Heart of a Dire Wolf Read online

  He tackled her again and put his mouth next to her ear. “No one to live for?” His body shuddered, but he held on. “No friends?” His words were more breath than sound. “No mate?”

  A powerful scent memory flashed through her, piercing the blind, black anger of her berserk beast. If she succeeded in killing the armor-hided creature, the guards would kill her as a warning to the others. Then she’d never even find out if her mate felt the call, or if he liked snow, or tasted as divine as he smelled. Her sister had died before ever finding her true mate. How could Skyla throw away her own chance?

  Lerro must have felt her relax, because he rolled off her and crawled away. He fell onto his side, trembling and panting.

  Rage and loss threatened to drown her, so she turned her focus to Lerro. She wasn’t all that surprised to learn he could talk. She very badly wanted to pepper him with a million questions, but that would expose one of his secrets.

  A loud clatter from the corridor had her climbing to her feet. Everyone in the shifter holding cells knew that sound. “Oh look, the maids are here.”

  Within minutes, a pair of guards dragged a four-inch hose in front of their cell. “Hug the walls. Now!”

  She and Lerro flattened themselves against opposite walls. The guards opened the valve to unleash a forceful spray of soapy water onto the cell’s floor. Her bare feet ached from the cold. Lerro caught her eye, a newly intelligent gleam in his. He looked to the guards, then back to her again. A shudder racked him, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

  Skyla looked at the burly human guards. As usual, it took two of them to hold the hose steady so it didn’t buck like a bronco. As usual, the water had a bit of magic mixed in with the soap and smelled of chemicals and metal. What was she supposed to be looking at?

  She was about to risk a questioning glance at Lerro when it hit her. She’d seen it a dozen times and never thought about it. The magic of the bars should have repelled the water but didn’t.

  She opened her magical senses wide and sent low-level probes to test the bars and the water, to see how they worked together. Unlike most of the lazy, brute-force spells she’d encountered in the underground prison, the interconnected security spells for the cell bars and doors were subtle and elegant. She sure as hell didn’t want to meet the dangerous and gifted wizard who’d created them.

  She made herself look away, as if uninterested. Lerro was very much more than he seemed. She owed him twice, once for showing her the water magic, and once for preventing her from committing suicide.

  Skyla wasn’t the right person to plan a great escape, but with Rayne gone, she’d have to do. She still planned to avenge Rayne’s death and do as much damage to the prison as possible, but she’d do it on her terms, and help as many people as she could in the process. Only together did they have a chance at freedom.

  2

  “Brick!” Landry, the husky, dark-skinned guard with the thick Louisiana accent snapped his fingers for attention, then pointed to the bench. “Sit. Stay.” A smart-ass smile flitted across his face. “Good dawg.”

  Nicolas Paletin, who shared his soul with a Siberian tiger, obediently sat. He angled himself so his legs didn’t stick out as the guard snapped the chain from his ankle shackles to the loop embedded into the wall. Nic pasted a peacefully vacant look on his face as he watched the guard enter the hexagonal-shaped monitoring center. The thick glass walls, brimming with spells, were supposed to muffle sight and sound, but it didn’t work if the guards left the doors wide open.

  “Hey, Sharon. Where is everyone?”

  Sharon made a rude noise. “Those rats quit yesterday. If the company doesn’t hire fast, I’ll be next. I’m not working any more double shifts with no days off. Magister Balton can kiss my ass.”

  “I hear ya’,” agreed Landry. “High pay ain’t worth nuthin’ if you cain’t spend it.” He waved toward the monitors. “What room can I have? Auction wants the new felines ready this afternoon, so I gotta do the alpha tests now.”

  The head wizard Balton and the wizards and sorcerers that ran the place for him knew surprisingly little about the shifters they were selling. Or maybe they didn’t care, as long as they could tell potential buyers about the type of animal hiding under the skin. The auctioneers apparently thought all shifter species and groups followed the rigid alpha hierarchy that was only common in older, ultra-conservative wolf packs. Felines who chose to band together in prides usually had a looser class structure, with dominants at the top, but not always.

