A blast of rain and dead leaves skittered in through the door creating a mini twister on the carpet. The intruder grunted, stumbled to one knee, and then fell face down at her feet, where he moved no more.
Finally she lowered the pistol and stared through the faint cloud of wind-shredded gun-smoke at the dead man. So distraught was she by her actions – the act itself, and the terrible knowledge she had become as her father, a killer – she didn’t notice the second figure standing in the doorway, wind and rain tossing his long black hair, rippling the dark jogging suit he wore.
“Like father like daughter,” he said, looking down at the body.
Genna cried out in shock.
When he lifted his gaze from the corpse, there was a gleam in his eye. “I guess this revokes your civilian status.” Only when the door clicked shut did Genna realize he had moved inside the room.
Who the hell was this? Surely not one of her father’s men. Nothing about his appearance suggested gangster. More like a rock singer. Similar in a way to Joshua in that he gave off an aura of effortless, almost balletic, grace. Unlike Joshua, this guy had cruelness about him; harder features, and a gaze that made his eyes chips of granite. He appeared to bristle with energy. Rain dripped from his sodden clothes and his hair. Genna looked down and saw that he was barefoot; mud and dead leaves were plastered to his feet.
She raised the gun once again. The intruder merely smirked and raised his hands in a parody of old stick-em-up movies. Genna frowned, but kept the gun as steady as her trembling hands allowed. Though she had killed one man already, she did not feel she had it in her to repeat the action so soon. Her thought process had crumbled. She was composed entirely of reflex; the speed of her actions raced ahead of her thoughts.
“Stay where you are.” Genna said, surprising herself with the steadiness of her voice. The unreality of the situation lent her the strength she lacked.
Ignoring her, the intruder bent down and grabbed a fist-full of the dead man’s jacket scruff, and seemingly without real effort, actually lifted the corpse one handed off the floor. In the manner of offering the town’s folk the head of an enemy warrior, he exhibited the body for Genna. “Neat work,” he said. “Real neat work. Your old man will christen your bambinos.” As though discarding a jacket, he threw the gangster back to the carpet. The floor vibrated beneath her feet.
Genna flinched, came within an ace of pulling the trigger. “If you come any closer so help me God I’ll blow your head off.”
He mimicked fear. “Ooooo.”
“You think I won’t?”
He merely shrugged. “Where’s your boyfriend?”
Genna found his nonchalance increasingly disconcerting. With a warm gun pointed at his head and with the corpse of the previous uninvited guest cooling at his feet, this guy acted as if he were here to fix the air-conditioning. “Who are you?”
“The big bad wolf,” he said, no longer smiling. “And you are Little Red Riding Hood. Now, where’s your boyfriend?”
She thought of Joshua, the strange news-clippings, the scrapbook. And now this stranger whose poise so reminded her of Joshua. What was the connection? “What do you want with…my boyfriend?”
“Guess daddy doesn’t want him as a son-in-law.”
Feeding off her anger she took her own forward step and held the gun at arm’s length. “Any closer and I’ll fucking shoot you.”
“While looking me in the eyes?”
“I looked him in the eyes.” She indicated the dead gangster.
“Bullet might go right through at this range; a small, neat entrance, peppered with gunshot residue. Double tap execution wound.” He took a sudden slantwise step, head moving like a cobra, his eyes never leaving hers. She tracked his face with the point of the gun.
They remained locked in this way for half a minute, staring at each other across several feet of air electrified with tension. His unflinching gaze pierced Genna’s defenses and bore straight into her resolve. It was then she noticed his eyes which, though menacing, were remarkably similar to Joshua’s, right down to the uncommon crimson striations. Her aim wavered.
With a voice rasping with gruffness, he said: “I’ll make this easy.” Threw up his arms as though startling a horse. “AAARRRRGGGG!”
Genna screamed and pulled the trigger. Twice. The slugs struck him high in the chest. The impact drove him back several feet. Blood formed on his jogging shirt around two neat bullet holes an inch apart. Exactly as he’d described, the wounds were neat, each peppered with gunpowder residue.
