by Mandy Rosko
Then the road tilted downward, and Shelley got a whole new view of the three vehicles they were chasing as the roads merged, and they got into a collision course.
Then she noted that Chris hadn’t bothered with his own seat belt. “Wait! What about you?”
He released a loud roar, foot ramming on the gas, and in the split second before impact, it almost looked like the engine side of the truck was coming toward them and not the other way around.
The crash of glass and crunching metal was earsplitting. Even with the seat belt to hold her into her seat, Shelley felt as if her body suddenly put on an extra ton of weight that struggled to pull her out of her seat. The metal cutters in her hands were suddenly too heavy for her to hold, and they flew into the windshield. Her head and hair flew forward in the whiplash. The tires of both trucks screeching long and loud as they skidded over the pavement was deafening. Despite that, the last noise Shelley heard came from that fucking stereo before Rose’s voice was silenced by the crash.
I wanna watch you bleed.
Chapter Eight
When Shelley came to, the hiss of the crushed engine was the sound that first caught her attention, then boots stomping along the pavement as the vampires who had been in the black car behind the animal transpo truck ran right past her. The undead boys probably thought she was for-real dead or were too caught up in seeing to their princess to notice her.
Shelley kept her movements slow, wiggling her toes, clenching her muscles, and turning her neck only a little. Nothing hurt, much, so that meant nothing was broken, right?
Then she saw the gigantic hole punched through the windshield, right in front of the driver’s seat, and Chris was nowhere to be found.
A roar and another crash caught her attention. A vampire wearing black flew up so high that at first Shelley thought he might actually be flying.
Nope. No bat wings spread out from his back, and he came down hard, crash landing on the crumpled hood of the truck directly in front of Shelley. Her hands shot to her mouth to keep her scream inside. It barely helped. His neck was at such an odd twist that, even though he was on his back, he was looking right at her, eyes open and speckled with blood. His face had been punched in so severely that his left cheek was crumpled in on itself, and one of his fangs had torn through his bottom lip.
Shelley had to look away before she puked, neck clenching at how gross it was. Definitely dead.
Shelley undid her seat belt, moving fast now as shouts and roars of rage became more prominent. With the dead guy on the hood of Michael’s truck, it was one werewolf against at least five vampires, if the number of them had stayed the same from when Shelley last saw them on her jog. Regardless, she didn’t have a lot of time, and that didn’t make for fair odds.
The heavy metal cutters had punched through the glass like Chris had, but they hadn’t flown all the way through. They were stuck. Shelley grabbed their handles, doing her absolute best not to look back at the dead guy staring at her, and yanked them out, taking little pieces of glass with them. Didn’t matter. She opened the truck door and slipped out.
On the driver side of the vampires’ white truck, another vampire, a male with a shaved head, lay slumped against the wheel. Blood, some of it in chunks, coated whatever glass was not yet broken. No seat belt on that one, but she doubted the crash had been what killed him.
On closer inspection, she noted the gash that tore long and deep through his neck. There was no broken glass around his open window, suggesting he’d been driving with the pane down, but their truck had crashed perpendicular to the van. Chris’s exit hole in the windshield was directly in front of the driver side door.
Shelley could just imagine Chris using his claws to kill that vampire while still midair from the crash. It was a strong reminder that these were warriors she lived with.
Okay, be in awe of that later. Shelley found the padlock of the sliding metal door to the cages, lifted her cutter, and tried to cut it off.
She barely scratched the thing and was huffing from the strain in seconds. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered, staring at her handiwork.
She’d done this in a miniseries where she’d played a detective. It had been so easy on set. Leave it to Hollywood to get the facts wrong about how goddamn hard it was to break a lousy lock!
She put the blades of the cutters around the lock again and this time put all of her 110 pounds into the squeeze. She exhaled sharply at the snap, checked the lock, and grinned to see it was broken.
She pulled it off and lifted the sliding panel. There they were. Michael was still out of it, but Alex had awoken from whatever daze that Taser had put him in, and his jaws were around the bars of his kennel, twisting the metal with fierce determination despite the crash his ride had just suffered.
He growled at her. Shelley jumped back.
Right. He was in wolf mode and confused. He didn’t recognize her.
“It’s me, Alex.” She dropped the heavy cutters and stuck her hands near the bars, forcing herself to not flinch back even as he rammed his head into them. Not just wolf mode then. Attack mode. “You know me, Shelley. Right?”
Her voice, familiar and calm, brought him down a little. His wolfy lips still revealed his fangs, but the hackles were no longer standing straight up. He started to sniff, and Shelley let him take in her scent, coming closer now. “That’s it, good boy. I need you as Alex now, though.”
She pulled the little bottle of salts out of her pocket and, keeping it as far away from her own nose as possible, twisted off the cap. Chris had said it only sometimes forced a transformation. She severely hoped this would be one of those times.
She put the bottle to the warped metal bars. Curiosity seizing the wolf, he bent his head to get a better look at what she was presenting him with.
Then he jerked his head back when the scent caught his nose, sneezing, coughing, and whining in the way that canines did when they were hurt, or sick.
