Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
There was a lot of blood on his face, like a glossy, red mask.
And then things got worse.
Off in the distance, through the tree line, the unmistakable flicker of headlights coming fast was the tick-tock of a doomsday clock.
“We’ve got company,” Rio said.
After which things got worse-er.
Flaring his nostrils, Lucan scented the air and bared his fangs. “Rio, get your gun out.”
Cranking his head around, he re-tested the scents coming over on the breeze and got a confirmation that made his pecs tighten. Great. The one thing that he really didn’t need added to this shit show.
“Mayhem says it was a wolf,” Rio called out. “In the road. He swerved to avoid a wolf.”
“Yeah, I can scent it from here.”
Lucan measured the approaching vehicles. They were closing in, an inexorable gunfight rolling toward them like a storm surge.
Glancing at Apex, he tossed the male the one gun he had. “Defend them while I go deal with a relative of mine.”
Apex caught the weapon and nodded without a word.
Leaping from the side panel of the SUV, Lucan hit the ground and ran down the undercarriage to his mate. “I’ll be right back.”
“Be careful.”
He kissed her quickly and then tore off, jumping up the shallow embankment. The road was unlit, but he didn’t need streetlamps to see. The wolf’s body was about forty feet away, in the center of the pitted asphalt strip, blood staining the white-and-gray fur of the chest, a gray tongue lolling out of open jaws. Surprisingly, the rib cage was still going up and down. That wasn’t going to last.
Even though it had been decades, Lucan recognized the male. It was another of his cousins.
The first had been brought in by the Executioner mere nights ago. For whatever reason, the wolven had come off the mountain and were circling the prison camp—
The growl came directly across from Lucan.
As he lifted his stare to a stand of bushes, a set of glowing blue eyes was locked on him.
“Rio,” he said loudly, without looking away from the wolven. “Get back in our car—”
“What?”
“Get in our car, right now.”
“But what about—”
“Now!” he barked as he sank down into his thighs and prepared for a fight.
Whether it was going to be on four paws or two feet, that was the only question.
Talk about spoiled for choice.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was with no small measure of confusion that Kane opened his eyes and regarded the night sky above him. Given the pain he had just endured, he had assumed… that the next thing he saw would be the foggy landscape of the Fade and the white door he had been told of by wahlkers.
But he had no mist, no door. He had only the dreary heavens above the earth, the twinkling stars offering little in the way of beauty and absolutely no mysticism to him.
Although if he was alive, he had a chance to—
“I’ve got to move you to some better cover. I’m sorry.”
Turning his head, he found it difficult to focus on the near-to, but after a moment, the face on a level with his own registered.
“Apex.” Dearest Virgin Scribe, his voice was so hoarse. “Wherever are we…”
“Brace yourself.”
His fellow prisoner left him no time to follow that order, but perhaps it was for the best. As Kane’s pain receptors once again became all he knew, the electric shocks boring through him like swords, the contortion of his limbs and spine nothing he could control, he retreated into his skin, the world lost unto him. Those icy cold heavens, too.
It felt like an eternity until he was laid out flat on the ground, and certainly the agony departed on its own schedule, what had arrived with a slamming alacrity retreating upon a leisurely stroll.
He opened his eyes again as a way of enduring the torture. In all his nights of suffering, he’d found that if he could focus on something, anything, outside of himself, he could beat back some of the onslaught—
Mechanicals. As his sight sharpened, he was looking at an interwoven thicket of pipes, shafts, wires, pans: It was a vehicle on its side.
In a flash, he remembered a gunfight, Apex leaning out of a window, throwing something—and then…
“You need to leave me,” he said to the other male.
When there was no response, he gritted his molars and turned his head up and around. Apex was kneeling beside him, his hands planted on the scourged earth, his body poised as if he were going to attack what was left of the SUV.
“You are going to leave me here,” Kane repeated, “and save yourself.”
As the other male opened his mouth, he found an octave lower in his tone. “Let me go. I heard what Lucan said. A wolven in the road. And there have to be more in the woods if we hit one, and there will be another flank of guards on top of all that. You’re free. You’re out of the prison. Go.”