by Anya Nowlan
The men shared a quick look and she could spot two of them shrugging at one another, still viewing her as something more of a passing amusement for the evening than any kind of a serious threat. They weren’t wrong, in a sense, just ignorant.
The first brave contestant took two steps forward, charging at her with his right fist held high. Kayla grabbed his wrist and spun to the right, using his momentum against him and sending him flying into the fallen over table. The sound of splintering wood marked his fall and a slight groan followed after it.
That released the flood and next, Kayla found herself staring down the snarling faces of two rather aggravated werewolves, yet to shift – thank god. She yelped as she had to duck past one of them and then grabbed the other by the shoulders, tipping him back with a kick to the knees and then the chin.
Before he could lose his balance and fall over, she used him as a stepping stool and swung her body up, grabbing the lamp that was hanging above her and swinging herself over the heads of the werewolves. She landed on the other side and without looking back, she took off running.
I can’t believe I’m fucking doing this. Again.
But there really wasn’t any time for general disbelief. She had a pack of angry biker wolves after her and nowhere to really run. Kayla managed to duck and weave her way out of the door and into the street, lit low with just a few streetlamps. She knew she couldn’t outrun them in a million years – even if she could as a human, then these guys had hogs and they could shift into goddamn wolves!
Even if she’d worn her running shoes, she wouldn’t be able to make it more than a few blocks.
“I don’t need a plan, I said. I’ll figure it out when I get there, I said,” she mocked herself, flipping herself over the closest motorcycle and tipping it over, causing a chain reaction as the expensive Harleys fell onto one another in a game of chromed-out Dominoes.
She took off running, hearing the shouts and curses of the men coming up behind her closer and closer with each step. About half a block down, she threw herself into an alleyway, hoping to find a door into one of the red-brick buildings and some form of an escape. Instead, she found a wire-fence, trash cans and locked doors.
“Shit,” she exclaimed, whipping her body around to see the men blocking off the only exit.
“You better stop running, girly. We got some questions to ask you. And trust me when I say that you don’t want to get us any angrier than you’ve already made us.”
“Really?” she asked, her voice echoing in the enclosed space. “I thought we’d go get some tea, talk this over like civilized adults, you know? Like they do in the movies.”
Nobody laughed and she had to admit that she hadn’t expected them to. Though perhaps a little courteous chuckling would have been nice of them. Assholes.
They came closer and with a steady stream of shit, shit, shit under her breath, Kayla went for the only option she had left. She flattened her body against the fence and squished herself between one of the trash cans and the fence itself, trying to crawl as far behind it as she could. There was no way out of there and she knew it, but it would provide a few extra seconds during which, maybe, she could figure out some kind of a brilliant idea to not get herself raped and murdered by a pack of obviously pissed off biker wolves that night.
Not that she didn’t necessarily deserve it, knocking out their friends, destroying their hogs and stealing their information.
“Come on, get me out of this one and I swear I’ll start going to church again,” Kayla pleaded, turning her eyes up to the skies.
But no salvation seemed to come from there. Instead, the night over Chicago was cloudy and dreary and she could hardly even see the moon, which peeked out from behind the cloud cover every now and then, seemingly just to mock her with its freedom.
“This is your last chance, honey. Get out here and give yourself up and maybe we’ll go easy on you.”
The cackle of laughter that followed that statement made Kayla rather certain that it was the exact opposite of what they were actually planning to do with her.
“You know, the offer’s super enticing but I think I’ll just stay here,” she quipped back. “You’re welcome to go and do whatever it is that big, scary-looking bikers do in the dead of night, okay?”
Kayla wasn’t exactly waiting for them to turn around and leave her alone, but some sort of acknowledgement would have been nice. She braced herself in the tight crawlspace that she’d created for herself, half-expecting the gigantic trash container to be ripped away from her by the brute strength of half a dozen aggravated bikers, but instead, she got nothing.
Which was weird.
Frowning, Kayla shuffled to the side a little to allow herself the option of peeking out from behind the container. Just as she ducked her head out a little, she heard a heavy grunt and a two-hundred-and-something pound body of a fully grown and extremely pissed werewolf biker came flying at her. Kayla pulled back just in time for the man to slam into the wire-fence, stumble back a step and then turn around, practically howling with anger.
What the fuck.
The beating of her heart was so damn loud in her ears that she could barely hear a thing over her own nervousness. Concentrating and daring another look out, her fingers grazing the gun on her hip, Kayla’s eyes went wide.
In the middle of the alleyway stood a man who was more vision than human. He moved as a blur of motion and strength, every step, kick and hit perfectly centered, executed and delivered. Three of the six bikers were already on the ground in various misshapen heaps, two of them passed out and the third one clinging to his consciousness through the sheer force of his pained squeals.
How she could have missed them before Kayla had no idea. The man sounded like a pig being slowly fed to the meat grinder.
Her attention snapped back to the unidentified man. He was tall, very tall, towering above the werewolves. His eyes were icy green and scary in their intensity, just like the rest of him. The expression of steadfast serenity on his face was more unnerving than anything else Kayla had ever seen, and she’d stared down the barrel of at least a few different large-caliber guns and been chased and beaten up by more shifters than she cared to mention lately.
