The Strip (24 page)

Jessie glanced up at the pilot. He was looking nervously at his gauges and, now that he mentioned it, Jessie could feel a slight difference in the way the blades were spinning.

They seemed sluggish. The helicopter was losing altitude.

Jessie stood in the doorway of the chopper and re-hooked the .270. He nodded at the pilot. “Fine. On the green,” he said. He ripped off his headset and threw it to the side, readying himself for what he knew would be coming.

The pilot managed to maneuver the helicopter past a few houses beneath him and land it on a smooth roll of grass just beyond the long, extended lawn attached to Gabriel Phelan’s house. As the helicopter touched down, bouncing once and then settling, Jessie leapt from the open doorway and flashed into wolf form.

He managed twenty or thirty feet in the direction of the street on the other side of the houses, when Gabriel Phelan’s luxury home exploded.

The sensation and sound were nothing like they were in the movies. On the big screen, a bomb went off with a
bang
and a flash of gorgeous, destructive orange and red flame and a mini-mushroom cloud of ash and debris.

But in the real world, a bomb went off with a
boom
. It was deep and rumbling and shook the earth as if the solid ground were nothing more than water in a pond. The force rippled out in a super-sonic shock wave that knocked the breath from your lungs and all awareness from your mind, temporarily turning everything into a muffled, painful
thump
of mega-proportions.

The blow ran over Jessie as if he were a squirrel in the street and a Mac truck had just decided to make road kill out of him. He was directly behind Phelan’s house when the blast ignited, and his body now took the brunt of the bearing. By the time he’d stopped rolling across the ground, his furry form was limp and he couldn’t feel his limbs.

Absently, he wondered if they were still there.

Not a lick of flame or rubble had come anywhere near him; it was only the force of the explosion itself that had driven him to the ground. His ears were ringing and he tasted blood in his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue.

In the distance sirens wailed, but Jessie barely heard them. His world had become a fuzzy, humming unreality and he felt just numb enough that he could only lay there and accept it, almost grateful for the unknowing that came with it.

Eventually, veracity seeped in around the edges of his consciousness and he remembered who he was. He remembered
what
he was. He remembered that he had to save Charlie.

Slowly, almost languidly, he blinked a few times, attempting to clear the white, fractionated fog from his vision. Sensation returned to his feet and he moved them. They were human feet, at the ends of human legs. He had flashed back into human form when the bomb went off.

He moved his hands and managed to push up off of the grass, raising his head. He breathed in, his lungs expanding painfully against the bruises his ribs had carved along his sides.

One rib was broken. He could hear it clicking as he breathed.

It shifted and re-attached, even as he lifted himself up off of the ground. By the time he was standing, the bone was healed and his vision was clear.

His amber, glowing eyes scanned the landscape. There were no bodies strewn across the rolling green. He scented no blood. No one had been hurt in the explosion. The sound of sirens reached his ears. They were still far off, but he could tell that they were coming nearer.

For the second time in the last five minutes, Jessie rushed forward and flashed into wolf form.

* * * *

Gabriel roughly pulled Charlie down beside him when the C4 in the saddlebags of Cole’s bike detonated and Phelan’s house belched thunder, its windows shattering and sliding to the ground in cascades of razor-sharp crystal.

The force of the explosion sent everything within an impressive circumference a few inches backward, including the Shelby Cobra, which skated a little across the wet lawn, forcing everyone who was hiding behind it to scramble along beside it, despite the fact that they were also somewhat stunned.

Charlie’s ears were ringing and her muscles felt slack. Her heart felt strange and heavy in her chest, as if it had been fibrillated by the blast and was now as befuddled as her mind. But Phelan had a hard grip on her upper arm, his fingers cutting into the bruises already left there by the warlock, Seth.

Seconds became minutes, and the rivulets of power radiating outward from the explosion began to die down.

“Clear the way to the chopper,” Gabriel instructed.

The warlock didn’t reply, but he again began to chant and anger coursed through Charlie. She hated the sound of his voice; of those horrible, ancient words he was muttering. She hated the fire-red glow in his eyes.

“Shut up, you vile, obnoxious freak!” she hissed at him, straightening so that she could attack him full-on. She just wanted to punch him, to send her fist flying straight through his rib cage and out the other side.

But Gabriel sensed her intentions and took action. In the space of a few short heartbeats, he had her in his arms and locked up against his chest. He didn’t bother saying anything to her, as any threat he could have offered at that point would have sounded empty. Instead, he focused on the task at hand.

“Get to it, warlock,” he commanded, his tone menacingly low.

Seth gazed steadily at Charlie. She’d managed to foul his spells twice in the space of less than ten minutes. There was little doubt in Charlie’s mind that if it weren’t for Phelan being with them there at that moment, the warlock would kill her. Slowly.

But Phelan
was
there and, instead of attempting to harm her in any way, the warlock once more began to chant. His gaze skirted from her defiantly flashing ice-blue eyes to the street and row of houses beyond.

Charlie tried to follow his gaze, to see what he was concentrating on – were there other people there? Who had flown the chopper? Who had shot out the tires? But Gabriel had her too tight. When she tried to turn her head, one of his hands came up to encircle her neck. It was a warning that required no words.

She went still in his grasp and tried to think. She knew one thing for certain. She knew that Malcolm Cole was nearby. Even if Gabriel had not credited the motorcycle to Cole as he’d hauled her into the adjoining garage and forced her into his car, she would have known.

