Page 57 of Their Mate
White-hot pain shot through me, exploding up my arm and into my chest. I threw my head back, a sudden, instinctive howl ripping from my throat. “Bloody hell, Aidan! That hurt!”
Aidan pulled back, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand with irritating calm. “Yeah, well, hopefully that means it’s working.”
“Don’t be a pussy,” Jamie grinned. “You got this, Declan.”
Cool and composed, Edward chimed in. “If we hadn’t done it, you’d be beyond saving in a matter of hours. Now you’ve got a fighting chance, at least.”
I pouted and flexed my bitten arm. It was throbbing painfully, joining the rest of my throbbing wounds. “Could’ve warned me a little more.”
Aidan smirked faintly. “I did.”
“We’ve bought ourselves time, but not much,” Logan reminded us. “Let’s get moving before the Elder Lycan decides to finish what he started.”
The Elder Lycan’s explosives had done more than try to kill us in the auditorium. They’d turned the tunnels into a twisting, crumbling nightmare.
What had once been wide, clear corridors were now a maze of jagged slabs of concrete and twisted rebar jutting like the bones of some dead giant. The air was thick with dust, every breath tasting like powdered stone. Somewhere far behind us, debris still groaned and shifted in the dark, making my wolf bristle.
We moved in silence, save for the scuff of boots over rocks on the ground and the occasional clatter of dislodged rubble. Logan led the way, Aidan and I limping along behind him, but refusing to slow. Edward’s assessing gaze swept every shadow. Jamie kept near Sera, knife loose in his grip, and Sera still walked with her chin high, scanning the dark like she dared it to come closer.
I’d been through enough hellholes to know this place was different. It felt… designed. Purposeful.
And then it hit me. The reinforced walls, the old blast doors we passed, they weren’t typical metropolitan tunnels.
“There’s something special about this place, isn’t there?” I asked in a low voice that carried through the darkness.
Edward gave me a quick, knowing glance. “It’s not. NATO had a facility under Dublin during the Collapse. It was totally off the books. Only a handful of people knew it existed.”
“That’s why the humans made their last stand here,” Logan murmured, running a hand over a section of reinforced steel. “It was already fortified.”
Jamie grunted. “And now it’s a bloody maze full of lycans and a monster and traps.”
We kept going, weaving through sections where whole walls had collapsed inward, forcing us to squeeze single file through gaps or clamber over piles of debris. Once, a low, distant howl carried through the darkness, bouncing off the metal and concrete in a way that made it impossible to tell where it came from.
“Sounds like we’ve got company,” Aidan muttered. The pain in his voice concerned me deeply. What had he endured to rescue me?
We pressed on through the long dark tunnels, my mind drawing unwanted comparisons to old stories of underground tombs and cursed ruins. It was like we were walking through the Mines of Moria, but with something even worse than orcs lurking beyond the shadows.
After what felt like hours, we came to a long hallway lined with rusted lockers and overturned benches. An old NATO emblem, faded and scorched, was still visible on the far wall. The place smelled stale, like it hadn’t seen fresh air in decades, but it was quiet.
Logan scanned the space, then nodded once. “We’ll stop here. There’re no obvious entry points, and only one door to cover. It’s the safest we’re going to get for now.”
We moved into the room, the group spreading out. Edward immediately checked the door’s hinges and locking mechanisms, while Jamie scavenged through the lockers for anything useful. He came up with a dented canteen and a few packets of military rations so old that I wasn’t sure they were even edible.
Aidan eased down against the wall with a groan, his injured leg stretched out in front of him. Sera crouched nearby, quietly checking over her knife methodically. I found myself watching her longer than I meant to, noting the way her focus never faltered, even now.
Finally, I lowered myself against the opposite wall, rolling my sore shoulders. “We’ll need a plan for getting out of here. If this base is as big as I think, there are probably other exits the Elder Lycan hasn’t trapped yet. Hopefully, anyway.”
Edward nodded, eyes still on the door. “Maybe. But finding them without alerting every lycan in the place is the trick.”
Logan sat on a crate, the weight of command heavy in his posture. “We rest for now. When we move again, we move fast. The Elder Lycan likely knows we’re still alive, and that means we’re all still in danger. Hopefully the explosions destroyed his cameras.”
Jamie let out a low whistle from the far end of the room. “Well, look what I’ve just stumbled across, lads.”
We all turned as he dragged out an old, dented metal case from the bottom of a rusted locker. He popped the latches and grinned. “Medical stash. Stuff’s sealed tight, and some of these are the kind that keep stable at room temp for a long,longtime.”
Edward crossed the room in two strides, kneeling to inspect the contents. After a moment, he nodded. “Antibiotics, painkillers, wound dressings… This is very good. Might actually help with the traumas you two have suffered and keep infection down until we get out of here.”
“Perfect,” Aidan muttered, leaning back against the wall and rolling up his pant leg so Edward could start on him. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got before this leg decides to fall off.”
