Outlaw Lovers: The Claiming

by Jan Springer

  He made an attempt to hand her his gun and she pushed it away.

  “No! You’re not going up there unarmed. If you go. I go with you.”

  “C’mon, Callie. Don’t make this hard for me.”

  “Screw you,” she spat and raced over to the kitchen counter.

  Lifting the lid to the flour canister, she dug out two flour-covered boxes of bullets and shoved one box in each of her back jean pockets.

  When she reached his side again, she had her gun firmly in one hand and a butcher knife clenched in the other.

  His gut twisted at the sight. It was the same knife she’d said she would have used on herself the night he’d first come to the cabin and taken away her gun.

  “Ready?” she asked him, determination flaring in her blue eyes.

  “Can we argue about this?”

  “No.”

  Shit!

  “Okay, just stay close to me and do as I say.”

  She tilted her head slightly in a most endearing way. “Don’t I always?”

  He almost laughed but stifled the urge. There were more important things to do right now than to afford himself the luxury of laughing.

  * * * * *

  The cabin and the surroundings were in almost complete darkness when they sprinted to the cliffs. She half expected to hear the zing of a bullet and see Luke fall to the ground, but nothing happened. As they reached the rocks, pure adrenalin raced through her making her want to sprint up the trail and come out on top shooting at anything that moved. She would have, too, if Luke hadn’t been here with her.

  Luke pointed to the eastern horizon where she noted the full moon shining through the trees.

  “We’re going to have to move fast before that moon clears the trees and catches us in the open,” Luke whispered.

  She nodded and followed closely behind him as they began to ascend the dark track that would ultimately lead to the lookout where she’d enjoyed her time alone just this morning.

  Gosh, it had been a close call.

  What if the person or persons had come along this morning while she’d been up there?

  She would have been in big trouble as she’d sat there debating whether to tell Luke her secrets. Anyone could have snuck up on her. As she’d told Luke earlier, she’d let her guard down over the past days. She couldn’t allow that to happen again.

  Her fingers tightened around the gun and the knife, and she trudged silently through the cool darkness.

  They were almost to the top when she noted Luke’s pace had slowed significantly. It was a good thing they hadn’t tried to make a run for it. Obviously, he was hurting more than he’d let on, and she wished she could call a halt to this insanity of coming up here. But the moon was rising steadily and it wouldn’t be too long before everything became illuminated.

  The urge to grab him and pull him back down to the safety of the cabin was so great she almost did it. But then they hit the crest of the cliff and Luke halted.

  A cool breeze blew against her making her shiver as she looked around. Up here the moon-glow had already arrived. Everything was illuminated in an eerie blue glaze that sent shivers rippling up her spine.

  “Look,” Luke whispered.

  She followed his pointing finger and barely made out the lone silhouette of someone sitting with his back against a gnarled pine tree, about thirty feet away. The intruder was facing the area where their cabin was located but his baseball cap was pulled over his eyes as if he were asleep. She didn’t miss the rifle cradled in his arms.

  Luke had been right. Someone was up here.

  “I’m going over to pay our friend a visit,” he whispered. “You stay here and cover me. If he moves…shoot him.”

  Before Callie could mount a protest, Luke had disappeared into the shadows.

  * * * * *

  Luke gently placed the open end of his pistol against the stranger’s neck.

  “Not one move, mister,” he hissed.

  The stranger didn’t so much as flinch, and for a heart-stopping moment Luke thought he might be dead.

  And then he spoke.

  “How’s the shoulder doing?”

  Luke tensed as he recognized the voice of Seth Barlow, the man who’d shot him.

  “What are you doing here, Barlow? This is Outlaw land.”

  Barlow tilted the brim of his baseball hat off his forehead and smirked, “Noticed you’ve shacked yourself up with an unclaimed woman. Callie Callahan, if memory serves me correctly.”

  Dread ripped through him. He’d seen Callie.

  “Hand over the rifle.”

  Barlow hesitated a moment, and Luke prepared himself for a fight. Then the man lifted the butt-end of the rifle and Luke quickly snatched it away.

  He pressed his gun harder against the top of Barlow’s head.

  “I asked you a question, Barlow. What do you want?”

  “Been scouting around.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re considering expanding our empire. We’ve got plans for your land, and your brother Tyler’s land.”

  Barlow’s blue eyes gleamed with amusement as he waited for Luke’s reaction.

  “Our contract says no foreclosure unless we miss two payments. We haven’t missed any. You have no rights to our land. Get out of here. Don’t come back.”

  “There’s talk about an offer. You want to hear it?”

  “No.”

  “Even if we considered telling you where your brother Tyler is?”

  Son of a bitch!

  “You tell me where he is right now and I’ll sign over my land when I have him back here safe and sound. You’ll have to talk to Tyler about acquiring his property. If I remember correctly it’s paid for.”

  Barlow pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Your brother is one tough nut to crack. He’s already refused any deal regarding his land.”

  “Can’t say I blame him.”

