and mesh, watching the proceedings below with lazy smirks. Gaden and his men stood just before a battered steel mesh door, a line of sizeable stun batons hanging from the wall of the tiny foyer. They each grabbed one, testing the charge before they opened the door.
“Flat…” Kain said, tossing one on the floor. “The battery’s fucked, and they haven’t replaced it.”
“Take this one,” Gaden said, testing several and throwing him a live one. “Everyone ready?”
As if to make mockery of that, a body was slammed into the door, blood splattering across Gaden’s face, then the corpse slid down, landing with a thump.
“We’ve just gotta wait it out,” he said, as much to them as him. “Just wait for the worst to be over, for the breeders to exhaust themselves.”
It was grinding and horrible, but they were all well used to it. All their exceptional instincts that helped them thrive in the wild put them at a distinct disadvantage here. They could easily fill in the gaps of the cacophonous noise, visualising when someone was slammed into the walls or the ground, the screams of protest, the fierce scrabbling, the ripping into flesh. Over and over, shifter breeding rites were corrupted into a form so completely devoid of anything that was shared between two of their kind as to need a new name. Rape only partially worked, as both perpetrators and victims were brutalised by this process, pushed into demonic states by the chips embedded in their brains, then left to face the knowledge of what they’d done. The three of them hunkered down, until one particular scream cut through all of the others.
Gaden was jerked to his feet as if pulled by a leash, every muscle tensing.
“No,” he breathed, the others joining him in standing. “Amika!”
“Gaden!”
He slapped Huron’s hand away as his other one went for the handle. He grabbed another baton from the wall, but that was just pissing in the wind and he knew it.
“Stay,” he said. “Don’t come after me. I either return with Amika or I’m dead. That’s all there is.” And, as they cried out, he pushed open the door.
He stepped out onto the hard concrete floor with a weapon in each hand, momentarily unable to move. He’d had to push the body of a woman out of the way to get out. Wolf shifter from memory. She’d been quiet and withdrawn, but now she was dead, her throat torn out as she stared glassily at the ceiling.
And she wasn’t the only victim. His teeth ground so hard he heard a molar crack as he saw the rabid men tearing at the women, all sense, all respect, all the hard-won instincts generations had hammered into them torn apart with one tiny bit of human tech. He zapped one man as he lunged at Gaden, snarling in a grotesque half shifted, half man form. The force of the volts lifted the shifter backwards so he landed flat on his back, but Gaden didn’t pay him any mind, searching the floor for her.
There, there she was.
His vision narrowed down, shutting down everything but where his mate fought off a rabid bear shifter. His heart thudded erratically as he ran across the floor, weapons outstretched.
Before he was captured, if anyone had asked Gaden whether he would jump over women being raped by shifters to help another woman, he would have just looked at you like you were insane. It was such an alien concept, to allow this kind of brutality to happen, but that was what this place was about. The theatre of it all, the buildings, the humans’ uniforms, their ever-present weapons. It was all this towering edifice to human ingenuity and complete and utter callousness. That they could inflict this kind of shit on animals was bad enough, let alone sentient beings… But here he was, swiping the baton in a great arc, smacking it at full voltage into the bear on top of Amika, his face a bloody mess from her claws, then thrust it into the chest of an incoming wolf.
“Gaden!” she gasped, wrapping her arms around him. He could feel the shake in her slender limbs, the race of her heart like it was his, as well as the bite of her claws on his skin.
“How did you end up here? You were supposed to be on laundry duty. I…” His mouth clamped shut, not wanting to reveal the lengths he’d gone to, to keep her away from here. “C’mon.”