But it didn’t seem as if the jab got through to Caleb, at least not based on the grin he gave her.
“Wow. You’re good.” He stopped and turned to face Erin. “You got it right off the bat. Omegas are definitely second-class citizens when compared to alphas like Harley…and other werewolves.”
Caleb glanced at Sawyer as he said that last part, then turned his attention back to Erin, eyes glowing with the slightest hint of blue instead of the usual gold.
“My nose isn’t that good compared to theirs,” Caleb continued. “My hearing isn’t so great, either. Same with eyesight. I definitely can’t see as far. Claws and fangs are a bit lacking, too, I guess. But of course, the big difference is control. Alphas are all over that control shit, while omegas like me have absolutely none.”
As he spoke, Caleb moved closer to Erin until he was only a foot away and gazing down at her with an expression that had suddenly lost all its humor.
“You might want to think about that the next time you decide to rag on me like we’re friends or something. I’ve been known to bite during my less-lucid moments.” Turning, Caleb strode down the hallway. “We aren’t gonna find that vampire by standing around talking, so let’s go. I feel like shooting something.”
Sawyer let his gaze travel back and forth between Harley and Erin before heading after Caleb. “Well, that could have gone better. Pissing off the guy you hope will be watching your back in the next few minutes isn’t the way I would have approached the situation, but whatever.”
Erin didn’t say anything as she and Harley caught up to him, but he hadn’t expected her to. Erin was good at burning bridges. She wasn’t so good at building them. Hopefully, her lack of social talent wouldn’t come back to bite them all in the arse.
As they moved through several more rooms and connecting corridors, the vampire’s scent didn’t get any stronger, which worried Sawyer. They should have encountered someone by now. But other than Long Hair and the vamp, it didn’t seem like anyone had been here in a few days. That made his inner wolf wary. There was definitely something wrong.
“Sawyer, do you have something on your side yet?” Jake asked over the radio. “We can’t be more than a few blocks from your location and haven’t seen anything.”
Before Sawyer could answer, he was interrupted by Adriana’s panicked voice.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded. “Do you think Kristoff is okay? If he was hurt, they wouldn’t kill him, would they?”
Sawyer tried to tune the girl out, happy to let Jake deal with this one. Adriana had wanted to come on the raid with them, insisting she could help. While it’d be nice to have her supernatural abilities the next time they ran into the vampire, he and Jake had vetoed that, refusing to back down no matter how much the girl had begged. Jake told her she could listen in on the radio along with the members of both support teams. Based on the current outburst over the radio, she’d also gotten her hands on a microphone. Hopefully, she hadn’t zapped all of the support agents.
“I heard something up ahead,” Harley said suddenly, jerking Sawyer away from the radio drama.
He listened, trying to pick up on whatever she’d heard. “It sounds like someone moaning.”
“I agree,” Harley said softly, her eyes intent on the far end of the hallway, like she was afraid she’d lose track of the sound.
They moved forward slowly, Sawyer interrupting the conversation between Adriana and Jake, telling them to stand by, they may have found something. The whimpering got louder as they approached an arched doorway up ahead on the right. The room beyond was as poorly lit as the rest of the maze. Sawyer caught Harley’s eye, covertly holding out two fingers before tapping his nose again.
She nodded. “I smell two people, but I don’t know if they’re bad guys or not, so watch yourselves. This feels really funny.”
Sawyer agreed. They’d been wandering around down here for nearly twenty minutes without coming across anything. Now, out of the blue, whimpering draws them toward a specific room. If Sawyer had been trying to set up an ambush, this was exactly how he’d do it.
They approached the room carefully, Harley and Erin in the lead, Caleb covering the rear, while Sawyer stayed focused on the corridor ahead of them. If someone was going to attack them, it could come from anywhere.
Harley gasped as she stepped through the doorway. Sawyer quickly followed her and Erin in to find a long narrow room lined with a series of holding cells along both walls. Thick bars ran from floor to ceiling of each, more than twice what you’d expect to find in a normal prison. The lock plate on each door looked equally strong.
The place was intended to hold some extremely powerful prisoners.
Harley ran past the cells that were empty, stopping when she reached the very last one at the far end of the room. Sawyer kept his attention focused on the pitch-black hallway beyond the cell as Erin followed, more leery of an ambush than ever. Caleb was still out there keeping watch as well.
“Bollocks,” Erin muttered, looking through the bars of a cell across the way from the one Harley stood in front of, eyes wide. “There’s a little kid in here. She barely looks alive.”
Another pitiful groan filled the room.
“There’s a boy in this one who can’t be more then twelve years old,” Harley said, not taking her eyes off the cell. “He’s hurt.”
Shit.
Sawyer’s heart thumped even faster as he sniffed the air urgently. Two kids left behind in locked cells, injured, weak, and in pain. They were bait.
This was a trap.
It had to be.
“Jake, we have two injured captives on our end—both kids,” he said into the radio as Harley, Caleb, and Erin frantically searched the room for keys to the cell doors. “It’s possible they were too much trouble to deal with and were left behind, but I don’t think so.”
Sawyer was waiting for a reply when the floor and walls started shaking around them, almost knocking him off his feet. He hadn’t even recovered from that when a low rumbling sound echoed in the air, the scent of smoke and dust filling his nose.
“What the bloody hell was that?” Erin shouted, her handgun out and swinging in different directions as she tried to figure out where the threat was coming from.
Sawyer didn’t answer. He was too busy trying to interpret the shouts and loud noises coming through his earbud.
“They blew a section of the ceiling!” Jake shouted, only to be interrupted by the sounds of gunfire. “They damn near brought it down on our heads, then opened up on us with automatic weapons before we even knew what was happening. Another second or two and we would have been under the rubble instead of trapped on this side of it. We’ll deal with them and find another way to get to you. I think they dropped the ceiling to separate us, so watch yourselves.”