Page 64 of Manix
I opened my mouth to demand answers, but he shook his head violently, lifting his finger to his lips. He reached behind his back, and pulled out a gun. He silently passed it to me, and I gripped the warm metal in my hand.
He tilted his head back toward Raiden. “Go,” he mouthed.
I didn’t want to go back to being a sitting duck, but for some reason, I trusted this guy. He’d saved me once, and I had to believe he’d do it again. I checked the safety was on, and then stuffed the gun down between my breasts. I moved faster toward Raiden this time, and breathed a sigh of relief when I was able to touch him again.
He was awake now, and his eyes were full of questions, but I shook my head. I didn’t have any answers for him, even if I had the chance to speak right now. The solid weight of the gun against my chest was like a security blanket, and I vowed that even if I didn’t escape, I’d put a bullet between the eyes of my uncle, and kill my monsters forever.
42
Gatlin
There were too many of them. They’d swarmed from the trees in the dozens and it was statistically impossible to hold them back. But we’d fucking tried and now the woods around our home, our Pack house, was littered with bodies.
But it had been for nothing. They’d taken Naja. They’d taken Raiden. Seven had taken some kind of armor-piercing bullet to the gut and was in surgery. I had failed my Pack. I’d failed them as an Alpha, as a protector.
Finlo was bloody in the corner, his back against the wall, his head hanging low. The Legion were here, in the Doc’s office, conferring. Too fucking late. Everything they did was too fucking late. The Legion Force had been too late. The witch had been too late. Everything was too late, and now they were gone.
Raiden’s dad was nearly hysterical. “I say we get the Legion Force together and get my son back,” he growled, but my father was shaking his head.
“And what? Where do we send them? We don’t know where they’ve taken them. We need to get our best trackers out there and get on their trail.”
“Our best tracker is in surgery,” Finlo’s dad shouted.
It went on like that, everyone talking but no one making any decisions. I didn’t know what to do. I’d lost two great loves of my life because I hadn’t been good enough.
“If we’d given her to a proper Pack, we’d still have the last female Omega,” someone said, and I stiffened. I was on my feet, but not as fast as Finlo was, and he had the Legion General on the floor and was pounding his face. The General might have been powerful, but he was old. Finlo was young and powerful in his own right, and I had no intention of dragging him off the cocksucking piece of shit.
His dads unfortunately had better sense, pulling their son off before he did permanent damage. I didn’t care anymore.
But everyone stopped when a glowing portal opened in the middle of the doctor’s office and the Witch Miranda stepped out. Everyone gaped, most of them having never seen the weird portalling thing she did before, and I dropped my head.
“What the fuck happened?” she said in a low voice that made all the hairs on my body stand on end. On the outside, she might be a pretty woman in a peasant blouse, but on the inside there was power that far outranked anything I, or any Manix, could counter. I knew that in my soul.
Still, I didn’t fucking care. “Your schedule meant that the wards were still weak when they attacked. They just walked straight through them, like you said. They are gone.” My voice broke, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be the toughest Alpha in the room anymore. I didn’t want to be anything.
She turned her angry glare on my father. “You. Squabbling over pennies and look what has happened. You are a disgrace.” An Eastern European accent made itself known, and I wondered absently if it only came out when she was angry. She looked back at me, her glare like an inescapable snare. “You. Tell me what happened. Everything.”
So I went through the whole thing, from the moment the alarms blared, to fighting a Kevlar-protected army as I uselessly watched Naja throw herself off the roof, and the enemy scooping her up, tossing her into the back of a van. The glimpse I saw of Raiden in that same van. Of finding an absolutely devastated Ellar clutching a traumatised Luisa in the woods halfway to Maxton.
They were at Finlo’s parents house now, as ours had been reduced to rubble. All those memories. Gone. It was painful, but not as painful as not knowing what was happening to my Omegas right now.
No, notmyOmegas. I didn’t deserve them.
Miranda clucked her tongue. “Enough of the pity party, Alpha. You lost the battle but the war is far from over.” She gave my father another disgusted look and then pulled a phone from the pockets of her voluminous skirt.
She clicked the number 2, holding it down. I could hear the grumble of a voice down the line. “Alexander. I need to call in a favor.” Whatever the person at the other end of the line said made her lips twitch. “Not now, Alexander. This is a time sensitive matter.” She quickly outlined the events of the last few hours. “I want your super special team on it. Don’t bullshit me and say that they don’t exist—we both know they do.” She paused, her eyebrows rising, until they nearly met the auburn of her hairline. “Indeed. Is that so? Well, isn’t that fortuitous. I have two Alphas who would like to join that operation. No, they aren’t liabilities, you pompous fucking lizard. They are Manix.” She sighed and squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Obviously not, Alexander, because I am literally standing in a room filled with them. Can we discuss this later, when the last female fucking Omega Manix isn’t about to die? Yes? Okay.” More silence. “No need, I’ll bring them to you.” Whatever he said next made the witch’s cheeks flush, and a small smile turned up her lips. “Only in your dreams, Dragon.”
Then she hung up. If you believed her words, she hung up on a fucking dragon. This bitch was terrifying, and one look at the rest of the Manix in the room told me that we all knew it.
She turned back to me. “You shifters are all so dismissive of that Moon Goddess of yours, but sometimes she truly does smile on you. It just so happens that the Convocation Member for the Shifters has been doing a sting on this lago for nearly two decades.”
Iago. The name that Naja had refused to speak, but a little bit of digging had made it easy to find out information on him. He was brutal. A sociopath. Little better than a rabid animal. He was wanted in the US on drugs and trafficking charges, but the human FBI agents kept getting shipped back to FBI headquarters in pieces. Sometimes in a box with a ribbon. Because they were dealing with shifters and not normal drug dealers. He was every bit the monster that Naja had said he was. And now he had her and Raiden.
“Long story short, he reached out to one of Alexander’s assets and said he had the last Manix available for sale. The asset jumped on it. They’re going to take this piece of shit down tonight, and you’re going to get back your Omegas.” Fuck, I needed my guns, but Miranda was hurrying me. “Let’s go, they’ll have the weapons you need and we don’t want to miss it.”
“I’ll get my car,” Finlo said, and the witch shook her head.
She grinned at us, and it was just as predatory as any shifter. “No need.” She waved her arm and a slit in reality that glowed a real weird red, appeared again. “Get in the portal. We are wasting time and it's been a while since I’ve shed a little blood. I don’t want to miss it.”
