Authors: Jody Wallace
“This is the dreaded Chang Cai?” the man asked, staring at her. “This tiny thing?”
“You know nothing,” Lars spat. “Take her gun and tie them both up.”
“Get ready,” Marcus whispered.
Get ready for what? To die? Or did he have a plan?
“You there.” The keeper kicked Marcus in the back of the knee, but he kept his balance. “Put your hands behind your back. Don’t give me any trouble or I’ll shoot you.”
Marcus’s shoulders flexed as he moved slowly to comply.
No, Marcus. Don’t give up.
His surrender jolted something loose inside her. Something that had been frozen in horror and now burned hot with the will to survive.
The keeper, satisfied by Marcus’s obedience, sneered at Katie and grabbed for her.
After that, everything happened at once.
A line of traffic crossed the bridge from downtown, headed right for them. She chopped the keeper’s forearm with a bone-breaking blow. Hopefully not her bone, because her hand stung like shit. Lars shouted orders, his voice a shriek of rage.
Marcus launched into action as if released from springs.
He hurled the closest man across the gravel shoulder. The guy howled in shock until his body slammed into a guardrail with a sickening crunch.
The vehicles approaching from downtown slowed at a stoplight. A car horn blasted. Someone shouted at the combatants about 9-1-1.
Katie had one chance. She dashed for the humans in the cars, screaming her head off. She was a small, defenseless-looking woman and she wasn’t afraid to use that.
“Help us! Please help us!”
She could hear scuffling, fighting. Cursing. Bodies hitting the ground. Gunfire echoed behind her several times.
Agony chiseled her upper arm. She’d been shot.
Shit. Shit!
How bad?
Arm. Just arm. Fiery pain stole her breath but her legs still churned. Her vision fuzzed in and out.
Didn’t matter. She called for Marcus to come.
He did. Thank the Goddess he was upright. Fate finally shifted in her favor. The light turned green and several vehicles began to reverse, trying to escape the crazies with the guns.
Several, however, remained to watch. She could see people with their cell phones, calling the cops or filming it for the internet. Either way, this would be harder for Lars to handle.
She approached the truck in the lead, driven by a bearded guy she recognized from the neighborhood they’d just exited.
He was kind of a dirt bag. And alone in the vehicle. He’d do.
“Truck,” she wheezed to Marcus. She zagged as gunfire erupted behind them. The windshield of a car burst. A woman screamed.
Katie crossed the road and slammed into the far side of the truck. Using it as a shield wasn’t enough.
Marcus, guessing her intent, yanked open the door and hauled the driver out. “Sorry,” he growled. “You’ll get it back.”
“Hey, you can’t jack my ride!” The guy tried to jump Marcus. The sedan behind them honked. Maybe to applaud the show, maybe to scare them.
She knocked the guy out of the way with a few well-placed kicks. He was so surprised, he lost his footing, landing on his ass at the side of the road. He ducked and rolled as the keepers fired a few more shots, warier now that multiple humans were included.
Katie didn’t have a black belt, but smelling lustful and being convex weren’t her only talents. She was quick, wiry and fought dirty. And she had a high pain tolerance.
Marcus leaped into the truck. Slid to the passenger’s side. She followed, glad he didn’t argue over the wheel. Wolves with their dander up weren’t easy to manage. She smacked the truck into gear and shredded in a half-circle, tires squealing.
She gunned it toward downtown. In the rearview mirror, the bearded guy chased after them, shaking a meaty fist. Lars, the only keeper standing, scrambled for his minivan. Another group of keepers emerged from the neighborhood, on foot and running. She hoped Lars’s people wouldn’t hurt the witnesses, but she and Marcus couldn’t stick around to find out.
She floored the truck. It zoomed across the overpass, jouncing into the air where the pavement buckled upward. They landed with a crunch, and Marcus grabbed the dashboard.
“Don’t wreck,” he said in a tight voice.
Adrenaline fizzed in her veins like carbonation. The gunshot wound faded to background annoyance. She gripped the wheel tight, perching on the edge of the seat.
When they reached a queue of cars at a red light, she slammed on the brakes. Tires screeched. People in front of them pivoted to see. The light turned green, and she swerved around cars like a slalom racer. She chose a side street that should have less traffic.
