JANE'S WARLORD

by user

  Druas laughed. Something in the sound made her skin crawl. “Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that very much. Some things a man just doesn’t tell the woman he’s screwing.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ice slid over her. He couldn’t mean what she thought he meant.

  Not Baran.

  “Sorry, Jane, you’re just not going to be able to stall me that long. I’ve got to go kill her now.”

  The phone went dead.

  “Shit,” Jane spat, slamming the gas pedal all the way to the floor as she dialed 911. “Shit shit shit shit.”

  “What’s your emergency?” the dispatcher said.

  “A woman’s about to be murdered in Cherokee Park. Send everybody you can dispatch. Now.”

  “Wait a minute, who is this? How do you know that?”

  “Jane Colby with the Trib. The killer just called me on my cell.”

  “Ma’am, we’ll send somebody to check it out, but it was probably a prank.”

  “It wasn’t a prank, damn it! It was a fucking serial killer, and if you just send one deputy, that girl is not going to be the only one bleeding out on the ground. Your cop is going to end up dead!”

  “It’s not necessary to use that kind of language, ma’am.”

  “Do you want to be on the front page in fifty point type, lady? ‘Dispatcher refuses to send adequate help: woman murdered.’ How does that sound, huh? ‘Cause I can do it!” She hit the End button and slung the phone back in her purse. “Stupid bitch.” Zipping around a minivan, she screeched up to the curb in front of the park.

  Near the entrance, a fountain sprayed a plume of water skyward from the center of a ring of dancing children.

  Baran threw his door open and jumped out without bothering to close it behind him. He took off at a run. “Freika, stay with Jane! I’ve got Xeran sensor readings!”

  “I’m going with ...” She blinked, watching his retreating back as he raced toward .fee trees. She’d never seen a human being move so fast in her entire life; he was almost a blur. She started after him.

  “No!” Freika’s teeth closed on the hem of her pants, dragging her to a stumbling halt. “He’s right. If Druas gets you out in those woods away from Baran, you’re dead.”

  She looked down at him helplessly. “But...”

  In the distance a woman screamed, her voice ringing with terror.

  Then there was nothing but the sound of the fountain’s spray pattering on brick.

  Baran went to riatt as he ran, neuro-chemicals roaring through his body in a molten flood, power pumping in after them. This time he would be in time. This time he was going to kill the bastard and end it.

  He could see them in his mind, his computer generating the image from sensor data since they were out of direct view. The girl ran easily, not realizing she was in danger as Druas closed in from behind in a leisurely jog. As if he had all the time in the world.

  Baran poured on the speed, dodging around the trees that blocked his path.

  As if sensing him, the Xeran glanced back over his shoulder. He began to run. The girl turned, evidently hearing him. Her scream rang high and shrill over the trees.

  The Jumpkiller didn’t bother with the slow strangulation that might have given Baran time to reach them. The computer image painted the flash of steel as he drew the knife, the arch of his arm swinging, the spray of hot blood. The girl crumpled; Baran was close enough now to glimpse the movement through the trees with his own eyes.

  Close, so close, but not close enough. Not close enough to be in time.

  Druas stepped back. With his sensors engaged, Baran could see the temporal field building around the murderer’s T-suit in waves of warping time.

  BOOM!

  And the killer was gone, leaving only the girl dying in the leaves as Baran skidded up.

  Her eyes met his, wide with horror over her ruined throat, begging him silently for help. Druas might not have taken the time to strangle her, but he hadn’t cut deep enough to render her unconscious, either. He’d meant for her to suffer, to know she was dying without being able to do anything to save herself.

  Death in 2.3 minutes, Baran’s comp told him.

  How can I save her? he demanded as he fell to his knees beside her crumpled body. Apply pressure ?

  Ineffective. She’ll die before medical assistance can arrive.

  He had to try anyway. Jerking the T-shirt off over his head, Baran wadded it up and pressed it against the wound, trying to avoid cutting off her breathing as he did so. She lifted a shaking hand and wrapped it around his, fighting feebly to help.

