by Jenna Kernan
The black werewolf came back and Travis Toren MacConnelly sent it to clear the bodies of the vampires from the highway. The black, hulking monster trotted away with hardly a sound. MacConnelly escorted Brianna around the outside of the strange building in a grip that was more custodial than polite. She was beginning to recognize her desperate plan had some serious flaws, because though she had escaped the vampires, she was now detained by werewolves and Marines.
Bad plan, she thought. Really, really bad.
He’d said he wouldn’t kill her. But neither would the vampires. It seemed she had only traded one captor for another.
The high wall around the series of buildings made it impossible for her to see more than the top of the two-story structure she’d found herself standing on. The hated iron ladder stretched up to the top. From up there she’d seen the perimeter wall and an open courtyard surrounded by one-story mud-and-brick structures that fit against the wall like the pueblos she’d seen in New Mexico. But from outside the eight-foot walls were just exposed cinder block. It didn’t fit.
MacConnelly kept hold of her as she pondered how she had gotten up on that roof and why the roof seemed as if it had been the target of a mortar attack. The only solid spot was the one she had found herself on. The rest resembled Swiss cheese. She had stared right down past the collapsed timbers into the floor below.
Bri’s ears prickled. She still had that feeling she was being watched.
The Marine glanced at her hands. “How long until it heals?”
So he knew about that, too, she realized. One of her earliest memories was of scraping the skin off her knee and then running to Nana, only to find the wound healed and the redness fading when she reached her. Even her broken wrist had repaired itself within minutes. She’d never been to an emergency room except with Jeffery. Her chin dropped as she thought of him, waking alone in the hospital and wondering where she was. He’d never find her. Never know the danger that pursued her and threatened him, and all because he loved the wrong woman.
He paused to check her palms. The raw skin now looked a healthy pink and the blisters no longer wept.
“You don’t spend much time in hospitals, I’d imagine.”
She drew back her hand, but he held on, tenacious as a terrier. “And you’d be wrong about that.”
They faced off. He ground his teeth. She held his gaze and his eyes narrowed, the threat clear. She bet that was the look he gave his men. It probably sent them scrambling to follow his orders, but she only lowered her chin preparing to fight.
“You’re in a restricted area. I’m placing you under arrest.”
“Is there anyone else here?” she asked, ignoring that he’d just arrested her.
Mac blew out an angry blast of air. Was she so cavalier because she assumed that she could escape or charm him into doing any blasted thing she wanted? A few things came immediately to mind, and he knew he wouldn’t object to her using him as her energy dumping ground for a start. He could take it. Wanted to take all she had to give.
“No one but the werewolf watching the perimeter,” he said—his hound, as she’d called him. She was afraid of Johnny and that might be all that kept her here. “Why?”
“Can you speak to the werewolves for me? Tell them I’m seeking protection?”
“Why not ask for my protection?”
“Because you’re a soldier, MacConnelly, and soldiers follow orders and kill people. I need protection from vampires. Only a werewolf can do that.”
“Those things”? She had a lot of nerve.
“It’s Sergeant MacConnelly, MacConnelly or Mac. I’m not a police officer.”
Bri lifted her gaze to meet his. He was big and broad and tall. She could escape if he’d just let her go. She must have telegraphed her thoughts because he captured her other wrist, dragging her against him.
She made a bad showing at trying to regain custody of her wrist.
“Let me go,” she insisted.
He shook his head. “The deal was not to kill you.”
Then he turned and continued the way he had come, dragging her along beside him. She dug in her heels, lost her footing and stumbled, but he still kept going. The hell with this, she thought and sat down.
He stopped and glared but she held her position.
“You can’t detain me. I’m a U.S. citizen.”
She didn’t like his smile. It held no humor and way too much anticipation. “At the very least you are a trespasser. Federal offense. Now get up.”
She didn’t.
He stooped, using her captured hand to yank her to her feet. A moment later she was slung over his shoulder. He carried her along the wall just as the gray wolf had done.
“I’ll scream.”
He laughed. The world jolted as blood rushed to her head. He walked her around two corners and through an open archway to the inner courtyard she had glimpsed from above. The ground was packed earth with not a blade of grass anywhere. Along one wall she spied a huge pile of hay or straw that might have been used to bed livestock, except there was no fencing. He crossed the yard and deposited her on her feet, keeping hold of her wrist. They stood under an overhang. Three doorways lined the porch, each hung with a different color blanket suspended across the opening with a rope.
“It looks like a qala,” she said. She’d seen photos in a magazine and read about the multigenerational structures created from this same reddish brick. Beside the doorway with the blue blanket lay a bullet-riddled motor scooter. She felt as if she’d stepped out of the state of California and into Afghanistan. “What is this place?”
He tugged her through the entranceway She blinked at the sudden darkness. Sunlight filtered through the blue blanket and splashed across the dirt floor. A moment later he released her. She stumbled and fell back to the packed earth.
