That done, they all settled into seats, the three men framing Helena.
It was only about thirty minutes before Theresa showed up with the sandwiches, chips, and drinks, but to Helena it felt like a long, silent wait. In fact, Theresa was passing out everyone’s good when, amidst the buzz of an electronic lock being unlocked, a side door opened and Dolf and Declan were finally escorted out.
With a happy squeak, Helena dropped her sandwich and went to hug them, trying to fling her arms around both of them at once. They didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they both leaned down to hug Helena hard enough to make her squeak again.
“Getting arrested while on a job?” said a voice from behind them. “I’m not sure if I’m disappointed with you or impressed that you had the time.”
“It wasn’t our fault,” protested Declan, straightening. Dolf was slower to let Helena go and straighten up. “There were extenuating circumstances.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Giles Geissler. “You’re just lucky that nothing happened to your client, while she was in lockup. In the future, if you’re going to get arrested during work hours, try to remember to have the client call the office immediately so that I can send someone to pick up the slack. Okay?”
Both men nodded.
“Noted,” said Dolf soberly, at more or less the same time that Declan nodded and said “Okay.”
Someone’s stomach rumbled. Both Declan and Dolf looked pained.
“So are those sandwiches?” asked Declan hopefully.
“The ones in the bag are for you,” said Giles Geissler, while scooping Helena’s still wrapped sandwich up from the floor. It went into the bag, along with Giles’ sandwich and a third from one of the Defenders who was unknown to Helena. “We’ll pick up something else later. Now, who’s riding with whom?”
“Helena is with Declan and me,” said Dolf quickly, and Helena nodded.
“If you three are headed back to the apartment complex, I’d appreciate a ride,” said he of the sandy hair and red running shorts. “Technically, my shift was over almost an hour ago.”
“Theresa can fit four passengers in her car,” said Giles. “You can ride with her. I’ll drop Buck at the office, and then head on home myself.”
“Right,” said Dolf, Declan, and the sandy-haired Defender, almost in unison.
Theresa, who looked unspeakably nervous, merely nodded.
Seating arrangements figured out, the group headed out for the parking lot. While they walked, Helena and Declan swapped cell phones. It felt nice to have her own cell phone with her own apps back in her pocket again. Declan hadn’t had anything good on his.
Helena was being ushered into an older model grey sedan by one of the other Defenders, when she overheard Giles say to Declan and Dolf, his voice low, “I’ve also got a message from Sharkbytes for you, Declan. He said to tell you that Pamela Pommard has a recent model cobalt blue Ferrari registered to her name, as does her cousin, Phyllis Rothschild.
“Theoretically, both girls were still at school when that cobalt blue Ferrari came after you. In reality, no one knows where she was, although her cousin Phyllis Rothschild was seen earlier that afternoon, while out running with the crew team.
“However, Pamela Pommard’s Ferrari is still in the parking garage, but Phyllis Rothschild’s Ferrari hasn’t been seen in days. Make of that what you will, gentlemen.”
Helena found all of that very interesting, even if it didn’t get her very far.
Both women, she decided, might have had a reason to kill her: Pamela to get the wills off of her cooling corpse, and Phyllis, if she inherited under the previous will, to prevent the later will from ever being found or probated.
Of course, that didn’t mean that it couldn’t have been any of the other Rothschilds either. Helena didn’t know how to hotwire a car, but that didn’t mean that Spencer or Patrick Rothschild didn’t. After all, she couldn’t possibly be the only scion of a rich family to have a couple of skills that were generally considered unsavory.
After that, the knot of men broke up, four of them headed for a nearby SUV, the sandy-haired Defender getting into the front passenger’s seat with his chips and sandwich, while Declan and Dolf getting into backseat with Helena, sandwiching her between them. Happily, they brought the bag of takeout with them.
As Helena remembered things, the drive between the apartment complex and the police station wasn’t long, but it did involve traveling over the high arc of a couple of suspension bridges.