With eyes of luminescent crimson, he looked down at his chest. “You’re truly your father’s child.” A blur of movement caught Genna unawares, and suddenly her hand, of its own volition, jerked toward her intruder. And then the gun was gone from her grasp. She fell back a step, nursing her fingers.
The intruder now held the gun, turning it over in his hands. “Heckler and Koch P7. Neat piece. Designed for a bitch, you might say.” He stuffed the barrel down the waistband of his pants. “My turn.”
Genna broke for the exit. One second she saw the door, the next she saw a mass of swirling stars; her teeth came together with a crack; an orchestra composed entirely of symbols filled her ears; the world tipped sideways. Next she knew her elbow dug painfully into her ribs. A thin line of blood trickled down her chin. When her head cleared she found herself face to face with the dead gangster.
“Up-si-daisy!” said her attacker genially, his fingers closing around her neck. She fought against the restraining hand but to no avail. Black spots burst before her eyes. She was dimly aware of a gurgling sound, tasting blood at the back of her mouth.
As the world about her all but faded, the hand at her throat loosened, though did not altogether release her. She felt herself being lifted, and then thrown across the room as if she were no heavier than an infant. Dizzy with the pain, left with no sense of direction, she closed her eyes and brought up her arms to protect her face.
Her knees struck the edge of the mattress and she cart-wheeled into the wall, her shoulder smashing the picture that hung there. She hit the bed in a shower of wood and glass and rolled onto the musty carpet. When she tried to draw breath she inhaled a lungful of dust and fell into a coughing fit.
“I should kill you quickly,” her attacker said as he rounded the bed and grasped her upper arm, his fingers digging like steel into her bicep. “But I want your old man to know you suffered.” With this he threw her against wall.
Genna felt her arm, for the briefest moment, slip out of its socket, before her muscles and tendons popped it back in. Her feet trailed over the carpet like the tail of an airborne kite until she hit the wall. Another explosion of stars. The room swam away from her and the last thing she saw before darkness engulfed her was the grinning face of a demon coming for her.
Along the Pacific Coast Highway Joshua obeyed the speed limit, driving sensibly through the storm sweeping in off the ocean. The windshield was an opaque blur, cleared briefly by the wipers before blurring again. He saw neither the road nor the rain. He saw the carnage at the warehouse.
An eerie calm settled over him. Renegade or Wolfkind – what was the difference? One spawned the other. Perhaps a few thousand years ago there might have been a place for them, but with the advent of civilization, stability and order, Wolfkind had no place. Society’s spoils turned them into monsters.
For Joshua, these thoughts were constant companions, introduced by Maximillian Barlow when Joshua and his brother were children. And although he had secretly hoped he might one day live among humans, he knew deep down he was just a monster with dreams of being a real boy. A ghastly version of Pinocchio. His finest hour lay in the past. Obliterated by Uzi fire. And with it any hopes of a relationship with the girl.
Genna.
He struggled to keep thoughts of her from his mind. But he found it hard – like pushing back the surf, which just kept coming and coming. He envisioned hard times ahead trying to forget her. The sooner he forced her fr
om his mind the easier it would be living with himself. He managed to keep her from his mind for a full minute, right up until he saw her BMW outside his motel.
Her vision tuning in and out of focus, Genna slowly came back, and found herself face to face with two crimson, hateful eyes. Unable to move her arms or breathe properly, she blinked and tried to pull away, encased in a constricting blanket of suffocating heat. She came fully awake.
“With us again,” said her crimson-eyed intruder, his warm breath hot in her face. Steam rose from his clothes as though he were afire. And the heat. Christ, the heat. He generated warmth like a boiler.
Genna knew she was going to die, and she was plain terrified. In the face of death she wished she had her sister’s courage. She did not want to die. Though her life was no picnic, she was not quite ready to throw in the towel.
“Screw you,” she said in his face.
He bear-hugged her tightly and pressed his nose to hers, his skin feverishly hot to the touch. “You can’t fool me. I feel your terror, lady.”
