Darkness Returns (19 page)

Teresa circled, trying to figure the best angle of attack. She closed in, lining herself up with Jessie’s back. When she felt close enough that she could make the leap up onto the truck, she sprung.

Jessie hadn’t turned, yet
something
hit Teresa in the chest like a giant fist of air, snapping her forward momentum short. As she fell, she felt the pinpricks of pain dotting her chest. She also caught a glimpse of Craig, poking out of the truck to his chest like a Nazi riding in his Panzer. He had his forearms braced on the edge of the doorway and his eye sighted down the length of a pump-action shotgun.

The spread of pain in her chest? Buckshot.

She hit the street in limp lump. Couldn’t catch her breath for a second.

Craig kept the shotgun trained on her while Jessie jumped down from the truck and sauntered over in her wacky outfit. Was this the mortal plane anymore? Teresa felt the dust on her coat of hair covering her entire body. Not far from her, the jumpsuit she’d taken from the warehouse lay like a shed skin, a cloth puddle of what remained of her humanity. She had become one of the monsters, just like Jessie.

Just like Mandy.

We’re all monsters.

Jessie stepped right up to her, boots a foot from Teresa’s snout. Teresa could smell the nylon laces, the rubber soles, and, of course, the leather. The girl reeked like a metropolitan fetish shop. The vamp nudged Teresa in the side with her foot.

The fucking nerve.

All that garbage about becoming a monster…Teresa couldn’t blame herself. She hadn’t done it because she
wanted
to. She’d never been given a choice. That didn’t mean she still couldn’t make the right choice—monster or not.

Despite the fire gouging her chest, Teresa pulled energy from a deeper pool she hadn’t before realized she possessed. How dumb of her. A single shot from a shotgun long range couldn’t put her down. Teresa Stevenson now had a supernatural heart.

She was a fucking werewolf.

When she shot to her paws, Jessie took a startled step back.

Craig fired.

Chips of concrete exploded beside Teresa, a few catching in her pelt, but no damage done. He’d missed, and judging from his scowl and how he tossed the shotgun aside, Teresa knew he’d run out of ammo.

Teresa whirled on Jessie and glared at her. She couldn’t speak through her wolf’s throat, but she sent a message with her eyes she bet Jessie could read well enough.

Just me and you now, bitch.

Teresa leapt for Jessie’s throat.

Chapter Twenty-Four

All Lockman could do was watch as Teresa, now a wolf, drove toward Jessie, and Jessie, taken off guard, shuffled backward but otherwise did not react until Teresa had her by the throat.

His heart pounded an irregular rhythm that felt like it might crack open his chest. He’d tossed aside the Mossberg when he’d spent its last shell and now clenched his hands in helpless fists that trembled against the bottom edge of the old truck’s door frame, the metal cool against his skin now that the desert sun had begun to set. He was able to look out from the truck by standing on the side of the passenger’s seat. Now he stepped up onto the driver’s seat, climbing up until he could sit on the back edge of the doorway and swing his legs out.

He wasn’t thinking straight.

Teresa had Jessie on the ground and shook her like a dog toy. He couldn’t see any blood, but watching this massive animal wrench at his daughter’s neck, and the sound of her leathers scraping against the cement street like sandpaper turned his rational mind off as easily as if it had a switch.

He slipped off the truck without fully contemplating his landing. His right ankle bent sideways and all his weight came down on the side of his foot, further torquing the joint in a direction it wasn’t made to go.

Lockman cried out as he stumbled and fell to the ground. The cement scoured off a layer of skin from his elbow, leaving a red smear on the street and a raw oval on his arm. But Lockman had spent a lifetime shaking off pain. He pushed himself to his feet and limped his way across the street.

He was
not
thinking straight.

No plan.

No concept of what he would do when he reached the struggling woman. Snips of time fluttered away like trimmed film. One second he stood by the truck. The next, he had the back of Teresa’s pelt gripped in both hands. It was like taking hold of a wild bull. She didn’t notice him. Didn’t pause in her relentless tugging at Jessie’s throat.

So with his good foot, Lockman kicked Teresa in the ribs.

