by Jess Haines
After Keith adjusted some dials and flipped a switch, obnoxious boom-boom music flooded out of some speakers, and Keith hung the headphones around his neck while we listened in on Nikki’s conversation.
“Looking for a job, pretty girl? Or a good time?”
Nikki handled his proposition with more aplomb than I would have managed. “A little of both, baby. You think you can handle this?”
I missed whatever they said next. Between Keith and Bo’s laughing so hard, Jason’s making some kind of lewd comment, and Jack’s shouting from the driver’s seat for everybody to can it, it was impossible to hear anything. Everything simmered down once Nikki got up from her bar stool and took Vic’s arm. They were headed for the exit.
Showtime.
Bo, Patrick, Jason, and Adam reached for their weapons. Mine were already on me, and it took effort to keep from surging to my feet and shoving my way past the men to the rear of the van. Jack eased his door open, not wanting to startle the target. We kept an eye on the video feed to make sure Nikki was leading Vic to the darker side of the building where we were hoping to pin him and force him to tell us where Chaz and the other Sunstrikers were hiding.
Everything was going according to plan. She tugged him away when he was making as if to go to his car, gesturing to the alley. Judging by the sudden leer and eagerness on his face, she must have given him one hell of a suggestive look. He practically shoved her toward the shadows.
That was our cue. Bo was the first out the door, and I was the last. I wasn’t expecting it when Patrick grabbed me by the throat and yanked me back against the side of the van. The man had huge hands. He leaned right into me, his nose nearly touching mine, as he opened his mouth to speak.
I socked him in the solar plexus, and he staggered back with a groan, releasing me to clutch his stomach. With the belt’s help, that little tap would have been nearly as painful as being punched by a shifted Were. Jogging to catch up with the others, I didn’t look back. Jason and Adam paused when I passed, looking over their shoulders.
Moving to Jack’s side, I reached for one of my handguns, now loaded with silver bullets courtesy of the Highly Illegal White Hat Weapons Emporium. They didn’t trust me to be on the front line yet. Jack was supposed to move in to hit Vic with a stun gun as soon as he was distracted. Bo, Patrick, and Adam were going to wrap him in silver-plated chains. Jason and I were backup, meant to shoot to wound the Were if things got too hairy or he broke out of the chains. We needed to question, not kill, Vic Thomasian.
Once Patrick stalked over to us, he wouldn’t look at me. I returned the favor, though he did growl something at me under his breath.
“Same to you, buddy,” I muttered.
Jack shook his head, then gestured for us to follow. He whipped around the corner and dashed forward. I couldn’t see Vic around the linebacker shoulders of Bo, Patrick, and Adam, but judging by the sounds of things, he wasn’t going down easy.
“What the fuck?” Vic’s voice. Followed by a meaty thump. There was no telltale crackle of the stun gun going off. Had Jack dropped it? “Shit! Ow!”
I still couldn’t see clearly around the men, but they weren’t using the chains effectively. The Were was using his fists, pummeling them, shoving them off, hissing every time one of the chains brushed and burned his bare skin. The smell of cooked meat and charred hair was contributing to the already considerable stink of the area.
Vic was a good fighter for a beta wolf. He’d gone deadly silent save for small sounds of pain from the silver, backhanding Nikki out of the way when she shoved a butterfly knife between his ribs. Even wounded, he was a formidable opponent. The guys were getting their asses kicked.
With a heave, Vic threw Jack into Bo with inhuman strength, sending the two men sprawling. Nikki hadn’t gotten back to her feet, and Adam and Patrick weren’t doing so hot, either. Adam tried to get the chain he was holding around Vic’s throat while he was distracted, but the Were tore it out of his hands and flung it aside, leaving Adam weaponless. They were too close for me or Jason to get off a shot without potentially hurting one of the hunters.
Patrick managed to get the silver around one of Vic’s wrists, which brought the Were to his knees with a harsh cry of pain. Before Patrick or Adam could grab his other wrist, the Were used Patrick’s grip to jerk him off his feet and slam him bodily into Adam. Stunned, the two men collapsed as Vic leapt to his feet—straight at Jason.
