by Bec McMaster
"Is that normal?" Mia whispered as everyone started ransacking the ammunition.
"No." Zarina stared at the windows, her body taut with tension. "Something's going on."
"McClain," Mia whispered. She just knew he had something to do with the riot.
As if in answer, the huge flare lights overlooking the arena flickered... and went dark. The room plunged into blackness.
"The generator's down," Zarina whispered, "which means the fence won't hold whatever's in that arena."
Shots hammered through the air outside. It sounded like a repeating rifle. Mia couldn't stop her feet from moving. What was going on in that arena? She had to go and see. Even if the glimmer of hope in her heart was but a spark.
Zarina hauled her back.
"Get your hands off me!" Mia hissed.
"You've got no weapons and barely any ammunition. What are you going to do? Head-butt reivers? You're a liability to him right now."
Good point. Mia dragged a couple of belt loops full of shotgun shells over her shoulders, and reloaded the shotgun.
"Ammo up," she told Zarina. "You're with me. That was the deal."
"If Vex sees me, then I'm a dead woman. This is my ticket out, Mia. You're asking me to throw that away."
Mia opened the clip on her pistol. She paused. "I need you. I can't navigate these streets without you. Please."
Zarina looked away, her shoulders tense. "This is a bad idea."
"You said your mother killed the man you loved. If you had a chance to go back to that moment and stop her, you'd do anything to save him, wouldn't you?"
Zarina cursed under her breath. "He's probably already dead."
"Then why are they still shooting?"
Both of them listened.
"Don't you want to spit in her eye?" Mia breathed. "Take back everything she's ever taken for you? Repay her for what she did to your man? Do you think you can just run away and put all of this behind you? You can't escape her, or what you've done. But maybe you can make amends."
Zarina shuddered. "Yeah. But if we fail...."
"We're not going to fail." Mia's eyes lit on a rocket launcher.
And suddenly a plan formed. Plan B.
She dragged it out of its case, along with a couple of the grenades. She'd been lost ever since that moment when she realized that McClain wasn't human. Her feet kept moving and somehow she'd managed to run and fire weapons but her mind had been in shock ever since, as if it could only focus on one thing at a time, and barely that.
This cleared the fog.
Once upon a time, she and Jake had been playing around with an old gas canister, a plastic tube sealed at one end, and a crate of oranges. They'd both gotten the hidings of their life from that moment too. But she knew a little about trajectory, and could imagine firing something like this.
She was going to get to McClain, or she was going to die trying. And if she did die... well, she was going to take every reiver in Rust City with her.
"How do you work this?"
Zarina shot her a careful look, then picked up the rocket launcher and hefted the end of it on top of a crate. "Like this," she said, and demonstrated how to load it quickly, her hands moving over the grenades as if she'd handled them before. She cocked one eye shut and lifted it onto her shoulder, then pretended to pull the trigger. "Bang.... Wait a couple of seconds and then...." She made an exploding sound through her cheeks, her clenched fist springing wide. "You shoot this, and you make sure you aim high and not at anyone."
Mia took the launcher, juggling its weight. "How big is the explosion?"
Zarina paused, glancing around for Jake and Sage. They hadn't noticed Mia's preoccupation. They were too busy trying to bandage Jake's arm. "You sure you should be holding that?"
"You going to try and take it off me?"
"Hell, no." For a second Zarina's eyes lit up. "I would love to see the look on Vex's face when she sees you coming."
"You will see it," Mia pointed out. "Let's go."
Adam couldn't find her.
Street after street, all he saw was violence and death. Reivers lay scattered and torn in the dirt, along with the odd warg. In the distance, some of the reivers near the main compound manned the gun turrets and bullets chewed the dirt there.
A warg bolted past on all fours, its matted fur wet with blood.
"You drew claws in that arena." Colton swung his arms out to the sides, and claws gleamed at the ends of his fingers. "Think you can do so again?"
