“I can’t just leave you there,” she protested. “Besides, what about the other people on the floor? It’s only a matter of time before someone decides to open their door to see what all the noise is about.”
“Riley, please.”
“Too late.” Through the phone’s speaker, Scott heard the ding of the elevator as its doors opened. He cursed and shoved the phone into his pocket, knowing that with only one arm fully functional, he’d need to keep his left hand free for his and Riley’s defense. He scrambled from the floor, biting back a groan as another stab of pain darted through his right arm; bracing himself to open the hotel room’s door, he heard Riley shout in the hallway.
“Hey, you!” she yelled. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, you big ugly bastard! Get away from that door!”
“Oh, you idiot,” Scott said, even though she couldn’t hear him. Without waiting for another moment to pass—he was afraid if he hesitated too long, it’d be Riley’s last moment—he grasped the doorknob painfully with his right hand, flung the door open, and charged into the hall, lifting his pistol with his left hand.
The wolf in the hallway—and it was definitely a wolf, now that he got his first good look at it—was focused on Riley when he opened the door, but the movement of the door swinging open made it turn in his direction. It snarled and took a step toward him, but the bang and impact of a gunshot sent it stumbling sideways. It let out a yelp of pain, but the single bullet didn’t slow it down at all. It recovered quickly and darted into their suite, barely missing Scott as he jumped to the side to avoid getting mowed over again.
“Scott!” Riley yelled, accompanied by the thud of her shoes on the hallway carpet, and it was only for that reason he stayed by the door and didn’t let it fall shut. As the beast turned to face him, Riley raced into the room, and he pulled his foot away from the door. It fell closed with a heavy whump.
And then they were trapped, together, in a hotel suite with a werewolf.
Six
Zachariah had been surprised by how cushy his father’s SUV was. He shouldn’t have been, though; Damon didn’t seem like the type who’d use his fortune to buy a shitty economy sedan. Hell, his house was in one of the better areas of the city, and it looked like it’d cost a decent chunk of change. It was the kind of house Zachariah dreamed of having someday, except his wouldn’t look so…lonely.
Because the house had looked lonely, and he’d always been of the philosophy that the appearance of a house suggested the emotions of the people inside. Houses that looked lived in, that looked warm and inviting, regardless of whether they were on the rich end of town or in the poorer areas, always suggested a happy, loving family to him. He wasn’t sure when he’d come to think this; maybe it was when he’d been a child and he’d been so proud of how homey his parents’ house—the Lawrences’ house—had looked compared to his friends’ houses. Marcus, whose parents were getting divorced, his house was always dark and on the chilly side. Or Trevor’s house, which was dirty and cluttered and smelled like mothballs because he lived with his grandmother, who had an obsession with stuffing the little white orbs in every crack and crevice under the misguided idea that it would make the house smell better. And then there was Abigail—or Abby, as he’d called her—his first girlfriend, whose house always smelled like cookies and felt like love, despite the conspicuous absence of her father. If he had to guess, he’d say that that was when he started associating the warmth and good smells of home with love—naturally occurring centered around his first love.
It made him sad to wonder if his father had ever experienced having a home like that.
He shook his head, trying to rattle his brain out of his psychological musings on the past and back into the present. He definitely didn’t need his attention to wander; he was, after all, driving seventy-five miles an hour down the interstate in the slightly bluish haze of dawn.
Ashton was slumped in the passenger seat, not exactly asleep so much as staring at the windshield in a trance. He hadn’t spoken a word since they’d gotten in the SUV, and Zachariah wasn’t sure how to approach asking him about what was bothering him. Even if he did manage to ask, he wasn’t positive Ashton would tell him.
As if sensing that Zachariah was staring at him, Ashton said, just loud enough to be heard over the music filling the space between them, “Eyes on the road, Zach.”
