He dressed, then sat and waited. It felt like hours passed, but it was probably less than half of one when a cheery robotic feminine voice in the ceiling said: “Number 5856, Please prepare to exit your cell for daily exercise.”
“Noah,” he whispered under his breath.
He looked at the numbered tattoo on his upper arm. It was the same place his dad’s alpha tattoo was. Just more insult added to injury. When he busted out of this shit hole, he’d get it tattooed over with something closer to what Cole had. Each day when he heard 5856, he whispered “Noah” so he wouldn’t forget. After twenty years in captivity, they’d already made him forget his last name. He couldn’t allow the same to happen with his first.
The glass door slid open with a whoosh, and a gust of cool canned air hit him in the face, filling him with a sense of wellness and happiness. But Noah wasn’t fooled. It was the stuff they put in the air conditioning to keep everybody calm. He was sure the humans in the main city were getting dosed with it as well to keep everyone docile and obedient.
For all he knew it actually worked on them. He wasn’t sure if it worked on the other preternatural prisoners, but no matter what Noah’s emotional side said, the cool, logical part of him wasn’t buying into it.
He barely remembered the machinations of the vampire king when he’d been building up his police state before the magic users had started taking over. But if Anthony could see this? He’d get a hard on. The humans had proven to be more diabolical than vampires. And that was saying something. Congrats, humans!
He filed out with the other numbered therian prisoners into the hallway. The cell next to his, 5857, was empty tonight. It wasn’t the first time a prisoner had disappeared and never returned. Noah tried not to think about it.
“Please follow the glowing arrows to the exercise yard, and remember to play nice with your friends.”
Noah hid the eye-roll. It would do him no favors for the cameras to catch a whiff of rebellion. He moved quietly with the inmates from nearby cells down the seemingly never-ending hallway. Another door slid open that took them into the exercise yard, which was a giant balcony instead of a real yard.
Even so, out here he could feel the moon on his face. He hadn’t seen the sun in more years than he could count because his group was mixed in with vampires now. But it only made him think of Sydney and how she’d never seen the sun.
Noah’s complexion was naturally dark, so at least he didn’t look too sickly. But he still missed the sunlight.
Someday.
Somehow in everything he’d lost, he’d managed to retain the memory of the date of his birth. Occasionally, he asked one of the guards what day it was. He’d been keeping up with the year as well. It wouldn’t be long now.
His twenty-eigth birthday had just passed. The next full moon he would reach his full power. If there was any chance at all, it would be on that night.
He’d forgotten about the twenty-eighth birth moon. But one day in a dream after he’d eaten the drugged meat, Aunt Greta of all people had shown up, telling him the harrowing story of what her twenty-eighth birth moon had been like.
It could have just been a dream, but when he woke, he remembered. Aunt Greta wasn’t mated in the same way his kind or the demons or vampires were mated, but she lived with a man who was much the same as a mate, a sorcerer named Dayne. Had he somehow made it possible for the werecat to deliver the message? Or was it a coincidence—his own subconscious reminding him that there might be a way to escape this place after all?
Was somebody out there still hoping and believing Noah was alive? He wanted to believe they hadn’t given up on him.
In the early years, he’d only been a child. The idea of escape had seemed like a lofty dream. It was a comforting story he told himself to fall asleep, and then, once asleep, it became more real and played out in vivid color.
But each day when he woke, it became the impossible feat once again. These people were powerful. They’d created a fortress of their city that no preternatural could get inside, and a fortress of their prisons that no preternatural could get out of.
As he’d grown older and wiser, he’d begun to see the cracks in their security, the way they believed too much in the stuff they sent in with the canned air, the drugs they gave them, the cheery robotic voice that worked daily to brainwash a bit more of their soul away.
Noah wouldn’t let them succeed. He thought about his parents, about Aunt Greta, about Sydney. He trained his mind daily to stay stronger than his captors even if he seemed obedient, even if it seemed he would never attempt escape because he never had before.
“Please remember, keep fraternizing to a minimum while in the fitness yard,” the cheerful robotic voice said over loud speakers. The speakers sat atop very tall fences crowned with barbed wire.
Noah didn’t have to shift yet under the moon, but when it was full, he wouldn’t have much of a choice—particularly on his twenty-eighth birth moon. One would think if it was the night he’d reach the height of his power that he’d be able to control the shift when under the moon, but it didn’t quite work that way. The moon overwhelmed most of them, even the strongest, unless they’d just fed.
He ran laps around the yard. They didn’t have to tell him not to fraternize. Others would betray you when it would save their own neck or when it most suited them. If you told someone your thoughts or feelings or plans, they were out there. And in a place like this, that was bad. He wouldn’t speak to anyone, and was only grateful that as a werewolf, nobody could force their way inside his mind.
They watched all therian interactions closely. But they didn’t worry about Noah and had long ago figured out that he wasn’t about to form any tight bonds. In their minds, it probably meant he’d succumbed to his fate—accepted it so he wasn’t a threat to them. In his own it meant he didn’t have to worry about busting anybody else out to take with him.
He wouldn’t allow himself to get attached. To any of them. He’d have one shot, and friends would only be dead weight.
Sydney sat in the passenger side while Jacob drove. She still wished she could have left him at the compound, but he was a dead man either way he went: coming out here into the wild with her or staying behind.
It was only a matter of which way he wanted to die, and he seemed to have chosen with Sydney. If it might be any consolation to the human driving the old-fashioned truck, she’d be killed right along with him. He was stronger than her, and a better fighter. So if he died, she did. Unless she accidentally drained him first.
When the humans had reinforced the cities against the preternaturals, they’d used magic to find new technologies and then blended the two into an almost seamless whole. Suddenly they had no need or use for fossil fuels. Nobody cared about them anymore. Oil fields had been abandoned all over the world.
The remaining preternaturals had taken it upon themselves to gain control of them because some might need to travel long distances using vehicles left behind. Automobile companies outside the major cities were taken over as well, creating a slow but steady trickle of new vehicles to replace the old ones that wore out.
The truck Sydney and Jacob were in was an old green beater that had managed to last over twenty years, which made it dinosaur-old in car age. It had been well cared for, even if the sides of it were rusting. Jacob had found it pretty easily at an abandoned service station in the middle of Cary Town—a service station that some intrepid rebel had made a gasoline delivery to.