Page 15 of His Curse
Fuck.
Fuck this place in the ass.
I know what that means; I know what my only friends are trying to tell me.
Goddamn this place straight to The End.
There is only one reason for that many cells to be empty; one reason that would create that many vacancies at once.
And it was confirmed without anyone’s help when I realized the three of us were the only ones left. We're too valuable, too important, toovitalto what Kentworth Labs is trying to do, but everyone else, they are—were—disposable.
"Come on, wolf, let’s go. You have a long day ahead of you and if you do what you're told without a fight, the doc himself said you could have a shower and a hot meal before going back to your own cell."
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Dick pushes through the back of the facility, shoving me out into the blazing sun—around 11:00 a.m., judging by the feel of it—as the most putrid smell hits my nose.
I blink against the unshielded light, turning my head to try and give my eyes a little relief; but when they finally adjust, when the fog is lifted and I finally see where we are, they slam closed again as I dry heave.
"That's right, bitch,” Dick sneers in my ear as he starts undoing some of my chains. “You're on cleanup duty."
My wolf howls in so much fucking pain as I look around the yard, my horrified gaze traveling over the faces of the people—mypeople—that I came to care for, the souls I bonded with over our shared hell. My eyes move from one to the next slowly as my anger becomes so real I can almost taste it.
Bodies.
Twenty-three bodies.
Twenty-three lifeless corpses laid out in one long row, the first twelve male, the last eleven female.
Twenty-three lives snuffed out, lives of shifters and vampires alike, though it's hard to tell which is which, save for the fact that some bodies are already charred from the sun.
Vampires.
Big cats and bears. Wolves.
The last of the birds.
Last of the rabbits, the deer, and the reptiles.
They all had names and lives, hopes and dreams.
And they are all gone.
I see Nadia, a peacock shifter, something I'd personally never seen before, the sweet girl barely twenty years old. She was a student at the local college, an art major who wanted to teach kids to love and appreciate visual beauty the same way she did.
Cory, her boyfriend—her mate—a puma shifter. A quarterback, a business major with a sports medicine minor. Totally devoted to her and getting the two of them out of here.
They wanted to get married, to officially mate and build a life together. They wanted to have a family once they got their degrees.
Next to Nadia is Ms. Eloise, a four-hundred-and-ninety-one-year-old doe shifter. She was a grandmother to seventeen and had just lost her human mate a few years ago to cancer. Ms. Eloise loved knitting and weekly chats with her kids.
On the other side of Cory is Armand, an eight-hundred-year-old-vampire who liked to go fishing and spent most of his life at sea. He was a solitary male but kind and very well educated, and he didn’t believe in hurting any living thing for sport, never fed from anything or anyone without making sure they could walk away unharmed when he was done.
To his right is Drew, a twenty-five-year-old bear who just started his own construction company in Iowa, who was almost positive he found his mate, who coached football for his younger brother's high school team.
Across from him is Trina. She was a sixty-five-year-old vampire. A musician who used to be in a punk rock band,psychedelic rock before that. She played several instruments, spoke thirteen languages, and hoped to find her mate one day so she could try to become a mother.
Twenty-three lives ended.
