Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (27 page)

When he came even with the stairs, Dallas shifted direction. Swiftly, but not so much as to draw attention, he started up the steps. He had only made it to the fourth when a voice came from behind him.

“Can I help you with something?”

Curt. Authoritative. He knew before turning that the voice belonged to Courtney Dwyer. When he did spin to look at her, she wore a perturbed, barely polite expression.

Dallas hoped to avoid a scene, but whatever it took was all right with him. He had run out of patience, run out of interest. He did not even really want to be here. With a smile on his face, he moved down two stairs so he stood only slightly above her.

“Actually,” he said softly, “I was just looking for a bathroom. I thought—”

“Rest rooms are in the back to the right.” Courtney stared at him, waiting for him to come down off the stairs, almost willing him down with the strength of her gaze.

Ooh, I like her,
he thought.
Girl’s got backbone.

He moved down to stand beside her at the bottom of the steps. Though she put some of her weight on the cane, Courtney stood up straight and met him eye to eye.

Dallas grinned amiably, then reached out and took her arm.

“Keep silent and Cantwell stays alive. Maybe you will too, not to mention whoever might get in my way down here.”

Her skin became ashen, and she stared at him. With his hand on her bicep he could feel her pulse race in her veins. In the din of the restaurant, a clamor of voices and music, no one could have heard their exchange, but he did not want it to look awkward.

“Smile,” he instructed her.

Courtney did.

“Let’s go upstairs and talk this over.”

Dallas could sense resistance in her, knew that she wanted to scream, to fight him, to call for help, to warn her brother somehow. But he saw the battle of conscience waged in her eyes as she weighed the odds that she would survive, and how many other people might die, and what might happen to Bill, whom she must already know was missing.

After a moment Courtney started up the stairs, using her cane to support her. Somehow she seemed smaller to him now. Dallas followed her closely, as though he were keeping watch in case she should stumble.

When they were nearly at the top, he heard a phone begin to ring downstairs amid the noise of the bar below.

Then they had reached the door and her hand was on the knob.

Somewhere in the kitchen Jack knew the refrigerator hummed and the clock ticked and a night breeze blew in through the window that had not been boarded up. But he could not see or feel any of those things. He had flesh, true, but with his soul focused on the land of the dead, he was barely more than a ghost himself.

“What do we do now,” Eden had asked.

“Wait,” he said. “Now we wait.”

A moment later he heard the sound of a door closing as though from a distance and he turned to see another gray human silhouette. With his visual perceptions attuned to the Ghostlands, she was colorless and without any density, as though he were watching an old black-and-white television, and her features were barely visible. Still, he knew it was Molly.

“Hey,” she said, and her voiced was muffled and distant as though she spoke to him through a wall of substance rather than perception.

“Hey.”

“Just thought I’d see how it was going.”

Jack smiled. “No way to tell yet,” he replied. “But pull up a chair if you want. The show’s free.”

Molly laughed softly and did exactly that, sitting down beside him, right across from Eden. Though Jack could only see them as if through a thick mist, he caught a moment between the two girls as they watched each other, sizing the other up. But Jack did not dwell on it.

His thoughts were only of Molly.

With everything that had happened in the past few days, the space that separated them had been filled with anger and hesitancy and unspoken words. Yet suddenly all that seemed to have dissipated. Despite the tension of the moment, Jack felt a burden lifted from him.

And then a ripple of fear, a murmur, passed through the gathered spirits of the dead and the ghosts began to move about as though jockeying for position. One of them, a thin man with olive skin and glasses, disappeared completely, fear winning out.

Jack glanced quickly at Artie, and then at Seth.

“The Ravenous?” he asked.

Seth’s voice was laden with dread. “
It comes.”

Matt Brocklebank poured a Guinness draft from the tap and waited for the head to settle before topping it off. He had been at work since half past ten that morning and exhaustion was setting in. For a while he had been ticked off at Bill Cantwell for not showing, but the more time went by the more worried he had become. It wasn’t like Bill, not at all.

