Page 4 of Heart of a Dire Wolf
Nic squeezed his eyes shut and dropped his head again. He willed his mate through their as-yet non-existent bond to snap out of it and get to the wall. She must have done it, because Landry let out his breath. “Good dawgs.” He pressed sequences of controls on the flat screen.
Nic fixed a dull gaze on the weapon-laden belt that cut into Landry’s beer gut, but turned his peripheral vision and other senses to the cell and its controls. The lethal magic in the cell bars made the hair on the back of his neck bristle. The scent of his mate made his dick twitch. He should be grateful, because he’d despaired of ever finding her, but the timing couldn’t have been worse.
Finally, Landry pressed the microphone switch that dangled at his neck. “C-6 is clean.”
Nic’s shifter hearing caught Sharon’s voice through the tiny speaker in Landry’s earbud.“Okay. Auction wants all the female shifters prepped for a private showing tonight.”
Landry shook his head. “I ain’t shackling up and herding thirty or forty shifters all by my lonesome for their stupid party.” He huffed in evident annoyance. “Tell Auction they can come get ’em.”
Landry pressed the control to reactivate the cell’s shadow spell, then unhooked Nic’s chain and ordered him to follow back down the long corridor of thirty cells to the hub. Nic’s feet grew heavier with each step away from his mate.
As he shuffled behind the grumbling guard, Nic inventoried his new information. The guards couldn’t see through the cell shadow spells without turning them off. He now knew his mate’s name, and that she smelled like a wolf. Best of all, she’d seen him and felt the connection.
Or, considering his luck of late, she didn’t feel it, and was just terrified by big, bearded, muscular males.
New urgency to escape coursed through him. He’d known three weeks ago how to get himself out, but then he’d scented his mate, and he’d stayed. She was a gift from the moon goddess who looked out for shifters. He wasn’t leaving without her.
In the intake room, Landry locked the door, then removed Nic’s shackles. Nic stripped off his sweatpants and T-shirt in case he needed to shift to exert dominance. Landry busied himself with his tablet rather than be forced to look at Nic’s nakedness. Humans had phobias about ridiculous things.
The new felines, still in pain from the shifter knock-out drugs, turned out to be orphaned twin bobcat brothers. They were barely seventeen and offered little resistance to Nic’s mental command to shift. In the brief link he made with them, he discovered they’d snuck out of a strict group home in St. George, Utah, headed for Las Vegas, and got caught their first night by auction-house scouts. Unfortunately, the boys were healthy and pretty, and would probably sell quickly. All he had time to do was blunt their mind-numbing fear, give them a mental map of the compound’s layout so they’d know how to get out, and tell them to pick their battles.
Landry told Nic to put his clothes back on, and left the boys standing there, naked, while he typed something on his tablet.
The floor beneath their feet began to vibrate, subtle at first, but growing.
“What the hell?” Landry looked at the floor with a frown.
The whole room started shaking. The rolling gurneys to which the naked boys had been strapped crashed into one another.
The traumatized twins clutched each other. Landry tripped. The tablet flew out of his hands and landed with a crunch. He swore as he keyed open the door so he could stand in the frame. An alarm began blaring painfully loudly.
Nic knew an earthquake when he felt one. He also knew a goddess-given opportunity when he saw one.
Roaring, he leaped over the tables and into Landry, slamming the man’s head into the doorframe before he even knew what happened.
Nic lifted Landry’s limp body onto one of the gurneys, latched a strap over him, then turned to the bobcats. “Stay here and be sold to the highest bidder,” he shouted over the din. “Or come with me and maybe get shot or killed if my escape plan fails. Choose.”
“With you,” they said in unison.
Nic pointed to the two stacks of folded clothes. “Grab those and let’s go.” He took off down the hall, with the twins right behind him. The shaking made his progress feel more like a drunken stagger.
The hub area had become an obstacle course of disarrayed furniture. Glass shards from a failed monitoring center window littered the floor. He vaulted into the opening. The bobcats arrived a moment later.
Nic pointed to the guard, Sharon, who lay face-down on the console, with blood coming from her head. “Tie her up and put her in the corner. Don’t touch her weapons—they’re spell-protected.”
While the twins complied, he focused on the cell controls for the shifter wing. He opened all the hallway doors but didn’t know the sequence to open the cells.
The shaking intensified. Another heavy window popped out of its frame and shattered on the floor. A gush of water somewhere outside the room sounded as if pipes had burst.
Magic surged. Nic instinctively ducked as the ruby-colored gems on the console blazed, then exploded in a hail of hot debris. On the huge displays, every cell door in the shifter wing sprang open. Shifters began pouring out of their cells, as if they’d expected to be freed.
He’d worry about that later. “Let’s go.”
The shaking subsided as he punched the door control and tapered off to nothing as he and the twins ran across the hub, leaving bloody footprints from the glass embedded in their bare feet. His ears ached with each blast of the alarm.
He ran into the first group of shifters and shouted, “Stairs at the end of the B-wing, past the offices and staff kitchen to the left. The auction wing stairs are booby-trapped.”
He gave the same information to the next two groups of shifters who ran by. He turned down the ramp to the shifter C-wing and nearly slipped and fell. Three inches of sudsy water covered the floor. Every one of the industrial hose connections along the walls gushed like open fire hydrants.
