The dim illumination from the lights of the city revealed that the rails had been worn smooth by passing trains. The two Prowlers moved quickly into the tunnel that had been hollowed beneath the city streets. Without the lights of the city, Bill felt immediately claustrophobic. He was not so dependent upon nature as many of his kind were — as he himself had once been — but with the stone and metal all around him and the thousands of tons of earth above him, he felt trapped. The air was close and oppressive, rank with the smell of urine and the scents of homeless humans who had made the tunnels their residence.
Scents.
Among the overpowering scents locked in that underground maze was the stench of death, of rotting flesh. The tunnels were deserted, devoid of human presence, save for that smell.
"They're dead," Bill growled.
Lao glanced at him as they followed the tracks. "Yes. I smell it as well. Humans, living down here. Many of them were killed."
"By us," Bill said.
"Not us," Lao said sharply. "Not us."
Bill understood what he meant. Whoever the Prowlers were that had slaughtered the humans who lived down here, Bill and Lao were not like them. Yet Bill could not escape the dread and the guilt that spread through him like poison whenever he discovered another atrocity committed by his kind.
The track turned somewhat but stayed on a northerly course. As they walked, Bill tried to gauge how far they had come. At first he had a sense of the distance, but soon that gave way to the darkness of the tunnel, broken only by the occasional light bulb or by city light streaming down through grates above their heads. After perhaps fifteen minutes the track began to hum and then the screech of brakes, of metal screaming against metal, echoed up the tunnel from behind him. They stood aside to let the northbound train pass and from the shadows Bill watched the zoetrope flicker of faces, people on their way home from a night out, some laughing, some with their eyes closed, heads leaning against windows. They were traveling across the killing grounds beneath their city, and had no idea that there were monsters in the dark.
There was a sense of urgency in the air and it carried its own scent, like burnt rubber. Bill picked up the pace and Lao took his lead. The two of them began to move swiftly now, jumping over pieces of concrete that had fallen away from the tunnel structure and shopping carts left behind days or years before. Some minutes later, the breeze that swept through the tunnel shifted and the air pressure changed noticeably.
They were coming to a station.
Wary now, they slowed as they entered the vast, cavernous place, their lightest footfalls echoing back to them from this dead place. For the station had clearly been abandoned for decades. Bill knew such structures existed in the vast labyrinth of New York's underground, though some of them had been blocked off. There were, he had been told by those who knew firsthand, entire tunnel systems that had been built in the late Nineteenth century and eventually left to rot. This station was not that old, but if it had ever been put to use, its heyday was clearly long in the past.
Bill sprang from the tracks onto the cracked platform. A dim illumination stretched into the shadows of the station from the grates above, and from those few lights on the ceiling of the tunnel that were still working. Arched columns stretched up to the ceiling. Metal gates had been put in place at some time in the past to block off the stairwells on either end of the platform that would have led to the street, but the heavy chains on those gates had been shattered and they hung loose. The stairwells were dark, however, and Bill suspected there was only concrete above. And yet there had to be another entrance, otherwise the gates would still be intact.
Lao sniffed the air and stepped deeper into the station. The air began to thrum again with the thunder of an oncoming train and a moment later it began to pass through the station, somehow louder now than the other had been when it was right next to him. Lights strobed the dark.
But Bill already had the scent. He did not need Lao to tell him they were not alone.
Prowlers began to emerge from the hidden recesses of the platform, from the stairwells and behind columns. They wore their human faces, but in the flickering illumination from the passing train, they began to change. Their bodies stretched, fur tearing up from beneath skin. Their faces elongated into snouts, snapping and gnashing with gleaming razor fangs. The beasts crouched in the dark with their talons curled, and began to close in around them.
The train was gone, leaving only the gloom and the monsters. The tunnel was silent save for their panting, excited at the prospect of spilled blood.
