The Night's Champion Collection: A supernatural werewolf thriller trilogy

by Richard Parry

  Sam looked out the open door, then at Adalia. “What?”

  “Go. You’re not our prisoner.”

  “I’m … what?” Of course he was their prisoner. They’d taken him from Ben and Ernesto, and bundled him up in his car, and…

  Wait.

  “I’m not your prisoner,” he said.

  “That’s right,” said Adalia.

  “This is my car,” he said.

  “Right again.” She was nodding at him, encouraging.

  “You … took away my jailers.” Sam thought about Ben and Ernesto, and the others before them, the stone-faced men who’d filed through his life. Watching what he did, what he said, where he went, hell, even what he wrote in his corporate emails.

  “Sam Barnes,” said Adalia, her voice harder than a human’s should be. “Sam Barnes, hear me. You can take the door. The easy route, the soft step away from this car and back into the world you know. You will wear the comfortable shackles of your hidden prison. You will see your Charlie again. But he will never be as you remember him. He won’t laugh and smile and run in the sun, because his soul will be lost. Or you can stay here, in this car. You can hear what we have to say. You can try to fight with everything you have. You will lose your kingdom. You will change the world. You will save your Charlie’s soul. Now choose.”

  There was a stillness in the car, like the world was waiting. Sam looked at Jessie, saw her hard eyes, but something in them that might have been pity. Saw the back of Rex’s head, the man waiting for his answer, hands easy on the wheel. Turned his head back to Adalia, saw her outstretched hand still held towards the door. “Will he die?”

  Adalia closed her eyes for a moment, tilting her head to the side. Her brow furrowed in concentration before she opened her eyes again, looking at him. Through him. “Hard to say. It’s not clear.”

  “So you’re telling me,” said Sam, “that if I stay here in this car, Charlie might die.”

  Jessie leaned forward in her seat, grabbing a fistful of Sam’s shirt, tie, and jacket. She hauled him forward, so close that he could smell her, sweat and leather and cordite. “She’s saying, asshole, that Charlie is gone. He’s lost. You step out this car, and he’ll never be your Charlie again. He’ll be theirs. You stay here, you stay with us, and there’s a chance you can hold your son again. Your living, breathing son. She’s giving you a chance, you dumb sonofabitch, to save the one thing that—”

  Jessie was cut short, Adalia’s hand on her shoulder. Sam could see the muscles in Jessie’s jaw working, but it was Adalia who spoke. “It’s okay, Jessica. He needs to choose. He needs to choose.”

  Sam fell back into his seat as Jessie let him go. He smoothed the front of his jacket. “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re all crazy.” He started to get out of the car, even had one hand on the sill of the door when Jessie spoke again.

  “His name was Gabriel, and I chose wrong.” Sam heard the pain in her words, and that held him still for a moment. “He was the most perfect thing in this world. Your Charlie still has a chance. If you walk away from here, he’s lost to you forever.”

  Sam looked out at the street, the soft pink of dawn starting to lean into the orange of real sunlight. He thought about Charlie, about how that kid of his loved to laugh. How he hadn’t heard that sound for a long time now. His fingers clenched around the door frame, and he looked back at Adalia. “He might die.”

  Adalia nodded. “He might.” She shrugged. “He might live, too. Actually, if my mom’s involved, he’s got a better chance of living than dying. But I can’t be sure.”

  “You’re not making this easy.”

  “It’s not about making it easy,” she said. “It’s about making it right.”

  Sam Barnes looked at her for another moment, then let go of the Maybach’s door frame. The door closed with a clunk, and he let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Tell me everything,” he said.

  The Maybach slipped away from the curb, purring into the quiet dawn of a new day.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE

  Liselle picked her way through the street, glass crunching under the red soles of her Louboutins. She’d mastered the stiletto heels, walked with an almost magical ability that meant even here, in this shattered New York city street, she never put a foot wrong.

