That night Brienne could tell that conflict was brewing between Arn and his pack, and that tension threatened to spill over to Roland’s pack. Brienne had learned that it was never good to get a pack of shifters all riled up and hot blooded, because in general shifters liked a good fight and barely cared about the the who or the why. Brienne’s presence, especially now that she’d taken the time to harness her druidic gifts, had made her a kind of wolfmother to the pack. Arn looked to be having trouble controlling his people, and she began to wonder if the custom bike job was more a ploy to buy himself some time before being back on the road, as no shifter would challenge him for the alpha spot while on Roland’s turf.
The druid had put herself into the mix in the hopes of diffusing some of the energy, and for awhile that worked. The impromptu feast had resulted in bellies full of meat and mead, the clubhouse was awash in live music and bawdy storytelling, and in many ways Brienne was reminded of her first night with the shifters four years ago. Apparently Arn had been also, and the two of them found it difficult not to stare at each other, each catching the other doing it as the night wore on.
Soren had gone home several hours earlier with Tasha, a young female shifter who shared a motorhome with Roland and Brienne. The druid had a hard time at first living in various RV parks these last few years, though she had since come to appreciate the ‘tent city’ style vibe that such places had. She also did not worry so much about security and safety, as it only took Roland’s pack moving in to turn the RV park into their territory. Nobody, regardless of how criminal they might or might not be, was about to mess with the bikers. The pack had four motorhomes that they shared, so when they showed up they created their own little neighborhood wherever they went. That left plenty of money for the shop, bikes, and everything else.
When the first explosion hit and took out the front door nobody had a chance to react before the exit was blasted open. Armored men came crashing in through the windows to join those pouring in through the smoking doors, and all of them were pumping round after round into the shifters packed into the clubhouse. Brienne had been behind the bar pouring another round of mead for herself and a few of the shifters, so was able to reach the lever-action shotgun Roland kept duct-taped just under the counter. The druid didn’t hesitate, and the first round caught a gunman in the chest to knock him off of his feet despite not penetrating his armor. The second shredded the unarmored thighs and groin of another, who collapsed in a bloody heap.
Faster than she could believe Arn tore one of the hunters to pieces and hauled Brienne around the waist while he ran past her. Though the shifters were a race of supernatural badasses, they were expected to fight only in that they must flee by any means. From pack to pack this was one of the few laws that shifters universally recognized. They had to keep their existence from becoming a widely known fact, better to stay in the shadows of fiction and superstition.
From what Roland had told her there was a mega-corporation known as Raytheodyne, which in addition to being a major defense contractor for the United States military-industrial complex also held several subsidiary companies that operated as bio-engineering firms. The company had become aware of the existence of the shifters only in the last five or six years, and had decided to keep it quiet. According to pack lore the company seemed intent on capturing a live shifter, likely to exploit their unique DNA for one product or another. For whatever reason the unique shifter biology became inert upon death, and so a dead shifter was just another human corpse. This meant that the company had to take one alive in order to exploit the species, and to date they hadn’t been able to manage it. Attacks were few and far between, as the company seemed not to have yet found an effective tracking method, though when they happened it was a bloodbath.
No one wanted to imagine what the fate of any captured shifter might be, and as such it had become shifter law to avoid it at all costs. Capture was worse than death to a shifter, and as Arn carried Brienne and bashed aside another gunman the druid could see many of the shifters make their choice. Most fled, as the building was wide open thanks to the broken windows and blasted doors, so it was a mad dash for their bikes or the safety of the night. A small few, those already engaged, fought like berserkers to the bitter and bloody end.
Once they were in the hallway leading to the rear exit Arn let Brienne down and they ran for the open door. Womack was behind them, firing a semi-automatic pistol into the fray as he kept pace. Brienne knew it was hard for him to leave Iri behind, just as it was for her to leave Roland, but it was the shifter way. When the three of them emerged into the night a gunman who had taken cover behind one of the bikes fired on them. Womack took the brunt of the blast as the cloud of silver buckshot tore into him, though one did strike Arn in the meat of his forearm. Womack’s body was thrown back against the wall as Arn fell to his knees. Brienne fired once with the shotgun, though at the distance her shot pattern was spread thin thanks to the chopped barrel of her weapon.
The return fire did distract the gunman, who crouched back behind the bike, giving Womack enough time to empty his clip at the fuel tank of the bike. The man and the motorcycle went up in a ball of fire and shrapnel that knocked everyone to the ground. Womack was lying on his back and digging in his own flesh with a switchblade, and his screams were inhuman and deafening. She could have opened herself to her druid powers and done something for him, perhaps even saved him, though such things took time that they did not have. The sounds of battle continued inside, mixed with the roars of engines as shifters from both packs fled the scene. Arn groaned and Brienne helped him to his feet. The two of them fled into the path of forest just behind the shop. Once inside the tree line Arn had shifted rapidly into his wolf form, and the two of them pushed deeper into the dark woods.
