Page 102 of The Last True Hero
Twenty-Six
ADAM LANDEDIN the center of the stands, among a couple dozen startled reivers. He'd cleared the fence, which meant he was halfway there. Now to take out those generators.
One of the reivers gaped at him, then drew a knife. Adam lashed out blindly. He was lost in a fog of rage and fury, lost in the claws of the warg within him. It wanted blood, and he wanted out. Both purposes meshed for the moment.
"Kill him!" someone screamed.
And they came at him like a flood. A flood of reiver scum that he actually welcomed.
By the time he came back to himself, he was standing in a pool of torn bodies, with a knife in his hand. He couldn't remember how he'd gotten it, but his arms were drenched in blood, and there were various cuts and grazes up his arms and along his ribs. As he looked down, they healed almost miraculously.
The warg was too close to the surface right now. The pewter medallion around his throat flared cold, as if in warning.
The rest of the reivers hung back from him. Sanity wasn't usually a prerequisite for reiver membership, but he'd just cut down at least twenty of them and now they were wary. Whipped curs, the lot of them.
"Come on," he spat, curling his lip a little as he darted toward a pack of them.
Bullets ripped through the air as the reiver on the gun turrets swung the massive repeating rifle toward him. Reivers went down beneath its hail, and Adam threw his arms over his head as he ran.
"Stop!" Vex screamed, as reivers bolted from him.
The cover fire fell silent. Clearly she wanted him alive.
The reivers in front of him scattered, and then his path was clear to the enormous generator tower that ran the fence and the lights. The giant generator was solid steel welded together, but the cables that lit the fences ran through the air above him. If he could take one of them out, then Colton could clear the fence.
The only problem was that they were live wires.
Adam leapt from stand to stand. He'd made a promise to Mia, and he intended to keep it. But to do that he needed Colton.
"Shoot him in the legs!" a woman bellowed, and Adam glanced at Vex's box. Half a dozen shotguns were trained on him.
The reivers around him scrambled to grab him. He lashed out with claws that had sprung from the tips of his fingers, seemingly out of nowhere. A partial shift. He'd seen Luc Wade use claws like these in the past, but he'd never been able to control it himself. Never wanted to. This time he took advantage of them.
Raking through flesh and bone, he lurched forward, diving low as shotgun fire echoed. Reivers screamed as they were hit. Adam kept going, using their bodies to cover his own passage.
A reiver leapt at him from above, an axe in his hand. Adam sidestepped, grabbing the man by the belt and arm and hauling him in a low circle around him. He let go just as they hit maximum velocity, and the reiver flew through the air.
The reiver hit the wires, his weight snapping them from the top of the tower. He hit the ground, jerking and screaming, froth forming on his ragged lips. Instantly the static buzz of the arena's fence went silent.
Problem solved.
Adam turned, but the ring was empty. His heart skipped a beat.
Colton hadn't waited around to see how he escaped. Instead he'd vanished back into the tunnels, the treacherous cur.
Now what?
"You cowardly bastards!" Vex had a whip out and was using it to slash and cut at her reivers as they tried to flee. She cast it aside in frustration, then locked gazes with him. "Five hundred gold pieces to the reiver who brings me that filthy warg's head!"
That slowed the pack of reivers. Some of them kept running, but others turned, greed lighting their eyes. Five hundred gold pieces was more than most of them had ever heard of. Hell, it was more thanhe'dever dreamed of.
"Dead or alive?" asked a vicious-looking woman wearing a fur vest, and painted stripes of white across her pale skin.
"Do I look like I give a shit?" Vex snarled. She paced the platform, then her face smoothed. "Actually. I want him alive. I want to do the honors. There'd be nothing better than a matching warg fur for my bedroom floor."
Jesus. Adam looked around. He needed a weapon. Snatching up the electrocuted reiver's axe, he hefted it just as twenty or so of them turned on him.
Adrenaline had kicked him along this far. He wanted out. And he wanted to find Mia, to make sure that she and the others were safe. That stiffened his trembling arm as exhaustion began to make itself known. He'd have to cut them down quickly, or else he'd start to lag. Having the warg right beneath his skin was both exhilarating and draining.
