Her relief was short lived, though, as Jackson began turning her with his one good hand.
“This here’s a game I made up. Only I h’aint played it with anyone like you, Sara. They’s all been nothin’ but low down whores and not that much fun.”
Round and round she turned. The rope above her creaked with the tension that Jackson wound into it.
“But, you’re my woman and there h’aint nothin’ more fun than foolin’ around with the one you love.”
The rope creaked and popped once or twice as he continued to spin her around.
Then, he let go and the world went by in a sickening swirl, fast then slowing before her momentum wound the rope in the opposite direction.
There was a sound. Sickening in its familiarity, almost like ice cubes settling in a cold drink.
Sara knew it for what it was, the jingling sound of Jackson’s belt buckle coming undone, the clasp rattling as he slid thick leather through his belt loops.
She screamed as he came at her. In his hands, one bizarrely curled into a claw, he held the belt and it was not doubled over with the buckle in his fist as he had always done before. This time he held it with its entire length uncoiled, the grey metal buckle dangling at the free end.
But, it was not the sight of the belt in his hands that made Sara scream a second time as she slowly twisted in the air.
The barn door was agape and over Jackson’s shoulder she saw haggard trees lining a dirt road and upon their branches were perched the black shadows of large birds, all of them looking down at her.
Sara screamed again as Jackson lifted his arm, readying himself to begin the punishment he thought he owed her.
And behind him, black eyes glistened in rapt attention as more and more crows descended from the sky in silence to join their fellows.
She knew what that meant and it was far worse than anything Jackson might do to her.
It meant that evil would soon follow. It meant that the Journeyman was on his way....
~~~
A dark sedan of European make pulled up alongside another that could have been its twin.
The low rumbling of its motor went silent as a large man got out from the driver’s seat. In the same moment, a young man got out of the other car. His face was serious then went into a wide grin as the rear passenger doors of the other car opened and two well proportioned women stepped out.
“Hey girls!” Flair said, then nodded to his employer and pack leader, Brazier Abraxis.
Neither of the two women seemed to notice the enthusiastic young man. Instead, they both appeared to study the ground at their feet and, strangely, had nothing to say for a change.
“These two have no more taste for pleasantries this day, Flair,” Braze said.
It was clear to Flair that whatever mischief they had been up to had been summarily dismissed by the alpha wolf. Always the master at everything he did, the wolf who ruled them was a force to be reckoned with. It was something that they all would do well to never forget.
“I brought you here to find a woman. The situation is urgent and becoming more so with each second,” Braze said, pausing to frown down at the two women.
“I’m afraid I do not have something of hers that you might use to scent....”
Agate cut him off.
“Yeah. We got it. She’s all over you.”
Opal mumbled something that sounded to Flair like, “She’s even in his ears. Or between ‘em more like it.”
The two women lifted their faces up and Flair was reminded of why he had been so drawn to them the first time he had seen them. The air had been seething in cigarette smoke, drunken people swaying in time with music that was far too loud, yet when those two had walked into the bar, it was like a burning comet had crashed into the crowd.
Two faces, one darkly tanned, the other almost snow white...together they made a perfect whole as they began walking toward the police barracks in arcs that depended upon one another. They cast about themselves, searching, and as Flair had noted from their previous encounter, they did not seem to use their noses. It was more as if they used some other, uncanny, sense that went well beyond any ability to track cold trails like common hounds.
It was as though they were able to trace the phantom of a trail that could not possibly still exist. Except that they were able to find what no one else could. Not even the most acutely refined nose among all the wolves could do what they did.
“Here,” said Agate. She had been sauntering forward and at the foot of the stone stairs leading to the barracks’ entry she had frozen in place.
She turned on her heel and Flair watched, fascinated, as Opal nodded back at the other woman and walked a quick arc in front of her.
It did not take long before she, too, came to a standstill and said, “And here.”
Agate came to her side and the two of them put their foreheads together, whispering between themselves. Then, they separated and gestured to Braze.
“There was a vamp with her, but she didn’t leave with him,” said Agate.
She lifted her arm to point down the street and said, “A human met them here. The stink of him is still here and strong. He met up with them, then left with the woman while the vamp went his separate way.”
Opal picked up where Agate left off, saying, “Yeah...and that dude is sick. Bad sick.”
Braze walked to the women and said, “Can you follow them? I must find her.”
Agate nodded and said, “Yes. That man didn’t up and die right afterward even if he stinks of death come knocking. But, we’ve got a bead on them now.”
“Good,” Braze replied and then all of them were rushing to one of the cars and piling in.
If someone had seen them leave, they might have imagined that the two beautiful women were playing at acting like dogs in a car. The windows on each side of the vehicle were down and both hung their heads out as it sped down the road.
As it was, though, they both managed to keep their tongues in their mouths while the car gathered speed.
~~~
Clement picked his way among the gravestones.
