Just as he lit up, Apex barreled into the den, looking like he was prepared to break up a bar fight—or a glory hole.
“Shut up,” Callum growled. “And he just left. We’ve got to go get him. Here.”
He tossed over something that spit out bullets. Who the fuck knew what it was. Then he took a couple guns for himself and prayed that what he grabbed in the way of extra ammo fit anything either of them had.
Stalking past the vampire, he knew he should have dematerialized right away, but he couldn’t concentrate. He needed some fresh air, along with the nicotine.
And as he rounded the cave’s passageway, he thought… he was going to lock up those fucking guns as soon as he got through what was left of this night.
Assuming he made it through, that was.
What thehellhad the Gray Wolf brought back.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Kane re-formed for the third time in a row, it was into a thicket of undergrowth, the vines and bushes clawing at the someone-else’s-pants he had on as his body once again became corporeal. Breathing in through his nose, he—
“Finally.”
Setting off in a northeasterly direction, he followed the scent of concrete, rot, and vampire, and with his target identified, he moved with a deadly purpose, crushing the weeds under the boots he’d borrowed, shoving branches out of his way instead of moving around them. As he went along, he had the strangest sense of bifurcation, as if he were watching himself from a distance even though it was his own legs churning, his own heart pumping, his own eyes scanning the environment for threats.
In the back of his mind, he knew something wasn’t right. But he kept going because he couldn’t worry about—
Dearest Virgin Scribe, he hoped he ran into guards.
With the thought occurring to him, he felt his fists curl up and his shoulders flex. The urge to fight was so natural, it didn’t even dawn onhim that he had never before, not once, looked for conflict in anything. Especially of the physical kind.
If only he had felt like this the night Cordelhia had died.
“Focus,” he muttered as his head whipped to the left.
There was nothing but shadows that didn’t move, the ambient light of the night sky neither highlighting nor obscuring anything.
His other attempts to get downwind of the prison camp’s new location had been an inefficiency he’d had to tolerate. He hadn’t been conscious enough to track the location as he’d been driven away from the abandoned hospital, and walking directly up the road they’d escaped on was just volunteering for a bullet to the chest. The best he could do was triangulate through this scruffy forest of—
His head jerked to the left again, his instincts firing for a second time. He had the gun tucked into the waistband of the wolven’s pants, even though there was every reason for him to have it at the ready because if he was going to fight something, he wanted it to be close, and very much in person—
The wind changed direction and that was when he caught the scents of Apex and the wolven. They were on the property, but they were not near him, and that was fine.
Better that they stayed away.
The chain-link fence appeared about thirty feet later, and instead of dematerializing through it, he took some running strides and jumped onto the links, clawing a hold into them, yanking his body up. He made no attempt to be quiet about the ascent, the metal-on-metal clanging the kind of thing that surely functioned as an alarm.
Up and over, dropping down, landing on the boots in a crouch.
Now he took out the gun. This urge to punch and kick was all well and good, but not if it got him killed before he found Nadya.
The weight of the weapon was heavy in his hand, and he glanced down. “Magnum.”
The word came out of him, even though he had never seen a gun like this before.
“Callum.”
That was the name of that male with the white hair and the blue eyes. But how did he know this? He hadn’t read the wolven’s mind. Had he heard it spoken by somebody? Or was he phasing in and out of amnesia?
Now was not the time for this.
Jogging forward, he kept low and his eyes began to move in a pattern he recognized only because he didn’t control it any more than he did his arms and legs. His body, and all its components seemed like… something that had been aimed at the camp.