Zachariah did as he was told, though he took Ashton’s words as an invitation to speak. “What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, don’t give me that crap,” Zachariah said. “You have that deep, pensive look on your face like you get when you’re picking over something.” Ashton rubbed his face but didn’t answer. “What happened back there?”
“Nothing.”
Zachariah scowled and cut the wheel sharply to the right, zipping across two lanes of traffic to skid to a halt on the shoulder. He barely got the vehicle in park before he yanked his seatbelt off and grabbed Ashton, forcing the man to face him. “Tell me,” he snapped. “Now. Because I’m in this car with you, and I have a right to know what the hell is chasing us.”
Ashton stared at him for a long moment, his eye searching Zachariah’s face. The music playing on the stereo grew louder as the song reached its chorus; he slapped the volume button to turn the radio’s power off. After a heartbeat of silence, he said quietly, “Werewolves.”
“I gathered that, Ash.”
“And…something else.”
“Like what?” he prompted.
“Something dark,” Ashton murmured. “Something really, really dark. Even darker than Ananael.”
“I wasn’t aware that was possible.”
“It is,” Ashton said, almost breathing the words out. “She is. She’s the darkest thing I’ve ever seen. Ever felt.” Before Zachariah could ask for clarification, he continued. “We can’t face it. Not this. There’s nothing we have that can stand up to this. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
Zachariah’s cell phone, safely tucked away in the center console, started ringing. He didn’t move to answer it right away; he just traced his thumb along one of the scars running across Ashton’s face and said, “We’re really up shit creek with this one, huh?”
“You have no idea.”
Zachariah let go of him then and dug his phone out of the console. It was Riley, so he swiped to answer and put the phone to his ear.
“Zach!” Riley yelled down the line, and for once, he didn’t bother to correct the usage of his nickname, cowed as he was by the urgency in her voice. “Tell me, right now, how to kill a werewolf!”
“What’s going on?” he demanded.
“Now, Zach! Before we get killed!”
Zachariah’s heart skipped a beat as, under his sister’s words, he heard a crash of breaking furniture and the very familiar snarl of a werewolf.
The moment she and Scott had been sealed inside their hotel suite with the werewolf, Riley’s brain had kicked into high gear, all reason checking out for logic and an almost mechanical reflex. She’d whipped out her pistol as she’d approached the animal in the hallway, and when the door slammed shut behind them, she went on the attack, taking aim at the werewolf and opening fire. Two of the three bullets she fired struck the beast in its side, while the third embedded into the wall beyond it. The werewolf let out a howl of pain and anger, and behind her, Scott said, “I think you just pissed it off.”
“It was already pissed off,” she retorted. She took a slow step back from it as it shook off the bullets’ impacts.
“Even more so.”
“We don’t even know how to kill this thing,” she pointed out. “Worth a try.”
“But we know someone who does,” Scott said, and she could have slapped herself for not thinking of it sooner.
“My phone,” she said. “It’s in my back right pocket. Grab it.” Scott’s hand slipped into her pocket and slid her cell phone free, but before she could take it from him, the werewolf lunged.
&nbs
p; Scott grabbed her shoulder and shoved her hard to the side; she collided with the wall, something in her backpack crunching with the impact, and her cell phone fell to the carpet. She held on to her pistol, though, and once she’d recovered, she shoved off the wall and whirled around, lifting her weapon in preparation to shoot the animal again. But Scott was in the way; like an idiot, he’d inserted himself between her and the wolf, blocking her shot.
“Get out of the way!” she yelled, but he couldn’t move even if he’d wanted to. The wolf had hooked its front paws over his shoulders in an attempt to pin him down to bite him—or worse—and he had his right forearm jammed underneath its jaw, trying to hold its mouth shut so it couldn’t succeed. His cast was badly damaged, a thick crack running down the length of it, gaping open to hint at the raw skin underneath. The werewolf flexed its paws and dug its claws into Scott’s shoulders, and he gasped in pain as blood oozed from underneath the beast’s claws.