  The urge to strangle the whereabouts of his brother out of Barlow was so great that he almost did it, but Barlow didn’t give him a chance.

  Before Luke could so much as blink, Seth knocked the rifle out of Luke’s hands and crashed shoulder first into his injured shoulder.

  Pain exploded through him.

  His legs gave out and he careened to the rocky ground.

  The barrel of the Barlow’s rifle kissed his forehead.

  “You should know by now no one says no to a Barlow. Not even an Outlaw. When we want something, we always get it. And right now I want that pretty little lady you got stashed away down in that cabin. Once I’m finished with you, I’ll be paying her a visit.”

  A gunshot blast shattered the night and Barlow’s eyes widened in the moonlight.

  A split second later he toppled over, hitting the ground with a dull thud.

  “Luke? Are you all right?” Callie called shakily as she raced toward him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Is he dead? Who is he? I saw him grab the rifle away from you…” She stopped mid-sentence and recognition rolled into her eyes.

  “Oh, my God. It’s a Barlow.”

  “Don’t be frightened, Callie.”

  She didn’t say anything as she stared down at the body. With a bullet hole in his upper left back and barely any blood spewing, he’d have to say Callie shot him square through the heart.

  The pain in his shoulder was almost unbearable as he struggled to stand. Reaching over, he grabbed the rifle from the dead man’s hand and searched through his pockets.

  He came up empty.

  But there was a sack beneath the tree where Barlow had sat.

  He seized the sack and the rifle, and grabbed Callie’s arm ushering her away from the body. In the moonlight, her face glowed a sickening white and she was shaking like a leaf.

  “I…I’ve never killed anyone before, Luke,” she whispered, as she cast quick glances at the dead body.

  At this point, he would have done anything so that she hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger.

&nbs
p; “I know, sweetie, but you did right. Or else it would have been me lying there instead of Barlow.” He shoved his pistol into his waistband, and pried her gun from her cold fingers before throwing it into the sack. Pain rippled through his shoulder as he intertwined Callie’s cold, stiff fingers with his and pulled her toward the trail.

  “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.” He hoped he was telling her the truth. And he hoped there weren’t any more Barlow brothers lurking around up here.

  “C’mon, let’s get down to the cabin.”

  * * * * *

  By the time they reached the cabin, the pain in his shoulder had turned to barely a dull throb. But it wasn’t himself he was concerned about it was Callie.

  Anxiety ripped across her features, and she’d vomited twice on the way down.

  She wasn’t taking her first kill very well. And he didn’t have the heart to tell her there might be more deaths on both their hands if things kept going the way they were.

  “Here, take a swig of this.”

  He uncapped a half-full bottle he’d found in the Barlow sack, rubbed the rim clean and handed it to her. Right now, he didn’t care if a dead man had been drinking from it; his first priority was to get her warm.

  “Whiskey?” she blinked at him with tear-filled eyes.

  “It’ll warm you up.”

  She nodded meekly, tilted the bottle, took a giant gulp and made a sour face.

  Grabbing a comforter from a nearby shelf, he wrapped it around her shivering body then began massaging her tight shoulders.

  “No one kills a Barlow and gets away with it,” she whispered then took another gulp.

  “We will. At first light, I’ll go up and bury the body.”

  “They’ll come looking for him. They’ll find him. They’ll figure it all out.”

  Panic laced her voice. She took another long swig of the whiskey.

  “They’ll only figure it out if we tell them, sweetie. And we aren’t telling them. Do you hear me?”

  She nodded and smiled wryly. “More secrets to keep. When will they all stop?”

  “This is a secret we have to keep, Callie. Okay? Are you listening to me? Tonight never happened. We don’t know anything.”

  “The Barlows own the town. They own the cops. They own the judges.”

  Luke didn’t have the heart to disagree. He knew she spoke the truth.

  The Barlows would come looking. They’d come asking questions.

  He needed to get Callie out of here.

  They’d leave for the Outlaw farm tomorrow.

  * * * * *

  That night there was no incentive to make love, no reason to be happy as Luke urged her to climb into bed with him so they could rest. The whiskey had done the trick by taking the edge off her panic and calming her enough so she could relax in his arms.

  In spite of her best efforts not to fall asleep, she did. With sleep came the familiar nightmare memory. Like always she was helpless to stop it…

  Even with her sudden grogginess, her heart picked up a frantic pace, and she clutched the sheets tightly around her as she always did when she heard the footsteps pause at her isolation unit. No one had come to take any samples from her for several days now. That was highly unusual considering not one day had gone by in the five years since she’d been locked up in this facility that a nurse or a doctor hadn’t come to jab needles into her body parts or told her to pee in a cup, or something.

  What would they want from her this time? Blood samples? Urine? Maybe her fingernail clippings like the last time? Or maybe they’d shave off skin samples from her thighs like the time before?

  She shuddered. That was one of the worst things they’d done to her so far and she wasn’t eager to repeat it anytime soon.

  The door clicked open, and a strange pockmark-faced man in a white lab coat walked inside.

