The Strip

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Cole pulled his gaze off of them long enough to focus on the woman in the chair. He moved forward to untie her when someone spoke behind him.

  “You always let your women fight your fights for you, werewolf?” Cole spun to face the source of the foreign voice.

  Half a dozen human males were standing in the doorway just inside the bedroom. In their hands were automatic weapons. Cole could smell the gun oil, the gun powder, and the faintest hint of weapons discharge. He registered all of this as all six men opened fire on him, emptying everything they had into his tall, strong form.

  Cole’s body jerked violently beneath the impacts, but he managed to turn once more and dive toward the woman in the chair, knocking her surprised form to the floor behind the bed as he went down in front of her.

  Bullets ricocheted within the room, bouncing off of door handles and the metal frame of the bed. Cole heard the pinging and the thunder of the weapons as if through a tunnel. It was distant and rumbling and reminiscent of wind chimes. He had been hit far too many times. He knew that. He was losing too much blood and with it, he would lose consciousness.

  He had no doubt that when that happened, the Hunters would kill him.

  * * * *

  There was no forethought to Charlie’s actions. It was as if that part of her brain – the part capable of weighing things carefully before she acted – was simply turned off. Blocked off. Burned out.

  She saw the woman in the chair and the pictures on the dresser and felt the receding pain that had burned through her body and she remembered the whip across her back and the years of David Reese, aka Gabriel Phelan, touching her as she was trapped in his arms. She thought of her father. Of her mother. Of the funeral on that sunny Sunday that had seen the last rays of light before a storm had come that night and washed away every flower left at their graves.

  In that moment, something inside of her changed. Something went away.

  Before she realized what she was doing, she was racing across the room toward the man who had trained her, built her up, and made her into the vessel of rage that she had become. She didn’t know where the strength and speed had come from. They should not have been her own. But it was inhumanity at its finest, faster than she could control, stronger than she could have dreamed.

  She and Gabriel went down like weights. They hit the floor with a fierceness that splintered the hard wood beneath them. Sound went away and the world painted itself red. Charlie’s hands flew on their own. An upper cut. A shot to the solar plexus. Her palms boxed his ears.

  Phelan rolled beneath her, shoving her hard and sending her flying into the opposite wall. A distant reverberation like a motorcycle engine shook the air around them, shock-waves of something repetitive and quick. But the sound was muted and all that existed was the slow-motion alacrity of their furied struggle.

  Something hard and sharp sliced through Charlie’s left arm. Another went through her right leg. She ignored them; all pain was dulled or nonexistent. She shoved away from the wall and lunged once more. Phelan met her dead-on this time, his own hands flying with a swiftness that defied logic. A back-hand, an elbow to the back of her head, a crunch somewhere in her left thigh and Charlie fell, rolled, and came up once more.

  Again, they rushed each other, the smell of blood now thick in the shrinking space of the bedroom. He blocked her first kick but missed her second, and it found his chest, breaking a rib and stealing his breath. He recovered, the space of a fraction of a second passing before he was returning the favor.

  Glass shattered around them, detectable only as a muffled tinkling and the occasional crunch. Something was floating in the air – feathers. Dust. Splintered debris.

  Time had come to a near stop, the world frozen in this snap shot of conflict. A woman tied to a chair now lay on the ground, bleeding. Her eyes were closed, her face slack. A man lay beside her, slipping away as balls of lead seared through his body and embedded themselves in the floor beneath him.

  Flashes of light pierced the dust motes and chunks of fabric that floated in the thick air. Lightning. Thunder. Blood.

  Charlie’s head snapped to the side beneath another blow, and she caught sight of the man beside the bed, his green eyes closed, his clothing soaked in thick, red liquid.

  They say you can’t stop time, that it is a constant and waits for no one. They’re wrong. Time slows when you want it to speed up. It goes too fast when you’re having fun. And it stops. It stops, dead in its tracks, when the unthinkable occurs. Time is not neutral, it makes no sense, and it bears no logic. It has nothing to do with nature or fairness or physics.