  Nic was too much of a loner to be a team player, and he didn’t want to be a leader. He’d had enough of fighting to last the rest of his long life, and disliked dominance trials. Ordinarily, he’d have refused to cooperate with the auctioneers, but his antsy tiger needed the distraction to keep from feeling claustrophobic. Shifters didn’t thrive in cages, and he was no exception. So far, only one feline shifter had the strength to ignore his order, and that male was a shambling disaster in every other way.

  Sharon, a short-chinned white woman with magenta and turquoise hair, pointed to a big wall monitor with little squares showing camera feeds from exam rooms. “Intake Three will be open in a few minutes. Auction better put shifters on sale or something. Crowding makes ’em berserk. Like that stinky wolf yesterday.”

  Landry nodded and rubbed his fat belly. “Yeah, I’m still sore, even after the healing spells. She sure was a fighter.”

  Nic’s frustrated, increasingly short-tempered inner tiger rumbled, not liking the reminder of the woman’s violent demise. The final beatdown had been in front of his current cell. He’d seen two other deaths in the six weeks he’d been captive, but that one bothered him the most. Nic shook off the disturbing memory and focused on what he could see through the double doors.

  The banks of security consoles had a mix of mundane technology and magical artifacts. Several big-screen monitors displayed more tiny squares with live feeds from each prisoner cell. The view angle suggested the camera was built into the cell’s door lock. He’d already seen and memorized an emergency evacuation map, so he knew the complex had six spokes, four for holding cells, one longer, branched one for staff dorms, offices, and exam rooms, and one for the auction showrooms. The raised, wide central hub, where he now sat, housed the security room, the staff lounge area, and the armory. Only the auction showroom and administration office wings had elevators and stairs.

  Nic reached down to rub his ankle and give himself a better view of the video monitors. The shifter wing cells looked fully occupied, with two and three to a cell, but the other wings looked half empty. He didn’t know if shifters outnumbered the other magical races, or if they were just easier to catch.

  He himself had been caught in a primitive but effective trap meant to snare a caribou shifter group. He hadn’t been a herd protector for more than thirty years, but he’d offered to stand in for his tiger father and caribou mother for the herd’s annual migration. His parents deserved to spend a few uninterrupted months with their new baby and his first sister.

  Only twenty kilometers from home, he’d sent the herd running on ahead while he investigated an oily, metallic smell that didn’t belong in a shallow lake. He’d tripped a huge, underwater trap that nearly drowned him. That was his last memory before waking up in a shifter intake room, feeling like his head was going to explode. He hoped the clan didn’t think he’d abandoned them.

  On the console below the monitors, a ruby-colored gemstone began furiously blinking. A red spark hovered near one of the tiny video squares. Sharon swore. “Since you’re waiting, do me a favor and check C-6’s control panel for magic activity.” She pointed toward the blinking gemstone. “This stupid thing has gone off twenty times since yesterday, for random cells, but the wizard on call says there’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “I got Thick-as-a-Brick,” said Landry, pointing a thumb over his shoulder toward Nic.

  “So? Take him with you. It’s the shifter wing.”

  Landry heaved a noisy sig
h, but turned and walked out toward Nic.

  “Come on, Brick.”

  Nic waited for each order to stand, walk, and stop. His captors had the mistaken impression his human half was docile, illiterate, and cognitively impaired, and he’d carefully avoided giving them any reason to suspect otherwise. Role-playing wasn’t usually his thing, but his dominant tiger half was useful to the overworked staff, and buyers weren’t interested in scratched and dented models like him when they had plenty of perfect specimens to choose from. He’d only once had to shift into his cranky beast, to remind the sadistic guard with tusks and horns not to torment his human half. Her armor-plated skin was no match for his speed or his huge, razor-sharp claws. It had been well worth the singed fur from her fireball.

  Landry led the way down the long, wide corridor of the shifter wing to nearly the end. Nic’s super-sensitivity to magic meant he got a barrage of sensations as they walked, like an otherworldly, variable wind in a crowded marketplace.

