Wild Beast Mate(34)

“Like women to men, not pigs. It’s a safe house.”

“They were safe here,” I said.

“There’s more afoot than you know, child.”

Patty was thirty-one to my nineteen. She could kiss my ass on her age superiority. “Don’t fucking ‘child’ me. I found your old ass in rags and hungry, and I welcomed you in here. I trusted you to take care of us. What the hell have you done?”

“Your parents are right. We should never breed with the beasts. Eventually, they’ll die out if we don’t. But what your parents failed to do, Brother Tom is doing. See, we, the women, have a duty to repopulate our planet, and what better way to escape the beasts than to marry and have a family with a man? The Pairing Program will never stop, but we are not helpless. If we’re pregnant, they can’t touch us, and all of us here would much rather fuck a man than those things out there. I didn’t see it until Brother Tom explained it to me. He sees all.”

“God sees all,” I said.

“Tom is his servant, our new prophet.”

Oh hell. “The nuclear war happened over the same thing. People kept using religion as a sword to do evil things. Don’t you see that’s what this Tom is doing? The pairs will be used again, but instead of being sold, they’ll simply be bred with whomever.”

“Yes. It’s the lesser of the two evils.”

“You think they will let you choose a man,” I concluded, more to myself than Patty.

“Why yes, Dewlyn, we chose them, quite the opposite from the Pairing Program.”

I doubted the pairs would get to choose anything. “Where is this Tom guy? I wanna have a word with him.”

Patty shrugged. “I don’t know.”

I stood and rested my palms on the table. “Patty, why haven’t you gone with them?”

“I stayed with my boyfriend. We’re leaving soon.”

A man emerged from the shadows. Quick and efficient, he palmed the sides of Patty’s head, then twisted.

Crack!

Wide gray eyes devoid of life stared at me. He released her, and her body hit the floor. Frozen, my legs couldn’t move, my breath completely arrested. I just blinked at him.

“I’m the boyfriend,” he said. The man strode back out and picked up some kind of a weapon. It looked something like a fire extinguisher but bigger. He aimed at the beds at the back of the shelter. Whoosh followed a path of fire, and the beds caught, sending smoke in the air. I still couldn’t move, but my brain finally processed Patty’s dead body on the floor. The guy had to be with Men of Earth. Why would he kill her? Would he try to take me?

Heat swept over my skin and tore me out of the petrified state. I had to get out of there. The bedrooms on fire were to my right. The exit lay across the open space and to my left. And the knives were only three steps away. I’d have to be fast. I stepped toward the counter when the man walked back and took Patty’s place on the chair. From the back pocket of his jeans, he took out tobacco and paper. He rolled a cigarette and offered it to me. I shook my head. He nodded, looking like he’d gotten tired of standing in line for ice cream and decided to sit and wait it out.

“Hi there,” I said and inched closer to the knives. “Wanna talk about it?”

The man’s haunted eyes kept staring at me.

Fire spread out and covered the part of the open space of the shelter we’d partitioned and made into our bathrooms. I coughed, the smoke burning my throat. When smoke started choking me, I took my shirt off to place it over my mouth. “You just set this place on fire. Let’s get out of here.”

“In good time.”

“What the fuck are you doing, dude?”

“Enjoying my smoke.”

“Would you like a cup of coffee with that?”

His eyes narrowed.

I squinted mine. “I ain’t burning in here.”

“That depends.”

At first, I leaned against the counter, but my knees shook, so I hopped up on it and crossed one leg over my knee. Casual while smoke collected on the ceiling. I didn’t think he’d hurt me or he would have already. But I also thought he’d lost his marbles, so I couldn’t be sure. The man didn’t seem too concerned with me, probably because of my size. The only exit was behind his back, which meant I’d have to dash past him to get out, then dash across the open space to the door.

His gaze fixed on his cigarette smoke. He seemed enthralled by it, so I reached behind me and gripped a knife, hoping like hell it was the biggest one. I fisted the handle. “Depends on what?”

“If you don’t piss me off long enough for me to ask you what I’ve come to ask you.”