“Oh, touchy subject? Sorry. Maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe you like all the fancy gadgets on your gun because of how small your dick is.”
“Secret,” Desmond hissed. “Is that really the best plan?”
“Probably not, but this might be.” I lifted my pistol and fired one round right between the sniper’s eyes. With his attention more focused on snarling at me, he’d looked away from the sight to trade barbs. Amateur move. If you can’t be sarcastic and fire a weapon at the same time, you’re not ready for one-liners.
The rifle plummeted from the loft with a rain of hay, and I holstered my gun and tossed my sword to Holden, ducking into a roll so I landed beneath the weapon right before it hit the floor.
I raised the rifle and took aim at the smallest group I could easily find.
For all my teasing about lasers and scopes, the honest-to-God truth was it made it a cakewalk for me to take down four of the six men at the front of the barn. The rest stood shocked for a moment as the body of the sniper fell from the loft, crunching onto the concrete floor beside me, and the men around them began to crumple where they stood.
Once they realized the kill floor was suddenly a shooting gallery, they scattered.
“Keep the wolves alive,” I instructed. “Everyone else is fair game.”
Holden gave the sword in his hand a perplexed look, then darted forward with a lightning-fast speed, quickly severing one running man’s head. The dude’s lower body kept going, so his head ended up on the floor ten feet behind his corpse.
Desmond fired a shotgun blast into the large group who had come through the back door. He was targeting the men on the outside edges to avoid the pair of Mercy’s lackeys who were holding Ben and Fairfax. Still, the shotgun was an imprecise weapon at best, and pellets were flying everywhere, pinging loudly off the metal bars of the pig stalls. I swung the rifle back around and targeted a man running towards a tack room on the far side of the barn. One shot to the head and he changed direction, smacking into a wall before collapsing into a heap on the floor. The rifle’s bullets could be silver—that was a consideration Mercy might make—but it didn’t matter. A headshot will take most things down in a way they won’t get up from.
A pair of her men near the front stopped running, and one lifted his hands up in a pathetic gesture of surrender. Part of me wanted to take the easy kill, but I couldn’t. It might have become simple for me to end lives, something I’d struggled with in the past, but I hadn’t reached the point where I could off someone who was giving up.
Another blast from the shotgun echoed behind me, and from overhead a man screamed, tumbling to the floor where he landed on his neck with a sickening thwack.
I glanced up to discover Holden had found a way into the loft and was dispatching the men up there. Gunfire sounded, but I couldn’t stop to worry about the vampire because Desmond’s suggestion of the men having backup had apparently been accurate. Every man we took down seemed to be replaced instantly, making it feel as if we were barely putting a dent in their numbers.
“Where the hell did she find a goddamn army of gullible idiots?” I asked to no one in particular.
Mercy had been known to convince people to follow her asinine path in the past, but this was different. She hadn’t had this kind of firepower at her disposal since she’d bedded down with Marcus Sullivan in his insane power play for Lucas’s throne. That was how she and Peyton had come to be acquainted, as well.
There was no chance Marcus was involved in helping her recruitment campaign because he was good and dead. Peyton, too, had been crossed off Mercy’s list of allies by my discriminating red pen.
But he might have helped her before I killed him. He was the most likely candidate for getting the werewolf drug to her. Was there a chance he had hooked Mercy up with Arturo? I hadn’t given up on my notion that the West Coast Tribunal Leader was the rat in the henhouse.
Was that why Sutherland had been targeted? Did his death factor into Mercy’s plan, or was that all coincidence?
I thought of what I knew about Mercy McQueen and tried to suss out what her motivations might be. Thi
s proved to be more difficult than it might be normally because I was trying to make perfect headshots as I did it.
I used to believe it was her heartbreak over losing Sutherland that made her hate me. She’d lost the love of her life because of me—or so she believed. And I’d stolen another lover from her when I killed Marcus. She’d never forgiven me for either, and it fed into her hatred. Fine. But then it wouldn’t make sense for her to want Sutherland dead, if he truly was her beloved.
Unless she wanted that version of him dead.
And my mother wasn’t exactly the queen of sensible thinking. Hadn’t she dosed Ben—her own son—with a drug to turn him into a thoughtless killing machine?
Did she love any of her children?
I became distantly aware of a pain in my midsection, but I ignored it and continued to fire at the reinforcements.
“Keep the girl alive,” Mercy’s voice boomed through the speakers. “Can’t you fools do anything right? The men are fair game, but the girl is mine.”
I took aim at another man who was racing towards me, and pulled the trigger. It should have misted his head, but the click sound was that of the chamber coming up empty.
“Shit.” I reached for my SIG and was thankful I hadn’t bothered to reactivate the safety.
The guy knocked me off my feet, sending us both to the floor, where we slid a good two or three feet before slamming into the big butcher’s table in the middle of the room. Beside me the metal bars of the cage hummed from all the vibrations in the air.
He grabbed me by my hair and lifted my head, bringing it up then smashing it hard into the concrete. My vision blanked, and a groggy, drunk feeling overtook my mind. I struggled to remember what it was I was doing before he’d concussed me.