Outlaw (A Tale of the Talhari Book 2)

by Heather Elizabeth King

  “Hush.”

  “What do you hear?”

  “I’m not sure.” He squeezed her hand. “It sounds like—”

  Then she heard it too, the low growl of a dog. A very large dog. “What is it?”

  His face was grim. “Your friends.”

  She eyed him. “Don’t be stupid. That’s a dog of some sort, or a … I don’t know what, but whatever it is, it’s not human.”

  “My point exactly.” His grip on her hand tightened, and he tugged her close until she was standing flush against him. “I think I made a mistake insisting you see them for what they are. I want you to go out back to the wine cellar. Go to the back of the house, just beyond the deck and you’ll see the entrance to the cellar. I want you to go there and wait for me there. There’s no internal access to it and I doubt they’ve ventured outside, so they shouldn’t know of its existence. You should be safe in the cellar.”

  His gaze was steady, so she knew he was serious, but she wasn’t about to do what he said. “I’m not leaving.”

  The growls were louder now, the source closer.

  “Don’t argue with me. Just go! What’s coming down that hall is not your friend.”

  She was opening her mouth to refuse again when Dario appeared in the second floor hall. He was running full out and didn’t pause at the balcony. He bounded over the railing and landed in the foyer ten feet from them, and ran for the front door. “Found three upstairs,” he shouted as he went. “They’re coming.” He swung the door open, leaned out and shouted, “Wolf!”

  Umberto pulled the pistol from his waistband. “Where are they?”

  “Behind me,” Dario said, moving to Umberto’s side, holding his own gun in hand. “She shouldn’t be here. They’re third stage.”

  The snarls were coming closer, as the sound drew nearer the noise of heavy footfalls echoed through the entrance hall. She knew from the noise that whatever was coming, there was more than one of them. But what were they? Despite what Umberto and Dario were implying, she knew the approaching creatures weren’t from the order. Whatever was coming was bigger than a human and far deadlier.

  “Make her go,” Dario was saying. “You know these guns won’t do anything but slow them down now that they’re third stage, and you can’t fight and hang on to her at the same time.”

  Umberto released her and clenched his hand into a loose fist. When he spread his fingers again she saw his nails had lengthened to fine points. She stared at his fingers, at his hands, but made no move to run. For years she’d been told about the vampire metamorphosis, but she’d never seen it with her own eyes. The most she’d ever seen were fangs and red eyes from the older ones. As she watched, his fangs extended, sharpening until the tips were honed to deadly points. His honey-colored eyes were changing too, deepening until all remnants of brown were gone’ replaced by the blood red hue of an old vampire’s eyes. The transformation she was witnessing should have repulsed her. She shouldn’t have seen Umberto the man anymore, but the undead thing that had taken over Umberto’s body. Problem was, she didn’t see a thing when she looked at Umberto, even now. He was still Umberto; the lure of him was still too strong for her to want to walk away from him.

  “They won’t go after her,” Dario was saying, “not when they have us to deal with.” His voice had changed, had grown deeper. She knew he was changing too, was allowing the vampire to take control.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said, forcing herself to turn from Umberto and focus on the balcony. “I’m trained for this.”

  The balcony shook with the force of heavy footfalls. Because the growls were louder, she figured the source was likely to appear at any second.

  “You don’t have a choice, Bleu.”

  She was rounding on Dario, prepared to tell him to back off when the front door crashed in. Wolf leapt into the entrance hall, snatching at his clothes as he moved. He ripped his coat to shreds, tore his shirt down the middle. His muscles rippled with every movement, flexing and contracting, bunching and expanding. He was changing, transforming before her eyes, but not like Umberto and Dario. His nose spread, split, lengthened even as his mouth lengthened into a muzzle. His eyes darkened until they were as black as a moonless night. Hair sprouted out along his naked back and chest, covering him with tufts of thick black fur.

  She took a step toward Dario while reaching for her blade. Her missing blade. “Shit.”

