by Amelia Jade
Gabriel’s ears perked up as he heard the sounds of booted feet running through the hallways, followed shortly thereafter by shouts.
“What the hell?” he muttered, rising gingerly from his seat and then exiting his room in a hurry.
A tall mass of muscles clad in a white shirt with markings on the sleeves, black tactical pants, and brown steel-toed boots went flying by. Gabriel sped up, his own boots slamming down on the floor as he followed the sounds.
He emerged from the hallway into the lobby to see what looked like a murder scene. Blood was everywhere. Streaked across the tiled floor, pooling under several bodies, and soaked through various articles of clothing.
“What the hell is going on here?” he snapped.
A nearby shifter finished setting the leg bone of another man in the same white shirt, black pants, and brown-booted outfit and stood up, his left hand slamming to his chest as he gave the Green Bearet salute.
“Captain Korver, sir! Jax’s patrol just returned.”
“I can see that,” he ground out, recognizing the bodies as having belonged to the squad commanded by Corporal Jax Miter. “But what the hell happened to them?”
“I’m not sure,” the other shifter said, looking embarrassed. “I was manning the front desk when they came in here, and I just saw they needed help and—”
Gabriel was no longer listening. His eyes moved quickly from shirt to shirt, seeking out the ranking markers on them. Some of the shifters were so covered in blood he couldn’t recognize them.
“Lieutenant Miter!” His voice carried easily across the entranceway of the motel serving as the local base for his Green Bearets.
A blood-covered specter turned to face him. Gabriel shook his head and reached a hand out, pressing the hanging flap of skin on the man’s head back to his scalp. He held it there for thirty seconds and then removed his hand. The healing was already well underway, and his own systems could handle the rest from there. It was likely that amongst his other wounds and concern for his men that the injury hadn’t even been noted.
“Report,” he gritted out, noting that several of the bodies wearing white and black were no longer moving.
Some of his men were dead.
“Fenrisians, sir,” Jax said, spitting blood out of his mouth. “They ambushed us. Took down three of my men before we could even react.” His eyes were haunted as he spoke of the deaths of his men. “We recovered and laid into them of course.” Pride infused his voice. “My men were like demons. They fell upon them like a coordinated tidal wave of death.” Anger seared away the pain for the moment as Jax recounted the battle to him.
Gabriel listened, nodding along and asking a question or two at certain parts, but he didn’t need to ask much. It was quite clear what had happened to his men.
“Did you capture any of them?” he asked, his voice dull, devoid of emotion as he tried to keep himself calm.
“Yeah,” Jax said tiredly. “Some of the others took him downstairs already.”
“Sir!” Another thickly muscled soldier ran up, saluting both of them before turning to Jax. “Derron didn’t make it. We tried, but it was just too bad.”
Gabriel felt his knuckles pop as his hands balled up into fists. “How many did you lose?” he asked as Jax hung his head at the news.
“That makes five,” he said dejectedly. “Almost half my squad. Gone.”
Pink tinged the edges of Gabriel’s vision as he heard the failure in Jax’s voice. His eyes panned around the room, taking in the dead, and the badly wounded. Each body that he encountered—Green Bearets didn’t leave their dead on the field, they brought them home—colored his vision with more and more red.
“You did the best you could, Lieutenant,” he said, his voice colder, harsher than he intended. “You’ll never believe it, but you did the best you could. They were ready for you. This is what happens in an ambush. A lesser soldier would have lost his entire patrol. You didn’t. Remember that, and remember that the survivors will be looking to you. Don’t let them down by falling apart,” he said dully.
Then Captain Gabriel Korver spun on his feet and headed to the rear left of the lobby, where the open stairs leading into the basement were located. He reached them and descended a level. The stairs ended, forming the base of a T-shape with the hallway beyond. He took the left, and then another left, before descending into the sub-basement.
There were two men standing outside a thick wooden door. They both came to rigid attention, fists thumping against their chests as they recognized the captain.
