Brazier Abraxis went home. And then he went up to the sole place that felt more like home than any fashioned by the hand of man.
A moonless sky stretched overhead as he walked along a familiar path. Dark leaves rendered darker brushed him as he passed by until he reached a small clearing within the dense growth of plants and trees.
His tower top sanctuary. That place where his most secret of secrets could come undone and his mastery was most complete.
Only now, he desired guidance and hoped that the voice of his father would not disappoint him in this time of need. There was far too much at stake.
Braze turned upon his heel, his head craned back and his eyes closed.
Yet silence was the only response in that deserted place.
"Will you not speak to me?" he said at last.
But the voice that answered him was that of a stranger who spoke with the dust of millennia in its tone.
"I had not considered that you would expect me. How unsettling."
The sound was like boulders grumbling as time wore them inexorably down into grains of sand meant to be washed to the seas before rising up in cataclysm so that the earth might throw them down once again.
"I do not know you," Braze said, "Yet, I believe I know who you are."
The owner of the voice did not respond immediately, nor did he show himself.
"You have heard the tale of the Messenger and the woman who saved him, then," said the voice at last.
"I have," Braze replied, "And you should know that the forest wolves have spoken to me of the giant who came from the trees and fought at their sides against Kabiel, dark angel and maker of vampires."
There was a heavy sigh from the shadows.
"Kabiel...yes. My father and his loathsome offspring. I could not have done otherwise just as I found myself without choice in coming to you this night, wolf."
Braze nodded even if he was unsure whether the voice's owner could see him or not.
"Then step free of the shadows, Nephilim, for I would welcome an ally such as you."
There was no sound of movement. Rather, there was a low grumble that was strangely similar to the growl of an angry wolf. A sound of warning.
"I am no ally. Not to anyone or anything. I do not choose sides unless it be the side that pits itself against my adversary and the vampires in his sway.
"You, the sons and daughters of Galgallin are as deserving of destruction as any blood drinker. This world is a world of men and we have no place in it."
Braze heard honesty in the Nephilim's voice...brutal, cruel honesty that said more about him than his own words.
"For the moment, my most pressing concern is an enemy against whom I am forbade any direct action. But, the vampires must not be allowed to gain the upper hand, and it appears that a grievous error has been made, first by the vampires themselves, then by you and your wolves. If I have scaled this glass tower it is because I would see the matter resolved and not in a way that favors the spawn of my father."
Braze considered the Nephilim's words. But he did so quickly and made his decision. There was not enough time to do otherwise, if he well understood the Nephilim's intention.
"You say that one day we will likely stand against one another, as enemies rather than friends. Yet you tender a collaboration I would be ill advised to not accept. As to that, I say let us be allies if but for a single night."
There was low laughter that sounded as if it echoed from deep caverns.
"Pragmatic and expedient," the Nephilim said, "You do well to agree, wolf. Now listen closely...."
~~~
They roared down dark streets. The nondescript sedan cornered even better than Flair had ever dreamed it would as he brought it hard around and into an alleyway that was darker than the streets down which they had just come.
The city at night, or more truly in the deathly quiet hours just before first light, was nothing like what he usually saw. It was a wild, abandoned place where laws could be set aside there where there were none to see.
He grinned as he brought the car to screeching halt. In unison, his two passengers let out their breaths and his smile grew larger as he considered that for just a short time, the Twins had been entirely in his power. They had been his to do with as he willed.
However, the race to the vampire's last known location was done and the passenger doors of the sedan flew open and his ephemeral power over the Twins with it.
Flair sighed, then got out to join the two women who stood very closely together. Their position was a strange one. They stood facing one another, toe to toe, with their foreheads touching and their eyes closed.
He was about to ask them if it was really the best moment to take a nap standing up when a heavy hand fell upon his shoulder.
Flair wheeled about, his hackles rising, only to see the familiar face of a wolf he knew in passing.
"These the boss's trackers?" the wolf asked. It took a moment for Flair to place his name, then he had it. Griff was one the most highly regarded hunters among the urban wolves. He and his three associates were the ones to call in times of need. Only this time, they had not been enough.
"Yeah," Flair replied, "I guess they need a minute to get their heads together."
He chuckled at his own joke, but Griff did not smile back at him. That was the next thing Flair remembered about the hunter. He was a humorless, all business professional and the fact that he had failed in his task surely weighed upon him. Flair supposed it would not help to remind him that no other wolf could have trailed the vampire as far as he already had. Or, that it was perfectly understandable that it had finished the way that it had...in failure.
"Well, I don't think there's anything any of us can do...but maybe they should get busy and scent what little is left of the trail. As it is, I can't pick it up at all anymore. My boys can't either."
Behind the large shifter stood three others staring back at them. All four of the hunters were massive, with huge square shoulders. Flair could think of no other wolf who could have been their match in sheer musculature if not for the very man who employed them all, Brazier Abraxis, himself.
