by Sky Winters
“You’re a monster,” said Tessa, her eyes narrowed.
“No,” said Lucas as the car pulled into what appeared to be a recently installed garage. “The monsters are those…animals out there.”
He pointed towards the general direction of the compound.
“They’re beasts, they kill because they can’t help it. It’s part of their nature. And I don’t know what Atticus or the rest of them told you, but they’ll kill you in time.”
“You’re wrong.”
Lucas shrugged.
“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, my plan seems to be going off without a hitch. The pack should be wiped out by now, with the exception of Atticus, who’ll be helpfully depositing his millions into the designated account any minute now.”
The car came to a stop and the driver killed the engine.
“And you’ll be right where you should be, at my side. With the money and power I’ve earned for us, we can do anything. We can even start that family you’ve always wanted.”
Thoughts of a wanting a family flooded back into Tessa’s mind. It was true, starting a family was a journey that she’d always imagined going on with Lucas. But as the years went on, the idea grew more and more distant, until it was only a shadow of a thought. She’d felt that they’d grown so accustomed to their lives as they were that there was simply no room for a baby. But now that Lucas spoke the words aloud, she realized that the love that she had felt for Lucas had simply faded over time, and with it, the desire to start a family with him. And as she grew older, on some level she felt that family was just something that was never going to happen for her.
But now that things were the way they were now, the idea of carrying Lucas’s child brought a feeling of sickness to Tessa’s stomach.
“I’ll never start a family with you,” said Tessa, her eyes narrow, her glare as sharp as blades.
But Lucas only smiled in response, a sly, knowing smile.
“We’ll see about that.”
The driver, a reedy man in a button-up shirt of blue silk and a pair of jeans embellished with rhinestones opened the doors and led the two out of the car, the pair of gang members following close behind. That familiar thumping bass, the same one that she’d heard that night weeks ago, filled her ears. Tessa wanted nothing more than to leave, to never see this horrible place or its hundreds of wasted, junkie inhabitants ever again. But as Lucas took her arm in his grip, she knew that this wasn’t possible.
“Come with me, Tess,” he said, flashing a toothy smiled as he gazed at her with narrowed eyes.
The driver opened the door from the garage, leading to a small, dark, hallway. The volume of the party increased as they reached the end, and once they did, the driver, flashing a smile of his own, opened the door. Beyond was a crowd of parties, dancing to the music, their bodies filling all available space of the farmhouse. But once Lucas entered with Tessa at his side, all eyes nearby fell upon them.
The crowd held still for a moment, as if confirming what they were seeing, before bursting into wild cheering. To Tessa, they seemed to be celebrating Lucas’s return, and she surmised that he must’ve told them that when he came back his business with the Swifts would be long-finished.
Lucas held up a hand, a smile on his face. The crowd continued cheering and Tessa’s gaze swept upon the jubilant masses, noting that each face seemed to be stricken by the effects of meth abuse in its own way. Some were pock-marked, some were red-eyed, some were prematurely-aged. But all looked terrible.
“They’re celebrating us,” said Lucas, yelling to Tessa over the crowd. “I told them that when I returned with you at my side, it would mean that we’d won.”
Horror crept through the Tessa as she looked over the crowd.
“Don’t you get it?” he asked, yelling louder. “These are your people, I’m their king. And you’re my queen.”
Tessa felt as though she wanted to drop to her knees and scream. It was hell that Lucas promised her, a horrible reign over a court of the damned.
CHAPTER 21
“What’s the plan, big brother?” asked Clyde to Atticus, who was looking out through the living room wall at the darkened woods beyond the compound.
“We go get her, it’s as simple as that.”
“That much is obvious,” said Ian, entering the room, his feet crunching on the broken glass that lay strewn across the floor. “But what are you proposing, exactly?”
Atticus was still figuring out just how he wanted to approach the plan of rescuing Tessa and destroying the meth operation. But he had some ideas. And all of them ended with him poised over Lucas, preparing to rip him into shreds with deadly swipes of his claws.