They were driving across one, when Theresa made a high, frightened noise and jammed on the brakes, rocking Helena forward against the restraint of her safety belt.
One of the two vehicles that had been coming towards them as part of oncoming traffic had veered out of its lane, its driver parking its length across their lane of traffic.
As Helena watched, mystified, the mini-van that had been traveling behind that first SUV also veered, pulling up behind the first vehicle and then backing up a bit so that it blocked the on-coming lane of traffic.
“Back up, back up, back up!” barked the Defender in the front passenger’s seat.
“But –” Theresa began to protest, her voice trembling.
“Now!” roared Dolf, shoving at the seat in front of him with one hand.
There was an awful grinding noise, and the car briefly lurched backwards, before Theresa slammed on the breaks again, this time throwing Helena backwards against her seat.
“Too late,” groaned Declan, and Helena twisted around in her seat to see what they were talking about.
Behind them, two other vehicles had blocked off both lanes of traffic and, as Helena watched with growing horror, a third one pulled up behind them, its headlights bright in the darkness. People started pouring out of the various vans and SUVs; lots of them.
Apparently, their SUVs have plenty of room inside, too much even, unlike my stupid rental, thought Helena, feeling more than slightly terrified.
They were trapped.
Chapter 22 – Dolf
Eyeing the vehicles before them and the ones behind, Dolf reluctantly concluded that even though Theresa’s clunker was built like a knockoff tank, they still probably couldn’t just ram their way to freedom; mostly, because the other side’s vans and SUVs looked equally solidly built.
Someone’s going to have to move them, Dolf concluded grimly.
He, Declan, and Chet were going to have their hands full, which meant that getting the keys and moving those vehicles was probably going to fall to either Theresa or Helena.
Declan and Chet shoved their doors open, the force of their movements rocking the car. Dolf followed suit.
As soon as he stepped out of the car, the scent hit him.
Hellhounds, thought Dolf furiously. They never give up, do they?
From her place in the middle seat, Helena unbuckled. She scrambled towards Dolf, making an annoyed noise when he pushed her back inside the vehicle without even looking at her.
“Dolf!” she complained, but she was already off, scrambling across the car towards Declan’s door, only to be stopped and pushed back inside by him too. They both slammed their doors shut, leaving Helena safely inside.
“Declan!” shouted Helena.
“Stay in the car, Helena,” ordered Dolf. “They’re hellhounds.”
At the first opportunity, they’d snatch her.
Just thinking about it – about these filthy, sniveling dogs taking his Helena away to be Severed by her awful family – made Dolf’s lips peel back in a snarl.
Never, he thought.
He’d never let them do that to her. Even if she didn’t love him back, even if this – he – was all fun and games to her, he’d protect her from that, at least. Dolf knew that he was slow to get attached, but when he did, he was all in – first with the military, then the Defenders, and now Helena.
There was no going back for him.
“Oh? Are they?” asked Helena. She was sitting up on her knees and peering through the ba
ck window. “Then I can help!”
“No, Helena,” said Dolf. “Let us do our jobs.”
From the car, so low that he thought that she probably couldn’t hear her, came Helena’s petulant mutter.
“I hate being a job.”
In his heart, Dolf’s heart squeezed, as much with pleasure and pain and fear for her.
There were far too many of them for him, Chet, and Declan to deal with them alone, even if they were moving very oddly.
This cannot possibly be their entire plan, thought Dolf, as he watched the nearest hellhounds advance; slowly, and so very, very suspiciously.
Declan must have had the same thought, because he tossed Helena his cell phone saying “You, call Gil. Theresa, get out of the car. We’re going to need you to try to move at least one of those cars.”
“No way!” snapped Theresa. “I signed on to take messages and type memos. This isn’t a thing that I do!”
“Well, you’re going to have to,” said Declan harshly.