  She took in the scene as she walked. There, a car overturned, all windows shattered, the roof flattened down. Her fingers traced along brickwork pocked with bullet holes, some of the dry dust and mortar wisping out, hungry for her touch. A utility pole was snapped at the base, debris strewn out along a line that led to fragments of the pole itself. She looked at the line drawn by the debris, traced the point of origin back to the bar.

  There wasn’t much left of the front of it, just some crumpled metal and fragments of wood that might have been tables, and could just as easily have been chairs. No people alive, a few bodies lying in their final release, some eyes staring, some closed. It was always the way: the dead forgot all their pride and purpose. The empty vessels of humans would drown the world before the end.

  She shook herself. Not yet. That’s why you’re here.

  Her feet crunched over more glass as she stepped inside. There were, a miracle in and of itself, still lights on. Another miracle: a man was here, working the bar. Or trying to work, without any customers — moving a cloth across the surface, cleaning away shattered bottles and spilled liquor. She took in the concave shape of a wall where something — something large — had been thrown with great force. Liselle stepped across the body of a woman who’d been taken, the blood gone from her body. Her name had been Candice Marshal. Her daughter, Susan, was not yet awake as the city stumbled from dawn into day. Candice’s mother, Theresa, named after Theresa of Avila, waited for her daughter to come home from working the late shift. Candice Marshal would never come home again.

  “We’re closed,” said the man behind the bar.

  Liselle looked at him, took in the broad shoulders, a face that looked like it loved to smile, but perhaps under better circumstances. She gestured to the broken frontage. “The door was open.”

  “Yeah,” said the man, “about that. Look, and I don’t want to be the asshole here, but I just need to say that tonight’s been one of those nights. You know the ones, where there’s people dying everywhere, guns firing, I mean for Christ’s sake, it was intense.”

  “You’re still here,” she said, sliding into a stool across from him, the faux fur of her coat making no noise. “It sounds like a night to remember.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure. Look, since you’re still here, do you need a drink?”

  “Do you have Midas Touch?” Liselle looked at the shattered glass from broken bottles strewn across the room. “I guess you might be low on stock.”

  “Dogfish Head?” The man turned behind him, freeing a bottle with a distinctive blue label. He looked around for a while before saying, “Do you need a glass? Because that might be a little tricky.”

  “It comes in a glass,” said Liselle. She took the bottle from him, took a pull, her eyes closing as she savored the flavor. “That’s good,” she said.

  “Sure,” said the man, again. “It’s not really my thing. Beer’s a beer, wine’s a wine, and that thing is—”

  “Something in between,” she said. “I know. I remember. They’re wrong, though.”

  “Say what?” The man blinked at her.

  “It wasn’t Midas’s tomb,” she said. “It was Gordius’s.” She closed her eyes. “He was a gentle man, for his day.” She took another sip. “This tastes of a better time.”

  “It tastes like ass,” said the man, “but each to their own.”

  She laughed. “You don’t … you’re not worried about what happened here tonight?”

  “It’s my job,” said the man. “People come in, I pour them drinks. I don’t really get worried about that.”

  She blinked at him, then laughed again. “And … the other events from this evening?”

>   “Oh,” he said, “you mean when everyone started running and screaming. I’ll admit, it’s cut down on the number of tips I got. But I’m waiting.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking at him over the top of her bottle. “Waiting. For what?”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m no expert, but I’d have expected the police to turn up at some point. So those guys, for a start.”

  “They won’t be coming,” said Liselle. “Not today. Not for this.”

  “Yeah,” said the man, “I figured.”

  “You did?” She was momentarily surprised, realized the feeling had been creeping up on her during the conversation until it collected into this moment. The barman, this man, had a drink that hadn’t been common for over two thousand years. This man was relaxed in the face of what had happened, and more: he was alive. “Tell me your name.”

  “Well,” said the man, “normally that’s not how you ask someone out.”

  Liselle almost snorted her drink through her nose. She picked up the small paper napkin to dab at her lips, and perhaps to hide her smile. “I … I wasn’t.”

