Green Cove Springs, Florida

Lucas prided himself on his ability to be calm in all situations, but he'd never been literally stabbed in the back before.

Pain sliced through him as he stumbled forward, shuddering down his nerve endings and turning the world a bright, blazing red. He fought against it—fought the warning signs of berserker rage escaping the tight leash he'd kept on it all his life…

The knife slammed into his back again, narrowly missing his heart. Pain and rage combined into a tidal wave of fury, and still he fought against losing control. Then the door to the cabin the shifters had been using as a temporary HQ crashed open and a flood of enraged shifters bent on murder—his murder—swarmed out.

Lucas pushed the pain to a small corner of his mind, pivoted, and caught the first man's wrist just before the blade struck a third and perhaps final time.

Then, for the first time in more than a decade, he released the chains binding the berserker side of his nature. The ensorcelled daggers that came to his call when he needed them shot into his hands, their worn hilts already hot to the touch.

"For Mycenae!” he roared, his throat closing with that all-too-familiar mix of shame and pride. "For Atlantis!”

The half-dozen shifters hesitated for a split second before they charged, two of them beginning the shift while the others came at him in their human forms. They had knives, chains, and guns, but they were foregoing the efficiency of shooting him for the pleasure of killing him up-close-and-personal.

That was the last rational thought he had for a while.

When Lucas came back to himself, back to some form of sanity, he stood alone in the center of a ring of bodies, his sword raised and dripping fat, scarlet drops onto the ground beneath him. He gulped down huge breaths of the cool night air and tried to think. Tried to remember exactly what he'd done.

What he'd become.

It took only a thought to heal his own wounds—his healing magic extended that far, at least—and then he forced himself to chase red-drenched memories through the darkness in his mind. But only flashes came. The red berserker haze and the whistling sound of his sword cutting through air, through flesh, through bone. He'd killed them. Killed them all. But his only emotion was a slight twinge of regret. Not for their deaths; for his failure.

Dead men couldn't talk, and he needed to know their plans.

A barely-audible moan broke through the haze that was slowly clearing from his mind, and he turned around to see that a single man—the one who'd first stabbed him—was still alive in that clearing filled with the broken forms of the fallen.

"Don't kill me, man,” the shifter pleaded, his hands scrabbling to keep his guts inside his body.

Lucas's mind calmly and automatically performed calculations:

Abdominal wound.

Head injury.

Fatal loss of blood.

Chance of survival: Nil.

Ability to confess to the nature of the shifter group's plans: Limited.

Time remaining to try: Two to three minutes, at most.

All of this ran through his brain in seconds. He crouched down in front of the man, who flinched and cried out, trying to back away despite his deadly wounds.

"Please. I didn't even want to do this. Any of this. Don't kill me, man. I'll tell you anything. Anything. Just don't kill me,” the man pleaded, tears and blood running down his face.

"Your name,” Lucas said, his voice almost too rusty to be understood. He cleared his throat, pushed the rage—kill, rend, destroy—back, and tried again. "Your name.”

"Burns. I'm Burnsie. Don't kill me,” the man blubbered.

Lucas smiled, and Burnsie closed his eyes and wailed.

"Burnsie, tell me your plans, and I won't kill you.” Lucas wasn't lying. He wouldn't do anything else to this dying man. Dying of a gut wound was horribly painful, or so he'd heard, and killing Burns would be a kindness the man didn't deserve.

The rogue group's plans included killing women and children, after all.

Burns clutched harder at his stomach and cried out but then cast a wide-eyed glance up at Lucas. It was amazing, the human capacity to hold on to hope in the face of overwhelming evidence of evil, despair, and imminent death.

Lucas liked hope. Hope made killing them easier.

"Tell me the plans for tonight.”

Burns nodded, his lips quivering with eagerness. "We're infiltrated the H Prime retreat. You know them? Humanity Prime? They're at that retreat center a few miles over near the river.”

Lucas nodded grimly. He knew the bastards. Humanity Prime was a hate group of human nationalists, and its sole aim was the utter destruction of everyone and everything supernatural. Ever since the Fae, vampires, shifters, and other paranormal entities had admitted the truth of their existence to the humans more than a dozen years ago, hate and fear had driven closed-minded humans to join up into groups whose goal was to prod their members into terrorism (H Prime and the others called it patriotism) designed to kill, destroy, and erase non-humans from the face of the earth.

The northeast Florida chapter currently holding a retreat was the one Lucas and his fellow Poseidon's Warriors had been investigating, but not because of the H Prime members themselves. No, the reason Jake was undercover inside and Griffin was surveilling from outside the compound was even darker. They already knew that Burnsie's group of shifters had gone into the retreat, pretending to be human H Prime members, and the group planned a repeat of a horrifying assault they'd perpetrated before: they were going to attack the entire group of humans sometime tonight or tomorrow, just before tomorrow night's full moon, and attempt to force the Transition into shifter onto all of them.

This was wrong in so many, many ways. The shifter council had decreed that no human could be granted the Transition without counseling, informed consent, and the agreement by the shifter pack involved.

