No, the only thing she truly feared now was the beast the doctors had unleashed inside her. During her slow journey home, she had learned that the creature's appearance was hard to predict. At the slightest provocation, her claws and teeth would extend and her sight would change, making nighttime seem like daytime and daytime painfully bright.
If she was frightened, startled, or threatened, the changes went even further. Her muscles would throb with power, and her face would change. She'd seen her reflection once in a stream and been startled to see that she looked almost catlike.
Sometimes the changes came on for no other reason than because she was sad or lonely or afraid. Those times truly terrified her, for with a curse like this, she couldn't imagine a time when she wouldn't feel those things.
Worse than the physical changes was what she felt happening to her soul. Where once she'd been a calm, compassionate person, now all she ever felt was anger and rage.
She had taken to traveling only at night, seeking cover in wooded areas, and avoiding villages and people whenever she could. While she feared being attacked or mistreated by people, she feared what the beast inside her would do to those people more.
Now, Minka wasn't sure if she'd be able to keep from hurting someone. She'd wanted to go around the village, but it was squarely in the middle of the path that headed toward the mountain pass. Two of the men following her had swept around, to get ahead of her, and she had to turn into the village to avoid them. Minka said a silent prayer, hoping she could pass through without incident, but she feared her prayers weren't even being heard anymore.
She was so busy second-guessing herself that she didn't see the men who'd arrayed themselves in a line along her path until she was almost on top of them. Her heart beat faster at the ugly expressions on their faces.
She stopped and slowly backed away from them, but it didn't matter. Two more men closed in from behind.
Minka didn't scream as they converged on her, afraid it would only spur the men to do something even more violent than what they already had planned-and afraid it would bring out the monster inside her. So she just stood there.
Two of the men grabbed her and lifted her off the ground while a third grabbed her ankles. As they carried her toward an abandoned building, she begged them in Tajik and in Russian to leave her alone, but they only laughed and called her horrible names. The man on her left shouted at her for being out alone without a male chaperone.
Inside the building, she tried to shove them away and get her back to a wall, but they continued to taunt her. When one man tore at her tattered shirt until it completely ripped away, they grew silent, their eyes latching on to her nearly naked body. She moved back against the mud wall behind her, trying to cover her bra with her arms.
But Minka knew her hands wouldn't stop these men from getting what they were after. After all the pain and suffering she had already endured, she was going to die just a short distance from her home in total disgrace and humiliation. She was never going to see her family again. That might be for the best, though. She didn't want her parents to see what she had become, what she was turning into even now.
The men didn't notice the change. Not at first, anyway. They were too interested in other things. But they noticed when the first man tried to kiss her and she sent him reeling back, his chest ripped open to the bone.
Minka thought for sure the rest of the men would run then. But they only cursed and came at her all at once. They threw her to the ground, one of them kicking her while the other two pulled out knives.
She hadn't wanted to hurt them, and if they had killed her quickly, she would've almost been grateful. But it was clear they wouldn't get around to killing her for a while. They would toy with her the way the doctors' guards had toyed with her, making her scream in pain.
But the beast inside her would never let her be tortured again.
Minka was off the floor in a flash, slashing and biting, pushing the men back to give her space to move. For a moment, she saw the door, clear of attackers and open to her escape, but she ignored it. The beast wasn't interested in running now. It was interested only in tearing and ripping and killing.
The men's shouts of pain and terror got louder as they ran for the door and scrambled toward the windows. But their cries only made her anger flame hotter, driving her into a fury she'd never felt before.
Minka desperately tried to rein in the beast, but it was like she was on the outside of the abandoned house looking in. She knew she was the one tearing the men apart, but she was no longer in control. She wasn't sure she ever would be again.
* * *
Sergeant First Class Angelo Rios glanced at his watch. They needed to get moving, or it'd take all day to get back to camp. He and his Special Forces A-team had been doing a recon sweep back and forth through the rugged terrain of southern Tajikistan when they'd heard about a small town near the mountain pass that had been hit hard by a recent storm. Repairing buildings damaged by high winds and torrential rain wasn't the kind of work Special Forces usually did, but Angelo and the team's new lieutenant figured it'd be an easy way to gain a little goodwill with the locals, which definitely was an SF mission.
Angelo squeezed the last of the cheese onto a cracker from his MRE-meal ready to eat-and shoved it in his mouth. With breakfast done, he stuffed the empty wrapper into his rucksack and swung the pack over his shoulder. The rest of the team got the message and did the same.
"So, do you think Kendra will ask you to be the godfather?" Staff Sergeant Carlos Diaz, the team's communications expert, asked Derek, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
Angelo let out a snort. Diaz had been ribbing the team's medic, Staff Sergeant Derek Mickens, for a month straight about his most recent crush, Kendra Carlsen. The Department of Covert Operation's admin assistant turned kickass field operative had married Declan MacBride, the DCO's freaking huge bear shifter, after spending a week alone with him in the jungles of Costa Rica a few months ago. And to top it all off, the couple was now expecting twins.
Derek gave Diaz a less-than-amused look. "Give it a rest already."
Diaz grinned, his teeth a flash of white against his tanned skin. "No way. After all the time you spent trying to convince us that you and Kendra had a connection after dancing with her at the captain's wedding, I'm going to be reminding you about this when we're all old and gray."
Derek muttered under his breath as he tightened the straps on his own rucksack. "Yeah, well tell me this: What does that big bear shifter have that I don't?"
Angelo chuckled along with everyone else. The only member of the team who didn't laugh was Second Lieutenant Ben Watson, and that was only because he was the new guy and didn't know why the whole thing was so damn funny. Angelo felt bad about Watson being out of the loop, but it wasn't like he could just come out and tell the lieutenant about the secret government organization called the Department of Covert Operations; or about humans known as shifters who possessed naturally occurring genetic mutations that gave them certain animal traits, like claws, fangs, enhanced speed and reflexes, and improved senses; or about man-made versions of shifters nicknamed hybrids; or any of the other crazy crap the team had been involved with in the past year or so. How did you explain to someone that there really were monsters in the world, complete with sharp teeth and even sharper claws? Worse, how did you explain that some of those monsters were actually the good guys?
Angelo was about to point out to Derek that the DCO's resident bear shifter had seventy-five pounds of muscle and six inches on him, not to mention a face that didn't scare small children, when screams of terror from the far end of the village silenced the words in his mouth.
Angelo had his M4 in his hands and was running toward the sound as the rest of the guys spread out behind him, checking for incoming threats. He rounded the corner of a dilapidated building and was heading down a dirt road lined with more crumbling buildings when a man covered in blood ran toward him. Two more men followed, fear clear in their eyes and blood staining their clothes.
At first, Angelo thought it was an IED-an improvised explosive device-but that didn't make sense. He hadn't heard an explosion. He slowed down anyway, worried he was leading the team into an ambush.
One of the men pointed behind him, shouting something in Tajik. Angelo's grasp of the language was pretty good, but the man was speaking way too fast for him to make out what he was saying. Then he figured it out.