Page 114 of Bought for Blood

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do. Everything past that fence depends on a thing you’d never done until tonight.” Faine looks out at the snow. “Get in the second car. Don’t speak to anyone in it.”

I get in. Crowe gets in beside me, and we pull out onto the highway.

Under my ribs, the drag is harder than it has been all day, hauling at me up the northbound road. I put my hand over it and hold on.

We’re coming. Stay alive until I get there.

Chapter 34

Serenity

The fence is chain-link with three strands of wire over the top. A man walks the inside of it with a rifle across his chest.

Thirteen of us are flat in the snow forty feet back. He has looked at this treeline twice.

He’s underneath them.

It’s not just my wolf who feels it now. It’s going right through me, hard and steady.

Crowe puts his mouth by my ear. “Now.”

I reach for it.

The magic comes up out of me and goes out over all of them. The weight lands across my chest and keeps coming, thirteen people’s worth, pressing down until I have to get both palms into the snow to stay flat. All of them. Nobody stays in the trees.

Hold. Just hold.

The man with the rifle walks six feet from where Odile is lying. He doesn’t turn his head.

Then we’re up. The cutters take the chain-link in four bites, and I’m through the gap on my hands and knees, dragging all of it behind me.

Thirteen. Hold thirteen.

The quarry floor is white and open with no cover anywhere. We cross two hundred yards of it in front of a lit building with men standing outside, and not one of them looks up.

Hold. Please hold!

Crowe turns his wrist over as we reach the wall. Six twenty-two.

Twenty-seven minutes.

The building above ground is a concrete box with the windows painted over. The way down is a vehicle ramp on the north side. Three trucks are backed up to it with their engines running and their tail-lifts down.

They’re loading.

Faine goes past me at the top of the ramp without any sound at all.

The smell comes up out of the ground and hits my wolf hard enough that I stagger into Crowe’s arm.

Bleach. Bodies. Old blood sitting in a drain somewhere below. People who haven’t been clean in weeks, all of it warm and wet, and underneath it the exact industrial cleaner they used on the floors of the ward I lived in for a year.

It’s the same. They’re all the same.

He’s down there.

I take the ramp.