Mila moved through the chilly blackness. Without thinking about it, she fished her tazer out and kept her eyes peeled. She’d never had a problem in the parking lot. Her boss let her park close so she didn’t have a long stroll to her vehicle. A couple street lights sharply illuminated the destitute environment. Though cars were parked there, the Cheeky Sprite was not obviously existent. Looking at it, people would never know it was anything other than a closed business. It had been disguised as an abandoned gas station, all the windows boarded up with plywood and with graffiti lining the exterior, age-old empty Slushee cups trapped against the wall. To get in, patrons had to walk to the front of the dark ruin and swipe their Visa to show they were a legal paranormal. The door would open and, low and behold, they’d go down to the hidden level. It had taken Mila weeks before she stopped feeling like she was a supervillain in a hidden hair.
Nobody moved in the shadows, but thanks to the eerie illumination of the dying streetlight, Mila spent most of the walk seeing every fire hydrant as a would-be rapist, every patch of grass as a feral animal. Once she got to her truck, she’d be fine. Until then it was not an experience she looked forward to.
Her truck waited for her patiently. As always, seeing it made her grin. It was an older Nissan Frontier, a sporty and rugged little truck she’d bought off Craigslist a few years ago. It had been a mechanic’s play toy and it looked like it. There were more modifications on it than there were factory pieces, from the fat off-roading tires to the tinted windows. Mila loved it to a fault. As long as it drove, she’d use it. She fully planned to drive the little fella into the ground. She named it Liam, as in Liam Nissan, which was probably the funniest thing she’d ever done.
She passed the wind deflector on the front and ran her hand along it. She’d been driving out in the country one time when a deer had come flying out of nowhere and literally landed on the windshield, scaring the ever-living shit out of Mila, cracking her glass, breaking her headlight and wind deflector down the middle. She’d fixed the light and windshield, but she’d kept the half-intact wind deflector because she liked that it added character; that and she was broke and couldn’t fix it even if she wanted.
Sleep. Ah, beautiful, precious sleep. Mila made the mistake of thinking about her bed, her perfect, soft, comfortable bed. She shook herself out of it. She still had to drive back. The initial plan of reviewing her accounting information before her exam the next morning became less and less likely as she tiredly missed the door handle a couple times. Locked. Not a problem. She had the keys around somewhere. She searched around in her purse for it.
Oh.
Oh, no.
With increasing horror, Mila realized they weren’t in there. The first thing that came to mind was that someone had stolen them out of her purse. It wasn’t likely, and she’d had her purse protected the whole night. She turned on the flashlight on her phone and shined it into the dark windows in the hopes of finding them inside.
Mila pressed her face against the glass and looked as best as she could. It took her roughly two seconds to see the keys, chilling on her driver’s seat.
Chapter 2
Mila stared at the keys numbly.
About a quarter inch of glass was all that kept her from grabbing them. More importantly, about a quarter inch of glass was all that was keeping her from getting back to her apartment and sleeping before waking up for a soul-crushing 8 a.m.
She didn’t feel angry.
Nor sad.
Nothing, actually. Just numb. Intellectually, she could see them. But in her soul? They were out there with her. Her soul would have to wait, because when it boiled down to it, she wasn’t able to get in. She wasn’t a person that did this kind of thing normally. The only time she could remember something similar was when she used a vending machine to get a candy bar only to discover the machine wasn’t functioning properly and that it had stolen her money. Then she had no money and no candy bar, and that was no way to live.
Luckily, she still had her phone. She unlocked it and went through her contacts to see who could help. Her parents? What a way to break a silence. It was only three in the morning. Dear old daddy was probably still awake, hitting the bottle. That’s not to say he’d talk to her. She’d be willing to bet he’d hang up. And her mom, though asleep because she couldn’t stay up past sunset without complaining about her sleep pattern being interrupted and how that caused wrinkles, would curtly inform Mila that she was a “grown woman now and she needed to take responsibility for herself.” She was forty, single for a great number of reasons, and without any contact with her kids. It wasn’t like she was exactly the best person to ask for advice.
