Page 57 of The Hero Within
True."Her people have mining rights the Confederacy wants to get their hands on. She's authorized to grant those rights in exchange for the medication she needs."
He glanced back toward Eden, just to check on her. Having her so far away made the monster within him flex, shrugging off its shroud of calmness. If something happened he'd never get to her in time....
"She is your woman?" Nnedi followed his gaze.
"Yeah." He didn't know how these wargs lived, but he'd seen enough of the Wastelands to know how events usually played out. "She's mine. If anyone touches her, I'll kill them."
A faint flicker of a smile curled over her lips. "I wasn't asking for her sake—I'd have their heads if they touched her without permission." Dark eyes raked him from head to toe. "But there are a lot of single women in the pack, andyoumight need her at your side to keep your jeans intact."
He... wasn't certain how to take that.
"All that smooth, olive skin, and pretty eyes?" Nnedi smirked. "You're going to be like an oasis in the desert and some of my girls are thirsty. They're going to be disappointed you're taken."
Heat crawled up his throat.Jesus.Was this what Eden had to put up with all the time?
"Are you actually blushing? Oh, you are just too cute. Hey, Amara!" she called. "Pretty boy here is blushing. We've got a live one."
"Ignore her," said a man at his side. "She's just pissing in your bedroll. Nobody's going to touch you either."
Nnedi laughed, a full-throated sound. "José, you take all the fun out of life. You could have let me make him sweat a bit longer."
"As long as your men keep their hands off Eden, we won't have a problem." He could handle himself. It was Eden he was worried about.
"They won't touch her." Nnedi sounded assured. "I'll have their heads if they do."
"And when the moon rises?" The warg within him was always content to doze the days away, as if sunlight weakened its hold on him, but night always brought the monsters out to play.
He could control it.
Mostly.
But an entire pack of wargs? Maybe they should have taken their chances and made a run for it, but he would never have been able to get both the kid and Eden out of there safely, and the chances of her leaving Cole behind? Slim to none.
"When the moon rises," Nnedi said coolly, "nothing shall change." She glanced at the amulet he wore around his throat. "We of Shadow Rock control the shift—not the other way around."
"You do? How?" It was something his parents had been able to do, and Cane had beaten it into him when he finally got his hands on him. But Johnny had never met another warg out there who was in control. Not even Cane. He'd been so desperate to get his hands on the amulet's Johnny's grandfather had made, as if that could stave off his madness.
"Do you know how wargs were created?"
"Pre-Darkening, in a lab. Yeah. I know a bit. Just don't know how."
"Wargs were created with nanotechnology and used to form a special branch of the pre-D government's military that was supposed to be the best of the best. The perfect soldier."
"Nanotechnology?" he breathed. There was the missing link in the stories his father had told him, and the records he'd found at Black River.
"Tiny microscopic particles that can warp the DNA of a regular human and manipulate the genome. I don't understand how it all works, though I daresay the Confederacy has better records than we do.
"Our legends state the subjects who volunteered to become these super-soldiers weren't used to the nature of the beast. They were violent and emotional, overwhelmed by their increased levels of testosterone and lower levels of cortisone and serotonin. But some were able to handle it.
"Shadow Rock is formed of the descendants of those who survived the Darkening. When the comet hit, it ruptured the walls of one of the compounds where a certain military group was being held. The government was considering whether to terminate the project—and the Alpha-Beta group—when they managed to break free of the facility."
"Black River," he murmured.
"You've heard of it?"
He'd been there. Seen the fallout and the prison cells where more than just wargs had been experimented upon. "Not a nice place, if you ask me."
"I've never been," Nnedi said, "but I suspect you're correct. My grandmother was one of the test subjects. With the skies turning black from the impact cloud, she and the rest of the alphas found shelter. There was a division among the group, and what was left—thirty-seven men and women—formed Shadow Rock. We've been together ever since.