Not to mention that forced Transition was punishable by death under human law, because the human courts considered that the act essentially killed the person who had existed before. The non-shifter version of the person was, in truth, dead, if one chose to look at it a certain way.

And given that nearly half of all humans who attempted the Transition died during their first shift—worse, more than three-quarters of the women did—a forced shift was often murder in more ways than just semantic.

"Tell me their plans,” Lucas growled, and Burns flinched again.

"Tomorrow. Midnight. They're going to call the leadership into a meeting and kill Greer—he's the chapter leader?”

Hate groups had chapter leaders. For some reason, this struck Lucas as almost worse than anything else. The bigotry bureaucracy; who would have guessed?

"Go on,” he told Burns, narrowing his eyes.

"That's it,” Burns whined. "After Greer and his leadership guys are dead, the group is going to attack the rest of the humans there and force the—” the man broke off into a spasm of wet-sounding coughing.

Maybe some lung damage, Lucas's mind automatically noted. Best to hurry this along.

"Force the Transition? On those humans? Do you realize there are women and children in there?” His voice lowered to a deadly calm, but Lucas could feel himself losing control again. He took a deep, centering breath to force himself to focus. Killing this pathetic weasel of a man would accomplish nothing; he needed to know more.

"Hey, don't be sexist,” Burns wheezed, when he finally stopped coughing. "Some of H Prime's most bloodthirsty ringleaders are women.”

"The children are innocents, at least,” Lucas snarled.

Burns shrugged. "Collateral damage, man. You're not human, right? You get it. We have to save ourselves.”

Lucas grabbed him by the throat. "I'm from Atlantis. Children are never, ever collateral damage to us.”

Collateral damage. Children. That's the expression he'd heard several times when he was listening outside the cabin, too.

Collateral fucking damage.

Lucas's vision started to turn red again, but he fought it back. Must. Not. Give. In. He was a man, not a monster.

Man, not monster.

Man, not monster.

Repeating it helped some. Not a lot—he didn't really believe it—but enough. Enough to allow him to release the man's throat.

Burns, clearly realizing in some part of his lizard brain that he was in immediate and deadly peril, hunched into a ball, clutching his belly. Trying to hold his guts in.

Too little, too late, Lucas could have told him, but he didn't bother. He had what he needed. Dismissing the dying man on the ground, Lucas stood and took a step away from the rank stench of perforated bowel.

He needed to talk to the rest of the Twelve, at least the ones who were here with him on this mission. Before he could reach out, he heard Jake's voice in his mind on the Atlantean mental communications pathway.

Denal. We need to talk. I've got innocents here, and we need to get them out of the way before anything happens. What's the timeline on getting the P-Ops people in here?

Lucas realized Jake was trying to contact Denal, who was their leader now and, in the past, had also been a member of King Conlan's first elite team of warriors—the Seven. Denal was also a serious pain in Lucas's ass, but that was irrelevant right now.

He answered Jake: Denal, our fearless leader, had to return to Atlantis to deal with some emergency.

Griffin spoke up next: I can handle the guards and, in fact, any obvious guns in the compound. What's the situation there?

Jake: The situation is bad, verging on horrible. I have no way to tell who's a shifter and who isn't. I haven't seen any sign of the werewolf prince, either. Maybe he isn't here after all.

Lucas cut in. He'd heard the shifters discussing this, too, before Burns had caught him off guard with that damn knife.

He's there. I found the rogue shifters' base a few miles away from the H Prime retreat and listened long enough to get their plans. They're planning to attack at midnight on the full moon, which is tomorrow. They know there are children inside, Jake. They don't care. The words "collateral damage" were repeated several times.

Jake: Those bastards. If only I knew which one the leader was, I could get a fix on his people.

Lucas nodded to himself. He could help with that. Easy enough.

He focused hard and sent the image of the leader into Jake's mind, carried by the mental pathway. He'd seen it on the phone image that one of the shifters had been passing around to a couple of the newcomers. Ugly. Thuggish. Old. Scraggly gray hair.

Jake's voice came through, sounding resigned. He's the bear?

Lucas responded: Yes. His son, who looks just like him, is the raptor. Mother must be a bird shifter. Stay clear of the son, Jake. He's completely insane and has gutted several of his own pack, just for the fun of seeing them die.

Jake: Little late for that, but I'll do what I can from now on.

Griffin's voice cut into the conversation: How exactly did you get all this information, Lucas?

Lucas looked at the bodies littering the ground around him and laughed—a choked sound that carried nothing of amusement or humor.

Easy. I killed all of them but one, and he was eager to talk to me, then.

Griffin: Lucas! You can't act as judge and jury all on your own. You should know that by now…

Jake cut in: What did you do with the last one?

Lucas glanced over at Burns, belatedly realizing that he hadn't heard the gurgling breaths or moans for a minute or two. The man's eyes were fixed and open, staring forever into the eternity he'd undoubtedly spend in the worst of the nine hells.

Lucas shrugged, feeling nothing. Not triumph; certainly not regret.

I killed him, too.

That's when one of the dead shifters turned out not to be dead after all, as Lucas discovered when the blow smashed into the back of his head.

After that, all he saw was blackness.