by L. A. Banks
Dr. Williams looked down at his hip and grabbed his vibrating cell phone. All eyes studied him as he listened intently. He clicked off the call and stared at the group. “The ICU patient just woke up. The attending physicians on the ward said he’s trying to yank out his tubes, get out of bed, and is as strong as an ox.”
“You heard the call, brothers and sisters,” Lion Shadow said. “Time to mount up. It’s gotten so bad that Hunter’s calling for an alliance with uninfected Werewolves.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Anwar said, shaking his head.
“The man said not to fire on them, we’re going in as one pack,” Lion Shadow said, his tone a hard command.
“Damn, wonders never cease,” Tomas muttered. “Just better hope that brother is in his full and right mind, feel me?”
The other members of the pack stared at Lion Shadow for answers that their leader was momentarily at a loss to provide.
“But we’re using a hospital as base camp?” Bob said, a question in his voice and his eyes.
“So far, Hunter and Trudeau got us here alive—at this point, I’m not asking questions, just following orders.”
“What! We’re going in with Shadow Wolves?” Lei marched back and forth along the infantrymen lines of Werewolves.
Shogun pointed a nine millimeter at her. “Challenge me at home as my sister, that’s one thing. Challenge me as the commander of this clan during strategic battle maneuvers and I may forget our relationship. Now step aside.”
“A rallying howl from Hunter and his Shadows?” Dexter said, eyes narrowing. He kicked Francois’s Queen Anne parlor chair into the fireplace.
“Thought we got that bastard?” one of his men said sleepily, rising from a white-satin-upholstered Louis XIX sofa now stained with body grime. “Only five of us made it after the tussle in here, and that can’t be a good thing if they’re rallying. Feel me?”
“No matter,” Barbara said, glancing around Francois’s mansion that they now occupied. “There aren’t enough of them left to pose a real threat. We’ve still got some of our own in the pathways and down in Terrebonne, remember.”
Nods rippled through the slowly stirring group as she began the rallying howl that caused the others to join in.
“Damn, don’t they have anything to eat in here?” a large, sluggish henchman asked as the wolf call ended.
“It’s a Vampire house we’re squatting in,” Barbara said flatly with disgust. “You’ll find all the bottled blood you’d ever want, but real food, forgedaboutit.”
Dexter smiled a toothy grin. “Then I guess we’ll just have to change for dinner and go out to eat in the French Quarter.”
Clarissa tugged on Sasha’s elbow as the lab filled with Shadow warriors that reverently greeted Silver Shadow and Hunter.
“I now understand why you’re gone for weeks at a time,” Clarissa spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “When you come back, I have questions, lady, that will not wait.”
Sasha smiled and landed a hand on Clarissa’s shoulder. “If I tell ya, I’ll have to kill ya.”
Clarissa stared at her, stricken. “Seriously?”
“No, I’m just playing.”
She left Clarissa limp and smiling, leaning against a lab table. The hardest thing in the world was going to be convincing Silver Hawk to stay behind, if that was possible—same deal with Woods and Fisher. Those two were soldiers, and the old man was a fierce warrior. But somebody needed to guard the lab that was working on serious antitoxins that could help their cause later. They also needed a clan elder that had been revered and respected in years past to come to the general session at midnight.
Hunter glimpsed her as though he’d already considered where she was going. He went to the livery where his grandfather lay prone, clasped his grandfather’s strong grip, and leaned over to gingerly touch his chest against his grandfather’s healing chest, warrior to warrior style.
“Some of us must guard the future,” Silver Hawk wisely said without contest, and then looked at Crow Shadow, Woods, and Fisher, then the human teams. “Some of us must restore the present,” he added, casting his gaze around the Shadow packs. He gazed up at his grandson and then at Sasha. “And some must redress the injustices of the past.”
Hunter nodded. Sasha nodded. Weapons got distributed along with vehicle keys and lethal cocktail shells. And just that simply, there was balance.
“I don’t understand why we’re not changing?” Barbara shrieked. “Shadow blood was supposed to bring us down, stabilize us to come out of the infected Werewolf transition, not block shape-shifts!”