The hunter kept his cool. I’ll give him that. Before he was tackled, he got off a single shot that clipped Vic’s shoulder and chipped the dirty brick wall. The bullet ricocheted and whined off to disappear somewhere in the dark. Tucking my own gun away, I sprinted forward as Vic tackled Jason to the ground, fighting for the gun with the hand that wasn’t wrapped in silver chain.
I kicked the Were in his wounded side where Nikki’s knife still protruded. He voiced a coughing snarl and rolled away, getting to his feet in a fluid movement that I might have admired if I hadn’t been so busy trying to take his ass down.
Though I was intending to shoot out one of his knees, the belt overrode my plan and sent me rocketing after the fleeing Were instead.
“What the hell!”
‘Go, get it, get it, now,’ it demanded. ‘Faster, move, just move!’
Though I stumbled, trying to wrest control of my body back from the belt, I couldn’t stop running. “Stop it! Don’t do this!”
‘Shut up and let me drive,’ it demanded.
I had no control over my movements. We left the other hunters far behind, the Were running in smooth strides that would have prevented a normal human from ever keeping up. The stench of Dumpsters and cheap beer was soon left behind, replaced by the salt stink of the wharf and the heavily panic-laced musk of Were.
He was fleeing. Running. From me.
He couldn’t get away. I wouldn’t let him.
Something inside me clicked into place, and with a hunger I had never before experienced eating at my insides, I gave in to the chase. Every step brought me nearer to closing the distance between us.
We ran between buildings. People. Cars. I didn’t get any of it except as blurred impressions as I passed. My entire focus was on the beast running from me. I could almost see it. The fur and the fangs and the madness under that human skinsuit. The monster hiding below the surface. The thing I had to rid this world of, because there was nothing more important than making sure there was one less moon-chaser on the prowl tonight.
Chapter 6
Once I gave in to the belt’s urging, keeping up with Vic wasn’t difficult. He sensed he was being chased, obviously, but he didn’t make any effort to check who was after him until he’d run perhaps a mile from the strip joint. There was a flash of mixed puzzlement and recognition in his expression as he glanced at me over his shoulder.
Two blocks from the gas station we’d blasted past, he turned a hard left into the dark between a body shop and a boarded-up building.
He was waiting for me, though I wasn’t far behind, once I rushed into the shadows after him. I don’t know if it was because I was a girl or because he recognized me that he decided to stop. It wasn’t a bad place for a confrontation.
I managed to skid to a halt before plowing into him. He made a grab for me that I avoided, hopping back a few steps to keep out of what would no doubt be a bone-crushing grip. The armor I wore was meant to stop claws or fangs, not that kind of pressure.
His eyes glowed with an eerie, yellowish luminescence in the dark, and he was baring his teeth, which were flat and fangless. Even with all the pain he’d endured, he wasn’t able to force a partial shift outside the full moon. That meant he was weak—for a werewolf—though he could still tear me apart with his bare hands if I got too close.
How funny to think of a werewolf as weak. No wonder Devon had once commented that I was crazy for being willing to approach Chaz on my own while he was in his half-man, half-wolf form. What the hell had I been thinking?
“Aren’t you the a
lpha’s pet human? What the fuck are you people doing?”
I snarled and darted forward, landing a punch that did a satisfactory job of wiping the disgust off his face, replacing it with pain and surprise. As he staggered back, I closed my fingers around his windpipe, shoving him flat against the wall.
“Where is he, you son of a bitch?”
Vic gasped, clawing weakly at my arm. The pain barely registered.
‘Easy,’ the belt said, the sound of it echoing in my skull with its excitement. ‘Too easy. Must find the alpha. Must.’ I got the idea that it wanted to find Chaz for the challenge—the kill—not because I wanted to find him to prevent him from hurting someone else while handing him a nice helping of revenge in the process.
Vic was struggling to speak. My fingers eased up just enough for him to take a breath. “... not ... you can’t ...”