“Let the men get a few hour’s rest,” said Atticus, not turning away from the window. “And that goes for you all, if you need it.”
He could sense that Roland was there in the room with them. Turning around, his instinct was confirmed: his three brothers stood side-by-side, awaiting orders.
“No need for rest here,” said Roland. “I’m ready to do what needs to be done.”
“Yeah,” added Ian. “I’m still riding a high from the fight in the woods.”
“I just want to get Tessa back,” said Clyde. “Every moment she’s with Lucas is another moment she has to suffer.”
Atticus nodded, pleased that his brothers were as loyal as ever. He considered just how he might reward them for their loyalty when this business was taken care of.
After a moment of thought, he had just the idea.
But for now, he needed to figure out how to both take advantage of the element of surprise and to overcome the numerical advantage that the gang had.
“How many junkies did the pack take out in the woods?” asked Lucas.
“Hmm,” thought aloud Roland. “Had to have been at least 30.”
“30?” asked Atticus, surprised. “Then that means we can take them at three-to-one odds. Maybe more if we surprise them.”
Then, a thought occurred to Atticus.
“Ian, do you still have the satellite map of the region? The one that showed all of the infrastructure?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because I think I just might have an idea.”
* * *
It was hours later, and the pack was ready to take the fight to the gang. But as they followed Atticus through the woods, still in their human forms, running through the still evening air, each man was gripped with the question of what Atticus had in mind, exactly. He had them bring no weapons, all dressed in outfits of their “worst” clothes- what Atticus told them to wear.
But after nearly an hour of running through the woods, they only stopped when they came across a massive power generator, an enormous relay of two large, metal coils draped with power lines, a small shack in the middle. The perimeter of the place was a tall, steel fence topped with vicious-looking barbed wire and festooned with signs covered in large, red letters of warning. Atticus stopped at the entrance gate to the place, looking over the facility with a careful eye. The men fell in line behind him, waiting for a command.
“Everyone!” he shouted to the men and his brothers, who all stood in front of him. “The farmhouse is a mile that way.”
He pointed down the slope of the hill they were on, a path that followed the black drooping power lines.
“Form up, here’s the plan.”
CHAPTER 22
Tessa sat on the tacky, leather chair in Lucas’s bedroom, the very same room where she encountered him in flagrante with two barely-legal women. The room was expansive, it was the master bedroom of the farmhouse. Though whatever tasteful farmer’s décor might’ve brightened the place was gone, replaced with tacky colors, garish posters, and drug paraphrenia that seemed to cover every available surface.
She felt insulted, as though he were rubbing her face in what was going on, that he had succeeded in stealing her away from Atticus, that he had managed to get her right where he wanted her, despite her wishes and protestations. And t
he worst part was that she knew there was nothing she could do.
“See, this is pretty nice, isn’t it?” asked Lucas, throwing open the curtains of the bedroom, exposing the vast tract of cleared land behind the farm, the first half of which was packed with partygoers, the crowd trailing off into the distance.
It was a massive throng, a black, shifting mass dotted by tiny flickers of light that she assumed were drugs being sparked up. What’s more, she noticed that the crowd was even larger than it was before, meaning the amount of users addicted to Lucas’s poison had only increased. She feared that soon the entire town would be under the thumb of Lucas and his gang.
Tessa glared at Lucas from her seat, her arms flat on the rests, her nails digging into the glossy, red fabric of the chair. Lucas looked out of the window, shaking his head in awe at the masses of people below.
“That’s something, isn’t it?” he said, his eyes fixed forward. “You remember when we first moved here? This place was nothing, just a handful of buildings surrounded by the woods, that big mountain looking down on everything. Population, what, 300?”
He shook his head.
“Now look at it- it’s like an actual city. Sure, it’s mostly junkies and drifters, but it’s more than it was before. And the best part is that I run things.”