"So it's to be tooth and claw instead of parley," Bill snarled. His eyes ticked to the right, and he saw the guilty expression on Lao's face. Hatred flared up within him as he tried to decide if Winter had known that Lao would betray him; if Winter had ordered it.
With a shudder and a loud growl, Bill crouched low and he changed as well. He set free the beast within, its fangs and talons slicing the dark, his fur bristling.
"It should be," a gravely voice said from the pack.
The speaker was a tall, lithe male Prowler with a coat of gleaming fur as black as pitch. He stepped forward and the others remained where they were.
"Hello, Lao," the black-furred beast said.
"Alec," Lao replied. He bowed low to this newcomer.
Bill growled, kept his back to the tunnel, though even now he caught the scent of others, down there on the tracks, moving in.
"You had to have known, Guillaume," Alec said haughtily. He dropped on all fours and trotted back and forth, capering like a wolf. When he unfolded to his true height again, he cocked his head to one side and slid his tongue along his teeth.
"You're Jasmine's mate," Bill said. "You've got her scent on you."
"Good," Alec rasped. "So you know I speak for her."
Silence, save for the distant rumble of trains rushing along tracks elsewhere in that vast underground warren. Fur bristled, eyes of many colors glowed dim in that dead, cavernous place. Bill felt his breath coming short and shallow, possibilities ticking through his mind at a maddening pace. Every few seconds, though, he came back to Olivia. And then to Lao.
Black lips curled back from his fangs and he snarled as he glared at Lao. The enormous beast would not even meet his gaze, ashamed of himself. As he should be, Bill thought. Coward.
Alec snapped at the others in a guttural bark and they began to encircle him, yet they kept at least ten feet away. He counted heads now, heads and scents, and thought there were at least fifteen of them including those who had come up now from the tunnel at his back. That didn't count Lao, but Bill was not certain if he ought to be included in that tally or not. No way to know his motivations or alliances now, save that whoever he was loyal to, it wasn't Bill himself.
Muscles tensed, rippling beneath his fur, Bill stood up to his full height and faced Alec directly, ignoring all the others. "You haven't killed me. What is it you want, then?"
"Haven't killed you yet," one of the gathered pack muttered.
Alec leaped across the platform in a single bound and slashed his claws across the face of the Prowler who had spoken. The beast cried out, snarling and hissing in pain, and backed off. After which Alec ignored him, loping easily back toward Bill.
"Got to keep order, you know what I mean?"
Bill nodded slowly.
"It isn't what I want," Alec went on, fangs flashing as he spoke, yellow eyes seeming to sparkled in the semi-dark. "It's what Jasmine wants. And what she has."
Instinct demanded Bill act then. His hackles went up and he bared his teeth further and every bit of his heart and soul demanded he lunge at Alec, tear his throat out. The beast was talking about Olivia, threatening her without even saying her name. But the only way Bill was going to have any chance of seeing her again was to deny his instincts, to embrace the essence of humanity he had adopted during the years he had spent living as one of them.
Still, he would not step back from Alec. He was not the leader of this pack,
but the mate of its Alpha. Jasmine was truly in charge and Bill would not allow himself to be seen to be cowed by her lackey.
"What does Jasmine want, then?"
"In exchange for the girl, Olivia?" Alec replied. His tongue snaked out and ran over his teeth suggestively. "A tasty morsel, that girl. Caught her myself."
Bill took two steps forward, towered above Alec and glared down at the slick, black-furred predator. He breathed in Alec's scent so that he would never forget it, inhaled the other beast's own breath.
"What does Jasmine want?" he asked again, voice little more than a growl now.
Through a grate far above him, Bill could hear a police siren wailing. It was nearly midnight in Manhattan, and that cry of sirens acted almost like a bell that tolled the witching hour, when all iniquities were possible and malevolent creatures emerged to stalk the streets.
All iniquities were possible.
Alec contorted slightly, painfully, as the fur withdrew from his flesh and new skin was formed around it. His false human face was darkly handsome and angular, his hair a little too long, his eyes captivating.