“He’s in there?” Gabriel asked.
There was no question who the “he” was.
“Yes sir.”
Gabriel nodded. “You’re dismissed.”
The guards looked at each other. “Sir?” one of them asked.
“You heard me,” he said icily.
“Yes sir!” they chorused and departed.
Gabriel knew they were looking back over their shoulders as they left, but he didn’t care.
The metal bars holding the door closed slid easily out of the way, and then he pushed the door open. It swung inward on well-oiled hinges, not making a sound. The room beyond was lit by one dull bulb swaying lazily from the ceiling. The vinyl flooring of the hallway gave way to cold cement, and the painted walls ended abruptly at the door. Cinderblocks replaced them.
There were no windows in the cell, no furniture. It was simply a blank room. In the center of it sat another man. He was crouched on his legs, looking up at Gabriel.
“Like I told them, I don’t know—”
“I don’t care,” Gabriel said, stepping inside and pushing the door closed behind him. His voice was ice, his eyes unblinking as he stared at the Fenrisian prisoner.
The other shifter stood up. “What’s the meaning of this?”
Gabriel growled in response, a fog of red in his eyes turning the entire room a different color.
“You killed five of my men,” he said at last, taking another step forward.
The other shifter moved away.
“It wasn’t anything personal,” came the reply, though the voice was unsteady, unsure of what was going on. “I didn’t have anything against you or—”
Gabriel roared and charged at the prisoner, locking his hands around the man’s throat. The other shifter tried to fight back, but Gabriel’s rage was too great. He shook the man like a rag doll, despite the near equivalent size between them. Then he turned and flung the shifter across the cell until he slammed into the wall.
The Fenrisian—Gabriel didn’t even care about his name—rose to his feet and came at Gabriel, but the Green Bearet danced to the side and leveled him with a blow to the side of the head. Then he reached down, picked the hapless prisoner up, and slammed his back into the wall.
He reached back and drove his fist into the man’s face.
“YOU KILLED FIVE OF MY MEN!” he roared, hitting him again and again.
And again.
And again.
Bone broke in the man’s nose, and then his orbital bone fractured under the repeated blows. His jaw hung sideways and blood flowed freely from his nose and mouth. But Gabriel didn’t stop, letting his rage consume him as he howled at the pain of losing five good men.
A wrecking ball hit Gabriel in the side and he went flying.
With another inarticulate roar of anger Gabriel swung a wild fist at whatever had hit him, but the shape dodged out of the way and an open hand slapped him across the face.
“Gabriel, it’s Luther!”
He shook off the voice and charged, but the unknown attacker dodged, once again slapping Gabriel across the face.
“CAPTAIN KORVER! YOU WILL CEASE THIS BEHAVIOR INSTANTLY.”
The bellowed command voice struck something inside Gabriel, appealing to a part of him that had been locked away since he’d seen the remains of the patrol upstairs. He came to a halt in his wild charge and blinked away the red as he focused on the source of the voice. He bent over sl
ightly at the waist, his lungs heaving.
Standing to his left, breathing slightly harder than normal, was a form he knew very well.
“Luther,” he said, inclining his head toward Captain Luther Klein, commander of the First Assault Company and the second-in-command of the entire outpost of Green Bearets in Cloud Lake.
“Outside,” Luther said firmly, pointing toward the open door.
In the hallway stood several more men. Men from Luther’s company, not Gabriel’s.
Smart move, bringing your own men, in case mine were unwilling to engage me while I was like that.
He moved through them, neither meeting their eyes nor hanging his head. Instead Gabriel looked straight ahead until he had ascended the stairs and banged through the door to the rear of the motel. There was a courtyard there and he moved into the center of it, looking at the inert water fountain. The Green Bearets hadn’t seen a need to reactivate it when they’d taken over control of the old Mineshaft Motel and converted it into their base of operations.
