Was she going to die in this cage?
Smoke filled the air. She choked and gagged. This was hell. These wolf senses in this place with these horrors happening were too much. She needed it to stop. Where was the man? What had happened to him? She hadn’t seen him since the bright light that had blinded her. Had he died in the explosion?
The cage shook from beneath. It jarred her like she was on an airplane not quite steady in the sky. Two hands appeared on the cage bars in front of her followed immediately by the man’s face as he pulled himself up. He was coughing, his eyes unfocused.
He pulled keys out of his pocket and inserted them into the lock. After turning it, he opened the cage.
“Run.” He coughed, his eyes losing their focus as he collapsed to the floor.
She leapt out of the cage onto the floor. It had, evidently, been some time since she’d used her legs. They felt unsteady and difficult to move. Her heart pounded hard as she stared down at the man who had kept her captive in a cage for weeks. He’d been gentle when he’d touched her and she’d actually been able to start communicating with him just minutes earlier. Plus, it seemed like he’d hurt himself to set her free.
Not to mention there was probably no way in hell she was going to stop being a wolf without his help. Ignoring the voice in the back of her head that wanted her to acknowledge she also thought he was adorably cute, she bit down hard on his shoulder.
He didn’t even react to the assault from her teeth. Dragging him as hard as she could, she realized she’d never have been able to do this as a human. He’d be way too big for her to manage with her hands but her wolf abilities were stronger. They’d made it to the back of the lab and up some of the stairs huffing and puffing from the exertion when she smelled the people behind her.
Dropping the man for a second, she lunged around. The door to the lab was closed and someone—she sniffed the air—no two people were pounding on it and shouting. She forced herself to listen past the siren. What were they saying?
“Azriel, can you hear us?” Pound, pound, pound. “They welded the door closed from the outside. Hang on in there, brother. We’re getting it open.”
Someone had welded the door closed? She growled at the thought. This was horrendous. People died in fires and lord knew with all of this fur she was getting really hot. The man on the outside had called him brother. Was that a term of endearment, like you might call someone ‘man’ or ‘buddy’ or were the people out there his family?
Leah shook her head from side to side. No, she couldn’t go through this alone.
Maybe it was wimpy to admit it but she was terrified of dying in the flames that she could see were rapidly approaching the staircase. Bending her head, she licked the man’s face.
He needed to wake up. Maybe there was another way out of the lab. He needed to tell her.
The man groaned, his head moving from side to side before his lids opened showing his brown eyes. He coughed, violently. Covering his mouth with his arm he sat up as he looked at her. One hand reached out and stroked the top of her head. “Hey, lady-wolf, did you drag me over here? I told you to run.”
Well, she wasn’t any frickin’ good at following directions evidently. If she lived through this she would add it to the list of things she was learning about herself.
Gesturing with her head, she whimpered at the door.
The man narrowed his eyes and struggled to his feet. She noticed he dragged one leg behind the other slightly, an old wound or something that had happened today? She didn’t remember seeing him do it before. As if the limp didn’t bother him, he took the stairs two at a time.
“Theo, Gabriel…is that you?” He shouted over the noise toward the door.
“Az, fuck, that’s a relief. We’ve almost got it open.”
The man nodded, which she found funny considering the people on the outside of the door couldn’t see it. It was almost as if he was talking to himself in his own head. Leah thought the man who had answered from the outside, either Theo or Gabriel, sounded genuinely relieved.
“No, no…listen…speak to me with your voice, okay? I’m not alone in here. The wolf—the one I’ve told you about, the one who hasn’t died—she’s with me, she saved my life, Theo.” He turned to look at her. “She’s really something, she can understand me, which means, if you can, speak so she can hear us too, just in case something happens to me.”
“Alright. Are you sure the fumes aren’t getting to you?”
The man laughed. C’mon, they were going to die and she’d placed all of her hopes on a person who found something about this funny? Maybe it was she who wasn’t right in the head.
“I’m sure, Theo.” The man turned back to her and crouched down. He turned his head back to the door and shouted. “Listen, I’m going to shift to get some extra protection from the flames. Keep talking aloud.” Reaching forward, he pulled her into his arms and whispered in her ear. “Don’t be afraid. It’s still me.”
Internally, she gasped as a warm, blinding light surrounded the man—no wait, she had heard his name, and what was it?—Azriel shifted in front of her eyes into a wolf. His limbs reshaped quickly, dark brown fur pushing out of his arms and legs to recover him.
He shook his head and the eyes that stared at her were wolf eyes.
She blinked twice. It was all so familiar, like she’d seen it before. Not that she’d seen it happen to him but to someone whose face she couldn’t recall. Maybe it had happened to her. How else would she have become a wolf? Azriel, the wolf, moved forward, nudging her with his head to get closer to the door. He’d told her not to be afraid and strangely enough, she wasn’t. The fire and the smoke had taken up most of her nerves.
Azriel’s turning into a wolf was nothing in comparison to the rest of it. Besides, maybe it meant he could teach her to do it and then she could shift back too.
Following him to the door, she heard one last pound. Turning around, she saw the black and grey smoke making its way up the stairs. She’d never be able to breathe that stuff. If it reached them, they’d have very little time to get away before they both suffocated.
The door flew open. She didn’t need to be told to run through it. Azriel hung back until she passed him and darted through the entrance first. After the blazing heat of the lab, the outside felt freezing. She shivered as she looked at the two men who were shouting for them to move away from the door.
They were tall—maybe taller than Azriel—but she could see the family resemblance immediately. The same dark hair and high cheekbones on each of them meant that they were family traits. But to Leah, that’s where the similarities stopped. In the afternoon sun, she could see that their eyes, although brown, were not as kind or warm as Azriel’s had been.
Just the same, she ran after them, turning around to see if Azriel followed. He was but that wasn’t what made her feet falter. The door that had been opened led underground. She’d been so busy getting free she hadn’t noticed she’d had to travel up three steps to reach the outside once she’d gotten through the entrance. She’d been trapped in an underground lab?
What the hell was this place? She sniffed the air as she looked around. It looked as if she was deep in the middle of the woods. Whatever was going on, Azriel and the rest of these people had held her in a cage in an underground lab in the middle of the woods. It was like something out of a teenage angst novel.
Note to self, evidently she knew about teenage angst novels. She sighed and it came out of her mouth like a moan.
Strong arms picked her off the ground. She yelped before she realized it was Azriel and relaxed.
He turned as he held her to the taller of the two men. “Give me that blanket.”