“Move out,” he called when they were set to go again.
They reached the last half of the gravel road leading to large ranch house about a half a mile from the panther’s clubhouse. Silas motioned again and they all parked. Getting off their respective rides, they found their weapons of choice and readied themselves. Although this was to be a surprise attack, Silas mentally braced himself. His gaze flicked across the uneven terrain. Everything seemed in place. Except why was it that the panthers didn’t have men stationed everywhere after attacking Silas’s clubhouse last night? He put it out of his mind and explained it away with the thought that they probably wouldn’t have expected immediate retaliation.
It was time, so Silas started giving orders. The four executives would head in first, and their seventeen reinforcements would be waiting to close in on the place once they drew out the panthers. He wrapped it up with, “Remember. No lethal force. No women or kids. No humans. Patch-wearing men, the officers we know, and if we can get to him, the fucking panther pres. Let’s show them we can hit them hard without going below the belt.”
The men all nodded.
16
Silas
The long row of connected adobe houses that made up the panthers’ headquarters had fresh coats of paint on it. Chickens were clucking and roaming around, and there were more than a couple dozen panther MC bikes parked out front. All was well in their fucking neighborhood. Or, it was for now, until he and his boys got to the door and started cracking skulls.
“Looks like the lazy asses are all still taking a fucking siesta.” Tate unsheathed two machetes and licked the back of one of the blades. “Time to put these new beauties to work.”
“You’re way too excited about those, man. Do you get off with them too?” Cole rumbled with laughter as he double-checked the safety on his Glock and handed Silas a sawed off he’d been hiding at his lower back.
“Alright, enough dicking around, everyone got the plan?”
“We’re square.” Axe pulled his rifle out of the custom holster he’d had built onto his bike seat specifically for that purpose. “Time to shoot first and ask questions later.”
Silas waved to get Tate’s attention. “Put one of those knives away and get out your IR gear. This place could be rigged.”
Tate reached into the satchel slung over his shoulder and pulled out a set of military-issue thermal imaging binoculars. “Got it.”
Buffered by the Beartooth Brotherhood inner circle with Tate in the lead, Silas got an overwhelming hit of adrenaline. He shuddered under the weight of his beast. Not wanting to give away the possible advantage, they moved in. Tate circled around the central adobe house and came back to the cluster of trees where they hid for cover. He gave them a thumbs down.
“What the fuck do you mean?” Axe questioned.
“There’s a small army in there, with weapons and ammo to the hilt.”
“Then we draw them out, just as planned, and once we have them outside, we call in the reinforcements. Everyone knows what to do. Let’s get to it.”
Silas gave the all clear before they split into two teams. Two were at the front, and two moved around back. Silas took the front door, knowing that when shit went down, the majority of the overspill would fall to Tate and Cole. He didn’t want the stragglers. He wanted the big guns who were higher up the food chain. He didn’t just come here to launch a counterstrike, he was here for answers. He took a deep breath and settled the trembling of his anxious fingers and the zeal tingling low in his gut.
Two seconds later his foot met with the panther’s clubhouse wooden front door. It cracked and splintered everywhere, and a goofy smile lit his face up.
“Rise and shine, fuckers!”
Two seconds after that he was dodging the shower from a hail of panther member bullets. He and Axe pulled a duck and cover on the front porch. Just as Tate said, the men inside were prepared and waiting. Silas smiled. This was going to be easy. Right now the panthers probably thought they had an advantage. They’d soon find out that was not the case. Keeping up the act, he fired into any open space and above any moving target he saw whenever he popped up to look into one of the big picture windows. They may have had more firepower inside, but every arsenal eventually ran out. Silas and his men would let the panthers get a false sense of security, and eventually, they’d get brave and bring the fight outside. When they did, Silas had a shit ton of rage hiding out less than half a mile away.
