It was almost comical seeing the much smaller, almost frail-looking vita preparing to fight the mountain of a man that was Kyson. His friend easily outweighed her by at least a hundred and fifty pounds. Then the pale-skinned creature backhanded Kyson across the room, bouncing him off the metal rack he’d broken loose from, and Trey realized the fight might be as lopsided as he’d thought, but in the opposite direction.
Trey continued his shift, the process made more complicated by the shackles and straps confining him to the table. A wide-eyed Rogi came running toward him, remote in hand. Skidding to a stop beside the table, he grabbed a scalpel from the tray and stabbed Trey in the chest over and over with the blade.
“Stop it!” Louis shouted. “You’ll ruin the resurrection process!”
Rogi ignored him. Apparently, he couldn’t give a shit about the boy and his resurrection.
So distracted in his desire to stab Trey, Rogi seemed to have forgotten the remote in his hand. Trey wasn’t complaining. The razor-sharp scalpel struck multiple times and hurt like hell, even though the agony of the electrical current was still rippling through him.
Once the shift had gone far enough, Trey was able to get a paw loose from one of the shackles. That freed him up enough to lunge forward. Rogi assumed Trey was going for his neck and threw up his hands to defend himself. Not going to turn down the target Rogi gave him, Trey sank his mostly formed fangs into the man’s left arm. The resulting crunch and cry of pain was intensely satisfying—almost as good as watching the remote hit the floor and bounce away.
With Rogi slashing away at him, Samantha and Shaylee shouting in the background, and Kyson fighting with Nadia, it was damn near impossible to stay calm enough to focus on finishing the shift. Taking wolf form had never come easily for Trey, which was why he’d only done it with his pack mates around to help. Listening to your own bones shatter and then knit back together in a completely different shape was terrifying. Getting through it meant relaxing and letting it happen. And no, he wasn’t exactly relaxed right now.
He was still fighting both the restraints and Rogi, barely avoiding a scalpel blade in the eye, when Louis showed up. The doctor threw his weight on top of Trey, trying to get his paw back under the shackle while attempting to reattach the catheters that were somehow still stuck in Trey’s now partially shifted leg.
“Jamison could die if the resurrection process isn’t finished properly,” Louis ground out as if he thought that would keep Trey from trying to save himself.
Trey planted his free paw in the doctor’s chest and shoved him away, propelling him halfway across the basement and bouncing the man off the glass case holding his struggling son. Jamison reached out and grabbed at his father, electricity continuing to sparkle across his goo-covered skin. Louis successfully shook off his son’s grip, making the glass tank rock. The liquid inside sloshed dangerously as Jamison grabbed onto his father’s lab coat.
Louis’s knees gave way and he collapsed to the floor, dragging his son out of the tank, red liquid splashing everywhere. Jamison’s cries of pain as he hit the floor made Trey’s stomach twist into knots. But for reasons Trey didn’t even attempt to understand, Jamison quickly jumped up and began to fight against his father, punching him.
Kyson suddenly came flying over the table, almost crushing Rogi in the process. Kyson bounced and slid across the floor, but immediately jumped to his feet, throwing himself right back into the fight with the vita. The battle was pure violence and rage, hisses and shouts filling the air and reverberating off the stone walls of the basement. Kyson and Nadia were both covered in blood, but they both healed as fast as the other tore them apart. Several times, he saw Nadia try to get her hands on his friend, probably to try to suck the life from his body. But every time she got that close, Kyson smashed the creature aside with one of his fists.
Trey was so worried about Kyson that he missed Rogi charging at him again. Trey didn’t even have a chance to move before the jackass slammed the scalpel into Trey’s chest, wedging the thin blade between two of his ribs before it snapped off. The pain was beyond description, but at least it gave him something to focus on besides the insanity all around him.
He used that focus to complete the shift, sliding out from under the leather straps before tumbling off the table and onto the concrete floor. The fall ripped out the catheters and remaining electrodes, ending those sources of pain at least. He was on his four paws immediately, off balance and unsteady, weak from blood loss, the electric shocks, and lack of practice. He looked around to figure out if he should help Kyson, try to free Samantha and Shaylee, or take down Rogi.
Kyson seemed to be holding his own, and even as much as Trey’s instincts screamed at him to go to his soul mate, he knew he’d never get through the lock of the cage in his present form. It was the sight of Rogi scrambling for the remote, obviously realizing it was the only thing that would keep him safe from Trey’s fangs and claws, that ultimately made the decision for him.
He launched himself at the man, reaching Rogi just as he found the remote under a bench full of surgery equipment. Trey dragged him out by his left leg, chomping down on his hand with the remote before he could push the button. Rogi dropped it with another whimper, the plastic device shattering into half a dozen pieces on impact with the floor.
Rogi jerked away, ignoring his damaged arm, and grabbed up the first weapon he could reach—a long surgical drill bit at least six inches. He plunged it into Trey’s shoulder. Rogi didn’t pause to see the results of his handiwork but, instead, turned and ran for the door at the end of the basement and the stairs beyond, shoving his way between Louis and Jamison in his effort to get way.
Louis stumbled backward, aided by a shove from his son, who barely seemed to be acting human at this point. The wounds that had been covering the kid’s body were only partially healed, but it was difficult to make out the fresh blood from all the red goo drying on his skin. But it was Jamison’s eyes—spread wide and filled with hatred and pain—that caught Trey’s attention. Hatred and pain that were aimed straight at his father.
Louis sailed through the air, falling into the rack of electrical gear along the back wall. His eyes widened as sparks erupted all around him. A split second later, he exploded in flames. Louis screamed, scrambling away to escape the pain, but he fell to his knees in front of the tank that had recently held his dead son. The fire spread quickly upon coming into contact with the red goo and the tank exploded, sending glass everywhere. Flames leaped up Jamison’s legs, sending him rolling across the concrete to the far wall, wailing in even greater pain than he had before.
Trey’s fur began to curl from the intense heat, and it struck him then how insane it was for Louis to have preserved his son in a vat of flammable liquid for almost three years.
Smoke filled the basement, flames racing up the heavy wooden columns and across the ceiling. Kyson roared in, his friend’s eyes filled with panic. Since getting burned in Afghanistan, Kyson had been deathly afraid of fire. Now that fear had left him paralyzed, cringing back against the wall even as the vita charged at him again.