Burn the Night

by Jocelynn Drake

  Smoke was starting to hang in the air on the first floor, and the temperature was steadily rising. The fire we started on the second floor had grown and was now determined to make its way down to the first floor. While it had set off a panic among the humans, giving us the ability to easily sneak up on them, it was now cutting our time short.

  “I think it’s time to call in Barrett,” I said as I slowly eased back to my feet by sliding my back up the wall.

  “You’re hurt?” Rowe asked, looking more than a little surprised.

  I shrugged and immediately regretted the action, as my collarbone was still struggling to mend. “It was a narrow hallway and they got in a few lucky shots.”

  “And the glass? You’re sparkling in the light,” he said.

  “The witch got in one spell before I could kill her. You have any problems?”

  “Nothing worth mentioning. The humans are dead and the naturi are alive. Just as it’s supposed to be,” he said with a wide grin.

  “Don’t get too excited,” I growled. “We still need to get down to the basement and see what the coalition actually knows. The witch could see me, but she didn’t know what I was. It might mean they don’t know about our people yet. We need to be sure before we leave this place.”

  Rowe turned serious as he pulled the little black walkie-talkie off the waist of my pants and pressed the button. “Any problems?”

  “None.” Barrett’s voice came back scratchy but easily understandable. “However, smoke is pouring out of the roof. I imagine that the fire department is going to be here soon.”

  “Then you better haul your ass in here fast so we can get this done. There are two lycan waiting for you to play with.”

  “I’m coming,” Barrett replied. And with him would be the entire fury of his pack.

  Twenty-one

  Rowe took the point going down the stairs while I headed up the rear, with Barrett sandwiched between us, his guns drawn. Rowe and I remained with our knives, preferring to stick with the old ways. We were faster that way. Rowe paused at the bottom of the stairs and pointed toward the light coming from under the door.

  “Private power generators,” he whispered, answering his unspoken question. “They’re ready for us.”

  I didn’t doubt it. They had sent a dozen armed men up to the first floor and not one of them came back alive.

  Standing back against the wall, Rowe pulled the door open. A barrage of gunfire flew in, peppering the staircase and far concrete wall. Rowe looked over at me and raised an eyebrow while smiling mischievously. It was a look that didn’t fill me with confidence.

  “Don’t shoot! Please, don’t shoot!” he cried in a wavering voice, as if terrified. He even changed the pitch and tone, removing any potential threat from his voice. “I only came here to bring you one of these dirty werewolves when the lightning storm started.”

  “Bring out the dog!” ordered a harsh voice. Rowe pulled me behind him, motioning for me to hold the door open.

  In one smooth motion Rowe pushed Barrett down to his knees with guns in both hands. As I moved into the doorway, Rowe stood behind Barrett, who fired while Rowe flung knives at the visible enemies. Screams of pain went up for a couple of seconds in shock before the armed men answered with their own gunfire. I put one foot on Barrett’s hip and slid him out of the way while slamming the door shut. Bullets pounded against the thick metal door before they finally gave up.

  “How many did you get?” I demanded, holding the door closed with my shoulder.

  “Two,” Rowe replied.

  “Four,” Barrett added as he changed the magazines in each gun so they were fully loaded again. I quickly scanned the basement area and sensed only ten more men, at least three of whom were wounded. The lycans were still there, toward the back of the building.

  “Do you think we should try that trick again?” Barrett asked.

  “They’ve already moved away from the entrance to the other rooms,” I said, pulling one of the knives from my side. At the same time, the light seeping from under the door went out, plunging us into total darkness.

  “They must have night vision goggles if they hope to take us in the dark,” Barrett grumbled.

  “Night vision goggles?” I repeated, looking over at Rowe.

  “Devices to allow humans to see in total darkness,” he replied quickly as he grabbed a fresh knife.

  “Can you see anything at all, Barrett?” I demanded. My vision was fine. It had taken me a second to get readjusted, but I was accustomed to the darkness of the night.

  “I’ll be able to in a minute,” he replied as he stepped away from us. He quickly stripped off his clothes and laid them in a rumpled pile at the foot of the stairs before changing into wolf form. There was no mistaking that this wolf was a shapeshifter. He was simply too large. I frowned. While he would have the edge in speed and added dexterity, he couldn’t wield a weapon beyond the massive jaws and sharp teeth he possessed. All told, I wasn’t sure that he had an advantage in his wolf form. However, I suspected he wouldn’t be able to see his opponent otherwise, and Barrett wasn’t about to allow us to leave him behind when we finally took down the last of the coalition members.

  “Barrett, we’re going to leave the lycans to you to take care of,” Rowe directed, edging closer to the door again. “We’re going after the humans. If you can sniff out Daniel while you’re at it, give a howl and we’ll come running. Otherwise, we’ll have to beat it out of a couple survivors.”

  “Hopefully he’s here,” I muttered before Rowe jerked the door open again.

  He walked out first, scanning the area with both his eyes and his powers. No one was in the immediate corridor except for the prone bodies of six dead men leaking blood across the tile floor. Rowe and I moved silently down the hall, while Barrett’s claws clicked across the floor behind us.