  “Hang on,” he ordered roughly, watching the white shirt turn red as she bled out into it. “Stay with me.”

  As if in answer, she made an awful, strangling sound. The bewildered pain in her glazing eyes choked him. It was all so vicious, so pointless. Savagery for its own mindless sake.

  “I’m going to kill him,” he gritted as he smoothed her blond hair back from her face with his free hand.

  She blinked up at him once. Her mouth moved, but no sound emerged. He struggled to read her lips. Something about “husband” and “love.”

  Then the life bled away from her eyes, and her hand fell limply to the leaves.

  And Baran, who’d killed more men than he even cared to think about, felt his shoulders began to shake.

  Jane heard the temporal boom roll out over the trees over the wail of sirens. “Son of a bitch.” She started toward the sound, but Freika grabbed her again.

  “We don’t know where Druas transported,” the wolf said. “In those trees he could Jump right in behind you before I could do a damn thing.”

  “Fuck.” She was tempted to run hi after Baran anyway, but she knew if she didn’t wait to tell the police he’d gone to help, they might shoot him by mistake.

  The first car roared up with shrieking sirens and squealing brakes. The door flew open and an officer scrambled out, gun already drawn. She knew him from a previous crime scene: Tony Garrison. He’d been a deputy barely a year.

  “That way!” Jane yelled, pointing in the direction Baran had gone. “They’re in the woods. My photographer went after them.”

  “Gonna get himself killed,” the cop grunted, bolstering his weapon as he grabbed his shoulder mike to radio it in before running toward the tree line.

  “Now we can go,” Jane told Frieka, and sprinted after the officer.

  “Jane—“

  “Find Baran,” she snapped, cutting off his protest. “One of these cops could shoot him if I’m not there to defuse the situation.”

  The wolf hesitated, then growled something and shot ahead of both of them. Jane brought up the rear, pouring everything she had into every stride she took.

  “Stay back!” the cop yelled at her.

  “The wo... dog belongs to my photographer!” Jane yelled back. “Freika’ll track Baran. Since he went in after the girl, if we find him, we’ll find her.”

  Garrison muttered something that was probably obscene, but didn’t protest again as the two of them crashed on through the woods.

  They found Baran cradling a limp figure in his arms, his broad, bare shoulders hunched, head bowed. His braids trailed in the blood that covered her chest. He’d pulled off his shirt; it lay forgotten in a gory bundle in the dead leaves beside him.

  “Put her down and back away,” Garrison ordered, drawing his weapon.

  “It’s my photographer!” Jane protested, her stomach twisting as she stepped between Baran and the cop. She’d been afraid of this. “I told you, he came in to help her!”

  “I’ve only got your word on that,” the deputy gritted. “And I’m not taking chances. Get out of the way, lady, or your ass is going to jail!”

  She knew he was just pissed off enough to do it, but she had to make him listen. “Baran was only trying to save her!”

  “But I didn’t.” She looked back over her shoulder and caught her breath. The Warlord’s lethal gaze was fixed on the deputy’s gun. “Get th
at weapon out of my face.” He still had his sunglasses on, thank God, but he’d been in riatt. She remembered how he’d taken her in the woods and realized just how shaky his control over his emotions really was. If the cop got too aggressive, Baran just might slam him through a tree.

  Hell. That was all they needed.

  “Put the girl down, sir!” Garrison set his feet apart and steadied his aim.

  “If you don’t shift your aim, I’m going to make you eat that gun.” His voice was utterly toneless, matter-of-fact, but something in his face made the cop back up a pace.

  Then Garrison stopped himself and steadied his aim. “Sir, I will shoot you.”

  And he would, Jane knew. Especially since he’d only gotten out of the Academy a few months before—and this might be the first time he’d ever faced a man over the body of a murdered woman.

  Or seen anything like the killing rage in the Warlord’s eyes.