“Go to hell.”
He laughed at her, revealing more canine teeth. He stank of wet clothes. Heat rolled off him in waves. Something was happening. Genna felt his body shift against her own, muscles undulating, flexing, working against one another, moving under independent control.
Genna felt sure her back would break, at which point the pressure eased, enabling her to draw several quick gasps of air. The sudden influx of oxygen made her lightheaded. Only when her feet met the carpet did she realize they had left the floor at all. She fell gasping to her knees.
Her attacker meanwhile had turned toward the door, head cocked to one side, listening. The redness had gone from his eyes and the radiated heat-wave appeared to have subsided. Nothing about the geometry of his skull suggested the enormous teeth she had seen only a moment ago. She found herself doubting her own eyes.
“What’s this?” he said, facing the door. Genna heard nothing. The hand that held her threw her to one side. She collided with the nightstand, sending the lamp onto the bed.
Then she did hear something; a pitter-patter of quick feet through the puddles on the forecourt. Then a moment of quiet – even the storm lulled momentarily. And then for a second time in the same night the door crashed open. On this occasion the pale blue door exploded off its hinges as though Thor had swung his mighty axe through it.
But standing firmly in the doorway was the windblown silhouette of a man Genna instantly recognized. In the dim light from the overturned lamp, his rain soaked outline was unmistakable. It was Joshua. The voice that issued from the silhouette, however, seemed not to be his. It was deep and it was menacing.
“Get away from her,” the voice commanded.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the intruder’s hand come for her. She shrank back, but he moved too quickly, snagging several locks of her hair and tearing them from her scalp.
Joshua charged across the floor, snarling like a tiger, and slammed into her attacker like a footballer taking down a quarterback. The thump of impact loud and meaty. Both men crashed to the floor.
Genna scrambled away, still on all fours, chanced a look over her shoulder. Joshua had grappled the intruder into a vice-like headlock, but strain showed on his arms. In the darkness she thought she saw his muscles bunch and tear through his shirt sleeves.
Joshua threw her a quick, panicky look. In the dimness, she saw his eyes, full of concern, and the fear that he could not hold this tiger by the tail much longer. “Go,” he said. “Run.”
Genna clambered to her feet, slipping twice before making for the doorway on unsteady legs. On the verge of escape, she looked back.
In the dim light that filtered in from the outside she saw Joshua lose his grip. Almost too quick for the eye to see, he lashed out a hooked arm, grabbing at his opponent’s head. But this strange adversary, slick as Joshua, cleverly slipped the arm-hold and brought up his head into Joshua’s chin. Joshua fell away, momentarily stunned, and once again the intruder was free.
She resumed her lunge for the door when something snagged her ankle. Bones ground together. Her palms and her forehead slapped the floor, and she grabbed the nearest thing she could in order to prevent being dragged back into the room – the dead gangster. Her fingers hooked his firearm. She fumbled madly for purchase and tore the weapon from the dead man’s hand, established a grip and turned to face what held her.
At first she could not make out what was there, and then she saw Joshua leap onto her attacker’s back. Still the long fingers clung on to her ankle, but she gritted her teeth, steadied the gun, and fired repeatedly, careful not to hit Joshua. Five bullets found their mark. Only now did the grip on her ankle fail.
Joshua regained his hold on the guy’s neck. He looked up at Genna, his face bruised and bleeding, his voice hoarse and strained: “Genna, go!” His opponent bucked like a rabid rodeo bull beneath him. “Can’t hold him…”
Genna felt several pieces of the puzzle slot into place. A crazy part of this seemingly senseless night made eerie logic. Not the kind that explained away recent events, but one that made sense within the crazy, unreal parameters her world of the past few days had set for itself.
Distantly, sirens wailed, breaking Genna’s paralysis. She fled into the rain, splashing across the forecourt to her car. The BMW’s door hung open. A shallow puddle had formed in the seat hollow. She dropped into the wetness and keyed the ignition. The engine roared.