Luc had been able to do the same. Adam grit his teeth. He'd never bothered to learn. Suppressing his warg nature had been all that mattered, and now that he was out of the ring he'd lost the claws he'd sprouted. "The axe is good enough for me."
"Suit yourself," Colton replied with a loose shrug. "But you're the one who fears the beast. I'm the one who controls it."
Colton headed down another dusty street, and Adam frowned. What did he mean by that? Could Colton control the actual shift? Or control the warg when it wanted out?
What would that mean if you were a warg? Was there a way to shift forms with his human mind still in control, so that he'd never have to fear letting it out again?
No time to find out. But definitely later.
Focus on Mia. He hurried after Colton. Once Mia and Jake freed her sister, they'd have headed for the armory and the vehicle lot, if they moved according to the plan.
He didn't know what he'd say to her when he found her. The expression on her face when he went warg kept flashing through his mind. Horror. Shock. Her feet taking one explicit step back away from him.
A reiver staggered out of a narrow alley between shanties, and Adam cut him down with the axe.
He wrenched the axe out of the reiver’s chest blankly. Whether or not Mia wanted him anywhere near her, he wasn't about to leave her to this. As soon as he got her and the others safely away from here, they could talk. Until she was safe, nothing else mattered.
"Which way?" Colton asked, standing in the middle of the next intersection. Bedraggled washing hung from lines between houses, and there was water—hopefully water—running in a dribble through the middle of road.
Adam caught the edge of Mia's scent. He spun around, staring along the road. She'd been here. And not long ago, not if he could still smell her.
"This way."
He started running, his heart pounding. If he could still smell her, then she was still alive.
And that was when he smelled the rank odor of the warg.
They weren't the only ones tracking her.
Colton smelled it too. "McClain...."
"Shut up." He leapt a pile of rubbish, and skidded to a halt in the next intersection. A scream jerked his head to the left.
And then he was sprinting again. Mia! He could hear her now, hear her gasping.
"Help! Help!" she cried.
Another corner. Something growled and there was a scuffle of dirt, along with a pained yelp.
"Incoming," said a low-voiced woman.
A net or something dropped over him. Adam's feet tangled in the bottom of it, and he narrowly avoided impaling himself on the axe head as he hit the dirt hard. In front of him, he saw the warg he'd been tracking wrapped in what looked like a clothesline. A woman stepped over it and blew its brains out, and then a pair of boots stepped in front of him.
He looked up.
Right into the double barrel of a shotgun.
"McClain?" Mia jerked the shotgun up and gasped.
It was her alright. He'd recognize those long legs anywhere. And far from being the damsel in distress, it looked like she and her companion—was that Zarina Cypher?—had things well and truly in hand.
Colton skidded to a halt behind him. "What the...?" He began laughing, and continued even when Mia turned the shotgun on him.
"Easy," Adam told her, trying to escape the net she'd dropped on him. "He's with me."
"Good thing we rushed down here to save them," Colton drawled.
Adam closed
his eyes. One of these days....
Mia yanked the net off him, and he rolled to his knees and dragged himself to his feet.
Then a warm, soft body slammed into his, her arms curling around his neck.
Mia. Oh, God, Mia.
He didn't know what to say. He'd been expecting her to spit on his boot, or turn her back again. Adam swallowed the hard lump in his throat, and slowly, gently closed his arms around her.
It felt like heaven. A part of him had wondered whether he'd ever again get to hold her in his arms. Everything that could have gone wrong had been plaguing him, but to see her here... to hold her... to know that she was safe, and that she'd walked into his arms as if she felt she still belonged there... he hadn't realized how much he'd needed her to do that.
"We were coming to get you," Mia told him, her entire body shaking. "But then all of these reivers started fleeing the arena, and we had to take cover. The next thing we knew there were wargs everywhere."
"Are you crying?" he asked in surprise as he drew back to look at her.