  Time is cruel.

  And it’s as simple as that.

  Charlie knew; she’d been trapped in it before. At least this time, the ceasing point in seconds and minutes played to her advantage. It took no time at all whatsoever for her to spin in place, slicing a round house kick through the air that connected with Phelan’s jaw and knocked him into the adjoining wall.

  A nothing second later, Charlie was punching him in the neck. If it hadn’t been for the breaking wall behind him, the werewolf would have lost his head. As it was, he curved into the plaster at his back, and it absorbed the impact, shaking the rafters and sending more gypsum and mortar crumbling to the ground around them.

  A bullet sliced through Charlie’s kidney. Another entered her left shoulder, followed by a third in her right thigh. She jerked at each contact, not hearing them and not recognizing the pain for what it was. There was only the distant, distinct knowledge that she’d been shot several times, and that was it. Her body kept moving of its own volition.

  Phelan took a blow that broke his nose, another that knocked out a back tooth. Then he pressed his palms to the wall on either side of him and raised his legs to shove against Charlie in a double kick that sent her literally flying across the room. On the way, she picked up several more balls of lead, each kissing her skin and searing a burnt-up tunnel through her body on its way back out again.

  Somewhere in the background of her consciousness, Charlie heard a man yelling. The thunder slowed and then stopped, trailing away, and she hit the opposite wall and crumpled.

  She forced herself to stand. And herself didn’t listen.

  Her body remained on the ground, healing beneath and around her, the holes closing up, the bones mending. Again, she told it to stand, determined, merciless – and this time, it obeyed.

  But as it did, she found herself surrounded by forms in black. She paid them little heed, blurred as they were, but they seemed to notice her with much more force.

  There was a hard, sharp jab of a needle at the back of her neck and her legs once more gave out. Liquid fire spread across her skin, eating her up, burning her down. She fell forward, barely able to catch herself.

  Blood roared in her ears, effectively cutting out the fuzzy, mixed-up reality around her. She hit the ground and her head shifted, her right cheek slicing against slivers of glass on the wooden planks beneath her. Malcolm’s arm stretched, slack and unmoving, beneath the bed across the room. She could see the side of his face, peaceful in his slumber.

  She would have given anything, in that moment, for him to open those light green eyes and look at her one last time.

  She felt arms lift her, pulling her off of the ground and against a hard chest. She looked up into Phelan’s sapphire eyes and saw triumph in his completely healed and once more handsome visage. She tried to rip it away from him, to peel it off of his face, but her arms wouldn’t obey. They hung useless at her sides.

  His lips moved as he said something to her. But she couldn’t hear him. It was useless. Everything was useless. Hopeless. And this was the end.

  No little one. We’re here. We’re coming. The voice rumbled through her mind, the desert wind on a summer’s night. It dried her internal tears and warmed her from the inside out. It was her grandfather – the Overseer. She would know his voice anywhere.

  We’re here, Charlie. Answer, me, angel. Guide us to you
.

  I’m here, she thought. Malcolm’s hurt.

  Above her, Gabriel’s triumphant smile faded. His sapphire eyes glowed more intensely. She felt the growl that rumbled through his chest and into her body.

  I can’t move…

  Dannai will help you, Charlie.

  Gabriel spun with her in his arms as the empty window frames across the room began to curve inward and Charlie imagined that they must sound horrible. The walls around them bucked and crumbled. Something was coming through.

  He dropped her and Charlie hit the ground to lay motionless, unable to move or call out or stir in any fashion. She closed her eyes, the division between sight and sound causing a wealth of vertigo to steal through her system.

  “Can you hear me, Charlie?” It was a soft voice, tender, feminine and deep. It sounded a little like Demi Moore. Maybe she was dreaming. Maybe she’d finally passed out and Indecent Proposal was playing in her mind.

  But the roar in her ears was receding and the woman’s voice came through once more. “You’re all right, Charlie. Open your eyes.”

