Don’t get taken in by it, I said, trying to keep my voice calm and only partially succeeding. It felt like we were sinking into quicksand.
Hollingsworth had created a strange little world in his mind. Faced with knowledge that shifters were real, he’d taken in their strength, speed, brutality when required, and physical beauty, and concocted a reality where somehow he was at the top of that tree, no matter what evidence there was to the contrary. Quite the opposite, he burned with a need to create a world that reflected that. Every time he caged a shifter or forced one to do his bidding, his view was reinforced. He was the apex predator and he did what he willed, because that was how nature worked. He could no more be held to account than a storm or an earthquake.
“You pathetic little worm,” I murmured, then cut his legs out from under him.
Show him, I said. Show him all of it.
In the way of thoughts, a great angry hornet of a thing formed from all the injustices and pain and anguish, the crushing boredom and isolation, the loneliness, the violation, the devastation, until Gaden. It crystallised the messy squall of emotions and memories and thoughts into something knife sharp.
“I love you,” she said. Amika, that was her name. She was beautiful, despite the drab gown, the simple garment only highlighting the delicate lines of her body. She had long dark hair and luminous brown eyes, eyes that shone with love as she looked upon Gaden. She bounced up, unperturbed by the man’s dour expression, placing a gentle kiss on the side of his mouth.
If he’d known then it’d be the last, he’d have held her close, not let her go. Just secreted her down into his bunk, kissing her for hours, memorising her taste until no other one would register in his mouth. But then, he’d been ignorant, not knowing what was coming.
“I’ve got to go,” she said at the clarion call that went over the PA system. As she pulled away, we could see this was a different facility. Ageing, with welded mesh walls and simple drop-down bunks attached to the wall, it was that and a toilet and nothing else.
His fingers held onto hers right up until she was forced to pull free with a smile.
“I’ll see you tonight,” she said, her hand going to the mating scar on her neck. She ducked her head with a smile and then she was gone.
It would have been bad enough to have heard what happened to her through the grapevine. Her vulnerability, the sweetness that drew him to her in the first place… It was why he remained so standoffish. When he watched his mate walk out of their cell to what he assumed was a day of work, it was like watching his heart walk free of his body. Every instinct in him said follow, shadow, protect, but there was no place for instincts here.
Only grinding reality.
“Inmate.” The voice of one of the humans was shouted at him from one of the gangways that ran around the complex, protected by wall to wall mesh. “You’re on clean up duty in the mating pens. Been a fucking bloodbath down there. You and your crew report there in ten minutes.”
He heard the human’s snicker and felt a chill go up his spine. Breeding, breeding, breeding, it was all they focussed on here, not realising that shifters couldn’t breed under these conditions. The women knew this wasn’t a safe place to bring a child into, so their bodies didn’t ovulate. They endured chemically induced heats, but it produced no viable eggs, no matter what they did. To change that, they’d need to do something they would never do—provide some safety.
But in their simplistic minds, they thought by pushing the men into insane ruts, where they killed as many shifter women as they did mate them, it would get them what they wanted.
Because that was the way humans ran their societies, Gaden decided as he walked down the hallway to rouse his crew mates. Might equals right. A rapist could impregnate a human woman, leave her facing down an unwanted child or an abortion, or force her to make the best of a situation. Shifter children were wanted, always wanted by both parents, something so alien to the human psyche, they kept trying these ham-fisted experiments, sure there was some way to compel them to get what they wanted.
He rapped his knuckle on Huron and Kain’s doorway, the wolf and eagle shifters rolling blearily out of bed.
“We’re on clean up.”
“Fuck!” Huron said, going a shade paler. “I hate clean up.”
“Shouldn’t have got into a fight with that other wolf then,” he replied. “C’mon, Kain. Let's do this shit before they start the zapping. My head’s killing me.”
“Up all night boning that pretty mate of yours?” Kain asked with a smirk.
He hadn’t. He’d slept poorly, coming awake over and over to stare down at Amika, watching the way the dim artificial light cast shadows over the plains of her face. Dreaming hurt. In them, the both of them loped across the stony slopes, picking their way through the stones, slinking low on their bellies, the wind in their faces as they snuck up behind argali sheep. Not here, anywhere but here.
“C’mon,” Gaden said. This was gonna be a shit day, and the sooner it was started, the sooner it would end and he could be back with her. With her scent in his nose, with her lips on his skin, he could find a way to let go of the horrors of the day.
The memory lurched forward, a sense of trepidation deepening as we arrived at the breeding pens. Screams, roars, the sound of shifters making war, not love. Gaden’s eyes slid backwards, checking in with his crew, cataloguing the hunch of their shoulders, the dart of their eyes. It sounded like a Roman coliseum inside, and the comparison was apt.
Humans stood along the ramparts of the pits, safe behind walls 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!”