"Jasmine will spare Olivia's life, and your own as well. She has no desire to kill her own kind. She would like you to join the pack, but doubts that you will. It will be her great pleasure to let you go on your own way, Guillaume, son of Yves. In exchange, you will linger here long enough to draw the attention of the humans you have befriended. Jack Dwyer. Molly Hatcher. Courtney Dwyer. I suggested that Jasmine have you kill them yourself, but she is merciful. She's content to allow you to be bait."
A blast of warm air washed down the tunnel, the first sign that another train was coming. From deep within that underground maze he heard the squeal of metal on metal again, the scream of the hurtling train, and it echoed with the scream Bill felt welling up within himself. Faces flashed through his mind, images, sensations, holding his little niece in his hands, his only living flesh and blood, Olivia. Olivia as a grown girl with those penny eyes wide and laughing. Courtney, his love, making him feel that much more human. The way her milky skin felt beneath his caress.
Jack. Molly. His friends.
Then Bill glanced over at Lao, who was staring at him expectantly, a grin on his features. All pretense had been stripped away. The tiger tattoo was buried beneath the fur on his head, but the outline of the mark could be seen in the pattern of the fur. There was a small chuffling noise and he knew it was Lao laughing. Lao, whom he had known for more than two hundred years, who had been Bill's pack brother for a time when Yves still lived. Lao the warrior. Lao the hunter.
Lao the betrayer.
Olivia.
Courtney.
"I'll do it," Bill snarled, rage and hatred and grief tearing through him. "But first, you have to do something for me, to prove you'll keep your end of the bargain."
Alec grunted with satisfaction and shrugged. A human response, now that he wore his human form. "Name it."
Bill pointed to Lao with one long claw. "Kill him."
Lao's eyes went wide.
"It's a deal," Alec replied.
The train screamed past, lights strobing the platform, air pressure thundering against Bill's eardrums, all but blocking out the snarls and screams as the pack fell upon Lao and tore him apart. Blood and fur spattered the crumbling arches.
Bill watched grimly, thinking only of his own blood, of Olivia.
CHAPTER FIVE
Perfectly innocent, Molly thought. It's perfectly innocent.
The phrase sounded prissy and old-fashioned in her head, but the part of her that might have been self-conscious about that was too busy panicking to worry overmuch about being prim. The small hotel was close enough to the small river that ran through Fairbrook that with the window slightly open, Molly could hear the sound of it burbling over the rocks like gentle laughter. It was still dark outside, but the sky was now a deep blue rather than black, the trees outside the window silhouetted by the pre-dawn. The fresh air that breezed through the window was bracing, but she was snug and warm beneath the thick comforter that lay across the bed.
The single, queen-size bed.
As the chilly air washed over her face and she stared out the window, Molly thought that perhaps it was not the comforter keeping her warm, but the heat from Jack's body where he lay curled against her, one leg draped across her hip. He was fast asleep, his breathing slow and even, sweet against the back of her neck. Or, perhaps, what was truly creating the flush in her cheeks and the warm tingle that rushed through her was the collision of conflicting emotions within her.
Nothing had happened the night before. It had been their misfortune that the hotel did not have any available rooms with more than one bed. Jack had offered to sleep on the floor, but Molly had brazenly waved the suggestion away as ridiculous. They had known each other forever, lived now in the same apartment. Together, they were exploring what sort of relationship might come of their mutual love and attraction. Not that Molly wanted to rush things along: deep kisses and soft caresses were exactly what she wanted right now.
But no way was she going to let Jack sleep on the floor.
They had exchanged almost sickeningly shy grins as they slid into bed together, both wearing nothing more than a T-shirt and underwear. It was, after all, the uniform in which they saw one another most mornings these days. Yet Molly had never been quite so aware of how close to naked she was in those two items of clothing, nor how warm Jack's skin was, until he lay beside her under the covers, his leg barely touching hers.
