Page 1 of Tempting Jupiter (Arena Dogs #2)

Chapter One

Jupiter had heard of the fiery afterlife the humans called Hell, but he’d never expected to end up there. It wasn’t that his soul wasn’t black enough; he just didn’t think the humans would allow an Arena Dog entry.

Flat on his back, muscles turned to molten metal, he battled the fogginess in his brain.

Flames crackled around him, eating their way closer. A chemical tinge burned his nose and turned his stomach. The heat of the flames intensified until one side of his body crawled with sizzling prickles. He tried to roll away from the danger, but his efforts gained him nothing.

He forced his eyes open. His heartbeat hammered against his chest and his gaze raked over the room. The smoke gathering overhead hung close to his face. Apparently, Hell had low ceilings.

A loud pop outside his visual range focused his mind like the air-shot at the beginning of an arena match.

With the added clarity, he realized a restraint stretched across his chest, holding him in place.

An attempt to dislodge it with his right hand brought a sinking realization.

His right arm wasn’t moving and he couldn’t feel his fingers.

That would have raised his heart rate if it hadn’t already been beating too fast to count.

The flames licked closer. Was he being set on fire as a special punishment, or was this just the usual hellish welcome to new residents of the afterlife?

He laughed at the thought, then coughed violently when he sucked in a lungful of smoke.

Suffocating spasms seized control of his body.

The memory of Seneca, the last time he’d seen his pack brother, formed in his mind.

When he closed his eyes he could still see the pale blush of Seneca’s lips, blood splattered across his face, etched lines of pain bracketing his mouth, and regret glazing his eyes.

Jupiter’s lungs burned. His body ached. And the sure knowledge that he was to blame for Seneca’s injury made Jupiter contemplate surrendering to the flames.

But he’d never been one to quit.

He was alive, despite injuries that had been more extensive than Seneca’s. He wouldn’t give up hope that Seneca might also live.

Jupiter glared down at the restraint. His eyes stung from the smoke and he blinked in an attempt to focus.

He pushed against the material with his left hand and found it stretchy and thin.

It clearly wasn’t meant to prevent him from getting free, but it might be meant to keep him from rolling out of the strange bed in his drugged stupor.

Yeah, his system had definitely been pumped full of drugs.

The pounding at the base of his skull and the jittery twinge of his muscles left no doubt.

He flicked out the claws on his good hand and the material fell away in a shredded heap.

Rolling to his side, he tried to get a look around, but didn’t recognize a single thing.

He swung his legs over the edge only to double over in pain.

His left hand shot to the throbbing ache in his middle.

A soft square of flex-bandage clung to his skin.

One quick look told him someone had patched him up with a stark white bandage.

A door to his right… and down… whooshed open and the flames jumped higher, licking the ceiling like a viper tasting the air for prey.

Whoa , Jupiter’s brain complained as it registered that his feet were dangling a meter above the floor.

He looked down, judging the distance. A sharp bark drew his spinning head back up, and he was jumping down to the floor before his brain had a chance to engage.

An unfamiliar Arena Dog stood in the doorway.

“Fire suppression is offline.” The Dog had the tall, broad, more than human build, wide face and pointed ears of their kind, but he was dressed more like a human.

The Dog threw a white canister toward Jupiter.

He tried to reach out to catch it, but his damn right arm failed him again.

The cylinder hit him in the chest and he cradled it against his torso.

The Dog who’d thrown it grabbed another and held it in front of his body. “Point the nozzle at the flames and press the red button!” He had to shout to be heard over the noise of the fire and something mechanical grinding metal against metal in the distance.

Jupiter struggled to work the fire canister without the use of his better hand, but somehow he managed. A blue powder sprayed out, dousing the flames as it bubbled and expanded wherever it landed. It changed the stench of the fumes—no less vile—but it dulled the burning in his lungs.

“What’s happening?” Jupiter choked out the words.

He still had no idea where he was and he wanted answers.

He stood in an aisle with two beds like the one he’d crawled out of, stacked one above the other on each side.

Across the aisle, both beds had been empty and were now blackened with soot beneath the blue skin of the suppressant.

He jogged farther along the row and doused more of the flames.

The other Dog followed, shouting to Jupiter as they worked. “You’re onboard a resistance transport. We snuck you off-planet and were trying to get you to our haven.”

“We’re not on Roma?” He’d known Roma was only one of many planets and that the arena spectators came from other worlds, but the idea of being anywhere else seemed implausible.

“No.” The other Dog answered over the last of the dying flames. “We’re in a transport vessel.”

The Dog tossed his canister to the floor and barked for Jupiter to follow back the way he’d come. “We have to keep the attacking ship’s crew from boarding us long enough for the pilot and the mechanic to make the repairs and get us moving again.”

Jupiter had never heard of the resistance or been aboard a ship of any kind, but he was used to adapting to unexpected situations.

He followed the man, but as he approached the bunk he’d vacated moments before, he spotted the still form on the one below.

The Dog’s ice white hair had been twisted into a single rope and pulled over one shoulder.

His long lashes rested against his cheeks. Bandages wrapped his torso. “Seneca!”

He dropped to his knees and pressed his ear to his pack brother’s chest.

The stranger shoved at his shoulder. “We have to go.”

