Witch Interrupted (34 page)

She’d heard it before—Lars was the most fanatical purist she’d ever met. In the larger coven network, it was considered backward to maintain such a belief, and on the council, many keepers had simply wished to do their jobs.

At least some of Lars’s ranting seemed to be news to his team. Their increasing unease, evidenced by shifting weight, downcast eyes, hunched shoulders and frowns, was obvious to her.

How could they not have known about his extremism? She knew. Marcus knew. Or was the team’s discomfort more about his other disclosures?

Lars seemed to sense his team’s reaction too, because he addressed them next, the herbal bomb held aloft like a sorcerer’s crystal ball. “Look at her. I told you how impure she was, and now you can see. She fucked her way into Harrower’s inner circle and nearly destroyed the council. Everything we stand for. Everything we stand against. She is a traitor. A mongrel abettor. It’s our duty to make sure she gets what she deserves. Such treachery cannot be tolerated.”

Lars’s motives shouldn’t matter to her. If he hadn’t tried to assassinate her, she might never have fled the council. Why be upset about the act that had inspired her to escape her despised existence? Especially not if she could use it to confuse his team.

“Still ranting that purist claptrap?” she said to him. “You’re stuck in the Dark Ages. A keeper’s purpose is to protect the existence of all shifters, not just witches. Or did you forget our creed as well as our honor?”

He scoffed. “Get in the tank or I’ll shoot off your papa’s fingers one by one.”

The men restraining her father brought him to Lars and pressed him to his knees. One yanked up his arm. Lars stuck the herbs under his arm, took his gun out of the holster and made a show of cocking it and holding it to Zhang Li’s hand.

Shit. Fuck. Damn.
Katie reluctantly approached the ladder, keepers shoving and jostling her. Marcus growled and snarled like a chainsaw in the background. There were too many keepers, and they were too obedient…or too afraid. Lars’s fuming hadn’t fazed them enough.

She, Marcus and Dad had nothing. No weapons. No ideas.

No goddamn clothes.

“I will never hurt you, Katie,” Marcus said suddenly. “Don’t be frightened.”

Considering he had to realize she was furious, not frightened, it seemed like unusual advice.

“Shut the animal up,” Lars said.

One of Marcus’s guards punched him in the mouth. His dark head rocked back and straightened. Blood trickled down his chin. With his strength, if he wanted loose, he could get loose, but the keepers had monkshood.

He licked blood off his lip and smiled. “Lars is the one who’s terrified.”

Lars’s jaw worked. “Drop her into the tank before I get angry. We have other business to attend.”

The keepers prodded Katie up a few more rungs. This gave her leverage. She kicked the one closest to her, and he muttered, grabbing her leg. Yasmine took out a knife. She offered it to the man Katie had kicked.

He promptly jabbed her calf. Blood poured down her ankle.

Dammit!
Before he could cut her again, Katie climbed. The metal ladder was uncomfortably cold. Her father’s head bowed. He’d given up.

“Hiram is terrified,” Marcus declared. “I can smell him. His fear is like piss. And he’s dying. If the rest of you are hoping he’ll succumb to his illness soon, you haven’t long to wait.”

“Liar. I am not weak.”

“Most of all, Lars is terrified of me.”

“I’m not frightened of a degenerate wolf,” Lars raged instantly.

Instantly and…predictably?

“Do you know how many animals I’ve eviscerated?” He stormed toward Marcus, jerking the gun forward. “I’ll kill you now. We’ll find another beast to kill her. It will give me time to poke knives into her. Say goodbye, mongrel.”

“No,” Katie shouted. “He cured cancer.”

All eyes turned to her. She’d nearly reached the top of the ladder. The men above her, extending their arms to drag her up, froze.

“You have cancer, don’t you?” she said to Lars. He was third pass-through…but he shouldn’t have gone downhill so much he was jaundiced and gaunt. Her father looked better than Lars did. “Marcus cured it. If you kill him, the cure dies with him.”

“Katie, no,” Marcus exclaimed. “Why would you tell him? Let it die with me. He doesn’t deserve treatment.”

Lars shoved Marcus, and he allowed it. He slammed into a storage tank with a dull boom. The keepers closed on him. Several unsheathed weapons—assorted guns and blades.

She couldn’t let this happen. Goddess, what could she do?

Jump?

And then what?

“How did you do this thing?” Lars yelled into Marcus’s face. He slammed the butt of the gun across Marcus’s cheek. “You were incompetent. A puling coward. A soft, lazy fool. There is no conceivable way you cured cancer. Just like there’s no way she has a recipe to block poppy.”

