Page 75 of Caretaker

Chapter Twenty-Five

The world was chaos.

Through the cacophony of the screams, the cheers, the thumps, and the alarm, another sound intruded.

Helicopter.

“Here come da’ judge,” I said, half hysterical.

“Touch her,” Clayton ordered, and Alejandro immediately stepped up behind me, pressed his body to mine, and slipped his arms around my waist.

“We’ve got you,” Clayton said, grimly.

Angus wasn’t Angus, not really.

He stood on the platform, shifted to his bull. Huge, black, bloody. Vicious.

He’d been fighting for hours and hours, I believed. There were dead bodies littering the floor, and even as I watched, a man with a hose began washing the blood down the drain in the middle of the platform.

Neither Angus nor his opponent paid any mind to the human washing away the blood. They circled each other, both bloody, wounded, and silent. Deadly. If I could have seen Angus’s eyes, I would have seen nothing but mindless rage. He was in the kill zone, and his captors had put him there.

I wondered if he’d be able to pull himself out again.

His opponent was a bear shifter, as large as Angus, but his soft growls were full of pain and his fur was flat and wet with blood. He wasn’t long for the world.

He dropped to all fours and backed away from Angus, and one of the guards reached up with his electric prod and rammed it against the bear’s hip.

The shifter screamed as sparks flew, and the fresh scent of cooking meat joined the older scents of countless burnt shifters and fighters that hung in the air.

The audience broke into cheers, their bloodlust so overpowering they completely ignored the screams of the prison alarms. They wanted to see the fight through to the end.

They wanted to see pain and death, and then they wanted their money.

Angus shook his head, his huge horns flashing as he stomped the floor. And then, as the bear tried once again to back away, Angus charged.

“Angus please no.” I shoved my knuckles against my lips, against my teeth. But I knew he had no choice. It was kill or be killed.

He gored the bear, his lethal horns spearing the beast through the chest. It was fast, the bear’s death. Angus withdrew his horns, backed up, and roared. In his voice was every bit of the pain that death caused him. Every bit of the rage at the humans. The only thing louder than his pain and rage was his absence of hope.

Alejandro pulled me back against him and slapped his hand over my mouth, and only then did I realize how loud my sobs were. Despite the discordant, earsplitting sounds around us, someone might have heard.

A woman’s sobs would have stood out in the sea of depravity and bloodlust. In my voice was only the sound of a broken heart.

Finally, I peeled Al’s fingers away from my mouth and pressed my face once more to the boards. Surely now they’d lead Angus away. Surely now they’d be finished with their depraved games.

But they were not. A door opened across the room and four guards led a man into the room. A man so large he towered over the handlers, his thick muscles bulging as he moved. One of his parents had been a giant, most likely. He wasn’t as large as a full-blooded giant, but there was no doubt he had giant blood running through his veins.

He had thick cuffs around his neck, his wrists, and his ankles, and his head and face were covered by a rusty metal mask. The handlers dragged him through the doorway by the chains attached to his cuffs and wrapped around his body.

Another man followed, striking the enormous man with a whip every few seconds. Not because the man was resisting, but because every strike of the whip caused the room to erupt in a frenzy of excited approval.

I put my dazed stare back on Angus. He’d shifted back to his human form, and had dropped to his knees, his head hanging. His hair had grown even more since I’d seen him last, and it hung long and thick over half his face.

He was defeated.

He didn’t look up, not even when the dead bear was dragged away.

Not even when one of the guards, prod in hand, jabbed the end against Angus’s bare flesh and zapped him.