Bite Back Box Set 2

by Mark Henwick

“Oh, yeah. There was an SUV trying to come out as we came in. When we blocked it, five or six guys took off and ran up that way.” He waved in the general direction of the San Gabriel range north of the ranch.

  My wolf thrashed.

  On foot. Prey. Chase.

  “Should we chase, Gunny?” Sky One asked.

  “No. That one’s mine,” I said. It came out as a growl.

  I felt a slow burning in my gut. I had him. I didn’t care how good his bodyguards were. They were running up into the San Gabriel in the middle of the night. They probably didn’t even have a flashlight. I’d hunt them down like rabbits.

  “Take a couple of SUVs, send teams to make sure they don’t double back down to the road,” I said to Sky Two.

  She needed something to do. She was pale with anger, so angry she could barely look at the bidders and their bodyguards lying on the floor.

  She spun on her heel and walked out, calling some of her team to her side as she went.

  Almost all the bodyguards had been wounded: some by gunfire, the rest beaten by Were. The bidders had done better, mainly because they had gotten down on the floor early and stayed there.

  Any of them who needed treatment were going to have to wait.

  “Once you’ve freed the prisoners, shackle these men, every single one of them, wounded or not,” I said. “Stack their dead in the corner.”

  “We’re handing this over to the police?” Sky One asked. I’d told them that while I’d briefed them at the studios, but his tone left me in no doubt what he wanted to do.

  “Yeah.” I didn’t want to. But we needed to keep Ingram onside. I had to hope he’d overlook a few dead bodyguards for the sake of being able to jail the bidders and break up this network.

  Another Were came in and whispered something to the Pasadena lieutenant.

  “Ahh…we found equipment in the building next door,” he said, and peered up at the roof. “There are cameras hidden up there somewhere. This whole thing was recorded.”

  Ingram would want that recording.

  I sent a couple of Altau security to strip it down and take the recording.

  By that time, the prisoners were freed, the bodyguards were separated out and shackled. Sky Two’s team started to pull bidders to their feet and pat them down for weapons.

  Americans. Mexicans. Saudi princelings. Three guys who had to be Italian Mafiosi. Central African men with hard, scarred faces and five-thousand-dollar suits. A couple of billionaire playboys from Brunei or Indonesia whose faces seemed familiar, as if I’d seen them in the news. Russian arms traders. Gulf oil magnates.

  I stared them down until Sky Two came back in. I could feel the fury coming off her.

  “Kill them all,” she hissed. Sending her out hadn’t calmed her down.

  She brought up her hand, holding something.

  “On the ground outside,” she said.

  A tiny bear. Grubby. Lopsided smile. He’d lost most of his fur, and one ear. A child’s toy. Maybe their last possession, snatched out of their hands and thrown away as they were herded in here.

  I took a deep breath and took my finger back off the trigger. “Try and find his owner.”

  I watched as she walked to where the girls and boys were huddling.

  One of them pointed wordlessly.

  A young boy, no more than eight. Curled up and shivering.

  Sky Two knelt down and held out the bear.

  He reached out one disbelieving hand. Touched. Now the tears came.

  Sky Two gathered him up into her arms and rocked him.

  One of the Saudis tried to jerk away while he was being shackled.

  “I demand access to my embassy,” he yelled at me. “I am a diplomat. You cannot arrest me.”

  “If he speaks again,” I said to the team watching, “shoot him.”

  Sky One tapped me on the shoulder. “Urgent from Tarez. Clear here and everyone back to the studios immediately with prisoners and the captives. He requested the Pasadena Were as well.”

  No!

  “Everyone?” I managed to say.

  “Except you and your House. He says good hunting.”

  Chapter 68

  The path was dry and dusty under our feet.

  They had a forty-minute head start on us. The night felt vast, and between the San Gabriel Mountains and Angeles National Forest they had over half of a million acres to hide in.

  There were hiking trails and a couple of highways cut through the mountains.

