by R. J. Blain
The next time I got anywhere near Scallywag, I was going to rip him to shreds and toss his body into the ocean, to hell with the consequences.
“You’re not him.” The woman had a pretty enough voice, a little smoky, a lot husky, and with just enough of a growl my wolf was ready to roll over and submit to her. “Who are you?”
My cell chose that moment to ring. “Answer that,” I rasped. “Thigh holster. Right leg.”
My already ruined dress ripped as one of the werewolves dug for my phone, locating it and answering with a swipe. To my surprise, she held it to my ear.
From what little I could see of her, she was a blonde.
“McGrady,” I answered.
“Any luck, Declan?” Anthony demanded.
“Declan?” the woman straddling me hissed, and I felt her hand fist over my chest, grabbing the front of my dress.
I flicked my thumb over my ring to take a picture of my captor. “Check the stream in a minute. Hey. How long does it take for a concussion to heal? I think I have a new one.”
“Declan, now is not the time.”
“Sure it is. I just cracked my head on the floor again, but at least this time, instead of six stories of stairs, I got…” I squinted in my effort to count the women staring down at me. “A gaggle of ladies.”
“A gaggle of ladies,” Anthony echoed.
“What do you call a group of women? Colony? Herd? Stampede? I’d count them, but things are a bit blurry right now.”
“Jesus Christ, Declan. Are you okay?”
The woman straddling me stole my phone and enabled the speaker. “Who the fuck are you?”
“He wasn’t joking about the gaggle of ladies, was he?” Anthony sighed. “Hey, client. I think he found your ladies.”
“He?”
“Declan is the scout portion of your extraction team,” my client replied, and judging from the clarity of his voice, he had claimed the phone from Anthony. “Is Patricia there?”
“Patricia, some dude is asking for you,” my captor said, disabling the speaker and offering my phone to one of the other women.
A moment later, someone laughed, soft and content. “No kidding, eh? No wonder I couldn’t tell; he’s wearing so much perfume it’s burning my nose.”
It was rare, but I loved it when a plan worked as intended.
“You want us to follow his lead? He’s half-dead, covered in blood, and wearing a dress that went out of style two hundred years ago. Are you serious?”
The other women giggled. I sighed, closing my eyes while the castle spun in circles around me, and said, “She’s probably right on that score. Tell him I’m going to slow you down. I can and will extract myself, thank you very much. I’ll figure out a flight plan for you ladies and either serve as a distraction or bait.”
Professional Pride: 2, Common Sense: 0.
At least I was being honest with myself. Until I had a chance to change to my wolf and hunt, I’d be useless. While my unnatural heritage kept me alive, I healed a lot slower as a human. Given a couple of days, I’d probably recover enough to get out on my own, assuming I could find somewhere quiet to hole up until I could rest.
I tried not to think too hard about the logistics, including the lack of water in the castle’s hidden hallways.
“He wants to talk to you.” My phone was passed back to me.
“McGrady,” I answered, closing my eyes to ward off my headache long enough to deal with the conversation.
“Do you think you can get them out of the castle?”
My client didn’t pull his punches, and I sighed, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into for only half a million dollars. “Hostage situations are a little above my pay grade and skill set, sir. I can try, but I’m used to working solo. I can give them directions on how to navigate the galleries and get to the ground level. I don’t know the lay of the land around the castle, only that the cliff has a one-person lift. The shore below is pretty minimal, and I have no idea how far it extends.”
It wasn’t really a lie; extractions involving living people had, once upon a time, been my speciality, but I had left that life behind a decade ago, and for good reason.
“You aren’t capable of joining them?”
“I’m a liability. I’ll cover their six and serve as a distraction to buy them time to get off the castle’s grounds.”
“You’re ex-military.”
I grimaced. I had never officially served in the military, but I had picked up things over the years working in operations, and my partner before Anthony had been a retired SEAL. “Not quite, sir. I learned a few tricks from a former SEAL.”
That was a safe enough admission. While I had once done some relocation for the US government, I tried my hardest to forget those days.
At least I’d been smart enough to use a false identity back then, one so complex the government believed in its authenticity. Living openly as Declan McGrady was the pinnacle of my accomplishments, although I wondered how much longer that would last.
It wouldn’t be much longer until no one believed my real age; I had already gotten to the point my youthful appearance drew unwanted attention.
My client clearing his throat dragged my focus back to my phone. “Make a plan and get the ladies out of the castle. I will text your phone with a link to a GPS tracking app. Install it, use the code I will send you, and make sure it stays running. That will make certain your phone can be tracked by the extraction team.”
“I’ll give my phone to the ladies once it’s set up,” I promised.
“What about you?”
“Contract rules still apply.” I hung up before my client could argue with me. When he called back half a minute later, I declined the call, silenced my phone, pulled up a map app, and went to work, ignoring the stares of the women surrounding me.
Lying prone on the floor for an hour gave my head some time to recover, though not enough to put an end to my dizzy spells and blurred vision. After I declined ten calls, my client took the hint and sent over the details for the tracking app, which I loaded up and set up to his specifications.