He had kissed her good night, a tender, lingering kiss, and brushed the hair out of her eyes, and then they had turned away from one another. For half an hour or more, Molly had lain awake staring out the window, and though she could not be sure she thought that perhaps Jack had also had trouble falling asleep.
Then only moments ago she had woken in the darkness, the night a rich indigo as dawn teased the corners of the sky, and felt his body pressed close behind her. He held her, even in his sleep. Somehow during the night they had come together naturally, seeking the comfort of each other's bodies. A delicious shiver ran through Molly as she felt him against her, molded to the contours of her body, and the flush in her cheeks grew even warmer.
She ought to go back to sleep, she knew. Though they were used to rising early because of the demands of running the pub, here they might easily have stolen another hour or two past sunrise without guilt or hesitation. But a tiny smile turned up the edges of her mouth and she could not banish it no matter how hard she tried, and she felt totally awake. Aware.
Minutes ticked by and she relished the scent and feel of him. By the tiniest of degrees, the room began to brighten, the light taking on a sort of metallic hue, as though everything was made of brass. Almost as though she were some flesh and blood marionette, Molly felt herself being tugged, every muscle longing to turn in his arms, to press her forehead against his. To kiss Jack awake and feel his hands on the small of her back, and let the intimacy of this moment blossom into something more.
That yearning frightened her. Molly's heart began to race. She pressed her eyes closed and savored the security and harmony she felt in that moment. Then reluctantly she slipped out from beneath Jack's arm and sat up on the edge of the bed. Disturbed by her movement he stretched in his sleep and raised his arms over his head, splayed out on the wide bed with the abandon of a child. His mouth was open ever so slightly and he sighed lightly, still asleep, before curling up again as though she were still there for him to cozy up to.
Molly giggled softly as she watched him. After a minute she rose and went to the window and stared down at the dark ribbon of river that was only just now becoming visible with the lightening sky. The urge to wake Jack up was strong but that would not be fair. Just because she could not sleep, that did not mean she should deprive him, but she would be bored out of her mind after ten or fifteen minutes of sitting in the semi-dark staring out the window.
The television was a bad idea. Even with the volu
me on low, it was possible that it would wake Jack. But its dark face called to her and if she did not find some way to distract herself she was going to just wake him up anyway, so it was not long before she surrendered. Molly picked up the remote control and perched on the end of the bed. She clicked the set on and turned the volume down instantly, so low she thought it would be barely audible to dogs. The image brought another smile to her face.
The click as she changed channels was louder than the volume, but that could not be helped. Click, VH-1. Click, PBS. Click, Home Shopping Network. Click, CNN. Click, scrambled pornography. Click, Home and Garden. Click, the Food Network. Click, A&E. Click, click, click, network affiliates too early for network programming. Local news.
A familiar face.
Molly frowned, staring at the nearly mute television set. In that gray morning light, still edging toward dawn, with the feel of Jack's body against her and the warmth of his breath on her neck still fresh in her memory, the room seemed to quiver with a kind of surreal quality, the world in soft focus. Not quite a dream but not quite life yet either.
A familiar face. What was her name again? Stephanie? No, Suzanne. That was it. Suzanne.
With a frown, she turned the volume up just enough to hear clearly.
" . . . no evidence that the driver of the truck, Marie Suzanne Robinson, was under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of the crash. While police have offered the theory that the veteran trucker fell asleep at the wheel, other causes have not yet been ruled out. For more on the story, we take you live to Hollingsworth, where . . ."
The image on the screen switched to a live feed that showed a tractor trailer truck on its side in a tree-lined gulley, jack-knifed so that the cab and trailer jutted up at opposite angles. Police and rescue vehicles were parked haphazardly on the soft shoulder and a group of uniformed men and women stood around together staring down into the gulley with hands on hips and scratching their heads. Molly sympathized, because she knew they had to be thinking exactly what she was thinking. How the hell are we supposed to get this stupid thing out of that ditch?
Prowlers: Wild Things Page 7