  From what I’d seen, Forsythe had chosen some capable men: maybe one of them knew the area, or, more likely, they had GPS-enabled smartphones.

  They’d be thinking that they’d only need three or four hours to get to one of the highways, even with Forsythe slowing them down.

  They’d be sure from the way we’d attacked the auction that we weren’t police, so all they needed to do was get on that highway and flag down a car. No roadblocks to worry about.

  They might have assumed they were safe.

  In fact, every minute they were getting less safe.

  Alex and I were in front, Yelena trailing a short distance behind. Athanate senses are good, but they’re nothing compared to werewolf.

  Julie and Keith had returned to Bembridge Studios with everyone else, apart from Victor. He was back at the ranch, waiting for a call, wondering how this crazy bitch was so certain she could track men in the night.

  And probably how she knew guys who could jump down twenty-five feet from skylights, bounce up and take out armed men in the dark.

  He’d have to keep wondering for the moment.

  Forsythe’s party numbered six. It’d taken them about fifteen minutes to find a hiking trail. They’d made better speed after that. One of them, not Forsythe, was bleeding slightly. There was a lot of adrenaline in their scent to start with, but it had faded. They weren’t panicked. They were professionals.

  They hadn’t been prepared for this, but the pace they kept up meant they weren’t going to get cold. Most of them had shoes that they could easily run in. They had no food or water, but I’d done hundreds of night runs in Ops 4-10 without anything to eat or drink.

  I knew what was going through their heads.

  They’d be wondering if they’d made a good choice of employer. They’d be thinking about getting clear, finding a safe place with a meal and shower and a bed. And then whether they wanted to stay employed by a man who clearly had powerful enemies.

  Forsythe would know that. I’d lay good odds he was increasing their bonuses.

  Just get me to Palmdale, he’d say.

  It was cold, and there was no moon, no stars. We made little sound other than our panting and the thud of our feet on the trail. I didn’t care how good Forsythe’s group were, they were only as fast as their slowest runner, the man who was paying their salaries, and none of them were any match for the pace we could keep up.

  Even if I was still human in body, I’d let my wolf out as I promised. She seemed to fill my head and she was fixed with lethal intensity on the scent of Forsythe fleeing ahead. A scent that was stronger with every step.

  Hunt. Kill.

  My wolf’s Call, echoed by Alex.

  I was getting flashbacks of the last time I’d hunted at night. Carson Park. I’d hunted Amaral down and killed him.

  Life simplifies down to that one thing—killing.

  Rogue. Rogue.

  No.

  I hadn’t killed indiscriminately. I had a reason to go after Amaral. I’d attacked him for that reason. That wasn’t the behavior of a rogue. Rogues didn’t reason.

  I had gone rogue after I’d caught him. And I’d come back. Alex and Jen had brought me back, and Diana had cured me.

  Thinking of her made the pain of my losses start all over again.

  Fragments of what was going through my mind must have leaked to Alex. He ran closer to me, and the sense of him was comforting.

  If I went rogue and killed Forsythe, no one was going to blame me. Except me.<
br />
  We could change to wolf, and I could depend on Alex’s dominance to keep me from going rogue again. But that would mean losing the use of the P90s strapped to our backs. We might need them.

  Instead, I tried to lose myself in sensations—the scent, the rhythm of our running, the sounds we made. It was easier to avoid thinking about what had happened today and all the reasons that I was chasing Forsythe. All the reasons I had for killing him.

  I had to treat it like an Ops 4-10 mission. Overhaul his group. Take them prisoner. Hand them over to Ingram. End.

  Hunt, kill, said the wolf.

  Forty minutes later, I could almost taste the men ahead. They’d found a side road that they could follow up to the highway.

  They were still hurrying, but they might be starting to think they were home free.

  We ran after them and we picked up the pace; in the cathedral quiet of the night our wolfy hearing could make out the distant sound of the occasional car on the Angeles Forest highway.

  We were a hundred yards behind as they came to the junction with the highway.

