by L. A. Banks
“I care, but as a leader, there are tough decisions to be made. Lose an entire village and a garrison, or risk a few civilians being lost, tragic as that may be? The choice is hard but the choice is clear. Right now I need every able-bodied soldier here to make sure we are secured during the night. We have miles of border to camouflage with reverse glamour. First light, I’ll send out a retinue to let the others know how to at least temporarily reverse what’s been done to them. After we are snug as a bug in a rug, we’ll also be investigating—because we need to know exactly which set of dirty spells they’ve used to attack us and our allies. Godspeed to anyone outside these walls tonight.”
The king of the Seelie turned around and studied his men with determination burning in his eyes. “Our enemies have been trying to find our North American fortress to siege and sack for years. I’ll not let that ’appen on my watch!”
CHAPTER 15
“I won’t leave my men!” Shogun said, panting. He spun out of an attacker’s claw rake, ran up the side of a tree, flipped down behind the beast and shot him point-blank in the skull, using the Derringer.
“You have to live to fight another day,” Hunter shouted, unloading a shotgun blast over Shogun’s shoulder to blow back a wolf that had gone airborne.
“I led them into this death trap—I was their alpha leader and should have known better! They trusted me!” Shogun yelled, running back to what was sheer suicide.
Hunter made a wide berth around the dead bodies, changing directions to follow his brother.
“This isn’t your battle—fall back!” Shogun yelled.
“One pack, one clan!” Hunter shouted, clearing Shogun’s path with gunshot blasts, reloading on the run with a howl.
Shogun and Hunter pressed their backs to a new tree line, staying downwind from the building, studying for ways to get back inside it. Hunter’s jeep was unapproachable—the parking lot was crawling with Buchanan clan pack members beginning to track their human scents. Angry barks and howls from the enemy cut into the humid night air. It wouldn’t be long before Shogun’s men were found and torn to shreds; it wouldn’t be long before they’d be overrun. Human body stamina would not outlast the Werewolf forms, and in a hard run there was no way they could outdistance their hunters.
Hunter glanced at Shogun, whose eyes remained steadfastly on the building, trying to figure out the impossible. In war, there were always difficult decisions to be made—survival was sometimes one of them. But he knew where his brother was right now; he was a tortured man with a soul that required peace. Shogun had violated a leader’s sense of responsibility for the safety of his pack; to leave now would not be the way of the wolf . . . and to let his brother die alone, savaged to death by the enemy without putting up a fight, was also an unacceptable option to him.
“Go home,” Shogun snarled. “Go back to the Shadow packs. Go back to her.”
Hunter growled. “Make me.”
A huge Werewolf crashed out of the side of the building on the floor where Shogun’s men had been. Chin-Hwa and Dak-Ho bailed out behind it, nude, and two more transformed wolves followed them in an aerial lunge. Hunter got off a blast that gave the wolf on the ground pause, splattering the two in the air in a single body shot that penetrated both airborne wolves in the gut. But the shotgun blast also gave away Hunter’s and Shogun’s position.
Shogun’s men dropped to the ground in lithe crouches and then became one with the trees in a flat-out dash, furious Weres in hot pursuit. Somehow, an injured Seung Kwon had managed to exit the building by the door on the roof. Using every martial-arts skill at his disposal, he was a human body against that of a fully transformed Werewolf bouncer. Seung Kwon was losing ground fast.
Insanity propelled Shogun forward to go after his cousin; strategy sent Hunter up a tree in a one-handed pull, shotgun in the other. A blast hit the Werewolf on the roof; a blast toward the ground gave Shogun a few more minutes to live.
“Fall back!” Hunter shouted, bringing his brother to a skidding halt.
Shogun gave him a glance and turned back as Seung Kwon climbed off the roof using a drainpipe.
Out of breath, Winters burst into Finnegan’s, rushed over to Doc and Silver Hawk, and began sputtering an explanation. They didn’t even let him finish as both older men jumped up from the table and headed out the door.
Huffing to catch up with those that had wolf in their DNA, Winters pumped his arms and legs as hard as he could, and then, just as he got midway across the street, house and porch in sight, something grabbed him.