  “He’s a lycan. You’ve nothing to be afraid—” Umberto began to say, but at that moment, three figures appeared at the top of the balcony.

  Bleu heard herself gasp, felt her heart turn to ice as she stood, staring. She recognized the three, recognized them, but had never seen them before in her life. “Eddie, Pendleton, Dalton,” she whispered.

  “Get her out of here,” Dario said.

  On the balcony, the three figures leered. She could make out the glossy black uniforms they’d been wearing, knew them well because it was what she’d get to wear after the successful completion of this assignment when she got her embeds. But where her uniform would fit nice and snug, the three on the balcony had rent the stretchy fabric to ribbons. Muscles had burst through seams, exposing the furry, inhuman skin below. Hair was long and straggly, so unlike the close cut hair of the men she knew. It was like they had devolved somehow, had reverted to a primitive form of man; Neanderthal meets australopithecine. Their arms were longer, their backs slightly bowed, but the gleam of intelligence in their eyes was unmistakable. She thought despite the simian appearance of the three, their intelligence was entirely human.

  Umberto shoved her toward the front door. “Go to the cellar. Hide. I’ll find you.”

  She took a step back, thought about staying. She was a Talhari … at least she had thought she was. She hadn’t been trained for this. Her training had centered on vampires, not lycan and definitely not on whatever the hell was on the balcony.

  “Go!”

  Gaia Knight had taught her that when the odds were clearly in the opponent’s favor, there was no shame in retreating to reassess your strategy.

  The figures leapt over the balcony railing, landed on the foyer and loped forward.

  Running wasn’t in her nature.

  She spread her legs and got ready to fight.

  From her left, something crashed into her. The blow was hard enough for her to lose her balance. It pushed against her. She was sliding across the floor too fast to grab hold of anything.

  The last thing she saw before crashing out of a foyer window was Umberto trying to run toward her. But the three from the balcony were on them.

  She fell out of the window and landed in a pile of glass.

  Inside, glaring at her through the broken window, was Nick.

  As she stared up at him, Nick’s skin began to change, his arms lengthened, his features changed. He was becoming like the things she’d seen on the balcony.

  Inside, Umberto was calling for her.

  She got to her feet, but Nick was coming out toward her. He paused there in the window, looking to his left.

  She looked to her right and nearly cried out.

  There were dozens of them. Dozens of beasts closing in on the house. But they weren’t like what she’d seen on the balcony, not like Nick. These creatures were lycan, like Wolf. Wolf had never hurt her. Chances were good that the beasts rapidly closing in on the house wouldn’t either.

  But she couldn’t risk it.

  When she looked back at the window, Nick was gone. She wanted to go back into the house, but the creatures were coming too fast. Her best bet would be to go around back and back inside from the rear.

  She leapt off the balcony, hoping against hope the lycan wouldn’t follow. But even as she moved she realized there might be more of them in the back. Even if she didn’t see them right away, that didn’t mean they weren’t there, watching. Wolf had said they were guarding the grounds, so they could be anywhere.

  Gaia never said anything about lycan.

  She reached
the back deck at a run, had to force herself to slow down and search for the cellar entrance. Umberto had said it was just beyond the deck.

  Looking over her shoulder, expecting attack at any second, she moved beyond the deck. So far, she was alone. No one had come after her. So, she searched. The seconds seemed to tick by like minutes—every one of them an agony. She didn’t want to think about lycan, and she especially didn’t want to think about what she had seen in the house. Talhari, but not Talhari. Umberto had been telling her the truth.

  Then she saw it. She wanted to howl in triumph. “Get a grip, Bleu,” she told herself. “It’s just a cellar.”

  But it wasn’t just a cellar. It was a way back in.

  From the outside, it looked old fashioned; the kind of cellar whose doors had been built into the ground. One look at the thing, shadowed by a large weeping willow, and she had an urge to go back the way she came.