Bianca. Well, there was something. Bianca would give her a ride, even though she wouldn’t be happy about it, and it would give her immense reason to bring up the fact that she’d told Mila a thousand times to get a spare for this precise contingency.
Mila looked around the parking lot. Hm. Having her friend lambast her for a good reason or call someone else to come pick her up from a shady, abandoned convenience store in the middle of nowhere and have to explain why she was there at all? Bianca looked like a solid candidate and, most importantly, Mila could trust her even if it meant getting ridiculed. She dialled her number and put her on speaker, still keeping an eye open to make sure that nobody was around.
It rang a few times, long enough to where Mila got a little worried, before she heard a sound on the other side and Bianca’s voice came through. “Mila….”
Mila cleared her throat uncomfortably. “Hey, did I wake you up?”
She heard a yawn. “Are you serious? It’s three in the morning. You know me…out partying, doing normal college stuff. Definitely didn’t fall asleep watching Netflix.”
Mila smirked. “I hate to ask.”
“But it won’t stop you.”
Mila winced. Bianca was a sweet girl, but this was testing her patience. The curt undertone of her voice did not go unnoticed. “I need a ride.”
A long pause.
Mila pushed her hair out of her face. She knew what Bianca was thinking. Mila worked at a bar late shift and did some questionable stuff to get by. Bianca was born into money. She didn’t understand having to do whatever was necessary to survive. Would Mila have liked to have a better job? To not have the wonky hours? Of course. In a world where everything was sunny and perfect, that would have been awesome. But she wasn’t in that world, and she stood a better chance of being elected Man of the Year than she did of fixing her life. Mila was normally the dominant one in their friendship, so it felt weird to beg. “Please,” she spoke softly. “Bianca, I need you.”
“And why can’t you call,” Another yawn, “what’s his name. Allen.”
“You know exactly why.” She hadn’t expected it to be this hard, but now that she thought about it, it made sense. “Bianca, please.”
Bianca sighed. “What’s wrong with Liam?”
Mila looked down. “I locked the keys in him.”
Bianca snorted with amusement, which was precisely the reaction Mila expected. First amusement, then gloating. “I don’t mean to tell you I told you so, but…”
“I’ll make it up to you.”
“Uber?”
Mila hated telling people her financial situation, least of all Bianca, who got yachts like most people got a new phone. While she was fumbling to come up with a reason, Bianca figured out what she was trying to say and spared her the humiliation of having to say it. It sounded like she got out of bed. “You owe me.”
Mila breathed a sigh of relief. “You’re the best. Name your price.”
“Three…no, four hours of book analysis with my group.”
Mila grimaced and tried to hide her disgust. It wasn’t so much that she was against books. It was that she was against the kings of books that Bianca’s book club liked to “analyse,” and there was only so much time that Mila could spend discussing how the author describing the curtains as blue was a metaphor for his sadness and
his depression, leading back to abandonment issues spawning from his mother. It drove her nuts. The curtains were fucking blue. “Um…okay. What book?”
“Walden.”
“Thoreau?”
Mila didn’t have to see Bianca to know she was relishing every moment of her predicament. “The very same.”
Henry David Thoreau, one of the most obnoxious people Mila had ever had the bad luck of come across. When she’d first read Walden, she hated everything about him, from his smug insults of everyone else to his obvious hypocrisy—to the point where some of her friends had suggested she add a part onto her blog called Thor-Roast where she would lambast him to her heart’s content. “But he’s a dick!”
“You want a ride or not?”
Mila would almost rather hike the miles back to her place than spend four hours talking to a bunch of Thoreau fangirls, but especially with the test in the morning, she needed her rest. “Fine. Deal.”
“Gimme twenty minutes.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m such a good friend.”
Mila snorted. “Yeah, yeah, don’t hurt yourself patting yourself on the back too hard.”