Unable to get the shot she needed, Riley shifted to the side, running toward the opposite end of the room to try for a better one. As she moved, she scooped up her cell phone and hit the contacts list and Zachariah’s name. It took entirely too long for him to answer, and when he did, she barked out, “Zach! Tell me, right now, how to kill a werewolf!”
“What’s going on?”
“Now, Zach! Before we get killed!”
Scott staggered backward, slamming into the wall Riley had vacated, and the werewolf moved with him, a steady, continuous growl issuing from its throat. Scott wedged a leg between himself and the wolf and kicked it, propelling it back from him. It toppled and crashed into the coffee table in front of the couch, which promptly collapsed under its weight.
“Silver bullets,” Zachariah said. “Put one in its head to slow it down and then put one in the heart.”
“Got it.” Riley didn’t bother hanging up; she just released the phone, letting it fall to the carpet, and raced to Scott as the werewolf struggled to its feet. “Get to the bedroom,” she said, ignoring the sight of his blood staining his shirt. “I have a mag of silver bullets in my suitcase.”
“And you only find it prudent to mention this now?” Scott asked.
“I didn’t think about it,” she admitted. “There are only three bullets left, anyway. And we’ve got to get past that.”
The wolf had regained its feet, and it had begun to pace, back and forth, like it was trying to shake off the blow; it moved with a slight limp it didn’t have before.
“I think only one of us is going to make it past that thing,” he said. “You got another gun in your suitcase?”
“A couple,” she replied.
“Good. Give me yours. I’ll need it to get you past that wolf.”
“Scott—”
“Now,” he said, snatching the weapon from her hands before she could protest. “Move, Riley, move!”
She realized that the werewolf was making its own move, charging at them with wild abandon. Knowing this was her only real chance to do this, she bolted to the side, running in a wide arc across the room. Gunfire erupted in a weird, staccato beat behind her, suggesting that Scott was shooting not only his gun but Riley’s as well. Then the firing stopped, and Scott let out a yell, and it took everything in her to not turn around to look. She didn’t have time; she had to make it to her suitcase before it was too late.
Assuming it wasn’t already too late.
She couldn’t let herself think that.
Her suitcase was still on the luggage rack by the windows, right where she’d left it that morning. She hurdled the corner of the room with all the skill of an Olympic sprinter and flung the suitcase’s lid open, knocking the whole thing over in the process. She dumped the contents of her suitcase onto the carpet and scrambled through the tangle of clothes until she reached the black zipper bag underneath them; she broke the zipper while opening the bag and pulled out the contents, jamming the magazine with the three silver bullets into one of her pistols. Chambering a round, she leaped to her feet and raced to the door to save her partner.
Much to her relief, Scott was still alive and holding his own—sort of. He’d gotten his hands on a luggage rack from the closet and was fending off the wolf like a lion tamer with a stool. The rack looked battered already, and Riley knew it wouldn’t hold up much longer. Desperate to help Scott, she charged out of the bedroom, raised her pistol, and fired a single shot.
The bullet embedded into the wolf’s side. Unlike with regular bullets, the wolf’s reaction was instantaneous. It let out a howl of pain, so loud and piercing that Riley’s eyes watered and she fought to not cover her ears as they felt like they were trying to fold in on themselves. Scott, who was much closer to the animal than she was, gave in to the temptation to cover his ears, but it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t any use to her anyway: he didn’t have any silver-coated bullets.
Shaking off the effects of the wolf’s howl, Riley pushed further into the room, taking advantage of the wolf’s pain to advance on it so she could get a better shot. She didn’t have a single bullet to waste. “Put one in the head to slow it down,” Zachariah’s voice said in her head, and as she drew close enough to it, she fired a bullet into the beast’s skull. It yelped and collapsed, whistling out of its nose, so much like a dog that Riley almost hesitated.
But no. Anything she did now would only be showing the animal some level of mercy.