The French version of Castle Transylvania was located north and west of Paris, which made it ideal for planning an escape. The castle wasn’t too far away from civilization, and if the satellite maps of the surrounding area were to be believed, terrain wouldn’t be an issue for the women.
The nearest town was ten kilometers out, which wasn’t much for a healthy, motivated werewolf.
“Okay, ladies, listen up,” I ordered, my gaze locked on the screen, which was the only thing my uncooperative eyes could focus on without putting up a fight. “You’ve got a ten kilometer run east from here to the nearest town, and it’s through vineyards and farmland. It should be an easy hike. Satellite imagery isn’t showing any notable obstacles, so you should be able to wait for extraction in relative safety. Moving targets are harder to hit, so once you go, keep moving and don’t stop until your contact team picks you up.”
After adjusting the zoom on the map, I charted a plan for their escape, setting my phone up to relay instructions to reach the waypoints I had set. “This is your flight plan. Stick to it. I’ll be sending the coord list over to the team so they can plan an interception.”
I turned the display to face them. The blonde insisted on staying right where she was, straddled over my stomach. As far as I could tell, she was quiet unless annoyed and capable of reining in the other women with a single word.
She snatched the phone out of my hand and muttered complaints about me while looking over the map. “Why set a route like this? It circles in on itself three times and zigzags all over the place. This is fucking stupid.”
I didn’t have the time or will to explain the concept of confusing the trail, so I ignored her complaints and replied, “Logistics. If you’re following a set flight plan, the extraction team can intercept you. With the tracking program running on the phone, they’ll be able to pinpoint when you should arrive at the next w
aypoint. That’ll help make sure you connect with them. You should be able to move fast enough on this terrain, especially since you’re fresh and ready to make a run for it.”
What, exactly, had I gotten myself into? Assessing the art collection of a spoiled rich lordling was far different from making certain a bunch of female werewolves made it from Point A to Point B without running into trouble; I was in no condition to keep up with them.
My wolf understood the irony of having finally found females of our kind, only to send them on their way without having a chance to court any of them. I had no choice but to resign myself to the bitter reality of the situation.
“We’re fresh,” she replied, her tone taking a hard edge. “Fine. We follow the phone to each waypoint. What then?”
Her guess was probably as good as mine, although I understood how extractions were supposed to work from my military ops experience.
My job was to extract myself, and different rules applied
Steadying myself with a deep breath, I replied, “You meet with the extraction team and they take care of the rest. Go with the flow and don’t put up a fight. Your job is to cooperate with them.”
“What about you?”
“I’m not a factor in the operation as soon as you seven ladies are clear of the castle grounds.” Either I would make my escape or I wouldn’t. Dancing around the subject wouldn’t change things. “My extraction is my problem, ladies. That’s the way this operation works. I’ll be on rear guard duty and covering your backs. I’ll make my own way out.”
With luck, less than a week from now, I’d be on my way back to the United States on a cruise out of Hamburg. If I missed the ship and had no other choice, I’d catch a flight out of Germany back to my home turf and put the entire job behind me once and for all.
“That’s bullshit.”
My wolf growled his appreciation in my head, and I ignored him. “That’s the terms of my contract, sweetheart. You’ll just have to live with it. You and your friends will be leaving the castle, you’ll be following the assigned route and hitting each planned waypoint, and you’ll be extracted and on your way back to the United States, probably by the end of the day.”
For the first time since tackling me to the floor, the woman straddling me rose to her feet, my cell still in her hand. I didn’t need to see her face to know she glared at me. I got to my feet, shaking my head to clear it of the vertigo still plaguing me.
“We’re wasting time. Let’s not give him any extra time to make preparations.” I turned, clenched my teeth, and marched through the hallways in the direction of the staircase leading to the storage room six stories up, wondering how I’d get them out of the castle without killing someone in the process.
Blood was a finite resource, and the quantity I had left on the staircase stopped me dead in my tracks. It puddled on the landing, and smears of it marked the steps and walls. I winced, gingerly touching the back of my head.
My reintroduction with the floor hadn’t helped matters for me, and at least one of the gashes had a tendency to open up and resume bleeding when I moved my head the wrong way.
I’d need the nineteen-day cruise complete with a stop in the Caribbean to recover from my misadventures in Scallywag’s castle.
“What the fuck?”
“There’s a reason I’m a liability,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Look, lady. Maybe instead of questioning my methods, get your head into the game. Your job is to get you and your friends to the extraction point. Let me worry about my problems.”
“Julie. My name is Julie, not lady, not sweetheart, and not any other idiotic cutesy nonsense you might try to come up with.”
“Fine, Julie. You worry about your job and let me worry about mine. You get one try at this, and if you twiddle your thumbs, you’ll hurt yourself and your friends without meeting up with the extraction team. You’ll end up stuck in France with Benjamin Scully. Got it?”