Relief flooded through Jupiter at the faint rise and fall of the chest beneath his ear. Seneca’s heart beat strong and steady. Jupiter looked up to meet the gaze of the Dog who was still trying to get him to move. “He’s alive.”

The Dog nodded. “He’s deeply sedated. He’s smaller, lower body mass. It’ll take him longer to come around.”

Jupiter wanted to stay with Seneca, to wait for his lavender eyes to open, but he understood they were in danger and had an enemy to fight.

He lurched to his feet and sprinted after the Dog, knowing the best thing he could do for Sen was to keep whatever danger approached from reaching his slumbering body.

They thundered along a narrow corridor of dull metal walls and grated floors that shook beneath their weight.

The Dog ahead of him slapped a palm against a panel next to a door and it slid open.

Jupiter followed him into a narrow space that led to a larger room.

He caught a flash of a console full of lights and screens before two men trudged through what appeared to be an external hatch and right into their path.

Jupiter had a split second to identify the uniformed men as humans carrying burst weapons.

He dived low as the miniature explosion of the guns blasted over his head.

The other Dog collapsed to the floor beside him.

Most of his chest was so much bloody meat and the only thing keeping his head attached was a fragile column of charred bones.

Jupiter had been the instrument of too much death to be shocked by the gore.

He bunched his leg muscles and lunged toward the two men still standing in the hatchway.

He kept low, aiming for their legs. One of the men had angled his body away from Jupiter and shot his burst-gun in the direction of the lit panels.

The other man had fired at Jupiter, singeing the decking where he’d been standing only seconds before.

He struck their legs and they tumbled to the floor around him, their limbs tangled with Jupiter’s body.

The ache in his abdomen spiked into his awareness before he once again pushed it from his mind.

He crawled over the closest downed man and struck a fast, sharp blow to his throat.

The satisfying crunch of the human’s trachea fueled his determination.

Jupiter made a grab for the other human, trying to wrestle the burst gun from his grip as the man thrashed against him.

When he couldn’t break the man’s hold, Jupiter snapped the man’s arm near the elbow. The man squealed.

“Wait!” The shout of a human drew Jupiter’s head up.

Damn! On the other side of the hatchway at least a dozen men aimed weapons at him.

They wore an unmatched array of body armor, most of which seemed never to have seen battle.

Jupiter rolled, pulling the downed human over him as a shield, but no blasts fired.

“Don’t shoot him,” the man warned. “He’s worth more alive.

” The small army of men kept quiet as their leader yelled orders.

Jupiter couldn’t believe his luck. The weapons were the only chance they had against him. Hand to hand, no number of humans would stand a chance. He shoved the man on top of him aside and bounded to his feet.

“Wait. Heel. Whatever the fuck you call it.” The leader stood well behind his team with his hands up in the universal sign for stop. He wore no armor, but he did wear a uniform of some kind. Something Jupiter hadn’t seen before.

Jupiter growled, drawing back his lips to show more teeth, at the men who still pointed weapons at him. He wanted to give them an eyeful of the deadly incisors he’d been cursed with, but experience kept him frozen in place instead of lunging for his prey.

The men closest to him edged back, feet shuffling, weapons aimed.

“Listen.” The human leader paled, but he stepped out from behind the armored bodies that had provided him cover. “There’s no reason to fight. Even if you kill us all, what then? Where are you going to go? Your pilot’s dead.” He pointed to the far end of the room and the proof of his words.

Jupiter’s nostrils flared and he snarled, backing the man away.

He knew a man was dead where the leader pointed.

He’d smelled the blood, singed flesh, and the rotten odor that comes from a man when his insides are exposed.

Now he let himself take in the remains. The pilot faced them as if he’d turned to fight.

He sat slumped forward, strapped into a chair and surrounded by view screens and controls.

Half his torso was gone, but he was clearly human.

Why would a human have been helping Arena Dogs escape the powerful reach of The Roma Company?

When Jupiter looked back to the enemy leader, the man grinned. It was the grin of a whip-master before he announced the number of lashes he intended to rip into a Dog’s back. The grin of the game-master before he stepped onto the platform where he handed down arena verdicts. It didn’t bode well.

“Unless you can pilot a spaceship, there’s nowhere to go.” His eyebrows wiggled like orange worms arched over his eyes. “Can you? Are you a pilot?”

The mockery in his voice should have outraged Jupiter, but he didn’t have the energy for rage. He swayed on his feet, thinking of his vulnerable pack brother in the compartment down the corridor. He should fight. The thought flickered in his mind, but his body didn’t respond.

“Or,” said the human, “we could just wait here until you bleed out.”

Jupiter’s chin dropped. Crimson splashed at his feet and a blood-soaked bandage stretched across his torso.

Another stream of blood trickled across his collarbone and down his pectoral muscle.

He touched his fingers to his shoulder and found it wet and slick.

He pressed hard against the wound, hoping the jab of pain would provide a much needed surge of adrenalin, but it was too late. He’d already lost too much blood.

His legs buckled and the jarring impact of his knees slamming into the decking sent agonizing shockwaves through his body. His eyelids fell. The rush of weakness could no longer be put off. It left him powerless.

He thought again of Seneca. Regret and longing for his pack brother settled in his chest. As the humans circled closer, he huffed out his bitter shame.

For the second time in as many days, he was going to die.