“Did she—” I begin, frowning. “Did she just pull out a tooth?”
“I think she’s trading it for something. Probably has a nice set of chompers.” Selene pauses as if contemplating. “Yeah, I think that place is like a medic ward. A shitty one, too, because at least we don’t charge inteeth.”
While I love Selene for how much she has my back, sometimes her worldview is narrow. She’s someone who isconfidentin what they know, and not everyone knowseverything. “It’s too hard to travel for some, or too dangerous. Oh no, look out?—”
I yank Selene down just as a glass bottle whistles past our heads and shatters against the wall. The stink of cheap liquor fills the air. The building on theotherside of us has a damn brawl erupting on its porch, with fists flying and bodies slamming against steel barrels or wooden pillars, as the children nearby back up and start cheering someone on. One man is cutting through the rest like he’s a hot knife slicing through butter—CRACK—he suddenly goes stiff and slumps over without an ounce of finesse, blood blooming in his shirt.
Our bodies react without having any exchange of words; we bolt back inside Hozier’s, breathing hard, hearts hammering in time with the dying echoes of the gunfire. The floor is sticky with god-know-what else.
“Was he just fucking shot?” Selene asks while Hozier yells at us.
“Yeah,” I breathe out.
We crouch behind a shelf right next to a window, the old woman now ignoring us as she bolts into another room before emerging with a shotgun, strutting past us like we don’t exist as she exits her shop.
Then it all gets quiet, the door to this shop swinging shut as the last bit of noise. A ripple moves through, like when the pressure drops before a storm.
“SirJudge,” someone says out in the square.
My veins may have well been injected with formaldehyde, and my body embalmed with fear, because everything in me isnumb and frozen. Selene peeks out through the window, tapping me on the shoulder, but I don’t move.
Judge.
No.
Oh, no.
DIANA
“It’s okay,Diana. I can’t smell you at all,” Selene comforts. “We just need to get out of here.”
She can’t smell me.
The words string through my brain with disinclination. The instinct to always assume my scent is present is deeply carved into my bones. I’m breathing so rapidly my head spins again.
When the space feels like it’s expanding and getting smaller all at once, I thrash around to peek over the windowsill, mirroring Selene in a sudden fight for survival. Outside, the shooter stands still, lowering his gun, slightly pointing toward a space we can’t see. It’s like the shooter is making eye contact with something that clearly has him stopping dead in his tracks.
Icannotget stuck here.
Even if we can’t see who is around the corner, the air alters. Physically. It’s full of a scent change that reeks of alphas. Very powerful ones. When a slight gust of wind carries the cold air toward this cracked window, chills rush through me. I’ve never been able to describe the way an alpha smells to another beta. Sure, I can describe the actual scent, but theeffectit has on usomegas… it deeply infiltrates my lungs with a musky edge that’s entirely pleasant, the air smelling like a fertile spring and something immensely masculine, like dragging my nose against skin hardened by battles.
It makes me want to punch whoever smells like that right in the nuts, because I don’teverwant to be controlled this easily by a stupid smell. Which is why I need toleave. I am so fucking close to the metaphorical lion’s den that I bet natural selection has already given up on me.
“Well,” says a voice emanating from the corner we can’t see around. “That was a bold fucking decision.”
The stranger’s words drip with confidence that only the most lethal men earn, a smoothness to their depth that has me very worried. The shooter nods once like he’s agreeing to something, and I stare at him like he holds the answer to a life-or-death question. “The fuck doyoucare?”
“The one you shot was collecting something forme.”
“And who the fuck are you, exactly? Y’all another gang?”
“We’re your new executioner.”
CRACK.
Blood sprays from the back of that man’s head as his body collapses, his brains spattered on the person next to him as they screech and wipe it off.
Two dozen figures emerge slowly from around the corner, a tide of leather and testosterone. Very rarely do I feel my body temperature truly drop, but this is one of those moments—like plunging beneath ice, lungs seizing, disoriented, no way back to the surface. Each one wears a bomber jacket, but not the kind that belongs to pilots. These are wasteland alterations, torn and rebuilt with thicker cotton interiors for the cold, bits of metal hammered sporadically, jagged spikes jutting from shoulders. Weapons are bolted and lashed to their bodies like extensions of their bones. The insignia across their backs is hard to identifyfrom this distance—but it states what’s needed, and that’s that they belong to a biker gang.
