was no pain and never come out again.
Fresh pain spiked through Deirdre, originating from the left side of her chest. Someone was digging iron spikes into her ribs and wiggling them around. Rusty iron spikes. It was the only thing that could hurt that bad.
Deirdre unleashed a string of epithets. She’d grown up around people with filthy mouths and creative minds—she knew a lot of swear words. And she exhausted her vocabulary as that spike ground against her bones from the inside.
“There’s my girl,” Niamh said. “You hang on to that anger, honey. We’re almost done.”
Another flash of pain, this time in her stomach.
Deirdre pried her eyes open. Her half-naked body was coated in so much blood. It couldn’t all be hers. There was too much.
She didn’t recognize the person digging through her wounds with a pair of tweezers, though she imagined it must’ve been a healer. Deirdre hated him instantly. She thrashed, trying to break free.
Niamh leaned her full weight on Deirdre’s ankles, trying to hold her still. Gage had one of her arms.
If Gage was there, then she must have been taken back to the asylum.
The healer was holding a bullet between the ends of his tweezers. He’d just fished it out of her gut. “That one was close to her liver.” He dropped it in the tray. “Good thing we got it out.”
The tweezers moved back toward her body.
“No, no, no—” Deirdre cried.
Everything was pain.
Deirdre healed faster than mundane humans, but not fast enough.
Hours after the healer finished operating, she still felt like her flesh had been packed with shards of glass.
“What I wouldn’t give to be an ordinary werewolf today,” she muttered. Her teeth were chattering, fingers shaking, temples throbbing. Deirdre had ridden out a lot of healing fevers, but none quite like this.
“It’s my fault,” Niamh said, dealing a new hand of blackjack on the table beside Deirdre’s bed. “I shouldn’t have let you be front and center during your first mission. I should have protected you better.”
“I knew this would be dangerous when I got into it,” Deirdre said, since it was slightly more gracious than telling Niamh that everyone in the asylum deserved to get shot by OPA agents.
“But I didn’t even try to change your mind. I’ve seen people getting shot doing this stuff with Stark before, you know. You’d think that he’d always have a handle on things with his compulsion, but there are too many factors outside his control.” Niamh played with the strap of a bra that was on Deirdre’s bed. There were two separate bra piles—one for each of them. “It’s my fault.”
“Okay. Fine.” Deirdre wrapped her blankets tighter around herself. She thought she was going to shiver herself into a million pieces. “If you want to take the blame, it’s all yours. I hate you. Get out of my sight.”
Niamh honk-laughed. “It’s nice having you here.” Deirdre couldn’t say the same, so she didn’t. The swanmay shoved her cards aside. “This hand sucks. I quit.”
“That’s not how blackjack works. You can’t have a bad starting hand.”
“I can and I do. I’m done with this game. It’s stupid anyway.”
“It’s your favorite,” Deirdre said.
“It’s your favorite. I only tolerated it for you all those years, Dee. But I can’t even put up with this stuff today when you got shot with, like, a million bullets. I suck so bad.”
In fact, it had “only” been seven bullets.
Which was about seven bullets too many.
Niamh slumped in her chair, arms folded over her chest. She was wearing a t-shirt with David Bowie’s face on it, a black leather skirt, and a fishnet bodysuit underneath both of those. She wore so much black eyeliner that it looked like she had shoved her hands into a fireplace and rubbed the coals over her eyes. The outfit seemed to reflect her mood. Deirdre couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Niamh so solemn.
Deirdre flipped her cards over. “It’s better that you folded anyway. I’ve got nineteen. I was just going to stay and watch you bust out.” Niamh always busted. Her impulse control wasn’t good enough to stop asking for more cards after sixteen. “Let me see your cards.”
“No way.” Niamh scooped her hand up. “Accept your victory and be quiet about it.” She flung a bra in Deirdre’s face.
“Let me see!” Deirdre reached for the cards, but leaning forward that far made her wounds hurt. She fell back with a wince.
“Stop moving, Dee. You’re supposed to be recuperating.”
“I wouldn’t have moved if you’d showed me your cards. Just pointing that out.”
Niamh’s smile faded. Seriousness had taken over again. Deirdre didn’t like that look on her silly, flighty friend—who didn’t seem nearly as silly and flighty as she used to be. Being part of a rebellion had made her grow up in a big way.