In this part of the cemetery, most of them had long since lost their inscriptions to wind and time, unreadable except, maybe, for those hobbyists willing to take charcoal rubbings or something similar.
Some were tipped at unlikely angles and he made certain to not brush against them as he crossed the grounds.
Each time that he had visited this place, it had been in the dead of night, but he had not been in such haste then. He had been able to stay to the larger, graveled alleyways between the cemetery plots until he had arrived at the oldest, yet most extravagant, part of the grounds.
This time, there was no time to spare, so he crossed in as direct a line as he could to where he had first encountered the voice in the darkness.
Brother Jonas, his mentor in hunting the undead, had always told him to be unafraid of searching for the clichéd places...the places of which local folk might tell stories of hauntings or other strange circumstances.
And, as his years of hunting had worn on, Clement came to understand that there was nothing foolish about visiting graveyards while looking for traces of blood drinkers. It was as though all that death gathered in one place drew them like moths to a flame.
And, once he spotted them, he would follow them, an eye always to ferreting out where the creature lay during the day. Sometimes, when chance smiled upon him, to even find a veritable nest of the things.
That was what he had been doing when he first came to the city several months ago.
Something had drawn him here. Perhaps on some level, he had been searching for news of the Abraxis family.
He was not so vain as to refuse to believe that some part of him might have brought him there for that reason. Even if, his entire life, he had avoided all word of Abraxis name and its apparent meteoric rise in world business.
His name was DuChamp and he had grown up in an orphanage in europe. His father had s
een to that and had taken great care that all ties with the Abraxis name had been cut as well.
As a young boy it had stung him and driven him to terrible mischief until Brother Janos had at last taken him under his wing. Thanks to that old man, Clement had learned to turn his bitterness over being abandoned by his werewolf father into a fever for the destruction of all things that were not natural upon the earth. Monsters had become his prey and his sword had become their bane.
He was aware that the old man had manipulated him into becoming a weapon against the unnatural. The religious order that ran the orphanage had in its possession for centuries a hallowed sword that no monster could resist. They had been in need of a champion and when he had been given in to their care by the very sort of creature they would see wiped from the face of the earth...well, it was seen as an act of providence.
Clement had always told himself it did not matter. That what he did was right and just, that in dealing out destruction, he became something more than what he might have been.
His actions had defined him. But, always, even if he did his best to keep such thoughts buried, he would remember the boy who had watched his father turn his back on him, only to be coerced into becoming the kind of man who killed without remorse.
And, now, one of these creatures had proved itself false to him. There was some agenda at work and he had been its pawn as it pointed him, one after the other, to vampires and their hiding places.
The hunt had been good these last few weeks. Only it smelled more and more as if he had been exploited in another’s strategy.
Clement had had enough of being guided as if he had no mind of his own.
He had tired of the game being rigged by others. Now it was time to get answers as to just what sort of embroilment he had been led into.
The last of the old tombstones behind him, tilting this way and that like dull teeth about to fall out, he made his way into one of the most unusual parts of a cemetery he had ever seen.
Here, there were above ground tombs, unlike the rest of the grounds which were much more modestly invested. Among the tombs, most heavily carved with deep incisions into marble and granite, inscriptions meant to last an age, there were veritable mausoleums, with colonnades and extravagant sculptures in every direction.
He could see from the dates on most of the edifices that all of it went back as far as the city’s own origins. These were the last resting places of wealthy nobility that had come to the new world to make their fortune.
And, perhaps, they had. But even they were not immune, despite all their riches, to old man time and the hooded one who follows in his path, a bloody scythe always at the ready in his bony hands and never flinching to cut the threads of life.
Massive figures in cut marble stood upon pedestals among the tombs. Some were more fantastic than others. Most were out of scale, massive in size and meant, perhaps, to dwarf visitors and remind them of their insignificance.
In the depths of a cold night, Clement had happened upon this place and as he had wound his way among angels holding mighty spears, or fair maidens pouring pitchers that held nothing but sorrow and loss, he had heard a voice.
His senses had warned him that it was none other than a blood drinker. Yet, the words were seductive to the hunter. The voice proposed to aid him. It said that it would tell him all he needed to know to keep his sword’s blade at work as often as he might like.
The voice had not lied.
Night after night, Clement was told where to go...where to wait. And the hunt had been fruitful.
But the time had come for answers and if he had to wait until darkness fell, he would, and there would be no escape this time for the owner of that voice. It would give him answer or he would hunt it down and end its days upon the earth.
The life of a woman hung in the balance, and if not entirely an innocent, she did not deserve being delivered into the hands of monsters.
Clement feared that he might be her only hope. But also that the wait for darkness might mean he would not arrive in time.
He turned about, looking for a likely place to pass the time until nightfall when he saw something out of place.
At first, his eyes scanned past it, noting nothing out of order, then he was drawn back to what he had seen. And what might have been perfectly ordinary for anyone else suddenly pitched into the realm of the impossible.
