Unfortunately, the time for my worrying about whether or not Peter would manifest the beast was long behind me. What was the point? We were doomed. Cornered like rats in a cage, surrounded on all sides by guns, men trained with military precision, and real life incarnations of hellish nightmares.
“We won’t wait forever, you know,” the giant grumbled to my back, vibrating my bones and insides with his quaking voice. “Remember, there’s never just one way to skin a wolf.”
I took a deep breath as I slowly blinked my eyes, my thoughts traveling out to wherever Peter and the men might be. Because even if Peter didn’t have the hybrid at his command, he and the rest of the pack were still our only hope. And if they couldn’t help us, no one could.
Which only meant we’d need to take our destiny into our own hands.
Chapter Nineteen – Peter
The first Bonesmen bullet shattered the rear window of my Ford Bronco.
All around us, the sleepy town of Enchanted Rock was coming awake to the newly realized horror of an all-out assault. This wasn’t exactly how I’d planned on repaying the town that had taken us in, but we didn’t have much choice in the matter. The only thing we could do was try to fend off our attackers and hope for the best. Sheriff Peak and Deputy Glick weren’t going to be much help in this fight, and I knew it.
Air sucked through the cab of the truck as I yelled at Richard. “Goddammit! Start shooting back!”
The shots from his pistol were deafening next to my ear inside the cab of the truck.
Dammit, I knew I should’ve gone to the storage unit weeks before and pulled the long arms. Having a shotgun for him to fire out the rear window would have been nice.
A motorcycle engine roared as its rider opened up the throttle and came revving up next to me, pistol brandished in his left hand, a gruesome grin of cracked and rotten teeth filling his face.
I grinned back before I jerked the steering wheel and turned the truck into him before he could even fire.
The Bronco jumped and swerved, the tires losing traction for a moment as, screaming in surprise, his bike was pulled beneath the truck. The big tires just kept spinning around, though, and Richard and I kept on right along with them.
Behind us, another biker fell to the street. This one from Richard’s sidearm dropping him.
Two of them got right on our ass and waved their pistols menacingly as they tried to line up a clear shot on Richard.
“Hold on!” I shouted, slamming on the brakes.
The two bikers plowed into the backside of the Bronco, sending both me and Richard lurching in the seat and the truck into a fishtail. The traction caught again, though, in no time.
I slammed on the gas again, barely losing any momentum. I glanced up in the rearview mirror, checking to see how many more were coming.
There were at least a dozen more, all swerving and veering around their fallen buddies who were quickly disappearing behind us, their bikes twisted and broken on the street. Shit. I’d been a little too optimistic on my earlier count.
“There are too many of them!” Richard yelled, still firing. He downed another one, blowing out the front tire.
“We’ve gotta thin out the herd a little bit!” I shouted back as I braked hard and took a right. We didn’t have much further to Main Street, and rolling into a somewhat busy business district was the last thing I wanted to do, especially not with the way bullets were already flying around. Besides, once we came to a stop, we’d be completely surrounded.
“Go down near the sheriff’s office,” Richard said suddenly, “and let me off.”
“I can’t slow down!”
“Didn’t say you needed to slow down, Pete! You see if you can draw them off, and I’ll head around to check on the women.”
“That’s a shit plan!”
“You have a better one?” he shouted back, raising his pistol to shoot again.
“No,” I admitted. “Not really.”
Ahead of us, people were screaming as they ran for cover, getting off the street and inside the businesses and homes ahead of us. Two cars that had been headed our way braked hard and turned off, heading both left and right as they cleared a path for our insane caravan that looked like something straight out of a Mad Max film.
“Turn here!” he shouted as the turn went flying by.
“Dammit, Richard! Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“Go back!”
“Hold on,” I said, slamming my foot so hard on the brake pedal that I was practically standing upright in the cab. I cut the wheel as hard as I could, spinning like a free wheel.
The car spun as Richard and I both yelled in a mixture of terror and exhilaration, the cab tilting hard to the driver side as the truck did a one-eighty, with the hood pointed back the way we’d just come.
“Is that Wyatt?” Richard asked as I slammed my foot back on the gas.
A biker with greasy hair, a scraggly beard, and terrified eyes came barreling at us on the back of his chopper. Behind him, the other bikers parted like the Red Sea before Moses.
“Think so!” I shouted back as we headed right for him.
Wyatt Axelrod, one of the local presidents of the Skull and Bones Motorcycle Club cut his handlebars to the side and gunned his bike, trying to get out of our way. My Bronco slammed into his rear wheel, sending him and his bike skidding across the asphalt like a stone over a placid pond. Only this stone left a trail of sparks and screams behind it as the bike collided with the underside of a parked car, and the rider rolled off into the gutter.
“Yeah!” Richard howled in delight as I kept going. Behind us, the bikers slowed and began to turn to catch back up with us.
Up ahead, I took the next left.
Behind us, there was more gunfire as the bikers whipped around the turn in our wake.
“Hold on,” I yelled as the turn onto Main Street loomed ahead.
I could hear the steady sound of more pistols and even the bass boom of a shotgun. Metal was clunking and thunking as bullets hit the back of my Bronco.
