by A. C. Arthur
“No you bastard, this is the time we’ve both known would come,” Decan said, his lion pressing hard against the man’s body.
It wanted out. It wanted this kill for itself.
Decan couldn’t let it, not yet.
“I told you I’d kill you,” he continued, the memory of the night he’d said those words flashing quickly through his mind.
“I’ll kill you!” he’d yelled that last night as Mackey had stood behind him, wielding that steel rod that had been laced with some type of poison so that it stuck to Decan’s skin with every contact, ripping his flesh in a way that could never be repaired. In the five years that he’d been held captive at SIC he’d never been able to completely heal from the beatings Mackey liked to personally give him.
“No, you dirty animal, I’m gonna kill you, just like I’ve been exterminating the rest of your kind!” Mackey had continued. “And when we find that cowardly leader of yours I’m gonna put his head on the end of my staff and hold it for all to see. We’re in charge here, the humans! Not some twisted ass breed of feline monsters!”
He’d slapped that staff as he’d called it over Decan’s skin once more.
“You won’t,” Decan had told him. “You will die instead. Mark my words.”
The fear that instantly rose in Mackey’s eyes was all the motivation Decan needed to remain in human form. He would take the beatings for now. He would not shift and give in to the lesser persona some of the humans had given them the moment they found out they were different. He had to be better. His father had told him that often. “Be better than any other shifter, or human for that matter. Show them that it can be done.”
And Decan had. He’d gone to school and he’d served in their military. He’d walked like them, talked like them, lived and regretted in the same way that man had and still they hated him.
Now, was his chance for revenge. He leaned in closer to Mackey’s face, roaring so loud and so long, tears poured from the man’s eyes.
“Decan! Stop!”
Her voice was like spikes of ice piercing through the heat of his blood in painful intervals that snapped his head back as he struggled to distinguish between memory and the present.
“Stop!” she yelled again. “You don’t have to do this. You’re better than this. Better than him.”
Decan roared again, this time feeling the crack of his bones as his body prepared to shift into the animal that wanted desperately to sink his teeth into Mackey’s throat. The hand on his shoulder stopped everything. Her scent seeped inside him, filtering through his nostrils and moving quickly to fill each corner of his body, warming him until he wanted to lay docile on the floor. The animal bucked against the submission, but the sound of the jaguar’s low murmur calmed the animal’s soul.
“We’ll take him with us. He’s more valuable to our cause that way,” Nisa said.
Mackey’s grip on Decan’s wrists slackened, the man’s face turning an ashen color.
“Let him go,” Nisa said, this time her lips close to his ear. “Take a deep breath and let him go.”
Decan took that deep breath, his head throbbing with the effort. His fingers ached, claws sinking into the man’s flesh. He could hear Nisa’s heartbeat. It matched his own. He took another deep breath and even though he was still staring down at Mackey, he could see Nisa’s face. She was everywhere and, Decan thought as the calm he’d always possessed covered him once more, she was everything.
He pulled his hands from Mackey’s throat just in time for the man to choke out a breath just as an unfamiliar sound rocked them and everything in that house.
After gagging and tying Mackey as quickly as they could, Nisa and Decan ran down the steps toward the light that poured in through the front door. The rain had stopped and as they stepped through the door it was to see nothing but fog surrounding them. A thick fog that even their extra-sensory vision couldn’t pierce through.
It had grown colder, the wind still blowing as an eerie sound filled the air.
“What is it?” she sked Decan, but before he could answer someone else did.
“It is Death.”
Blaez Trekas with three other lycans stepped from around the side of the house. Decan hadn’t even known the lycans were there.
Nisa didn’t bother with introductions, but asked yet another question, “What or who is Death?”
“They don’t live here,” the lycan dressed in leather pants and jacket and who looked unmistakably like a sexy biker answered. “They are from far away but like all of us have been in a state of upheaval since the Unveiling and the supermoon that soon followed.”
“The supermoon that reportedly ripped through the veil separating the Human Realm from the Otherworldly Realm,” she said.
Blaez, whose eyes glowed that intense blue that Decan recalled seeing when the lycan was in his complete wolf form, nodded to Nisa.
“There are more here than shifters now and unfortunately, much more at stake than a lowly human who rules with hate in his heart,” Blaez told them.
A screeching sound bellowed through the air then and they all stared ahead in silence. Waiting.
Decan stood near Nisa, pulling her close and reveling in the fact that she did not attempt to pull away.
Something cut through the fog. Something big and dark. The ground shook beneath them, almost to the point of sending them all tumbling. They managed to remain upright and continued to stare when the big and dark pierced the fog once more, this time in one quick motion that produced a heavy wave of warm air to fall upon them. In the next second more was visible, until it was no question they were staring at a wing. A more than one hundred foot wing so dark it appeared to be a deep purple color.
Nisa gasped as the second wing appeared and then a golden arch of fire was spewed into the air. The cold that had greeted them when they’d first stepped outside immediately vanished and heat filled the space. As suddenly as it appeared, the wings and the fire vanished. The fog rolled back in a motion that seemed as if the owner of those massive wings had sucked it in with its departure.
