Crawling across the floor, I allow myself to peek around the corner.
I don’t see Mason anywhere.
Taking my phone from my pocket, I try to send a text but pause when I hear movement from the next room. Russ appears on the staircase and, from somewhere deeper in the building, I hear the movements of several people. Maybe even a dozen.
I grind my teeth and decide to finish my text.
Mare’s nest.
A perfect complement to Bernie’s text from earlier. The rest of our group chat is filled with things like where are you? and two men in the gym, stay safe. I manage to send that off, but that’s it. Mason comes up out of a trapdoor about two feet from me. That’s when I realize that we’re in what amounts to an attic; he’s used the access point to surprise me.
My booted foot kicks out and hits him square in the face, but it doesn’t faze the man at all. Instead, he grabs onto my ankle, yanks, and uses his bodyweight to let us both fall. We crash into the old wood floors, and then through them, to the next level.
I’m choking and struggling for air, fingers grasping at my side as I feel this rush of white-hot heat and pain. Shit, shit, shit. Something stabbed me when I fell. Not Mason’s knife, but a piece of wood that’s speared me through the shoulder in a way that one might stake a fucking vampire.
“There we go, so you’re human after all,” Mason murmurs, kicking my gun from my hand. I’m not sure where my phone is anymore. Doesn’t matter. I just need to get up and move. I need to run. That’s not easy for me to admit, that I’m in over my head. I should not have chased Russ the way I did. Too cocky, Cal. Don’t get too cocky.
“I was once human,” I agree, and then I’m tearing the piece of wood from the wound and plunging it into Mason’s thigh. He barely lets out a hiss of pain before he’s hitting me across the face and knocking me on my back. I land in a pool of wet blood that splatters across the nearby walls like just another wave of graffiti. HAVOC is scrawled in black paint just above it. Marking our territory. Staking our claim.
“Still human, kid,” Mason tells me, and then he reaches inside his jacket for a pistol. The sound of another explosion outside buys me about a tenth of a second. But it’s enough for me to turn and retrieve my own gun, rolling onto my back and firing, not at Mason, but at Russ as he rounds the corner with an assault rifle at the ready.
I manage to peg him right between the eyes as Mason turns back to me, frowning so hard in the dark, damp space, I swear I can smell it on him. Surprise. He shoots me in the arm, and a gasp escapes my lips, one that reveals the lie I refuse to admit myself: you are not invulnerable, Callum Park.
And I’m not. But I wish so fucking desperately that I were that I almost believe it sometimes.
The floor beneath me shifts dangerously as Mason takes a few steps in my direction.
“I think I’ll take you home with me,” he says, his voice a total deadpan. But his mouth, what little of it I can see in the light that cuts through the boarded-up window, is vicious. Ruthless. Penetrating. Mason lifts the gun to shoot me in the leg, but I slam my boot down on the floor and it collapses.
So does the floor beneath it.
I end up gagging on dust and debris as I scramble out of the pile and down the staircase, stumbling and dripping blood everywhere. On my way toward the front door, I pick up a loose board, swing around the corner with it and hit one of the nameless lackeys in the face with it so hard that I’m wondering if I might’ve broken his neck.
Regardless, he drops to the floor and I keep going.
When the next man gets in my way, I drop low and throw myself into his belly, keeping him from shooting me as he lands on his back with a gasp. The end of the board in my hand is ragged, bits of splinters and jagged shards of wood at one end. This is what I ram into the soft, white skin of his throat. Once, twice, three times. He’s gurgling now, but I don’t have the time or leisure to make sure he’s dead.
Instead, I’m out the door and blinking into the weak morning sunlight, even as I notice the red and blue wash of police lights in the distance. The cops are at the school. The thought brings me some amount of relief. SWAT will come. The VGTF will be there. Reporters.