So Matt kept working, serving beers and cocktails, wiping down the bar to keep it clean, dishing up bowls of trail mix. It was late enough now that the bar was packed and he barely had time to think about Bill, never mind anything else. The only thing on his mind right about now was quitting time, and whether or not there was some magic spell that could transport him to last call.

“Guinness,” he muttered as he slid the pint to a guy with pug features, bright blue eyes, and pepper-gray hair that looked to have set in too early.

The guy raised the glass to Matt and took a swig. He was running a tab, so Matt moved on to a couple of other guys flagging him from the far end of the bar. He grabbed another bowl of trail mix from under the bar and slid it onto the counter in front of a couple of cute blondes who had so far fended off advances from just about every guy in the place.

“What can I get you gents?” Matt asked the two men at the end of the bar.

“Two Rolling Rocks,” one of them replied, his wallet open in his hand.

There was a note of apology in his voice as though he thought he ought to be ashamed of ordering such a normal, everyday beer in a place where Sam Adams and Guinness were so prevalent. Matt thought it was silly. If you wanted just plain beer, nothing special, Rolling Rock was smooth and crisp and tasted a lot better than most of the other beers in its class.

“Comin’ up,” he replied in bartender shorthand. When it got busy, it was almost as though he had only a dozen phrases or so to choose from.

He opened a cooler behind the bar and reached in to retrieve two of the green longneck bottles. As he was popping the caps off, the phone behind the bar began to ring. It was up loud so it could be heard over the roar of the restaurant, but Matt frowned as he looked at it. The main number didn’t ring back here. Someone had to either dial in the number for the bar, or be transferred from another phone inside Bridget’s.

Bill,
he thought, picking it up quickly. “Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Hey, Bill,” Matt said, relief flooding through him. “Where’ve you been?”

“Later, Matt. Just listen. Where’s Courtney now?”

The bartender frowned, but he glanced around the restaurant to see if he could spot the manager. There were too many people in front of the bar for him to be able to get a good look at the place.

“I think she’s on the floor.”

“What about Jack and Molly?”

“Molly was working last time I saw her. Jack’s upstairs, I think,” Matt said slowly. “Bill, what’s going on?”

“I’m on my way there now. Just do this for me. When you hang up the phone, get one of the barbacks to cover for you, or a waiter, I don’t care. Find all three of them and tell them to sit down and have a drink or something, right in the middle of the place. Tell them there’s trouble, and I’m on the way.”

“What kind of trouble?” Matt asked, growing nervous now.

“Just do it. I’m going to try to call Jack upstairs.”

Matt started to say “All right,” but then there was a click and the line went dead. Bill had hung up.

Jack stood quickly, chair scraping on the floor, and he felt his blood rushing, heard it in his ears. Beads of sweat ran down his forehead and yet he felt strangely cold. The Ravenous was coming.

“Be ready,” he told Seth.

Before the spirit guide could reply, a scream tore through the apartment.

It was his name.

His sister, Courtney, was screaming his name.

Shift.

Jack spun, the world seemed to invert again and his stomach convulsed with nausea at the instant shift. His perception altered, Molly and Eden and the room around him regained their color, their life, and the ghosts were merely shadows again.

In the corridor outside the kitchen, Courtney stared at him, blue eyes wide with fear and heavy with consequence. Behind her stood a long-haired blond guy with a half-hearted goatee on his chin and wild eyes. Even if it were not for the grip he had on Courtney’s arm, Jack would have known, would have seen it in the way he stood, the way he carried himself, the way his body seemed to flow with every motion.

Prowler.

He locked eyes with the beast and he recognized those eyes from the night before, knew this was the one who had tried to kill Molly, maybe kill them all. The one he had shot.

“Hello, Jack,” the Prowler said. “You can call me Dallas.”

Then Dallas began to change, the animal erupting from within.

And even as he did, the ghosts cried out in alarm.

The Ravenous was here.

C H A P T E R 14

Jack froze. Panic surged through him and he was torn. The golden-furred Prowler had changed completely now, his black lips curling back in a disdainful snarl as he clutched at Courtney’s arm. The beast—Dallas—had the upper hand and he knew it.