  “Put her down, Baran!” she said, raising her voice just short of a yell, trying to penetrate the Warlord’s riatt frenzy. “He’ll do it. And you’re not thinking clearly.”

  He stared at her for a long moment before he gently lowered his limp burden to the ground. “She’s already gone. I didn’t get here in time.”

  “Down on the ground!” the deputy snarled. “Hands behind your head.”

  “Deputy Garrison, he didn’t hurt her!” Jane raised her empty hands to show she wasn’t armed. “The man who did this called us on my cell phone and told us he was about to attack her, and Baran ran in here trying to help.”

  “So where is this killer, huh?”

  “Getting away while you wave a gun in our faces!”

  “My job is to secure the scene,” Garrison snapped. “I’m securing it. Get! Down!”

  “Tony, I’m a reporter. You know me!”

  “And you should know better than to interfere with a police officer! Down on the ground! Both of you!”

  “Do it, Jane.” Baran said heavily, and stretched out beside the body of the woman he’d fought—and failed—to save.

  She looked from Garrison’s furious eyes to the bore of his gun, sighed, and obeyed. As the deputy began to pat

  Baran down, she pressed her face into the crinkling leaves and tried not to wonder who Druas was planning to kill next.

  It might just be her.

  Lose the shades,” Tom Reynolds said to Baran as they sat in the detective’s car. “It’s like talking to the Terminator.”

  He had no idea who the Terminator was, but Baran obeyed the detective anyway. For lack of anywhere else to put them, he held them in his lap. It was a good thing enough time had passed to give his body time to recover from riatt, or his eyes would have given him away. Unfortunately, he still felt raw, and he knew his control over his simmering rage wasn’t the best! Law enforcement agents on his own world would have understood, but these deputies obviously found his reaction to the aftereffects suspicious.

  One of them, watching the tremors shake him, had asked if he was under the influence. Baran had asked, “Of what?” For some reason, the man had not seemed to appreciate the question.

  Now Baran eyed Reynolds and hoped he could get through this interview quickly. Jane was being questioned in another car, and Baran did not particularly like having her out of his sight. Freika was sitting patiently by the vehicle she occupied, standing guard, but that wasn’t enough. The wolf was deadly in a fight, but it was doubtful he could hold Druas off in any extended combat.

  The facts were brutally simple. If Baran was arrested, Jane was dead.

  His fists clenched. He couldn’t afford to be taken. If he had to fight these men so he could snatch her and run, he’d do it. He would not allow Druas to butcher her as he had the woman Baran had just watched die.

  “It’s been a bitch of a day, huh, Hoss?” the detective asked in a low, quiet voice, watching his face. “You’ve tried to save two women and fucked up both times.”

  Baran’s head snapped toward the detective so hard the beads slapped his cheek. It took him a moment to cool his helpless rage and blank his expression. “So it would seem.”

  “Pisses you off, doesn’t it?” The cop settled back in his seat and wrote something down on the little notebook he held. “You cut yourself all to hell trying to get the first woman out of the car, then you go tearing through the woods after a killer, only to get there too late. All you can do is watch her die in your arms. Sucks to be you, huh?”

  He almost told the deputy he’d had to watch people die before, but remembered the photographer he was supposed to be. “I’ve had better days.”

  “So tell me what happened.”

  “I have already told you what happened,” Baran said, restraining his flare of irritation at hearing the question yet again. “Just as I told the three other officers who asked.”

  “We just want to make sure we get the details right,” Reynolds said blandly. “So when was the first time you met this girl?”

  Baran frowned. “What girl?”

  “The girl that just died.”

  He shook his head and drummed his fingers on the car’s dashboard, staring at Jane’s silhouette in the back of the other patrol car. He wanted to be done with this so he could get her to safety. “As I said before—repeatedly—I didn’t know her. All I did was try to ...”

  Suddenly a plump, motherly woman ran past the front of the car. Even through the closed window, Baran could hear her sobbing screams of denial.

