Page 86 of The Last True Hero
McClain rolled to his elbows and knees, still jointed like a wolf-man, albeit one with teeth and claws. Light glinted off his tawny fur. For a second she almost thought she saw something human in his eyes. Then his gaze locked on Jake, and he threw himself at the bars, the impact making them shudder.
Mia squealed as Jake hauled her out of the way.
“Let her go!” Colton snapped. “He’s reacting to you.”
Jake surrendered her with a hard swallow. “What do you mean he’s reacting to me?”
Colton shot her a look, one hand held out in a placating manner. “She’s his woman, no?”
No.Not like this. Mia's jaw dropped open. “He’s a monster,” she said, shock stealing her words.
And McClain lifted his muzzle to the sky and howled, a long, sad, echoing sound.
* * *
Jake and Ellietook the girls to see if anyone heard the ruckus in the cells, taking the shotgun with them. Colton showed the others another way out that nobody had seen, barred the main door, then knelt beside her to wait. McClain—or what had once been McClain—paced the cell.
“How?” Mia asked hollowly.
“Usual way,” Colton muttered, raking a hand through his silky black hair. “He got clawed up. Turned.”
She shook her head. “No. How does this… this amulet stop him from changing?”
She could remember Jake sitting in her bar, telling her about the warg up North who’d lived among a town unnoticed for years. Had that been McClain? She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around this. Wargs were monsters. That was an inescapable Badlands truth, one that little children learned at their parents’ knees.
But McClain….
She kept getting flashbacks to moments when he’d smiled at her. The night she’d fallen asleep in his arms, feeling not just safe, but… something else. As though nothing bad in the world could ever touch her again. The way he’d been drinking in her bar for that entire month, as though fleeing from something. That time he’d saved them all from the revenants at the tor, heedless of his own safety, volunteering to help virtual strangers save their people, when their friends in town wouldn’t even lift a finger.
How could she put the two together? Hero and monster. How did that mesh?
If you knew my truth, Mia, then you wouldn’t smile at me like that….
She felt sick in the stomach. With her history, she’d kept herself at arm’s length, especially when he’d admitted that he had secrets. But now she knew them… she couldn’t hate him for keeping them. He’d known she wouldn’t look at him the same way.
Ugh.
"I don't know." Colton shrugged. "I never needed one to keep me from shifting."
She eyed him sideways.
There was a stillness to the man that made him seem like he was always watching the world around him. "You control it?" she asked.
Colton scratched at the stubble on his jaw. "I'm different to him. I was born this way. It's never been a problem for me." Dark lashes shuttered over his eyes. "The first change happened during puberty. I was under Bartholomew Cane's thumb then, so maybe that's it. He was the warg who changed McClain, and another man named Luc Wade. He... he was—"
"A monster?" she suggested.
"Yes, but you think a warg is a monster." Colton looked at her. "A warg is a beast. It's hungry, it's thirsty, vicious, and violent, but... that is the nature of the beast within. It thinks of survival—of food, and water, and fucking—and it has no concept of human things, like revenge or sadism. That's the human inside it, not the beast. Cane was pure, cold evil. He did what he did because he liked to. Seeing people suffering... he got off on it."
"Why can none of the others control the shift?"
In the cell next to McClain, Zarina sat up, her arms still bound behind her. Somehow she'd slipped the ropes around her feet, but she seemed more interested in what Colton was saying than in escaping.
Colton shrugged. "Maybe they could if they taught themselves to? It's not easy, but if you have the right motivation.... Well. Last year Bartholomew Cane meant to bring McClain and Luc Wade to heel, so he captured Luc's kid, Lily. Used Lily to draw Luc and his woman, Riley, into a trap. When Luc got there, Cane forced him and Riley into a room together for the night. Took Luc's medallion off him. Cane wanted Luc to tear her apart with his own claws. Luc turned, but he didn't hurt her, and in the morning, during the middle of the fight, I shot Cane."
Mia drew back in horror. She couldn't even imagine wishing such pain on another person, warg or not—to force them to kill someone they loved. Colton was right. That was pure evil.
"I can force a partial shift," Colton said, and lifted his hand. It began to shift, hair crawling up the back of his hand, and claws erupting through his nail beds. "The only other man I've met who could do this was Luc, but he couldn't seem to stop himself from transforming when night falls. I can." He tipped his head toward McClain, then shook his hand and watched as it began to revert. "And he doesn't seem to be able to control it at all."