He caught a glimpse of Axe going hog wild, old west style on their asses. He was a bit overzealous, shooting everything and anything that could crash down and do nonlethal damage, plucking the exposed ones off one by one. No one was exiting the house yet, but the Brotherhood had time. The fuckers would eventually get ballsy.
“So, on a scale of one to ten, how well would you rate this raid?” Axe shouted to him.
“It depends on how our brothers are doing out back.”
Axe laughed, crouching behind a rocking chair. Damn shitty cover. “They’re fine. No one’s left the building yet. I’d give it three, but my guess is I can upgrade that to a seven when we start doing target practice on panther kneecaps.” He bounced up on the balls of his feet and got off three shots before he dropped to the floor again. “They still think they outnumber us. I can’t wait until they realize we’ve got them trapped. We can’t lose.”
Silas peeked over the doorjamb and took out a panther’s foot in his line of sight. The guy screamed like a little girl and fell on the floor. His return shot went wide, and Silas laughed at the guy’s crazy lack of judgment.
“Shift and walk it off, you pansy-ass pussy!” Silas shouted, catching another shifter who was hurtling down the stairs in the shoulder. Dude was just facing the front door at the wrong time. “Are you guys all idiots in there or what?” he taunted them. “Did you suddenly lose your fucking memory? Shift. Heal. Shift back. Fight. You should know the drill. Or is your president shitting bricks in a corner somewhere? You’re boring the fuck out of us out here.”
This was part of the mental game of domination. Intimidate and conquer. He and Axe were getting bored now. The sorry excuses for novice panther shifters inside made this no fun at all. It was time to up the ante. He concentrated on taking them out one by one. If they wouldn’t shift, he’d disarm, disable, immobilize and incapacitate every panther he could hit. Tunnel vision became his world as a vivid memory of slamming Sabrina down into the floor took over and his beast roared within him. So many of them deserved what was coming to them.
“Axe, how you doing over there, bro?” Silas shouted, throwing himself to the left as a shell whizzed by his right ear.
Axe didn’t answer right away, except with shouts and curses. The next time Silas had a free moment to breathe, he took a quick peek over at the man. Axe was lying on the porch with his hand clasped to his shooting shoulder, face screwed up in a grimace as he rolled around on the ground. “Jesus fuck, this pain never gets any easier,” he wheezed out.
“You okay?” Silas swallowed, clutching his gun until his knuckles ached from it. Blood rushed through his skull, blocking out everything else.
“Peachy.” He scampered back and dropped to the dirt so he could transform into his bear and heal himself away from the line of fire.
“No more fucking around,” Silas grumbled, dropping his sawed off and revolver with a crack of his neck. “Time to play dirty, you twisted sons of bitches.”
As if his beast had been waiting forever for this very moment, it sat up inside of him and roared. Loops of sadistic pleasure twisted through Silas’s brain. God, he was looking forward to unleashing a little hell. He unbridled his perpetual anger, revelling in the red that danced across his vision and became a permanent state. Within seconds, volcanic heat flooded his system, eating up all his thoughts.
He closed his eyes to the searing burn that reformed his cells as his chest expanded and his arms chunked with muscle, growing longer. Dizziness made it hard to breathe as he shot upward, forced int
o motion out of his crouch while his clothing shed to the floor like the Incredible Hulk. When he opened his eyes he’d be towering above everyone. He fought the vague notion of clasping his skull between his hands. They weren’t hands so much as paws now. Paws with sharp claws that could carve into his cheekbone with barely any pressure.
Even knowing the drill, the transformation was still brutal. Tiny pinpricks of pain dotted everywhere that course hair showed up. Teeth lengthened in his mouth and he let out a feral roar of sound that engulfed the dry desert. He couldn’t look down yet, not when the trembling overtook his flesh as it reknitted itself. The world narrowed and expanded all at the same time in a much bigger, broader way.
One swipe of his paw would take down anything that moved.
And there was a lot of retribution on the books.
