Royal Mate

by Juniper Hart

  “Hungry, huh?” Reuben had watched her eat. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m impressed…”

  She gave a bashful expression. “I was hungry!”

  3

  As she finished off her drink, Cara glanced out the window.

  There was a man on a motorcycle in the parking lot across the street, staring at Eddy’s car through a motorcycle helmet. His helmet was ridiculous. Someone had painted a wild smiley face across the front, spanning from the visor to the back. But it wasn’t a nice smiley face, like the nice families often have painted in the dust of their back windshield.

  The face was… disturbed and just a little off. The teeth weren’t even and the smile was off-centered. Creepy. That was the only way she could explain it. Looking at the helmet and the man wearing it made the hair on the nape of her neck stand up.

  “Guys, check it out,” she said, pointing to him.

  Adrianna was the first one who saw him. “Eddy, get us out of here!” she ordered. “Now!”

  Eddy, to his credit, didn’t ask why. He just shifted the car into reverse and slammed on the accelerator. After a second, he jerked it into drive with his foot firmly placed on the pedal. The car’s wheels spun wildly as they tried to get traction before it shot off towards the road.

  “What the hell?” Reuben demanded, picking the remains of his burger off his lap. He had not been prepared for the sudden movement.

  Cara looked out the back window. The guy hadn’t moved. He was simply turning his head slowly, tracking their movements before he vanished behind a building. He wasn’t chasing them. He appeared to be content just watching.

  Adrianna wasn’t looking back. She was busy explaining to an angry Reuben why she had convinced Eddy to speed off. “Did you not see him?”

  “See who?” Reuben’s voice was a low growl. He had gotten most of the ketchup off his pants, but not all of it.

  “Jacob,” she said. “Widowmaker.”

  As far as cool names went, “Widowmaker” was right near the top. It caused a physical reaction from Eddy and Reuben. Reuben’s face went white.

  “Are you serious? There?” He shook it off. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Cara saw it too!”

  Everyone looked at Cara.

  “Well?” Reuben asked. “Did you see him?”

  “I have no idea who that is,” she replied. “But I saw some dude on a motorcycle with a smiley helmet.”

  Reuben let out a breath.

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Cara didn’t like it. She was okay not knowing everything about Reuben’s increasingly suspicious past, but it was another thing entirely to not know about who everyone was apparently scared of.

  “Who’s this Widowmaker guy?”

  Reuben was looking out the back window, but he obviously couldn’t see the motorcyclist. They’d left him far behind.

  “He’s a killer.”

  “A mercenary?” she asked.

  “Oh, he’s way worse. He’s a merc, but not like me. He only accepts death contracts. That’s why he has the nickname Widowmaker. He doesn’t care about right or wrong, good or evil. He just murders and brings back evidence—an ear or a ring or something. It’s always small enough to pack on him, but identifiable to the person he was sent after. Every now and then, it’s a picture. Point is he’s bad news. Very bad news. I’ve heard he’s never missed a target.”

  “But we can beat him, right?” She was starting to get nervous. The group seemed to have lost much of their confidence. “I mean, you guys are a bunch of hardcore guys… and woman-thing, whatever Adrianna is.”

  “Go suck a cock,” Adrianna said sweetly.

  Reuben took Cara’s question seriously. “Widowmaker is not the kind of man you want to mess with. I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to go up against him.”

  “Is he a human?”

  “No, but nobody’s really sure what he is.”

  “Thanks for clearing that up,” Cara said sarcastically.

  ‘So this guy’s name is Jacob? But kind of not, because he gets called by the name Widowmaker?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘So this guy is not human, but nobody knows what he is despite knowing his first name?’

  ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’

  Adrianna started shifting in her seat. Whoever this Widowmaker guy was, she didn’t want to interact with him. Cara was starting to hope they’d been wrong and it had been some other guy with a strangely painted helmet. Adrianna had been shot, thrown through several walls, drowned in a swimming pool, used as a sledgehammer to break a glass door, and basically ever other form of punishment out there. She wasn’t scared of Reuben or Eddy, but she was terrified of Widowmaker.