And lying on the ground just about ten feet away from where they stood was the body of a man.
Blaez moved first and Decan immediately followed him. They both came to a stop—Blaez’s pack behind him and Nisa beside Decan.
“That’s Cole Linden,” Blaez said and looked up at Decan who stared at the man once more and then looked at Nisa.
CHAPTER 15
“You think you know everything,” Ewen Mackey said with a smirk hours later. “You have no idea.”
Decan sat at the other end of the nine-foot table looking the evil bastard directly in the eye. They were back at Oasis, in a room with reinforced steel walls and automatic locked doors. The room had only this one table and four chairs. A smaller room connected by a narrow doorway held a mattress where Mackey would be sleeping for the foreseeable future. The man wore slacks and a button front white shirt, both of which were dirty and wet from the storm and the way Decan had been sure to drag him across the ground until tossing him into the trunk of the vehicle they’d traveled in. A few miles before entering into the forested area that would lead them back to an Oasis entrance, Mackey had been blindfolded and gagged and for good measure, Decan had knocked him unconscious with one punch. Nisa had frowned and called that overkill, but the fact that Gold was lying on the third row of the vehicle bleeding profusely from a wound Lial had inflicted with that fucking knife was motive enough for him.
“Then, please, fill us in,” Amelia asked, her dark hair pushed behind her ears as she sat in the chair to Mackey’s right.
She was closer to him as Jace had insisted she do the questioning instead of Decan. He probably thought that she would be more diplomatic than Decan who had made no effort to hide his rage toward the man when they arrived at the Central Zone Headquarters. Rome, Kalina and Nick, who had now delayed their trip back to Assembly Headquarters, were with Jace at the medical center where Ary was leading the curanderos in e
xamining Cole Linden. Nisa was in the room with Decan, Amelia and the bastard. She stood by the door listening.
“Not a chance,” Mackey said with a sick grin. “I don’t answer to animals.”
“You won’t leave without providing some answers,” Amelia said in that cool, professional tone she always used.
Mackey tossed his head back, strands of his frosty white hair were sticking up giving him a crazed and delirious look.
“You don’t scare me. None of you!” he yelled.
Decan stood abruptly then, pushing the table until it pressed into Mackey’s chest, sending his chair sliding back until the man was trapped between the wall and the table.
“Why are you paying Lial to kill for you? And how long has he been working for you?” Decan asked, his tone anything but professional.
Mackey sobered as he tilted his head and glared at Decan. His beady little blue/green eyes usually hid behind wire-rimmed glasses. Tonight, the glasses were long gone and his eyes were clear as they focused on Decan. His lips pulled back from his perfect—too perfect to be real—bright white teeth and he slammed his fists onto the table before coughing.
“I swear I should’ve killed your ass when I had the opportunity! The moment that hooker you were screwing reported you, I should have had them cut your fucking head off!”
Decan pushed the table again, until this time Mackey coughed, gasped, and his face reddened.
“We want him alive, Decan,” Amelia said from where she now stood to the side of the table.
“Why?” Decan asked, whipping his head around to stare at her. “He’s never gonna tell us anything useful and even if he does, it’ll probably be all lies. You can’t trust him. He’s killing his own people as well as shifters!”
“You want me to tell you something?” Mackey asked in a wheezing voice.
Not giving a damn that he sounded like he might keel over at any moment, Decan only glared at Mackey in response.
“I’ll tell you that this dirty bastard you’ve got here is a liar and a cheater!” Mackey spat.
“Why do you say that?” Nisa asked as she stepped closer. “Because he hates you?”
“Noooo,” Mackey replied drawing the word out as he shook his head. “This isn’t about me, is it Decan? It’s never been about me?”
Decan’s fists clenched at his words. Nisa’s confusion was palpable. He did not turn so that he could look at her, but he did not need to. The questions were already running through her mind, ready to roll off her lips at any moment now. But Decan was more worried about the answers, the ones that might finally send her running.
“You know him personally?” Amelia asked before Nisa could speak.
Mackey laughed. “Oh yeah. Decan and I go way back. Don’t we Decan?”
“If you mean back to the five years you held me and thousands of other shifters captive in one of your killing camps, yeah, I guess so. Why don’t we talk about that?”
Decan knew it wasn’t going to work, the moment he said it. Mackey had latched on to his leverage and was more than ready to play his hand. He also knew what Mackey was going to say and hated like hell that this was going to play out in front of other people, instead of when he and Nisa could be alone.
“No, I think this little lady here would rather hear about how that hooker’s blood is on your hands and about how many had died since then because you and your friends wanted to play renegade.”
He chuckled as he looked at Nisa. Decan was about to push the table again, this time hard enough to crush that sorry bastard’s insides. But Nisa was faster. She moved around him, going to stand right next to where Mackey was pressed against the wall.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
“Nisa, he’s our prisoner,” Amelia began after tossing an irritated look at Decan. “We need to find out where Lial is now and who else might die because of the work he’s doing for the Ruling Cabinet.”
“No!” Nisa shouted and looked back at Amelia first, and then Decan. “I need to hear this.”