“Hello, the car!” called one of the hellhounds. He was a point of stillness in the center of a stiffly lurching wave of hellhounds. “As you can see, we have you outnumbered and surrounded. Give us Helena Tarleton, and there won’t have to be any trouble.”
“Yes! Let’s do that!” cried Theresa. She flung her door open, shouting as she scrambled out of it. “Take her! She’s yours!”
“No, she’s not!” roared Dolf.
“Yes, she is!” shouted Helena from her place inside the car. She threw herself forward, trying to squirm up between the two front seats.
“Helena, no!” shouted Dolf, at the same time that Declan snapped it.
“There is absolutely no reason to think that they’ll just take you and go away without causing any more trouble for the rest of us,” added Declan.
“In fact, once they have you, they won’t need the rest of us,” added Dolf, pulling it together for Helena’s sake. “Now, call Gil!”
Truthfully, he didn’t care about all the reasonable and rational reasons that they ought to keep Helena Tarleton safe. It wasn’t about professional pride or pragmatism or even doing the right thing for him.
For him, it was about Helena.
He wasn’t going to fail her.
He was going to keep her safe.
Because he loved her.
That was the moment that the nearest hellhound shambled into his arm’s reach and, taking advantage of his own speed relative to the hellhound, Dolf hit him hard enough to knock him down. Then he hit another one and another. Then he had to wait for the next few to catch up.
“Why are they moving so slow?” demanded Dolf, annoyed.
He wished that they would hurry it up a bit, but there was no way that he was going to go to them. Helena and all the others were right there, after all.
“Yours are slow?” Chet mad an angry, cat-like noise, and something hit the car once, twice, three times hard enough to rock it before he said, “Mine are fast.” Then, smugly, “But I’m faster.”
Dolf could practically sense the lash of Chet’s long tail as he said it too.
“It’s the insulation!” shouted Helena from her place safe inside the car. “Maybe they have a lot more of it this time!”
“You were very free with the electricity the last time that they tried this,” grunted Dolf, who was now fighting with three other guys.
“Theresa!” order Declan on a harsh gasp. He had moved to help Chet with his faster, more lightly equipped hellhounds. “Check their pockets for keys!”
It was unlikely that the drivers would be in the first wave, but it was definitely worth a shot.
“No way! If the door wasn’t stuck, I’d be –”
What Theresa would be, Dolf was destined never to find out as, at that very moment, the high wail of metal scraping along metal interrupted her.
Looking down the length of the bridge, Dolf watched as a small, low slung, cherry red sports car shouldered its way through the narrow gap between an SUV’s bumper and the guardrail, scraping the hell out of itself and both of them.
The unspeakably awful noise was a warning, one that the hellhounds in front of him were too thoroughly insulated to heed. Dolf watched, horrified, as the remnants of the sports car mowed a wide path through the pack of hellhounds, as they tried and failed to get out of its way.
Less encumbered, he barely made it out of the car’s path in time, hearing Helena’s scream and then a heart-stopping crash.
Scrambling to his feet, Dolf took it in at a glance: the injured and perhaps dying hellhounds, the sports car that had t-boned Theresa’s car, Helena lying too still and too quiet, her head propped against the dashboard.
A red wave swept through him, bearing his reason – and his human form – away with it.
Throwing his head back, Dolf howled a long, warbling challenge.
And from within the half crushed sports car, something accepted.
Chapter 23 – Helena
Helena’s head was still spinning when someone yanked open the driver’s side door and threw themself into the car. Whoever it was started the car, which seemed… wrong to her. Struggling to remember past the painful ringing in her head, Helena tried to remember why the car shouldn’t be moving.
She couldn’t.
She couldn’t even see clearly, not with the blood in her eyes and the black spots eating at the edges of her vision. Sucking in a deep breath, Helena tried not to panic.
Except the scent that she pulled into her lungs was all wrong. Instead of Dolf’s clean, unadorned scent or Declan’s astringent drug store cologne, Helena had breathed in a rich, musky scent, something designed to linger in a room and make a statement.