Someone had just died out there, thought Brienne to herself as she silently attempted to remember how many shots she fired and what she had left. As it was she did her best to take slow and deliberate breaths, keeping the noise minimal as she relied on her training to intentionally lower her presently thundering heart rate. The wolf’s breath misted in the cool night air, and she saw his ears perk up and he jerked his head to the right as he bared his teeth in a silent snarl. Brienne followed the wolf’s eyes and saw that one of the hunters had been rushing to flank them, and though she could tell that the armored man had not seen them, he soon would.
The hunter was dressed much like the three others that Brienne and the wolf had made bloody corpses of back at the clubhouse before taking flight. She had no idea how many of them might be out there, considering the chaos they’d left behind. Likely many of them would be rushing to remove as much evidence of the recent battle before local and federal authorities arrived. The wolf’s hackles rose and he began crouching low to the ground, prompting Brienne to do the same, and then he began to slink towards the hunter. The man was wearing night vision goggles, though Brienne knew that such technology had its limitations, and though the man could see in the dark the wolf was a master of stalking prey. Brienne dared not move from her position, camouflaged as she was by a thick clump of wide-leafed ferns, though she began to draw upon her powers in preparation.
Druid magic was slow to rise when compared to the savage ferocity of shifter magic, though once in place it became as powerful as any other force of nature. Her body was like a hollow reed and the energy of the earth filled her as she called out to the land. The power crackled at her fingertips and she felt as if she was breathing pure light as the magic rose to meet her desire. As the wolf crept closer to the hunter Brienne used her mind to call up the symbols that would help her shape the raw power she now struggled to contain. The druid’s mind swam with visions of Celtic knotwork, symbols within symbols, and into that network she poured the energy. It had taken years of study and training to call the knots, to learn which symbol would channel the energy to what manifestation. Plenty of druids through the ages had burned out or gone mad because they had not learned the humble patience required fo
r the deep magic of the earth. Brienne had that patience, even if she still struggled with the humility part.
The hunter began stalking in her direction, his face obscured by the night vision goggles and the matte black face covering that matched his modern body armor. In his hands the hunter wielded an ugly looking combat shotgun, and from recent experience she knew that it would be loaded with silver buckshot. While the hunters seemed ignorant of the druid, they had certainly come prepared to engage with the pack of biker werewolves.
Arn was nearly upon the hunter as the two enemies closed distance, and Brienne knew it would only be a matter of seconds before the hunter’s night vision goggles revealed the wolf stalking him. Brienne began to envision the burning light of the sun, reaching out to touch the solar energy that coursed through the plant bodies of the flora that surrounded them. Plants were incredible batteries for solar energy, and for druids solar magick wasn’t as much about connecting with the sun as it was connecting with the very plants that depended on it for life. Her hand began to grow hot, and she knew without looking that to the eyes of anyone who could see power it would look as if she held a mini-sun in the palm of her hand. As it was, the hunter was a mundane, and what he saw was a young woman emerge from a clump of ferns holding her hand up and palm out. At the same time he saw the giant wolf crouching in the underbrush nearby, though as he raised his shotgun to fire at the wolf a flash of light burned out his night vision goggles.
The hunter screamed in pain as Brienne’s sun spell blinded him. Arn leapt upon the man and the wolf’s weight brought him to the ground. They brawled for a brief moment, then as the wolf got its jaws around the hunter’s throat it ended with the sound of tearing flesh. Brienne heard more shouts and the sounds of running feet as more hunters converged on their position. Arn raised his bloody muzzle and his eyes locked onto Brienne’s. The wolf gestured with his head, and the druid could see that he wanted her to go deeper into the forest. She could see from his stance that he intended to go back and distract the hunters, perhaps to kill as many as he could before they took him.
“No, I’m not leaving you to face that alone,” said Brienne as she brandished her shotgun and burning sun.
The wolf’s hackles stood on end and his lips drew back in a brutal and bloody snarl, the mere sight of which put the fear in Brienne’s heart. It was one thing to argue with a man, but another entirely to disagree with a wolf. Brienne let out a deep sigh and nodded, then rushed into the darkness as Arn turned to face whatever was coming.
ACT IV
The door exploded inwards in a cloud of smoke, fire, and splinters as the concussion grenades ripped through it. The force of the blast knocked Roland and Iri to the ground along with the two bikes they’d been tuning. In seconds men in matte black body armor swarmed through the shattered space where the door had once been, pumping rounds from their shotguns into the garage. Roland roared and rolled from his stomach to his back as he reached out for the massive sledgehammer that had been knocked off the wall to clatter to the concrete floor nearby. Iri sprang to her feet even as she shifted to her half-wolf form and tackled one of the armored men. They crashed through a low workbench and soon blood and pieces of armor were flying in all directions from where they’d landed.