  I could hear them arguing how to make sure the next car stopped. Up in the hills, at this time of night, there weren’t many.

  We slowed. Alex and I slipped off the road and started to come around uphill of them, hidden by the bend in the side road and the pine scrub. Yelena went downhill.

  I could hear them panting and arguing long before I saw them.

  “Just wait here. Next car comes, we stand in the road and stop it.”

  We crept closer until we could see them.

  One of them was peering back along the way they’d come. “We have to keep moving. We’re being followed,” he said. “I know it.”

  “They’d need dogs to track us. I don’t hear nothing.”

  “We should walk, put more distance behind us.”

  “I can’t.” That was Forsythe, slumped down on the raised wall of a storm drain, head in his hands.

  “That much commitment to take out the auction doesn’t just let us walk away. Who the fuck are they, anyway?”

  Forsythe just shook his head. “Some gang wants the business,” he said, but even he didn’t sound convinced.

  “They got choppers, for fuck’s sake, they’ll have night vision. They could be overhead any time. If we stay here, we can hide where the cover’s good. If we walk, we might get caught out in the open.”

  Alex and I had made our way directly above them, flicking the safeties off the P90s and checking we had single round selected.

  Our wolf eyes could see them clearly, glowing with the heat of their exertions.

  They could barely see each other. They certainly couldn’t see us.

  I could make out Yelena as well. She stopped out of our line of fire.

  I nodded at Alex. His voice would make more of an impact on them. Not that I expected that to do any good, but I wanted them alive for Ingram.

  “Put your guns on the road and lie down,” he called out.

  Good or bad, dumb or desperate—they reacted.

  Two went for handguns in shoulder holsters. Two of the others flat out sprinted along the highway in different directions.

  Alex and I fired at the same time, the rounds knocking over the guys who’d gone for their guns.

  With a couple of jumps we were down onto the road.

  The guy still standing took a swing at me. I got a glint of a blade as my only warning.

  I ducked inside his arc. He hadn’t been expecting that. He probably wasn’t expecting me to break his ribs with my fist. Or dislocate his shoulder as I took the knife off him.

  I slammed him face down onto the asphalt.

  The two we’d shot weren’t going anywhere and there was a startled cry as Yelena brought down the one who’d run in her direction.

  Alex sprinted up the road after the last of the bodyguards. That wouldn’t take long.

  Forsythe?

  He’d taken the opportunity of the confusion to run. Where?

  Down the slope. I could have followed him on the noise alone.

  I retrieved the bodyguards’ guns first. Not good to come back to a nasty surprise.

  I vaulted the storm drain.

  My wolfy eyes could see where I was going. Forsythe didn’t stand a chance, but he was running with all the desperation of fear, even when there was a steep drop right in front of him.

  I grabbed his jacket to jerk him back. A rock twisted underneath my foot. We both went over.

  Chapter 69

  Tumbling down a hill in the dark doesn’t favor anyone.

  I collected two hard thumps to my head before the slope leveled off. Forsythe got off lightly, and I’d had to let him go to protect my head.

  He jumped up, lashing out wildly all around him.

  I was in about as much danger from his swinging arms as I was from getting sunburn in the middle of the night.

  I took him by his shirt and slammed him back against a tall boulder.

  But something changed. All of a sudden, there was less fear from him. A sense of relief, as if somehow he felt he’d done something clever.

  Which might have been something to do with the hypodermic syringe sticking out of my side.

  I grabbed the first thing that came to hand. It turned out to be the knife I’d taken from his bodyguard. I shoved it under his jaw and pushed up until he was standing on the tips of his toes.

  “So, this was a little something you had for the auction?”

  “Farrell?” he said, his voice squeaking.

  “A muscle relaxant? Something to take the fight out of her, but leave a woman able to sense what’s happening to her?”

  I pressed harder.

  “Wait, wait.”