“What the fuck was that?” Luther snarled a minute later, apparently having followed him outside.
“Not now,” Gabriel said, trying to shake off the other man.
“Yes, right fucking now,” Luther returned, his voice brimming with anger and…and…
Sadness.
“Don’t you dare pity me,” Gabriel sneered. “I don’t deserve it. Not after that.”
He knew what he’d done was wrong. Even as he had gone downstairs to do it, Gabriel had known he shouldn’t. But he couldn’t have stopped himself. It was too much.
“All these years together, and you think I’m pitying you?” Luther said with a sarcastic laugh. “I guess you don’t know me as well as I thought you did. I’m not pitying you.”
“You’re not?”
“No, you oaf. I’m sympathetic to you.”
Gabriel’s head shot up as he looked Luther in the eye.
“Oh, don’t fucking look at me like that,” Luther said with a wave of his hand. “Do you think you’re the only one who wanted to go beat the piss out of that guy?”
“Uh, honestly, I hadn’t really thought about it,” Gabriel said, sitting down heavily on the edge of the fountain.
Luther came and sat next to him, a strong hand giving his shoulder a squeeze.
“We all did, Gabe. We all did. But we can’t. You know that.”
Gabriel closed his eyes. “I know, Luther. But it’s just too much. These past few weeks, them attacking our patrols, trying to goad us into attacking, and us unable to respond. It’s been wearing on me. We lose a man here, a man there. We do the same to them, oftentimes worse. But for what? What possible purpose could this be serving them?”
“It’s goading us into doing something rash that they can use against us,” Luther said gently, his voice letting Gabriel know that what he’d just done was one of those impulsive things.
“This whole war was rash,” he replied dejectedly. “I hate it.”
“Don’t we all,” Luther agreed. “But just because Fenris declared war on us, and not the other way around, doesn’t mean we can suddenly abandon all the rules.”
There was a long pause after he spoke. Gabriel didn’t have to look over at his longtime friend to realize that Luther was hoping he would speak up, to tell him what was going on, why he’d lost control like that.
But Gabriel couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t do that.
“You’d have thought that this all would have ended when they got kicked out of their homeland,” he muttered.
“Perhaps,” Luther agreed unhappily.
Several months earlier, one of the several dozen independent shifter territories scattered across the planet had declared war on his homeland of Cadia. This wasn’t some little upstart though; Cadia was the largest, most populous of the lands that had been carved from human rule some two hundred odd years earlier. They weren’t the rulers of the others, but they were widely regarded as the ones in charge.
But Fenris, the second-biggest and their arch rival, hadn’t seen it that way. They’d launched an unprovoked attack on Cadia. It had come out just recently that that attack had been provoked by the meddling of the human government, as part of an attempt to bring the shifter territories under human control.
Nobody had quite been able to figure out the why behind that just yet, besides the simple fact that that’s what humans did. They needed to rule everyone and damn the consequences. It wasn’t like shifters wanted anything to do with the humans. For as long as Gabriel could remember, until the start of the war, the contact between the two had been extremely limited. The borders of the shifter territories were patrolled ruthlessly, and humans were not welcome. Most of the time humans illegally caught inside a shifter territory were never found again.
But with the coming of the war, the human town of Cloud Lake—the closest town to Cadia by a wide margin—had come under attack by the forces of Fenris. The Green Bearets had responded in strength, not only to kick Fenris out, but to garrison and protect the town from any future attacks.
“Our men are getting hammered out there,” Gabriel said. “Not in huge battles, but they’re killing us off piece by piece,” he raged impotently.
It was true. The Green Bearets were the warrior arm of the bear shifters of Cadia. The elite. They worked in tandem with the other races to fight together. But Cloud Lake was under Green Bearet protection, and it was his men that patrolled the nearby areas, helping to keep the rogue elements of Fenris from causing more damage.
“You know we can’t go after the Remnants ourselves,” Luther said.
