“Brielle and I found one of the nukes,” Caleb said into the radio. “And I’m pretty sure the others are nearby.”
“Roger that. But hurry,” Jake said, his voice almost lost in the static filling the connection and the alarms still ringing throughout the tunnels. “Misty figures we barely have more than seven minutes left.”
Shit.
He and Brielle had just started across the rough rock floor when eight people came into the room from one of the tunnels directly across from them. For half a second, Caleb saw the black tactical gear they wore and thought it was his teammates. Hell, he would have even been happy if it had been some of the agents and cops from McKay’s backup team.
But then Caleb saw Xavier Harrington and Uriel Cerano and his whole body tightened, his inner wolf letting out a snarl. He drew his weapon, his claws and fangs extending at the same time. While he’d been stunned Uriel and his fellow Vandals were down here with the nukes, he’d never dreamed Harrington would be as well. Caleb guessed the psychopath was more committed to this new world he wanted to create than anyone had realized.
Or maybe he was simply a frigging whack job.
“What is it about you that makes it so difficult to know where you’re going to show up?” Harrington asked, eyeing Caleb curiously as Uriel and the other members of his supernatural security force drew weapons and began to spread out to surround him and Brielle. “Sometimes I can read you clear as day, but other times, it’s like you don’t have a clue what you’re going to do until you’ve already done it.”
Caleb snorted. Unknowingly or not, Harrington had described Caleb’s muddled journey through life. He had never known what path he would walk down until he was already on it, for better or for worse. Mostly worse, he supposed. Not that he was going to throw any praise the man’s way for his exceptional guess.
“Maybe you’re simply not as good at this seeing the future crap as you think.” Caleb goaded. “In fact, you suck so bad at it that I’d drop this whole insane scheme if I were you.”
“But you aren’t me,” Harrington said. “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. You’ve never been burdened with the knowledge of where humanity’s ignorance will lead us and watched as the world burned in endless nuclear fires as every living soul on the planet is snuffed out in an instant.”
“No, I can’t say I’ve seen any of that,” Caleb answered, fighting the urge to say something snarky instead. “But even if I did, I wouldn’t destroy a good portion of the world to save the rest. I’d find another way.”
“That’s because you’re naive and foolish,” Harrington ground out, glancing at Uriel as his right-hand man continued to move closer to Caleb and Brielle. “Don’t you think I looked for a better way to do this? There isn’t one. It’s this. Or the end of the world.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Caleb saw Brielle moving to a position so she could cover him while keeping an eye on all the bad guys at the same time. But that was getting harder to do by the second as the Vandals continued to spread out. He’d hoped Julian and Kiara would show up at some point to even the odds a little, but they hadn’t yet. And they might not show up at all. At least, not until it was too late to matter.
Caleb turned back to lock eyes with Harrington. “You can’t honestly believe we’re going to let you do this, can you? We’ve already taken out five of the nukes. You can’t stop us from reaching the rest.”
Harrington barely reacted to that announcement. “The five you’ve disarmed don’t matter. The ones that are left are more than enough to do what I want. Theywillgo off. You will all die. And then the lasers will fire. Just as I planned. Exactly as I’ve already seen it.”
Caleb might have considered arguing, but Uriel and the other Vandals were lifting their weapons. And his first instinct was to protect Brielle.
But Brielle was already moving, and damn, she was fast. She charged across the room, smashing one of Uriel’s guards in the face, ripping the assault weapon out of his hand, and then firing half a dozen rounds into his chest at point-blank range. She was moving on to the next man before the first one hit the floor, her hand reaching out to borrow the next person’s abilities even as she took him down.
Caleb had watched Brielle fight before, but this seemed to be the first time she’d gone all in with her gift like this, absorbing one fighting style after the next, dropping one empty weapon only to strip another loaded weapon off the next bad guy. Even as Caleb launched himself at Harrington, knowing he had to get through him to go after the nukes, he found himself staring a little at his soul mate. Because seriously, she was frigging awesome.
Then Uriel flicked a finger in her direction and Brielle went flying across the room, smashing into a wall so hard that Caleb felt the impact. A second later, Caleb’s .45 was ripped out of his hand and sent flying down one of the tunnels.
Caleb’s instincts warred over the desire to both run to Brielle’s side to see if she was okay and kill the man who’d hurt her. In the end, he retained enough logic to realize that if he didn’t stop Uriel, the asshole would hurt Brielle again and again. So he swerved to the right, closing the distance between him and the lead Vandal in the span of a single heartbeat. Caleb brought his hand up in a slashing sweep, his claws raking across the man’s chest. But even as he drew blood, Uriel was reacting, shoving Caleb across the room without barely lifting a hand.
Caleb flew through the air, watching as Uriel turned to focus on Brielle again. Then he lost sight of everything as he crashed into something extremely hard. There was a cracking sound, and the obstruction broke under the force of his impact, the entire structure clattering to the ground with him on top of it. When a sharp pain lanced up his back, suggesting he’d broken something, he looked down to see that he’d landed on the nuke.
Seeing Uriel heading for Brielle, Caleb panicked. He picked up the nearest thing at hand that he could use as a weapon. It was only after he’d beaten one of the supernatural security guards with it, then tossed the weapon across the room toward Uriel that he realized he’d picked up the nuke. But Uriel batted it away it with another wave of his hand, smashing the weapon so violently against the far wall that it knocked out a chunk of rock.
A small part of Caleb’s mind pointed out that bouncing a nuke around like that probably wasn’t a good idea, but then Uriel turned to Brielle, and Caleb stopped worrying about the damn nuke.
Caleb ran toward Brielle, but Harrington of all people stopped him, picking up an MP5 submachine gun from one of his dead security guards and using it with more proficiency than Caleb would have ever given him credit for. No matter which direction Caleb leaped, the older man seemed to know exactly where he was going. That was likely true, considering Harrington could see the future. Caleb had no idea how many times he was hit, but he was pretty sure there wasn’t a part of his body left unharmed.
For a second, he wondered why Harrington was able to read him so well right now when earlier he’d said he couldn’t always get a read on him. But then he saw that Uriel had reached Brielle, standing right over her, about to shoot.
Caleb lost it then, his thoughts going hazy as his omega took over and reacted. He sprinted toward Brielle, his bullet-riddled body hurting like hell, slowing only long enough to pick up the nuclear warhead and sling it in Harrington’s direction.
Then he was on Uriel, only to get smashed to the ground like a rag doll. He slid across the rough floor, coming to rest against Brielle’s side. The look in her eyes when she saw how badly he was bleeding was heart-wrenching. Then she reached out and touched his face.
Brielle’s dark eyes glowed vivid blue, then pearly white fangs extended and claws appeared at the tips of her slender fingers.
Uriel smiled at Caleb as he aimed his weapon at Brielle’s back and pulled the trigger. She barely flinched as she jumped to her feet and leaped through the air at Uriel, her claws tearing into him while her savage snarls had him stumbling backward as fast as he could.
Harrington and the last of his security guards turned their weapons on Brielle and pulled the triggers.
