I tug my hoodie closer around me. “I told you—I’ve gotten into fights. And not with those guys. I go to martial arts classes. Sometimes things get kind of rough in the sparring.”
That seems like a reasonable explanation, but Brooke’s expression stays skeptical. “Like I said, I understand if you don’t want to talk about it. As long as you remember I’m here if you change your mind.”
I wet my lips and stiffen against a wave of dizziness. Shit.
I wish I’d gotten Dominic to heal me up during the drive. She’s really going to freak out if I start swaying around like I did at the club.
“I swear,” I say, “I can see how it might look bad, but it’s really—”
My deflection is cut off by the bang of the back door slamming open and a flurry of bodies springing out of the shadows from all around us.
I yelp and instinctively dive for cover behind our patio’s planter. All four of my guys are barging out of the house—and at least a dozen black-clothed figures have burst from the darkness down the alley and between the other buildings.
In the first couple of seconds as my pulse stutters and my mind scrambles to make sense of the scene, I register the black helmets that cover all but the intruders’ eyes and a slat around their jaws. Just like the helmets the guardians wore in the facility, only painted for stealth.
Our jailers have found us.
A startled gasp bursts from Brooke’s lips, and one of the armored figures lunges straight at her.
Panic flashes through me. I leap back over the planter, hurling myself between my unexpected friend and her attacker with my claws flicking from my fingers—
But my weakened muscles react too sluggishly. I lash out a foot shy of the incoming guardian, who barrels straight into Brooke before she can emit a full-out scream and stabs a curved blade into her neck.
Her voice cuts out with a gurgle. Blood gushes down her fuzzy sweater and splatters the ground I’ve just fallen to.
A cry of protest tears up my throat.
No. No. She didn’t do anything—she was just standing there—she barely had anything to do with us.
The guardian shoves Brooke’s body away, and it topples over like a puppet cut off its strings. Every nerve in my body clamors to snatch her up, to drag her away from these menaces as if there’s any way to keep her safe now, but her attacker is already spinning toward me.
I spring backward, falling into a defensive crouch. My heartbeat thunders behind my ears, but not loud enough to drown out the smacks and grunts careening from the patio.
The man whips up an odd-looking gun. I hurl myself to the side just in time to avoid a dart that clatters off the brick wall behind me.
They’re trying to tranquilize us. Of course.
The bastards don’t wantusdead, only back under their control.
I can’t let the brute I’m facing off with get another shot at me—I have no idea how badly the drugs in those darts will react with the toxin already in my veins. I roll to the side, leap off the wall, and ricochet straight toward him.
As I crash into him, an electric crackle sounds from where he’s tried to pull some kind of taser-like device from his pocket. But it’s his own thigh that spasms with the electric jolt, and then I’m gouging out his throat like he did to Brooke, the closest thing I can get to poetic payback.
Fury sears through my chest. He won’t hurt anyone else who didn’t deserve it now.
My gaze passes over her slumped, bloody form, and anguish floods me in turn.
Fucking damn it. If I’d just made it to him faster…
Another figure sprints toward me. I jerk around to defend myself, but before I need to, an invisible force wrenches him off his feet. It smashes his helmet against the corner of the neighboring townhouse, the metal denting right into the man’s skull.
Jacob is standing by the planters, his face rigid with concentration, his hands slashing through the air as he directs his talent. He flings another guardian against an electrical post hard enough that the crack of a spine echoes through the air. Then he yanks another that’s gotten too close right toward him—impaling him on the purple spines now jutting from his forearms.
The victim of his full dose of poison twitches like a fish flopping on a dock, spittle spewing from her lips before she collapses.
A massive form charges forward, so familiar and alien at the same time that my mind jars as it tries to process what I’m seeing.
It’s Zian, and yet it’s not—not any version of him I’ve ever seen before. Coarse, dark fur has sprouted from his peachy golden skin all across his shoulders and down his arms to where his own vicious claws protrude from his fingertips. His face is partly human but partly beastly, a stunted, wrinkled snout protruding where his nose and mouth used to be, huge fangs protruding over his wolfish jowls.