With a shake that thumped the back of his head against the graffiti-stained concrete of the body shop, I hefted him higher until his feet left the ground. He choked, his eyes bulging. The belt was radiating a fierce desire to squeeze the life out of him by collapsing his windpipe, which I only barely managed to suppress.
‘Kill it. It doesn’t deserve to live.’
“I need him, you fucker. Shut up and let me do this.”
Vic was already looking at me like I was off by a few degrees on the crazy meter. I’m sure by now I had notched over from “a little nuts” to “totally batshit” in his eyes. Maybe I was. Gritting my teeth, I ground out a few more words, all the while battling the belt’s urging to crush his windpipe.
“I need to know where Chaz is hiding. Tell me. Now.”
With a little more effort, I eased my grip on his throat just enough for him to speak.
“Not ... not telling ... you!”
“Talk, you mangy excuse for a moon-chaser! Or do I need to use some silver to cut it out of you?”
“Never!” he choked. By then he’d regained the urge to fight, and started struggling. He kicked me, hard, using the leverage of the building behind him to shove me off him. We both landed on our asses, me sprawled a few feet away.
He made the mistake of trying to jump me instead of running.
Already hyped up from the earlier chase, burning with the need to hunt, the belt rose up in me like some leviathan from the deep, sliding into my limbs and directing my actions like I was no more than a marionette. With a detached sense of dull horror and panic, I could only watch and take in the sensations like a bystander in my own head as I whipped out one of the silver stakes, using the momentum as Vic yanked me toward him to embed it deep in his shoulder. He let out a howl of pure agony, his grip loosening, and I forced the stake in deeper as I rolled him to his back to straddle his waist.
His irises still burned that strange yellowish color as he gaped up at me, the hand from his uninjured side weakly clawing at my shoulder. The silver was paralyzing him. Even through the gore and the rip in his shirt, black corruption was visibly creeping over the edges of the wound and into his blood as it spread through his veins like poison. Unlike Chaz, Vic’s body wasn’t strong enough to handle the taint for any length of time. If the weapon stayed in his body too long, he’d die, even if the wound alone wasn’t a fatal one.
This was too much. While I was caught up in the chase, the thought of killing Vic hadn’t seemed so bad—but this wasn’t what I’d signed on for. He wasn’t who I was after. This wasn’t how I’d pictured this hunt ending. Maybe beating him up, hurting him a little, yeah. But I’d had every intention of sending him on his way and moving on to Chaz as soon as Vic told me where to find the bastard. The threat of using silver on him had only been that—a threat. I had never intended for things to go this far.
I silently told the belt to stop hurting the lesser Were and to pull the stake out. It ignored me. My muscles wouldn’t respond no matter how hard I concentrated on shifting my position.
For the first time, it used my mouth to speak, one of my hands cupping Vic’s jaw to force him to look at me while the other still held the stake firmly in place just below his collarbone.
“Where is your pack leader? Where are the rest of the Sunstrikers hiding? Tell me now and I’ll make it quick.”
The Were stared up, his eyes now bloodshot and dilated with panic and pain. His voice was weak, every breath a gasp. “Can’t ... won’t ...”
My facial muscles twisted in a frown. It wasn’t me making it happen. Inwardly, I was screaming, searching for the key to get out of this prison in my mind and stop this before the belt went too far.
“... kill you ... Every Other in Tri-State Region will kill you for this....”
That set my heart to skipping a beat, even though I doubted the truth of the statement. No doubt, the local shifters in the community wouldn’t be happy to find out one of their own had been hurt by a silver-wielding vigilante hunter. Thanks to the pictures of me in full hunting regalia that had made it into the news after the fight against a crazed sorcerer in Royce’s restaurant, La Petite Boisson, no one would have difficulty figuring out that Vic’s wound came from one of my stakes.
I hadn’t wanted to do anything more than rough him up. What if he died from silver poisoning before I could regain control of myself? I stepped up my efforts. A shiver traced down my spine, and the belt backed off, letting me withdraw the stake from Vic’s shoulder.
