Not one step out into the hallway, a streak of red light flew past me and struck Claire in the tail; severing the extra limb and eliciting a screech of pain from the girl.
I glanced down the hallway in the direction the shot came from, catching a glimpse of a Keeper clad in a black trenchcoat with a red tie dangling from his neck, some sort of high-powered rifle in his hands. Then he whistled sharply.
Two shapes appeared from out of the murky shadows of the hallway. Great black dogs with gleaming blue eyes and skeletal white faces. Fangs like a sabretooth tiger jutted out of their snouts, and their paws left glowing blue prints in the hallway as they bounded towards Claire, rushing past me as they closed the gap in mere seconds.
Claire tried to fight back, just like she tried to fight back against the Signal. But in the end she was no match for her foe, and the Hellhounds tore her limb from limb. As with the dino-man back at Hilltop, in death Claire’s body reverted to its human form.
Up until then I had been having some doubts about the moral standing of the shadowy organization I was working for. But there was something about staring down at the dismembered corpse of a young girl that my coworker had just savagely murdered that really drove home exactly how out of my depth I really was here.
“Never gets old, that feeling,” said the black-clad man who was suddenly standing next to me. His rifle was resting on his hip and he had a cigar in his mouth. A nasty scar ran up his cheek and split his ear in two places, and he was missing a few fingers of his left hand—fewer than me, but still. “I never get tired of watching them die.”
Those were the first words Agent Boris spoke to me, and I already knew I hated his guts. This was the guy talking to Aleksei down in the labs.
He gave a curt nod over my shoulder, and I felt Tabitha walk up beside me, her hand finding my shoulder as her eyes drifted over to Claire’s remains, and I felt her grip tighten considerably. I understood where she was coming from. Sure didn’t help the stinging pain running up my arm though. It had only worsened, in fact.
Some of that pain and the horror I felt at this entire situation must have translated into an angry look on my face, for the next time I looked at Boris he wore a vicious sneer.
“What? You pissed I stole your kill? Grow up, kid. Field work gets messy from time to time. Just ask your little cuck friend. What was his name, Dennis? He and that slut are fighting a Warlock upstairs and it’s not going well. Better go help them out, eh?”
I took a half-step forward, ready to clarify just how pissed I was and why, when Tabitha stepped in front of me.
“Easy, hotshot. There’ll be other hunts. Other kills. You can let Agent Boris have this one, alright? C’mon. Let’s go help our friends out of whatever trouble they’ve found themselves in.”
Boris chuckled darkly. “That’s right, hotshot. Listen to the little bitch. Run along and go rescue the useless cunts. If you ask me we should leave the hex-techs back in the lab with the eggheads. You’d be doing us all a favor if you let ’em get wasted.”
Tabitha was pushing me as hard as she could, and I wasn’t budging.
Boris winked at me. I wanted to kill him on principle.
Io’s voice cut in all of a sudden. “Ryan, please, listen to her. Go with Tabitha, now!” Perhaps it was the urgency in her previously calming voice. Or maybe it was the way Tabby was silently pleading with me. But either way I relented and allowed myself to be dragged away.
Boris cackled. “Attaboy. Taking orders from your woman. Good doggie.”
It took everything I had. Everything. But I ignored him and kept moving. Tabitha and I had to step around those massive skull-headed dogs as they devoured Claire’s corpse, and then we were free to head towards the stairwell. But we felt Boris’s eyes following us the whole way.
I made sure Tabby walked in front of me. There was no way I was going to let Boris’s eyes anywhere near her perfectly sculpted ass. He could stare at mine, instead, but Tabitha already seemed uncomfortable enough.
We moved inside the stairwell and went up one landing before Tabitha turned to me, tears rolling down her cheeks, and fell into my arms.
Shocked, I caught her and braced myself against the stairwell as she just silently shook in my arms. Her tears created a wet patch on my shoulder and for a moment neither of us moved aside from the trembling of her arms and chest and her quiet gasps as she struggled to regain her composure.
The pain in my arm was worsening by the minute, but still I remained silent and steady.
For her.
After a while, Tabby reasserted control over herself and took a step back, wiping the tears from her face. “Thank you.” That was all I got from her at the time. Just a quick thank you and she was back to business, like that whole scene in the stairwell just never happened.
She tapped her earpiece. “Io, report. What’s our status?”
“The Warlock is down for the count, flash-frozen by Derek and shattered by Bianca. I saw the whole thing from one of my drones. Quite the spectacle. Bianca is uh…helping Derek heal from a rough injury in apartment 104. She made it sound like it could take a while and then cut our connection. She also said you and Ryan were free to head back without them as they can find their own transportation back.”
Tabitha shook her head and motioned for Ryan to head back down the stairs.
“Thanks, Io. We’re heading back to base. Let us know if there’s anything else that requires our expertise between here and HQ, alright?”
“Will do, Tabs. Safe travels.”
Tabitha and I left the apartment complex and made our way back to the ambulance in near-total silence. There were an awful lot of cops between us and our vehicle, and more than once we got separated in the crowd only to find each other a few steps later. We were only a few meters shy of freedom when a voice called out to us from back in the throng of police officers swarming the building we had just left.
“Ryan!”
I turned and looked into the crowd, scanning it for any sign of a familiar face.
Seeing nothing, I turned towards the driver’s seat once more and started to enter.
“Ryan, no!”
This time I whipped around on the spot. Nothing. Maybe the pain was making me hear things? Shaking it off, I climbed up into the driver’s seat. Right when I started to turn the key my vision suddenly darkened and I hunched forward.
Tabitha’s hand found my right shoulder and her voice drifted to me as if from far away, but whatever she was saying was lost on me. The pain crawling up my arm was quickly becoming unbearable. Just like when that first Feral slashed me and I started growing a dino-arm, Claire’s spikes had given me a dose of manticore blood.
I was changing. Again.
Somehow I managed to straighten back up into my seat and wave Tabby off, promising her that I was fine even though I knew I wasn’t. I tried to start the car again only to be wracked by pain so intense that I completely blacked out.
Like somebody flipped the Ryan switch from ON to OFF.