With most people, Mila would have to worry about offending them by saying something like that. She’d known Bianca for years. Mila might be able to come up with something to upset her, but she’d had to reach deep for it. When the call ended, Mila had no doubt that her friend was on the way.
Now…what to do for the next twenty minutes? She had two options: wait inside or outside. Mila tapped her thigh impatiently. On the one hand, out there she was by herself and protection was up to her, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because her dad had forced her to take numerous years of self-defence classes before pulling the vanishing act. On the other hand, inside was the bar and she wasn’t thrilled about the idea of going back inside and admitting that she’d locked herself out of her car like a moron.
She popped Liam’s tailgate and hopped inside nimbly, taking a seat against the back of the cab. Unless someone was trying to find her, she could chill there, and nobody would be able to see her. Some people had left periodically from the bar. She hadn’t paid attention to who, only that some people were gone and less cars were parked out back. She didn’t see anything that she could imagine a Khan driving, so maybe they’d already left and gone about their werewolf business to kill and terrorize elsewhere. Mila mindlessly let her legs dangle off the edge of her bed. Trying to imagine Jackson dealing with them was a sight she was almost sorry she missed.
Maybe this was a bad idea.
It was too quiet, and the longer she sat, the more she thought about how someone could sneak up on her without her noticing. After she found herself casting suspicious glances at empty cars, the better a plan going inside seemed. She tugged her shorts lower on her thigh and kept a hand on the tazer just in case. She checked her phone to see how long she’d been waiting. Fifteen minutes. Within no time, help would arrive. She could be coming down that highway right now, or maybe she was still leaving town. Regardless, leaving seemed silly, because then she’d have to come right on out, and that sounded like too much work. She stayed in the bed of the truck and pulled her feet up, confident that she was well hidden.
She got to wondering about her dashcam. Was it recording her? The mechanic who she’d bought it from had somehow hooked up a dashcam based on movement. When the car was on, it was always running, but if someone ran up and tried to break into her car while it was off, the shaking of the car would trigger it and, handily enough, it would go straight to an app on her phone if she had it set up that way, or she could reach it by logging in on a computer. Sometimes it activated during rainstorms, determined to keep that pesky rain from breaking in. Mila was decently mechanically competent, but even she had not the faintest clue how he’d pulled that number off. It was wired in behind her radio, so she couldn’t see it and besides, her curiosity in figuring out how it worked was less than her fear of accidentally breaking it while tinkering. She turned and peered into the back window. The light on the tiny camera blinked. Yep. It was on. She waved at herself in case she ever opened the footage.
The way that she was sitting—looking through the back window and towards the dash, gave her an excellent view of her car. She saw Donny the Dimetrodon on her dash, a model figure of her favourite dinosaur that she’d affectionately named Donny, or Donald when she was feeling proper. She saw her keys, taunting her with their very presence. She saw the library book in the passenger seat that she was going to have to return soon.
And she saw the werewolf.
Flying towards her.
Mila had seen some insane things in her life. She’d worked in the Cheeky Sprite for years and even before that, she was in less-than-reputable communities to try and find out who she was as a person. And yet, never in her life had she experienced the shock she felt at seeing an alpha predator get tossed like a ragdoll. Before she could move or think, 1,800 pounds of beast crashed into the hood.
Mila bought a Nissan Frontier because they were tough, reliable trucks; hers especially with the modifications. Between the lift kit, light bar, roof rack, oversized tires, double spares, snow chains, and everything else, Liam was ready for nearly every contingency. Apparently, there was at least one thing that Nissan hadn’t planned on, and that was the sudden deposit of a massive beast on it.
Liam handled it like a champ. It shook from the impact of the werewolf’s impact even as the tires popped and the metal crumbled. Mila’s face smacked against the back window before she got jettisoned out of the back. She slammed into the asphalt, not a graceful descent but a painful flop straight onto her butt. A brief stab of pain shot through her body. Her legs were in motion before she told them to be, scrambling away from her truck. Roars, howls of rage and pain, and the screeching shriek of cars being crushed echoed from behind her, surrounding her and making Mila run ever-faster towards the woods.