“Oh?” asked Tessa. “You’ve ruined this town and you think this is an improvement?”
“Better than wasting my days in that cabin, waiting for a big break that was never going to come.”
He turned towards Tessa.
“And now that the bears are done for, this whole area is under my control.”
“You’re not going to get away with it,” said Tessa, glowering at Lucas.
“That’s where you’re wrong, my dear,” he said. “Because I already have.”
With that, there was a gentle rapping on the bedroom door.
“Come in!” called Lucas.
The door creaked open and Tessa's eyes shot towards whoever it was that was none other than the two girls who she’d seen Lucas cheating on her with. Her stomach dropped as the two scantily-clad women sauntered in, their gazes sensual and fixed on Lucas.
“Tess, I’d like you to meet Becky and Jessica,” said Lucas as the two girls made their way over to him, Lucas slipping his bare arms around their slim shoulders as they reached him.
“Hey,” said the redhead, waving her fingers.
“Hey,” said the blonde, her eyes tracking up Tessa’s body.
“What’s going on?” Tessa demanded.
“Well, you all recognize each other, right?” asked Lucas, to which the two girls nodded in agreement. “Good. Well, I figured that we all got off on the wrong foot that night. And now that Tessa’s back into the fold, I think we ought to give her a proper welcome.
“Sounds great to me,” said the redhead, a seductive grin on her face.
“Mmm, I’d love to,” said the blonde.
The redhead then pulled her shirt over her head, revealing a pair of small, pert breasts with small pink nipples. The blonde followed, her larger, tanned breasts tumbling out from underneath her thin t-shirt. Tessa wanted to get up and leave, to run out of the house right then and there just like before, but she knew there was no way she’d get far.
Instead, she dug her nails into the fabric as the two girls moved their hands up Lucas’s body underneath his shirt, pulling it over his head and off, revealing the sculpted, perfect physique that Tessa knew so intimately. The two girls began kissing his torso, their lips dragging across his body as Lucas took a long swig from a nearby bottle of whiskey.
Then, Lucas ran a hand through each of the girls’ hair, guiding them away from his body and towards one another. The girls got the hint right away and locked their lips together as they kneeled in front of Lucas, their wet sounds of their kissing loud and sensual.
“Didn’t we always talk about spicing things up in the bedroom?” asked Lucas, turning his gaze towards Tessa. “Well, now’s the chance.”
Tessa watched as the blonde scooped one of the redhead’s breasts into her hand and began sucking and licking her nipple, the redhead moaning all the while. But as Tessa watched, a strange feeling began to come over her. She was disgusted by Lucas, sure, but something about watching these two beautiful women kiss and touch one another aroused something deep in Tessa. She watched the girls kiss and fondle one another, the redhead slipping her hand up the blonde’s skirt, the blonde taking in a sharp breath as she did so.
“Beautiful, beautiful,” said Lucas. “See? It’s good to be king.”
Lucas left the girls to their business and walked over to a nearby dresser, retrieving drug paraphernalia from it.
“You know what would make this even better,” he said, a lighter in one hand, a glass pipe in the other.
The two girls eyed the drugs with hunger and as Tessa watched how their expressions lit up as they looked at Lucas’s offering, whatever arousal she was feeling disappeared like mist on the wind. The two girls eagerly took the drugs from Lucas’s hands and got them ready to smoke.
But right at the moment they would’ve sparked them, the lights in the room cut out, leaving the four of them in total pitch darkness.
“What the hell?” demanded Lucas.
But a slim smile crossed Tessa’s face as she sat in the dark. She didn’t know how she knew, but there was only one thing this could mean: Atticus was here.
CHAPTER 23
Atticus watched from his vantage point on the small hill beyond the farmhouse as the lights to the place went dark, shrouding the building and the partiers around in a deep darkness, the deafening thumping of the music shutting off abruptly, the silence of nature reasserting itself.
