The ward … I’d gone through the ward. Time to stop. I spun to look back into the trees. Claws. Too many Claws. Where were the guys? Wait. What in the world? There’d been five Feral Claws, and now there were nine, except four of them were larger.
Tawny eyes flashed in my direction.
My pulse skipped a beat. Noah?
A red-eyed Claw slammed into him and then a silver wolf, lean and large, leapt onto the Claw’s back. His violet eyes flashed as he tore the Claw from Noah’s back. Because it was Noah. It had to be. Noah was a Claw and so was Logan—the chestnut wolf. Ash was the golden wolf with the pale eyes, and the silver one had to be Jace.
What the actual fuck?
They were Fangs.
They were Claws.
They were experiments.
Several more crimson-eyed Claws rushed into the clearing. Shit. There was no way the Fangs were going to be able to take them all out.
Don’t, Dad said. Don’t you even—
But I was already sprinting toward them. I drew my tulwar as the ward slipped over me with a tingle, and then I was in the fray. Ash was right in front of me, his back to me as he faced off with two Feral. No need to slow down, just keep running and jump. Using Ash’s back as a launch pad, I flew over his head, sword arching down to slice at the nearest Feral. It snapped at me, but I spun, tulwar at a ninety-degree angle, and sliced its throat. His snarl turned into a gurgle. Beside me, Ash had taken out the other Feral. We locked eyes for a brief moment. Was that a wolfish grin on his face? And then we spun away from each other and back into the fray.
Movement to my left. A silver wolf. Safe. To my right were red eyes. Kill. The next few minutes were carnage. But we were winning. The Feral were down to two. The monsters were too far gone to realize it was time to quit and run. They were ruled by their hunger, and the virus forced them to keep fighting. The Fangs, in wolf form, closed in on them.
Ash’s huge bulk appeared beside me. He nudged me with the side of his head. His cue for me to back off.
My arms ached, my legs trembled. Yes, backing off sounded good.
I retreated several steps, and Ash slipped in front of me. This wasn’t going to be pretty. Look away, just look away. Awful sounds of tearing flesh filled the night air, and then there was a silence that lasted several long beats.
Was it over?
“Eva?” Noah’s voice was low and tentative.
I turned to face the four Fangs that could shift into wolves. They were bloody but clothed, and once again clutching their weapons. How did that make sense?
“Are you all right?” Jace winced sheepishly.
“I’m fine. What about you guys? You could have been bitten.”
“We have extremely thick hides,” Jace said.
I snort-laughed. “You’ll fill me in later, right?”
Was that a hint of a smile on Noah’s lips? “Yes,” he said.
I turned back to the wards. “In that case, now that we’re warmed up, let’s go slay the monster under the bridge.”
* * *
Several crimson cloaks stood on the periphery of the darkness that seeped out from beneath the bridge. We were crouched on the bank above, lying low. Watching. Waiting for the cloaks to leave so we could kill the monster they called master but who we knew as Subject 14. My hackles were up, scalp prickling with a revelation that was just out of reach.
“No, they have not returned yet, Lord,” one of the cloaks said.
A long beat of silence followed his declaration.
“My Lord, we will gather a sacrifice from the village … Yes, tonight … We understand, and they will too, if they wish to continue to receive your mercy.”
I guess Tobias and me getting away had put the village back to square one. The thing still needed to be fed. My eye caught movement from beneath the bridge. A tendril of living night swept across the ground, wrapped around one of the crimson cloak’s ankles, and tugged.
The crimson cloak didn’t even scream as he was pulled under the bridge. His comrades merely bowed their heads and began to hum. The seconds ticked by, and my skin broke out in gooseflesh. I turned my head to the left, to Noah’s aquiline profile. His dark lashes cast shadows on his cheekbones, and his jaw was tight as he focused on the scene below. He sensed me staring and glanced at me. I shook my head, lips turned down, trying to convey that something wasn’t right. Something was seriously off.
His head jerked back to the scene below us, and a sick feeling turned in my stomach. Yes, something was wrong. The air was wrong … something in the air. I followed Noah’s gaze and bit back a gasp as dark tendrils shot out from under the bridge and slammed into the cloaks.
They didn’t flinch, they didn’t cry out, and just as fast as the darkness had touched them, it retreated. What had just happened? The humming cut off, and the cloaks lifted their heads in unison to stare straight up at our hiding spot.
“Oh, fuck this.” Logan scrambled up, his bat held loosely at his side. “Is this where the reunion is happening?”
Noah made a sound of exasperation and then pulled himself to his feet. I followed suit as the others did the same.
The cloaks remained stationary and silent, but they all cocked their heads at us. Their eye whites bled to black, and suddenly it was like staring into an abyss, because it wasn’t the cloaks that were watching us, it was the thing under the bridge.
Logan let out a low whistle. “Nice getup you got here, by the way. Tiny village of frightened humans willing to sacrifice their own in exchange for protection. Nice wards too. No wonder they kept you in isolation at the lab.”
“Logan …” There was warning in Noah’s tone.