  Charlie opened her eyes in time to see a woman above her standing and turning away in a flurry of long, jet-black hair and dark gold skin and multi-colored eyes. The woman was racing away from her, off to some other destination, before Charlie could get her bearings and sit up.

  She was healed. There was no pain or even stiffness in her body any longer. She sat up and the world cleared around her, coming into sharp focus. Time moved at its normal rate once again, which was very fast. She smelled blood, sharp and metallic. She smelled sweat and gun powder and dust. There were several werewolves in the room now.

  With a gentle, but comforting kind of shock, Charlie recognized Jessie among them.

  Across the room, the woman who had been kneeling beside her a second ago was now kneeling beside someone else. It was Malcolm.

  At once, Charlie on her feet. Her gaze searched the wrestling bodies for a man with blonde hair and blue eyes, but Phelan was gone, and her grandfather was also nowhere in sight.

  Charlie blurred into movement, ducked beneath the flying body of a male human, and leapt forward, flipping in the air over the sudden rolling ball of fur and black fatigues as a second werewolf took down yet another Hunter. She landed, found her feet beneath her, and continued until she was kneeling beside her mate.

  The woman next to him glanced up. Charlie was caught in a powerful gaze of gold, green, purple and blue, and her breath was instantly trapped in her chest. He is healed, Charlie, but tell no one, came a voice in her head. It was gentle, but insistent.

  The woman smelled human. But the power rolling off of her was unnatural. Tell no one what you’ve seen me do, the voice commanded gently. Please, she added softly.

  Charlie gazed into the woman’s eyes for what seemed a short eternity. And then she was ripping her gaze away and looking down as Cole groaned low and turned his head. Without thinking, she caught his face in her hands and willed his eyes to open. To look up at her.

  They did. Light green sliced through the waning light, trapping her in their stark beauty. Charlie stared at him, once more in awe of his exquisite perfection.

  “Duck,” the woman beside her suddenly ordered.

  Without thinking, Charlie ducked down. A body went flying over the three of them. When it passed, they sat back up, Cole included. Then the two werewolves were on their feet, both moving as if they’d never been injured. The woman with the long, dark hair and extraordinary multi-colored eyes remained on the floor, turning her attention to the unconscious woman strapped to the chair.

  Charlie was now certain that the young mother was going to live. There was no absolute logic behind it; it was just an instinctive knowledge combined with the fact that Charlie could hear her heart beating. She also knew that the woman tending to her was some kind of witch. She’d healed Charlie and would do the same for the young mother who had been trapped in this Hell. Maybe she would even help her forget.

  Charlie scanned the room, once more searching for just one man. But, even as she searched, she felt her mate beside her, whole, alive, and strong. She thought of this moment in time – a gift she would have given anything for only minutes earlier.

  Jessie dispatched a Hunter, ripping his heart completely out of his body, and then turned toward another as the man came through what was left of the doorway.

  Charlie had never seen this side of her best friend. She’d never seen the wolf in Jessie. His amber eyes glowed like yellow fire. His fangs were stark white, long and sharp and wicked. His claws were fiendish and dreadful and his entire countenance seemed to have grown a foot taller and gained the breadth of the same. He was massive and monstrous and awesome.

  He was beautiful.

  Two other werewolves wrestled with one another in a corner. One must have worked for the Overseer. An enforcer, perhaps. The other must have been with Phelan. They were both in wolf form.

  The same scene was repeated near the center of the room and Charlie watched as one furry body was thrown into the bed, forcing the mattress and box springs it to go skidding across the room and smash against the opposite wall.

  The witch with kaleidoscope eyes managed to gather up the woman she’d untied and roll with her as the bed slid by, saving them both from its crushing momentum.

  Charlie watched as another enforcer flashed into wolf form and charged the two Hunters who were now racing through the door after their comrade. All three bodies went rolling back out into the hall.

  Machine guns littered the floor, along with the bodies of the fallen Hunters.

  And, still, Phelan was no where to be seen.

