Welcome to the Dark Side (The Fallen Men 2)

A bullet grazed the outside edge of his arm but Bat was undeterred as he slammed the gun out of the man’s hands then slipped his big knife effortlessly between his ribs and up into his heart.

Third man down.

One of the men in the room with me hesitantly moved forward to engage him.

Before he could get the chance, a body flew through the air from the stairs and crashed into the wall with a horrific crunch.

Seconds later, Zeus appeared in the doorway.

From deep within my cocoon of shock, my heart began to thaw and my mind began to whir.

Zeus was there.

I tried to scream because there were about four guns trained on him the second he stalked through the door with Bat at his back.

Zeus didn’t care.

He plucked a dead body from the ground and used it as a shield as he walked into the room then roared like some great angry beast as he threw it into two of the Nightstalkers kneeling closest to him.

They fell back and before they could get up, Bat and Axe-Man, who had appeared out of thin air, were on them with knifes sinking through their butter-soft flesh.

Zeus took a step toward Blackjack, utter rage in every line of his enormous frame but before he could get there, Ace emerged from behind the door and jumped on his back, sinking the edge of his blade into Zeus’s trapezius.

Zeus bellowed so loudly, the room shook with it. I watched without breathing as he reached back with one of those mighty man-killing-hands I loved so much, grabbed the smaller man and flipped him over his shoulder. Then before he could land, Z picked him up by the throat and flung him against the wall.

There was a sickening snap as Ace’s spine broke on impact.

Vaguely, I noted that Nova had his knife at Blackjack’s throat and that Axe-Man was beside me, gently cutting through the tape at my ankles and wrists.

“Don’t have to watch this,” he mumbled.

I watched on as Zeus stalked over to the crumpled man, pinned him against the wall with a knee to the gut and cupped his face. Then with a quick, almost casual flick of his wrists, he broke Ace’s neck.

The man dropped to the ground like a broken toy, but Zeus wasn’t done. He proweled over to where Nova held Blackjack and smashed his head into the wall behind him.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Zeus shouted. “You betray your brothers like this?”

“You aren’t my brother,” Blackjack spat. “You never gave a shit about me or my problems. You fuckin’ promoted that Irish fuck Priest over me. There’s no fuckin’ brotherhood under a Prez who’d kill his own brothers.”

Zeus’s laugh was hard. “That what your dad told you, that I killed Crux for kicks? He was fuckin’ killin’ brothers, you motherfuckin’ idiot. He was killin’ brothers just like you killed Mute, for no goddamn reason other than that you’re fuckin’ sick.”

My system rebooted like it’d been jumpstarted and suddenly I was on my feet, so powered by rage my body vibrated with it as I moved toward the group huddled in the corner. I didn’t notice the blood drying my clothes to my skin or the fact that my dad’s body dropped to floor when I got up.

All I noticed was Blackjack and the words Zeus had just uttered.

The words I’d been thinking already.

Blackjack killed Mute.

Before Zeus or Nova or Axe-Man or even I understood what was happening, I was grabbing Zeus’s gun from the back of his waistband, lifting it with a steady hand and popping off a shot into Blackjack’s throat.

He watched me in shocked horror as the shot slammed him back into the wall and blood spurted like a geyser from the wound.

I watched him without remorse as he fell to the ground and slumped over, bleeding out like a stuck pig.

The Fallen men looked at me and they did it carefully.

“Lou, give me the gun,” Zeus grumbled.

I didn’t.

Instead, I flipped the safety, threw it to the ground and wrapped my arms around Zeus’s blood-drenched back.

A second later, I burst into tears.

My guardian monster’s arms came around me, his lips pressed to the clean side of my hair. “I got you, little girl,” he said in a voice as rough and deep as any monsters, while he held me like a guardian angel. “I got you.”

I was graduating. Somehow, the year was finally ending and I was graduating. I still had my hair, something I never would have thought at the beginning of the year but then again, I never could have predicted where these months had taken me. My dad was dead, entombed in the Lafayette Mausoleum at First Light Church that no one ever visited. Warren was dead too, found floating in Entrance Bay just weeks after he’d been involved in a bar fight that left him with an ugly, broken face. Only Javier remained standing, an impenetrable pillar of Entrance society, stepping into the vast vacuum left by the Lafayette’s abdication from the societal throne. There was nothing to pin on him, no evidence stating he’d funded the Nightstalkers, no witness to his cold-blooded murder of my father but for me. He lived free and well but with an itch at the back of his neck that told him The Fallen would never forget.