“What the fuck, Dexter?” a strong beta shouted, looking at his still-human hands in disbelief.
“They added something to the blood—that’s the only way. If it’s not pure, if anything else is in it, just like we can’t take normal human meds, it slows the shifts.” Dexter slammed his fist into the wall. “Double-crossing, no-good Vampire rat bastards!”
“If we can’t change, and Shadow packs are breathing down our necks . . . not to mention, if our own altered packs find us not in leadership form . . .” Barbara said, panicked and allowing the obvious risk to trail off with her sentence.
“We head to the French Quarter,” Dexter snarled. “That house where they took Crow Shadow. This time we don’t wait for them to do some fancy blood extraction where they can mix it. We eat it right from his flesh, direct.”
“They will be coming here,” Francois said evenly.
“Oui, they will try. But the fight is much better on that rolling estate of yours, rather than on a lovely, densely populated human boulevard where a spectacle could occur to drive away future business,” Etienne murmured, unfazed as the trees outside his French Quarter property became heavily loaded with bats. “And they already put out their call to their own, I take it, before they learned that they couldn’t shape-shift.”
“Which should bring the other infected Shadows there first,” Francois stated flatly, peering at the filling trees with his hands behind his back.
“And the Werewolves, infected and uninfected—just like the uninfected Shadow Wolves—are on the move.”
Francois slightly inclined his head. “Forgive me, mon ami, then why are our legions here?”
“To keep the infected Shadows and general nuisance infected Werewolves from leaving your mansion area to head toward this uptown house in search of untainted Shadow Wolf blood . . . or to the hospital, savaging neighbors along the way. We simply cannot have this disruption to our lifestyle,” Etienne said with a wave of his arms, dispatching half of the bats in a black cloud that blotted out the moon.
Chapter 22
Glass shattering on the first floor of the mansion sent Dexter and his crew into a sliding dash across the polished floors and up the steps. They’d found a weapons stash that the Vampire’s human familiars kept on hand for Werewolf invasions, but it wouldn’t last forever. Taking window positions on the second floor and over the spiraling staircase rails, they tried to pick off invaders using conventional demon-hunting artillery.
Shadow pathways opened, and infected Shadow Wolves joined in the fray, significantly evening the odds for Dexter’s side. Huge infected Werewolves breached the staircase, wiping it out, and pump shotgun blasts fused with rapid-fire machine-gun sprays to send the beasts back over the rails. The battle waged hard outside in the gardens, but no one dared to go near a window to witness which side was winning. Hunkered down, Dexter and the four wolves that survived with him panted through terror-induced sweat, listening.
Screeching car wheels brought Dexter’s team to the other side of the house. A silver BMW careened forward over the driveway, through the manicured bushes, M-16 rounds whirring like tracers in flashes lighting the night. A Dodge RAM spun to a skid and turned what looked like a pipe organ toward the house. Multiple launched rockets spit a death rain of silver against the property, splintering wood, glass, and wrought iron. Trapped at the top, no stairs, and angry, demon-infected Werewolves at
the bottom battling infected Shadow packs, the mansion burning from grenade explosions, there was only one option. He and his small retinue of rogues had to run to the other side of the house.
A huge wolf pack appeared at the tree line and Shadow warriors spun to meet the threat.
“Hold your fire! Those are alliance forces!” Sasha yelled and then released a long howl. A return howl made every warrior seek Hunter’s gaze for approval.
Hunter released a long, soulful wail and then turned to his men. “Find a gas main,” Hunter shouted, motioning toward the house, “and burn the mothers out!”
No sooner than he’d called the command, a shoulder-launched rocket found the kitchen window. The impact of the explosion sent wolf and human bodies tumbling. A white-orange blaze lit the blue-black night, and bats screeched in outrage as they fled from trees hit with burning debris.
“I want those little bastards, too!” Hunter yelled, pointing an automatic toward a cloud of fleeing bats and then firing, beginning the black hail of bat bodies.
The truck turned in a slow pivot as the Shadows manning the MLRS sent silver death into the cloud of bats, making it rain teeny rodent bodies across the far acreage.
