Raines wasn’t going to kill Xander with his own hands. He was going to sit on his asinine throne and watch his warriors do it. Fucking pussy coward.
The guards jerked at him, but Xander dug in harder. “Fuck you. Fuck your rules, and your time schedule, and most of all fuck your alpha. If I don’t see Jenny, I don’t fight.”
“You don’t fight, you die.”
“I’m pretty sure the idea is for me to die anyway,” he said. “But if I don’t see my mate right fucking now, I’ll make you do it right here, and your alpha doesn’t get his show. Your choice.”
They stared each other down. Finally, one of the guards said, “Take the pussy to see his female. Maybe she can talk him into having a little spine.”
Xander gave him the double middle fingers. That earned him a backhand across the face, but it made him feel better.
They led him to a small cabin behind the three main houses, dragged him up the porch steps, and shoved him inside without knocking. Xander stumbled forward, catching himself just before he fell.
“Xander!” Jenny ran over and caught him in her arms, hugging him fiercely. “Oh, God, Xander. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. His hands were still cuffed in front of him, so he lifted them over her head and encircled her in his arms. His cat’s agitation settled immediately.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“Hey, come on. Stop that shit,” he said. “None of this is your fault. If anything, it’s mine. I should have realized that meeting was bullshit, and they would come after you.” He looked around. “Where’s Brandon?”
Jenny shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “They took him away from me a little while ago.” He could feel her growling.
Fuck. “Why?” he asked.
Jenny bit her lips, not meeting his eyes.
“Jenny?” he said. “You need to tell me. I need to know what we’re up against here.”
“Cindi says Alton can’t admit that Brandon’s not his,” Jenny said. “It’s like he’s insane about it. He’s willing to accept Cindi’s cub, too, I guess, but if he admits Brandon isn’t his son—that I fooled him—he’ll lose too much status, and he’ll have to maybe face the fact that he’s probably sterile. And he just can’t handle that.”
“So what, he’s going to kill me to prove Brandon isn’t my son?”
“He needs to defeat the man I left him for,” she said. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I think he wants to make me and Brandon watch you die.”
Xander held her to him. There was no way he was going to let that happen. He’d fight until his last breath, and hope that somehow Flynn managed to bribe or coerce a plane out of somebody and get here in time.
Out loud, he said, “We’re going to fucking fight them, Jenny. Both of us. Me in the ring, and you out here. We’re both staying alive, and we’re both getting out of here. Because we’re rebels, and we never do what we’re told. And that includes dying.”
She nodded. “Rebels forever,” she said.
“That’s my badass panther.” He kissed her forehead, then leaned his against it.
“Listen,” he murmured, aware of the guards outside the door probably listening to what they were saying. “Reach in my right front pocket. There’s a tracking device in there. Flynn gave it to me. Once I shift and leave my clothes behind, I can’t keep it on me. You take it. That way the crew can find you, okay?”
“Find us,” Jenny said firmly.
God, he loved her. “Find us,” he said. She nodded, slipping her hand into his pocket and taking the tracker. He said, “I wish I had time for all the things I want to do when I feel you stick your hand in my pants.”
“Perv,” she said, with a shaky laugh.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “But I’m your perv.” He could see her trying really hard to smile at him.
He said, “We don’t have much time, and there’s not much to say, except I love the fucking hell out of you and Brandon. I just want you to know that.”
She nodded, blinking back tears. Then she said, “Claim me.”
He couldn’t have heard her right. “You want me to claim you. Now?”
“Yes. Now. So when you go out there, you know I’m yours, and not his. Always.”
He looked into her eyes, saw the love and certainty there. Jenny bowed her head and bared her neck. Xander, wishing they were doing this anywhere but here, whispered in her ear, “I love you, Jennycat. I Claim you.” He bit her on the big muscle where her shoulder met her neck.
He tasted the blood, felt the heat. The words echoed in his mind. I love you… love you… love you… His ears roared, and then he and Jenny were enveloped in blue light. He’d seen it before—the magic of the Bad Blood bond. And now Jenny was a part of it. She gripped his hands, and he felt a sudden rush of energy, like a golden wave pouring over him.
They were one. She was finally a Bad Blood. Together, they could do anything.
“You can take these guys,” she said. “Whoever it is, you can take them. They have no idea who the fuck they’re dealing with.”
Xander kissed the wound on her shoulder, already healing. “You betcha, babe,” he said.
“I’m serious,” she said. “You don’t know what you have inside you, Alexander Fierro. But I do. We’re going to get out of this, and we’re going to be a fucking family. Dead glitter creatures and poop monuments and all. And I love the fucking hell out of you too.”
The guard opened the door. “That’s all the time you get, pussy.”
Xander gave her one last kiss, and then he let them take him to the arena.
Save your family. Don’t get killed.
Chapter 26
At the Bad Blood compound, the atmosphere was grim. Tank monitored the tracking app on Flynn’s phone, while Jaz and Brody moved the dining room table and started unloading weapons from the cache under the floor.
Sloan paced back and forth, bloody and bandaged and pissed off as hell. “I can’t believe I let them get the drop on us,” he muttered.
