Chapter 126

The monsters coming out of the darkness around them were unlike anything Jo had ever seen before, and she’d been watching horror movies since she was a toddler--or thereabouts. Some of these things were conglomerations of mythical creatures--with heads and claws of one species and bodies of something completely different. Some had wings, others had horns where they shouldn’t be, and the one thing they all had in common was that they were trying to kill them.
Or eat them alive.
In the darkness, even with her superhuman eyesight, Jo was having trouble aiming at the monsters. Most of them were so dark black, it was difficult to see them against the backdrop of the tunnels. Jo found herself aiming less and firing more, which was never a good way to wield a weapon.
Somehow as they were fighting the monsters, Jo managed to get herself separated from her aunt and Zane, who had been closer to another tunnel when the monsters had come flying at them. Now, she was backing into a tunnel with Christian, Scott, and Ryker--not exactly the trio she’d want to be with if she had a choice.
Keeping the human from getting hurt was proving to be difficult as well. Christian wasn’t even trying to protect Ryker, and while Jo wished she wasn’t either, it was hard not to stand in front of him when the otherworldly monsters were snarling and attempting to bite and slash them. He was shooting right alongside the rest of them, but he was so much slower than the LIGHTS team members, there simply didn’t seem to be any way that he could keep himself from getting killed or at least maimed.
“Watch out, Jo!” Scott shouted from her right. Jo didn’t know what that meant until it was too late. A large bird-like creature swooped down, aiming for her head. Jo dodged aside slightly just as the claws raked over the side of her face. Furious, as pain filled her head, she reached up and grabbed hold of the bird’s wing and yanked it out of the air, slamming it onto the ground and shooting it. “Son of a bitch!” she muttered, blood dripping down into her eyes.
Scott’s blue glow hit her a few seconds later, and immediately the pain went away. He wasn’t capable of healing major wounds at a distance, like his father was, but he could patch up scratches like these without too much trouble even when he wasn’t touching the victim.
She didn’t have time to thank Scott for his help as another beast was bearing down on her. This one was much bigger than the others. Shaped like a large hippo with the head of a wolf, saliva dripped from its mouth.
Jo shot it several times, but it was so large, even after burying three or four bullets into it, the bastard wouldn’t fall down. As it neared her, she had to think of another way to defend not only herself but the rest of her team.
The shots had done some damage. The creature wasn’t coming as quickly as it had been before. Jo lifted her leg and kicked it in the chest. It felt like slamming her leg into a brick wall. The monster rocked backward slightly, but it didn’t die. A second later, it had recovered and was aiming for her head again with its massive teeth.
All she could think of to do was punch the thing in the side of the head as hard as she could. It reared around, swinging its face in the opposite direction. That seemed to throw the monster off slightly. It wobbled a bit, giving Jo a chance to shoot it a few more times.
Eventually, it fell onto the ground, still writhing slightly. With more monsters coming, Jo had to hope it was enough to keep the hippo monster down. She turned her attention to a snake-like creature coming up on her right and sank a few bullets into its slithering body before it stopped moving.
To her left, Jo heard a shout of pain and turned to see the hippo creature was up again, and its teeth were sunk into Ryker’s arm. “Goddamnit!” she shouted. “Why won’t you just die?” She flung herself at it, landing on its back, and wrapped her legs around its neck. This method was unconventional, to say the least, but it let go of Ryker’s arm. With her legs still secured around its throat where, hopefully, its airway was cut off, Jo aimed for the top of its head and fired four more times until the monster went down.
Suddenly, the silence around them was just as loud as the roar from the creatures had been. Jo surveyed her team. The four of them that were still together looked all right, except for Ryker’s arm, which was bleeding badly.
Scott was already moving to see what he could do. His magical abilities wouldn’t work on a human the way they would a Guardian or Hunter, though she’d heard his father’s did, but he was still a trained doctor. He had Ryker sit down and take off his jacket to examine the wounds.
As much as Jo wanted to wait and see how badly Ryker was wounded, Jo needed to know exactly what was going on and what they could expect.
The only person who might be able to answer that question was Christian. “What now?” she asked. “When will they be back?”
“Who the hell knows?” he said with a shrug. He checked his gun to see how many bullets were left and then loaded a full cartridge. “Bastards do what they want.”
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered. He was absolutely no help. She may as well have come into the portal without him.
She turned back to Scott and watched him for a second as he bandaged Ryker’s arm up with some strips of fabric she assumed had come from his shirt. “He needs medical attention, the kind I can’t give him in here without my medical bag, and he needs it now.”
“I’m fine, goddamnit,” Ryker muttered. He clearly was not fine.
Turning back to Christian, she said, “Can you open a portal into headquarters so we can get him out of here?”
Before Christian could respond, Ryker started shouting again. “I’m not going anywhere, Jo! Goddamnit!”
She returned her attention to the angry human only to see Ryker attempting to push Scott away from him. “I’m trying to stop you from bleeding to death,” Scott told him.
“I need my fucking arm!” Ryker shouted, shoving at Scott again.
The Healer lifted both hands and backed up as if to say he could just go ahead and bleed to death if that’s what he wanted to do. “Fine--but what the hell are you doing?” Scott asked him.