She’d thought that she wasn’t really afraid of anything. Looking at this blond fury of a man, dressed in black slacks, combat boots and a long black jacket without a single discernible form of identification, Kayla Malone was beginning to rethink her views on life.
He grabbed one of the men advancing on him by the neck, slamming his knee in his face with a sickening crunch before the man could even attempt to land a blow. Using the huge body of his victim, who must have weighed more than Kayla’s mystery savior – though maybe not, because while the man in black looked like all muscle, the bikers were more blubber than meat – he practically bowled down the other two.
Fumbling, they dodged the body of their fallen comrade and he slouched against a wall, face-first, probably leaving a very impressive indentation on his forehead. Growling, his remaining friends seemed to decide that enough was enough. The next leap saw both of them shifting.
Oh man, he’s so fucked, Kayla managed to think, only to be proven entirely and incomprehensibly wrong in the next moment.
The man in black seemed to stay rooted to his spot, his hands loosely at his sides and his legs slightly apart in a combat stance. His shoulders seemed entirely relaxed and his head was held high, back turned to Kayla. The werewolves were shaggy, gray and brown creatures in their wolf form, with pale golden eyes that seemed to glow a little too intensely in the darkness.
They lunged at the same time and Kayla wanted to squeeze her eyes shut to avoid seeing the man being torn to shreds, but a mixture of morbid curiosity and a little something she’d later call faith (but was actually just more of that curiosity, really) made her watch the whole thing.
He grabbed them from mid-air, meeting them with a few steps that were faster than Kayla’s eyes could track. Getting a firm gr
ip on the front paws of each of them, he crushed them together in their flight, toppling them both to the ground. Disoriented as they were, he grabbed the first one, crunching his knee into the animal’s head and then elbowing it in the ribs as it lay slumped on the ground.
Kayla could hear the sound of several ribs breaking all the way to where she was. Maybe the skull too, considering the amount of blood coming out of the wolf’s head.
The last one managed to get on its feet before the man in black got to him and the animal backed away, its steps wobbly.
“Forget about her. Forget about me. This never happened,” the man said, his voice resonating across the walls.
It was the kind of voice that would make anyone stand up a little straighter and look over their shoulder. It had presence, command and a whole lot of gravitas. The dark growl underneath the words added a nice punch as well.
The wolf gave a half-assed nod and turned tail, running out of the alleyway as fast as its shaky legs could take it. The man Kayla had heard first was still screaming and the man in black silenced him swiftly with a kick to the face that either knocked the guy out or dislocated his jaw. Or both, again.
Kayla was still peeking out from behind the trash container when her mysterious savior turned around, heading straight for her with slow, almost ambling steps. The look of serenity crossed from his features and he now wore a slim, unnerving smile. Kayla became very aware that she had goose bumps on her skin and the Chicago night seemed unbearably cold all of a sudden.
“I’m warning you, I won’t go down as easy as those chumps did,” she said, her voice as shaky as the last werewolf’s step had been.
Who the fuck is this guy?
He didn’t deem it worthy to answer her.
Smushing herself against the container and the fence, she shuffled in deeper again. She didn’t even think to try and wrestle her handgun out of its holster. The container was huge, there was no way a single man could move it. So when it was pulled away from the fence like it was no more than one of those plastic trash cans that sits in the corner of every office in the world, Kayla’s breath caught in earnest.
He stepped in front of her, reaching out his gloved hand to her. With her mouth solidly agape, she took it and he pulled her up on her feet.
It felt like she’d just shaken hands with the devil.
“Who are you?” she stuttered, retracting her hand and cradling it against her as if she’d just lost a bit of her soul, and not in the good way.
“You can call me your guardian demon,” he said with a chuckle, that dark voice of his sending uncomfortable shivers down her back again. “Or Spade, for short.”
It was only later that Kayla would learn that she really had just met the devil.
Two
Rio
“How much longer are you going to take?” Ryker asked with an aggravated sigh over Rio’s shoulder.
“I’ll take as long as I fucking take,” Rio huffed back, waving away his twin. “Don’t you have badly armed and unskilled Polish operatives to mow down?”
It was the middle of the night – as it always seemed to be when Shifter Squad Nine was at work – and they were somewhere in the Polish plains, where there was nothing but strips of forest to be seen for miles and endless miles. It was probably for the best, because the whole place was going to go up like the Fourth of July had finally come to Europe.
Tinkering with the pad in his hands, Rio cocked a brow at his own handiwork. The weapons manufacturing and storage compound that they’d been tasked to clear out stood a half a mile away from them, creatively rigged to explode with the full force of all the gunpowder and heavy explosives that Rio had managed to find. It was going to be his masterpiece. Truly something to behold.
But someone was making it really damn hard to enjoy it.
“Seriously, how long?” Ryker grumbled.
Rio spun around, glaring at his brother, who was lighting a cigar from the bonfire next to him. The tall, imposing-looking werebear wore an expectant expression, his neatly trimmed beard framing his face almost as well as the glinting light of the healthy fire did.