  “Get a grip girl and stop acting like a coward.” She’d been to worse places in her life, after all, and had never batted a lash. Going unpleasant places and meeting unpleasant people was the nature of her work. She’d gotten accustomed to that a long time ago. At least she thought she had. Then she’d come face to face with a werewolf and seen her colleagues turned into Tolkien creatures of the night. And what exactly was she, if she wasn’t Talhari?

  “Only a cellar,” she said in a whisper.

  But every time she looked at it she got a flash in her mind of the movie adaptation to Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot”. She could see the vampire, garbed in black and looming in the shadows, waiting. Waiting. The damn cellar was creepy. Why in the hell had Umberto told her to go there of all places?

  But it was just a cellar. No Stephen King monsters there, otherwise Umberto wouldn’t have told her to go there.

  Huffing a breath, she started forward.

  The grass around the cellar door was pretty much non-existent, which wasn’t odd since the spot would rarely receive any sunlight during the day. She bent and pulled the cellar doors open. They moved easily on their hinges. Immediately she was greeted with the stench of mold and rot.

  She gritted her teeth and swallowed the lump in her throat. Steadying herself, she stepped down into the cool darkness. She was enveloped by it and again had to staunch an urge to turn and run. She kept her hands braced on either side of the wall as she descended, feeling for a light switch, all the while knowing she wouldn’t find one until she got to the bottom, and maybe not then. So far, the only light sources she’d seen had come from candles. Odds were the same would hold true for the cellar. And she didn’t have matches or a lighter. Fortunately, there was just enough light coming in from the moon above to light the stairway. She wasn’t going in blind.

  At the bottom, she found a pull cord and gave the line a tug. Immediately, the cellar was awash in light. “Thank God.”

  Unfortunately, the cellar didn’t look any better in the light than it had in the dark. Much as she expected from the foul odor saturating the air around her, the cellar was in severe disrepair. From the look of the place, nobody had done much upkeep there. Unlike the immaculate living space upstairs, the cellar was in dire need of renovation. The floor was covered by a heavy powdering of dust and grime. It was so thick she could make out the tracks of foot traffic in the dirt. Every counter top and every window was covered in filth. Around the floor she saw bits of rat droppings. Cobwebs and spider webs were the rule, not the acceptance. Save the center aisle between wine racks and the wine racks themselves, everything in the cellar suffered horribly from neglect.

  She stepped back onto the bottom step, climbed up, and pulled the cellar doors gently shut.

  Carefully, she stepped onto the cellar floor and made her way toward the center aisle, taking great pain not to make any noise. As she moved, she searched for movement and for a door back into the house.

  She entered the center aisle and turned to make sure nothing had crept up behind her. When she turned back and started forward again she noticed there was a name at the end of each rack. She didn’t know whether the name referred to the wine brand or where it came from, and she didn’t much care. She walked slowly, stopping to look over her shoulder every few seconds.

  The creatures she had seen on the balcony, those beasts had been Talhari. She recognized their uniforms. But how could that be? She’d been with the organization for years and had never seen anything like that. Gaia Knight, who’d become closer to Bleu than anyone else, had never mentioned anything of the sort. Was there truly a civil war among the Talhari?

  Umberto had known what she was all along. Instead of letting the mission go down as Kyle had planned, Umberto had kidnapped her, an action that had the effect of pulling her from danger. He didn’t have to do that, but he’d done it anyway. And for the two days that she’d been in his house, he hadn’t hurt her. Nobody had. He’d hidden her away so nobody would find her.

  “Damn it,” she whispered, trying to gain courage from the sound of her own voice. Thinking of Umberto had reminded her of something he’d said in the house. That there was no way back into the house from the cellar.

  “Damn it,” she said again. She wasn’t sure what to do. Go back outside and around the side of the house so she could get back in? She couldn’t stay out here while people were fighting inside. While Umberto was fighting inside.

  Something moved. She jerked her head up. Instead of running to investigate, she hunkered low to the floor and didn’t move again; only listened.

