Alpha Blood Box Set(54)

I shrugged, but didn’t stop my melodious meowing. “Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow-mix, we deliver!”

Our noise was enough to wake the dead and drowned out the noise from an atomic bomb. The men used their fists and elbows to bash away at the plate, and in a matter of seconds the floor door fell into itself and lodged down a circular shaft. Stacy listened with one ear on the door and the other deaf with our noise. She tensed and stopped pounding. “Trouble!” she hissed.

The men grabbed the plate, yanked it back up into place, and sat clumsily in front of the broken floor. I rolled my eyes at their hastily thought plan, grabbed Stacy’s wooden legs, and stomped over to Luke. I gave him a good whack on the head, and he rubbed the sore spot and looked up at me in astonishment. “Whose side are you on?” he accused me.

“Not yours, that’s for sure!” I loudly proclaimed. By this time I heard the square peephole door slide open behind me.

“What are you doing now?” the guard growled.

I spun around and wagged a leg at him. “Do you think I like being stuck in here with these guys?” I hissed back. I marched over to the door and pounded a leg against it so hard it splintered. “That’s what I think of your groups and about your werewolf superiority! I’ve been stuck as one of you for over a month and I’m already sick of all these politics and messy alliances! You hear me? Sick of it!” I bashed another leg over the peep hole and the guard shut it.

The guard swung it back open and glared at me. “If that’s how you feel then scream all you want. I won’t be back.” He slammed the small slot shut and marched away.

I breathed a sigh of relief and my shoulders slumped. “I’m not getting paid enough for this,” I quipped.

Luke stood and smiled at me. “You’re a good actress.” He rubbed his head and winced. “You even had me convinced for a second.”

I tossed aside the remaining legs, crossed my arms, and shrugged. “I had to do something to keep them away. We don’t want them looking through that thing a second after we’re gone and catching us again,” I pointed out.

Alistair and Baker quietly pulled the plate from the hole and we all glanced down. The rounded walls were fashioned out of plaster and a metal ladder led down into the darkness. I looked around at the men and sheepishly grinned. “For once I don’t think I want it to be ladies first,” I told them.

“I’ll go first,” Baker offered. Before anyone could suggest drawing straws, which was a good thing because we didn’t have any straws to draw, he slipped down the ladder and out of sight. His clanking feet told us he was still alive, and in a few seconds there was a splash. “Looks like a sewer. Better be prepared for some shit ahead,” he called to us.

I rolled my eyes. “The one time he tries to be funny it’s a farmer’s joke,” I muttered.

Alistair was next, followed by Stacy. I grabbed Luke’s shoulders and tried to shove him down ahead of me. “Come on, don’t be a chicken,” I scolded him when he grabbed my arms and stopped my pulling.

“You first,” he ordered.

I put on my best pouting face. “How come you always get to be the last man standing?”

“Because you’re a woman, and a very beautiful one at that, so I don’t want anything to happen to my beautiful mate. Now get down there.” He picked me up and lowered me feet-first into the hole. I clung to the ladder and glared up at him after he let me go.

“You’re pushy, you know that?” I asked him.

“I learned from the best, now climb,” he commanded me.

My mature response was to stick my tongue out at him and scurry down the ladder. I hit water before I hit the bottom rung, and shuddered when something dark and globular touched my leg. We had climbed down into a large sewer culvert with water dripping from the round ceilings and a smell so rancid I wondered if all the city had eaten only breakfast bean burritos over the last few years as a joke on us.

Alistair politely grabbed my waist and set me into more filthy water. My hero. My werewolf sense of smell was nearly overloaded by all the wonderful scents of an entire city focused on flushing the toilet. The smell rose up like the ghost of past Christmas dinners. I clapped my hand over my nose and shuddered.

“Breathe through your mouth,” Stacy suggested.

“I’m seriously thinking about cutting off my nose,” I mumbled through my hand.

Luke hurried down after me and splashed into the water. “Do you mind? I’m trying not to swim in this stuff,” I hissed at him.