  “No, it’s cool,” said the man. “Women of today, you got to lead the conversation. I get it.” He made a fist and pumped the air. “Girl power, right?”

  “I’m … did you just call me a girl?” Liselle wanted to be offended, but that wouldn’t have felt right. There was a light inside this man, something she caught a glimpse of out of the corner of her eye. She could see it through his skin, and she hadn’t ever seen anything like that. The color of his soul, perhaps, although she’d never seen its like in a million other humans.

  “Hey, I don’t judge,” said the man. “You don’t roll with the gender binary, we can work with that too.”

  “I … what?”

  “Another?” said the man.

  “What?” she said again, feeling a little out of place. After all this time, someone made her feel unsteady, unlinked, and it was delicious.

  “Your drink,” said the man. “You’re empty. And that impresses me, because you couldn’t pay me to drink it and you just sucked it back like you were siphoning gas.”

  Liselle looked at her empty bottle. “I could do another.”

  Another bottle appeared on the bar. The man put aside his cloth. “Your accent. It’s neat, but I can’t place it.”

  “That’s…” Liselle felt the grin on her face, and she didn’t want to stop it this time. “That’s not how you ask a girl out.”

  He laughed, and there it was, that wonderful smile. Like his face was born to hold it. “I … I don’t know. Was I?”

  “You were,” she said.

  “Right,” he said, and then looked at his hands. “I’m a bit out of practice.” He turned around, rummaging through the stocks behind him, and pulled out a beer of his own. It was a Peroni, a beer she judged good by the standards of today. “I think we should do the name thing.”

  “The name thing?”

  “You tried. Before,” he said, making a gesture with his bottle that might have meant a moment ago, or might have tried to encompass the world. “You did it wrong, remember?”

  “So I did,” she said. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Who?” Not he must be a lucky guy or what the hell have we been doing for the last ten minutes, just who.

  She was going to answer when the sound of the motorcycle rolled through the open front of the bar. Loud, he was always loud. Josef. He was riding something with a Harley Davidson label on the side of the engine. They both turned to the front of the bar as Josef kicked the stand of his Harley down, leaning the bike over with a practiced air, and started a slow, confident walk through the open front towards them. His short boots — crocodile skin, unless she missed her guess — crunched over broken glass. Josef was wearing a sleeveless vest, the muscles on his arms a thing to catch the eye. The vest was open at the front, no shirt, showcasing a lean physique. Hard was what Liselle thought whenever she saw him. Hard, and maybe hungry too.

  “Him,” said Liselle.

  The barman looked Josef over, a practiced eye used to gauging the competition. “You could do better.”

  She wanted to laugh, tried to stop herself, then let it out anyway. She covered her mouth with a hand. “It’s … it’s not like that.”

  The barman nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

  Josef walked up to them, looked at her, then at the barman. “Who’s this?”

  “We hadn’t got that far,” said the barman. “Two drinks in, still don’t know her name.”

  “No,” said Josef, some of that hard and hungry coming into his voice. “You don’t.”

  The barman winced. “That’s cold. Interest you in something frosty to loosen up?”

  “Beer,” said Josef. “Something American.”

  “Miller it is,” said the barman. He slid a bottle across to Josef. “I don’t know how you can do that to yourself.”

  Josef eyeballed the barman for a moment. The barman looked back, nothing challenging in it, standing like a rock in the face of that stare. Josef turned to Liselle. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “You’re late,” she said. “I’ve been working already.”

  Josef looked at her, then at the barman, then back at her. “Really.”

  “Really,” she said, letting some steel into her tone. “It happened. Here.” Liselle tapped a finger against the top of the bar for emphasis.

  Josef leaned back, and she could see some of the tension he’d been holding ease out. “There are no bodies.” She knew he didn’t mean the bodies of the humans. He meant the bodies of the Night.

  “That’s because … they survived,” said Liselle. “Josef, they’re alive.”

