Bright, blinding light. The whump of an explosion. More light. Cassidy’s eyes screwed shut, and Miguel grunted and dropped her. Cassidy tried to scramble away, only to be stopped by a paw whacking her down to her side.
More light. A flash of brightness so intense it blinded her even though Cassidy had instinctively shut her eyes.
And then the stench. Not Shifters. Sharp raw smells—ammonia, gasoline, and pepper. So much pepper. Not pepper spray, but an explosion of nose-assaulting chiles, the kind that could burn your skin and make your eyes and nose run for hours.
To throw that over a Shifter…
She heard yowls and snarls, howls. Confusion.
Over it came another explosion of light, and in the middle of the light—as well as her streaming eyes could see—a man.
Not a Shifter. He was an upright man with black hair and eyes like midnight. He held a shotgun in competent hands, and he blasted Shifters left and right. Behind him came a very, very angry grizzly.
The Shifters weren’t dying. They were falling, groaning, weeping, howling. Whatever Diego was hitting them with was making them insane with pain.
Two large paws locked over Cassidy. Miguel. Still up, still fighting.
He dragged Cassidy to the darkened doorway, caught her by the scruff of her neck, and tossed her inside. Cassidy shifted at the last second, the change painful this time, and caught the doorframe with both hands. Miguel shifted at the same time, rising tall to face Diego.
Diego just looked at him, no emotion, no fear, nothing in his face. He’d come to do a job, and he’d finish it. No questions.
“The woman is mine,” Miguel shouted at him. “No matter what you do to my Shifters, she’s my mate. I claim her.”
“I reject the claim!” Cassidy yelled.
Her shout would have been good enough for civilized Shifters, but Miguel only smiled. “The claim is mine unless this puny human here wants to Challenge.”
Diego would have no idea what that meant, but apparently he didn’t care. Diego brought up his shotgun and aimed it at Miguel.
“Consider this a challenge,” he said.
He fired. What hit Miguel was not a bullet, but scattered shot that smelled and burned. Miguel got it full in the face.
While Miguel was howling, Diego charged forward and grabbed Cassidy.
At the same time, the room filled with still more light, blinding and hot. A tall, lean man appeared in the middle of it—Stuart Reid.
Before Cassidy could register shock, Reid bent over Xavier and came up with the man across his shoulders. Another white-hot flash, and both were gone.
“Run,” Diego said into Cassidy’s ear, but his voice was still very calm. “Marlo set explosives. This wreck is coming down.”
“No, wait.”
Cassidy had glimpsed something important on the other side of the darkened doorway when Miguel had tried to throw her through it. She shook off Diego and charged through to stairs that led down into cool earth. The stench came from below.
What she’d seen on the stairs in the one moment she’d had to glance at them had been a child.
The cub had been about five years old, just old enough to shift, and he’d been naked and filthy. As she neared the bottom of the stairs, the smell got worse, and Cassidy found what she’d feared she’d find.
A big room—large enough, thank the Goddess, or Cassidy would have found worse than she did—spread out before her. Frightened eyes turned her way as she charged in.
The females. They were sequestered and naked, surrounded by the children too small to be around the full-grown males. Shifter males would have the instinct to kill the offspring of rival males—as with the problem of Torey in Cassidy’s Shiftertown—but the ferals wouldn’t even try to suppress the instinct. Miguel had obviously gotten around that problem by sequestering all cubs until they were big enough to fight for themselves. Even worse, some of the women down here were human.
Only one person rose to meet Cassidy—the alpha female, Miguel’s mate, who’d looked at Cassidy in such worry.
“Get them out,” Cassidy shouted at her. “Now.”
No one moved.
Damn it, there was no time. Diego’s attack depended on surprise, chaos, swiftness. Miguel would figure out how to regroup, and then they’d lose the advantage.
“This building is going to blow,” Cassidy said. “You have to leave.”
The females still stared at her, every confidence they’d ever possessed having been beaten from them long ago.
“Miguel’s down,” Cassidy said. “He’s finished. You’re free.”
“No!” The alpha’s cry was anguished. “You bitch, what did you do to my mate?”
She launched herself at Cassidy, shifting along the way.
Cassidy shifted again, her bones aching, her Collar already slowing her down. But she knew how this had to end. She had to defeat the alpha, become alpha herself, before the rest of the women would follow her.
The female, an Ursine, was unhampered by a Collar, but she’d been weakened by living down here in the darkness. In the real world, she wouldn’t have had the dominance Miguel had given her here.
The fight was swift. Cassidy’s Collar snapped and sparked, pain biting deep. Cassidy tried to close her mind to it and pinned the female with her paw. She fought the instinct that made her want to snap the woman’s neck, telling herself that whatever this woman had become, it wasn’t her fault.
Cassidy knocked the female’s head on the stone floor, and the woman groaned, the fight going out of her. Cassidy rose to her full height and shifted, pretending that the change wasn’t agony.