“Hold your fire!” Sasha said, panicked. “Any shells that don’t connect will keep going into possible civilian areas.”
“Roger that!” someone yelled from the truck.
“Direction was toward the bayou with twenty acres of Vamp land in between,” Hunter called out, and then lowered the automatic he clutched. “I hate Vampires! But Sasha’s right—we can’t let stray shells hit houses a coupla miles away.”
“Keep it that way,” Sasha hollered over the din. “Conventional weapons only, hold on the high-powered as a last resort! Flame throwers.”
“You got it!” Hunter raced across the back lawn that had become a battlefield. One of his men reached out an arm and pulled him up to the truck and slapped a flame thrower into his grip.
Demon doors suddenly opened on all sides, allowing in wave after wave of huge, demon-infected Werewolves to encircle the Shadow Wolves in Sasha and Hunter’s pack. The guys in the vehicles that rimmed the lawn would be sitting ducks if something came up beneath them from the ground. But in the tight circular formation, there was no way for their uninfected warriors to turn and fire without possibly blowing away their own men who were engaged on the ground. Before the onslaught of predators hit the vehicles, Shogun’s lethal pack was on them.
In an odd turn of events, the pack he led leaped in as wolves struck deep wounds, and then rolled away as men in lightning-quick martial arts moves. From their glistening, naked bodies they ripped away long stainless-steel blades that had been taped to their spines and hunting knives that had been taped to their thick, sinewy thighs, to come up beneath a predator and gore or behead it. Sasha paused for a moment, awed by the almost balletlike display of raw force on the field. For a moment, she and Hunter’s men held their fire, also not wanting to hit an ally. It was a first on many levels. A breakthrough.
The allied clan’s hand-to-hand combat style had obviously been perfected over centuries, and it used as much of their mind to outwit their opponent as it did their psychic and physical agility. For a split second her eyes met Shogun’s. His hair had been a swaying curtain of midnight that moved when he moved, causing a near-hypnotic trance. It parted ever so briefly as he paused, caught his breath, and the night air opened it enough that his gaze latched upon hers.
Moonlight cascaded down his hard, bronze body, illuminating the lean sinewy steel that moved like river currents beneath his skin and bunched in hard, distinct blocks down his torso. She stopped there and looked away when he moistened his mouth with his tongue and then quickly flipped out of a predator’s lunge before beheading the creature. The too-intimate exchange that was too crazy took all of three seconds. Focus returned her instantly to the battle as she pulled the trigger and blew an infected Shadow Wolf’s head off.
Swarms of bats took off in a zigzag pattern, but Hunter’s well-aimed flame thrower sent popping, smoking cinders to the ground in a hail of gruesome rain.
Tiny, charred rodent bodies littered the rolling, manicured lawns. The stink was god-awful. Massive Werewolf bodies lay dead and twitching. Infected Shadows lay faceup, glassy-eyed, and unmoving as the trucks inched forward and Hunter’s and Sasha’s ground troops turned over bodies with the barrels of automatics, and pumped extra slugs in foreheads and chests just to be on the safe side. Shogun’s men separated heads from bodies. The carnage was total. They took no prisoners. This was the way of the wolf. Both clan leaders stared at each other and gave each other a nod of appreciation and acknowledgment for a battle well fought.
They also came upon four human bodies and turned them over slowly.
“Barbara . . . damn,” Hunter said and spit on the ground. He couldn’t catch Bob as he leaped down from the truck.
“Oh shit, oh shit—she was in there and you shot her!”
Shogun’s men snarled, but their leader held up his hand. This was clearly intrapack Shadow politics. His men fell back. Hunter’s men circled in to better understand and keep the peace.
“Wasn’t like that, Bob,” Sasha said carefully. She looked at Lion Shadow for assistance.
“Use your nose, man,” Lion Shadow said calmly.
“She was raped! Dexter had her in there with all those infected Shadows—no!” Bob yelled, still holding a gun on Hunter.