Joshua locked his arms around the renegade’s neck and squeezed. Tendons creaked until finally something popped. All at once the fight left the beast. The hard muscular arms went limp in his grip and became dead weight.
After a beat, Joshua quickly reached for his Beretta, but the instant he relaxed his grip the renegade sprang to life, forcing Joshua against the nightstand, reducing it to splinters. Powerful hands grabbed his shirt and threw him against the wall. He struck with such force the aging wall gave way, and he crashed through into the next unit. In a cloud of plaster and dust a section of the ceiling gave way.
Joshua came down in a shower of smashed bricks and chunks of plaster on the double bed in the neighboring unit. Fortunately no one occupied the room. Joshua rebounded off the mattress, twisted and pushed himself to his feet. Dust puffed into the air. He grabbed a chunk of smashed brick and raised his hand like a pitcher winding up to deliver a fast ball.
Like a bullet down a barrel the renegade sped though the dusty hole, moving swiftly and surely. Joshua pitched the brick as hard as he could, but the renegade dropped one shoulder, hands scraping the floor, and ducked the missile. At the same time Joshua sidestepped, grabbed the creature’s wrist and hooked an arm around its neck, but again swiped at thin air. With balletic poise the renegade fell into a forward roll and tore free of Joshua’s grip.
Joshua jumped back a stride, allowing himself a moment’s break before another attack came. But the renegade allowed him no breather. It dove at him from a crouched position, aiming for his center of gravity. Joshua stepped into the attack and allowed himself to be tackled. Two powerful arms clasped his midriff and wrestled him off his feet. The renegade used its weight and came out on top of Joshua, effectively pinning him to the ground. Their combined weight striking the floor shook the window frames.
Outside, people were spilling out of the neighboring units. Someone yelled for the police. Several cupped hands appeared at the windows.
The renegade, sitting astride Joshua, growled and slashed him across the face with a clawed hand, the actions driven more by anger and frustration than by the will to stay alive. It lashed out again, with the other hand, pausing only to listen to the wailing sirens cut the night.
Joshua looked up into the creature’s partly transformed features: red eyes, vicious canine teeth, lower mandible pushing against the surrounding flesh, carotid artery pulsating rapidly. Its black sweat-top was torn, revealing a dark chest, bulging with writhing muscle and bristling hair. Something within the hair glinted.
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br /> He drew the Beretta and jammed the barrel into the beast’s side. Pumped a round into the chamber. Only one shot was required, be it a head shot, an abdomen, or even a leg shot. The creature stared down at the Beretta – and the snarl smoothed out.
A microsecond from squeezing the trigger and sending this renegade to oblivion, Joshua eased his finger away from the trigger. The object he saw glinting fell away from the renegade’s chest and swung on a gold chain. A wolf’s head amulet. Identical to his own. His mouth fell open
The renegade acknowledged Joshua’s amazement with a wry smile. “Did Barlow instruct you to kill your own brother, Joshua Grenire?”
“Nathaniel?” Joshua said.
With rain hammering against the windows and the distant wail of sirens growing ever nearer, Joshua removed the pistol from his brother’s side. Still wary of each other, they rose to their feet, stood face to face.
At first Joshua did not draw a breath, nor did he blink. He gazed, hypnotized by the chain around Nathaniel’s neck. He reached inside his shirt and touched his own amulet. He felt no fraternal connection or lifting of the spirit at the knowledge his brother still lived. Only confusion, a persistent feeling something was dreadfully amiss. A million questions filled his whirling mind, jamming his brain with their incessant supplication. “We thought you were dead.”
Nathan stared at Joshua searchingly, equally showing no sign of fraternal compassion. He cast a stony look at the Beretta clasped in Joshua’s hand. “What you doing with that thing?”
Still too shocked to notice the steely edge to his brother’s voice, Joshua numbly holstered the pistol. “The...The renegades!” he said. “For the renegades. I…we...I was on the trail of renegades and…Nathaniel, why did you attack the girl – she’s human?”
Nathan pulled hastily away and stepped back through the demolished wall into Joshua’s apartment. “Get your stuff,” he said.
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