Cold claws came out of the night in a lethal grip. His scream was choked by what felt like steel around his neck. He could see Silver Hawk skid to a stop in slow motion. Bradley was on the porch in a robe, waving his arms; Clarissa was screaming something he now couldn’t hear as consciousness ebbed. Doc turned slowly, withdrawing a Glock from the back of his pants, raised the weapon in his direction, and fired.
Suddenly he was on the ground, hitting the asphalt with a thud. A horrible screech and the scent of burning flesh and sulfuric ash stung his nose and made his eyes water. Vomiting from the terror and the offense to his nose, Winters pushed himself up on shaky arms and legs.
“Get onto the porch!” Bradley shouted. “Vampire attack—get onto the porch! The house is invulnerable!”
An old man grabbed him with the strength of a twenty-year-old marine. Winters looked up, still disoriented, as Silver Hawk lifted him over his shoulder like a baby, while Doc covered them, spinning 360 degrees, constantly moving. They hit the porch and Bradley brandished two one-gallon jugs of holy water while Clarissa flung brick dust across the threshold, reciting Psalms.
“I only got one,” Doc said, wheezing. “The other one, the redhead, got away.”
“Is that how you thought you’d endear yourself to me, by flagrantly violating a directive to leave the boy for my enjoyment?” Baron Geoff Montague’s eyes flashed coal black with rage as he backhanded his lover. “This is not our fight! We are not involved in this squabble, but we are vested in the outcome!”
Black blood splattered from her mouth and painted the red tresses that fell against her cheek. She backed away with fear glittering in her eyes.
“Sa fina and I were going to bring him to you, Geoff. We thought we were following your orders. You said, ‘If the boy leaves the house, he’s mine.’ Our objective was only to bring him to you.” She held her face and lowered her head in submission. “I swear to you . . . do not dispense with me harshly. I loved her, too.”
“Tragically foolish,” the baron said through his teeth. “I would have mind-stunned him, used his body, and returned him just to let the wolves know that we can get close to their humans anytime we so desire. It would have been a mild warning, but not one that would incite war. Had you been successful, that would have been grand—but you weren’t successful . . . and not only did you lose my beloved Safina with all of this, now our enemies think that Vampires are involved in the greater conflict!”
For a moment, neither Hunter nor Shogun could move. Horror filled their eyes as three New Orleans Police Department cruisers careened into the parking lot. It all happened so fast that it seemed like everything was moving in slow motion.
Seung Kwon fell into Shogun’s arms, bleeding. Werewolves that had been in hot pursuit turned on the new human threat. Police vehicle lights painted the air a throbbing blood red. Human voices echoed from a bullhorn. Two brave but foolish officers got out of their vehicle with shotguns raised. Hunter lifted his gun to his shoulder, trying in vain to give them a chance to escape. He pulled the trigger and it only clicked. He was out of shells; the officers were on their own.
Werewolves rushed them, taking the non-silver gunshots into their bodies without slowing down. Seeing the huge creatures of the night under a nearly full moon made the officers hesitate, their minds paralyzed by what they could never understand.
The rst officer’s face was swallowed whole inside massive jaws with a scream. All that was left
seconds later was the back of his skull and part of his brain as his body dropped and then twitched on the ground. The second officer was caught between two frenzied beasts and summarily severed in half.
A driver in one of the backup vehicles tried to throw his cruiser in reverse, but a huge wolf crashed through the window, dragging the driver out onto the hood to leave no more than a bloody streak. His partner never made it out of the cab. The entire top, cherry lights and all, was peeled away like it was a tin can, and he was extracted by jaws of steel, screaming. Two thick-bodied Weres rushed the third vehicle, knocking it over onto its side and then raking open the gas tank. The wolves fled as a half-transformed bouncer lifted a shotgun, aimed, and pulled the trigger, setting off a massive explosion that cooked the officers alive in their own car.
Shogun’s men caught up to their position, breathing hard, dirty, naked, and bruised. They all looked in the direction of the human carnage, understanding; six human law enforcement deaths would be impossible to cover up. Humans were now involved.