  * * * *

  Alexander waited with stark, calm patience as the man who had killed his son slowly stood from where Alex had thrown him against a hollow, dead tree trunk. Gabriel Phelan gained his ground, rose, and seemed to collect himself with incredible ease. Alexander watched as his wounds healed and his blue gaze focused on the Overseer.

  “Here to finish your son’s fight for him, old man?” Gabriel finally whispered. The words filled the silence of the desert around them. How they’d gotten there, Alexander was certain that Phelan did not know.

  Alex had taken them there. He could move through short spaces like that. In the blink of an eye – in a flash. And sometimes, if he willed it enough, he could take someone with him. His older brother possessed the same gift, but was able to travel vast distances with it. Kavanagh was confined to smaller areas. It was a lapse in power that his other abilities more than made up for.

  This was the desert that spanned out toward the airport behind the young mother’s dilapidated house. Phelan wouldn’t know that. But he also didn’t care. They were there now, and they were alone. This moment had been a long time coming.

  The moon shone brightly in the midnight tapestry above them. Power lines hummed softly several yards away. The rocks and dirt and bushes and lightning-struck tree husks were starkly outlined in the yellow-white light it shed.

  “You should have given her to me, Kavanagh. I would have spared you, then. Out of respect for her,” Phelan told him as he slowly pace away from the dead tree. The Overseer’s eyes carefully followed his movements. “But now I’ll have my men Hunt you down. And when they fail to find you, they’ll find your granddaughter.”

  “You’ll never touch her again, Phelan,” Alexander said. “Never.”

  Gabriel threw back his head and laughed, the sound coming from deep inside. It was truly hilarious to him, the idea of him leaving Charlie alone. “You’re a powerful old man, Kavanagh. I’ll give you that,” Gabriel finally said. He shook his head, once. “But you can’t stop me.”

  “I already have,” Alex replied. You’re here with me, Gabriel, and the woman you want is somewhere else, with her healed and chosen mate. He shot the words into Phelan’s mind. “In essence, I’ve won.”

  Gabriel’s expression froze. His gaze hardened.

  Alexander didn’t let up. The air around the
m began to grow hotter. Desert nights are mild in nature. The heat of the day leaks away to leave a gentle breeze that carries seventy degrees of comfort to everyone it touches. But now, that seventy degrees was rising. Seventy-five. Eighty. Ninety.

  At one hundred and five degrees, Gabriel glanced around. He sensed the power and smelled the magic and knew, in that instant, what he was up against.

  I will boil you alive from the inside out, Phelan, Alex told him. And then I will freeze you. And burn you – over and over again.

  The power lines overhead began to buzz. Louder and louder, they hummed in their casings until one snapped and snaked for a moment as it fell to the Earth. Sparks scattered and hissed as it hit the ground and skittered madly with the electricity running through it.

  Gabriel’s blue gaze cut to the line and then back to Alexander. Alex could smell the fear in him now. It was faint, but it was there.

  One hundred and fifteen degrees and climbing.

  Sweat broke out along Phelan’s brow, but his gaze narrowed. If I die, my Hunters will scatter, Kavanagh. They will go into hiding until you least expect it. And then they will come after those you love most.

  Alexander listened as the werewolf spat mental words back into his mind.

  “Your granddaughter will die, but not before her precious husband,” Gabriel said aloud. And her precious child, he added mentally. She will live to see every member of her family murdered. And then, by the time my men have finished with her, she’ll beg them to kill her.

  Fear was often a good determinant in a battle’s outcome, but anger was another. Both were a bane for any man wishing to gain the upper hand in a fight. And as Alexander rushed the other werewolf and Phelan met him, head-on in hand-to-hand combat, that point made itself decidedly clear.

  Phelan had been training to fight for years. His reflexes were quick and strong and Alexander failed to get a grip on the man. Their bodies flashed from human to wolf and back again. All the while, the air continued to grow hotter. Another power line broke free, snapping in half, the rubber tube casing scorched and smoking. Sparks showered down on the two struggling forms below.