  Cara did not want to meet anyone or anything that frightened the assassin.

  Reuben had immediately dropped the nice werewolf act and started drilling Adrianna on everything she knew. She was still stunned from seeing the man on the bike, almost like she’d seen her own death. She robotically answered everything Reuben asked.

  “Where’s Ezekiel?”

  “He’s in Minneapolis. Or at least he was when I last saw him two days ago. He’s coming our way.”

  “Who else went after the bounty?”

  “I don’t know. I was the first to investigate the posting he put up. Widowmaker, apparently, wasn’t far behind.”

  The car suddenly accelerated, pushing the remainder of the lettuce on Reuben’s crotch into the seat. He cursed.

  “Eddy!”

  “We’ve got issues,” Eddy said. He swerved around one car and back again. “Look back!”

  Everyone turned as one. Cara spotted a motorcycle zipping between traffic. She thought for a second it was the smiley face guy, but upon closer examination, she saw that his helmet was completely normal except for a tiny shark fin up the middle. A moment later, there was another one from the right – and another behind that. Soon, she saw a fleet of bikes dangerously flying through traffic with something in their hands.

  It took her a second to see the “somethings” were actually compact submachine guns.

  “Who are they?” Cara yelped. “Is that Widowmaker?”

  “Goblins,” Reuben said. “Keep your head down!”

  He reached down into the backseat and shoved Cara down out of the way, turning into that alpha male that she was so attracted to. There wasn’t really enough room for both her and Adrianna to lie down and be protected if they started shooting. But because of Reuben’s helping hand, Cara won the battle. Unfortunately, her landing space was between Adrianna’s legs.

  “Get off me!” Adrianna shouted at her. “And dammit, Reuben, untie me!”

  “Shut up and lie down!”

  “Let me defend myself!”

  Reuben roared. “Eddy, let her go!”

  Eddy didn’t even worry about questioning Reuben. He simply just allowed the bonds to vanish by saying some sort of magic phrase. Adrianna looked down at Cara in her lap, looking like she about to rip Cara’s head straight off. She glanced up at Reuben. When he gave her a dangerous glare, she pulled her hands away from Cara’s body and ducked down.

  Despite Eddy’s best attempts to get ahead of the motorcyclists, the pursuers had the better vehicle for getting in and out of small places. Cara couldn’t see much else other than Adrianna’s muscular thighs, but she could hear angry commuters honking, the sound of a motorcycle zooming closer, and then, the one sound she’d been dreading.

  Gunfire.

  She’d fired guns before. She hadn’t made a practice of it, but she’d done it once or twice in self-defense, like the time she’d shot Adrianna. It had never seemed terribly loud then because it had been so close to her and she had known when it was coming. But when she’d heard other people fire weapons, it absolutely boomed. It sounded like a cannon going off. Strangely, when the bikers started shooting, it sounded quiet as though Cara was wearing noise-cancelling headphones. She lifted her head and spo
tted one biker speed by with his gun in his hand. The gun had a narrow attachment on the end. A silencer. These guys were professionals. Why they had decided to attack in the middle of an interstate, Cara didn’t know. All she knew was that they had, and that they were in the middle of a firefight with a series of armed shooters in a very public place.

  Something shattered the glass over her head, showering her in shards of sharp glass. She shrieked and tried to brush it off her head, which resulted in half a dozen little cuts on her fingers.

  Reuben lunged into the backseat and grabbed something from the weapons box that suddenly seemed like a great idea. He loaded it up and started firing at their pursuers. Not quickly – he didn’t want to hit an innocent bystander – but he carefully aimed and fired round after round.