"No." She brushed her eyes dry with a stubborn look on her face.
His heart dropped through his boots. Somehow his hands were on her face, and her cheeks were wet beneath his fingertips. It floored him. Those tears were for him.
But not for long.
Mia shook him off, touching the bare skin across his abdomen. For a second he didn't know what she was doing. Her movements slowed as her warm fingers traced the oiled skin there. Where he'd been shot.
He swallowed again, his voice coming out rougher than he'd intended. "I'm whole."
And he was back in that cell again, seeing the look on her face when Colton took the medallion off him.
"Sorry to interrupt," Zarina drawled, "but we've got to get out of here before my mother rouses the rest of the reivers."
Adam looked up.
"She's with us," Mia explained. "She wants to escape, and she's been helping us."
"Sorry to disappoint you, but your mother's getting the hell out of here," Colton said. "The last I saw, she was heading for the helipad."
"What?" Zarina stiffened.
"Let her go," Mia murmured, still looking at him with dazed eyes. "She can't hurt us now."
"No. You don't understand. That helicopter was a gift from one of her contacts in the Confederacy. She supplies them with women—or men—so they can keep them in hidden facilities to use as sex slaves whenever they want. There's an entire consortium of rich Confederacy citizens who owe Vex a lot. She can't make it over the wall the Confederacy are building, but she can head straight for one of their military outposts. She'll spin it so that you guys attacked the town, and tried to take all of her slave trade. They've got weapons and tech we can't even dream of, and if she gets her way, she'll come after us, and she'll bring the enforcers with her. General's already on his way."
"They don't have any sway in the Wastelands," Colton argued.
"Who needs sway when you've got tanks and enough guns to blow your little towns to pieces?" Zarina replied bluntly.
It wasn't the words, so much as the fact that Zarina Cypher—stone-cold killer—had paled, that got his attention.
"Then we stop her," Colton said.
"Which way is the helipad?" Adam asked.
Mia reluctantly let go of his shirt. Adam wanted to grab her hand, anything to keep her in close proximity, but Zarina was right.
This wasn't over yet.
Twenty-Eight
THEY FOUND THE helipad after a hellish slog through streets cluttered with bodies and hungry wargs.
A huge engine kicked into gear even as they neared the chain-link gates. Wind whipped out from behind the tin fence as something began rotating, slowly at first, then kicking into gear. The tin fence shuddered.
"She's getting out of here!" Zarina screamed.
"How do we stop it?" Adam roared back, trying to be heard over the massive engine. His shirt blew back in the wind the contraption created. He'd heard of helicopters, but he'd never seen one himself and the sight of it was a thing to behold.
The blades whipped faster and faster, and the helicopter began to rise. Zarina screamed in impotent fury, firing her pistols directly at the helicopter.
"Drag her out of the way!" Mia insisted.
"What?" He turned around and saw her lift a fucking rocket launcher onto her shoulder. Jesus. "Mia!"
"Get Zarina out of the way," she replied, focusing on the helicopter.
Adam dove forward and grappled Zarina into submission. She screamed and kicked and tried to head-butt him, but he maneuvered her out of the way, getting a mouthful of her brown plait for his efforts.
"I want her dead!" she screamed. "She can't escape. Not like this. No!"
"Mia's on it," he bellowed.
Zarina stopped fighting him with a sob. She looked up as the helicopter began to find purpose in the sky. Mia calmly tracked it with the launcher and then pulled the trigger.
There was an explosion of fire out the back end of the launcher, and Mia staggered as the grenade launched with a whizzing hiss. Its flight path steadied in the air as it flew determinedly toward the helicopter.
"Take cover!" Colton bellowed, and drove Mia into the ground.
Adam caught a glimpse of Vex's face as the startled warlord caught sight of the rocket heading directly for her, and then the world turned molten.