Before Lars had become sick, he would have been taller than Marcus, but now, his body had broken down. It was pathetically obvious. The contrast between his scrawny, jaundiced form and Marcus’s vitality was almost painful to behold.

She hoped it pained Lars.

“Is it a spell? What is the recipe? How did you do it?” He gestured wildly with the gun. “Tell me the truth. I can make you tell me the truth.”

Marcus sighed. “I cured cancer. After I left the keepers, I constructed this lab. It was what I wanted to study all along. Not weapons. Not the berserker spell you cobbled together from my research. Healing was my goal. You know my sister had cancer when you—”

“I don’t care about your bleeding heart or some stupid mongrel whore. There is no cure. You’re lying like she lies. Trying to buy time.” Lars raised the gun.

But he’d gotten very close to Marcus while shouting and threatening.

Katie’s vision blurred. No, Marcus blurred. He blurred into motion and struck Lars.

Chaos erupted. Lars skidded across the ground, shrieking with rage. Guns fired. Bullets pinged off metal deep in the factory. Keepers ducked. She hugged the ladder while the keepers above her plastered themselves to the top of the tank.

Where was Marcus? Keepers pivoted, guns pointed. Several raised spell guns but hesitated to fire. Zhang Li crawled behind a piece of machinery.

Where was Marcus?

When she saw him, magnificent, triumphant, atop the other storage tank, she nearly cheered.

Until she noticed he didn’t have a gun. He had the stringy wad of berserker herbs.

What the hell?

Witch magic thundered through Marcus’s veins. A gun stopped one person at a time. If he could pull this off…

Desperate, he focused the cayenne magic, his magic, through the berserker bomb. He hadn’t had much time to study the components in the past week, but he knew how to activate them.

Power shattered through the herbs and into the surrounding area. The blast caught everyone present.

Every…single…soul.

He continued to pour magic into the spell. A wolf who was a witch. A witch who was a wolf. If the spell sucked up everything he had, if it evaporated the cayenne and ejected him from dual state forever, he didn’t care. He dredged up every smidgen of strength to drive the spell beyond what anyone could have imagined for it.

Anyone except him. Its creator.

Let this work. Let this work. Let this work.

When he heard the first agonized howl, he knew it had.

The howl resonated profoundly inside him. Rage, rage and need, gushed through him like it was gushing through the keepers.

Panting, he dropped to all fours. The rusted metal of the storage tank creaked under his weight. He should leap down…but not yet. Not until he could verify.

The spell was scattershot. Directionless. All-consuming. It was taking everyone. His vision misted with red. He stared through the haze at the people below as they convulsed and twisted, limbs contorting. Faces lengthened into muzzles with sharp, white teeth. Skin sprouted coarse, gray fur. Hands fisted, pads and claws emerged.

Before Marcus lost himself, he spotted two people unlike the others. Two people who weren’t transforming into their other halves, perhaps their better halves.

One was a woman on the ladder. A woman he loved so much he’d give everything he had to save her.

Alpha witch. Katie.

One was an old, sick man on the ground, screaming obscenities, fumbling in the bright, white spotlight for a gun, a spell pod, anything.

The old, sick man wasn’t Katie’s father. Zhang Li hunched over, enduring the wrath of the berserker magic.

Fucking Hiram Lars was alpha. That was Marcus’s last thought before his consciousness was overwhelmed by the magic.

* * *

It took Katie a stunned moment to absorb the scene. Marcus, amazing, incredible, inventive man, had funneled so much power into the berserker mix it broke the witch and wolf barrier. No one else could have done it—only him, with the cayenne burning up his lattices.

Wildness captured the other shifters and called forth the wolf inside them. Inside her too—but she experienced the magic as fury. Which might not be magic, because she was pretty fucking furious already. Her wolf stirred, as it did during sex with Marcus.

Her witch was stronger.

What would happen now? Was this a frying pan/fire situation or was this the miracle that would save them?

She had to act. Up the ladder or down? Two keepers above her whined and howled. Twenty below her writhed and tore at their clothing—including her poor father.

Would the berserker turn them all feral? Would they all try to kill her?

Movement of a different nature snagged Katie’s attention, and she spotted Lars. He was unchanged.

She’d once bemoaned that being the only convex alpha in existence meant nothing—but it would have meant a great deal right now. Too bad she’d been wrong. Lars, the other convex alpha in existence, pulled himself to his feet using a pipe bolted to the wall.

He saw her.

Shit.
Time to evade.

Katie scaled the ladder and tumbled over the edge onto the tank. The shifters on top were preoccupied by their transformation. Should she…

One lifted his head to glare at her with a beady, bloodshot eye. He shook off his clothing and started to rise. His patchy fur bubbled with the rapid shift. She’d never seen the change take someone so grotesquely. Wolf shifters were part of the natural world, and their magical abilities were no more deviant than what witches could do.