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, but you—”
“Oi, what do we have here?”
Hands still gripping the bars to Alex’s cage, Shelley turned her head, and her heart stopped.
Caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Two more vampires, one with three long claw marks, fresh, from the looks of it, trailing down the left side of his face, stared at her with grins on their faces.
“Looks like the mutt was only distracting us, Jimmy,” said the one with the Irish accent.
Jimmy’s black-painted fingernails became long, pointed daggers. “So it would seem. We’ll go teach that little dog a lesson when we’re done here.”
Teach him— “What did you do with Chris?”
They stepped forward, and Shelley moved back. “We were told not to put holes in the silver one. Miss never said anything about the others.”
Shelley put her hands up and took a step back, recalling the poison, the fangs, the complete disregard for life that had come from Pearl. These men were no different. “Please.”
Alex busted through his cage, the whole door, bars and all, creating a metallic clatter as it forcefully skidded over the road. He was in human form.
He landed on his knees, and the first thing he looked at was the two stunned vampires closing in. Shelley got a good look at how the skin of his back bunched up.
“You—”
The vampires didn’t give him a chance to finish as they attacked, but Alex was ready, and he met them halfway, all three creatures clashing in the air as they leaped.
Shelley didn’t have time for this. She went to Michael’s cage as the fight commenced, heart lurching at the sight of him, lax and unmoving on his side.
“Michael.” She reached through the thinly spaced bars, quickly threading her fingers through his coarse fur, along his ears, and down his muzzle, then repeating the process.
Her spirits lifted as his tail sleepily lifted up and down, tapping the metal bottom of his cell at her touch. His silver eyes opened but only halfway before slid
ing shut again, and a wolfy groan rumbled out of him. The drug was still working through him.
Shelley got her bottle of smelling salts ready. He was about to get the next best thing to taking a shower in an ice storm. She was getting him on his feet and sober whether he liked it or not.
She waved the little bottle frantically under his nose, making sure he got a supreme dose of it. His long face scrunched and shook as he sneezed, his body quickly jerking away from her. He hid in the back corner where she couldn’t reach him and where he’d be safer from the bottle she held.
Bingo. That was more like it.
“Oi! Get away from there, you little bitch.”
Shelley turned as the vampire still fighting with Alex scrambled out of the heap they made on the ground and moved toward her. Alex held on to the other one, choking him with that huge bicep around his neck, but he couldn’t do anything about the one advancing on Shelley without releasing his prisoner.
“Run!” he screamed.
Ten steps ahead of him. Literally, she’d already started running for shelter around the two twisted vehicles. There was no way she was going to make a getaway down that dark road, not with Michael, Alex, and Chris fighting for their lives.
She could do this. Cardio was her best skill, and all she had to do was keep Batman back there chasing her in circles until backup could arrive.
The vampire must’ve caught on to her scheme pretty quickly, because the next thing Shelley knew, he jumped high, and arching over the truck, he dropped, landing on his feet, knees bent, right in front of her.
She screamed as she skidded to a stop, falling backward into the weeds and rocks on the side of the road.
He straightened then smiled, showing off fangs that got longer and longer before her eyes, until they nearly touched his chin. “End o’ the road, pretty.”
He took a single step then was rammed into the side of the truck with the force of a bullet train, knocking it onto its side with more loud groaning from the bending metal and crunching glass.
Michael! He was still in the cage! Shelley got to her feet and ran to the other side of the truck.
Whatever it was that rammed into the vampire about to attack her and the transport truck had pushed both ruined vehicles into the middle of the road. Neither Alex nor the vampire he’d been struggling with was anywhere in sight, but Shelley saw the dark circle of blood expanding from under the white truck.
Her fingers found their way to her hair where they gripped tightly, and her heart skipped several beats. It was something that had never happened to her before, and it felt horrible, making her light headed and her bones weak.
She stepped closer. “Michael?”
“Shelley, get away from there!”
She spun just as she was engulfed in a pair of thick, muscular, familiar arms.
Shelley hugged him back and couldn’t contain her sobbing. He was human again. He was alive. She kissed him everywhere her mouth could reach, delighting in the feel of his warm skin.
When awareness hit her again, Michael was pulling her away from the crash site.
“Alex,” she started, worried now that the lake of blood might just belong to him.
“Right here,” he said, and Shelley pulled away from Michael’s chest to see him. He was naked, but his body was red with blood and littered with claw marks. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was the one who had been attacked by a werewolf.
“Jesus Christ, Alex, are you okay?”
“Nothing I won’t live through,” he said, touching his shoulder where a particularly nasty set of gashes were. He barely noticed but for a wince when he put his fingers there. He nodded toward the truck. “One of the cage bars that got mangled must’ve stabbed that bloodsucker where it counted. We got out of the way before it could pin us.”
Pin, he’d said. Not crushed like a pancake. Shelley held onto Michael a little tighter. Of course. Something like that wouldn’t have killed them, but it would have been a really big annoyance under the circumstances. A vampire could die from a broken neck and getting stabbed through the heart, but those were only some of the few ways their deaths could be attained. The creatures on this road were still built Ford tough.
