Freedom!

Nicholas Corcoran’s POV

I felt someone grab me by the belt and haul me backward just before automatic weapons fire came up the stairway. Fiona’s warning, and Leo’s quick reaction, kept me from being turned into a casualty.

Emily launched herself down the stairs, and I heard a loud crash when she reached the bottom. The shooting stopped, and Vicki was yelling my name. “It’s safe,” Emily said.

I let Leo look down the stairs before I did. Emily was near the bottom of the stairway with a dead vampire at her feet. Leo checked it for himself before he sent me down. We could see the dead vamp’s head leaning against a gate at the bottom.

Emily had taken a half-dozen shots from the M-16 rifle the dead vamp had fired. “Are you all right,” I asked as I reached her. She was a bloody mess.

“It could have been a lot worse. I’ll heal in a few minutes,” she said. Emily removed the knife stuck in the dead vampire’s arm and looked at it before tossing it to the ground. “Great throw, and thank you. Get the door open, Nicholas. Your mate needs you.”

Hell yeah. I looked at the door and thought about blowing it. “Check the pockets, wolf boy,” Emily said without turning around as she walked up the stairs.

Yeah, that was smarter. I found a key ring and opened up the gate. The girls were waiting for me as Leo followed me into the space outside their cell. “The bars are silvered,” Vicki warned.

Leo went up to the bars, his eyes looking over the girls. “We’re getting you all out of here. Is anyone hurt?”

“Vicki’s on bedrest,” Fiona said. “The rest of us are fine.”

I found the right key and pulled the door open. The five girls didn’t rush out; instead, they waited for me to get my mate. “Hey, my love,” I said as I picked her up.

“I never lost hope you’d come for me,” she said. She buried her face in my chest as we walked out of the prison cell. “I lost our baby.”

“I know.” Leo was using the bolt-cutters to remove the silvered collars from us, and I could feel their joy as they rejoined the Pack link. When Vicki’s collar came off, her love and loss almost overwhelmed me. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

The other girls walked ahead of us on the stairs, avoiding the corpse at the bottom. I didn’t feel her weight in my arms as I carried her up; such was my happiness at having her back. There was a cheer as the girls entered the office building, everyone clapping and welcoming them back.

“Thank you all for coming to rescue us,” Vicki said for them all. “I’ll never forget your courage and sacrifice."

Leo had to handle some things with the vampires; after all, we’d just had a firefight, complete with grenades, flamethrowers, and automatic weapons in the middle of an industrial area. Even with the Mermaid’s help, you couldn’t hide a battle like this.

It was time to get out. The warriors who remained were tending to the wounded. As we walked towards the door, I saw people leaving their weapons in a pile for the vampires to dispose of. There was no point in trying to bring them back into the States, much less Australia. “Leo, our teams have finished clearing this building,” a man said. “The Vampires have control over the warehouse and have captured the remaining vampires. We only have a few minutes before the police arrive.”

“Thank you, Ivan. Evacuate the wounded and retrieve our dead,” Leo replied. “The vampires will take care of their kind.”

“You should know Chairman Carver didn’t make it,” Ivan said as he pointed over to the bodies near the rear door before he walked away.

I looked over to see Leland Carver’s armor-clad corpse as wolves zipped it into a body bag. Five other body bags lay next to him. Leo took one last look at the bodies, then turned back to the staircase.

There was a shriek of happiness as Fiona jumped into Joseph’s arms. He cupped her butt as she wrapped her legs around his hips and kissed the hell out of him. “We’ve got to go,” I said, and Joseph didn’t let her down as he walked outside with us. Amy, Makani, Noelani, and Carly all looked around longingly for their mates, their faces falling when they didn’t see them. “Sorry, girls,” Leo sent over the Pack link to them. “The SEALs are still training, and Michael Kanoheh is in Cancun with your Mom, Carly. You’ll be able to talk to them soon.”

The crisp mountain air felt great as we walked out to a waiting SUV. Vicki stayed in my lap, and our driver took off as soon as the doors closed. “Do you need a hospital, love?”

“No, I just need you and a few days in bed together,” Vicki said. “Sleeping.”

I snorted at this. “I’ll make sure you’re healed up first,” I promised.

Fiona touched my arm. “The vamps took two pints of blood from each of us, and we’re still recovering. A nurse gave Vicki a drug to end her ectopic pregnancy. I didn’t get the name of it, but the nurse said it was working, and she’s been getting better.”

“Are you all right, Fiona?”

She let out a breath and leaned back into Joseph’s arms. “Physically, I’m healing. I’ll never get back what those bastards took from me, and I’ll never be able to give my mate the purity I saved for decades. I can’t even get my revenge because the vampires killed them.”

“We’ll get a doctor to check you all out when we’re safe.” I didn’t say much else; I didn’t have to. My wolf and I poured our love for Vicki through the bond as I held her close. She fell asleep in my arms as I rubbed her back through the scrubs they were wearing.

We were twenty minutes away and nearly back to our hotel when the driver got a call. “Understood,” he said. Hanging up, he did a U-turn.

“Where are we going?”

“Change of plans,” the driver said. “Leo wants you all at Master Vespucci’s mansion.”

“WHAT,” Fiona asked. “Why would we go there?”

“You’ll have to ask him,” the driver replied.

I tried to reach Leo on the link, but he was too far away. “What happened upstairs,” I asked Joseph.

“Most of it went just like we planned,” Joseph said. “We’d use auto shotguns, rifles, or flamethrowers to incapacitate them before the trail wolves took their heads off with the swords. I was in the group holding the entrance to the warehouse, and that was a fucking bloodbath. Do you have any idea how much damage a flamethrower can do against a group of people?”

I could just imagine. “How many survived?”

“Maybe twenty. The vampire masters and their people hit both sides of the warehouse concurrently, and they waded in and parted the crowd like Moses. Heads were rolling everywhere, and the smart ones followed the order to give up. Some tried to escape to the office, but our flamethrowers took care of them quickly. The older vamps ended their suffering, and it was all over in less than a minute.”

Damn. Over eighty vampires dead in less time than it took us to get down to the girls. I was glad those Masters were on our side!

We’d been driving about five minutes when the sky lit up, and I could see a huge explosion in the distance. “Was that ours,” I sent out to everyone over the Pack bond.

“Yes,” Leo replied to us all. “The vampires stashed all the bodies down in the cell, then set off a gas explosion and brought the whole building down onto it. Master Emily is going to stay behind to make sure the investigators write the explosion off as natural gas line leak. The mermaids made sure there were no human witnesses.”

“Damn. The Masters can pull that off?”

“Emily assures us she can steer the investigation that way, and I have no reason to doubt her.”

It was a handy power to have. I narrowed the link down to just Alpha Leo. “Alpha, why are we going to Master Vespucci’s house?”

“You’re not questioning my orders again, are you?”

“No, but we’re all trying to figure out why we’re going from the frying pan to the fire.”

I could sense Leo’s amusement at this. “We’re going to imprison the girls in Vespucci’s basement, of course.” With that, he closed the link.