But they also understood that, as tragic as it was, the brief diversion had afforded them a chance to possibly live. It went without saying—they owed the men who’d given their lives . . . the innocents who had probably shown up to a 911 call about shotgun reports in the area.
“In due time we will avenge the humans as a matter of honor,” Hunter said, pulling back into the denser foliage.
Shogun nodded, half carrying his injured cousin.
But then all men stopped. It was amazingly quiet. Too quiet. Each man looked around into the nothingness of the bayou. Instinct kicked in. They were surrounded. Seung Kwon slowly pushed himself away from Shogun to take a fighter’s stance. In extremely slow moves, like a subtle ballet, each man moved into position, forming a ring, bracing for an attack.
A rocket-propelled grenade hit the building; Werewolves came out of hiding with angry roars. Half of them doubled back toward the Bayou House, the other half charged at the small circle of men.
The dead shotgun butt became one with Hunter’s arm as he swung it like a baseball bat to stun one attacker. Halving it, he then rammed the broken barrel through the skull of the wolf behind him. Shogun’s agility was unmatched by the thick-bodied wolves that rushed him. Tree branches, tree trunks, anything that gave him leverage, kept him out of claw range as he ducked, pivoted, and lobbed throat-ripping jabs. Seung Kwon, even injured, was formidable when paired with his brethren. They worked in fluid coordination like deadly synchronized swimmers, using jagged branches to gouge out eyes and spear throats in bloody hand-to-hand combat.
An M-16 gun report ripped through the air. To Hunter, it was background white noise—he was in kill mode, adrenaline making him high. His wolf was caught inside his human, but his human had become a beast. Strength coursed through his hands; necks snapped at their will. His feet dug into the soft earth, holding his ground as he twisted a jaw into an unnatural position, then spun to land a haymaker that crushed a skull. His voice contained the sound of wolf rage; suddenly the predators had become the prey.
The building was on fire. There were still twenty-to-one odds. Hunter and Shogun exited the tree line to join the battle raging in the parking lot.
Sasha’s howl made them both snap. Shogun left the ground, leaping onto the back of a retreating Werewolf, his jaws powerful enough, even in human form, to rip off an ear. When the Werewolf went up on its hind legs with a howl and spun to disembowel him, Shogun quickly dismounted and Woods caught it in the gullet with a single hollow-point silver bullet. Fisher lobbed a grenade into a cluster of attackers, splattering the side of the burning building with ripe gore.
Bear Shadow and Crow Shadow were a killing blur at Sasha’s side while Sasha ran headlong, squeezing off machine-gun rounds. Hunter’s gaze locked with Sasha’s for a moment. It was enough to send pure insanity through his soul.
In a headlong lunge, he went one-on-one with a massive Werewolf male. A head butt left the wolf stunned for a second with his belly exposed. That was long enough for Hunter to come away with entrails in both hands.
Sirens in the background, smoke billowing from the building inferno, the Buchanan clan in retreat as the sound of grenades and gunfire echoed in the air, and Hunter threw back his head and howled. Dead cops, a burning building, and dead Buchanan clansmen and clanswomen beginning to transform back into mangled human bodies would be inexplicable in any court of human law.
Fisher squeezed off shots, felling the last of the retreating Buchanan fighters in single shots as everyone piled back into the three available jeeps. No one had to say it; they all knew what had to be done. Before local authorities could arrive on the scene, they had to take the vehicles as far into the bayou as possible and then strip them of any VINs and tags, as well as doing a full fingerprint wipe-down, then pray for a mudhole to screw up any DNA evidence.
The sirens were getting farther and farther away, but as Hunter’s fight adrenaline ebbed, his wolf did not. Shogun glanced at Hunter. The men shared a look as Sasha stared at them both.
Safe haven, Hunter murmured inside his own mind as they pushed a jeep into the black water of the swamp. Great Spirit open up a shadow that will swallow me whole.
Sasha’s cell phone ringing made everyone stare at her. Then her face burned as both Shogun’s and Hunter’s eyes followed the sound to her ass. She quickly extracted the device from her back jeans’ pocket, listening to Clarissa’s distraught message as well as trying to judge the location of the distant sirens.
