Page 68 of Broken Souls

“I got to Khalid,” Maddox shouts down the stairs. “You two still alive?”

Leno is just about to answer when the stairway door below us is ripped off its hinges. Pivoting on the landing, I instinctively raise my knife to face the new threat.

“Fucking hel, you two look like shit,” Enoch says as he steps in.

“Smell like it too,” Ezriel adds.

“Fucking took you long enough!” Leno shouts. “You’re a bit late, as always, fucking useless.”

Enoch shrugs. “Had to stop for a piss.”

As they’re bickering, I drink a healing potion and feel the warmth of it flow through me, restitching flesh and healing bruised ribs. It’s a miracle I didn’t break anything other than my trigger finger. Our three brothers join us on the landing, their attention shifting to the dead wolf taking up most of the space.

“Can you copy its DNA?” I ask Maddox. Having that beast in his arsenal would be amazing, but I know the answer before he shakes his head. Antonio wouldn’t have left an experiment in our hands if we could use it.

“Nah, bruh,” Maddox says. “It’s too riddled with disease. If I try to change into that, it might kill me.”

“You’re telling me we fought it half dead?” Leno shouts.

“You killed it in a few minutes; it couldn’t have been that hard to fight,” Maddox says.

“We got fucking lucky. It just so happened to run into my vines at one point. I couldn’t sense the fucker moving. I’d hate to have to fight it in an open area.”

“Where’s Khalid?” I ask Maddox.

“Upstairs with his girl. He tried to fight Antonio, but the coward jumped out the window.” He grins. “Antonio, not Khalid, though I can see how that would be confusing.”

“Did Khalid get any DNA off him?”

He shakes his head.

“Call Rudy and get him to come clean up. I need to call Aleric.”

“Real masochist, huh?” Leno teases as he stands. “I’m going to go get Krypto.”

The twins move to the side so he can pass, then they follow him. “So was it really Talon?” Enoch asks, pained.

“Yeah…”

As they leave, I pull out my phone and call the Boss of the Blood Fangs. He answers on the first ring.

“I have a body here,” I say. “One of the super werewol–”

He hangs up on me, but a moment later, he’s here in the stairway, as is his other soldiers minus Vlad. “Oh, goodie,” he says as he squats down beside the wolf’s legs. “This is one fine specimen.”

“It had a disease that was killing it,” I say. “If Cara Jervis can replicate it, then we might be able to use it against the rest of them.”

“Mmm,” he says. “Yeah… I’m probably just going to fuck it.”

Dear gods. How the fuck do we share any DNA?

He flashes me a smile and then he and his soldiers are gone. Alone in the hallway with just Maddox, I turn to him. “How are you?”

He rotates his shoulder and cracks his neck. “Bit sore, but I’ll survive.”

“And Khalid?”

“Good. No wounds a healing potion didn’t fix.”