“I assume you can’t walk through walls?”
“Of course not.”
“Great,” he said and closed the door, leaving her in darkness save for the bright beam of light that shone beneath the door. She reached the opening in time to hear the lock click. She shook the handle and felt the burn of metal again before drawing back.
Chapter 3
Mac headed into his quarters and spent the next hour with a power drill, hacksaw and wooden planking. When he finished his work, he felt like he’d already done a day’s work. He studied the results of his labors, satisfied that the barricaded window would hold her temporarily. He paused on the way through their kitchen to grab a cold bottle of water from the refrigerator, then he approached the door behind which Brianna Vittori waited. He paused, listening to her breathing—fast, because she knew he was there.
“Step to the opposite side of the room.”
He heard her shuffling away. As fast as he could, he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The closet was large, six feet by five, but he could still feel the heat of her skin. It took only a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and when he did it was to find her gaze on him.
Could she see in the dark?
He tossed the water bottle toward her middle. She lifted her hands and caught it easily, answering his question.
“Thank you,” she said and released the cap before lifting the opening to her mouth.
His night vision was near perfect if only in black and white. He wondered if she could see colors as he watched her raise her chin and swallow again and again until she had drained the contents. Why did watching her drink make his mouth go dry?
When she drained the contents, she stared at him, eyes glowing slightly in the dark. “What happens now?”
“I’m moving you to my bedroom.”
Her eyes went wide and he heard the sharp intake of breath. Only then did he recognize what she must be thinking. He couldn’t keep the smile from twitching at his mouth. Not that he wouldn’t
like to, but...
“There you’ll have a bathroom, shower and a bed. I’ll bunk with Johnny for now.”
“For how long?”
“Not sure. Right now I need to take care of the ones we killed.”
Her eyes went wide, the dark pupils impossibly large in her pale irises. “What will you do with them?”
“Turn them over to our superiors.”
“But not me?”
“Not yet.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t. I’m not doing it for you. I’m not convinced you don’t pose a threat to my CO.”
“What’s a CO?”
“Commanding Officer.”
“But I would never...not intentionally.” Her gaze swept his face. “You don’t believe me?”
“There a reason I should?”
Brianna swept a hand through her thick hair as she considered her captor’s question. “I can’t think of one.”
His head gave a funny shake as if her answer was not what he expected and then she remembered. In his eyes she was a temptress, a dangerous seductress artfully using her wiles on him. But the only wiles she knew about were her power of suggestion, which did not seem to work on this Marine. Why was that? She decided to try it again. She stepped silently toward him. His eyes narrowed and went cold, as if this were what he expected. But how could he even see her in here?
“You can see in the dark, too?” she said.
In answer he made a grab for her, and she was too slow to escape. He easily caught her wrist and pulled her out into the light, blinding at first, after the cool dark of the closet.
“Come on. Let’s get you to your new quarters.”
She followed him at a trot to keep up watching the muscles of his shoulders bunch as he moved.
He led her down a short hall, past a kitchen that seemed strangely out of place in this believable recreation of an Afghanistan qala. Before she could ask, they had crossed a threshold and then another hallway. He paused at the third door. She stepped inside and he followed, shutting them in. He regarded Brianna as her gaze swept the interior.
The one window was covered with rough-cut boards haphazardly screwed to the wall. A full-sized bed frame dominated the adjacent wall, and the bed covers were neatly made in military fashion. There was nothing else beyond a floor lamp, an empty molded plastic chair and a closed footlocker. Draped across the bed was a muddy, wet shirt. His, she wondered, noting his bare chest. There was nothing on the walls and only a small Persian rug to cover the cold concrete.
Her gaze flicked back to the bed and then to her captor.
The Marine stood, hands on hips. Bri’s skin tingled and her stomach twisted with uncertainty. He did not look like someone who cared for lost, frightened women. Instead he reminded her of every recruiting poster of a soldier she’d ever seen—rock-hard jaw and implements of killing worn as casually as a woman might wear a bangle bracelet. She suspected he wore those camouflage fatigues to make it easier to sneak up on and murder his enemies. Now she was his enemy. What had she gotten herself into?
Her skin flashed hot and cold as she tried vainly to disappear.
She glanced at the scars that slashed across his chest, suddenly seeing a definite pattern. This wound was not random like one made from bits of flying shrapnel. The puckered marks looked like teeth imprints. As if a bear had clamped down on his shoulder as it clawed at his torso.
“What now?”
“Still deciding.” He pointed to the bed. “Sit down.”
She did, rubbing her palms reflexively back and forth as she waited for what was to come.
He leaned back against the door and folded his muscular arms across his wide chest. She stared up at him, his posture now all menace and might. His eyes were cold as blue glass. A chill danced up her spine.
“How did you get away from them? And don’t bullshit me.”