  We turned a corner and came upon a room with a set of windows in the wall, revealing men seated behind a series of glowing blue screens, furiously typing in away while glancing continuously over their shoulders.

  “They’re trying to delete their information from the computers,” Rowe said. “I’ll take care of them. Continue down the hall and don’t get yourself killed.”

  “As you wish,” I muttered under my breath while Rowe slipped like a ghost into the room, then quickly proceeded to kill every human inside. Three down. Just a few more to go.

  Barrett accompanied me down the long hall to a pair of double doors. Gripping the blades tightly in each hand, I drew in a slow, steadying breath. My powers were completely useless, considering how far underground we were. I had to rely completely on my training as a killer. But then, Rowe had been very thorough in my training as a defender for the queen and a protector of the people. Yet, after spending most of my life trapped in a cage, I had begun to wonder if I would ever get the chance to try my skills out on armed humans.

  As I edged the door open, I heard the ominous click of weapons being cocked and locked into position. Not hesitating, I dove into the room and leapt behind a tall set of crates off to one side. Gunfire filled the air, lighting up the black room. Barrett scampered after me and settled behind the boxes. Bullets chipped away at the wooden crates and pinged off the concrete walls near us. We were pinned down, but that would only last for so long. It was only a matter of time before they started their approach and took aim from a significantly shorter distance.

  “If I draw their fire,” I said to Barrett, “can you get behind them?”

  The wolf nuzzled my arm for a second before turning in the opposite direction to poke his nose out from behind the box. He was ready for me to draw their fire.

  Pushing my back away from the crates, I rolled my shoulders and closed my eyes for a second as I summoned my wings. They sprouted from my back, tearing through the soft material of my shirt. The thick blackness of the wings blended with the darkness of the room, allowing me to stretch them to their full length before drawing them in again. Climbing carefully to the top o
f the stack of crates, I slithered across on my belly, then balanced on the edge with my wings extended. The ceiling was just high enough to allow me to glide a short distance. Unfortunately, I would reach the ground a few feet directly in front of them. Barrett only had one shot to get at them before I was torn to shreds by their weapons.

  Clenching my teeth, I launched myself off the crate and glided across the room. I threw three knives down on them before they even took notice at the attack from above. Screams of horror went up and they moved their weapons so they were now pointed at me. Just before reaching the ground, I jerked my wings in and tucked my body into a ball so I rolled forward, making myself a smaller target.

  Luckily, more screams went up, accompanied by a low growl as Barrett struck. To lend him a hand, I rolled back to my feet and jumped over the table the men who took refuge in the room had been hiding behind. With my knives slashing with frightening speed, I dispatched the last of them, while Barrett tore another man apart with his teeth.

  The lights suddenly flicked on as we finished with the bloody work. I raised one hand to shield my eyes from the overwhelming glare, blood dripping on my nose and running down my cheek. I blinked a couple times and twisted around toward the entrance to find Rowe standing in the doorway, looking a little bloodier than he had been only a few moments earlier.

  “Finished in here?” he inquired in a light voice.

  My wings settled around my shoulders as I looked around at the carnage. An array of black and lethal-looking weapons was spread out on the table I’d leapt over. The four men in the room had been hacked to pieces in a matter of seconds and were now lying in pools of their own blood. “Just finished,” I replied.

  “I took a peek around the place,” Rowe said, keeping his eyes on me as Barrett wandered off to a corner to change back into human form. “There are three locked doors. Two with lycans behind them and one with a human.”

  “The human has to be Daniel,” Barrett said in a low, rough voice, just barely back in human form.

  “What do we do about the other lycans? Are they prisoners as well?” I asked as we headed toward the door Rowe was holding open for us.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Barrett said with a shake of his head. “They betrayed their people. They could have taken their secrets to their grave and they didn’t. They deserve death. But right now my main concern is getting to Daniel. We need to reach him before the fire department arrives and this place caves in around us.”

  Rowe silently led us to the room that held the presence of a human. One well-placed kick near the doorknob sent the door flying open and banging against the wall behind it. In the center of the empty room a haggard, beaten man was taped to a metal folding chair. He was slumped over, looking as if he were barely holding onto life.

  “Daniel!” Barrett cried, rushing over and kneeling beside the man. Rowe and I quickly set to work cutting the thick silver tape that bound him to the chair. He reeked of urine, sweat, and dried blood. He might have been held captive for only a couple days, but it appeared that he had spent most of that time being beaten into a bruised and bloody pulp.

  “Barrett?” Daniel said in a dazed and rough voice as he tried to lift his head to look around.

  “Yes, it’s me. I came to take you home.”

  “How did you know?” Daniel asked, his voice cracking.

  “You haven’t contacted us in days. I promised that we would come after you.”

  “I didn’t tell them anything, I swear. I didn’t say anything,” he continued. Tears started to stream down his face, and I was forced to look away, focusing on the last bit of tape at his ankles.

  “I know you didn’t say anything,” Barrett said, squeezing both of Daniel’s shoulders. “You would never betray us. What about the other lycans?”

  “I never saw them, but I could hear them being tortured.” Daniel gave a shudder before falling forward to lean heavily on Barrett. “I could hear the screaming through the walls next to me. I think they’re from Charleston. They’re not from Savannah.”