Yet on the opposite side of the room, the lost souls who had come to aid Jack were now crying out in terror. All but a few of the ghosts were dark, faint traces like visual echoes. Some of them, Artie and Corinne Berdinka, and Alan Vance, had more substance, a shimmering, diaphanous mist in the gloom of the kitchen. And Seth was there. Eden’s spirit guide shone brightly.

Jack could see them, but without shifting his perceptions to the Ghostlands, he could not see the Ravenous. But he did not have to see it to know it was there. The ghosts cried out in alarm and one of them, a woman he could barely see, began to shriek in agony as the Ravenous tore into her, began to rip at her essence with its snapping jaws.

With Corinne and the others, Artie rushed at the Ravenous. The ghost of Father Pinsky grabbed at the invisible beast, and then he screamed in agony as his arm simply disappeared, trailing misty tendrils like scraps of savaged flesh and muscle.

“
Hold it,”
Seth shouted. “
You must hold it still.”

“What the hell do you think we’re trying to do?” Artie retorted.

Jack stared, open-mouthed. He had to help, to do something to stop the Ravenous from destroying all of these souls, including Artie’s. His gaze ticked back and forth from the hall where Dallas clutched at his sister, to deeper in the kitchen by the windows where the ghosts cried in panic.

In the hall, his sister with her lips pressed together, refusing to scream or plead. And the Prowler who held her, leering.

“What are you waiting for, a rescue?” Dallas growled. “Cantwell’s not coming. He’s out of the picture.”

Courtney winced, then, and bit her lip. “Oh, Jesus,” she whispered.

“He’s not coming either,” Dallas said with a chuffling sound that might have been its laugh. “What’s it gonna be, Jack? I’m supposed to kill you all, but I’ve decided I’ll settle for you. I don’t really want to be here anymore, but you shot me. You pissed me off. Come on over here, show me your throat, and I’ll let the cripple go.” His attention still split, the ghosts crying out in anguish and panic behind him, Jack glared at the thing.

“Your timing really sucks.”

Courtney gritted her teeth, held her breath, and shot her elbow up and back with all the strength she could muster. It connected with Dallas’s throat and the thing grunted in pain and released his grip on her arm. Then she spun, keeping her weight on her good leg. She raised her cane, held it at the bottom, and swung it like a baseball bat, cracking the silver lion’s head across the beast’s face hard enough that he staggered back. The cane had belonged to her maternal grandfather and it was made of stern stuff. Courtney swung again and this time the lion’s head struck Dallas in the left eye, and he cried out and reached his claws up to its face.

“Now who’s the cripple?” she screamed, her throat raw with the fear and rage and adrenaline. “Come into
my
place,
my
house, threaten my brother and the people I love!”

She raised the cane again.

Almost more swiftly than she could see, Dallas lunged for her, batted the cane from her hand, and raked his claws up her body from abdomen to throat, tearing her clothes and slashing her skin. Courtney did not even have time to breathe. She went down hard on the ground, legs unable to support her, blood spilling out of the wounds, spreading too quickly across her shirt.

She heard Jack cry her name.

Already numb, her eyes beginning to shift out of focus, she saw her brother grab up the chair he had been sitting in, raise it up, and rush at Dallas. The beast spun too quickly for him, whipped a hard backhand at his face. His fist connected, and Jack was thrown backward, falling. He struck his head against the edge of the table and when he hit the floor he did not move.

Courtney felt blood pooling beneath her on the floor. She heard Molly and the girl, Eden, screaming for Jack to get up, crying out for help. Deeper in the kitchen, for just a moment, she thought she saw other people, a panicked crowd screaming silently and grappling with some unseen force.

The door in the hall behind her opened and Courtney just managed to turn her head enough to see Matt Brocklebank come into the apartment. He was just a kid, really, a good worker and a sweet guy who almost never noticed the women at the bar hitting on him.

“Bill called and said there was trouble,” Matt said hurriedly, glancing around. “What the hell’s going on up—” His eyes widened as he stared at the lithe, slavering creature crouched in the darkened kitchen.

Then Courtney’s vision began to dim . . . and faded to black.