Page 107 of The Last True Hero

Both of them listened.

"Don't you want to spit in her eye?" Mia breathed. "Take back everything she's ever taken for you? Repay her for what she did to your man? Do you think you can just run away and put all of this behind you? You can't escape her, or what you've done. But maybe you can make amends."

Zarina shuddered. "Yeah. But if we fail...."

"We're not going to fail." Mia's eyes lit on a rocket launcher.

And suddenly a plan formed. Plan B.

She dragged it out of its case, along with a couple of the grenades. She'd been lost ever since that moment when she realized that McClain wasn't human. Her feet kept moving and somehow she'd managed to run and fire weapons but her mind had been in shock ever since, as if it could only focus on one thing at a time, and barely that.

This cleared the fog.

Once upon a time, she and Jake had been playing around with an old gas canister, a plastic tube sealed at one end, and a crate of oranges. They'd both gotten the hidings of their life from that moment too. But she knew a little about trajectory, and could imagine firing something like this.

She was going to get to McClain, or she was going to die trying. And if she did die... well, she was going to take every reiver in Rust City with her.

"How do you work this?"

Zarina shot her a careful look, then picked up the rocket launcher and hefted the end of it on top of a crate. "Like this," she said, and demonstrated how to load it quickly, her hands moving over the grenades as if she'd handled them before. She cocked one eye shut and lifted it onto her shoulder, then pretended to pull the trigger. "Bang.... Wait a couple of seconds and then...." She made an exploding sound through her cheeks, her clenched fist springing wide. "You shoot this, and you make sure you aim high and not at anyone."

Mia took the launcher, juggling its weight. "How big is the explosion?"

Zarina paused, glancing around for Jake and Sage. They hadn't noticed Mia's preoccupation. They were too busy trying to bandage Jake's arm. "You sure you should be holding that?"

"You going to try and take it off me?"

"Hell, no." For a second Zarina's eyes lit up. "I would love to see the look on Vex's face when she sees you coming."

"You will see it," Mia pointed out. "Let's go."

* * *

Adam couldn't find her.

Street after street, all he saw was violence and death. Reivers lay scattered and torn in the dirt, along with the odd warg. In the distance, some of the reivers near the main compound manned the gun turrets and bullets chewed the dirt there.

A warg bolted past on all fours, its matted fur wet with blood.

"You drew claws in that arena." Colton swung his arms out to the sides, and claws gleamed at the ends of his fingers. "Think you can do so again?"

Luc had been able to do the same. Adam grit his teeth. He'd never bothered to learn. Suppressing his warg nature had been all that mattered, and now that he was out of the ring he'd lost the claws he'd sprouted. "The axe is good enough for me."

"Suit yourself," Colton replied with a loose shrug. "But you're the one who fears the beast. I'm the one who controls it."

Colton headed down another dusty street, and Adam frowned. What did he mean by that? Could Colton control the actual shift? Or control the warg when it wanted out?

What would that mean if you were a warg? Was there a way to shift forms with his human mind still in control, so that he'd never have to fear letting it out again?

No time to find out. But definitely later.

Focus on Mia. He hurried after Colton. Once Mia and Jake freed her sister, they'd have headed for the armory and the vehicle lot, if they moved according to the plan.

He didn't know what he'd say to her when he found her. The expression on her face when he went warg kept flashing through his mind. Horror. Shock. Her feet taking one explicit step back away from him.

A reiver staggered out of a narrow alley between shanties, and Adam cut him down with the axe.

He wrenched the axe out of the reiver’s chest blankly. Whether or not Mia wanted him anywhere near her, he wasn't about to leave her to this. As soon as he got her and the others safely away from here, they could talk. Until she was safe, nothing else mattered.