Even among their wild cousins, those forest dwellers who shunned the cities of men, there were wolves of great stature but none who could match the sheer physical presence of the urban wolves' alpha.
At that thought, Flair startled.
"Wait a sec...Mr. Abraxis isn't here?"
The big wolf looking down at him simply shrugged his shoulders and said, "We thought he was coming with you."
"He said he was going to meet us here...." Flair answered, his voice trailing off. It was not like the alpha wolf to not do something he had said he would. It was not like him at all.
Behind him, Flair heard a sigh slip from two throats at once.
He turned and the Twins were looking at him and the big shifter named Griff. The two women's brows were drawn down hard and their lips were raised.
"Big bad wolf or not," Agate said.
"We's a goin' huntin'," Opal finished.
The darker of the two women, Agate, snarled and arched her back then dropped forward in fluid motion. Before her hands even hit the pavement, they had veered into wide paws and a somber beast rushed forward like a spear thrown by a dark god.
Opal grinned wide and Flair felt himself hammered by her raw beauty once more.
"Ya better get movin' puppies, or the show'll be over before ya know it."
Then she, too, was on all fours rushing away like a ghost made of leaves blown before a wild autumn wind.
The big wolf beside Flair had his mouth open and his serious air had given way to something else. It took Flair an instant to recognize what it was he saw on the hunter's face, then he had it.
What he saw was nothing less than wonder.
"Do you think they really...?"
Griff did not have time to finish his phrase.
"Yeah, I think maybe they did and if we don't move now we're going to lose them, too."
Flair shifted. His body lengthened and fur rippled down his skin and even if it had happened countless times before, he had never lost his love for that moment. That place where man and wolf coexisted for but an instant, that intangible moment where the man's heart beat a half rhythm that finished in a wolf's chest.
His narines flared. There was no sign whatsoever of the blood drinker from earlier that night, but the scent of the two females spoke clearly to him as he raced after their trail.
Dimly, and with little interest at first in whether they followed him or not, he heard the faint clicking of the hunting pack claws on macadam coming after him. Flair's heart swelled in the joy of the hunt.
It was what the forest wolves knew and spoke of with such intensity, such passion. Flair realized that it was ephemeral and surely illusory, but he loved it all the same as he ran with the other wolves after their quarry.
This, he knew, was what it felt to be pack. Rare, unheard of, even, for urban wolves.
Pack.
Together they ran hard after the females and in time the five wolves gained upon the pair who pulled them along in their wake.
Flair's lungs burned and his heart hammered hard in his chest. His tongue lolled from between his open jaws as he ran and his breath was hot and humid.
Not a single human was in sight and for that the young wolf was grateful. As a rule, he did not wish harm upon the humans he crossed while other wolves were more ambivalent. Yet others, and in particular the forest wolves, viewed mankind with animosity or outright hatred.
This night, though, they were spared any encounter that might have ended with misfortune for both species.
Wolves like them would not be overlooked if anyone had been there to see them. They were very large beasts compared to the natural, mundane wolf. But more than anything, the sight of them would burn its way into human memory once they turned their baleful yellow stare to look back at the wide eyed human who, in turn, would recognize an intelligence equal to his own.
And for that, men would show them no quarter.
Fortunately, the werewolf knew the ruse of hiding in plain sight, couched in legend and disbelief. An eventual conflict between the two species would be hard fought to end with none as vanquisher.
Flair believed both races capable of monstrous, terrible things and the destruction they might visit upon one another would be without limit or mercy.
Better that their paths not cross and that a hunt such as this take place at an hour that belonged to beings other than human.
The five shifters turned a corner to come to a skidding halt.
The two female wolves were there. They stood still, their noses in the air, questing this way and that. If Flair did not already know better, he could have imagined this was what it looked like when the Twins knew doubt.
It was a risk, but Flair decided it was worth it.
He shifted just enough to allow a roughly human voice pass between his lips and asked, "What's the matter, girls? Did you lose the vamp's trail?"
He meant it as good natured kidding, but their immediate response showed they found nothing humorous in what his question implied.
They both reared up on two legs, their bodies transforming more quickly and fluidly than any werewolf Flair had ever seen. What was more was that the two had left their clothing lying where it had fallen, back at their starting point beside the black sedan.
Five male wolves stood perfectly still, their pupils opening wide to take in the unabashed display of the two females.
"No, blondie...we didn't lose the trail," Agate said, her full lips saying the words with careful precision.
"Vamp's right in there," continued Opal, her grey blue eyes drifting over Flair before flicking in the direction of an old brownstone tucked in among others. The windows were boarded up from the inside with newish looking plywood while most of the glass had long since been broken out with some still clinging to the frames and looking for all the world like jagged teeth.
The pale woman's voluptuous form moved with animal grace and elegance as she turned to look more fully in the direction of the mansion.
Flair's teeth clicked together as he drew his jaws shut, coming dangerously close to biting his own tongue. Opal's bottom flared from her slender back and waist in a shape that demanded a male's touch and he gulped as he felt himself thicken down between his legs.