The cloaks’ mouths fell open. “We are alive. We survive. We feed.”
We?
Noah walked across the bank, his grip white-knuckled on his machete. “We can’t allow you to keep preying on these innocent people.”
“We survive, they survive.”
“They can survive just as well without you,” Noah said.
At least some of them would. The ones that made the cut for the bunker.
“You wish to take them. You wish to survive,” Subject 14 said. Laughter echoed up out of the cloaks’ mouths. “They belong to me—each and every one. They drank from my waters, and the virus that runs through me now runs through them. I feed, I siphon, I live. They remain, they siphon, they live a little longer … as do I.”
Oh, God … it was all making sense now. The wards were a lie, a false hope to these people. People who were probably all infected because they’d associated with Subject 14, and this ancient supernatural creature, recreated in a lab, had found a way to cheat his own death by using these desperate people and the power of suggestion to create a ward around his domain. He wasn’t immune like the Fang had thought.
Logan cursed softly under his breath.
“The light burns. I miss the light.” Subject 14 sounded almost forlorn.
He was trapped. Trapped under the bridge, and all the people in the village were already dead. So was Subject 14; it was probably only a matter of days, maybe a week or so if he got lucky. It was the stench of decay that had been heavy on the air, the pungent aroma of death that had set alarm bells ringing. The village and its inhabitants were doomed, and I wasn’t about to expend any more energy on this scenario.
I turned away from him and began to trudge back up the bank.
“Wait, where are you going?” Logan called after me.
“She’s leaving,” Noah said. “Because we’re done here.”
Chapter Fourteen
The ride back had been a silent one, and I’d headed straight to my room once we’d gotten back. I needed my strength for the morning. But sleep was being elusive as questions about the Fangs circled my mind. What were they exactly? What was their story?
A knock on the door pulled me from my doze.
“Come in.”
Noah entered the room, and his presence filled up the space, teasing to life a we
Noah hadn’t had such qualms it seemed—he’d changed out of his black combat gear and was dressed in loose navy pants and a white vest. He pulled out the chair tucked under my dresser and sat down.
I locked gazes with him. “I hope you’re here to tell me exactly what you guys are.”
He offered me a small smile. “I thought you may have questions, and if you’re anything like me, unanswered questions tend to make sleep elusive.”
“Yeah, you thought right.”
“We’re experiments, just like Subject 14.”
“I know that. But what are you exactly.”
“Right. Well, I’m a hybrid. Part Fang, part Claw. As far as I’m aware, I was never a child. I just was.”
I stared at him, trying to wrap my brain around that. “You were born a grown-up?”
His smile was wry. “I woke up aware and filled with knowledge I didn’t quite comprehend. I wish I knew more, but without the original data related to my conception, everything is conjecture.”
“And the others?”
“The others were born naturally to female subjects. After in vitro fertilization, of course.”
Thanks to my extensive education, it wasn’t hard to follow what he was saying.
“Logan and Jace are fraternal twins,” Noah said. “I know they don’t look alike but they’re siblings. Their base genomes are Fang and Claw, but there’s also a little fey DNA in them. We believe it’s incubus DNA. It manifests differently in each of them.”
I knew my fair share about the fey from what Dad had told me. They’d retreated beyond the veil into their world when the virus had hit. They’d sealed the door behind them, but not all of them had made it out. The ones that remained had gone into hiding. It was obvious that the government had collected DNA on all the species before this happened. Incubi were sexual beings, thriving on sexual contact, needing it to survive. It was their source of food, their energy. It meant that they were extremely charismatic. Able to cajole, seduce, and manipulate.
Yeah, that didn’t sound like Jace, and it most definitely didn’t sound like Logan. “Neither Jace nor Logan seem like they have incubi DNA.”
Noah bit back a smile. “Like I said, it manifests differently in them, and it is only a small part of who they are. The Genesis Project was all about trying new things, creating new creatures, hoping maybe something would lead to a cure, that one of their creations would have a natural immunity to the virus.”
“They infected their subjects?”
He pressed his lips together. “They did a lot of questionable things in the pursuit of a cure. Humanity is tenacious, Eva, and it clings to life, tooth and nail. The virus is a killer to humans, not just because it can infect and end them directly, but also because it turned the supernatural community against them. Fangs and Claws that were once their colleagues and friends, that were once the stars of the silver screen, now hunt them. Creatures that lived in harmony with them, now lust for their flesh and blood.”
Dad had said that Fangs had lived off bagged blood provided by a government program called Quench. Prior to that, they’d fed off a small number of humans aware of the existence of supernaturals. In return for blood, the Fangs had provided the humans with protection, money, whatever they needed. It was impossible to imagine such a world now. This was the only world I knew.
That explained what three of them were. “What about Ash? What is he?”
“The same as the twins, but Ash’s fey DNA is ogre.”
Ogre. Ogres existed at some point? It explained his size. “Are ogres mute?”
Noah shrugged. “We don’t know. But we do know that their natural habitat was underground. It explains Ash’s day blindness.”
