“Hell hath no fury, Akio. My mother is ready to shake down every city from here to kingdom come, if need be, but that would not be best. The Forsaken have no idea what they’ve done,” Cory firmly stated. “We’ll be ready when you arrive.”
Akio thought about telling her he’d call when the pods took off, but he saved his words. He knew what the pack and the members of the FDG were doing. Telling them when he’d arrive would change nothing. They would sit, and the wound would fester.
Their only relief would come when they faced their enemies. When they stared their fears down and let the courage of their convictions give them strength. It was what Terry preached day in, day out.
It was the very best of civilization, but to rescue him would bring out the worst in mankind. Akio heard it in Cory’s voice.
Unbridled rage.
Chicago
Char remained in human form to run alongside Joseph. In her Were form, she would have been faster, but getting there ahead of the Forsaken would not benefit her. She wanted him in the fight against the other Forsaken. He’d helped many times in the past twenty-five years.
She thought about Paris, but only for a moment. Joseph had saved the FDG from walking into an ambush. He’d finally earned her trust.
Char was asking for his help because she knew that she couldn’t do it alone. If Akio never showed up, then she would have to continue on her current course, which meant that she needed every asset at her command.
She needed Joseph’s abilities to help her understand the mind of the Forsaken that would do something so extreme as kidnapping Terry Henry. Minions had been sacrificed in the effort.
She would leave no door unopened and no room unchecked in her search for her husband.
Joseph’s eyes clouded as he thought of what it must be like to have the love of such a woman. He clamped his jaws tightly and continued to push his body for more speed as they ran toward North Chicago.
“What do you need from me?” Joseph stammered as he tried to keep pace.
“All the insight you can bring, Joseph. You have the ability to read minds. That is a gift. We can use that and any influence you might be able to wield within a Forsaken stronghold. Make them hesitate, if only for a moment. I don’t want them to kill TH when they realize that they’ve lost,” Char shared sincerely.
“You know that I will do everything in my power to help free your husband and bring him home.”
Joseph retreated within his own mind and concentrated on running. He could plan nothing, only hope that he was up for the challenge when it arose.
North Chicago
Mark walked up to Cory as she stood in front of the mayor’s building.
“I’m sorry, Cory, that this happened to your father. I’m here for you. Anything you need. The colonel saved my life, helped me become a person I’m proud to see in the mirror.” Mark hesitated, turning back to catch sight of the platoon double-timing their way through the park. “We’re ready to go get him.”
“Akio isn’t on his way yet, but said he’d be coming soon,” she told him without looking at the older man.
The company of warriors slowed to a walk. Blackie bellowed the cadence. They fell in step, halting on the single command. They remained in formation while Blackbeard checked in with the captain.
“We have some time. Get chow for those who haven’t eaten. You know what it’s like killing Forsaken on an empty stomach,” Mark said with Terry-Henry-style bravado.
Blackbeard snickered. He returned to the company. “Listen up. We have a few minutes, so stack weapons. I’ll stand guard. All the rest of you sorry asses, go get chow. Be back in thirty minutes, not one second longer!” he yelled.
At the mention of food, they almost lost all discipline, but the platoon sergeants started to yell. Felicity winced, as she always did at the brute force the FDG sometimes applied to its own people. But they came to attention, were released by their platoon sergeants, and like a mob, they ran for Claire’s Diner.
Geronimo was standing to the side. He’d left the FDG after tweaking his knee. He couldn’t run at the level the FDG demanded, and although Terry Henry had given him the opportunity to stay in a logistics role, he turned him down. It was combat or the quiet life of a rancher.
He joined his wife in taking care of the horses and the children. They had seven kids ranging from ten to twenty-four. The oldest was a member of the Force and had run off without saying anything to her father. He expected no less, because the lieutenant had told them there was hot chow on the objective.