Whatever man was putting that car into gear wasn’t either of the men that she trusted. Worse, in a screech of protesting metal, the car had begun to move.
Reaching out, Helena clumsily groped for him.
It was good that driver’s seats were usually within arm’s reach of their passengers, otherwise Helena might never have found him. As her fingers scrabbled against the warm, smooth skin of his arm, as he slapped them away, Helena called on that spark within her, the one that was always white hot and ready to leap to the surface.
And this time was no different.
Electricity leaped from her fingers to his, and he cried out, making an awful wet noise. Around her, the car briefly sped up then abruptly slowed down before hitting something sturdy enough to stop it.
Instinctively, Helena’s hands flew up. She tried to catch herself on the dash, to protect her head, and she mostly succeeded, although the scent of burning plastic was rank. It made her even dizzier.
Annoyed, Helena tried to shake it off then immediately stopped, as that only made her dizzier. Prying her fingertips out of the newly melted indents in the dashboard, Helena pressed her hand against her poor, abused head.
Ideally, she would have sat still and quiet for awhile and waited to see if her vision cleared. Unfortunately, there was a stranger sitting in the seat next to her, and she had no idea how long he would be incapacitated.
Groping to her right, Helena’s fingertips first found plastic. By virtue of sweeping her fingertips back and forth across it, Helena eventually found the door’s handle.
By then, her spotty vision was clearing, and getting out of the car, feeling the night’s cool breeze against her face, helped a lot.
Taking a deep breath, however, was a mistake.
The air wasn’t fresh. It smelled like blood and rotting flesh, like someone had dug up a corpse three weeks dead, and breathing it in made Helena gag and dry heave.
Bending over at the waist, Helena braced herself on her thighs and willed herself not to vomit.
On the foul wind were borne the snarls and guttural cries of both the combatants and the injured. Looking past the dangling ends of her hair, Helena saw a hellish landscape.
There were lots of badly injured people lying on the ground, most of them lying in a clear path fro
m the vehicles blocking the road to the crumpled remnants of what had once been a fine sports car. To one side of her, Declan and that other Defender, the one that she had only ever seen in passing, were still fighting it out with a knot of hellhounds, those members of the pack that had been standing at the opposite side of the bridge when the sports car had gone marauding through their ranks. Everyone had dropped their human forms in that fight.
Nearer by, at the very edge of the bridge, an enormous, slavering dire wolf was battling with a nightmare. There was no other way to describe the desiccated bag of bones rattling around in its leathery skin as it fought Dolf, snatching at him as if it meant to pull the dire wolf to itself with its long, grasping claws. As she watched, Dolf darted in to snap at the creature’s leg, neatly hamstringing it, and the creature screamed, a long, rattling cry of anguish pouring from between its torn lips.
But it didn’t slow or waver or even seem to worry about its injured limb. Instead, the thing immediately slashed out at Dolf, raking its long, grasping claws down one of his furry sides.
Dolf howled and stumbled, the creature falling on him in an instant.
“No!” shouted Helena, flinging herself forward – toward the nightmarish creature – at nearly the same time.
Pain wrenched through her head, and her stomach flipped over. Her vision was eaten up by the electric glow of her own hands, the roar of her own blood in her veins. In that moment, Helena was an island entirely unto herself.
That was probably why she didn’t notice the dragon until bolts of lightning started raining down around her.
Forks of lightning cascaded down around Helena, smashing into the pavement and sending shards of asphalt flying in all directions. They bit into her flesh, the sharp, searing pain of it slurrying together with the rolling crashes of thunder against her poor, damaged skull and the sheer ecstasy of being hit by a direct strike.
Is this what it feels like all the time to be a full lightning dragon? Helena wondered, as she doggedly moved forward, towards Dolf now as much as towards his attacker. Her shoe got stuck, caught in a melted patch of asphalt, and Helena simply chose to run out of it, kicking the other off as she went.
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