“What’s that?”
“His vision is compromised in sunlight. It’s why he prefers to hunt and track at night. During the day, he’s forced to rely on his other senses.”
That was why he’d gone to Haven at night. “You all escaped from the lab together?”
He nodded. “Yes. The boys were barely nine years old when we ran. One of the scientists let us out of our cabins when the Vladul raid began. He urged us to run. I guess the scientists didn’t want the Vladul getting their hands on us.”
“You managed to get out and you took the boys. You raised them?” How had he survived?
“Yes. It wasn’t easy, but we made it. And then we came across intel that led us to this bunker over ten years ago. We’ve been here ever since.”
He’d been like a father to them, but who’d taken care of him? He looked the same age as they did. He’d been forced to forgo childhood, forced to step into a paternal role, yet he was one of the team. He was their leader. A strange feeling of kinship gripped me. We were the same in so many ways. Struggling to survive. Struggling to keep others alive, except in my case, I’d been told not to. I’d been urged to look after number one.
I’d thought I understood this new world, but it was evident that there were gaps in my knowledge. “My dad never told me about the Vladul. I didn’t even know they existed.”
“Not many people do. They keep to the Genesis lab. It’s safe within the walls. Either that or they’re used to hiding. They did it for centuries, hibernating under the earth until an opportune time.”
“But how did they know it was a good time to rise?”
Noah shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Do you know what they want?”
“To survive, like everyone else. The lab is now their base, heavily fortified. They have their produce, their own food supply, and they send out soldiers to reap more.”
“What do you mean by produce?” Please don’t be what I think it is …
He gave me a flat look. “I mean, they keep humans like cattle and force them to procreate.”
My stomach turned. “You think that’s what happened to Haven, don’t you? You think the Vladul somehow got in and took the humans.”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. They have ways of controlling the Feral Fang. We’re not sure how they do it, but they seem to be able to herd them.” The lamplight caressed the side of his face as he leaned forward in his seat to rest his forearms on his thighs. “My turn for questions. How long have you been running?”
I blinked in surprise at the switch in focus, and it dawned on me that this had been his real reason for coming to visit me. To ask me about me. To satisfy his hunger for knowledge by gathering information about his new houseguest. Knowledge was power, and people rarely gave it away for free.
I studied him for a long beat, noting the tension around his mouth and the slight furrow to his brow, as if he was perpetually worried about something.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“I know I don’t. But I have nothing to hide.” My hand itched to reach for the key around my neck, but I resisted. “We’ve been running for around six years. The compound we were holed up in was compromised. Many of us were killed. The ones that got away scattered. My dad was infected. He died. I had the coordinates to Haven, so Tobias and I made our way there.” My tone was matter-of-fact and unemotional. He watched me carefully, as if searching for a crack in my armor.
Search away, Fang, you won’t find one.
“There are Fangs out there like us,” he said. “Not hybrids, but uninfected and in hiding from the Vladul. The uninfected Claws have retreated north into the forests. The fey have gone into hiding. Anything to survive.”
Uninfected Claw and Fang. Shit. I kept the surprise off my face. There was no need for him to know how clueless I’d been.
“Like you,” he said with a smile. “You’re a survivor.”
“Yes.” Where was this going?
“You handled yourself well out there. You fought well.”
“I know.”
“You know what we are. You know that we require blood to live, but I want you to know that you don’t have to be just a donor. In fact, I’d like you to be part of the team.”
I arched a brow. “You want me on your monster hunting team?”
He offered me a small smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Yes.”
A thrill raced up my spine, a childish thrill at being asked to join the club, but I was no longer a child. “No. I’ll keep my end of the bargain. I’ll stay until you find someone else to take my place, but I won’t be hunting with you.”
He canted his head a fraction. “You don’t strike me as someone afraid to put their life on the line for the greater good.”
“Yeah? Well, you don’t know me. Fear keeps us alive, and my goal is to survive.”
“And how is walking into a warehouse filled with Feral Fang conducive to that plan?”
I tore my gaze from his beautiful face and focused on the plaster wall behind him. “We all have our weaknesses. Yours is blood. Tobias just happens to be mine.”
“Tobias? Your friend … or is he your lover?”
My neck heated. “That’s none of your business.”
This time his smile was wider, almost predatory, and a shiver of apprehension bordering on fear skated up my spine. He stood up and walked over to me, and I realized how the space between us had been a buffer, how the air was suddenly too charged. He crouched so he was at eye level, and my breath stalled in my lungs, but I kept perfectly still, refusing to shy away, to show weakness, to be afraid. His leonine gaze remained on my face, but his hand came up, fingers settling on the hammering pulse of my jugular.
“No, Eva, that’s where you’re wrong. Blood isn’t our weakness. Blood is our power.”
He sounded different. There was a sibilant hiss to his tone that made my stomach hurt. My mouth lost all moisture, suddenly bone-dry and aching to squeak. I bit the insides of my cheeks to quell the sound and drew blood, warm and coppery. What was this? How had he gone from calm and collected to … this?
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