Gerry laughed to himself. They always said there’d be hot chow on the objective, but there never was. It didn’t matter. They accomplished the mission and didn’t wait around. Other people filled the void after the FDG cut the head off whatever snake was terrorizing the populace.
Gerry leaned on his cane as he slowly approached. Mark smiled broadly and closed the distance, offering his hand.
The two friends shook warmly.
“What’s going on?” Gerry wondered.
“The short version? Forsaken have kidnapped the colonel and we’re waiting on Akio, because we’re going after him.”
“How did that happen?” Gerry was all ears.
Mark shrugged. “He killed eight of them, but they had an airship of some sort and flew away. Akio is going to take us to them so we can kill all the rest of them. If they’ve hurt the colonel, I suspect the major will lay waste to every fiber of their beings.”
“I expect that she will. Give me a pistol, because I’m going, too,” Gerry demanded.
Mark looked at his friend before shaking his head. “Can’t do it, man. Only the active members of the Force,” Mark said sadly.
The sound of a vehicle approaching drew their attention. It was one of the jeeps that they’d started to produce in one of the nearby factories that had been refurbished and restarted. It belched black smoke as it kicked up dirt during a high-speed cornering maneuver. The engine screamed as the driver revved the engine, powering through the curve and sliding to a stop next to the weapons stack.
Blevin was laughing as he climbed out, shuffling to the other side to help Corporal Heitz.
“Is this where they’re boarding the train?” Blevin called.
“If they’re going, I’m going,” Gerry said flatly.
“They’re not going,” Mark said definitively as he intercepted the oldsters.
CHAPTER SEVEN
North Chicago
Ted woke with a start, feeling refreshed but realizing he may have missed the pod.
“Oh, no!” Ted cried, getting up and high-stepping over the sleeping wolves. “Come on, my pretties!”
He usually wouldn’t waste a brain cell thinking about going to war, but this was different. Someone had come into their house and taken the patriarch right out from under their noses. There was a line that one didn’t cross, and that was it. Ted’s peace and security had been shattered. His ability to work without interruption was gone as long as he was afraid that strangers could enter their town with impunity.
That wasn’t the deal. The FDG was there to keep the bad out. Ted needed them to keep it out.
He’d been able to concentrate in peace since setting up in New Chicago. Terry Henry Walton and Charumati, the pack’s alphas, saw to his safety and their security.
Although Ted lost his way briefly, getting sucked into the Mini Cooper and the allure of the wolf pack sleeping in the morning sun, he felt that he had to take things into his own hands to ensure status quo was regained. That meant finding and recovering Terry Henry Walton.
As in all things, Ted believed that if they wanted something done right, Ted had to be the one to do it.
Which meant that his equilibrium was in jeopardy if they left without him. He cursed himself for not seeing it sooner. He took his clothes off and changed into Were form.
He ran like the wind, the wolves barely able to keep up.
When they arrived, they found Cory and a few others still waiti
ng. Ted changed into human form.
“Thank God you haven’t left!” he exclaimed.
“Uncle Ted,” Cory said softly, looking over his head. “Where are your clothes?”
He shrugged as if that was inconsequential. Felicity was enjoying the show, not in a hurry to see Ted get dressed. Billy shook his head and cackled.
“I don’t mind you looking at the menu, my love,” he told her before he started coughing. It had been getting worse of late.
He covered his mouth with his arm as the violence of his fit wracked his body. When he finished and pulled his arm away, the blood splatters stood out in sharp contrast to his pale skin. Billy looked at them oddly, something that shouldn’t be there but was.
“That ain’t good,” Billy Spires suggested slowly in his gruff voice.
Terry’s Prison
Terry woke up with a start. It had not been a nightmare.
He was still in chains. TH stood on his toes and worked his shoulder until the nanocytes helped pop it back into place. He grunted with the effort.
Terry had no idea how long he’d been there. Hours? Days? His insides still felt like mush, which made him think that he’d only been out for a few minutes. He hated not knowing.