  Instantly she didn’t like him. Whether it was because of the creepy satisfied way he looked at her from beneath his black, handlebar moustache as if she were some prized guinea pig, or because of the odd tray filled with empty test tubes that he held in his hand, she didn’t know. But instantly she did not like this guy.

  She blinked away the sleepiness that was tugging down her eyelids and sat up in bed.

  “Hello, Callie,” he said casually.

  “Hi.” The palms of her hands grew damp with a sudden nervousness. Who was he? She’d never seen him before.

  “I’ve heard you’ve been in here for quite a few years.”

  “That’s right.”

  He sat down on the lone steel chair, and lifted out a thick file from the tray he’d brought in. He flipped it open and read the contents for a moment, the sound of his heavy breathing split the sterile air of her isolation cell.

  He looked at her with coal-black, frosty eyes that made her shiver, and cocked a dark eyebrow in puzzlement. “You never acquired the X-virus?”

  “You sound surprised?” What a stupid question. Why else would she be locked in here?

  He glared at her and she shifted uneasily.

  “I am surprised, considering I’m the one who created it.”

  Her mouth opened in shock. Her thoughts whirled.

  This was Blakely? The scientist who’d sold the X-virus to the DogmarX terrorist group. What the heck was he doing here?

  “I gather by the expression on your face you’ve heard of me.”

  “Hasn’t everyone?” she snarled as raw anger sifted through her.

  The monster had single-handedly almost wiped out womankind. And he was walking around scot-free! As if he’d done nothing wrong.

  He shrugged coolly. “Well then, let’s get down to business. I’ve been hired by the US government to find a vaccine for the mutated versions of my virus. And I can do it by any means necessary.”

  The US government hired him? That couldn’t be possible.

  “The first business at hand is to try and infect you with the X-virus.”

  Her blood literally froze in her veins. Infect her?

  “I don’t think so,” she snapped blinking away the odd sleepiness that was claiming her senses despite her growing fear.

  He frowned obviously not liking her defiance.

  “I should tell you that the government has allowed me free rein over you, Callie. You belong to me now. I can do whatever I want with you. Anything.”

  Callie shivered at his chilling words.

  “But before that, I’ll be extracting samples from you, so I can analyze your DNA.”

  “Like hell you will.”

  “Unfortunately, my dear, you have no choice in the matter. By now you should be feeling a little sleepy.”

  Sleepy? How the hell did he know?

  “Drugs in your food, Callie.”

  No!

  She tried to push aside the sheets covering her so she could stand up, but her hands didn’t cooperate.

  Oh, my God!

  He chuckled, the horrid sound slicing blades of terror through her.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll survive this operation.”

  “Operation? I’m not having any operation,” her words were beginning to slur.

  Fight it, Callie! Fight it!

  “We’re just going do a little internal exam on you, among other things.”

  “No fucking way are you touching me!” Callie made another move to get up, but her limbs wouldn’t cooperate and she sprawled helplessly onto the bed.

  Above her Blakely hovered like a grinning vulture, drenching her in a sickening scent of tobacco that made her stomach churn, and showing off a set of yellow stained teeth that made her cringe.

  Raw terror washed through her veins as his cool finger trailed up along the side of her neck and settled beneath her chin.

  “Easy, Callie. It’ll all be over before you know it.”

  She wanted to scream but darkness swooped over her, freezing her cries for help deep in her throat.

  Chapter Eight

  It was a strangled cry that broke Luke fr
om a deep sleep. A noise that sounded oddly similar to that of a trapped animal.

  For a moment, he thought it was, but when he squinted through the darkness and saw Callie, his heart nearly froze at the shocking sight.

  She was still fast asleep and in the grips of a nightmare.

  Her face was so pale in the candle glow it sent a shiver of fear through him that had him bolting upright to find her fingers knotted in the bedsheets as if she were preventing someone from ripping them off her.

  My God!

  “Callie,” he whispered, trying to keep his voice low so as to not alarm her.

  She didn’t respond.

  “Callie, c’mon baby, you’re having a nightmare.”

  He gently shook her shoulder. It was a big mistake.

  She turned on him like a wildcat.

  “Get away from me! You bastard!” Her fists shot out blindsiding him. Hard knuckles smashed into his eye, a knotted fist made impact with his sore shoulder, sending renewed shards of pain ripping through him and making him cry out.

  She must have heard him because suddenly her fists went slack.

  Terror-filled eyes blinked back at him.

  For a moment, she didn’t recognize him, and it took every ounce of strength for him not to cuddle her into his arms and soothe away her horror, but that look of fear on her face led him to believe the last thing she wanted right now was to be touched.

  Tears washed over her rounded cheeks and she quickly wiped them away, as if trying to erase the evidence that she was distraught.

  Instinctively, he knew it was finally time for her to tell him what was bothering her.

  “I think we’d better talk about your nightmare, Callie.”

  A new kind of terror flashed in her eyes. A fear of telling him?

  She reached out and brushed soothing fingertips against the bandage covering his shoulder.