The Remnants. As the war went worse and worse for Fenris after their initial surprise attacks were turned away, the civilians in charge had decided to sue for peace. Not wanting to go along with that, the Fenris Wards had left to continue their attack. They had taken up refuge on human federal land several hours north of Cloud Lake, and had begun harassing attacks not long after.
The Wards were often now referred to as the Remnants, because they were no longer officially recognized by Fenris itself. They were made up of bears, wolves, dragons, and other species. The multi-racial force had protected the Fenrisian borders, just like the Guardians of Cadia still did for his homeland.
It was not a good situation. Gabriel had been on the front lines for months now, and it was starting to wear on him. But he couldn’t take any time off.
Not yet.
The door to the motel banged open and a shifter approached.
“What is it?” Luther growled, his voice a warning that the soldier had better have a damn good reason for interrupting them.
“Uh, sorry sir. It’s just that, there’s someone at the front asking for the captain.”
“I’ll be there in a bit,” Luther said, waving a hand to dismiss the shifter.
“Um, sir.” One thing that couldn’t be said about the Green Bearets was that they were timid. “They’re not asking for you. They apparently have orders to talk to Captain Korver, sir.”
“Orders?” Luther asked while Gabriel sat there, his head hung low as he tried to compose himself. “Who the hell has orders to talk to him? Is it The Colonel?”
By that Gabriel knew that Luther meant Colonel Garrin Richter, the second-in-command of the Green Bearets. There was only one colonel in the command structure, and thus his title was referred to as The Colonel.
Never when he was within earshot though.
“Ah, no sir. It’s actually a woman.” The shifter paused. “A human woman, sir.”
Gabriel’s head came up of its own accord as something in the shifter’s voice spoke to him. A human woman, here to see him? But why?
“What for?” he asked, putting a staying hand on Luther’s arm. He could speak for himself now.
“She didn’t say, sir.”
Gabriel looked at him, his look clear. Next time ask what she wants before you come get me.
The shifter, a private from one of the other companies stationed in Cloud La
ke, ducked his head apologetically. “I can stall her, sir?”
“No,” Gabriel said, pushing off the cold stone of the fountain that had been his seat and rising easily into a standing position. “I’ll see her.” He snorted. “It’s not like this night can get any worse, right?”
Luther wisely didn’t respond.
Chapter Three
Stephanie
She shivered. Night had fallen since she’d arrived in Cloud Lake, and the walk over to the motel wasn’t the warmest. Spring was nearing the midway point, but the nights could still get cool on occasion, and Stephanie had been looking forward to the warmth of the building as she approached.
So when the guard stepped in her path and told her she had to stay there, it not only irritated her, but also aroused her curiosity. Why would she not be welcome inside? It wasn’t as if she’d been rude, or attacked anyone, and she knew that the building had a lobby. She’d studied the plans of it on her way to Cloud Lake.
In fact, calling the place a motel was a bit of a misnomer she thought. It was much larger than a normal motel, two stories high and with nearly a hundred rooms, it should have been classified as a hotel. It was a big U-shape, with the bottom of it facing the street she was currently standing on, waiting for someone to let her in.
It was a reminder of days gone by when Cloud Lake had been a mining town, taking everything they could from the nearby mountains. But then the terms of the shifter treaties had been changed and the mountains had suddenly been within the border of Cadia, and the miners were forced to look elsewhere.
Cloud Lake had become a ghost town for a while, until the shifter population grew to the point that it had needed to begin bringing in supplies from outside. They wouldn’t allow humans to bring the supplies inside, so instead the trucks were met at the border and the trailers brought the rest of the way by shifters.
This had given rise to the need for a nearby trucking depot, and then a receiving warehouse, a place for truck drivers to sleep and eat, and more. Cloud Lake had risen from the ashes, increasing until it had a population of nearly fifteen thousand, including the immediate surrounding area.