Page 5 of Rivers and Roads

Darkness began to descend as I was dragged across the pavement, along the forest ground, and eventually dropped in the back of a white van. I hit the floor with a sharp thud, my head cracking on a piece of jagged metal, and I felt blood trickle over my eye. There was a body in there with me—a human, by the scent of them, and then there was a low chuckle.

It was a man, most likely. His voice was young, but he still spoke with a low rumble after petting my hair like I was some sort of dog. “Good boy.”

My claws began to extend, and for a moment, I thought I was healing. Then came another sting, and I felt my fangs begin to elongate. My ears sharpened, my body began to twist, but it stopped halfway through the shift. It was agony, but I still had no voice to scream.

“Get comfortable, dog,” the man spat, “you’re in for a very long journey.”

Chapter

Three

ORION

“You’re driving me up the damn wall,” Kor snapped after the meeting.

I turned my head to stare at him, and it was then I realized I was drumming my fingers on the table and shaking my leg. I hadn’t even realized it, but the fact that Zane hadn’t turned up at all was worrying. His phone was going straight to a recording, but there were no voicemail options with the burners we all carried, so there was no other way to reach him apart from a text that wasn’t going through.

He wouldn’t have turned off his phone, but it was possible it had died. At the coffee shop, he’d looked more haggard than I had ever seen him, but nothing that would have worried me. Or, at least, not at first glance. After all, insomnia was plaguing every damn one of us, but we were stronger than a few sleepless nights.

We endured weeks of fighting on a handful of hours during the First War, and this was no different.

“Sorry,” I muttered. Sounds and movements were more overwhelming to Kor than they had before he lost his sight, and it was easy to forget that. Cameron said it wasn’t so much that his other senses were getting stronger, but more that his brain was trying to reroute his ability to understand the things going on around him.

“It’s like if you were in a soundproof room for several hours, and then you stepped outside and right onto a busy city street. It can be a lot.”

Part of me wanted to ignore his advice, but only because I was still frustrated that we hadn’t been able to get to Kor before he was no longer able to heal his injuries. Any reminder that Kor’s life was irrevocably different, that he was still struggling through adapting, reminded me I had failed him. I kept the guilt to myself, though it was likely he could sense it through the bond, but we didn’t discuss it.

And it was getting easier.

A year had passed since he’d arrived at the compound, and he was moving on better than I expected him to—far better than I might have in the same circumstances, though it was hard to know for sure. Any one of us could fall subject to the monsters in those labs, and the gods only knew how we’d come out.

Kor had said repeatedly he was lucky he was only left blind when they were through with him.

I tried not to picture Bryn’s fate—if he had even survived it. He’d been with them far too long, I couldn’t imagine there was anything left of him to bring home, even if his body was intact.

“Why don’t you take a walk?” Kor suggested. “In fact, you can come with me across the street, because I promised Misha I’d find something for dinner so we don’t have to cook.”

I scowled, mostly because this was nothing more than Kor trying to distract me. I was already frustrated by how badly the talks were going with the other bases, and I didn’t need a missing Zane to add to it. “Can we at least send someone out there to check on their progress?”

Kor let out a sigh, but he reached for his cane and unfolded it, making his way to the door ahead of me. I heard a sharp command, ordering whatever Beta was just outside the door to go on a run, then he turned back to me with raised brows. “Happy?”

“Not really. I’m irritated that you’re not more worried about him.” I pushed my chair under the table, making sure there was nothing left for Kor to trip on, then I met him at the door, and we started down the hall.

“I’m trying not to panic right now, Orion,” he said quietly. His head was bowed toward the floor, his eyes closed, which was still unsettling for me, though it made no difference to him. He was every bit the Alpha he’d ever been—except with a few more silver hairs at his temple from the stress of taking up this job. He looked happier now that he had Misha though, and I grudgingly accepted that the human was a welcome addition to our rebellion.

Of course, I still wasn’t convinced they wouldn’t find a way to use him against us, but for now, he’d given Danyal what he needed in order to start working on the serum that would likely save some of the Wolves who had been taken.

It had been Kor’s idea in the first place, once Danyal was able to understand better what the labs had done to Misha in the first place. He’d ordered Danyal to research everything he could to replicate it—then asked him to make it temporary.

“If we can mask our Betas,” Kor told me when I cornered him about taking a page from the humans’ book, “we can send Wolves in with military training. Wolves who know how to get in and out of places. The humans don’t look twice at Omegas who can’t fight, but they have Wolves working for them who could scent someone with eye alterations. We need to be just as clever.”

I still didn’t think it was going to work. Any Wolf who put himself through that shit was likely to get stuck as some halfway between Beta and Omega. But I understood why we had to try. It was the only way we’d get close enough to the humans’ database—and doing that was the only way we’d ever get ourselves more than an inch ahead of them.

At Zane’s reluctance to the whole plan, I felt a little less alone in my discomfort with Kor’s decision. I could see the frustration on Zane’s face that morning when he brought up Danyal, and I could almost sense his fury at being unable to offer another solution. Of course, Zane’s reaction didn’t surprise me. He had done what he needed to do during the war to keep the Wolves serving under him alive, but he never developed a taste for it.

Not like so many.

Not like the ones who had seized power at the expense of civilians.

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