The blood in her body confirmed it. It was humming to life with something like hope. She could sense him as surely as some peoples’ bodies could tell them that it was going to rain. The promising sensation managed to dull most of the unpleasant fear that had invaded her body and mind. Even the pain that Gabriel now caused because he was touching her was muted compared to the certainty she felt that her mate would not allow her to come to any more harm.

My mate?
she thought, bewildered. Where had that come from?

She didn’t have the time to consider her own thoughts for much longer however, because Gabriel was suddenly swearing again and the warlock was spinning around in place as a giant black wolf bounded toward them at a speed so unbelievably, impossibly fast that it seemed to actually blur the edges of his fur around him.

Charlie was thrust to the ground and hit the grass just as another one of those strange flashes went off around her. She rolled over to find herself staring at two massive wolves – one black, one white – locked in mortal, terrifying combat.

The sounds they were making were inexplicable.

Charlie had heard
cats
fight before. She’d seen them rip into each other in the alley behind their apartment in Pittsburgh. She’d always gone out into the alley to try to break them up because the sound was so awful. It was like children being tortured to death. This was worse. These weren’t cats. They weren’t even dogs. They were full-grown, larger-than-life wolves, all fang and claw and deep, reverberating growl that seemed, at once, louder than a Harley’s engine and meaner than the Hell’s Angel atop it.

“One of them will die and you’ll be stuck with the other,” he continued, his tone still soft and low and laced with a menace palpable enough that she could almost taste it. “Set to be collared and leashed and rutted on until you get pregnant with his puppies,” he told her.

She whirled on him, her heart hammering.

His red eyes glowed hellishly. He smiled – flashing fangs.

My God…what the hell are you?
she thought, frantically. Her breathing quickened and her pulse began to race. She knew he wasn’t a werewolf. She knew it in her blood.

But he clearly wasn’t human. She’d been right about that.

He came forward then and, as if he were some gentleman out of a historical romance novel, he offered her his hand. She glanced down at it and hastily took a step back.

He cocked his head to one side, his red eyes flashing. “I can take you away from all of this, Claire.”

He’s going to kill me
, she thought.

“I will
not
kill you,” he promised, speaking expertly around his razor sharp fangs. “I give you my word.”

The fire trucks and ambulances were too close, his resources said. The authorities would be upon the scene in minutes. Apparently, humans along the street had already ventured out of their homes – and slipped back inside, terrified and confused at what they had seen.

No fewer than twenty 911 calls had been put in, and Kavanagh felt he could safely say this incident would go down as one of the worst exposures in werewolf history. But, as bad as it was, it was not one that couldn’t be dealt with. He had the world’s best magic users working for him. And he had connections in every government agency known – and unknown – to man.

It wasn’t the possible exposure that had Kavanagh on a private plane, headed for Las Vegas at that moment. It wasn’t the damage to the golf course or the media mess or the pay-offs he would have to make that were truly bothering him.

It was the fact that his granddaughter was right smack in the middle of it all.

When Jessie had informed him that Gabriel Phelan, also known as David Reese, was the rogue leader of the Hunters, Kavanagh’s heart had fallen into his stomach, cold and heavy as a lump of coal. For a human to be a Hunter was bad enough. They were skilled fighters, hell bent on the utter destruction of the werewolf race.

But their zealousness was misdirected and mistaken and could often be written off as a form of insanity; they likened werewolves to demons and honestly believed them to be such. In the end, a human could sometimes be forgiven for their ignorance.

But a werewolf? A Hunter? And not only a Hunter – the
leader
of the Hunters? What kind of sick son of a bitch was Phelan? And what would he do with Claire… with his little Charlie?

Kavanagh felt another nauseating wave of apprehension roll through him. He was surrounded by an aura of disquiet, anxiety and concern. Most of all, he was wrapped in anger. He had loved his son very much.

Cole knew that Gabriel Phelan was a good fighter in human form. But in wolf form, he was subject to the same laws of nature that every other werewolf was held to. All that mattered was size and strength and determination.

And right now, despite the fact that Cole had already been injured by another werewolf, the two wolves were matched on all but one of those qualities.

Phelan wanted Charlie. That much was patently clear. But Cole wanted her more. And there was enough hatred and needed revenge running through Malcolm’s bloodstream at that moment to fuel an entire German army. So, when a slip in Phelan’s defenses finally presented itself and afforded Cole an opportunity that anyone else would have missed, Malcolm took it.

He brought his claws up toward Phelan’s underside and attempted to dig in, but Phelan sensed his intention and twisted, allowing Cole’s teeth to rip completely through his flesh in exchange for the freedom it afforded the white wolf. Phelan pulled away and backed up, the snowy fur of his left shoulder covered in rivulets of dark red blood.

Cole growled, exposing his blood-soaked fangs.

Phelan flashed back into human form.

When he did this, Cole was temporarily blinded. He skittered back on his paws, shaking his head to clear it. By the time he focused on Phelan again, it was to find that the man was holding a gun on Charlie.

Where he’d gotten the gun, Cole had no clue. He must have had it on him before he’d flashed into wolf form. Perhaps tucked into the back of his pants. It didn’t matter.

Cole flashed back into human form himself and glanced at Charlie. She was looking from Phelan to Cole to a black man who was standing a few feet away from her. The stranger’s scent was human. But his amber eyes were glowing, and he was sporting fangs.

Cole was overwhelmed with a plethora of different emotions at that moment. Confusion was high on the list, but higher still was anger. Highest was fear. Of everyone in this fray, Charlie was the only one who could be killed with whatever bullets Phelan had in that gun.