Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
“Out for a stroll in the woods.”
“Apex—”
Closing his eyes, he dematerialized into the field of battle, re-forming behind the only guard who’d stayed in the same position. The rest of them moved around, shifting from tree to boulder to tree. Not this guy.
Mr. Static was either shitting his pants at his first combat experience. Or he was wounded. Or maybe he just liked the view.
In any event, Apex was on him before the bastard knew it, a sharp blade opening a barn door in his carotid artery while at the same time leaving his windpipe nonfunctional. No more high or low notes for him.
Catching the body when it started to slump, Apex laid it on the ground, stripped the weapons, and waited.
Three…
Two…
One—
Another guard was in a forward position about twenty feet over. Leveling the muzzle of the handgun he’d just taken, Apex waited for the flash after the other trigger was pulled—and then he discharged a bullet of his own at the target that revealed itself: There was a strangled yell, and then the oh-so-lovely sound of a sack of potatoes hitting the ground.
With a quick check of the magazine, he confirmed he had seven bullets in the chamber. Not enough. Keeping his eyes on what was in front of him, he patted down the bled-out guard, feeling the body heat still radiating from the torso, and he found—
“Toss the weapon and hands up or I shoot you in the head.”
Apex cursed and considered trying to dematerialize. Until he felt the precise circle of a gun muzzle on the back of his skull.
“I’m waiting,” the guard snapped.
As Apex pitched the handgun, the loss of ammo stung just as much as the loss of the weapon itself, and then he put his palms up in classic stickup fashion. The clink of handcuffs was a musical sound, and he felt his right wrist get taken in a rough hold and cuffed with steel. But he didn’t care about that. He was waiting for the spin-around.
Because, really, somebody needed to welcome the sonofabitch with a head butt.
The second his body was sent for a little turn, he—
The gun was shoved right into his face, with such force it bent his nose. The guard was not one he recognized, but then it wasn’t like he’d gone to a cocktail party with any of the fuckers.
“If you make me shoot you right now, prisoner, you won’t know whether your friends made it out of here alive.”
Well, guess that was why the bastard was taking his time with that left-wrist thing.
As the guard nodded a signal, there was a rustling from behind the boulders, and as Apex glanced to the sound, he saw Mayhem and Rio being marched out of that foxhole behind Callum’s little pool party location. There was a pair of guards with them.
Lucan was being dragged by his arms and appeared to be unconscious.
“You fuck around with me,” the guard said, “I will order all three of them shot. Right here and now.”
Apex cursed in his head. Yes, they’d been outnumbered, but goddamn it. And it went without saying that they were being taken back to the camp and would be used as examples of what not to do.
Those pegs on that stained wall were going to have a new set of body weights to hold in place.
“Let’s move them out,” the guard said. “Do we have the all-clear—”
As the question was cut off, Apex didn’t pay attention. He was too busy running probabilities on escape ideas—and calculating how many coffins were likely to be required with each scenario.
And then he realized the gun being pointed at him was gone. So was its guard.
Apex looked down.
Well. This was unexpected. The male in the uniform appeared to have spontaneously ruptured his entire throat: Glossy red blood was everywhere.
The question was who had done the handiwork with the knife.
The two guards who had daisy-chained Mayhem and Rio started shouting, and it was with a feeling of total unreality that Apex watched as something came out of the darkness and went for their throats.
It was not a vampire, that was for sure. It was more like a tree trunk that had suddenly taken on a life of its own, moving with a sinewy grace. Attacking with deadly accuracy.
The mountain itself defending her own.
Both of the guards dropped to the ground, one after the other.
And then Rio threw herself over Lucan, putting up her handcuffed wrists like she was prepared to use them as battering rams to protect him.
She was clearly far more scared of whatever was roaming around the darkness than of the guards and the prospect of being taken back to the prison camp and tortured to death.
What the hell was out there?
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
For Callum, the descent to his garage at the base of the elevation was lightning fast. Even though his wolven side wanted to run, he dematerialized to the supply hideout, and the second he arrived, he went down to the gun closet. After draping himself in bullet delivery devices of various calibers, he accessorized with enough ammo to wage a siege on a military installation.