  “Oh, I’m waiting,” I said. “Thing is, these drugs don’t affect me the same as they used to. So, two things can happen. I start to feel weak, in which case I slide this blade up through your jaw and into your brain. Or I don’t, and we just have a talk, you and me, while it wears off.”

  The fear was back. His whole body was shaking.

  I pulled the syringe out. The plunger had been pushed all the way in.

  I felt fine. A bit light-headed. Muzzy. Battered from the tumble. Post-adrenaline kicking in.

  The blade twitched in my hand.

  Fear. That sweet, sweet taste. Flooding my senses.

  I had to focus. I was not going to go down the Basilikos route. It wasn’t anything to do with what he deserved, it was everything to do with the choices I made for myself.

  Focus.

  I said the first thing that came into my head. “What did you do to Fay?”

  “Uh?”

  I eased the blade back a little.

  He was bleeding. Not a deep cut. Still, I wanted to pinch my nose so I couldn’t smell it. The blood was calling to me.

  “Fay,” I said. “Fay Daniels. Your lawyer. What did you do to her? How did you make her go along with your sick fantasies?”

  “No! She…” his voice cut off.

  He couldn’t speak. I eased off a fraction more.

  “You’ve got it wrong. She’s the one you want,” he said.

  I pressed again, the blade drawing more blood.

  “She came up with it!” he screamed, his feet scrabbling back to try and lift his chin away from the knife. “You’ve got to believe me. All of it. It was her idea. When you made fun of her. She couldn’t take that. She got the drugs. She told us to film it.”

  What? Is he lying?

  I wasn’t an Adept Truth Sensor. I could hear if a person was lying from the changes in their heart rate and the scent of the body.

  Forsythe’s heart rate was one step from him blacking out and he stank of fear. And blood.

  I pushed closer, glaring into his eyes.

  If my eukori worked, would I be able to tell if he was lying? What would his eukori feel like? Would I ever get the stench of it out of my head?

  The drugs were making me trippy. I couldn’t handle this shit
now.

  His face. Gleaming with sweat. Eyes manic.

  Shouting. Close up! Close up!

  She’s a whore! Fuck her. Fuck her.

  This is the man who raped me. Who got his friends to rape me.

  And he stinks of fear now.

  Just like Amaral down in New Mexico when my wolf jaws closed on his throat.

  I blinked.

  Forsythe’s face blurred with Amaral.

  I was sweating. The temperature was dropping. Shivers broke out. The drug was getting to me. I could feel it slowly sucking me down.

  Can’t let him go. Rather kill him. But Ingram wants him. Needs him alive. Where’s Alex? Yelena?

  Forsythe was babbling.

  “You want revenge. You have every right.”

  It isn’t about revenge, is it? Resolution? Redemption?

  What do I want to do?

  I wanted to lie down.

  He was still babbling. “I’m as much of a victim. She’s screwed my head, Farrell. I’ve never been right. It’s her you want.”

  Lies. Half a truth, maybe. Both of them sick, sick, sick. Both of them.

  I just wanted it to stop. All of it. Just let it all go.

  The knife felt clumsy in my hand. Slippery. Heavy.

  His feet weren’t scrabbling any more. His voice was slowing down.

  “You don’t want this on your conscience. I’m unarmed. I’m not the one you want anyway.”

  Something’s wrong.

  His smell was changing. Or my senses were changing. I was losing the wolf.

  I wasn’t getting all the richness of the night in my nose.

  His face seemed to darken, lose definition. He just smelled human and sweaty. My whole body was shivering.

  Kill him now.

  It felt like I was wading through molasses. Everything went slow.

  He grabbed one of the bodyguards’ guns I’d picked up. I’d just shoved them in my jacket pocket, and one was hanging out after my fall down the slope.

  It pulled free easily. He wasn’t even hurrying.

  I just wanted it to stop.

  He smiled. A wide, easy smile. Confident. Just the way he used to smile at South High.

  Elethesine exploded into my system. The Athanate equivalent of adrenaline, turbo-charged. Burned out the drugs.