  Something hit the back of the car. Adrianna turned to see, which tossed Cara off her lap. There were two men on the back of the car. Well, they weren’t really men. They had the same basic shape as your typical classic action movie thugs, but instead of shoes they were barefoot with huge, dagger-like claws that sank into the steel of the car and kept them from flying off. Adrianna shoved Cara out of her way and grabbed a gun from the weapons box.

  She’d barely loaded it before they shot her in the chest with some sort of blue bullet. When it hit her skin, it didn’t go straight through like a normal round. Instead, it burst into a thousand bright blue fragments. A bolt of electricity shot through each of the fragments, making Adrianna jitter and fall between the seats.

  Cara scrambled for a weapon while Adrianna’s body jittered violently next to her, but she didn’t know how to fight the creatures that were coming at them. Adrianna, to her credit, was starting to get up with tendrils of electricity shooting through her hands. Most of her hair was standing straight up from the electricity that was suddenly in the air, but she was obviously not ready to fight anyone.

  Cara took matters into her own hands, pointing the baby handgun she’d found at the guys on the back of the car and pulling the trigger. The resulting recoil was puny. It was a small handgun and couldn’t do much damage to most things. It could, however, do a considerable amount of damage to flesh. The tiny bullet streaked into one of the guy’s legs. He grabbed at it in surprise, lost his balance, and fell off the car. He tumbled across the ground once or twice before the tank following them plowed him over.

  Wait. What? A tank?

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Adrianna snapped, firing at the second guy, who ended up having the same rather unfortunate fate as the first guy. “A tank? Really?”

  It wasn’t a typical tank, like a modern day military war machine. It was somehow older, like the industrial train that had taken Reuben and Cara to South Dakota. Instead of pistons, there were clear reserves of a sort of gooey orange substance. The tank itself was littered with memorabilia from all over the place – from a pirate flag flying high to a bumper sticker that said Share the Road. A Respect Cyclists sticker stuck to the front of the monster. The part that especially stood out to Cara was the huge speakers strapped to the front that were playing “Born to be Wild!”

  “Guys,” Adrianna said, “I think stuff is about to get serious.”

  4

  Eddy was laying into the horn, trying to get everyone ahead of them out of the way. If they could just speed up, they could easily leave the tank behind. It was a tank, and they were in a sports car. Do the math. But the problem was that the interstate was so busy that it was all Eddy could do to avoid them getting run over by the tank, all while being shot at by the remaining motorcyclists.

  “Ye-ye-ye-ye!” howled one of the bikers on Cara’s side, jumping from his bike towards the car. At the last second, Eddy saw it coming and spun the wheel to mess up his trajectory. The biker slammed into the side of the car loudly, busting open the window and also his visor. His face was a sickly yellow with serious goblin-like features. If Cara had seen a picture of him in a book, she would have known: goblin. The large nose, small eyes, sharp fangs, and ugly features were all a dead giveaway of a classic goblin.

  He grabbed something from his belt and tossed it through the now-open window. “Catch, ladies!”

  Adrianna shot the unfortunate goblin in the face.

  His head snapped back and he rolled off the car, but the thing he’d thrown inside started beeping.

  “Get it out!” Adrianna yelled, trying to grab the little orb. It bounced over to Cara, who grabbed it and chunked it out the window. It sailed through the air for a moment before landing under the tank’s fearsome treads. It blew up a second later. The tank bucked wildly, but was otherwise unaffected. “Born to be Wild” missed a beat before getting back on rhythm.

  “Eddy, get us out of here!” Reuben yelled.

  A motorcycle came up beside him and shot him with one of the blue bullets. He snarled in pain and anger, and pushed open the door into the guy. At the speed they were going, the goblin lost control and slammed into a ‘keep left’ sign.

  “What do you think I’m trying to do?” Eddy yelled back. “They’re everywhere!”