What she could do.

Hard to believe this magic wasn’t destructive when it appeared to be excruciating. But the convexity of the keepers hadn’t protected them. They were powerless against the berserker spell. All these witches had just become the creatures they despised—and they would vent their frustrations on any two-legger left standing.

The wolf who’d noticed her steadied himself on shaky legs. Froth decorated his wrinkled, snarling muzzle. Death gleamed in his eyes.

Praying she could move fast enough, she kicked. He gnashed his teeth, barely missing her leg, which was already bloody. Her second kick caught him in the hindquarters. He tumbled over the lip and off the tank. The other wolf, who hadn’t finished transforming, was easier to punt.

He yelped as he struck the ground.

Okay. Okay. Channel Chang Cai. Strategize. Fight.
She had a minute to plan. Wolves couldn’t climb ladders.

Except…

Gunfire. A bullet pinged off the access hole railing. Flakes of metal struck and cut her bare skin. Katie dropped to her stomach, protected from Lars’s gun by the angle. Chilly, deteriorating metal and rust scratched her stomach and legs. Her flesh goosebumped—fear, adrenaline, temperature. Across from her, on the second tank, Marcus crouched, snarling.

Was he…lost? Feral? Could she trust him yet?

Would he ever hurt her?

He saw her looking at him and barked, deep and throaty. Was that meant to be reassuring or a threat?

Not her primary concern. No wolf was as much of a threat as a lunatic with a gun.

“What have you done?” Lars screamed. “What is this perversion? I’ll tear you apart, you fucking animal. I’ll shoot you ten thousand times!”

Bullets peppered Marcus’s perch. He nimbly vaulted off the backside. Katie belly-crawled to the lip of her tank, where gaps had rusted through the rim, and peeked down.

Lars hobbled across the floor, kicking wolves. They whined. Cringed before him instead of attacking him. She scooched sideways to peer through the corroded holes. The closer Lars came to the tank, the worse his angle was for shooting her.

Unless, of course, the bullet blazed through the old metal. Or he hurled a spell bomb atop the tank. Calming mix. Sleep. Did he have anything besides monkshood?

Lars seethed. Yelled. Katie sensed the pressure of something urging her to hurl herself off the tank to her death. She started to submit but stopped herself before she was exposed to Lars’s sight.

His alpha had a wide-area impact like a spell bomb.

Although…if he could do it, could she?

Kill him
, she thought at the wolves.

Some growled. Hackles spiked. Lars lambasted them in earnest and cowed their rebellion quickly.

They were his pack. Slowly, emerging from their convulsions, squirming out of their clothes, they crept to their master. Their Sire. His influence curbed their reaction to the berserker. Heads low, they crouched around him. The wolf she thought was her father, who’d had white fur splashed across his muzzle, was nowhere in sight.

Insanity, rage, obsession—Katie had no idea which—consumed Lars. Spittle frothed on his chin as if he were rabid. His body shivered and trembled. He shot her tank a few more times before the hammer landed on an empty chamber.

Swearing, he hurled the gun at a small, dark wolf, who barked and ran. Three other wolves chased after it. Lars had no shortage of weaponry in his team’s discarded clothes. She wouldn’t be safe up here much longer.

She wouldn’t be safe down there at all.

The last time she’d been in this situation, she’d pitted the ferals against one another. That wouldn’t work. Lars was mostly in control of them, and the wolf lust she’d manipulated as a keeper was no longer generalized. She was in love with Marcus and wanted no other bed partner.

Her world crystallized into right here, right now.
Live through the next two minutes.
She needed weapons. The obvious ones were on the floor. Guns, spell pods, pipes, knives.

Wait.
Her foot encountered cloth. The first man’s pants. She rolled quickly to the garment, grabbed it and rolled back to the shielding lip of the tank. Patting the material, she pulled out spell pods, a knife and a cell phone.

“I’ll shoot you down like a fox in a spruce. You’re trapped, Chang Cai. You can’t whore your way out of this.” Lars monologued his intentions, probably hoping to intimidate her. Gunshots—two at a time—flicked the corroded metal around her. He had two pistols now, and he knew how to use them.

Lars was right. She was treed. Where were the eagles when you needed them?

Katie thrust her legs into the pants. Some covering was better than none. She cinched the belt tight. Knowing Lars couldn’t see her from the ground, she crawled to the far side.

Twenty feet. She could land that if she were careful. She slithered over the side and let herself dangle. The overlong pants draped past her toes. Three, two…

A chorus of growls stopped her. She glanced down. A heavy body smashed against the tank beneath her. Wolves barked, tails wagging, leaping for her legs. Metal groaned on impact. Lars might not have heard her scuffles, but the wolves could.