  A cop ran to meet her. She tried to push by, but he stepped to block her. She screamed something and flung herself at him just as a middle-aged man ran up to drag her back. . “That would be the momma and daddy,” Reynolds said.

  Baran could almost feel the weight of his coolly analytical gaze, dissecting every expression, every twitch. “That’s the thing about a small town. Somebody dies, and two minutes later the family knows it. Poor bastards.” Softly, cruelly, he added, “You want me to introduce you? I mean, you did try to save her, right?”

  For an instant Baran considered planting his fist in the man’s face. Unfortunately, he still had so much riatt left in his system, the blow would probably kill the detective. He forced his muscles to relax.

  The detective smiled slightly. “That’s better. Thought for a minute I was going to have to shoot your ass right here in the car. You’re a scary bastard when you want to be. Your eyes ... I could have sworn ...” He shook his head and closed his notebook with a tired sigh. “Okay, you can go. I gotta start looking for this’ son of a bitch.”

  Baran lifted his brows, wondering if this was some kind of trick. “That’s it?”.

  “I’ve talked to a lot of people who just killed somebody, and you don’t have the look. You’ve got the eyes of a guy who’s blaming himself for not being thirty seconds faster.”

  Baran smiled slightly, dryly. The detective was far too perceptive.

  “Besides,” Reynolds continued, “I’ve known Jane since she was twelve years old and coming to crime scenes with her daddy. If she says you didn’t do it, you didn’t do it.”

  His muscles cautiously unknotting, Baran reached for the door handle. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t forget your blanket.” Reynolds had handed it to him so he wouldn’t have to walk past the crowd of onlookers bare-chested and covered in gore. “None of us needs the kind of rumors that would trigger.”

  He nodded and pulled it up around his shoulders again as Reynolds radioed the other officer to let Jane out of his car.

  As he got out, Reynolds leaned over and looked up at him. “By the way, tell her she needs to get a new cell number. And don’t give this one out to everybody in town, dammit. The wrong guy definitely got hold of it this time.”

  The Warlord nodded. “I’ll make sure to pass along the message.”

  “On the other hand, don’t.” Reynolds frowned. “We may need to put a tap on her phone. Might be useful if he calls again.”

  With an effort, Baran kept his opinion of that idea
off his face. All the police needed to do was listen to one call, and they’d realize he and Jane knew far more about their mystery killer than they should. That, he thought, we definitely do not need.

  Baran pushed the door open as Jane get out of the other car and hurried toward him, Freika trotting at her heels.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he growled.

  “God, yes,” she said, glancing toward two men, one armed with a video camera, who were working through the crowd of onlookers toward them. “There comes that jerk Clarkson from WDRT News. We don’t want to talk to him—particularly not with you covered in blood.” She led the way back toward the SUV at a speed just short of a run.

  As they pulled away from the curb a moment later, she glowered into her rearview mirror at the camera pointed at their truck. “I never thought I’d ever be the one running from reporters. Usually I’m at the head of the pack.” She turned her attention to the road, a grim set to her mouth. “Damn, I don’t want to end up as that bastard’s lead story.”

  Glancing at him, she read his puzzlement. “There’s an old saying in television journalism, Baran—‘If it bleeds, it leads.’”

  An hour later Jane realized she was a slut.

  It was, she decided, the only possible explanation. No decent Southern belle would get this turned on after the day she’d just spent. Not even watching Baran Arvid take a shower.

  Dry-mouthed, she gazed through the bubbled glass door at the muscle shifting in his powerful arms as he washed all that long, black hair. She barely noticed the beads biting into her hands. He’d handed them to her when he’d taken down his bloody braids; now she clenched her fingers around them and fought to control the impulse to join him.

  Yep. Slut. She had to face facts.

  White runnels of soap ran down the rippled planes of pectorals and washboard abs, painting slow and sensual trails that Jane would love to follow with her fingertips.

  Yet even through the glass, she could see the tired slump in his body, could tell from the slow movement of his hands that he felt drained, weighted with guilt and failure.