The direction shift concealed them from pursuers. The fact that no cars had rammed the back of the truck was a good sign the keepers hadn’t caught up.
Yet.
Marcus turned his attention to their rear view. “I don’t see Lars’s minivan.”
She followed a twisty route to the parking garage. Marcus rifled through the car, its glove box and behind the seat. He tucked things into his pockets and put a dirty ball cap on his head. He also found a camouflage jacket that was too warm for the weather but would alter his appearance.
Soon, they reached downtown, where Katie pulled into a parking garage a block from the one she wanted. She was relatively sure this one had exit cameras, not internal ones.
She parked the truck in a slot on a crowded level. Before she could get out, Marcus stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Let me see where the bullet struck you.”
“It’s nothing.” They’d faced Lars. They were alive. A gunshot wound was a small price to pay.
His grip tightened. “Shut up and cooperate. I’m having enough trouble containing myself without you egging the wolf on.”
“Sorry.” She tried for docile as he inspected the wound.
He dabbed the cut with a handkerchief. Her blood seeped into the white cotton, stark and copper-scented. “It’s shallow. Hurt much?”
“Feels great.” She pulled the keys out of the ignition and folded them into the driver’s side visor. “I love getting shot. Makes me giddy as a schoolgirl.”
“Giddy or woozy?” He wound the hankie into a strip and tied it around her arm. “You got lucky.”
“I’m not lucky, I’m good.” Happily the keeper shooters weren’t. “It looks worse than it is.”
“I should have hung on to my briefcase so we could purify the truck.”
“It’s okay.” Her fingerprints and DNA weren’t in human databases and wouldn’t show as unusual if tested. The people who’d witnessed the shooting, including the guy whose truck they’d stolen, would report the incident and the theft. She didn’t know how high priority the case would be. It depended on what else the keepers did besides shoot guns and wolves and vandalize a tattoo parlor and terrorize a neighborhood.
Yeah, it would be high priority, until the keepers wiped everyone. No matter how powerful Lars thought he’d become, no matter how desperately he wanted to kill her, he wouldn’t ignore the human witness portion of the covenants, and he’d activate his media specialists to handle any internet issues.
That being said, she’d rather be caught by human cops than Lars any day. She still couldn’t believe they’d gotten away.
Marcus tightened the handkerchief. Katie hissed in pain. “You’re going to cut off my circulation.” When he released her, she hopped out of the truck.
He slid out her side and straightened her T-shirt over the makeshift bandage. “The wound is visible. Put your jacket on.”
She bit back the urge to snark—with relief—and donned the windbreaker. He still looked wolfish. As he watched, she zipped it to hide the blood spatter on her shirt. He frowned down at her, licked his thumb and wiped a few spots on her face.
This time she batted him away. “Seriously?”
Ignoring her, her plucked leaves and twigs out of her hair and then finger-combed it. He tucked strands behind her ears. Katie shivered.
“I can’t do much with the cowlicks,” he said.
“You and me both.” Self-consciously, she palmed her crown where her hair tended to rooster up. “Am I presentable for someone who recently escaped certain death?”
Joking about it helped. Her insides jittered with amazement. She felt as though she was going to rattle apart.
Marcus’s big, warm hand lingered on her neck a moment, rubbing the delicate skin over her pulse. “I owe you an apology.”
Not what she’d expected. “Just one?”
The cap’s brim shadowed his face, making him hard to read. “We should have used masks this morning.”
Why the masks mattered this late in the game, she had no idea, but it couldn’t be changed. If she obsessed over that particular what-if, she’d spin around and around the vicious cycle of all the what-ifs pertaining to her own behavior and how she’d gotten them into this situation. Forward momentum would be history.
She pulled away from his touch before she went weak in the knees, and headed for the stairs. Her legs were uncertain enough after the mad dash away from Lars. She didn’t need her crush on Marcus interfering. “Lars almost had us. Now he doesn’t. I can’t obsess over what we did wrong, only what we’re going to do next. I never thought I’d face Lars and survive, but together we did.”
His eyes, dark again, met hers as he opened the metal stairwell door for her. Two hours ago, this man had planned to tie her up and have sex with her. Now he was fixing her hair, fretting over her wound, opening her doors. “You’re the last person I expected to find a bright lining in our predicament.”