17
Silas
With a less defined, more animalistic game plan set in motion, Silas let his bear charge through the doorframe, taking out anything in his path and knocking a giant chunk out of the exterior wall for good measure. Tit for fucking tat. They fucked up his home, so he’d bulldoze theirs to the ground, rain down fire and eat the ashes. The first few men he took down with his claws, swiping across their chest cavities until he saw rivers of red. They’d patch up okay, but he wasn’t here to kill so he went for limb shots on the rest of them with his teeth. Their calf, thigh and forearm tissues got stuck in his teeth as copper-tasting blood rolled down his snout.
He roared at them when they kept shooting, but the bullets barely made a dent in his adrenaline-fueled pain sensors. As if they were bowling pins, he took them out one by one, enjoying the crunch of bone, groans of pain, and grunts of his enemies as they fell like toy soldiers. His beast liked simple—what was simpler than bloodshed? Eventually, they got their heads out of their asses and started shifting too.
Now this will be interesting.
His bear let out guttural animal noise that in human form could have passed for the chuckle of a madman. Three fully formed panthers launched themselves at him from three different sides of the room. He went up on his hind legs, catching one with his paw on its hindquarter. That sent the cat spinning through a window and outside into the desert. One sunk its fangs into Silas’s side as he fought to buck him off, while the other went for his throat. Silas used all the force of his jaw and bit down until bones that weren’t supposed to crunch sounded off in his mouth, rendering the panther’s facial muscles useless. That one writhed in pain on the floor for a while—his beast enjoyed that one. Small whimpers echoed in his ears, and for a second he wished he could speak so he could tell the animal to toughen up and heal itself.
Silas’s bear licked its snout and made an effort with its paw to rip out a pair of panther teeth deeply embedded in his tender neck flesh. Sadly, those teeth were still attached to one obstinate cat. Silas let out a frustrated huff, registering that the shooting had mostly stopped. Everyone except for this overly eager panther still buzzing at his throat like a mosquito on an alligator’s back. The smarter animals were either hiding or in retreat.
Except for the breath expanding his chest, everything around Silas fell silent. Or his world warped. To make sure he left his mark on the clubhouse, he sent his body crashing through the open concept marble kitchen island, bracing himself for the impact. It worked like a fucking charm. The panther glued to his neck yelped, hissed, and didn’t move much anymore, now that it was wedged into the decor.
This left him in a supposedly empty room devoid of panthers and filled with weapons. This was not part of the original plan, but where the fuck was his backup? He knew there were others upstairs. He could smell them. Whether or not he wanted to fuck with them was another story. His beast badly wanted to spread pain throughout the house until it was coated in red blood. Each wounded animal would be a mark of his vengeance, but goddamn it, he did need some of them awake and alert to answer questions. And where was their sorry-ass president?
He took a guess that the panthers were in hiding because no one wanted to do any talking, but that couldn’t last. Someone had to answer for last night. He knew he could count on his boys for that one. With a small huff, he dropped back down to all fours and lumbered through the back entrance. All was quiet. Too damn quiet. Where the fuck was everyone? He let out a roar. His boys would know exactly what it meant and hop to it if they knew what was good for them.
A chill raised all the hairs on his back in stiff spines and he shook himself, licking his wound that flashed with small doses of pain. They needed to get out of there now while the bastards were too out of it to call for their own reinforcements. He couldn’t have full vengeance until after the full moon, and after he knew why they’d attacked his clubhouse. This evening had only been a taste, and their ultimate goal was to get details as to why they bombed the Brotherhood. Too bad that idea seemed shot to shit, with every uninjured cat in hiding.
“Pres! Yo, pres! Over here!”