  “We’ll take care of them before we leave.”

  “I’ve got it,” Rowe said, snapping my head up. The naturi disappeared from the room without a whisper of noise. We didn’t move as we listened to him kick in each door and quickly dispatch the other two lycanthropes quickly and mercifully.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he commanded, sticking his head back in the doorway. “Smoke is starting to fill the hallways. The first floor may be impassible now.”

  “This used to be a parking garage,” Daniel said. “They took me out a back underground entrance one night. We can use that.”

  Putting one of his arms over my shoulder while Barrett took the other, we helped Daniel back to his feet. We moved as quickly as we possibly could, but he stopped us once again as we passed the room where the men had been working at the blue glowing screens.

  “The computers! We need the computers!” he shouted.

  “There isn’t time,” Barrett argued.

  “It’s full of information on everyone,” Daniel pressed. “We need it. We need to know what they know. Otherwise, this whole mission was for nothing.”

  Barrett looked over at me and Rowe for a moment in indecision. “I’ve got him,” I said. Rowe and the shifter didn’t hesitate to dart into the room. I watched as they pulled cords out of two metal containers and hefted them up on their shoulders. I didn’t know what kind of information resided with these computers, but apparently it was important enough to risk everyone’s life.

  We paused one last time so Barrett could run back and grab his pants before Daniel directed us to the enclosure where Barrett and I had encountered the last group of Daylight Coalition members. At the rear, we saw a plain white van. We loaded Daniel into the back while Barrett worked on getting the van started. Rowe pushed open the gate and I slammed the back doors shut when it growled to life. Then Rowe hopped inside as Barrett idled by the gate.

  In the parking lot, Barrett stopped next to the car he’d driven up to Atlanta. Rowe hopped out with instructions to follow us back to Savannah. We were pulling out of the business complex just as giant red trucks pulled in with sirens blaring and red lights flashing. I took one last look out the back window of the van to see flames poking out of the windows of both the first and second floor. The rain had stopped but the clouds still hung black and heavy in the sky.

  We’d succeeded in our rescue mission, but I had the distinct feeling that we hadn’t heard the last of the Daylight Coalition. We had merely slowed them down a bit.

  Twenty-two

  During the next four hours, Daniel hovered between consciousness and uneasy sleep in the back of the car. We threw an old cloth tarp we found over the floor for him to lie on. It didn’t provide any cushion, but after everything he had been through, he didn’t appear to notice the hardness of the car floor.

  “Thank you for coming with me,” Barrett said after we rode for more than an hour in complete silence. “I know that neither you nor Rowe wanted to help, but I am grateful that you did. Daniel would not have survived much longer in their hands.”

  Sitting in the back of the van beside Daniel, I looked up to meet Barrett’s hard gaze in the mirror. “You’re welcome,” I murmured.

  We fell back into another long, uncomfortable silence before the lycanthrope finally spoke again. “Does it bother you that much to be helping someone like me?”

  “Someone like you?” I repeated warily, unsure of where he was headed with this conversation.

  “Yes, a shifter. A lycanthrope. Mira says that at one time we were like pets to you and your kind.”

  I frowned. He was determined to bring up a past that seemed ancient history, and unlike him, I’d been around to live it. Barrett was only feeling an echo of ache for his ancestors. I was reluctant to proceed, as it seemed the only outcome would be an argument.

  “Soldiers, actually,” I corrected him in a soft but firm voice. “The lycanthropes were created as soldiers to fight
against the nightwalkers and the bori. You were too valuable to be kept as pets, though some were kept as personal guards for elite members of the naturi clans. The better question might be how you feel about working with a creature that was born to be your natural enemy?”

  “What are you talking about?” he snapped.

  “During the last days of the wars, it was the nightwalkers and the lycanthropes fighting. Not the naturi and the bori. The bori created the nightwalkers to fight the naturi and the lycanthropes,” I said with a shrug. I gazed back down at Daniel, who had fallen asleep again. “Your two races have now seemed to overcome your past and are working together. You should be proud of that accomplishment. It is something that can never be achieved between the naturi and the bori.”

  “Why?”

  Again I shrugged, but I didn’t think he could see it. “We want the same thing, but are unwilling to share.”

  “What’s that? What thing?”

  “Dominance over the world.”

  “That’s not what Cynnia has been telling us,” Barrett argued, looking over his shoulder at me, the wheel of the vehicle jerking. He twisted back around and tightened his grip on it. “She promised that the naturi would leave and live a life of solitude in peace.”

  “Cynnia is trying to rewrite the goal of our existence. She still desires to possess the world and strengthen the powers of the earth. The only difference between her and our ancestors is that she believes it can be done with the coexistence of humans and naturi.”

  “Do you think she’s right?”

  “I am willing to help her achieve her goal any way I can.”

  “But do you think she’s right?”

  “In all honesty, I do not know. Our people have been trapped for a very long time, and now there is a fight for the throne for the first time in our history. Things are changing rapidly for us, which is very unusual. If Cynnia is to succeed, now is the best time for that to happen.”