Among the statues surrounding him, there was one of a gargantuan man. He was carved with a robe most resembling a toga, although it was a spare garment that left the sculpture’s torso and legs bare. Clement imagined that it might have been Herculean in its intent, but he saw no lion skin, nor a club that an artisan would have included as a finishing touch.
He looked closer, but there were no spears of lightning, there was no trident either. However, what drew his attention more than anything were the tendrils of fog drifting from the sculpture’s shoulders.
On a dewy morning, it would not have been unusual to have seen the first light of day drying the marble figures in the graveyard. It would lend an eerie air to an already unnerving place, but it would not have been out of the ordinary.
But now, especially now, it was anything but ordinary. It was late afternoon and the sun had ridden up high and warm.
No other statue steamed like that one and as he watched, Clement had the impression that it was not water vapor rising from the thing’s shoulders. He could have sworn, in fact, that the thing was actually smoking, as if the sun itself was burning the stone.
Then, it moved.
He thought it was trick of the light, or that, somehow, his own eyes had betrayed him. Except that it did it again, shrugging its enormous shoulders then turning its massive head to look directly at him.
Clement took a step back and as he did, his sword was already hissing as it slipped from its sheath in his tight grip. He did not doubt that there were very few swordsmen alive who might best him. But, the thing that began walking toward him left him shaken.
Vampires, werewolves, all of them existed on a scale that was understandable. They were horrific, but they were not something that went beyond human beings in their size.
This thing, though, as it walked steadily toward Clement, was terrifyingly huge.
He had not realized just how far away it had been when he first saw it. The statues next to it had seemed small, maybe representations of fairy women, only with each advancing step, Clement saw how mistaken he had been. The sculptures of women that had ringed the colossus were made to human scale. It was the gargantuan itself that had dwarfed everything around it and as it came toward him, its size became far too apparent.
The colossus stood at least ten feet tall and as it neared, he could see streamers of smoke issuing from its body.
In the beginning, Clement was sure that it was a blood drinker betraying its own kind. Then, just a few nights before it had told him that it was of a race spawned by angels and human women.
Apparently, it had told the truth.
“Ah, human. I had thought to see you one day here, but not so soon.”
Its voice was as gargantuan as its height. While familiar to him, the sound had taken on other proportions with the light of day upon its stony face.
Clement swallowed, suddenly at a loss for words.
“Nephilim...that’s what you called yourself,” he managed at last.
The giant nodded, then grinned. In his large mouth, Clement saw a quick flash of inhuman canines that left him cold.
“I am that, human. I am the last, as well,” he said, then gesturing to the sword in Clement’s hand, he continued, “However, you need not fear me. After so many exchanges between us, I could have broken you at any time. I did not...I will not.”
“I think I’ll keep it ready. But, thanks anyway,” Clement said.
The giant flashed his terrifying grin again and Clement could not help but see that it was with true amusement. Despite what he knew about blood drinkers and their ilk, he was surprised to see
something so...human.
“It is my stature that makes you hesitate. For that, though, I have a remedy that will likely put you at ease,” the Nephilim said.
Without warning, Clement heard a high pitched hum, not unlike a dentist’s drill, then he saw that the creature towering over him was vibrating all over. The smoke drifting slowly from its shoulders stuttered with the resonance of the vibration and, stunned, Clement watched as the thing began shrinking in size.
Quickly, it went from something nearly twice the height and twice as wide as any man had any right to be down to a normal, if extraordinarily muscular, man’s size.
“It costs me to do so and I will not bear it for long, but if you find me more manageable this way, I shall do my best to remain...condensed...as long as I am able.”
This time it was Clement’s turn to nod.
“Uh...yeah, ok. Thanks. I guess.”
He could not fault the thing’s logic and slid his sword back into its scabbard.
“I see questions upon your brow, human, and I have answers if you are willing to hear me recount them in my own manner,” the Nephilim said.
“Fine,” replied Clement, “But you had better make it good because I’ve had just about enough of being played like some kind of puppet.”
He eased his hand away from the pommel of his sword, then added, “And, by the way, I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not, but it looks like you’re smoking...or something.”
The stone-like creature chuckled in cavernous tones.
“This is the second time that a human has reminded me of that. The first occasion was with a surprising young woman and I can tell you what I told her. I spent nearly a century imprisoned and exposed to full sun each day. My nature is not entirely like that of the blood drinkers you hunt. For them, it would mean nothing but instant immolation. For me, it was a means of punishment as the pain it brought me was immense.
“However, after so many years, the pain lessened, or I became inured to it. And, during that time, the sun bleached away all semblance of life from my body, leaving me like this.
“However some vestige of evil remains in me and the sun continues in its efforts to burn it away. As for the pain, I have learned to revel in it, as I have learned that my endless hunger for those such as you will gnaw at my soul for all eternity.”
Her Billionaire, Her Wolf--The Novel (A Paranormal Alpha Werewolf Romance) Page 17