Silas’s big bear head swiveled to the far right. He saw the guys had themselves a little panther barbeque while he’d done all the heavy lifting inside. They had a panther club member strapped to a grill with his head inches away from being pressed into the hot metal grate. They wouldn’t hurt the creature, but the threat of death was more powerful than actually killing anyone today. This spit roast thing had to be Tate’s idea. It had the guy written all over it. With an appreciative head nod, Silas trotted over to his brothers. Axe was sitting against the adobe stucco, clasping the spot where he’d been shot. It was completely healed, but the man was probably sentimental or something.
“Just a souvenir for the road,” Axe said with a grin. He must have noticed Silas looking, not that it wasn’t obvious when a big grizzly bear was glancing his way.
“You, uh, might want to fix yourself.” Cole gave Silas a once-over and chewed on the edge of a cigar. “We can’t really use you when your clothes are like shredded wheat now. I’ve got some under my weapons bag in the bushes over there.”
Silas snuffled in thanks and trotted off to the bikes. Now came the hard part. He closed his bear eyes and concentrated on the loud, wheezing breath shuddering out of his huge bear lungs. One second filtered into a million. He channeled an inner sense of calm as the rest of the world floated away to individual heightened smells and sounds. Somewhere, someone had the water running, and the sunset against the bike smelled like overheated motor oil mixed with burning bacon. With every breath, he tuned it all out.
He focused on his human side. Meanwhile, the rest of the world continued to turn around the loud screams of the panther MC member who was being questioned outside. When Silas finally dug to the center of his humanity, he flipped the switch and waited for the inevitable. His breath went tight in his lungs. Instead of being a molten river in his veins it was a dull ache as if a vice was squeezing his body and trying to make it fit somewhere it didn’t belong in the first place.
His first instinct was to curl into a small ball in the dirt. But that wasn’t an option as he continued to struggle to stay conscious against the anxiety of being trapped in his own skin. His fingers were shoved back into place. Every bone in his body split and remade itself shoving into a hole that was too small to accommodate it, until he was a writhing mass of far-flung cells. There was no way his brain could keep up. He waited for the lights to go dim so he could shake back into a pristine, completely healed, good-as-new human body and be done with it.
The transition was never easy, to heal and transform at the same time, but it was necessary. The only time they could shift at will without pain was during a full moon, and would remain in animal form during a full moon. His mother had told him it was a trademark of the isolated shifter clans in the mountainous area where they lived, which was a convergence of the Grand Canyon, Mojave Desert, and Colorado Plateau. He’d never known anything different, but according to Tate, they were one of only a few clans of natural shifters, compared to the thousands that Tate said were turned after the age of eighteen. Sil
as would have been more interested in this if he didn’t already have a full plate running the Brotherhood and protecting his people.
Looking around him again, he focused on their reason for being in panther territory. Silas’s bear, however, was still pissed about going back to being stuck inside a body that no longer fit it. It was angry and ornery and not willing to be caged up just yet, but Silas had human things to do, human words to speak and rivals to interrogate. The bear fought back with every push and shove his human side gave it, until it eventually went into submission, turning away from the world around it.
Silas woke up with a jolt that seemed to be shaking his brain loose from his skull. Sure, the first couple lucid seconds after a shift always sucked ass, but this time he was on the tail end of what felt like a fight with a baseball bat, right after the searing pain but just before the physical rehab. His first instinct was to rub his forehead. When he went to move his wrist, he could barely jerk his arm forward. In fact, his whole body was weighted, lethargic.
Wait, was he upside down?
He blinked and got his bearings, tugging with both arms as he violently struggled against…something. He grunted with effort, thrashing, and twisting but nothing changed. All he saw was black tarmac and a little patch of oil at the base of a wheel.
“What. The. Fuck,” he thundered.
18
Silas
Each time Silas got close to holding his head up, his upchuck reflex had other ideas. Nausea spun and stung at the back of his throat, and he swallowed through a mouthful of dust and grime. Someone had some fucking explaining to do. Stat. He’d woken up in some fucked up situations before, but tied to his own bike? This was a new one.
Outlaw MC Bear Page 9