  “You,” said Josef to the barman. “What did you see here tonight?”

  The barman stared at Josef for a minute, then turned slowly to Liselle. “You want to get out of here? Since, you know, ‘it’s not like that.’”

  She felt the warmth hitting her cheeks — I’m blushing, by the Father, I’m blushing — and looked down at her beer. “I can’t,” she said, meaning, I want to.

  “As a small … what would you call it, incentive,” said the barman, “I will tell you two things.” He held up two fingers, as if there were an audience to keep count.

  “Two?” she looked up, met his eyes.

  “Liselle,” said Josef, “we don’t—”

  “Yeah,” said the barman. “First up, I’ll tell you my name, and we’ll do it right this time. Second, I’ll tell you what happened here tonight. So Captain Action here—” and he jerked a thumb at Josef without looking at him “—can relax a little.”

  “Yes,” said Liselle, knowing she should have said no.

  “Great,” said the barman. That smile came out again. “Let’s start again, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Liselle. “I’m Liselle. Liselle Vitols.” She held out a hand.

  The barman looked at her hand, then reached out his own. She felt the warmth of his skin in her palm as they shook, the easy strength of his hand, and felt that thrill of the brightness inside him as their skin touched. “John,” he said. “I’m John Miles.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX

  Val crouched by the edge of a dumpster, a big old worn piece of metal. The smell coming from it was exceptional, which bothered him for more reasons than the obvious. It was probably easier to hide in an alley filled with a … magnificent, horrendous stench when you didn’t have such a great sense of smell. That was the thing about these creatures, if Val’s borrowed memories were right: they were strong, and fast, and could see in the dark like goddamn walking Starlight scopes, but their smell wasn’t for shit, and their hearing wasn’t much better either. Strong and fast, check, rest of senses, basically non-existent. It’s what made it possible, in a set of particular circumstances, to sneak up on one. He was really, really counting on that set of memories being right. Otherwise, tonight was going to go from bad to worse. Still, the setup had worked.
It had made the creature go here, to this alley. This perfect, beautiful alley with such a horrible dumpster.

  It hides from us.

  The creature had run in here moments ago, Val hot on its heels. He felt the—

  Paw and claw. Feet across the bare earth, mother moon above us.

  —thrill of the chase, the hunt, but also fear. The last time he’d fought one of these … well, it wasn’t him, for a start. It was Volk, and Volk’s memories were a scramble of inconsistencies wrapped up with a heavy dose of crazy. But if Volk’s memories were to be believed—

  I remember also.

  —then a single one of these creatures was more than a match for him. Even if Val changed, it wouldn’t be enough. They were that strong, that fast.

  There was a small ace in the hole. Volk’s problem, near as Val reckoned, was that the man had never worked in a team. Always going it alone, running from friends, running towards the dark. Val and Danny had talked long about what they’d do when they found one. The ultimate goal was to capture one, but that was several levels above base survival. A dead one would do just fine for a start. No one had pulled these things apart to find out if the insides were full of meat or cotton stuffing.

  Tonight was a test.

  They were going to pass. He knew. He knew it in his blood, could feel it in his hands, taste it in the air. He knew it because Danny—

  Pack mate.

  —ran at his side. His friends, his family, had his back. Time to pay back that trust.

  Time to save the world.

  There was no blood leading into the alley — these things wasted nothing, he’d watched this one suck that waitress dry like she was a cold beer on a hot day, not a drop left in the bottom of the glass. Val knew when he killed things, when the Night was free, there was always blood. Everywhere. But these things used blood like some kind of freaky battery, and they didn’t need a napkin to avoid getting a stray drop on their clothes.

  The odor of the dumpster meant he couldn’t find the thing by smell, and the fuckers didn’t have the common decency to have a heartbeat. Mark One Eyeball it was, then. Although, if he was being honest, it was more like a Mark Twelve Eyeball; the Night gave him all the edge he needed.