She curled herself out of their reach. Good damn thing she’d maintained a semblance of an exercise regimen. Otherwise she’d never have had the arm strength to manage this. She swung a leg up and over, wincing when jagged metal shredded her baggy jeans and the skin beneath.

“Is she trying to fly away?” Lars’s voice rounded the base of the storage tank. Katie clutched the knife and silently, silently, eased to the opposite side of the container. Why couldn’t the dudes on the tank have had guns? Grenades? She clutched the knife and inspected the pods.

One orange-red. Four white. Five green, five dark green, two yellow. Not much that could stop a convex keeper.

She sniffed the orange-red carefully, and her nose tingled from the cayenne-laced pepper bomb, a pod version of her cayenne spray.

What could she do with it? Not immobilize Lars, that was for sure. Would it work on wolves who’d been convex witches? Or would it refract off them and into the closest non-convex victims—her father and Marcus?

Where
was
Marcus?

The ladder poked past the rim of the tank. Aside from removing it to prevent Lars’s ascent, could she use it? Somehow? She shoved the pods into her pockets, the cayenne separate, and slithered toward the ladder. Bullets ricocheted through the storage area.

She flinched but kept inching along. Was Lars not bothering to aim? A wolf howled. Several yelped. Lars railed at her but had remained stationary. Why wasn’t he patrolling the bottom of the tank, looking for ways to hurt her? Perhaps he’d been injured when Marcus had shoved him.

Katie raised a cautious hand and placed it on the ladder. When Lars didn’t shoot her fingers, she grabbed the other side and eased it into the air. The cheap, aluminum weight of the ladder wasn’t unmanageable, but it clanked. Loudly.
Crap, crap, crap.
Growls and claw tics spread out on all sides of the tank. Surrounded.

Throwing caution to the wind, she rose to her haunches and hauled the hell out of the ladder until she had it atop the tank. Before she ducked, she turned.

Lars stood in the middle of the aisle, aiming at her with a hunting rifle.

She hit the deck.

Buckshot screeched through metal around her, ripping and tearing. A ball cracked off the aluminum ladder and then her scalp. Katie bit her lip, silent and motionless. The glancing blow—thank Goddess it was a glancing blow—stung like fire.

Lars would get lucky eventually….if she continued to wait here like a nice little target.

Maneuvering onto her back, she eyeballed the ceiling where the round spotlight shone on the turmoil. She hefted the keeper’s knife—it was weighted well, better than she’d hoped—held her breath and stood up really, really fast.

She needed clearance. As soon as she got it, she flung the knife at the light. Hard. Lars fired at her. Missed. The recoil pounded him back a step. She wasn’t sad that Lars, in his old age, seemed to have become a terrible shot.

She wasn’t old. Or a terrible shot. Her knife struck the spotlight dead on, smashed the glass and plunged the storage area into darkness.

Buckshot, too close. She launched herself to the other side of the tank. When she hit the surface, the metal beneath her crumpled. Her lower half burst through it.

Katie scrabbled for a hold as the weight of her legs dragged her into the holding tank—and whatever the hell was inside. Chemicals? Bugs? She’d hoped the darkness would help her dodge Lars, but right now she couldn’t see to stop her fall. Her flailing hand found purchase on the ladder. The whole thing trailed behind her several inches, screeching on rust and metal, before it snagged on something like a grappling iron.

She panted, heart racing, eyes adjusting. Diffuse light snaked into the storage area from the main section of the factory. The silver ladder was braced awkwardly between the lip of the tank and the access railing.

Luckily she didn’t weigh much. Before the rusted metal cut her in half, she tugged herself to safety. Painful scuffs decorated her bare upper half; she didn’t have to see it to feel the raw scrapes. Her leg wounds throbbed.
Hello, tetanus.

Lars had gotten his hands on pistols and shot blindly through the dark. As far as she could tell, no shots were coming close to her. Another wolf yelped. And another. Lars bellowed with rage.

Was he shooting the keeper wolves? She could only hope. He hated wolves with all-consuming passion. Which would win—his hatred of wolves or his hatred of her?

“Find me her father,” he ordered the wolves. That answered her question. “I’ll dismember him. That will bring her to me.”

Would the wolves do it? He’d been kicking, cursing, shooting and mistreating them, probably when they’d been two-leggers as well. How many were his offspring? That didn’t seem to matter to him.

Claws skittered on the concrete in several directions as they scampered to do Lars’s bidding.

Stupid wolves. She hoped her father was long gone. She could do nothing to help him if she couldn’t save herself first.