I sped on, holding my breath, as we approached the turn.
More bullets. And then a sudden heat in my lower back.
A painful burn that began to radiate throughout my body filled me with agony. “Shit,” I groaned. “Goddammit.”
“What’s wrong?” Richard asked, still facing towards the back of the truck, dropping another biker with a well-placed bullet. “What happened?”
“I think I’ve been shot in–”
Before I could finish my sentence, though, the world went black.
Chapter Twenty – The Hunters
The stranger stood out on Enchanted Rock’s folksy Main Street, with its coffee shops and little art gallery. The smell of propellant and explosive fumes filled the air, hanging over everything, and the satisfying sound of bullets firing seemed to punctuate every single thought of his with nice, precise, popping periods. Around him was assembled his staff, both men and women wearing all black uniforms, radios sticking out of their ears. Busily, they coordinated the unfolding, evolving effort of the strike on the shifters of Enchanted Rock.
And, the stranger had to admit, the strike was going quite splendidly.
Already, they’d cut off the fat sheriff and his hick deputy. They only lasted a minute or two, really.
Less than one hundred feet away, inside the Curious Turtle, Klaus and his little band of trained ruffians had already treed the shifter woman, Vanessa Springer, along with three of the four other mates. They may have been locked inside, threatening to perform elective neurosurgery on themselves with the pistol they still had, but at least they were contained and at the hunters’ mercy.
The only concern, of course, was that they’d make good on their threat. And from the profile on Vanessa Springer, their female alpha, those threats were certainly real and worth treating cautiously. Without having their mates alive, it would be harder to contain the shifters once they had them in custody and hooked up for extraction.
No matter, though. Even with the delay caused by Vanessa having been with the girls who worked at the art gallery, they were still running approximately on schedule.
Across town, the team was about to close in on Enchanted Rock High School. They were waiting for lunch period to begin, which should just be a little bit longer. Their man on the inside, who’d taken a position on the custodial staff under an assumed identity, would take care of the rest. And what did it matter if a few teachers and students got in the way while he fulfilled his mission to grab the little Waynescott girl-shifter and the Stokes woman?
Acceptable losses, the stranger thought. Couldn’t make an immortal omelet without breaking a couple eggs.
Now, the only thing they had to be worried about were four shifter veterans, the members of Frost Security. They might be flapping in the wind, as it were, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t soon be brought to heel.
Up ahead, though, down towards that dreadful diner the shifters always seemed to frequent, an engine roared. One of those ghastly Yank engines, the kind Detroit had been churning out for nearly a century. Nothing like the feline growl of the impeccable Jaguar. Tires screeched and squealed like harpies, and more guns fired.
“Well,” the stranger said more to himself than the staff assembled around him, “isn’t that just interesting.”
An old, dented, beat up Bronco came rumbling down the street that intersected with Main from the stranger’s right. Even as it approached the stop sign, it was clear that the driver had little intention of stopping, or really slowing down in any appreciable manner.
The driver crossed the stop sign, the wheels cut to the left, and veered onto Main. The tires lifted from the street as it turned, though, and the stranger watched in almost wistful surprise and amusement as the pickup tipped over on its side. But it didn’t stop there. No, the turmoil just continued to mount, as the momentum of the Bronco’s speed took the truck up on the roof, sending it rolling over and over, almost in slow motion.
Metal ground on metal, twisting and groaning like a steel beast falling to the earth. Glass shattered all around, and over it all, the sound of a car alarms resoundingly went off, the honks of the little Miata the saddest funeral dirge the stranger had ever heard.
Not that he’d heard many. He preferred to interact with anything that made him think of his own death as little as possible. That past time was one more fitting for mortals to indulge.
“One, two, three,” the stranger counted quietly to himself as his bright, inquisitive eyes followed the trajectory of the Ford Bronco as it nearly entirely flipped over a parked Mazda Miata, went over the sidewalk, and through the coffee shop store front that sat on the corner of the block.
Just behind the Bronco, a smattering of Skull and Bones bikers came rolling up with the stranger’s new friend Spike in the lead. They parked their bikes and went running across Main towards the coffee shop, whooping and hooting and hollering, guns raised.
“What a shame,” the stranger said to aide on his left. “They made a smashing latte.”
“Yes, sir,” his aid replied. “I’m sure they did, sir.”
“Come with me, Abigail,” the stranger said as he started off after Peter Frost’s truck. “Let’s inspect the remodeling job our shifter friends have just begun.”
Abigail, the quiet, demure, specially trained aide-de-camp for the stranger, followed after him, her hand on the pommel of her sidearm. She, like all the men and the bikers of Skull and Bones, were armed with silver bullets that were designed to lodge within the target. Because not only would silver kill a shifter, but even the smallest amount trapped inside them would prevent their healing and shifting abilities.
“Oh, ho,” the stranger said as he led the way onto the crossing of Main Street, a spry skip suddenly present in his steps, “it seems things are going even better than I hoped. Do radio Klaus and let him know what my little loose cannons just dragged in. Let’s see what kind of leverage we can get over that Springer bitch now.”
Chapter Twenty-one – Vanessa
The crunch and crash of the car wreck outside was so loud it might as well have happened right in the room.