It left a dark hole that instantly filled with blood and pus threaded with black flakes of rot as his body fought to repair the damage. The smell of putrefaction that wafted up made me gag, but I managed to keep from tossing my cookies and concentrated on the task at hand.
“You can still walk away from this,” I said, hoping it was true. That wound made me worry. Had the stake been in too long? Was he going to die anyway? “Just tell me where to find Chaz. I’ll let you go.”
Though his eyes were glazed with pain and he’d gone frightfully pale, he pulled his lips back in a rictus grin. Blood flecked his lips when he answered in a gurgling whisper. The stake must have clipped his lung. That, or the internal silver taint had spread faster than I’d thought. “... die ... You’ll die for this ... hunter....”
Chilled, I rose on unsteady feet. This wasn’t what I’d meant to do at all. The White Hats were supposed to help me interrogate and then release him. Killing him wasn’t in the plan. Wasn’t part of the deal.
My preoccupation gave the belt an opening. Once again, my limbs moved of their own accord. Before I could stop myself, the belt had me draw one of my guns and fire point-blank into Vic’s forehead in one smooth motion.
The gunshot echoing between the two buildings was extraordinarily loud.
I screamed and staggered back, dropping the pistol as the belt released me just as fast as it had taken possession. Vic’s feet and arms jerked, his body moving in small spastic fits as if denying the last spark of his life had been stolen away. Something oatmealish splattered the concrete below his head in a growing pool of blood, and his eyes stared up and up into nothing.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, no.”
‘What? He would have died anyway. That just sped it along.’
“You ... What the fuck are you? How could you say that! Oh, fuck, he’s dead, I shot him—”
‘No one who matters will ever know it was you. Stop worrying.’
I staggered back, reaching for the edge of the nearest building. I leaned over, and my chest heaved in an effort to take breaths to calm down, but they were coming so fast, too fast, I couldn’t stop seeing those eyes staring up—
“Hey! Hey, look—over here! You okay?”
I whirled at the sound of Jack’s voice. He was leaning out the driver’s side of his van and waving to get my attention, stopped at a light across the street. I gestured weakly for him to pull into the alleyway.
The headlights washed over the dirty concrete, the Dumpsters, piles of trash, the spill of blood, and the body. Jack didn’t move right away. I’m sure he must have realized what I’d done. The rest of the White Hats
spilled out of the back of the van, looking around.
Bo came over to clap me on the shoulder. “You ran out of there like a speeding bullet! Watch out, or I’m gonna have to start calling you Wonder Woman. That wolf get away?”
I shook my head and pointed. Bo squinted at the shadows, then walked over to the body. Patrick and Jason soon joined him, giving low whistles.
“Did a number on that poor bastard,” Jason said. Though I was expecting disgust or horror, his tone was completely matter-of-fact. “Better get the water, bleach, and a tarp.”
“Got it.” Jack walked past me with some folded-up cloth and rope under one arm, and a couple jugs in the other hand.
I watched, mute and dull with shock, as Patrick and Jason rapidly rolled Vic’s body into the tarp and tied it shut, and then carried it to the back of the van. Bo leaned down to pick up the gun I’d dropped, handing it back to me. He didn’t say anything about the way my hand shook when I took it from him. He then proceeded to take one of the jugs from Jack, and the two of them tore the seals off and used the water to rinse away some of the blood and bits of bone and brain matter from the cement. They followed up with some bleach, I guess to keep anybody from finding any DNA evidence to connect us to the scene.
My stomach did a queasy flip at this, watching as they did a quick, practiced job of clearing away at a casual glance any signs of the murder I’d just committed. Jack finished off the job by pulling a Swiss army knife from his back pocket and using the pliers to pry the bullet out of the concrete. Bo urged me to follow him back into the van.
Nikki was in the passenger seat. Adam was slumped in the back. Both were looking the worse for wear, but neither surprised nor impressed with the body. Or me, for that matter. Everyone else was quiet as we sat down on the benches opposite Keith’s equipment, squished together, as Jack pulled out and headed for home. For my part, I could only sit and watch in a numb haze, occasionally picking at the flakes of dried blood on my hands.