A shadow darkened the doorway. He flinched, which made him angry. Flinching was caused by fear. Was Terry Henry that afraid of the pain?
“FUCK YOU!” Terry screamed, straining at his shackles as he leaned forward to glare at the Forsaken.
But Kirkus wasn’t the one who walked through the door. The Weretiger walked through, in human form, wearing slipper-like shoes and dressed casually in blue jeans and a floppy sweatshirt.
She looked at him, seemed to study him. She called into the hallway in Chinese. The other woman appeared with yet another tray of food. Terry could have eaten a whole buffalo, so he looked at the tray in anticipation. His mouth started to water.
The Weretiger held up a hand, stopping the servant.
Terry growled. He was being played. From pain to pleasure, to withholding pleasure, creating a different mental anguish.
“You will not hurt my servant?” the tall woman said with a Chinese accent. She articulated her words smoothly, as if she had spent a great deal of time in America.
“No. I did not before and I won’t now. I will not because she is an innocent. Not so much for you, though,” Terry cautioned, glaring at the Weretiger as he flexed his injured shoulder, willing the strength to return to it.
She signaled for her servant to feed the prisoner.
“Maybe we do as we are ordered. Not everyone is the great Terry Henry Walton, master of the world’s destiny with final say over life and death itself,” she said in a sultry voice.
Terry wondered if her accent and breathy voice were part of a ploy to get inside his mind, try to seduce him, but he had more control than that. Her body language suggested otherwise, so he discounted his initial impression.
“Master of life and death? Is that how you see me?” Terry asked between bites.
“It is what you do, is it not, keep the world safe from people like him, people like me?” she clarified.
“Not people like you. My wife is Were. You should see my daughter’s ears. Wolf ears on a human. It could be her best feature, definitely makes her stand out,” Terry said, smiling as he thought about Cory. “No, not Weres, but Forsaken. They have no place here, and even then, there is a Forsaken who I call a friend. Tell me, why did Kirkus come after me?”
She waited while Terry took a long drink from the pitcher. When it was drained, the servant wiped Terry’s mouth, bowed to her mistress, and left.
“We know about Joseph,” she answered softly.
“Then you know that I don’t kill every Forsaken I meet. I don’t kill every Were. Look at who is around me—Werewolves, Weretiger, and a Werebear. We have an elephant, but she’s a real elephant, not Were. Can you imagine a Were elephant?” Terry continued to watch her closely, looking for any sign of duplicity, but he didn’t see any twitches in her lips or eyes. “What’s your name?”
Leaning against the wall, she blinked slowly without replying. Terry waited. She pushed away from the wall, turned toward the door, and with one last glance in his direction, she was gone.
“Well now, whoever you are, what’s your game? Or are you out there, Kirky-poo, listening in, doing your Forsaken voyeur thing? Well, you can suck my hairy balls. NO! Scratch that. I don’t want your lips anywhere near there, so how about suck my ass or maybe you can just fuck off, you jack wagon.”
Terry was feeling better by the minute. They’d fueled his body well. That meant round two of pain was coming. He didn’t let that bother him. For the moment, he was good enough.
***
Char and Joseph ran through the gate and continued running to Mayor’s Park, where they found the weapons stacked and Cory talking with some of the others. She wondered why Ted was naked, but only for a moment.
“Akio should be on his way any time now,” Cory reported as she handed the communication device back to her mother. Char looked at the small piece of technology.
Everyone used to carry something like that. Char kept hers for months after the fall before realizing that it was a waste, a relic. She didn’t need anything on the phone to survive, which was what her life had devolved into.
She had hidden the phone in a sturdy building outside Toronto, refusing to simply throw it away as the others had.
Someday, she thought she would go back and get it. Charge it and see if there was anything from her former life that mattered.
Cory cocked her head as she looked at her mother. The young woman’s hairy, wolf ears stuck out beyond her hair.