“They were attacked by Vampires,” Sasha said, sending her gaze around the group of assembled warriors. “Two females went after Winters.”
Angry glares met hers as Woods stepped forward.
“Is the kid all right?” Woods smoothed a palm over his scalp. “Jesus . . . tell me he’s alive.”
“Yeah, he made it,” Sasha said quickly, landing a hand on Woods’s shoulder and watching him visibly relax.
“But we don’t have to put him down or anything, do we?” Fisher asked in a nervous tone. “He’s . . . just a kid, man.”
“He didn’t get nicked . . .” Sasha looked off into the distance and then addressed the question to Clarissa. “Right, ’Rissa—Winters didn’t get nicked.” It was said as a statement, a hope, a prayer, not delivered as a question. The confirmation that her fears had been misplaced made her shoulders relax by two inches.
Sasha turned back to the group. “He wasn’t bitten, just shaken up. The house is secure. Bradley and ’Rissa surrounded it with holy water and brick dust, and Doc and Silver Hawk held down the fort with artillery.”
“Then they’ve gotta get out of there,” Hunter said flatly. He nodded toward the sound of the sirens. “By tomorrow morning, if not tonight, this is going to be on the news—if we’re lucky—as a big drug raid that ended in the loss of the lives of six NOPD officers. Any other gunfire heard in a residential or commercial area is going to be followed up with significant force. If that happens, the only way out of it will be for Sasha to go to her general and start the process of a Paranormal Containment Unit cover-up . . . which always opens Pandora’s box.”
Fisher let out a hard breath and rubbed the back of his sweaty neck. “The man speaks the truth. The only reason they probably haven’t gotten to the B&B yet is because NOPD’s forces are still seriously thin and a full show of force is being diverted to this catastrophe out here. But it won’t be long.”
“Hold on, ’Rissa,” Sasha said. She placed the cell phone against her chest as she listened to the post-battle report and tried to think of where she could get her team to safety on the fly.
“They had drugs in the house, for sure,” Seung Kwon said. “You name it, they had it, plus a white-lightning still. Best moonshine in the area, Werewolf headbanger.”
Chin-Hwa nodded. “When they find the nude bodies, they’ll say it was a raid . . . The officers walked in on some sort of untoward entertainment, then were attacked—there are shotgun shells littering the ground that show a
firefight . . . Any animal attacks can be blamed on guard dogs that fled into the bayou . . . so humans will claim that the human officers gave their lives in the line of duty.”
“They did,” Dak-Ho said quietly. “And they should not have . . . This was not a human fight.”
Shogun nodded and looked away, his expression pained. “No, this was not a human fight. They should not have died so that we could live.”
“Humans do that all the time—I am so fucking tired of hearing about the way of the wolf! So the next time you guys start talking shit about what humans are or are not, remember that,” Woods said, spitting on the ground, and motioning back toward the carnage behind them. “I’ve about had it with the familiar bullshit. You saw pure grade-A 100 percent US-military-issue soldier from me, Fish, and Sasha back there. That,” he added, motioning over his shoulder with his thumb, “is what we do. It’s what me and my platoon used to do . . . God rest Rod Butler’s soul.”
Sasha nodded. “God rest Rod Butler’s soul.” Then she moved toward her man, who was clearly reeling from the gunflght and the residual effects of dark magick. “But stand down, soldier,” she said quietly, laying a hand on his shoulder. “The moon is high and so are emotions, and you’re standing in the middle of a pack of post-battle-hyped wolves.” Her eyes met Woods’s. “I’m telling you because I love you like a brother,” she said in an even quieter voice as the two alpha males behind them slowly began to snarl.
Woods let out a hard breath and relaxed. “It’s just a crying shame what happened to those officers back there . . . One was no older than Winters. That’s what fucks me up.”
Hunter nodded and relaxed. “Humans are honorable. It hurts when you lose any member of your pack, or an innocent.” His gaze went around the group. “No more low remarks cast against humans in our families—no aspersions made against those with more human blood than wolf in their veins. Agreed?”