“What happened at the office after I got shot?” Deirdre asked.
“You shouldn’t worry about that right now.” Niamh plucked at one of the holes in her fishnet tights, making the hole bigger.
“Okay, then what was the printout thing about? Did I get shot for a good reason?”
“I don’t actually know. Stark told me what he wanted and I got it. I don’t ask questions.” Niamh hesitated, then leaned in close. “I pulled the names, breeds, and addresses of all families including at least one adult woman and two daughters who had received benefits from the OPA in the last decade. Isn’t that weirdly specific? A woman and two daughters.”
Deirdre frowned. “It has to do with the campaign against Rylie Gresham, right?”
“You’d think.”
Rylie did have at least two daughters. But she hadn’t received benefits. She was the one who’d helped set them up.
Deirdre didn’t know what to think about that.
The bedroom door opened and Gage entered. He took one look at the cards scattered over the table and said, “You almost died and now you’re gambling? It’s been two hours. How do you even feel like gambling?”
“It’s not like there’s money on the line. We play for undies,” Niamh said.
Gage’s jaw dropped. “Underwear?”
“We wear the same bra size,” Niamh said. “Which, by the way, is a 32C. It looks bigger on Deirdre because she’s shorter and likes those pushup bras that give her all the cleavage, whereas I prefer to minimize.”
“Niamh…” Deirdre warned.
“Anyway, the shelters always provided our clothes, but nice bras were not part of those provisions. So whenever we got cute melon hammocks—”
“Melon hammocks,” Gage echoed.
“—we’d gamble for them. Not just us two, mind you, but a whole room of girls gambling for bras.” Niamh gave an exaggerated, lascivious wink. “You should have seen the pillow fights.”
“Okay!” Deirdre said. “Thanks for the win, Niamh, but I would like to talk to Gage now. Alone. As he is my boyfriend and all.”
Niamh grinned. “You should show him your new bra.” Deirdre shoved it underneath the covers before Gage could get too curious. “Group training after dinner. That goes for you, Gage. Dee can probably get out of it for the night. Play sick. Get some sleep. See you guys later!”
She left. Gage stared at the door that she’d shut behind her.
“Is she trying to be flirtatious or is she just crazy?” he asked.
“Crazy,” Deirdre said. “You’re not nearly sweaty enough to be her type. That’s a co
mpliment, for the record.”
“So you won’t be betting me over a card game anytime soon?”
Deirdre laughed. “No.”
“Okay.” Gage grabbed the remote control off the side table. “Now that you’ve got a new, um, thing over there, we have to talk seriously.”
He turned on the television.
The anchor currently on the news was a woman named January Lazar, a celebrity journalist who got the best preternatural interviews. She’d done an exclusive with Rylie a few years back and it had made her career.
Now January Lazar was talking about Deirdre.
Her photo was in the corner over January’s shoulder. The shot must have been taken right after they’d emerged from the benefits office. Deirdre’s mouth was opened in a shout, gun lifted, aimed at the camera. She looked angry in that picture. Deirdre didn’t remember being angry. She only remembered being terrified.
The TV was muted, so Deirdre couldn’t hear what January Lazar was saying about her. That was probably a mercy.
“Oh my gods,” Deirdre said. “Oh my gods.”
“Deep breaths. Try to stay calm,” Gage said.
“I’d like to see you stay calm. Everybody who’s ever known me is going to see this and think that I’m part of the rebellion.”
“You are part of the rebellion.”
“Stupid, tiny detail,” she said. “What’s Jolene going to think of me?”
“Jolene’s a vampire. She’s going to be proud of you for killing people.” He waved a remote at the TV. “This is going to be a problem after all of this is over, though. Assuming we survive and you don’t get shot again. Why’d you do that?”
“You’d have to ask the police officers,” Deirdre said. “It’s not like I pulled the trigger.”
“You moved in front of Stark. You took those bullets for him.”
That was news to her. “I was trying to stop a reporter from breaching the line.”
“I’ve seen the video. That’s not what it looks like.”
Deirdre felt weirdly defensive. “You think that I’m eager to save Stark’s life? You know that guy has smacked me twice, right?”