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I took in a deep breath and walked up to the first ship.
“You got this,” I whispered to myself as I went. “You got an army behind you. Your friends. The Chief. Yougot it.” And I’d never felt more in control in my life. The conversation that I was going to have with whoever I was going to find on that ship replayed itself in my mind as if it had already happened. I knew exactly what to say and how to say it. And I was going to do a damn good job before giving the soldiers the green light to start searching.
But I shouldn’t have been so confident in that silence. In that darkness. In that emptiness of the ship. I walked all the way to the gangway before I realized what a stupid mistake it had been to expect people who’d want totalkto us to be here.
There weren’t.
A loud crack took me by surprise, making me stop in place. The sound of metal against metal made me cringe and step back, my eyes searching until I saw the movement. Until I saw that something wascoming upfrom one of the containers somewhere in the middle of the deck of the ship. Something big and dark and…
“De Ver!”
The Chief’s voice pulled me out of my trance. My body moved on instinct. I pulled out two of my guns immediately, and I aimed them ahead.
More people were jumping and walking on top of the metal containers, their footfalls loud, drilling into my brain.
So manyof them—at least twenty men that I could see, not to mention what looked like a large modified machine gun that had come right out of those containers. I meanlarge. And two people were right behind it, smiling down at us.
I took another step back, and the sound of the ODP soldiers approaching did nothing to calm the beating of my heart. They were right there—and more shadows were moving on the deck, on the sides of the containers. My breath caught in my throat when I saw a red light blink somewhere on that machine gun.
And the first shot reached my ears.
Chaos everywhere. The ODP soldiers and my friends reached me, and a hand pulled me back before I jerked away. The soldiers were running up the narrow gangway to get onto the deck, shooting their own guns while these men kept firing the machine gun at us, and the bullets flew…
Wait. Not bullets.Syringes.
“Get down!” someone called, but I wasn’t sure whose voice it was. The adrenaline rushing in my veins gave everything around me a dreamy feel, and it took me a while to get my body moving properly again. I shot after the soldiers, raising my guns and shooting the men over the containers, but nothing reached them. Not my bullets, not those of the soldiers, or the snipers positioned behind us, but those tiny syringes they were shooting at us kept coming anyway.
And as soon as I jumped over the railing at the end of the gangway and landed on the deck, I saw one clearly—just as it stabbed the side of the neck of a soldier in front of me, and the orange liquid was dispensed inside him within a second. The soldier fell to his knees, dropping his guns instantly.
The other in front of him did the same—as well as the one to my side.
An ambush. Of course. They knew we were coming, and they’d never intended tospeakto us. It’s why they hadn’t bothered to move the ships away from here in the first place—they’d been expecting us. And now that we were here—supernaturals who counted on their magical abilities to fight—they had the perfect defense against that: Crackdown.
I ran forward, ignoring the shouting soldiers who were being hit by the syringes, and the men who were coming out from behind the containers to finish them off. I needed to get below deck. I needed to find a way to that machine gun. I needed to—
My arms were wrapped around my head, and I was trying to get close to the first row of containers to use it as a shield. My focus must have wavered because my magic wasn’t there to hold back the syringe coming for me, and I didn’t even see it until it buried right on my forearm.
I raised it to my face and looked at the orange liquid quickly disappearing inside me. The sting wasn’t bad—barely a pinch, but the effect was immediate.
My knees trembled before they let go of me. My vision narrowed completely, and black dots filled the whole world around me. My guns slipped from my hands, and I fell on all fours, bile rising in my throat. Something inside me kept vibrating,tryingto resist whatever foreign force was taking hold of every cell in my body, altering it,owningit.
I was seconds away from throwing up when a foot connected with the side of my head. To say I wasn’t expecting it was an understatement, and I didn’t have even a bit of energy to stop myself from falling to the side, rolling, and hitting something made of metal with the back of my head.
Stars exploded in my vision. I tried to breathe deeply, tried to get my body to cooperate, and after about a million blinks, I could finally see the dark sky over me. The screams and gunshots everywhere around me shocked me awake, too.
And the vibration in my chest stopped, like a switch being flipped off.
Drawing in a deep breath, I sat up, held onto the railing of the ship where I’d hit my head, and somehow made it to my feet. I’d been drugged. I had Crackdown in my system now, too.
It’s okay.Dominic was on it twice. It didn’t kill him.
It wasn’t going to kill me, either. It hadn’t killed the soldiers. It had taken away their magic, but most of them were still standing, fighting with their bodies and their weapons. I wasnotgoing to die.
That thought alone gave me the boost of energy I needed to focus on my surroundings. My guns were on the deck, and I reached out for them, just as a man flew right past me, hit the railings with the back of his thighs, then fell off into the water with a scream.
With my guns in my hand, I instantly felt better. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have magic—I never really used magic, other than for a shield when I could. I never relied on it because it was weak. It never served me in a fight. All I’d had was my body—exactly what I had now.
Soldiers fought all around me, the floor of the deck coated in blood, already full of dead bodies. The two men on top of the containers were still shooting that machine gun, even though some of the soldiers were already shielding themselves with magic. It wouldn’t be long, though. They’d need their focus on it to make it work, and so many of those men were still coming, jumping on the deck from over the containers. The Chief had probably already called for backup, but there was no time to waste.