The back blast of the explosion flung both he and Zarina off their feet; a heated wind that stole breath from lungs and dried his eyes in their sockets. Adam landed flat on his back, then rolled, dragging Zarina beneath him. He clenched his eyes shut as flames swept over him, heat blistering his bare skin. The helicopter hit the ground with another explosive boom that echoed in his bones. The very dirt beneath him seemed to shake, and one of the helicopter blades whined past him and impaled a nearby hut. Adam flinched. Mia! Sound screamed in his ears; the shriek of dying metal. Bits of debris bit into the exposed skin on his back. Christ. His ears rang, and Adam grit his teeth. How much more could he take?
And then it was over.
Adam gasped as he collapsed atop Zarina. He couldn't get the smell of burnt... everything... out of his nostrils. Slowly he lifted his head. Zarina's breath came in ragged sobs. But the only thing that mattered was Mia, and when he saw her wobble to her knees across the street, the lump in his throat almost choked him.
He'd been closer to the blast than she had been. Mia's shirt looked like it had lost a fight with an angry badger, but apart from that she seemed untouched and as much as he hated to admit it, he probably had Colton to thank for that.
Bastard. It was growing hard to keep finding the energy to hate him.
"She's dead," Zarina whispered, hauling herself to her feet and staring at the wreckage. Nearby, a doorway that had been hovering in mid-air finally collapsed.
Fire bloomed in places. His skin still felt hot and tight, like it had shrunk two sizes. The helicopter had taken out a handful of shanties and the flames spread from shit hole to shit hole. Adam caught the faint tang of burning flesh in his nostrils, and deliberately started breathing through his mouth as he hauled himself to his feet with a wince. His back would heal.
"I never... I—" Zarina looked lost.
The words faded into the background.
He stared at Mia. She stared back.
"Plan B," she told him, as if that all made sense.
And it suddenly became very clear to him. He'd been trying to keep her at arm's length for days. The excuse had always been don't hurt her, don't break her heart when you walk away. But the truth gave a little twist in his heart. It had also been about protecting himself.
He no longer cared what had happened in that cell. All he'd been thinking until this moment was that the right thing to do would be to walk away. Again.
But how long could he keep running?
And he realized what she'd been saying to him in that alley, when they first met. That hadn't been rejection. She'd been trying to find him, just a
s much as he'd been trying to find her.
Taking trembling steps, Mia reached for him. Adam slung an arm around her shoulders and dragged her against his body. He was insanely tired, all of a sudden, and his entire body ached.
And they needed to talk.
Just as soon as they got out of this hellhole.
"Well," Colton said, shattering the moment. "Looks like you got yourself a real warrior there. Good luck with that, McClain. Now, we'd better get out of here before those fires spread."
"Amen," Mia whispered.
Twenty-Nine
BY THE TIME Mia woke up, the sun had risen and she was in a car bumping along the desert floor.
The pillow beneath her was warm. Like, really warm. She lifted her head a little, using her hand to push herself up. Everything hurt, and her eyes felt grainy from exhaustion. Something hard flexed beneath her and Mia looked up into green eyes. The morning sunlight was that soft hazy color that sometimes turned the desert to gold, and it was doing the same now with McClain's blond eyelashes.
She'd fallen asleep on him. She was also pretty sure she'd been drooling.
"Sorry," she said, pushing herself upright and bumping into Zarina, who was crammed in the seat on her right.
"It's okay," McClain muttered, sliding his arm back from where it had been resting around her.
Her stomach fluttered. There were a thousand things she wanted to say to him, but she didn't exactly want an audience for it.
And she wasn't quite sure what he was thinking either.
The events of the night before flooded through her memories. Running through the night after she'd blown up the helicopter; finding Sage and the others either hotwiring jeeps or slashing the tires on the ones they didn't need; and the awkward tension between her and McClain as they both pretended nothing had happened in the cell before it all turned to shit.
Too much to do at the time, she'd told herself. She'd deal with McClain once they got free of the entire mess.