  To Cara, everything was in slow motion. She’d heard that in times of extreme stress and danger, people saw things in a slower time frame. She hadn’t ever believed it. She’d always just assumed it was a common myth like alligators living in the sewers: fun, but completely wrong. She learned on that car ride that it was no myth. She felt strangely alive and excited and even calm. She knew it was crazy. She was not a soldier, unlike all of the other people in the car, but she supposed her adrenaline had simply kicked in.

  It was in slow motion that she saw Eddy get shot.

  Again, the blue bullet hit square on. Eddy didn’t have the incredible strength and stamina that Adrianna or Reuben had. He was, near as Cara could tell, a human that had powers. He jolted around before slumping. The car’s wheel started to spin wildly, but they weren’t slowing down.

  Reuben grabbed the wheel and slammed the goblin into a large truck. He then tried to either get Eddy to wake up or pull his foot off the gas so they didn’t keep accelerating towards the traffic that was trying to get out of the way. He accomplished neither goal.

  “His foot’s stuck!” Reuben shouted. “I can’t get him free!”

  Cara wasn’t sure what got into her, but she jumped between the front seats to land on top of Eddy. She was the only one of them that could actually fit between him and the steering wheel. Her thighs were pressed up against the wheel, but she took charge of the vehicle and swerved to keep them from going off the interstate onto the smaller roads below.

  Reuben kept tugging on Eddy’s foot, trying to get it unstuck. Cara couldn’t see what Adrianna was doing, but she could hear gunshots. Cara was panicking so much that she didn’t quite register the fact that she was driving a getaway car from a hoard of goblins that apparently wanted a reward on her head for angering a vampire clan.

  That was one to put on the resume list, right next to “computer science major” and “eight years of writing experience.”

  She tried to remember how famous drivers did it. They had to have some sort of easy steps to follow, right? Do this, then this, and you’ll be fine. Then again, she reminded herself, professional drivers get a nice oval space to drive around in. They didn’t have to worry about hitting people just trying to get to work in the morning.

  As she veered to avoid a car, something boomed and the back half of their vehicle shot up in the air before crashing down, sending the remains of the windows into the seats.

  “What was that?” she yelped.

  “The tank is shooting at us!” Adrianna told her. “Get off the damn road!”

  If only it were that easy. People on the interstate could hear the chase coming and were pulling off to the sides of the road to let the chase go right through the middle. Whether they planned it that way or if that was just how it worked out, Cara didn’t know. What she did know is that it completely blocked their little group from getting off at any of the exits.

  Finally,
she saw one that was half unblocked. She shot towards it while the tank fired off a couple more shots at them. Each one made the car swerve and pushed Cara’s heart further into her throat, but she zoomed towards the small hole as fast as she could.

  Fifty feet… Twenty… Ten… Five… One.

  She hit the sides of the cars on both sides, but other than scratched paint and a horrid screeching sound as the doors lost part of themselves, they were through and they were okay.

  The tank, meanwhile, attempted to follow them, misjudged, and plowed through the guardrail. The driver attempted to correct, but it was too late.

  Watching a tank fall off an elevated interstate highway was unlike anything Cara had ever seen. It kept playing “Born to be Wild” as it fell.

  Boom.

  It didn’t explode, which made Cara somehow disappointed. It just hit the ground like a huge boulder instead of an intricate machine. Whatever was inside was unconscious at best, but was most likely dead from the impact.

  “Oh my God!” Cara yelled. “Reuben, get his foot off the pedal!”

  Driving on the interstate full speed in a very fast sports car was one of the scariest moments in Cara’s twenty-eight years of life, but a close second was trying to drive it on the side roads. There was less traffic, sure, but there were also more stop lights. More than once they barely managed to avoid getting creamed by unknowing traffic.

  They saw the lights of a police car once. That was it. The cops stood no chance against Eddy’s car, as they were gone almost before they showed up.

  Finally, Reuben managed to untangle Eddy’s foot from the pedal. They came to a stop on a dusty road by what they could only assume was a series of huge old farms.

  “Is he okay?” Adrianna asked Reuben as he checked Eddy’s pulse.