Seeing Cordelia, Char knew that she didn’t need any reminders from her past. It was a brand new world, a good place that they’d created from the ashes of humanity’s conflagration.
She reached out to play with her daughter’s ears as she stuffed the communication device into her pocket.
“Mom!” Cory pulled away and straightened her hair to drape it over her ear. Char laughed.
“The little things that make us all unique,” she said, looking around her at the assembled group. Ted, Joseph, Billy, Felicity, Gerry, Mark, and a few others. “Ted. Go get some clothes on. What are those reprobates doing here?”
She smiled at the two old men as they waved, grinning.
“We’re bringing the firepower, ma’am!” Blevin belted out, almost falling over as he snapped to attention and saluted. Heitz caught him but lost his grip on his cane. Mark stepped in to keep them both from falling. Gerry limped over to help.
“Is that still bothering you?” Cory asked, upset that he had refused her help. “Are you here because you want to go?”
Gerry nodded sheepishly.
“Pull up your pant leg,” she ordered, passing Ted, who had not yet left. She turned to Ted. “And you, go get some clothes on!”
Gerry tugged at his pants, Mark helping to steady him. Cory gripped the man’s knee and closed her eyes as she let her nanocytes flow through her hands. She squeezed his knee tightly to stay in contact as long as possible. Without linking to her flesh, the nanocytes quickly died. She stood up after a minute, weaving a little, dazed for a moment as she always was after healing someone.
Geronimo smirked as he flexed his knee. “Why didn’t we do this ages ago?” he asked.
“If your knee was good, what would you have done?” Cory asked sagely.
“I would still be a warrior in the Force!” he exclaimed proudly, before his exuberance faded.
“Because you needed to be with Kiwi and your family,” Cory replied. The older men shifted uncomfortably. No one wanted to think they were being manipulated. Cory saw them all as family, but her father’s demands on those in the Force de Guerre were monumental.
“It is my gift to use as I choose. No one has the right to demand that I use it on them. It is not theirs to command. We live in a society of free will, don’t we? My father taught us
that,” Cory said passionately. She looked intently at the oldsters.
“We owe each other the gift of courtesy and honesty. If anyone is down, someone will always show up to help. It’s what we do. If someone is where they shouldn’t be, isn’t it incumbent upon us to let them know? Kiwi was carrying a heavy burden, and you weren’t there, but we were.” Cory stopped to lift Gerry’s chin to look at her. “Not helping you was my way of helping you. You didn’t know that you needed that help, but you did. And look how it turned out. Your daughter is in the Force and doing well. Your family is happy. Kiwi is happy. I’d like to think that you are, too.”
Gerry looked befuddled. He hadn’t complained about his knee, only looked longingly at a life of adventure and excitement.
“I guess I was always a family man,” he finally admitted. “The horses, Kiwi, the children, the tribe. My family.”
“Who in the fuck started a shmoopfest?” Char yelled. “Family is why we’re here because my husband is in the hands of some fucking Forsaken who’s written his own fucking death certificate!”
Ted finally ran toward the housing units where they all still lived from when they’d first arrived. Felicity watched him go, the wolf pack running alongside. Despite Ted’s foibles, he was a good-looking man, something he never paid any attention to.
The others sobered.
“Prop me up so I can fire my baby!” Corporal Heitz called. Blevin wasn’t sure, but Char nodded. The two old men climbed back into the jeep, where Max stood in the saddle, bracing the fifty cal against his shoulder. He leaned backward and cocked the weapon, not an easy task even for a young man.
Shocked expressions preceded people diving out of the way. Even Billy ran two steps to the side and dove to the ground. That made him cough and hack again. Felicity joined him, to help him up.
“Get that idiot away from that gun!” the mayor yelled. Corporal Heitz bristled, but he immediately unloaded the weapon, and then refed the belt into it, before leaning back.
“I’m nobody’s idiot,” Max said coldly. Felicity was angry because Billy continued to cough, sending blood specks over his arm.
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