“You are some sick bastards. This is horrible,” I said, unable to believe what I was seeing before me.
“We know,” Silas admitted. “That’s why we’re going to spring them. Happy Birthday, man.”
They’d told me we were going to Vegas for a little fun. It was my birthday, and we had a break in assignments, so a celebration was in order. At least, that’s how Tarron had pitched the trip to get me to agree to come. Now here we were, sitting in the audience of an underground fight ring, right down front with a perfect view of the animals they were prodding with cattle prods to fight each other.
I tried to tell myself they were just animals as I sat watching in horror. There was a solemn feeling that fell across my team. Taylor had tears in her eyes as Grant tried to console her. They were newly mated and tried to keep PDA to a minimum, especially on the job, but this was certainly an exception. She was a badass and none of us were used to seeing her go so soft. I couldn’t blame her though. I wanted to cry, too.
As one of the two dogs in the cage went flying into the railing right in front of us, blood splattered on us all. The stupid humans watching this for sport roared and cheered as I gagged and fought not to throw up.
“Do we have to actually watch this crap? I’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here, rescue those poor animals, and blow this place up,” Baine said.
That would be a disturbing statement from anyone else, but Baine was our resident explosives expert and his answer to everything was to just blow it up.
“Patience,” Silas said. “We have backup on this one, but we’re boots on the ground. Security doesn’t stand a chance against us, but no matter how disgusting these humans are sitting here enjoying this, we can’t afford so many casualties. Last thing we need are the Feds coming in and deeming us a terrorist group. So sit tight and try not to throw up.”
He looked at me. He must have heard me gagging. Silas knew I hated blood. The sight of it, the smell of it, didn’t matter, it all brought back too many nightmares.
When we were young, we were dubbed the children of the gorillas. Some do-gooder scientists that were studying our bands found us and took us from our families. They had no idea what they were doing. Silas and I met in an orphanage and made plans to break out and get back as soon as possible. But we were too late.
The scientists had only been there observing. They didn’t know or understand anything about my kind. They thought we were just simple minded gorillas, and that these poor little human kids must have wandered away from our village and been adopted by the gorillas. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Books were written about it, movies made even. Tarzan was probably the most popular, but George of the Jungle, and so many others capitalized on that very concept.
I tried not to blame the scientists for what happened, but I was uncomfortable around their kind. Silas didn’t elaborate on who we were working with on this, but from the sad apologetic look in his eyes, I could guess. Patrick O’Connell headed up Westin Force, the organization I worked for. He had many human contacts from a group that called themselves Verndari.
The Verndari weren’t supposed to harm or even directly interact with shifters. That’s what I was, a shifter. Not the human boy those scientists had assumed. I wasn’t living with a band of wild gorillas. I had been living with my parents. Some of my brothers and sisters were indeed animals, and my parents spent most of their time in their fur. I had been a bit of an accident. My parents were working on a repopulation plan for the gorillas. Our numbers had dwindled thanks to poachers in the area. One drunken night out on the town and my mother couldn’t shift back. That happens when a shifter becomes pregnant in human form, just like when she got pregnant in gorilla form, she couldn’t shift back to her skin until delivery. Those pregnancies always resulted in animals, not shifters.
My parents hadn’t planned on having me. I had a couple older shifter siblings, but as a family they’d chosen to go gorilla and work on repopulation believing that was the