As it was, while he had already had a chance to appreciate the storefront, it turned out that the back room was just as finely made as all the rest.
"And, he's not alone," Agate said, breaking the spell that held the male wolves in stasis.
Her tone was one of barely restrained fury and the two women marched quickly toward the old mansion, apparently all need of stealth and wolfish power gone.
Flair did not look to the others to signal that they should follow. He simply slipped back into the skin of a wolf, prudence being the watchword until the Twins' strange behavior revealed its own mysteries.
He trotted after them, catching up quickly just as they mounted a short flight of stone stairs from sidewalk level to a large door that hung ajar.
The women did not hesitate as they pushed it wide open and slipped into the darkness.
Flair's vision showed him black and gray amorphous shapes that made no sense, until he realized they were simply sheets covering what little furniture remained within the old demesne.
However, the Twins acted as though they were no strangers to the house as they wended their way down a dark corridor to yet another door. It stood more widely open than the first and the quality of darkness beyond its frame was not the muffled, dusty silence of the old building's interior.
He padded just behind them as they stepped outside into a courtyard surrounded on all sides by the mansion's walls. It would have been a stifling, overly close place if it had not been for the open night sky visible overhead.
There were long dead trees in the four corners of the courtyard, their bare branches stretching like the bones of the forgotten toward eternity and loss.
But what held the werewolves' attention, all eyes riveted and unblinking, was the hulking form of a man who rose from the ground like a ghost coalescing in a lieu of death and sorrow.
In his hands he held an enormous hammer that he hefted with no obvious effort for his body in silhouette was one of a man built like a mountain, a living metaphor marred only by the fact that he moved like water with an ease that should have been impossible for someone so massively built.
He took a step forward from the shadows that enveloped him and the Twins snarled in unison.
"You arrive too late," Brazier Abraxis said to them as he let the sledgehammer slip through his fingers to fall to the ground.
Behind him, Flair saw the reason for that hammer.
Lying spread-eagled, his arms and legs drawn tight in the four directions of the compass, was the blood drinker that had been the object of all their collective efforts this night.
Instead of a single stake driven through the thing's chest, there were four iron pipes jutting up from each of its forearms and from its legs just below the knees. The effect being that while the creature struggled weakly, it was fixed to the ground just as surely as an insect in a meticulous giant's collection.
Flair barely remarked his own metamorphosis from wolf to man as he stood in amazed silence while the alpha wolf, Brazier Abraxis, came to them.
Before he had time to say anything more, Agate snarled.
"You lied to us," she said.
"You knew where he wuss all along," continued Opal.
Braze shook his head, his expression grim.
"Your accusations are unfounded and unworthy of you both. Your skill is nothing less than remarkable and in honor of that alone I speak the truth."
He looked from one to the other, his eyes demanding that they believe him. For their part, the Twins did not flinch from his solemn gaze. Rather, their eyes blazed in anger and defiance.
"I pose
d this wager in good faith and was unaware as to the vampire's whereabouts. I swear this to you in the name of the sire of all wolves, Galgallin, himself."
Agate shook her head slowly.
"And yet here you are," she said.
"I am," replied Braze, "And that constitutes failure upon both your parts. Therefore, I am under no obligation whatsoever to cede to your corporal appetites."
Both women growled low and deeply from the back of their throats. With alarm, Flair saw in a flash what they meant to do, so he cleared his throat more loudly than necessary and gestured with his chin toward the four hunting wolf males that had come in silently behind the two females.
Agate glanced over her shoulder back at them, then put a hand on Opal's arm.
"We didn't fail and we owe you nothing."
Opal took up where Agate left off.
"You's the one done the tricking here," she said.
Then the two sultry women turned around, apparently abandoning any idea of attacking Braze, and pushed their way through the hunters behind them.
"A pity," Braze said, "They could be such an asset to our efforts, Flair. Instead, those two women leave us embittered with thoughts of revenge their sole unguent in answer to the sting of a task left undone."
Flair did not know how to respond to the alpha wolf. To his mind, something smelled like cheating despite what Braze had to say.
Instead, he changed the subject.
"So, did the vamp actually know what he said he did?"
Braze shrugged his broad shoulders.
"It would seem so, yes. Once he discovered I had no wooden stake to drive through his heart and end his worthless existence at once, he pled for mercy and I do believe he told me all that there is to tell.
"Apparently, he sought to sell his information to vampires ranked more highly than he, but he was met with rejection and dismissal. And that was most fortunate for our organization because he has, indeed, learned the names of far more of our infiltrators than I would have believed possible."
Braze cocked his head slightly to one side as if listening for the blood drinker to contradict what had been said.
"In any case, once I began staking him into place with the first things I found at hand, he understood that his doom draws nigh and all that he knew spilled out in a flood of information among which one thing is of vital importance."
Her Billionaire, Her Wolf--The Novel (A Paranormal Alpha Werewolf Romance) Page 26