  Landry hooked Nic’s ankle chain to the center floor ring, then turned to the cell’s control panel. Nic yawned loudly and smacked his lips to hide his interest. Landry touched small gemstones in sequence. The cell’s shadow spell faded to reveal the occupants, a male and a female.

  The female had straight, midnight black hair, a mix of Asian and African features, and a slender body like a ballet dancer. Even smudged with dirt and hair sticking out every which way, she was exquisite. He’d only glimpsed her once before, in an auction block display cage, but her lingering scent had told him everything his tiger needed to know. She was his mate.

  And the palsied male in her cell was the only feline his tiger had ever met that he couldn’t even tell its species, much less dominate.

  Nic’s inner tiger roared and lunged, trying to force a shift, wanting a rematch. He gritted his teeth and forced it back.

  “Oh, hell.” Landry punched a control that broadcast his voice past the kill bars into the cell. “Walls. Now!” he ordered. “And none of your shit, Lerro.”

  Nic dropped his head so his long hair hid his face. He inhaled slowly to catch the scintillating scent that had been both arousing him and settling his tiger for days. He nearly drooled in pleasure.

  Nic risked a quick glance up at his mate. Big mistake. When their eyes met, she froze, deer in the headlights. His tiger stilled, fascinated.

  Landry made a disgusted sound. “Don’t make me flatten you, Lerro. You neither, Chekal.”

  Nic squeezed his eyes shut and dropped his head again. He willed his mate through their as-yet non-existent bond to snap out of it and get to the wall. She must have done it, because Landry let out his breath. “Good dawgs.” He pressed sequences of controls on the flat screen.

  Nic fixed a dull gaze on the weapon-laden belt that cut into Landry’s beer gut, but turned his peripheral vision and other senses to the cell and its controls. The lethal magic in the cell bars made the hair on the back of his neck bristle. The scent of his mate made his dick twitch. He should be grateful, because he’d despaired of ever finding her, but the timing couldn’t have been worse.

  Finally, Landry pressed the microphone switch that dangled at his neck. “C-6 is clean.”

  Nic’s shifter hearing caught Sharon’s voice through the tiny speaker in Landry’s earbud. “Okay. Auction wants all the female shifters prepped for a private showing tonight.”

  Landry shook his head. “I ain’t shackling up and herding thirty or forty shifters all by my lonesome for their stupid party.” He huffed in evident annoyance. “Tell Auction they can come get ’em.”

  Landry pressed the control to reactivate the cell’s shadow spell, then unhooked Nic’s chain and ordered him to follow back down the long corridor of thirty cells to the hub. Nic’s feet grew heavier with each step away from his mate.

  As he shuffled behind the grumbling guard, Nic inventoried his new information. The guards couldn’t see through the cell shadow spells without turning them off. He now knew his mate’s name, and that she smelled like a wolf. Best of all, she’d seen him and felt the connection.

  Or, considering his luck of late, she didn’t feel it, and was just terrified by big, bearded, muscular males.

  New urgency to escape coursed through him. He’d known three weeks ago how to get himself out, but then he’d scented his mate, and he’d stayed. She was a gift from the moon goddess who looked out for shifters. He wasn’t leaving without her.

  In the intake room, Landry locked the door, then removed Nic’s shackles. Nic stripped off his sweatpants and T-shirt in case he needed to shift to exert dominance. Landry busied himself with his tablet rather than be forced to look at Nic’s nakedness. Humans had phobias about ridiculous things.

  The new felines, still in pain from the shifter knock-out drugs, turned out to be orphaned twin bobcat brothers. They were barely seventeen and offered little resistance to Nic’s mental command to shift. In the brief link he made with them, he discovered they’d snuck out of a strict group home in St. George, Utah, headed for Las Vegas, and got caught their first night by auction-house scouts. Unfortunately, the boys were healthy and pretty, and would probably sell quickly. All he had time to do was blunt their mind-numbing fear, give them a mental map of the compound’s layout so they’d know how to get out, and tell them to pick their battles.

  Landry told Nic to put his clothes back on, and left the boys standing there, naked, while he typed something on his tablet.