“We may have to if we come to a deep pool,” he pointed out. He waded forward to where Baker’s dark shadow stood a few yards down the pipe. “Well, it seems we have to guess which way to go,” he mused.

“Not necessarily,” Baker countered. He knelt down and I shuddered when he dipped his fingers in the water. “The water’s heading that way, and that means the treatment plant is bound to be in that direction. If we can’t find a manhole to climb out of we’ll end up there.”

I turned to Stacy, who looked as ill as me. “How far away is that?” I asked her.

“About fifty blocks,” she replied.

I looked back to the men. “Um, I veto going that far.”

Luke turned around and glanced up at our escape hatch. “I’m sure we’ll find a manhole sooner rather than later, but what I’m worried about is them finding us. We have to get moving.” He sloshed downstream and the rest of our damp group followed. It was slow going because even with our wolf vision there was little light to see more than a few yards ahead of us. I groped along the wall until I touched something I could only describe as this-will-haunt-me-in-my-dreams disgusting and decided Luke’s shoulder looked a lot more tempting, and clean. I shuffled through our little crowd and clutched onto him.

“Wonderful vacation spot, darling. We should take our travel agent out and shoot him,” I quipped.

“I couldn’t agree with you more, but I hope we can cut our vacation short in a few minutes,” he replied. He glanced up and frowned. “If we don’t find our way out of here soon we’ll be driven mad by these smells.”

“I’m already mad, but about more than just the smells.” I shuddered when something brushed against my legs. “Any way you want to reenact a scene from all those mushy romance novels and carry me?”

He turned, looked me over, and smiled. “But you look lovely in brown.”

I scowled at him. “I look better under the sun.”

“I may be able to oblige you,” Alistair spoke up. He sloshed over to the wall and gestured to an alcove in the wall. A ladder led up to a few small holes of moonlight. Freedom and fresh air lay beyond that dirty, heavy manhole cover. Alistair turned to me with a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “Perhaps the men should go first.”

“Oh hell no. Ladies first this time,” I argued.

“I should go first,” Stacy suggested. “I know the city much better than you and can tell where we are.”

I had a really great counterargument set up, something along the lines of if-there-isn’t-any-oncoming-traffic-I-don’t-care, when there was a loud noise behind us. It sounded like the splashing of a half dozen guards sicked on us by Cranston to drag us back to that horrible white room. That, or the sewer alligators had found us. “All right, but if you don’t move fast I’m climbing over you,” I told her.

We hurried up the ladder with the men close behind. Stacy removed the manhole, stuck her head out, and then climbed into the fresh air. The manhole opened up onto a side street a dozen blocks from Stacy’s dad’s house. As I was making my escape from the sewer of stink I heard a commotion below me and glanced down. Luke was grappling with a few dark shadows and Alistair dropped off the ladder to help. The pair and the guards dunked and punched each other, and it looked bad for my mate until Baker joined the brawl. He landed on two of them, and Luke and Alistair took care of two themselves. Then they hurried up and joined us in the clean world.

“We need to hurry. They’ll be able to trace our scent by following the stench,” Luke told us.

“Hurry to where?” Baker challenged him. He opened his arms and gestured to our surroundings. We stood in a narrow alley between two tall fences that stretched for most of the block. Trash cans stood beside the few gates and the din of the city sounded far off. “The city’s big, but Cranston has Stevens under his control and that means he’s got a tight fist on everything.”

“Not entirely,” Stacy spoke up. “I rent an apartment my father doesn’t know about, and what my father doesn’t know about then Cranston doesn’t know about.”

“An apartment for what?” Luke asked her.

Stacy smiled and shrugged. “Oh, just exchanging some favors from my network, and a girl has to have a place where she can be alone.”

“Lead us to it, then, before our stench leads them to us,” Baker demanded.

“And we’d better avoid a taxi. They might have the wrong armband,” I added, much as I regretted to remind everyone. My feet ached to be free of my wet, soggy shoes.