“It’s not your fault, babe,” Caitlyn said for about the tenth time, looking up from the satellite map she was studying on her computer. “Don’t blame yourself.”
“Do we need grenades?” Brody asked.
“Better bring some, just in case,” Jasmin answered.
“It is my fault,” Sloan said. “I promised Xander I’d take care of them. And I let them get kidnapped. If anything happens to them—” He ran his hands through his hair in frustration.
“We’re not going to let anything happen to them,” Flynn yelled down from the loft.
Lissa yelled back, “I’d feel a hell of a lot better about that if we were on a plane already, heading to Broken Hill. Why the fuck are we still here, again?”
Flynn replied, “A) because we didn’t know where they were fucking going. And B)—”
Tank interrupted, “Transmitter stopped moving again. Signal’s holding this time.”
Caitlyn traced the coordinates on her map. “Not another airfield,” she announced. “Wooded area, isolated, with a valley in the middle.” She enlarged the map. “And a whole bunch of cabins. If that’s not a shifter encampment, I don’t know what is.”
“Too bad we can’t get live satellite,” Sloan muttered. “I might know some people…”
“No time,” Flynn said.
“Well, there would be if we’d started contacting people hours ago when Xander freaking went with those assholes,” Lissa said. “And I won’t get started again about why you let him go with them alone.”
“Please don’t,” Tank said under his breath.
Lissa glared at him, and then up towards the loft. “So now we know A) where they were fucking going,” she said. “What’s B?”
Flynn bounded down the curving wooden staircase, carrying a plain metal box. “And B, you don’t need a plane when you’ve got a plan.”
He held the box up to eye level. A small beam of light flashed out, and there was a tiny buzz
and a click as it did an iris scan. After that, he pressed his left thumb onto a fingerprint scanner.
Sloan stared. “What the hell do you have under that kind of security?”
He stopped as the box opened, showing a velvet interior holding two thick gold cuff bracelets, engraved with intricate designs. “Holy fuck.”
Flynn lifted the bracelets out of the box. They were dragon-made, over a thousand years old. They were also terrifyingly magical. Sloan and Caitlyn had almost lost their lives only a couple of months ago, retrieving one from Afghanistan and another from a seriously psychotic ex-Intelligence analyst.
Sloan said, “Ashley told me she was going to give those back to the dragons.”
Ashley Sliver was a cobalt dragon—a princess of the Draken House of Akkabi, as a matter of fact. She was also a country singer and a friend of the Bad Blood clan.
Flynn gave him a flat black stare. “I believe her exact words were that she was going to make sure they got to the right person.”
“And?”
“They did.”
Caitlyn’s mouth had dropped open at the sight of the bracelets. Now she said, “You know how to use dragon magic?”
“I know how to use these,” he said. “They were made for the Lion Guard of the Draken House of Al-Maddeiri.”
Which answered no questions whatsoever. Just raised more.
“And the dragons and this Lion Guard won’t care that you’re using them?” Tank asked.
Flynn snorted. “They’ll care. But I’ll deal with that when the time comes. For now, this is the only way to get to Xander without Alton Raines knowing and shutting us down.”
The bracelets, among other things, gave the wearer the power to travel through the spirit world while still in their physical body—a rare and dangerous ability. They could also take other people with them.
“You’re going to travel us right through the spirit world to their territory?” Lissa asked.
“I hope to hell it isn’t going to make you into a psycho like Donnelly,” said Brody. Jared Donnelly was Caitlyn’s ex-fiancé, and also the psycho ex-intelligence agent who had nearly killed her and Sloan to get his hands on the bracelets and the power they contained.
Flynn gave him one of his famous crooked grins. “Already crazy. Haven’t you heard? And no, they’re not going to make me any crazier or more homicidal than I already am.”
The grin turned deadly. “Nobody fucks with my crew.”
“So?” Jasmin jumped out of the weapons locker and looked around the room. “What the hell are we waiting for? Let’s go liberate us a panther family.”
Chapter 27
Xander was led to the arena and shoved into one of the tents. It held a bucket of water—presumably for proper hydration and washing off blood between fights—and a rough wooden bench. That was it.
The guard removed his manacles. “Strip off,” he said to Xander. “This is a real battle. Teeth and claws.”
Just fucking awesome.
They were going to put him up against battle-tested warriors, and then watch while they killed him. And then Alton Raines would take Brandon, and shove Jenny back into his harem like she was a prize from a fucking McDonald’s Happy Meal action figure collection.
It really sucked that Flynn and the others would probably only get here in time to bring his body home. He hoped they buried him somewhere nice. Maybe poured a beer on his grave now and then.
He thought about Kayisha, the ghost that had haunted Sloan for years.
Maybe Xander could haunt the crew. That would be awesome. He wondered if he could take some time off and haunt these fuckers, as well.
That would be even better.
Or we kill them all, his cat said.
Yeah. Or that. Maybe it was time to channel his homicidal rage.
He let himself sink down into the memory of the dark days, the days just after he was Turned.