“A woman warned me. She showed up out of the blue and told me that I was like her. The same thing the woman that came to my school my senior year said. Two different women. They looked so different in every way, completely, but there was also something akin about them, other than their stunning physical beauty. When I told Nana about her, she moved us again. And she made me promise not to tell anyone. We were always moving. She died one month ago, but before she went she told me what I am.” Bri tried to remember what the woman had said, but it blurred together with her nana’s warning to keep moving. But she hadn’t. She’d stayed because Jeffery had asked her to stay.
“Who was the woman?” he asked.
“She said she was like me. But she’d been captured by those things.”
“By the Chasers. They’re the ones who track females like you.”
“Yes, maybe. She said they caught her and trained her. She said years. The vampires had held her for years and would kill her if they found out she had warned me. She told me to run and I did. I ran home. But they found me there.”
She’d left the strange woman at the hospital—or rather, the woman had left her. Something about her beauty and her earnest tone had terrified Brianna through and through. Her warning delivered, she had said they were coming then vanished right before Bri’s eyes.
Of course Brianna had bolted. She’d hurried to the parking garage and run a red light getting home. Only home wasn’t safe, either.
Brianna trembled as she told him of her return to the empty apartment. “Someone broke in.”
She recalled the sound of a shatterring glass window coming from the empty bedroom across the hallway from hers. If they had entered her room instead, would she have had time to escape? She didn’t think so, and the realization of how nearly she came to capture chilled her skin.
Her heart had jumped to piston-firing speed at the crunch of someone walking on a carpet of broken glass across the hall from her bedroom. She’d snatched up her shoes and thrust down until her feet her heels slipped into place. She’d headed for the window as the thing turned the knob of her bedroom door.
“It trapped me in my bedroom,” she said to Mac, as she flinched at the memory of the thing hitting her bedroom door.
Bri remembered it crashing into the room. “It had glowing red eyes and a face so pale it was bluish, like skimmed milk. It opened its mouth. It had a scarlet tongue, and fangs like a lion. So I jumped. It was three floors up, but still I...”
She didn’t really see the Marine anymore. Her mind had turned inward, seeing that thing charge her and feeling the air rush past as she jumped from the second-story window, screaming, into the night.
* * *
“I fell, but I didn’t really. I just bounced like I was on a spring. It followed me. I saw it on the apartment roof.”
Bri had jumped again, out over the parking lot, down Bell Street, past the Jack-in-the-Box and over the cars that waited at the drive-through.
“I lost him. Then I thought if I kept jumping he might see me over the buildings, so I just ran. I never ran so fast before. Didn’t know I could.” It wasn’t her normal jogging speed. She had been as fleet as Mercury in his golden sandals, and her breathing came swift and easy as an Olympic runner. “I passed a young couple on the sidewalk, but they seemed to be standing still. Neither one even turned a head in my direction.” How was any of that even possible?
“And I wasn’t tired. I passed a car rental place. I got a compact car. Then I remembered what that woman had said, the one at the high school, about vampires staying clear of werewolves. At the time, I thought she was absolutely crazy. But she said they killed vampires and that I’d know if I was near one. I’d smell it. That it would raise the hairs on my neck, and then I did smell it. Before Nana died, just a few months ago when I was driving near here. I thought if I could find a werewolf before those things found me, it might kill them.”
The Marine made a
sound that brought her back to the here and now. He had only one arm crossed over his chest as the other cradled his opposite elbow. When had he drawn his shirt back on?
“Did it occur to you that a werewolf might kill you on sight?”
She answered with a question of her own. “Do you know what the vampires would have done to me?”
He couldn’t hold her gaze. Oh, he knew all right.
“I’d rather be dead.”
MacConnelly’s expression changed as if he saw it coming before she did. He took a step in her direction as the tears started, rolling down her face as her breath caught and the hoarse cries came from her burning throat.
“I’d rather die than let them touch me, use me,” she whispered in that little voice she hadn’t heard since she was a girl standing beside her grandmother’s bed begging to sleep with her after a nightmare. Her nana never let her. She’d walk her back to her own room and sit with her until she slept telling her the stories of the little folk, the Selies and the Fairy Court.
All real, according to Nana’s deathbed confession. The rambling of a confused mind, the doctors had said, and she had tried so hard to believe them. But they were wrong and Nana had been right.
The sergeant moved to the bed and sat beside her. The mattress sagged. He was big and intimidating and he scared her half to death, but he didn’t touch her. The only thing scarier was those things in the woods. No, the thing in the apartment. Bri trembled. Her world had suddenly become populated by walking nightmares, and Sgt. Mac MacConnelly was just one more threat.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Her uncertainty grew, swarming in her stomach like a hive of bees.
She didn’t prevent him from dragging her to his side, and she found she didn’t want to. But she had to. If her nana was right than he must not touch her.
“Don’t,” she whispered, even though his arms felt so good around her. If she closed her eyes she might believe he could protect her from what chased her. But he couldn’t. Only a werewolf could do that. A man, a human man, was just going to die because of her, and that would be her fault, too.