Roland grasped the hammer and stayed low as he rushed behind one of the few bikes still standing and managed to stay out of sight long enough to flank the other two men who had entered the garage. The alpha’s entire left side, from his arm down to his leg, burned with a white-hot intensity and he knew that he’d been hit with silver buckshot. Iri howled in pain as the two men emptied their shotguns into her and the dying man she had pinned beneath her. Roland bellowed in rage as he leapt out from cover and swung his hammer with all of his might. The blow caught the nearest hunter in the temple and was so powerful that the man’s helmet shattered along with his skull in a spray of blood and ceramics.
The last hunter leveled his shotgun at Roland’s chest, though before he could pull the trigger Iri’s clawed hand lashed out and tore into the back of his thigh. The hunter’s shot went wide as he fell to the ground. The dying shifter used her claws to climb atop the hunter as they struggled for position. Roland had taken another pellet of buckshot from the hunter’s errant shot and struggled to limp his way over to the two combatants. By the time Roland reached them the hunter had managed to slip a thin silver blade under Iri’s jaws to finish her. Before the hunter was able to get out from under the dead shifter’s body Roland growled and raised his hammer.
“Wait! Wait!” begged the hunter as he dropped the knife and held his hands out in front of him, “It’s a kill or capture, if you just came peacefully…”
The hunter was interrupted in his plea as Roland brought the heavy hammer down on the man. The shifter knew the score, and had been pack alpha long enough to know that there could never be peace between hunter and shifter. No quarter asked and none given.
The force of the blow crushed the man’s faceplate and pulped his skull. Roland leaned up against the engine that hung on chains suspended from the ceiling as he tried to catch his breath. The silver shot was burning its way though him, and the alpha knew that no matter what was happening in the rest of the clubhouse that he had to get the silver out before he would be of any use. The alpha was growing weaker by the second as he limped, then crawled over to the tool chest and found a set of needle nose pliers. He rolled over onto his back and unfastened his belt so that he could fold it over on itself and place it in his mouth. Then Roland took several deep breaths, and pushed the pliers into the first of the ragged holes in his side.
The pain was worse than anything he’d experienced, despite his long life of violence and wilderness. Had it not been for the belt he would surely have screamed and alerted any nearby hunters to his position. The alpha could hear other members of his pack howling and fighting amidst the roar of motorcycle engines and the coughing bark of the hunter’s shotguns. There had long since been a contingency plan in place for such an event, he thought to himself, rolling the plan over and over in his mind as a way of keeping his mind off the excruciating pain. The pack appeared to the casual observer as just another ragtag motorcycle club, though no matter how low a profile they kept, the hunters would always find them.
It had been a good ten years since the last time Roland and his tribe had come into conflict with a band of hunters, and the alpha could not help but to feel as though they’d been caught off guard. Then again hunters were never this organized or heavily armed, the shifter reminded himself as he pushed the pliers into his flesh to dig out another pellet of the burning silver buckshot. Hunters were more often than not lone wanderers, driven by a need for vengeance against the shifters. Shifter packs did sometimes have occasion to make a few corpses here and there, though that had more to do with being biker gangs than it did being shifters.
The real menace was the Blackwatch, those hardcore shifters who had acquired a taste for human flesh and who reveled in their physical superiority over humankind. Those were the real life big bad wolves, and most hunters wandering the landscape looking for revenge were victims of Blackwatch attacks. Since the Blackwatch shifters were always on the move, and worldwide they numbered only a few packs anyway, it was the rest of the shifter breed that typically had to deal with the broken-hearted hunters wielding silver bullets.
However, this had to be the work of Raytheodyne mercenaries, thought Roland as he popped the last of the buckshot from his arm and spit out the belt, having nearly bitten it in half. These hired hunters, for what else could they be but that, had used explosives, wore body armor, and burned through ammunition as if they didn’t give a shit how much an ounce of silver cost. Most hunters were dirt poor and were lucky to have a few silver rounds or a sharpened piece of fine cutlery, these guys had some serious financial backing. Roland knew about the secret war with the mega-corporation, though he’d never thought he and his pack would be on the front lines of that fight.
After the firs
t two years of the company attempting to capture a wolf there had been a pack of Blackwatch shifters who had assaulted the Ratheodyne corporate headquarters. The psychotic werewolves had ripped through the security forces and slaughtered the Board of Executives before hanging the CEO out the window by his own entrails. Only one of the shifters survived the attack, though she had claimed it was worth it to kill the company. The problem was that mega-corporations of that size weren’t killable, and more executives simply stepped up the company ladder to fill the vacancies left by the slaughter.
The new Board and CEO used their vast resources to perform a flawless media cover-up, gave themselves raises, and continued the relentless pursuit of the shifter tribes. Since then shifter packs had taken to living even more on the fringes of society, with regular packs becoming more and more like the Blackwatch every day. Roland knew it was a slow grind, and that eventually there would have to be a showdown. One way or another it was going to end messy, he just hadn’t thought it would be today.
Alpha Breed: Werewolf Bikers (Sex & Violence Book 1) Page 3