“You’ve got a live one,” Rio commented, pointing down at Ryker’s feet.
“Hmm?” the engineer queried, glancing down himself.
The bonfire moved, quite literally. One of the guys – the werewolf shifters who’d had the unfortunate joy of guarding the compound – who made up the bonfire twitched, gasping for breath and trying to crawl out from under the stack of bodies above him. With a sigh, Ryker grabbed the slim, impossibly sharp and always deadly knife from his hip and slammed it down into the man’s skull.
The bonfire stopped moving.
“Happy now?” Ryker asked, snorting.
“Fucking ecstatic, brother,” Rio answered.
Shaking his head, he looked down at the controls in his hands. He almost wished he’d lived in the good old days, where the explosives expert basically had to stand next to the goddamn bomb for it to properly go off, or at least thread an ignition line from the main source. These days, it was all remote-controlled deadman switches and carefully calibrated triggers.
The night was dark around them and when before, the forests had seemed to be echoing with screams, now there was nothing but the steady crackling of the corpse-fire to fill the silence, along with the occasional sigh from Ryker.
“What’s the holdup?”
Rio groaned audibly as Dice appeared from the shadows, carrying the prone form of another hapless guard on his shoulders. He tossed the guy into the fire with a little help from Ryker.
“There was motion inside the compound,” Rio said with an annoyed snarl.
The night had been long, he was basically doused head to toe in mud and blood, and frankly the Polish weather was not exactly his thing. It was too damn cold. And moist. He hated that.
“All the more reason to blow it up sooner,” Prowler added, walking out of the darkness as well, having just gotten back from his own patrol of the area.
He dragged along two dead bodies by their ankles and one look at the man’s face as he came into the range of the fire told Rio that he’d enjoyed every second of his hunt. Price jogged up behind him, depositing one of his own additions to their rather impressive fire.
“Oh look, a guard tower,” Price commented, grinning, flicking his gaze around. “Jesus. Do you people even get it?”
For someone who had almost died a few months back when Dice’s little scavenger mission to retrieve his mate blew up in their faces, Price was damn jovial as of late. Must have been the whole life and death thing that got his blood pumping. Rio couldn’t say that he didn’t understand.
He did, all too well.
“This one might be the biggest one yet,” Prowler added appreciatively, looking at the six-foot-something stack of bodies they were burning, the reek of it almost intolerable.
Well, unless you were used to it. And Shifter Squad Nine, for better or for worse, were.
“Sure is,” Ryker confirmed, adding some gasoline from a nearby canister to the lot, making the flames puff up angrily.
“Lynx Four, come in,” Dice spoke into the headset, making Ryker turn down the volume on his.
Their resident sniper was still on the loose somewhere and as much as Rio would have liked to push the buttons and make the world go up in a cascade of brilliant colors, there was honor even among thieves and cutthroats. After an unfortunate incident in which Dice himself had almost been on the receiving end of machine gun fire (never trust the jungles in the South Pacific, basically), Shifter Squad Nine had come to a begrudging understanding that nothing would get torn down to its base particle before the whole team was accounted for.
“I’m here,” came the low, solemn reply of Thor, slinking out of the darkness with his long sniper rifle slung lazily over his shoulder.
It was almost as tall as he was and that was saying something, considering the size of each of the Shifter Squad Nine members. They didn’t screw around �
� everything was larger than life. Their missions, their toys, themselves.
“Good. The gang’s all back together,” Dice said with some mock joviality, prompting a few snorts and for Ryker to start digging around for another cigar.
They’d been running together for nearly a year now, but Shifter Squad Nine was still antsy as hell around one another. The trust wasn’t there and frankly, Rio couldn’t imagine what would make things really change. Sure, the fact that they’d ultimately all come to the help of Dice had been something, a starting point. But out of the six of them, five of the men present should have probably been locked up for crimes against humanity a long time ago, and since becoming Spade’s private death squad, Dice’s morals had obviously been somewhat compromised as well.
Guess we’re rubbing off on him in the worst kind of way, Rio thought with a private grin.
Their missions tended to go off without a hitch – or at least they always got their target and so far, they’d all come back alive. Time after time, someone had gone above and beyond to save another’s life, but to these men, it didn’t seem enough to incite trust in one another.
If a man gets burned enough in life, then trust is something that isn’t given out quite so easily.
“Can we blow it up now?” Prowler asked with a grumble.
“Probably. Thor, were you in the factory?”
Rio glanced at the sniper, who’d begun dismantling his gun piece by piece. Thor nodded absently, looking up for only a moment.
“I was. Figured I couldn’t be bothered to drag the bodies back here, so I stashed them in the factory.”
“I thought we agreed to not go on an active explosives’ site,” Ryker commented, saving Rio the need to do so.
“Yeah, well, I also thought we agreed to not come to Europe when it’s fuckin’ freezin’, but I guess not all promises are meant to be kept,” Thor mused.
Price chuckled and even Dice cracked a grin, though it was gone as soon as it appeared.