Page 329 of Immune

Rolling under one grabbing arm, I come up low and slash across the back of someone’s thigh. Blood sprays across the space behind him and the masked man drops with a shout. Then three more shapes appear in the smoke, moving toward me completely unaffected by the chemicals choking the clean air.

Black masks.

Gray gear.

No hesitation or surprise. And that shit scares me worse than the weapons.

They watch me take two of them down. They don’t panic, they simply adjust. One of them lifts a compact weapon that looks too much like a baton and not enough like a gun.

My stomach drops into my ass.

“Nope,” I rasp.

I throw my knife before my next pained breath, and the blade sinks into his shoulder rather than his throat like I wanted. Apparently my body is still being rude despite recovering for two days from injury, heat, stress, science nonsense, and being bitten by three emotionally complicated Alphas.

The weapon still fires and a crackling line hits the wall right next to me, spitting blue-white sparks over the concrete.

Shock baton.

Oh wait. No. Not a baton, I realize.

A fucking shot projectile.

I know what electricity does to me now, and I know what it wakes.

Distance.

Pulse.

Threat.

Remove.

Oh, fuck me. Not again. Please, no, not again.

I duck behind a stack of metal crates just as another shot zips past me. The smoke burns my eyes until tears spill down my cheeks, making the world all watery and white and annoying as shit.

Somewhere beyond it, Fletcher roars my name, and not just with his voice. It’s through the bond, hitting me so hard I almost topple with it.

Dakota.

Not a word exactly, but a shape. A demand. Terror.

Ewan comes next, bright and wild and frantic, shoving roughly against my chest like he’s trying his best to crawlthrough the bond with his bare hands. Kaito follows after that, deeper and sharper, a blade pressed against the inside of my ribs.

Three bonds.

Three alarms.

Three anchors trying to hold me exactly where I am.

And then there’s a fourth place. The quiet place. The place my body keeps trying to reach before I can stop it.

Xeon.

Nothing answers, of course, and the absence is so stark and glaring that it hurts worse than the smoke. I shove the feeling away and reach across the ground for the pistol I stole from Porter with shaking fingers, risking a shot to arm myself.

Porter.