“And then put one in the heart,” Zachariah’s voice added in her head.
She took careful aim.
One shot and it was all over. The werewolf shuddered then went still. Riley’s pistol slide was locked back, the weapon empty. She was shaking, she realized as she stared down at the dead animal; adrenaline had flooded her veins and was seeking release. Scott was kneeling on the floor, so she dropped the pistol and hurried to him, taking a knee so she could be on his level. Blood stained both of his shoulders, and a pained expression on his face suggested just how much he hurt.
“Are you okay?” she asked, fighting to keep the urgency from her voice.
“Are you hurt?” Scott asked in reply. “That thing didn’t get ahold of you, did it?”
She shook her head. “No. No, I’m fine. Not a scratch on me. I’m more worried about you.”
“We need to get out of here,” he said, not acknowledging her concerns. “I have zero doubt that other people heard the fight and have called the cops by now. I really don’t want to deal with trying to explain this.” He nodded to the bedroom. “We need to change. We’re both bloody. Take only bare necessities, because we have to move fast.”
Riley helped him off the floor, and they retreated to the bedroom. She stripped off her shirt and exchanged it for one from the jumbled pile that had dumped out of her suitcase. Then she turned to give Scott a hand, figuring he would need it.
Scott was in the process of pulling his shirt off one-handed, his partially healed broken arm hanging at his side, the cast a network of cracks and crevasses. His face was marred with a grimace, and it drew her to him. She grasped the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head, tossing it to the floor and retrieving a fresh shirt for him. While she was at it, she snagged the first aid kit so she could at least apply quick bandages to his wounds.
As she quickly taped down patches of gauze over the wounds in his shoulders, she glanced at his broken cast and asked, “What are we going to do about that?”
“Splint it,” he said. “Just for reinforcement until I can get to a doctor’s office. I’ll just say we were mugged and the mugger busted my cast. No big deal.”
Riley snorted and grabbed a splint and a roll of gauze from the medical kit, tearing them open and beginning to apply them to his broken cast. “Do you realize how often we use ‘I got mugged’ as a front to explain some weird injury to the doctors?”
“It’s what we get for running in cities like this,” he replied. When she finished splinting his arm, she helped him put a clean shirt on, and he added, “Find everything that has our names on t
hem. We need—” He broke off then went to the windows on the other side of the room. A second after he brushed one of the curtains aside, Riley heard for herself what had apparently caught his attention: police sirens outside their hotel.
“Oh, son of a bitch.” Riley overturned the medical kit, dumping its contents all over the bed and rooting through them, grabbing supplies she thought they might have a chance of needing and dropping them into her backpack. Then she raced to her fallen suitcase and shoved the articles of clothing aside to grab the last pistol she’d left in the zipper case. She jammed it into the waistband of her pants then hurried into the living room area of the suite and scooped up not only the two expended pistols, but the cell phone she’d dropped. She put the phone in her pocket and the pistols in her backpack then turned to Scott, who’d followed her out of their room at a similar pace. “What’s the best way out of here?”
“Probably the stairs, assuming no one’s in the stairwell,” Scott said. As they strode down the hall to the door leading to said stairs, he added, “Remember the number one rule about running?”
“Walk, don’t run,” Riley recited.
“Exactly.”
Damon left Henry’s office and the Agency’s headquarters not long after his short meeting with Henry and Vanessa. He’d made a short stop by his office to wipe his computer and pick up the sparse few things he couldn’t leave behind, then he’d reset all the access codes to the office before leaving. He had no intention of going back to that office. He wouldn’t be allowed to anyway, not once the Committee had their meeting.
He couldn’t help but stew over everything as he drove through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C. How the hell had all of this gotten to where it was? His job had fallen flat on its face in a matter of hours, and people were chasing and trying to kill his children. It was only a matter of time until someone—probably Brandon—tried to add him to the tally.
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