  The floor beneath their feet began to vibrate, subtle at first, but growing.

  “What the hell?” Landry looked at the floor with a frown.

  The whole room started shaking. The rolling gurneys to which the naked boys had been strapped crashed into one another.

  The traumatized twins clutched each other. Landry tripped. The tablet flew out of his hands and landed with a crunch. He swore as he keyed open the door so he could stand in the frame. An alarm began blaring painfully loudly.

  Nic knew an earthquake when he felt one. He also knew a goddess-given opportunity when he saw one.

  Roaring, he leaped over the tables and into Landry, slamming the man’s head into the doorframe before he even knew what happened.

  Nic lifted Landry’s limp body onto one of the gurneys, latched a strap over him, then turned to the bobcats. “Stay here and be sold to the highest bidder,” he shouted over the din. “Or come with me and maybe get shot or killed if my escape plan fails. Choose.”

  “With you,” they said in unison.

  Nic pointed to the two stacks of folded clothes. “Grab those and let’s go.” He took off down the hall, with the twins right behind him. The shaking made his progress feel more like a drunken stagger.

  The hub area had become an obstacle course of disarrayed furniture. Glass shards from a failed monitoring center window littered the floor. He vaulted into the opening. The bobcats arrived a moment later.

  Nic pointed to the guard, Sharon, who lay face-down on the console, with blood coming from her head. “Tie her up and put her in the corner. Don’t touch her weapons—they’re spell-protected.”

  While the twins complied, he focused on the cell controls for the shifter wing. He opened all the hallway doors but didn’t know the sequence to open the cells.

  The shaking intensified. Another heavy window popped out of its frame and shattered on the floor. A gush of water somewhere outside the room sounded as if pipes had burst.

  Magic surged. Nic instinctively ducked as the ruby-colored gems on the console blazed, then exploded in a hail of hot debris. On the huge displays, every cell door in the shifter wing sprang open. Shifters began pouring out of their cells, as if they’d expected to be freed.

  He’d worry about that later. “Let’s go.”

  The shaking subsided as he punched the door control and tapered off to nothing as he and the twins ran across the hub, leaving bloody footprints from the glass embedded in their bare feet. His ears ached with each blast of the alarm.

  He ran into the first gro
up of shifters and shouted, “Stairs at the end of the B-wing, past the offices and staff kitchen to the left. The auction wing stairs are booby-trapped.”

  He gave the same information to the next two groups of shifters who ran by. He turned down the ramp to the shifter C-wing and nearly slipped and fell. Three inches of sudsy water covered the floor. Every one of the industrial hose connections along the walls gushed like open fire hydrants.

  The alarm cut off in mid-blare, leaving his ears ringing like a bell.

  A tiny, delicate-looking woman fell on her ass and swore, then shifted into a pygmy hippopotamus, shredding her clothes as she did so. She bellowed and waddled toward another cell, where a big badger climbed onto her back. They headed up toward the hub.

  Nic continued down the corridor, repeating the escape instructions while scanning for his mate. He hoped he’d still be able to smell her if she shifted.

  Snarls and screams of pain arose behind him, and familiar magic surged. The tusked, thick-skinned guard had arrived, and was using her fireball magic. He mentally ordered the bobcat twins to stay well away, then turned, preparing to let his vengeful tiger deal with the sadistic guard once and for all.

  Before he could begin his shift, a huge moose shoved the guard into the nearby cell bars. Her body arced and scorched. She shrieked and struggled to free herself, but her horns had melted onto the bars, trapping her head. A scarred brown bear came out of the cell to rake powerful claws across her leg, leaving furrows that seeped green blood. A screaming gorilla pulled the nightstick off her belt, broke it, ignoring the arcing defensive magic that burned his fur, and drove the jagged end into her throat. Her body twitched, then collapsed. The cell’s magic continued to surge.

  A new wave of water pushed against his legs. Magic flared and buffeted his senses like a hurricane. Suddenly the deadly magic in the bars was gone for all the cells.

  Nic turned to the twins, who were following him like ducklings. “We’ll never have a better chance. Use the mental map I gave you and show people the way out.”