The other women kept their mouths shut, staring between me and Julie. From what I could tell through my blurred vision, they worried. The horrific amount of perfume I had bathed myself in did a good job of masking their scents in addition to my own, which was probably a good thing.
I disliked that they knew my real name, but at least they couldn’t tell I was a werewolf like them.
“Understood, Mr. McGrady.” Julie clacked her teeth together, glared at me, and stomped up the staircase, hesitating at one of the dark splotches several steps up. She shook her head and kept going.
I waited for the other women to begin the long hike up to the sixth floor before joining them, grimacing at having to climb so many stairs. In the effort of preserving my dignity, I took my time, pausing to take in the stains marking where I had splattered my blood in the stairwell.
A normal human should have died after such a tumble.
“How the hell did you survive that fall?” Julie demanded in a whisper when I reached the top of the staircase.
“Your guess is as good as mine. I spent twelve hours out cold at the bottom, for what it’s worth. Got lucky.” Being inflicted with lycanthropy helped, but I couldn’t tell them that. I hesitated, taking in the wall, and sighing in relief when I spotted a lever near the stone wall. “Once I open this, you’re on the clock. I know absolutely nothing about the castle’s security systems, except for the fact I saw surveillance cameras through the gallery. This opens to a store room. Your best bet is to take advantage of the fact you’re fast and know where you’re going.”
I grilled them all on the way out until every last woman was able to repeat the directions back to me, complete with landmarks, which I showed them on my phone by accessing the catalog of images.
They’d be able to find their way out one way or another.
Julie glared at me, looking like she wanted to give me a shove down the staircase. I scowled back at her, wondering what I had done to irritate her so much. “Ready to move, ladies?”
“Ready,” the others chorused. Julie growled something under her breath, grabbed hold of the lever, and yanked.
As it had with me, the doorway swung silently open, revealing the unlit storage room. Like me, the women showed no signs of needing light, and Julie led the way, squeezing through the crates on her way to the doorway leading to the main galleries.
I stalked after them, waiting for the ax to fall and our escape to be revealed. The door shut after me of its own volition, and the thump of stone on stone chilled my blood.
If luck was on our side, we’d be gone before the security system and those monitoring it registered we were present. If all hell broke loose, I didn’t know what I would do.
Once the ladies were free and clear, I’d make my way back to Hamburg to the hotel I had booked, change into real clothes, and pretend I had never taken the job from hell. I’d board my cruise home, take my half million dollars, and disappear for as long as possible. I’d wash my hands of meddling clients and the risky world of high-end theft.
Anthony would understand. Some risks weren’t worth taking, and I’d finally bit off way more than I could chew.
All I had to do was get the women out of the castle and on route to the waypoints so they could return to the United States.
How hard could it be?
Chapter Five
A successful heist hinged on the timing, and my twelve-hour nap at the bottom of the staircase coupled with the lost hours exploring abandoned corridors set our escape window at shortly before dawn.
I’d take every bit of good luck to come my way. I needed it.
The galleries were completely dark, which made navigating through the castle a tricky affair. My eyes were good in the dark, but not that good, and I relied on the gleams and reflections of the rooms with windows to guide me, and the rest I did by feel.
The soft patter of bare feet in front of me allowed me to track the pack of female werewolves, who kept silent without any coaching from me. As I feared and expected, they did move a lot faster than I could after my t
umble down the stairs.
By the time I reached the third floor, the female werewolves were so far ahead of me I could no longer hear their feet on the cold stone. I kept my pace slow.
The last thing I needed was to hit my head again. The pounding in my skull was accompanied by the throb of abused muscles and bruised bones, but there was nothing I could do about it. There would be time enough for resting after I made my escape. Once I left the castle, I’d risk the cliffs, although I’d risk them in a way no one anticipated. Thanks to my trip on the yacht, I knew the waters were deep enough for cliff diving, although the cliff’s height still worried me.
I hadn’t done any jumps higher than fifty feet, and the cliff was closer to a hundred if my guess was correct. In the dark, I’d have to rely on my wolf’s strength and speed to jump far enough over the shore to miss the shallow waters.
Sending seven women out in lingerie was bad enough, but at least they had direction. Without my phone to guide me and looking like an attempted murder victim, if I came too close to civilization, I’d face a lot of unwanted attention.
My best bet was to head for the ocean, shift to my wolf, and make a mad dash for Hamburg following the coast. Once in the city, I could sneak into the lodge serving as my hotel, change into clean clothes, rid my face of makeup, and pull out the extensions lengthening my hair.
I’d even be able to cut the two months of growth I’d added to help me pull off my infiltration. In one or two hours, I’d be a whole new man.
The castle remained dark and quiet, and by the time I reached the ground floor, the only sign of the women’s passage was the front door, which they had left open in their wake. I slipped through and shut it behind me.
The first light of dawn touched the sky, and I eyed the distance from the castle to the cliff. The anchor for the lift waited, and in its shadow, I saw the last person I wanted to see.
Scallywag was alone, and he was armed with a pistol. In the gloom, I couldn’t tell the model. He saw me moments later, and he straightened, stepping towards me.
