“Oh. Wow,” I whisper. The room turns out to be a well-stocked armory.
“How are you with weapons?” Deja asks, striding to a wall filled with what I can only assume are guns, but they are unlike any guns I’ve seen before.As I look around the small room filled with weapons, my eyes fall to a display in the center of the room that is filled with every kind of wicked-looking knife you could imagine.
“I’ve had good luck with this,” I muse, picking a knife and pulling it from its leather sheath so I can admire the bright metal blade that is just like the one Rovos gave me.
“I don’t think your mate would appreciate it if I let you close enough to the enemy to use that.” Deja chuckles and holds a small gun out to me. “Have you used a blaster before?”
Sheathing the knife, I tuck it into my waistband and tighten the drawstring to keep it in place. Deja doesn’t say anything; instead, she grins as I cross the room and take the blaster from her.
It’s small and lightweight. I wrap my hand around the grip, and I’m surprised at how comfortable it feels in my hand.
“I’ve never touched a gun or a blaster in my life,” I admit as I make sure to keep my finger away from the trigger—at least, I think that’s the trigger.
“Like this.” Deja takes the gun from me, shows me how to hold it, then points out the features. “This is your safety. Red means it’s locked; green is live. Sight along the nose and tap the trigger to fire off bursts. Hold for streams.”
I take the blaster back from her and hold it like she showed me, sighting down the nose. “I think I’ve got it.”
Deja removes the knife from my waistband and wraps a loose belt around my hips, where she clips the blaster to one side and my knife on the other.
Once I’m decked out in weapons, she straps several blasters to her body, including a rifle that she slings across her chest and a knife twice the size of mine that she straps to her thigh.
“Ready?” she asks me once she’s finished.
“For what?”
“You don’t think I would let our males have all the fun?” She grins at me.
If I wasn’t sure whether I liked her before, I sure do now. I find myself grinning back, and then we’re hurrying out of the armory and down a narrow hallway I hadn’t noticed before.
At the end of the hallway is a narrow flight of stone steps.
“Stay here,” Deja cautions. Then she climbs to peek out through the wooden door at the top. “Anna, hurry!” she whispers, waving for me to follow her.
The compound is eerily empty, after seeing it teeming with people not even an hour earlier. I can hear the sounds of battle and lasers in the distance.
“This way,” Deja whispers, and I follow her through a maze of hallways and small rooms. The further we go, the louder the sounds of battle become, and the harder my heart pounds in my chest.
A gray alien I don’t recognize comes around the corner, but before it makes a sound to alert anyone to our presence, Deja has her blaster out and fires. The alien falls backward with a smoking hole in its forehead.
I swallow the bile that’s forcing its way up my throat as we step over the smoldering body. Slipping the blaster from my hip, I flick the safety off. When we get to the end of the hallway, the zapping sounds of lasers, followed by shrill cries of pain, echo close by. My heart is pounding, and my palms are sweating as I stay close to Deja. With her back pressed to the wall, she peeks around the corner. A stream of laser fire shoots past us, narrowly missing her as she pulls back.
Moments later, a man runs past us, only to stop and backtrack.
“Damnit, Deja!” he grunts. “What are you doing? If Xan knew you were here, he’d—”
“Xan knows by now that he can’t keep me below when I can help,” Deja snaps.
The man shakes his head, lifting his eyes to the ceiling. “Fine. He’ll have my balls for this, but…” He waves his fingers for us to follow, and next thing I know, I’m hunched over and running through bursts of lasers.
I expect a searing hit at any moment, but we make it through the room unscathed. The man leads us into the kitchen, where we duck behind a counter.
“You two can pick them off from here,” he says with a grin before disappearing back into the fray.
From behind the counter, we have an unobstructed view of the doorway where an endless stream of aliens are coming through. Mimicking Deja, I crouch low, popping over the counter only long enough to squeeze off a few shots before ducking back down.
At first my shots go wide, and at one point I almost hit a human, earning me a dirty look. But it doesn’t take me long to dial in my aim, and soon, I’m dropping aliens almost as quickly as Deja.
Picking off the ugly gray aliens with a laser gun reminds me of playing a video game, and I lose some of the reality of what we’re doing. Until the flash of something familiar draws my attention, and I catch sight of Volethos across the room. His nose wrinkles, and I see a flash of fangs as he bellows orders at the swarm of gray aliens.