Rage. Deep rage, for what he’d lost. Anger. Fury.
Kill. Kill them all. Kill everything. Destroy it, because what is there left?
No home. No family. They took it all away.
They took it all away.
Except now, he had years of fight experience to draw on. His time on the streets. His months in Alexander Grant’s cells, honing his will, his determination, his survival instincts.
A year of fighting his crew. Months of cage combat training from Jasmin and Brody.
He would not go down. Whatever they did, however they tried to break him, they couldn’t. His grief and anger hadn’t broken him. Grant’s fucking guards and scientists hadn’t broken him. His loneliness hadn’t broken him. He’d thought they had, but he’d found Jenny and Brandon, and learned he still had some love left in him. Something to live for.
These fucking panthers wouldn’t break him either. He had Flynn the indestructible on his side. He had Lissa the unbroken, Tank the Protector. Sloan and Caitlyn, who’d followed their bond through the spirit world and home again, fighting for each other the whole way. He had Jasmin, the Demon Queen of the Amazon, and Brody the fucking White Tornado Monster Wolf.
Never submit. Never give up.
Never say die.
The guards escorted him out to the fight ring. Naked, of course. Because that was supposed to make him feel vulnerable or some shit.
He didn’t care. He continued to feed the rage inside him, getting his cat riled up. Kill them all. Save your family. Kill them all. Save your family.
Kill them all.
They walked him up in front of the platform, where Alton Fucking Raines was now sitting on his stupid-ass throne. Just behind the throne, on either side, stood two lieutenants. One was a scarred-up dude Xander didn’t know. The other he did recognize, from back when he hung out with Jenny and Cindi and thought their friends were just regular humans.
Trent Powell. Some kind of cousin to Rhett, the last alpha. A finance guy. Smart. Decent.
He was the one who should be running this clan, with Rhett gone. Too bad he was too much of a wussy to stand up to Alton.
What the hell was wrong with these fuckers, that they didn’t step up and do the right thing? Flynn was certifiably batshit cray-cray, and he was a better alpha than Raines. And Tank would never let anybody get the crew killed off because they were too egotistical to stand fucking down.
He didn’t see Jenny or Brandon. He was glad his son wasn’t going to witness this, but he really wished he could see him one more time.
He wanted him to know his father fought for him with everything he had.
The clan had filled the bleachers, having picnics while they waited to cheer their heroes on to victory, otherwise known as tearing Xander into bloody pieces. Xander could see the fighters off to his left, in a small enclosure between the tents. Three of them.
They were already in cat form, pacing, snarling, working themselves up into a killing rage, glaring at him with baleful eyes ranging from yellow to bright green.
The brighter the green, the crazier they were. And they were all bigger than he was.
The crowd noise died down, as they realized the show was about to start.
“Kneel before the alpha,” his guard boomed, smacking him to get his attention.
Xander laughed. “Fuck that,” he said, looking up at Raines. “He’s not my alpha, and even if he was, I wouldn’t fucking kneel. Any alpha needs that shit to keep his crew’s respect is a lame-ass wussy.”
The crowd booed. Xander gave them the double middle fingers. There was a ripple of surprise—maybe even a tiny bit of respect.
Yeah. This was not the old Alex they were dealing with, motherfuckers. He saw Alton’s jaw clench in anger. Score. He still had the ability to piss people off.
“Where’s my son, Raines?” Xander said.
Alton gave a fake laugh. “Brandon is not your son. You tried to steal the heir to my throne. You have failed, and you will pay the price. My warriors will prove the falsehood of your claims on your body. This is a Truth Challenge.”
The guard backhanded him. “You will show respect for the alpha!”
Xander snorted. “Um, no. Not unless he comes down here and fights me himself, the pussy. And probably not even then.”
But Alton managed to keep his temper, although it was obvious he was pissed.
He managed another laugh. “I’m a proven warrior, a leader of my people,” he said. “You’re no one. To earn the honor of challenging me, you must first prove your worthiness. If you can best my top three warriors, then I’ll fight you.”
“Oh,” Xander said. “So you get the others to soften me up, wear me down, and then you fight? Pardon me while I pause to admire your bravery. Okay, wait, no.”
Alton waved his hand negligently. “You will be healed in between. If you survive.”
Yeah, maybe. Even if Alton’s Healer had magical healing abilities—which a few did—Xander knew one person could only do so much at a time. That’s why they saved the magic for life-threatening injuries, and why a crap ton of Alton’s warriors were still dead.
Not enough mojo to go around. He doubted they’d waste it on him.
“After your death,” Alton went on, “My two sons will be raised to be strong leaders and warriors. One day, the strongest of them will be alpha after me.”
Oh, fuck no, fuck no, fuck no. No way was he leaving his son here to not only be raised by crazies, but to fight his so-called brother one day for the privilege of leading them.
His cat gave a furious snarl.
“I challenge you right now, asshole,” he said. “You don’t get my mate, and you don’t get my son. So come down off that ridiculous thing that looks like a cheap knockoff of a movie prop, and fight.”
Bad Blood Panther (Bad Blood Shifters Book 4) Page 15