It was like my heart nearly stopped, and a spot of painful heat began to radiate from my lower back. I groaned in pain, gasping for air.
Across from me, Jessica’s eyes went wide and she stepped forward. “Richard!”
I waved her off, even as an image of Peter formed in my own mind’s eye. “No, Jessica. Nothing we can do.”
“But that was him!” Jessica nearly yelled as Ashley hugged her, trying fruitlessly to comfort her. “Fuck you, that was him!” Tears began to stream from her eyes as her friend clung to her, attempting to soothe her. The soothing didn’t help. Instead, she just stared daggers at me over Ashley’s shoulder, her eyes puffy, her face streaked with salty tears of anguish.
I knew exactly how she felt. “Think I don’t know that?” I growled back, the gun suddenly very weighty in my hand as a cold sweat broke out all over my body. My stomach lurched, and I had to fight to keep my breakfast of toast and black coffee down. “Think I can’t feel it too?”
Shifters mate for life, and when they bond, that bond is nearly unbreakable. Unfortunately, Peter and I had broken ours years ago. We may have been mates, but that instinctual connection was gone, snapped like a tether in a gail.
I hadn’t had a feeling like this in years, not since Peter and I had first admitted that we were mates, back when we were teenagers. He’d torn up his knee during a football game our senior year, and it had felt like the ligaments and tendons inside my own knee had been ripped from the bone. He’d begun healing soon after, of course, like all shifters did, but the pain had lingered for a little while longer. A malignant phantom, but still nothing more than a phantom.
This, though, this had been different. I’d never felt anything like this, even during the times I’d been shot. The heat stayed in my back, pushing other thoughts from my head as it continued to grow in severity.
I growled beneath my breath, panting desperately as the pain transformed, creeping into my head and into my vision.
I tried to shake it off and get back to normal.
Before I could, though, there was another round of pounding on the door behind me. “Oh, little shifter,” called the giant in his bass cannon of a voice, “we have another offer to give you!”
“Fuck off!” Elise screamed, her little tanned fists balled tightly into dense bricks of rage. “Fuck off and die!”
The giant chortled behind me, sending the door rocking again, vibrating painfully against the spot on my back that was just growing more and more painful.
“Such mouths on you women,” the German said through the door. “Well, if you don’t care to save your two shifter mates, I’ll be more than happy to let my superior know you decided to pass on the deal.”
“Wait,” I gasped, even as Ashley released Jessica and turned around.
“Which one?” she asked, stepping towards me and the closed door.
The giant laughed. “No, no, you’ve been quite explicit in your denial of a deal. That’s fine.”
“Wait!” Jessica yelled. “It’s Richard, isn’t it?”
I licked my lips. “And Peter, too,” I said in a near whisper. “They have Peter.”
“Yes,” the giant said. “We do. I’ve been informed that horrendous crash outside was a Ford Bronco. Your little coffee shop is in need of some repairs now. Sad, really. They pulled an exquisite latte for such a backwater.”
Jessica looked at me, her eyes full of hurt, of pleading. “Please,” she mouthed.
I licked my lips and swallowed hard. My mouth was dry, my body clammy and drenched in sweat, my hair suddenly plastered to my head. Whatever had happened to Peter, it wasn’t getting any better. He wasn’t healing.
“What do you want?” I finally asked.
“Why, we want you ladies, of course.”
“And you’ll let Richard and Peter go fr
ee?” Jessica called back.
“Our word. We give it to you now.”
Jessica and I exchanged looks. She was in, I could tell, as hurt as her eyes were. Anything for her mate. Just like I felt for mine.
Even though I’d been willing to redecorate the inside of Jessica’s tiny office with Peter’s pistol, the thought of him being lost to me again was too much. I don’t think I’d be able to make it another minute without him, not in this cold cruel world, especially knowing that my own stubbornness was the reason for his death or his capture.
“Just the two of us,” I replied. “Elise and Ashley stay here, with my gun. You pull back, leave them be.”
There was silence for a long, painful moment. One where there seemed to be hours between the ticks of the second hand on the clock. Where universes were born and died, and loves were won and lost. It seemed to stretch on and on, as both Jessica and I held our breaths, waiting for his answer.
“Jah,” he said finally with a resigned sigh. “Jah, jah, jah. This is good. We have a deal.”
“Good,” I said, nodding. “We’re coming out.”
“What the fuck are you two doing?” Ashley hissed. “You can’t exchange yourselves! What will Richard and Peter think?”
“They’ll be pissed,” Jessica said, matter-of-factly.
“No,” Elise said, her voice lowered, “you guys can’t really be serious about this shit.”
“I am,” I said with a wince as I flipped the pistol around and held it out to the curly-haired woman. “I made a deal. I keep my word.”
Elise snatched the gun out of my hand. She looked more than comfortable holding it. Not necessarily like she’d trained or anything, but she definitely had experience using one. “You’re a fucking thief, though!”
“Who cares? Think we don’t have honor, too?”
Ashley grabbed hold of Jessica’s arm. “Richard’s going to murder me for letting you walk out that door! You can’t do this!”
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