“Okay!” I shouted, rolling over onto my stomach, clasping my hands behind my head. “Okay! Happy?”
“Zip ties, Kowalski! Zip ties!”
This was it. This was really it. We were either going back into our rooms or they were taking us off the premises. We were going to disappear, and even though our men were here somewhere, Jessica and I were going to be hostages…victims for the rest of our lives.
The reality settled in like a sumo wrestler sitting on the base of my skull, the weight of it crushing all passion or love from my mind and body. This was it. There was nothing more afterwards, just a cheap simulacrum of life, a facsimile where I was poked and prodded and experimented on until I died.
And Jessica? What would she have? What kind of life would she live as a human hostage who was of no use to them?
It was better for her to die on these stone steps, right here and now, than it was to perhaps live out a life like that, where all she was a cheap token used in a game to keep me under control. No, right then, I had to make a choice. A choice for her, but also a choice for both of us.
As the guard standing over me now, his feet straddling my form on either side, began to slip a plastic zip tie around my wrists, I made my decision. I was going to fight.
I grabbed the guard’s surprisingly soft hands in mine and rolled, kicking up as I went, trying to sweep his legs out from beneath him.
And then the sound of silenced rifles broke the air, cutting through the shouts and yells with the finality of a bartender making last call to a crowded bar.
The body I’d just kicked went limp and fell to the side.
Above us, the other two dropped like marionettes with their strings suddenly cut. Their bodies went slack and collapsed onto us.
“Vanessa?” Peter’s voice called.
“Jessica?”
She and I both rolled out from underneath the deadweight, the Jaeger-Tech personnel’s last dying breaths heavier in my ears than their bodies had ever been. “Peter? Oh my God, you’re really here! I knew you were!”
One moment I was struggling to my feet, bruised and sore from the tumble down the stairs, and the next I was enveloped in his loving embrace. Complete for the moment, my body and my soul screamed out in joy as I was with my lover, with the man I was meant to be with for the rest of my life.
He crushed my lips with his, and I closed my eyes as I melted into his strong arms, his rifle pinned between our bodies. I’d never been in love or felt so loved by anyone before in my life. It was like coming home, like having someone tell you everything was going to be all right, and being able to one hundred percent mean it.
Slowly, though, reality crashed back over us like waves on the coast, and we broke apart. We were still at the top of this tower, surrounded by men who wanted us alive as test subjects, as simple resources.
“Are you okay?” he asked, gazing down into my eyes. “Are you hurt?”
“Scraped up,” I said, grinning up into his camouflaged face, with all its swirling streaks of black and brown and dark green. I noticed the smudge on his lips and chin, and realized that had been me. I reached up, tried to wipe it off. All I got was a streak of grease on my fingers, though. “I’ll live.”
He grinned back at me and I thought that, if only for a moment, he’d lose himself in the joy of the moment. And I think he did. I think he really did. He knew true joy. But then the training kicked in for both men. “We need to go,” he said. “Murdoch, get a move on.”
“Right,” Richard said as he and Jessica separated from their own passionate reunion. “These three were up here trying to secure you. We gotta go.”
Before we left, though, Peter drew his own sidearm. He flipped it around and handed it to me, grip first.
I took it with a nod, racked a shell into its chamber, and disabled the safety.
And, just like that, with the world coming down around us, gunfire still filling the air, and bodies now lying at our feet, we were off. Finally.
We might not have been safe yet, but at least we were together.
Chapter Forty-eight – The Hunters
The young ginger-haired girl, their IT person, screamed when Mr. Finney shot the shifter in the back of the leg with the silver bullet. With a quiet grunt, he dropped to one knee, leaving the little block of clay-looking C4 right where he’d stuck it to the wall.
“Frank!” the older woman shouted, rushing to his side. “Are you okay?”
He tried to shove her off, to whip around with the carbine rifle hanging at his side.
Finney, though, was too fast for him. He already had the barrel of his pistol shifted. “No, no,” he said, flashing him a cruel, cold grin. “Let’s not go that route, shall we? Unless, of course, you want to find out if silver works on normal humans, too? Because I assure you it most certainly does.”
The shifter, all dressed up in his nighttime insurgent gear, with his camouflage makeup and his packs full of ammo and explosives, eyed the barrel of Finney’s pistol, and where it was pointed: his young female comrade.
Finney had come upon them at the back of the compound when he was on his way to the carriage house. It was quite the surprise, to be honest, but not quite as surprising as the little something he gave the shifter.
“Now drop the rifle.”
Grudgingly, the big shifter stripped the rifle strap from his shoulder and tossed the whole thing on the ground in front of him.
“Excellent. Your pistol, too, of course. Can’t have you going and getting any bright ideas.”
“Fuck you, man,” the shifter replied, his Texas twang so thick and heavy it would take a Bowie knife to cut through it. But, despite his words, he still reached down and pulled his pistol from his hip holster, tossing it on the grass in front of him. “Fuck all y’all.”
“Tough, tough talk coming from a shifter with a few grams of silver stuck in his leg. So they sent you in alone, did they, to rescue your little friends? That leaves, what, four others? Two at the wall, two inside the building to get your women? Do I have the count right?”