“Keep in mind you don’t actually know me that well.” The stairs reeked of urine and fast food. She hung on to the peeling industrial paint of the railing. Her leg muscles bitched at her. Her body wanted to collapse. “You look at me and see a keeper, a convex alpha, a guinea pig.” She could have added lecher, since he’d observed that aspect of her too.
“Multifaceted, yes. Optimist, no.”
“I’m not an optimist. I’m a realist. A survivor.”
“You’ve done this before—gone on the run.” They reached street level. He opened the door for her again.
“Not for a long time,” she admitted. “And not without my family. This is the closest call I’ve had in twenty years.”
“You handled yourself well.”
“I have substantial motivation.” And shaky legs. She didn’t think Marcus would mock her for it, but if she vocalized it, it might overwhelm her. “Since we survived Lars, this means we have a chance to help my family. We need to sneak back to the shop. Make sure he didn’t find the others.”
“Not safe.” He skirted past her to the street side and slid an arm around her shoulders.
To shove him away would be conspicuous, so Katie allowed it. The protectiveness of his gesture, placing himself between the traffic and her, flustered her. She stumbled a little until their strides began to mesh.
“He knows Vern came to Alabama. Now he knows why. He might not know about Tonya or Ba, but he’ll turn the shop upside down. Panic rooms don’t work that great when other witches know what to look for.”
Witches rarely warred with other witches. Their kind tended to be pacifists, the elders shuttling awkward jobs off to the keeper council so their hands stayed clean. The keepers had little cause to go after witches, unless those witches were aiding and abetting a transformed wolf.
How much of Lars’s boasting could she believe? Had he been going after witches too? If they survived this, Vern needed to alert the elders to the fact Lars was pulling some massive shit behind their backs.
“Vernon wasn’t drained. He can defend them. He had all of our supplies.” Marcus’s arm tightened around her when they neared a mass of people waiting at a crosswalk. He kept his face tipped down, toward her, as if he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She tried not to give any cameras a full view of her features either. She stayed tucked under his arm, letting him block as much of her as possible.
“Vern isn’t convex,” she said in a low voice. “Tonya and Ba won’t be any help at all. They have no memories and no magic. And Ba, well, he’s difficult in the best of times. I can’t wait forty-eight hours to find out if they’re going to make the rendezvous point. It’ll drive me insane.”
“With us out of the picture, it may be easier for Vernon to get aid from the coven network. Your father and Tonya aren’t former keepers.”
Katie had excised her ego a long time ago. It shouldn’t matter that Marcus was right. Dad and Tonya were safer without her. Then again, Lars would be doubly furious because she’d slipped through his grasp.
Pedestrians milled around them as cars whizzed past. Katie’s gaze skipped from driver to driver and scanned the sidewalks. Marcus, tension oozing off him, checked her as much as he did their environment.
Did he think she was going to bolt? Her course was set. She’d given her word and wasn’t going to—okay, probably wouldn’t—double-cross him again. She’d try to convince him to let her dial Vern’s cell, but she wouldn’t ditch him. She’d be stupid to ditch him. He was the only person who could help her now. Maybe he’d come to understand that, and maybe not.
Maybe she’d come to understand it too.
Trying not to let his agitation crank her higher, Katie kept an eye out for men in black military gear or police uniforms. She assumed the keepers had quashed the human onlookers at the bridge, any cops and the Birmingham border patrol. For now. The patrol would have notified their superior as soon as they’d picked up Marcus’s essence and possibly phoned in a warning about the attack by unknown operatives in minivans.
The keepers could more easily erase their activities from the human’s system than the pack’s system. Though Lars was the bigger threat, she couldn’t ignore the threat posed by any packers who might stumble across them. She stepped toward Marcus as they waited at the crosswalk. “Notice anything out of the ordinary? Sirens in the distance? The musical sounds of Lars venting his rage at our daring escape?”
He kind of smiled at her and shook his head slightly. “I see the garage. Make and model?”
In case they got separated? “Tan Ford station wagon, ninety-eight, looks like it’s been in a wreck.” It had. Dad had shit aim behind a gun and behind a wheel.