Page 75 of Bound

“Bastards,” Naomi hissed. Resisting the urge to gag, I ducked through the door behind her.

The cell was eight feet square. Several decades worth of body fluids I preferred not to think about streaked drab gray cinderblock walls. Two pallets and a metal toilet bolted down in the corner ate up every inch of free space. There was no sign of Kieran. An emaciated vampire with greasy brown hair wearing a flimsy gray cotton tunic and pants huddled on one of the pallets. He shrank back as soon as we entered.

“Hey.” I crouched down a few feet away, giving him as much space as I could. “We’re going to get you out of here. I’m Topher. This is Naomi. What’s your name?”

For all we knew, first responders were already in the tunnels. We had to get out of there. Now. But I’d been the one in that cell. I knew what it was like to be violated in every way possible, until you all but forgot the will to live. Sometimes all it took was one person to serve as a lifeline and a reminder most people were good and decent until you found your way back to yourself. The way West had for me.

“S—S—Stephan.”

“Okay, Stephan. We need to move fast. Can you walk?”

He scraped his hair back off his face, and I saw his fingernails had been raked down to the quick. But he quickly rose on shaky legs to follow us.

“They keep the lights on the shifters, too?” I asked Vlad once we were out in the hall and I’d given Stephan one of the emergency blood bags we’d brought. He and River had two more prisoners out of their cells, an emaciated female vampire, and a young male shifter.

“Just the vampires. The silver in the walls is enough to contain your kind. Long-term fluorescent light exposure is toxic to vampires, particularly at doses over eight thousand lumens. It’s one of the few things that will sicken one of us to the point we can’t dematerialize.”

Naomi’s eyes burned a fierce, angry gold. Vlad watched her curiously. The shifter finished his protein bar and stood, blinking like he was trying to get his bearings. I frowned.

“That’s—”

“Hudson Smith. The kid that went missing out of Austin a few weeks back. He’s in better shape than the others. They haven’t had him that long.” River touched his earpiece. “August, sit rep.”

“Fire just got the gas lines shut down. Austin PD is evacuating campus. No sign of a shooter so they’re treating this as a gas leak. Fire is heading down into the tunnels. We don’t have long.”

Down the hall, Phoenix had started towards us.

Hudson Smith began keening and rubbing his temples, babbling a string of nonsense.

“What the hell?” River muttered. “Naomi, can you check him?”

“On it.”

I said to River, “We can’t leave anyone behind. The feds will be crawling all over this place and anyone they find, shifter or vampire, will be turned into lab rats.”

River’s voice was cold as ice. “Yeah, we’re not fucking letting that happen. August, can you overwrite the security camera footage from the last half hour?”

“Already done.”

Vlad rose from beside the prisoners. Stephan had already managed to dematerialize to the extraction point. The young female vampire was still too weak. I averted my eyes, trying to block out the sounds of her chugging a second bag of blood like she hadn’t fed in months. Vlad and Rowan could jump them out, but they could only dematerialize so many times within a short interval before they would be drained. We were already pushing it. The more vampires who could dematerialize themselves out of the prison, the better. “How many more on this cell block?”

“Looks like…” Galen frowned at the screen, glasses reflecting a string of numbers. “Four, maybe five… I’d estimate we need at least ten minutes depending on how long the system locks me out automatically between logins. They’re using my same user information to access the other block as well. I—”

The corridor exploded with a burst of gunfire. As River slammed into me, knocking me away from the biometric panel, I watched a bullet enter just above Galen’s temple, shattering the side of his skull and spraying blood in a crimson arc over the keypad. I whirled, only to come face to face with Ian, who had an automatic pistol aimed at my head. Phoenix and River were locked in a standoff, guns drawn and shouting obscenities over the ringing in my ears. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Naomi had a gun pointed at Phoenix’s friend, Karl. Vlad stood motionless behind her, shielding the hostages. Because this day couldn’t get any better.

“Okay,” I said through my teeth. “Let’s all slow down.”

“It’s you we want, Greer. Not them.” Phoenix kept his gun trained on River.

“Yeah, let me think about that. Hmmm… no thanks.”

“You either come with us willingly or I kill the rest of your team and we take you with us anyway. Up to you.”

I bared my teeth. “Does London Blake know you’re a goddamn vampire sellout?”

“I respect the hell out of London, but we disagree on this. There’s only one way shapeshifters survive what’s coming, and that’s by uniting with vampires in the war against humans.”

Vlad laughed sharply. “You bought that shit my mother’s been selling? My god, you’re even stupider than I thought. She will use you until you’ve served your purpose, and then toss you aside, just like she does all the other pretty little toys she tires of playing with.”