Taggart gave a dreamy smile. “I’d love that. I look forward to filling our living room with photos of the three of us together.”
“We will,” Soren said, settling in for more snuggle time with him. “I promise.”
Arlo
“You can’t stomp him yet,” Bash said, maintaining his position between Arlo and two of the other enforcers who were trying to extract information from the ‘thing’ without killing it.
It was so close to death already it was trying to taunt them into doing it, not that they’d been able to shake it the way it had shaken Arlo, who just wanted it dead.
“We can keep letting you heal enough to stay alive for as long as you’d like to prolong this,” Tobias, the massive midnight-haired enforcer, threatened, right before he stomped on the thing's shoulder.
It groaned, shadowy smoke puffing from its lungs, its lips dripping vile black toxins. “You are all marked for death,” the thing choked. “Every one of you.”
“Yeah, but you’re first, don’t forget that.”
“Then there is no reason for me to care what you do, or how long you do it for,” it wheezed.
“You should,” Tobias cautioned, his eyes revealing the truth of the threat.
“Just as you should all have left things the way they were,” it rasped. “In time, you’d have seen the genius of what they were trying to create. A species tougher than any form of shifter. A species that could mingle with all and even save those who were so rare they’d never find mates or have families.”
“What good is a future like that if you had to accomplish the goal by slaughtering so many that you caused them to become rare in the first place!” Arlo bellowed, trying once more to go around Bash, who was just as pissed, considering what had happened to his mate, Romy.
“They had to find the right genes,” it explained, like that made total sense.
“And they couldn’t have gone about it any other way?” Tobias snarled. “That’s bullshit. That might have been the end game once, but it isn’t now, is it? It’s no longer about saving speciesand helping shifters repopulate. Now it’s about creating a race of beings to rule over all other shifters, isn’t it? It’s about certain council members not wanting to lose control of the power and positions they were clinging to after they failed to keep the promises they made when elected to the council in the first place!”
“Just let me have one moment alone with him and he’ll give us what we need to know!” Arlo roared.
“Wait,” Bash growled, pacing between Arlo and the thing, Bash’s fists clenched, agitation revving up. “Just… we need Tobias to keep trying, then you can smash him out of existence.”
Growling, Arlo barely refrained from taking a swing at him.
“How many more of you are there?” Tobias snapped as he re-stomped the shoulder that had slowly started to knit.
This time, it just writhed in agony before finally hissing out, “There were six, there were six of us, dammit, six of us in all. Two owls, two polar bears, and two like me.”
“And what the fuck are you?”
“Isn’t it obvious,” it rasped, right before trying to shift its mangled body.
Scales showed, then Arlo said to hell with all of it and shoved past Bash, who didn’t even try to stop him this time. It never had time to take its full form, Arlo stomped the life out of it first and kept right on stomping until it became smeared bits and fragments of dark, broken scales, mashed into the earth. Even then, it didn’t seem like enough. Nothing seemed to be enough. Not knowing there were three more of these mutated bastards they hadn’t encountered yet. Three more threats to his mates, to all of them.
Bellowing, he stomped a small crater into the ground with the thing’s corpse at the center, and none of them lifted a finger to stop him.
He wasn’t calm afterwards, either.
Not when it was silent.
Not when Tobias and the other enforcer, Durrant, shook their heads at the mess.
“Snakes,” Bash muttered, the only one still pacing. “They fucking mutated snakes?! Is this ever gonna end?”
“Oh, it’s going to end,” Arlo declared, flooded with a fierce sense of determination, beyond pissed off. “Because we are going to end it.”
Chapter Fifteen
Taggart