This meant putting all his weight on his bad foot. Between the weakness in the ankle and the thrashing of Teresa’s wolf body that he tried to hang onto by fistfuls of fur—or hair, or whatever werewolves were covered in—he lost his balance, was taken off his feet, and in his effort to keep from getting bucked halfway down the block, grabbed at her pelt all the harder.

Instead of hanging on, he only managed to tear away two healthy fistfuls of her hair as he swung away from her like an amateur cowboy off of his first stallion. Some patches of her flesh had come with the hair, pinkish flakes of skin peppered with blood.

Enough to get her attention.

Teresa let go of Jessie’s neck and curled her lithe, animal body in a U to face Lockman, who now lay a good seven yards or so away. Other than the wet and angry purr in Teresa’s throat, the street was quiet. Anyone peeking out of their doors had shut them—and bolted them if they were smart, maybe shoved a sofa or chest of drawers in the way as well. No curtains fluttered by hands that pushed them aside for a peek. Unlike the scene at the Hummer, not a single police siren cut the soft sigh of the growing desert breeze as dusk settled over this poor Vegas subdivision that had become host to the world’s darker things.

A smell, like burning hickory carried on the wind. And dust. Lockman’s flaring nostrils felt like parched holes in his face.

“Get away from my daughter,” he said.

Teresa’s growl intensified. Lockman got the impression she had something to say, but couldn’t in her wolf form.

Didn’t matter. The two of them had exchanged enough talk in the past. Neither had changed their mind. And Teresa had let her own position push her into madness. Never in his life could he have imagined his old friend—old
lover
—joining a wolf pack in the name of…what? Principle? Vengeance? He still didn’t understand.

Probably never would.

Teresa must have realized he posed no threat to her. She started to turn back to Jessie.

“Hey,” he shouted. “I have something of yours.”

When she turned back, he held up his clenched fists, tufts of her hair still sticking out between his fingers. He opened his hands and let the hair flutter to the ground, some of it falling faster, weighted by the bits of skin that had torn loose. His palms felt sticky with her blood.

Teresa actually barked at him. Her lips quivered. Foamy saliva coated her gums.

Lockman kept his gaze fused to her eyes. The dusk had deepened. Some automatic streetlamps had turned on and gave her eyes that greenish shine as if caught in the headlights of a passing car on a dark country road. He wanted her attention on him, because he didn’t want her to notice the movement behind her.

Jessie, initially stunned or knocked unconscious from Teresa’s efforts to rip out her throat, stirred. She sat up. The leather around her neck hung loose, revealing some sort of flexible metallic sheeting underneath. Either cutting edge body armor developed in the new Agency’s labs, or some sort of charmed material, courtesy of some fucking mojo.

Even if it was mojo, he wouldn’t begrudge it this time. It had saved his daughter’s life after all.

Lockman’s stare down tactic only worked for so long. Teresa had a wolf’s instincts, and she easily sensed the movement behind her.

She swung her head back to face Jessie. Hunched her shoulders. Growled like a motorboat.

Jessie got to her feet, tore away an extra flap of leather that dangled from around her neck like a bib, showing off more of the special material underneath. Dusk had settled enough to allow her to draw the zipper across her mouth open. She took an exaggerated and unnecessary breath. Then she flipped the goggles off and tossed them aside.

“Much better,” she said.

Teresa’s growl turned down an octave. Her hackles rose.

Jessie pointed to the shiny underlayer of her outfit. “Something the boys back at the office fixed up for me. They call it Raptor Skin. You know? Like the dinosaur? Pretty sweet, huh?”

As if possible, Teresa’s growl seemed to drop lower still.

Lockman’s nerves jangled. The pain in his swelling ankle fought the endorphins keeping him from feeling it. “Quit toying with her,” he said, “and end this already.”

He should have kept his mouth shut.

Apparently, he still wasn’t thinking straight.

Teresa curled back around to him and charged. He didn’t have a chance to react. He could have been on his feet, no twisted ankle to deal with, the Mossberg back in his hands and fully loaded. None of that would have mattered. She moved too fast, too unexpectedly.

Her mouth found his throat for the second time that day. As he felt her teeth poke against his flesh, smelled her meaty breath engulf his head, he experienced that proverbial moment he always thought a lie.