  There it was again. A soft shuffle. What was it?

  Again, there it was.

  Someone … something was down there with her.

  She was on her feet in an instant, listening. The sound was soft, wispy, like someone walking. No, that wasn’t quite right. It sounded like they were dragging one foot behind them as they came.

  Step, scrape, step, scrape.

  She doubted it was Umberto, or anyone with good intentions. Anyone who didn’t mean her harm would have come down the cellar stairs, seen the light was on, and called out. They would have announced themselves, not wanting to scare her and not wanting her to scare them. This person did neither.

  She tried to peer through the racks, but that wasn’t any good. She couldn’t see anything. She moved toward the center aisle with sure, light steps, careful not to make a sound.

  The person was closer now. She could hear breathing. It was a phlegmy sound, as though they were just getting over a bad cold.

  The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

  Step, scrape, step, scrape.

  She neared the end of the aisle, held her breath. She needed her blades, her weapons, something.

  Without second guessing herself, she grabbed a bottle of wine and held it clenched in both hands, batter style.

  Step, scrape, step, scrape.

  Her hands tightened around the glass bottle neck. It would have to do. It wasn’t a knife, but was better than nothing.

  Step, scrape, step, scrape.

  Goose flesh stood out on her skin. A shiver moved the length of her body.

  Step, scrape, step, scrape.

  The mysterious person was closer.

  Almost on her. Any second now.

  Step, scrape, step, scrape.

  Then nothing.

  Nothing.

  They’d stopped.

  She had to work to keep her breathing under control and fight not to move.

  The stranger didn’t move.

  What on earth was he, was it, waiting for? But she didn’t have to think on that question for too long. She knew what it was doing. It was waiting for her to act, waiting for her to make the first move.

  She waited, wishing she knew what kind of threat she was facing. Was it a man or a creature, a lycan, a vampire, a Talhari beast? Unbidden, an image of Peter Jackson’s uruk-hai monsters played across her mind’s eye and had her shrinking in on herself. She wondered if that had been what the Talhari beasts had been modeled after? The Talhari beasts were more
simian than the uruk-hai, but the resemblance was too horribly similar to be an accident.

  Uruk-hai inspired creatures or not, she had to get tough. She might have to fight her way out of there.

  Whatever it was, it didn’t move. She knew it was still there, though. Not only could she feel its presence, she could hear it breathing.

  Not human, she thought.

  Nick. Only Nick would follow her here. Only Nick hated her enough to want to kill her. But not Nick. It would be the Uruk-hai version of Nick she’d seen him becoming in the house.

  She swallowed a nearly insurmountable desire to scream. Shaking with terror, she bit her lip hard until she felt blood oozing over her skin. She forced herself to stay calm. She couldn’t very well stay in the cellar forever, waiting this thing out. She had to do something.

  Must escape, she thought. Must get out of here. Go back in the house and help Umberto.

  If Umberto is still alive, a sinister voice inside her head mocked.

  She took a deep breath, braced herself to step out into the aisle. Took one more breath, and then screamed.

  The sound echoed off the walls around her. She scrambled back, nearly falling onto the ground. She backpedaled until she hit the wall, crashing so hard into it that her teeth slammed against her tongue.

  She screamed again.

  The figure bounded into the aisle after her, loping forward and baring its fangs. The creature’s eyes were huge and feral, its hair long and straggly, its form was similar to the creatures she’d seen in the house. There were only two differences. This creature had a blade of some sort sticking out of his left leg. She knew at once it was the blade that made it walk funny. Someone had fought the beast, stabbed it, but it had still managed to get away. Then there was the uniform. Where the uniform the others had worn was black and green, the thing before her wore a rent uniform of black.

  Still clenching the bottle of wine in both hands, Bleu sucked in a breath and tried to steady herself. “Nick?” She tried to press her body into the wall, but had retreated as far as she could go.

  The thing before her slowed as it closed the distance. It seemed to grin at her.