It hardly made Shelley feel better.
“I know you didn’t do that,” Michael said, looking at the enormous crater on the side of transport van. Then he looked at her.
“I thought you did it,” she said.
The scratch of fingernails over metal had her pulling away from the site and dragging Michael with her as fast as she could. No one would ever accuse Shelley of bravery, and she was perfectly comfortable with it staying that way so long as Michael stayed safe with her.
Unfortunately, Michael would not allow her to take him very far. She got him two steps away before he planted his feet and stayed like he was superglued to the spot.
“The vampire,” Shelley said, still clinging to his arms. “Something pushed him into the truck, I don’t—”
“He’s dead, baby,” Michael said, eyes firmly on the shaking truck as Cal pulled himself up and over the threshold, his body, from the hair on his head to his perfectly sculpted chest, was as covered in blood as Alex’s, though all that color likely came more from the vampires he’d crushed rather than any battling they’d done.
Cal jumped down from his place on top of the wreckage as easily as if he hadn’t just crashed into it and violently killed an enemy.
Shelley pointedly kept her eyes on his face as he marched toward them. She was nearly at her limit of how many naked men she could handle, and it was just, well, there.
Cal didn’t bother her with a look. Michael was his whole focus. He stopped just in front of the man and pointed his finger in a jabbing motion at Michael’s nose.
“Now you owe me.”
Because she still held tightly on to his arms, Shelley could feel the sudden tension in his body as everything became tight. He clenched his jaw, struggling for patience. His eyes went down to her for just a moment before nodding.
“Understood, but I can’t give you alpha status. You’ll still have to earn it.”
“Looking forward to it,” Cal snarled.
What’s he talking about? What does he want? Shelley thought, putting her energy into making Michael hear it. However, unlike the many other times when they’d conversed like this, Shelley felt as though her words were being reflected off a brick wall.
He was blocking her.
A loud shriek erupted into the night, echoing into the darkness, cutting off any questions Shelley was about to throw out there. Another body flew into the air in a steep arch, but this one did not have the graceful landing that the previous vampire did. It wasn’t a vampire at all. Chris.
He sailed high with the grace of a dishrag and came down hard, his body smacking onto the gray pavement and sliding forward until he came to a stop, smearing blood and skin along the rough surface of the road.
Shelley’s heart pumped in her throat. All three men still standing ran to their fallen brother. Michael was the first to get to his knees before him, but no one put their hands on him.
Shelley didn’t move. She couldn’t. If she’d thought Alex and Cal looked bad, Chris was worse. The vast majority of his body resembled ground beef. Had it not been for his hair, she wouldn’t have recognized him right away. His face was in pieces, eyes glued shut with blood.
The fact that this had been done to him and yet he’d still bought her the time required to free Alex and Michael meant that he’d worked a miracle and was also the bravest man on the planet.
Now her feet started to move. “Is he alive?” Shelley reached out to touch him, fingers shaking.
Michael snatched her wrist before she could get near him. “He is, barely, but you can’t move him, baby. We don’t know what’s broken. We need to wait for Deena.”
Deena. She was going to have a panic attack when she saw what had been done to her husband.
Maybe everyone else had th
e same thoughts, and maybe their werewolf link somehow blasted that into Chris’s mind, because he suddenly jerked. His throat gurgled as he lifted his head and coughed blood all over his ruined face. Helping hands tilted his head enough so he could spew vomit mixed with red over the pavement, the fear of a broken neck done away with by Chris’s movements. All three men proceeded to wipe the blood from his face, being careful of the places that were missing strips of flesh and talking him into lying still.
The animal transport truck was toppled over, but Shelley ran to it and grabbed one of the dog blankets pinned under the wreckage. She shook the glass and little rocks from it before bringing it back to Chris.
Cal saw her coming and held his hand out for the blanket. She wasn’t thinking. She saw the hint and reacted accordingly. She gave him the blanket, and he gave it one last hard shake before gently placing it over his brother’s naked form.
It was like watching a man, drunk off his ass, trying to stumble to his feet. Chris’s attempts to lift himself, to throw the blanket off, were pathetic at best. The only noises that came from his mouth were broken moans and loud wheezes. The constant flow of blood and the bits of flesh hinted that he’d bitten his tongue, maybe several times as his face had been punched in.
“Deena woke the others up too, right?” Shelley asked Cal. If he was out and about, that meant the other wolves had to be too, and Deena needed to get here pronto if Chris was going to make it. “Where are they?”
“It hardly matters.”
Shelley looked up, and all three kneeling men growled, crouching their bodies protectively over Chris as Pearl stepped out from behind the wreckage. One other vampire guard was still standing by her side, though his cloak was in tatters and he had bloody scratches across both cheeks. Shelley couldn’t see the damage done to his eyes because of the shades, but he looked about as pleased as Pearl did.
What got the men to stop their territorial hissing was the sight of the scruffy black-and-gray wolf that went and stood by her side.
Jake.