“Uh, yeah,” Row said before clearing his throat. “But if you haven’t noticed, we’re at sea.”
I clutched my throat and cocked my head at him in horror. “I beg your pardon?”
Hamilton paused and actually shifted into his human form. “It’s a ship,” he said as he rolled his shoulders. Maybe he’d hurt one and the shift was healing it? Because he immediately shifted back into formidable bat form and kept ramming that glass.
In the room next door, Quillan was doing the same thing now. The opaque thing was failing all over the place, letting me see a lizard-looking dude on the other side of Quillan and… Huh. There was a centaur to the left of us who was mule kicking his glass.
All of a sudden, the lighting went from surgical white to rolling red as those beacon things descended from the ceiling in the hallway out front of the cells. So they knew we were being bad down here. I had a feeling soldiers were about to appear.
“Get behind me.” I stepped in front of Row and Kazinsky.
“Why?” Kazinsky asked.
“Can either of you heal from a bullet wound in under a minute?”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, fuck.”
They lined up single file behind me, and I glanced back to see that Row was even ducking a bit since he was taller than both of us. I could heal from a head wound, too. Yeah, that would be no problem. Uh-huh.
The wall shattered like car glass, in chunks and not completely, and Hamilton shifted again before stepping outinto the hall. Quillan’s glass, the lizard guy’s, and the centaur’s popped right after. Swear to god, if I wasn’t terrified, this whole thing with a colossal man-bat, snarling werewolf, fucking mini-Godzilla, and very angry half-horse man would’ve beenso cool.
And then a whole lot of other supernatural dudes stepped out of their cells all along the hall. Feathers, fur, hooves, scales— “Goddamn, is that guy a whole fucking snake?” Because he had a human upper body but he was one long danger noodle after that.
“Wiley, stay behind me.”
“Yeah, sure. Get me a gun, though. Then I can really help.”
“Us, too,” Row said from behind me.
They could choose to flip on us, but it really didn’t look like they were going to. I didn’t know how long I’d been in that cell before I woke up, but they could’ve been in there a lot longer. Just stewing with the idea that a monster was going to come along and fuck them whether they were okay with that or not. I was pretty sure that would switch anyone’s loyalties.
Hamilton looked over his shoulder at me, big brown eyes giving me a once-over. I could tell it wasn’t because I was naked and he appreciated that. Nope, he was thinking something like he was not about to hand me a weapon.
I smiled. “If you don’t hand me a gun, I’ll just take one off a corpse.” He sighed right before elevators started dinging from either end of the hallway. I patted his butt. “Go kill the bad guys, baby.”
He did. Hamilton went right, others went left, and it was a bloodbath. Part of me was likeyurp, so many severed limbsbut the rest of me was mentally cheering on every single supernatural badass who was plowing through our captors.Thank goodness you wore your helmet so your severed head wouldn’t get a concussion!Claws, fangs, and whip-like tails were showing these brainwashed morons just how dissectible the human body actually was, kevlar and all.
And then I fucking got shot! Just below my last rib on my right side—I didn’t know what the fuck was inside me there, but it bled a lot more than my thigh had last time. I bumped backward into what was left of the glass wall and it gave completely, sending me sprawling into the cell. Kazinsky rushed to my side, putting pressure on my wound and making me howl.
“Fuck, man, I thought you said you couldn’t be hurt!”
“I can be hurt, but I heal really fast.” I could feel it happening and freaked out that his hands on me might stop it, so I smacked him away from me. “There. There, see?”
I didn’t want to look at it, but Kazinsky’s multiple expressions of holy fuck told me everything. While guns fired all around us and people snarled and snapped, I waited until my wound stopped feeling weird. Sitting up, I ran my hand over my back and looked at the complete lack of a hole in my front. “See? Good to go.”
Kazinsky’s mouth opened a closed a few times, and I guessed he just couldn’t find the words.
“Oh, look!” I pointed. “Guns!”
Row already had one and it looked like he was watching Hamilton’s back, firing on his fellow soldiers. So part of me was glad someone had my man’s six and the rest was pissed it wasn’t me. But then Kazinsky grabbed a gun and handed another to me and… Could I actually kill someone? A fellow human? A guy standing right in front of me and aiming his own?—
Oh. Yes, apparently, I could. Got him right in his throat actually. Don’t point a gun at me when I have one, too. Lesson learned for both of us. Ew, fuck, look at it spurt. That was so gross!
The next guy, though, he put his hands up. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his eyes, and he was freaking right the fuck out. And surrendering.
I tucked the gun into my armpit, which fucking hurt, and yelled, “Stop eyeballing me and get on your knees, motherfucker!”