“Look, man, you want me? You got me right here. Got a bullet in my leg, so you know I ain’t going nowhere. How ‘bout you just let these two women go?”
“These two?” Finney asked, smiling a little. “Why would I do that?”
“Ain’t got nothing to do with this, man. Whatever you want from us, I know Gen and Lacy can’t give it to you. Only reason you took ‘em is because you think it gives you some kind of bargaining chip. Well, here you go, man. Here I am. You ain’t necessarily in need of one now.”
Poor man. So short-sighted. Mr. Finney turned his dire attentions to the two human women, the grandmother and granddaughter. “Now,” he said, “as much as I wish it weren’t the case, you two are clearly of some importance to my superior. And I want to know just what exactly that is.”
Both women exchanged looks, a befuddled expression on the older of the two.
Older. It was always a phrase Mr. Finney had hated throughout the years, if only because it carried with it the connotation of aging and death —of a term limit set on human existence. Not that he had to worry about that, of course. But, still, the whole implication had always rubbed him the wrong way.
He received no response from either of the women.
But, no, there was something there, something that the older woman was hiding. She did know something, and Finney could see it. The question, though, was what?
“That won’t do,” Finney said, abruptly turning the sleek automatic in his hand on the shifter soldier who’d been helping them escape. “When I ask a question–” he aimed the gun at his good leg and pulled the trigger, “–I expect an answer!”
Both women screamed as the man cursed in pain and fell backwards against the wall, his hands going to the new wound in his leg. The younger one went to him immediately and began to strip off her hoodie to apply it to the gunshot. “You fucking psycho! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
The shifter’s face
contorted in pain, beads of sweat rolling down his painted face.
Finney turned his attention to the grandmother.
She frowned deeply, the wrinkles in her face looking to him like deep etchings scraped into ancient stone.
“No?” he asked. “Is that not enough?” He raised the barrel and pointed it at the girl’s back as she began to apply pressure to the shifter’s wounded legs.
The older woman followed the trajectory on the barrel. “You wouldn’t dare,” she whispered.
“Whatever would make you say that?” he asked, smiling broadly. When he spoke again, his voice had a note of confidence that wasn’t there before. “Clearly, I’m a sadistic, twisted, soulless creature who quite frankly doesn’t care about human dignity or lives. In fact, the only thing I care about right now is what you know about my superior. If you’re unwilling or unable to tell me that, I care less about your lives than I do a mayfly’s.”
Silence. Continued stony silence, as obstructionist as a pile of masonry piled into a wall.
“Fine,” Mr. Finney said, raising the gun a little. “Your lives are forfeit. Might as well start with your granddaughter, of course.” He went to pull the trigger.
“Wait!” the woman shouted, stepping forward a little with her hands extended. “Okay, all right. You win, all right? I’ll tell you what I know about your boss. Okay?”
He lowered the gun. “Good. Now start. We don’t have much time.”
And so Gen began to tell him the tale of Jasper Davis, of the immortal man she’d once been madly in love with.
Chapter Forty-nine – Peter
Jessica’s face blanched a little as we skirted the bodies on the landing of the floor below us.
“Don’t look at them,” Murdoch said. “Don’t look at them, okay, babe?”
“Okay, okay,” she replied, her voice husky and breathless. “I won’t look, okay?”
With Murdoch and I on point and Vanessa bringing up the rear with her own sidearm, we kept moving. Only a little bit longer. Just another floor, and then a hallway, and then out through the banquet hall.
We followed the turn of the stairs, our feet shuffling, our rifles leveled and ready.
We got to the ground floor and cleared the hallway. Looking each direction, there was no sign of anyone. I glanced over at my watch, still snugly in place on the bottom side of my wrist. Just a couple more minutes before Jones and Wayne were going to close up shop and melt back into the woods. That didn’t leave us much time, but what little it did leave would have to do.
“Ready?” Murdoch asked as we crouched in front of the doors leading to the banquet hall. We were both breathing heavily from the rush of adrenaline, and my heart felt like it was about to leap out and dance a jig in front of me.
I couldn’t believe we’d actually pulled this off.
I couldn’t believe I’d actually gotten Vanessa back, even if she was a few pints of blood short of a full tank.
I glanced back at Vanessa and Jessica. “Ready?” I asked.
They both nodded.
“Let’s go.”
Murdoch and I hit the door, throwing it open. With him crouched to the side, taking the right side of the room, I swept my gun over the left. At first glance, I saw nothing. Just the outside world on the other side of the giant dining table.
I should have looked twice.
“Move,” I said, rushing into the room.
But then, as we entered into the room, I realized there was something wrong. Something was off. It just didn’t feel right, didn’t smell right.
Rifle raised, I spun left.
Something blocked my vision, rushing toward me with an ear-splitting roar that seemed to rattle my teeth and bones like a tremor from the earth itself.
The giant! I dropped my rifle from my cheek and began to discharge my rifle.
Gunfire competed with his guttural, animalistic roar as I continued to fire, backing up into Richard.