Lockman saw his life flicker across his mind’s eye.

At the brink of death, it didn’t matter that most of his memories, the oldest ones, came from the ether of a dozen or so other souls. None of them belonged to him. He saw them anyway. Four different faces, each one his mother, eyes doting as they stared down at him in his crib. A pair of men, superimposed one on top of the other like a double exposure in his memory, two of his fathers, crouched to his five year-old height, given stern but loving direction on how to handle the pistol in Lockman’s tiny hands. Fifteen different drill sergeants all shouting at him at once about what a worthless pansy he was and how he might as well pack it up and go home private.

Then the recent memories.

The real memories.

The day he met Kate.

She wore one of those clear rain slickers that hung over her like drenched crystal. Lockman had run into her on his way out of Aco, where he bought his third hammer of the week while fixing up his three-loose-boards-from-condemned house because he kept losing the damn things. He’d made the decision to burn the house to the foundation and start from scratch if he lost this hammer, these thoughts caging his mind so that he didn’t even see the woman rushing along the sidewalk to get out of the rain until he had plowed into her and knocked her to the ground.

She looked a mess. But under the drooping edge of her poncho, he saw her eyes. Hard eyes. Eyes that didn’t give a damn about his rambling apologies. Eyes that only cared about the dozen eggs in her grocery bag that Lockman had obliterated when he had knocked her over.

The kind of eyes that belong to a woman he could love forever.

Their first date.

It rained then, too.

But this time she carried an umbrella. And those eyes watched him the whole time, dubious that a man whom she had called a
fucking wrecking ball on a pair of left feet
would want to take her out to dinner.

The date changed everything.

Everything.

Set Craig Lockman on a path that would eventually lead him to finding out he had a daughter, a daughter that drove him nuts, but also won his heart with the same eyes as her mothers. Eyes that held nothing but strength and the promise that anything was possible.

All in the hair’s width of a second or less, these memories and thoughts flashed through Lockman’s mind as if in preparation for the moment when memories and thoughts would cease for him forever.

That’s when he heard the most terrible scream of his life, like a throat tearing open and a legion of bats flying out of the bloody hole. Not human. Not by any stretch.

Enough to make Teresa hesitate and give Lockman an extra few seconds of life.

But when the scream came again, Teresa couldn’t help abandoning her attack and looking toward the source.

This gave Lockman the chance to do the same.

They both found themselves staring at Jessie—

—and at one of the more horrifying things Lockman could imagine.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Funny. For a girl her age, Jessie had seen her dad nearly killed a whole lot of times. Way more than any girl should. And this wasn’t like,
My dad’s a fireman or cop and puts his life on the line everyday while I sit at home doing Math homework
. That shit had to be tough, too. But Jessie had actually
seen
her dad near death on more occasions than she cared to count.

It’s enough to fuck with any girl’s mind.

When you’re a vampire, though, apparently emotion has special power. You reach a point where you can only take so much. Maybe that’s why a lot of the older vamps looked so fucked up, so very far from the people they used to be. Like the ones that looked like pure demons. Like the ones that looked like those winged mother f-ers painted on Kress’s round room.

Shit, she could sit down and analyze this all day. Dad never was one to give her all the answers to the nasty things they dealt with. Protecting her, somehow. But if he knew, even suspected, that what happened to her in that desert dusk in Vegas
could
happen to her, she would take time out later to kill him herself.

The scream that nearly ripped open the corners of her mouth when she opened it so wide came about from the pain. Pain like nothing she’d ever felt before. And Jessie knew pain. She’d had all her blood sucked out of her and fed back in through her mouth. That qualified as more than a little uncomfortable.

This pain, though?

Probably made childbirth and passing gallstones—those bastions of pain thresholds—feel like freakin hangnails in comparison.

It started low in her back, almost as if she’d twisted wrong, which, after tussling with Teresa the Wolf, would have made sense. It grew quickly, though. And spread as fast. Up from the base of her spine to the nape of her neck. First it felt like her spinal column had turned into a lava pipeline. Then the pain evolved to acid-soaked razor blades all jammed every which way up and down her back.