Mila didn’t know what was happening, only that something was going on back there that she didn’t want to be a part of. She didn’t dare look back, even when her heel caught on a rock and she tumbled. In the moment before she hit, she saw a dead tree, broken at the trunk, in front of her. Her eyes widened, and, with a yelp, she ducked under it. Though she saved herself from knocking her teeth out, she couldn’t save herself from sprawling out in the mud and pine needles.
She might’ve seriously injured herself, but at the rate that her adrenaline was pumping, she would never know. Hands jittering, mind running a thousand miles an hour, she hid behind the dead tree and peered around it cautiously. The sounds of battle hadn’t gotten louder, so she was hoping that nobody had chased her. Her theory was right. Nobody was coming after her because all the action was still by Liam.
Mila couldn’t see much, but what she saw was enough to make her decide to leave it alone. She’d seen all kinds of fights in her life. Nothing came close. Despite the number of cars in the parking lot, everyone was held in the bar by what appeared to be two men carrying assault rifles. Two huge, shaggy figures, hidden by a line of cars fought. Werewolves, and big ones. Based on the howls, someone was losing.
Mila couldn’t pull her eyes away. Her truck was totalled. Most of her tires were popped and the ones that hadn’t were barely hanging to life. Her windshield was now in her front seat, the roof was crushed into oblivion, and the headlights laid in shards. Slowly, she backed up. A Khan fight. That’s the only thing that made a lick of sense. Negotiations must have gone remarkably poorly.
Mila snapped herself out of it. Khans. What did she know about Khans? Oh, yeah. That they didn’t take kindly to having witnesses to their murders. She backpedalled into the darkness of the woods, trying to control her shaking. She never thought that she’d be happier tripping through pitch-black wilderness than chilling in her truck, but she was swiftly getting proved wrong. Running ended up being a poor decision. Her right heel had broken off her shoe, but the left one, feeling left out, got caught in a rut and had its mom
ent to shine when Mila tripped and wiped out again. She got a face-full of spiderweb.
“Gah! Mother-fucker!” She tore it off her face and forced herself to calm down. She had to think about it. Sprinting to nowhere wasn’t going to help her. Nobody had seen her, and nobody had a reason to suspect that someone would be hidden in the back of a truck silently when the fight started. Keeping up what she was doing was only going to get her hurt. And speaking of hurt…the adrenaline was starting to wear off and now she felt like she’d been hit by a wrecking ball.
Bianca.
Mila eyes shot open and her breath caught in her throat. Bianca! Any moment, her loyal friend would be showing up to pick her up and would drive into a death trap. Mila stood and took a hesitant step. Uh-oh. Where had she come from? Where was the road? Everywhere she looked, all she could see was the outlines of trees. The road could be twenty feet away or half a mile and she wouldn’t know.
“Fuck, fuck, fuckkkkkk.” This wasn’t the time to be indecisive. Luckily for Mila, the universe decided to throw her a bone. A single light formed on the horizon along with the sound of an engine. A motorcycle. Mila made her way as fast as she could that way, hoping and praying that Bianca was running late for the first time in her life.
Chapter 3
Mila arrived at the road just in time to scare the shit out of Bianca.
She made it to the side of the road and scoured for lights near a bend. Had she missed her? Was she too late? She’d seen a couple cars so far, not many, and she didn’t have her phone on her. She must have left it back in what remained of poor Liam, rendering her utterly useless other than standing on the biker lane and hoping the next car would be Bianca.
Headlights appeared. Mila’s hopes soared then fell when she didn’t hear any music. Sure enough, when she got a glimpse of the car, it wasn’t her. Mila ducked into the shrubbery. She had no intention of getting someone else involved in this mess. The road didn’t get near the Cheeky Sprite. To get there, people had to really want to—which was what unlucky Bianca was doing.
The Deadwolves' Prisoner Page 2