The giant came at me, the bullets doing nothing to slow him down. He just roared louder, his fat lips twisting like worms as they pulled back from his enormous, white teeth. He reached down, batted my gun away with one hand, and slammed a meaty fist the size of a Christmas ham into my face.
Pain erupted inside my head as I felt my cheekbone and nose snap, sending thick, hot blood pouring down my face as I went flying back through the air. I hit the ground, the back of my head smacking into the tile flagstone tile as I slid a dozen feet backwards.
The ground shook and, faster than any man should have any right to move, the giant flung Richard across the room and onto the dining table. With Murdoch out of the way, he came right at me.
I scrambled to my feet as the women screamed in horror.
There was more gunfire as Vanessa began to shoot into his back, her own voice rising to compete with all the noise.
The giant ignored the bullets like they were gnats, and cleared the distance between us in two giant loping steps that seemed to shake the castle at its very foundations.
Three more shots, then nothing. The gun was dry.
Hands up in a defensive posture, I backed away, trying to get myself off the wall. I needed room to move. “Run!” I shouted to Vanessa and Jessica. “I’ll hold him off!”
“No!” Vanessa screamed.
God, he was fast, though. He veered right at me as I double-timed it away, and feinted with his left fist.
I didn’t fall for it and tried to go low instead. I struck hard in his belly and drove an elbow into the top of his other arm, trying to snap it. It was like punching a brick wall that had been constructed of living flesh somehow. No give. No budge. Nothing at all.
He didn’t flinch. Instead, he slammed his knee into my stomach, knocking the wind from my lungs.
Gasping for breath, I reeled back and struggled to stay upright. His first fist must have split open my brow, allowing some blood to trickle down into my eyes. I blinked it away, trying to give myself a chance to fight.
Another fist came at me.
I ducked under and back, and tried to counter.
His other hand came down in a stiff-handed chop and crushed my shoulder.
I felt my collarbone crack and snap, the sound like a tree branch in my ears, and my right arm went limp as that whole side of my body erupted in fire and agony.
Another knee crushed into me, sending me up into the air.
Two, no three, ribs broke like twigs in my chest, and I fell to my knees, my one good arm clutched around my torso in protection.
I needed to change to heal this damage. But, even in my wolf form, what good would it do against something like this? I looked up, the blood already drying on my face, my nose already correcting and healing itself. I looked past the mammoth, the walking pile of flesh and bone and muscle standing in front of me, right at Vanessa and Jessica.
“Go!” I shouted. “Run!”
The giant just laughed. He leaned forward, grabbed a hold of my short hair, and slammed another gargantuan fist into my face. I rocketed back into the wall behind me, and I felt my back snap. Soon after, I felt nothing else.
“Don’t run,” the giant roared in a thick German accent. “”No, no! This is fun! Look, you already heal from my love taps, Herr Frost. We can do this all night, ja?”
I twisted my head to the side, the only part of my body I could move, and spat blood onto the floor.
“Ja, ja. All night long, after you’re better.”
My body slid down the wall and slumped to the floor. I tried desperately to get up, but all I could move were my eyes. I tracked up to the colossal monster above me and watched as he raised the biggest boot I’d ever seen in my life over my face.
“Say gute nacht, shifter.”
Chapter Fifty – Vanessa
The crunch of Peter’s bones and body seemed to resonate with my own, and my heart leaped into my throat as my stomach bottomed out.
The giant laughed, his great shoulder shaking as he looked down at my mate’s broken form spr
awled at his feet.
“No!” I screamed, running towards the giant’s back, pistol raised in front of me, my finger spasming on the trigger reflexively like somehow, some way, bullets that would actually stop this bastard would magically spring into the barrel.
But there were no bullets that would kill him. Or any other kind, for that matter. I’d used them all when he’d first turned his back to me and began to go after Peter.
“Vanessa!” Richard yelled. “Get out of here! I’ll handle this!”
I ignored him, my world on fire and full of light and heat. I rushed the giant, threw my empty gun at the back of his head, glancing it off his ear.
Klaus the Giant winced a little and roared as the butt of my gun tore a flap of sensitive flesh off. In a rage, he spun and faced me, his teeth bared like a wild animal’s as he came rushing at me. “Damn you!” he shouted. “My ear!”
Shit! I hadn’t realized how close he was and hadn’t accounted for how long that reach of his could be. I ducked low, dodging his clutching hands, darted left out of the way, and spun around to his side.
He quickly corrected his trajectory, came after me again, and reached out a grasping hand, each finger as long and thick as a smoked sausage.
I dropped low, nearly doing the splits as he grasped just over my head. I rolled to the side, deftly avoiding another grab as I tumbled across the ground as fast as lightning.
The ground shook as he swore and came after me again.
I came up from my roll, gasping for breath. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all. If he caught me, I was going to be as bad off as Peter. But then, as my eyes focused, I stopped frozen in my tracks at the sight that had appeared right in front of me.
Klaus’s hand grabbed my head from behind, his thick fingers entwining themselves in my coppery hair, and yanked me back towards him with a cruel jerk. “Now I have you, little shifter!” he roared as my feet flew out from beneath me and I landed on my ass.
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