And she did, he thought as she slowly turned back to Mackey. She needed to know all the dark and ugly secrets so she would understand and stop looking at him with hope in her eyes. Or had that been his own reflection he’d seen each time he stared into her cat’s eyes? Had he been hoping that the companheiro calor they shared would lead to a joining? Had he finally accepted that this woman, this stubborn and inquisitive warrior was the perfect mate for him?
“He ravaged her every night,” Mackey said, his thin lips turning up as if in disgust. “Right in front of us he continuously took poor Marlee because he wanted to get her pregnant with his animal spawn. Then, when given a choice, he’d watched as her limbs were cut off while he decided whether or not to give up the name of the Desert Cat.”
“Who? I’ve never heard of a Desert Cat,” Nisa said.
“I have,” Amelia added. “Years after the Unveiling, talk surfaced above ground of an elusive shifter that traveled through the desert land in the Pacific and Mountain Zones burning down the camps the humans built to contain us.”
“This one here thought he was better than all the rest of the animals we had caged up,” Mackey continued, his tirade against Decan.
This time it was Nisa who leaned in close, slapping her palms on the table in front of him.
“We’re not animals!” she yelled into his face. “And you’re going to start showing some respect or the next time, nobody will be around to keep him from ripping your throat out!”
A spurt of pride spread through Decan as he watched her. From the start of this mission she’d told him that she was in charge. He’d shot her down quickly enough and thought she’d shown exemplary training and respect for their security hierarchy by not continuing to argue over control with him. Instead, she’d continued to do her job, the one thing she knew that he could not do in place of her. She’d done it so well he hadn’t even known about the things she’d uncovered until she’d told him, Jace and Amelia when they arrived at Central Headquarters.
“All he had to do was cooperate and he refused,” Mackey continued as if Nisa hadn’t spoken at all. “Then the Desert Cat struck again.”
“Burning the New Mexico hell hole you unlawfully kept too many shifters in, to the ground, that’s what happened next,” Decan stated evenly.
“Yes, there was a fire,” he said. “And then there was the break-in at my office and the taunting of the other members of the Ruling Cabinet. You and your friends have been busy these past months breaking into our computers, and stealing from us. You gave me no choice but to hire security.”
“That’s what Lial Johansen is to you?” Amelia asked. “He’s security?”
“He’s protecting us from the Desert Cat and this little band of mercenaries that unlawfully broke into my house tonight, assaulted and kidnapped me!” he yelled.
“I should have killed you!” Decan replied and flipped the table over.
As Amelia and Nisa avoided getting hit, Decan moved quickly to Mackey, yanking him up by the front of his shirt and slamming the man’s back against the wall.
“When I watched you running from that fire in New Mexico I should have hunted you down and gutted you right then and there. And tonight—” he paused because he could feel her gaze on his back.
Mackey laughed.
“What? You can’t control this you dirty forest scum! There are people in place to pick up where I leave off, so no matter what you do to me we’re gonna get rid of all your kind. You don’t belong here and we’re gonna see to it that you get exactly what you deserve for trespassing.”
Decan growled, his teeth bared. But he had control, now. He tossed Mackey across the room until he bounced off the other wall like a discarded toy before storming out of the room.
Nisa’s mind was whirling.
She came out of the room where they had been questioning Ewen Mackey, took two steps and had to lean against the wall to keep from falling to the floor. So many voices had been slamming i
nto her head while she stood in that room listening. So many scenes had replayed right before her eyes.
One in particular had her gasping for air now.
The walls were cinderblock, layered in four rows. The single door was made of thick iron bars, no latch or lock in sight. The cement floor was dirty and probably cold in the dark 9x9 space. Yet the smell there was sterile, clean, almost devoid of any identifying scent.
It was the same smell she’d picked up that first night at Keller’s bunker when she was looking for a way out.
The tapping grew louder and louder, the source, a long stick with a metal edge and a black handle held by a man around five-feet eleven-inches tall. The man wore black leather gloves. His shoes were shiny tie-ups that clicked as he moved across the cement floor. He wore a business suit and tie, an outfit that did not seem to fit in this surrounding. He was tapping the end of the stick to the iron bars. Over and over. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Just like Nisa recalled hearing that night at Keller’s place.
Her heart was beating wildly now, so fast and furious she lifted a hand to her neck as she tried desperately to take deeper breaths.
Finally, the iron bars lifted upward and the man stepped through the opening inside the small space. He chuckled as he looked toward one corner where a naked man’s body lay crumpled on the floor. The man moved immediately, rolling over, leaving streaks of blood on the cement as he did. He stood quickly on strong legs, standing until his head was only a few feet from the ceiling. His chest was bloody, some old blood that had dried and was now peeling, other parts oozing fresh fluid. And his face…it wasn’t distorted this time. It was the face of a man, the eyes of a lion.
Decan.
“Nisa.”
Familiar hands touched her shoulders and Nisa leaned into them. Her eyes were closed, her hands shaking as the scene cleared from her mind, the remnants of it still sifting through her soul.
“Let’s go in here and sit down,” her mother said and guided her down the hall to another room.