“Fuck!” Craeg barked as he tried to stop his body from reacting to the stimuli.

“What the fuck!” Novo yelled.

Or some version of that.

Thin air.

Next thing he knew, he had fallen off an edge he hadn’t seen coming and gone into a free fall that left even him screaming at the top of his lungs. All around him, air rushed up, traveling through his clothes and making them flap, streaking his hair and the skin of his face and back, riddling his ears with a buffering sound. He was going to snap both of his legs if he landed feet-first, but there was no time, and no distance—and no reason to even try to broker a landing that wasn’t going to be devastating—

Sploosh!

He hit an unanticipated pool of water on his side, his body getting caught in the safe hold of cold, fresh liquid. The relief as he didn’t end up with both his femurs coming out of the tops of his shoulders was short-lived. His Tasered, tortured, overheated muscles immediately cramped on a oner, everything freezing up, his lack of body fat turning him into an anchor, not a buoy.

The shock of the unexpected bottoming-out had caused him to pull in a tremendous lungful of air, but that oxygen supply wasn’t going to last. He needed to get to the surface.

With clawed hands, and only one leg that had any mobility, he scratched and kicked in what he hoped was the way up. He had no visual orientation at all, nothing but a black abyss that was going to consume him if he didn’t save himself.

The surface of the pool, pond, lake, whatever it was rearrived with the same unexpected, unannounced surprise that he’d plunged into it with. Coughing and trying to suck in air were two mutually exclusive activities, and he had to force his primordial sense of survival to regulate his diaphragm’s spastic responses.

Chlorine. They were in a pool.

He didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about that. The pain in his cramping muscles was unbelievable, like having daggers driven into his thighs and his ass and his gut, and he started to sink back down before he’d caught his breath—and that was a no-go. He was going to die that way.

Fighting against his body’s impulses, he used his mind to override his sympathetic nervous system: Taking an enormous breath in, he stroked his arms out and down, creating an artificial current that swept his torso flat across the top of the water. Then he stopped … fucking … moving.

And let the air in his chest cavity become the life jacket he wasn’t wearing.

It wasn’t a perfect float. His legs continued to sink, and he had to kick every so often to stay on top, but it was a hell of a lot better than hitting the bottom and drowning.

From time to time, he expelled his breath and reinhaled.

He wasn’t sure how long he could last like this. But he was going to find out.

God … his cording muscles were a torture to endure, and to distract himself, he relived being up high on that catwalk. The Brothers were brilliant, he decided. Going from that heat to this cold? After the electrical shocks?

It was an engineered environment guaranteed to put someone exactly where he was: fighting against his body’s natural responses to certain stimuli and environments.

What was happening to everyone else? he wondered.

Where was the female?

Not the one he’d been on the elevation with … but the other one? Paradise?

As water clapped in his ears, it was like the light show from the gym, obscuring and then letting in sensory input. He heard splashing, both close to him and farther away … a lot of shouting and gasping from others in the pool … echoes—they must be somewhere large with a relatively low ceiling and a lot of tile.

Releasing the air in his lungs, he immediately reinflated them …

… and waited for whatever was next.

Chapter Eight

“… pair in the mouth. ETA four minutes. Clear entrance and far right side of pool…”

Pressing the release button on the wire that ran from his earpiece down the side of his neck, Butch said quietly, “Roger that.”

As he strode around the edge of the pool, he tracked the movements of the candidates in the water with his thermal-imaging goggles. Two more had just fallen in from up above; both had surfaced and assumed a dead man’s float so they were tight and relatively quiet. Not always the case. He and Tohr had had to pull four candidates out already, which meant there were only three other males in with the new couple.

Everyone was far away from entry point B over on the right. Good.

Butch checked his watch. Whoever was left behind in the gym was going to be timed out in another six minutes. And all this stuff was just the preamble to what he and his Brothers were referring to as the Final Destination—and that last stop was going to be shut down by the sun at dawn, so it was mission-critical that the group who made it through these early tests had enough time out there.

Doc Jane and Manny’s clinic was filling up. The mild herbal emetic had more than done its duty, and there had been a variety of minor cuts, scrapes, muscle pulls and burns. Two loads of dropouts were already on their way off the property, and there were going to be more.

This was the thing with a meritocracy: Shit had to get real fast, because he and V weren’t going to waste time on anybody who couldn’t make the cut.

“Is it my turn yet?” Lassiter asked over the earpiece. “I was born ready for this.”

“Of all the people who could be immortal,” V muttered, “why are you one of them?”

“Because I’m awwwwwesome,” the fallen angel sang. “And I’m part of your team—”

“No, you’re not—”

“—living your dream!”

Butch’s head started thumping even worse. “Shut up, Lass. I can’t do singing right now.”

“It’s from Despicable Me,” the angel commented. Like he was being helpful.

“Shut up,” V cut in.

“Shut up.” Butch fought to keep his voice low. “We’ve got another four minutes in the gym. I’ll let you know when you can—”

“I’m losing air over here, you know,” Lassiter bitched. “My inflatable is deflating.”

V cursed. “That’s because it doesn’t want to be around you any more than we do.”

“You keep this up and I’m going to start thinking my enmity is mutual.”

“About fucking time.”

Right, Butch didn’t get off on dragging soaking-wet, panicked idiots out of a pool—but, man, he was really frickin’ glad he wasn’t on the back side of the house with those two fighting. “Sit tight, Lass,” he said. “I’ll be in touch—and, V, for the love of God, will you turn off his fucking mic—”

“Ow! Hey! What the fuck, V—”

Annnnnnd everything went blissfully silent.

As his headache tried to kick down the door to his skull, Butch wanted to pop his goggles off and rub his eyes, but he wasn’t about to lose sight of the candidates for even a moment. The last thing the program needed was someone getting seriously hurt, or worse, waking up dead.

Besides, he was distracted enough on his own, even with the 20/20 headset.

Something was wrong with Marissa.

Shit knew he’d spent enough time being a walking zombie back during his human days to recognize the numb preoccupation she’d been rocking.

The trouble was, she was giving him nothing to go on. Every time he asked her what she was thinking about or whether she was okay, she smiled at him and made some BS excuse about things being busy at Safe Place.

Undoubtedly that was true, but that was always the case. And she didn’t always look like she had for the last night and day.

Maybe they just needed an evening off—and not only in terms of not working. The mansion was a great place to live—the chow was good, and the company even better. The problem was, you didn’t get much privacy. Short of retiring to your bedroom, which in their case was a shoe-box-sized enclave with a thin door and thin walls at the Pit, you weren’t ever truly alone. Intrusions happened without warning by everyone from the staff, to other Brothers, to mates.