The generator has been a simple set-up, and looking over the equipment, he saw that it would be easy to rig the thing to shut off at a particular time- in this case, a half hour. His brothers and the rest of the pack were given orders to infiltrate the party, to take up positions in the crowd, and to be ready to shift and strike when the power shut off.
He looked over the crowd, trying to spot the members of his pack, but it was simply too dark.
But the roars and screams that sounded seconds later signaled to him that the plan was underway.
Atticus was pleased that all seemed to be going according to plan, but this feeling was quickly replaced with a sense of urgency. He knew that Lucas was smart enough to realize that the power outage wasn’t a mere coincidence and that it almost certainly meant that Atticus and the rest of the pack were gearing up to make an attack. And Atticus knew that as soon as Lucas realized this, Tessa’s life would be in danger.
Atticus took off into a run, his legs pumping with wild abandon as he closed the distance between him and the house. As he drew closer, he could begin to make out the shapes of the pack among the crowd, tall, fearsome night-shrouded shapes that filled the air with deafening roars, the crowd in a mad rush to escape them.
He kept running towards the house, now getting closer and closer to the partygoers who had made the quickest escapes, the faces of them painted with fear and shock as they ran past Atticus and into the woods beyond.
Then, the flashing and popping of gunfire began to sound, the pack now doing their work of neutralizing the guards of the house. Atticus gave the men strict orders to not harm anyone who wasn’t a direct threat to them, but he knew that things could get chaotic in the middle of a battle.
As Atticus ran closer, more and more of the junkies rushed past him and he could now make out clearly the forms of the members of the pack as they set upon the armed gang members, roaring as they swatted them away with massive, fearsome claws.
Atticus knew that they needed to have the element of surprise on their side and having the pack ready to shift and fight the gang from the inside out was just the way to do it.
He finally closed the distance between him and the house and Atticus was now among the teeming throngs that were in a mad, frenzied dash away from the building.
He guessed there easily was hundreds of people there, all running from the bears that had seemingly appeared from nowhere. The place was becoming more and more of a scene of chaos by the second.
Looking to his right, Atticus watched as two members of the pack set upon a pair of guards, swiping them away effortlessly, only to have another trio of gang members approach them from the back, all brandishing pistols. They began cracking off shots at the bears, the pack members roaring as the bullets impacted their thick hides. As Atticus drew closer, he recognized one of the bears as Clyde, his bulky, powerful form easily identifiable even in his shifted shape.
Atticus rushed towards the three guards, slamming into them at an incredible pace, knocking them off of their feet and onto the ground. Now that the gang members were stunned, Atticus looked up at Clyde, who flashed him a look of appreciation as he turned towards the gang members, all holding their hands up and shouting in fear as Clyde and the other bear loomed over them.
Atticus turned his attention back to the house, watching as party-goers streamed out of the entrances, some even jumping from the windows and landing in the sparse bushes before breaking into a run. He pushed his way past the throngs of people, making his way into the farmhouse.
Once inside, he saw that the scene was just as chaotic was it was outdoors. The rest of the pack was among the crowd and all were shifted into their fearsome bear forms. Atticus spotted Ian and Roland, who were busy fighting off the guards, taking care not to harm any innocent members of the crowd. The gang members shot round after round at the bears and Atticus sighed in relief as he realized that they didn’t seem to be armed with silver-tipped bullets. Though enough regular shots could take down a shifter, especially a well-aimed one- Ian, Roland, and the rest seemed to be handling the panicked, ill-trained guards with ease.
Atticus rushed through the house, his eyes settling on the stairs that led to the second floor. He didn’t know exactly where he’d find Tessa and Lucas, but he figured that up and away from the chaos was a likely place.
He ran up the stairs, weaving through men and women who streamed down, and arrived at the second floor. It was a large, expansive space, and his eyes settled on the door at the end of the hallway to his right, which he guessed led to the master bedroom. Atticus stormed down the hallway, rage building in him as he realized that Tessa was close.