Ryker was reaching into the pocket of the leather jacket he had just taken off. Jo hadn’t even noticed the jacket before. She was so used to seeing him in that dumb furry coat he wore all over Russia, now that he didn’t need it anymore, she hadn’t realized he was dressed a lot like the rest of them.
It was a syringe. Ryker pulled a syringe out of his inner jacket pocket and used his injured arm to pull up the sleeve on his other arm, wincing at the pain it caused to use his bleeding arm to do anything at all.
“What the hell is that?” Scott asked, his eyes going from Ryker to Jo and then back again.
She didn’t know for sure, but she had a feeling. “Ryker, if that is what I think it is, I’m gonna beg you not to do that. You’re going to regret it, and it’s not going to do you any good.”
He wasn’t listening, which didn’t surprise her at all. Since when did Ryker listen to a damn word that she said?
Ripping the cap off of the syringe, he studied his arm in the dim light for a second. He somehow managed to find a vein with his bleeding arm and inserted the needle. All Jo could do was shake her head as he pushed down on the plunger.
“What is it?” Scott asked, though Jo wasn’t sure if it was directed at Ryker or her.
Jo couldn’t answer right away. She was too stunned at what she’d seen. She knew from her own experience that the pain he was about to go through was going to be unlike anything he could ever comprehend.
Ryker tossed the spent needle and syringe away. “I’ve heard… in here… rules are different. This should work.”
“It won’t work!” Jo screamed. “You’re going to be in horrendous pain for no fucking reason!”
“If it won’t work, then it won’t hurt!” he shouted back. “And then I’ll bleed to death in a few minutes anyway!”
“Do you have the pain blocker we usually take after that serum enters our bloodstream?” she asked, dropping to her knees next to him, ready to search his jacket to see if she could find it.
“Nope. I don’t need it,” Ryker said, wincing. “I have a high pain tolerance.”
She slowly shook her head. “You have no fucking idea.”
“Is that Transformation serum?” Scott asked, his eyes huge as he finally recognized that that was exactly what it was.
Jo nodded. Behind her, she heard laughter and realized that Christian was getting a kick out of this, the sadistic bastard.
Turning around, Jo scanned the area around them, not looking at Christian, who was smoking a cigarette about ten feet away from them, but looking for monsters. At the moment, they seemed to be fine. She wished Cassidy was with them so that she could throw a shield or something, but she had no idea where her aunt and Zane were and no time to try and find them on the IAC or otherwise.
Ryker’s face scrunched up, his eyes closed, as the first wave of excruciating pain from the serum hit him. Scott began attempting to patch up the injured arm again, but that was the least of Ryker’s problems. He was convulsing in horrendous pain now, his eyes rolled back in his head.
“Son of a bitch,” Jo whispered. “Why do people always have to pull this shit on me?” She couldn’t imagine anyone having the balls to do this if her dad was in charge.
She briefly remembered that her dad was dead, but now wasn’t the time to dwell on that either.
“Christian, can you open the portal I requested, please?”
“No!” Ryker shouted. “It’s working, damn it! If you send me out, it’ll stop working!”
“But--”
“No!” Ryker screamed again. “I’m fine!”
“You’re not fine, and it could take days for this to work, if it’s possible for it to work at all. Are you just going to lay here on your back with these fucking monsters all over the place, unconscious, for days?”
“It won’t take as long in here,” Ryker said between winces.
“How the fuck do you know?” Jo screeched. “You know someone who has come into the goddamn Blood Moon Portal and turned themself into a--what kind of serum was that? Guardian? Hunter?” She knew that there had been experiments years ago where humans had attempted to change themselves into “super-humans.” They’d taken the serum that LIGHTS team members used to Transform and shot up with it. As far as she knew, none of those attempts had ever done anything but give the humans a buzz for a while. But they had delineated between “Hunter” serum and “Guardian” serum, which the LIGHTS team members had never needed to do before. The same serum worked on either of them because they already had the elements necessary to change them in their DNA.
“Guardian,” Ryker eked out.
“Figures,” Jo muttered. “You would want to be as indestructible as possible and live forever.” She still didn’t think there was any chance in the world that this would work.
“I’m… starting to feel better,” Ryker said, but he didn’t sound convincing. Behind her, she heard a screech and turned to see Christian shooting a monster. It wasn’t large, and it fell to the ground, but in her experience, those bastards were rarely alone.
“What are we going to do?” Scott asked, still sounding a little more panicked than a Healer should.
“Well, if he’s right, then he should be a Guardian any minute now, which means that your powers will work on him. Why don’t you see if you can fix his arm now?”
Before she could see whether or not Scott was having any success with that, she turned back around to see if anything was creeping up on her.
“Holy hell,” Scott muttered.
Jo turned around.
A blue glow surrounded Ryker’s arm from Scott’s touch. It was working.
“Holy hell indeed,” Jo agreed.
Ryker’s annoying chuckle rumbled beneath the pants of pain. He really was able to change himself into a Guardian. How the hell was that possible?
She didn’t get a chance to ponder it for long. From a tunnel on the other side of the opening, she heard a scream she’d only heard a time or two in her life. That was her aunt. Cass rarely screamed about anything, so whatever was wrong was really wrong.