“No, I think we just missed her. She’s been moved from this room.” My words shook.
I reached up and wiped at my mouth a few times. I could still taste the sickness there.
Brace handed me a canvas-type bottle of water. He had a few of these skins stashed in his army pants. I quickly rinsed my mouth and spat. I sucked in a ragged breath, but I seemed to already be dealing better now. Compartmentalizing my emotions and trying to focus on our task.
My eyes scanned the space again, skipping over the multitude of mutilated bodies. I was pretending they were not there. We were in some sort of building. Not particularly large, but there were reflective surfaces surrounding us on all sides. Like mirrors, only a little different. The setup was odd. It reminded me of the interrogation rooms that used to be in those old cop shows we’d watched before television bit the dust. But this room was on a much larger scale. Could it be an interrogation warehouse?
Even though I was trying not to focus on the girls I still saw the blood pooling under cut throats, not to mention the multitude of bruises and lacerations. I had to harden my heart, because I couldn’t help these girls any longer. But I silently promised each of them that if I found out who had done this, those humans would suffer.
For now, my half-Walker wasn’t in this room. It was time to follow the tether. Here’s hoping it led me not only to her, but also to the animals responsible for this mess.
I didn’t speak as I started to follow the cord, my boots squishing into grime and fluids as I stepped through the bodies. The floor was heavy with blood, the liquid now congealed and the bodies cold.
The girls had been dead for some time, but my half-Walker had only recently left the room. Had she been stuck in this room with all this death? Or was there some other reason that this was the place my tether had brought me? The golden cord was very strong now, with just a slight transparency. We were heading in the right direction.
Lucy’s wide blue eyes were shimmery and rimmed in red. A sprinkling of tears littered their multi-colored depths, and I could tell she was fighting to control her emotions.
Colton and Brace’s faces were hard to read as they followed behind me. Well, actually, if carved-from-stone and ready-to-kill-anything-that-moved was an expression, then that was the one they wore. I could imagine them tearing through the gangers without a second thought.
I wondered then what hardness was currently in my features. There was no denying that I had lost little pieces of my innocence over the course of the past year. I was almost nineteen, but it felt as if it was a hundred years since I had stepped through Quarn’s shimmery portal on Earth.
The cord led us to a gray and white brick wall. Like those thick, reinforced-style bricks. I reached forward to rest my hands against the solid structure. How were we supposed to get through here?
“Stand back.” Brace’s voice was a bite of steel. Cold and cutting.
Colton shuffled Lucy and me behind him, the three of us moving a few feet from the wall. I watched from beneath Colton’s arm. I expected Brace to throw an energy ball or something at the wall, but instead he simply cocked back his arm and, with the force of a sledgehammer, slammed his fist into the structure. Noise and dust exploded around us. When my vision finally cleared, and I saw what he’d done, my jaw pretty much fell to the floor. With one punch he’d leveled the entire wall, leaving a six-foot high and four-foot wide gap in it.
“Note to self – do not spar with Brace.” Lucy looked impressed as she followed my mate across the gap and into the other side.
Colton snorted. “I could have done that too, little pixie. He just beat me to it.”
Lucy patted his arm – which was as strong and nicely muscled as Brace’s. “I know, wolf, I know.”
Even after punching down a wall, my mate didn’t look any happier. And I totally got that. The images of those females continued pounding through my head, and the fact that we shared a bond and mental connections was not making it any easier to forget. We were bouncing our anger off each other, and this was not allowing any of it to leave our systems.
Bring on the gangers. Finding them would definitely help with releasing more of my pissed-offness.
The tether didn’t seem to care about walls or buildings which lay in its path, simply sending me along the shortest route to my girl. Luckily, though, the next time we hit a wall, there was doorway which led into a long hall.