A single shot fired from the bushes dropped Bob to his knees. The man fell forward, eyes still haunted. Bear Shadow stepped into the truck’s high beams. “Clan policy. Never draw on the alpha. That was his third time. He was mentally gone and things are better this way.”
“If he were a Werewolf,” Shogun remarked calmly, “the first offense would have been enough.”
Shogun and Hunter stared at each other, and then crossed their forearms over their chests in respect. Sasha hung back, waiting, to see how the Shadow packs would absorb the loss, as well as the alliance.
Silent nods confirmed Bear Shadow’s decision. He was an enforcer and it had been his call to protect the clan leader at all costs during battle. This was all costs. No one argued. Bob had been a problem. An even bigger problem now was Dexter wasn’t in the body count on the ground. There was no resistance to Shogun’s presence, or that of his pack—if they hadn’t gotten involved, Shadow Wolves would have been lost when the demon doors flooded open.
The Shadow Wolf pack surveyed the smoking, body-riddled terrain as distant sirens sounded. Nothing moved or disturbed the still tree shadows against the blood-soaked earth.
“Flame throwers on those demon wolves; local cops will never understand,” Sasha said. She looked at Hunter and then Shogun. “Dexter and the others with him, the core leadership, obviously couldn’t shift. The Vampires must have done something to Crow Shadow’s blood, like our man said. We’ve gotta move out. Head back to the French Quarter where Dexter has to be headed—that and the hospital are the only places he can go to get pure Shadow Wolf blood; the bags I left hanging when me and Shogun got to Crow Shadow, and from the lab at the hospital—which Dexter will soon be able to track, given all the activity with us there.”
“We stop him at the house,” Hunter said, looking at the heavy artillery, “but not like this. People, families, children . . .” He shook his head as he picked up a nine from the ground and checked its half-filled clip. Then he found a full one to jam into his back pants pocket. He looked at Shogun. “I like your style. One on one, man to man, I blow his head off nice and clean—the rest of this artillery goes back into storage after the UCE Conference. I want no retaliation incidents there, so be on the ready, but fall back and wait. No preemptive strikes. Foot soldiers guard the hospital but be very careful of collateral damage. No innocents die on our watch.”
Shogun smiled a sly half-smile. “You trust us Werewolves to guard innocent humans now?”
The group paused, their gaze going between the two clan leaders.
Hunter smiled a half-smile. “Trust you more with humans than my woman.”
Shogun chuckled and shifted back into his wolf form, calling his men with a rallying howl to make the run back to their hidden posts. “Good choice,” he said over his shoulder with a wink, and then was gone.
Hunter walked toward the BMW; Sasha raced to catch up with him and jumped over the side of it into the driver’s seat. “You need both hands on artillery, partner.”
While it was nice to be hunting together again, she continually glimpsed Hunter’s jawline. It pulsed with palpable frustration as though a shape-shift was so close under the surface of his skin it was all he could do to contain it. There was no way to fathom how he felt or what it must be like to have an incredible gift all one’s life, then have that taken away at the time when it was needed most. Crippling was the word that came to mind, but he seemed to be dealing with his circumstance much better than she knew she would have. Then there was the Shogun thing that she knew was gnawing at the quiet recesses of his mind.
“What are we gonna do about the Vamps?” she asked, trying to keep the subject focused on the battle at hand, while trying to avoid drawing the attention of local police as the speedometer climbed. She backed off the gas a little, knowing the only thing keeping them from getting pulled over was the fact that eighty percent of the New Orleans police force had quit after Katrina, and they’d yet to be replaced. Still, there was no reason to push it.
“I don’t know. My main target is Dexter,” Hunter said, his eyes straight ahead. “One day, them, too . . . we got a lot out at the mansion, but Dexter can’t escape again.”
Sasha kept her eyes forward and left it at that. It was better that way, if no one said what was really on their mind.
Dexter bounced a commandeered Audi over the curb and jumped out of the vehicle, rushing the French Quarter property, taking no security measures. Wild-eyed and panic-stricken, the scent of Crow Shadow’s blood drew him into the house. Bats flooded through the broken window behind him. A BMW bounced to a stop behind his car.
