Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed (15 page)

“
Where’s Damien?” Kane
growled after a moment.

“
Son of a bitch!” Basil
roared. “That fucking bastard! He’s with Laurie!”

At that point, both of them attempted
to charge after Lucien. The battle for the smooth, cleared path
wasn’t a quick one. They lost more time knocking each other off of
the trail and into the brush that bordered it than they would have
if they’d simply formed a single file. They were both too pissed
off to think straight, however, and by the time they reached the
edge of the yard, Lucien had crossed it and was charging up the
steps to the porch.

Uttering roars of rage, worried now
that they might miss out on pounding on Damien, they gave each
other one final shove and bounded across the clearing in an effort
to catch up to Lucien.

They managed it because Lucien slammed
into the bolted door and rebounded, flying back off the porch and
landing on top of them as they raced up the steps. By the time
they’d managed to untangle themselves and pick themselves up,
Damien had snatched the door of the cabin open.

This time it was Damien’s scent that
wafted to them and maddened them further when they were already
crazed with rage.

“
Not …!”

Damien didn’t get the chance to get
anything else out. If they hadn’t been blocked by the narrowness of
the door frame, all three would have plowed into Damien at the same
time. As it was, Lucien was the spearhead and Basil and Kane
slammed into both of them, carrying them almost all the way across
the living area in spite of the fact that they hit the couch and
rolled over the back like a tide.

The door to the bedroom flew open.
Damien stared up at Laurie’s shocked face for a split second and
then he felt his beast spring forward. The shock gave way to
terror, but that only seemed to spur his raging beast. It certainly
didn’t calm it.

Screaming like a banshee, Laurie raced
back into the bedroom, slamming and locking the door and then
dragging everything she could move across the room to barricade it.
Her mind was churning the entire time, trying to make sense of
something that simply defied logic.

She’d thought Damien had been attacked
by some sort of monsters.

And then Damien had turned into one,
too.

Retreating to a corner when she ran
out of anything to pile at the door, she crouched down in a tight,
shivering ball, trying to think what to do. She discovered she
couldn’t think. She was too terrified to think. All that kept
running through her mind as she listened to the ferocious fight in
the other room was that any minute they’d finish with each other
and come after her.

And she didn’t think the door would
hold against them.

She glanced fearfully out the
window.

It was still dark—not pitch black like
the dead of night but dark.

They’d see her if they got after her
and she wouldn’t have any protection at all.

But she could see.

And she didn’t believe the door would
hold them long.

For that matter, there was nothing to
stop them from racing around the cabin and coming in the
window!

That clinched the matter. With an
effort, she shoved to her feet and wove a wobbly trail to the
window, pausing only long enough along the way to grab her t-shirt
and panties and jerk them on. It took her several moments to figure
out how to unlock the window and get it open. The moment she did,
however, she bailed out. She landed in a heap under the window,
scraped and bleeding lightly from the encounter with rough wood.
Brushing the dirt and pebbles off of her knees, she glanced around,
trying to decide which way to go and finally took off down the
drive.

They’d parked the armored vehicle down
at the bottom of the drive somewhere. She remembered overhearing
Kane telling Lucien they’d ‘covered’ it.

If she could just get to it and get
inside!

Maybe they’d left a spare key
somewhere inside?

Even if they hadn’t, she could lock
herself in and she thought she would be safer in an armored
vehicle.

To her surprise, she discovered the
vehicle was parked in plain sight at the bottom of the drive. It
was still really dark and the shadows were deep along the driveway,
but the shape was unmistakable.

The realization that safety was close
at hand spurred her to more speed. Ignoring the stitch she’d
developed in her side, aided by the downward slope of the driveway,
she ran faster.

She was running so fast by the time
the man stepped from the shadows near the vehicle that she couldn’t
stop, couldn’t even slow down appreciatively. She tried to veer off
into the woods. It was a mistake. Her bare foot skidded on the
pebble strewn ground and she went into a slide that scraped the
hide off of her palms and the leg she landed on.

The man was on her before she could
scramble to her feet. She screamed. He retaliated by punching her
in the face with his fist so hard he stunned her. She was only
semi-conscious when he tossed her over his shoulder and jogged
toward the vehicle, but even as he tossed her into the backseat she
realized she’d run right into the very men the guys had been trying
to protect her from.

She hadn’t dreamed when she’d run from
the monsters that she was going to be running directly into the
grasp of a different kind of monster.

How had they managed it, she wondered
dizzily? She knew the guys had been on high alert almost the entire
time since they’d left Atlanta. They’d thought there was a high
probability that whoever Smith had hired, or Smith himself since he
was out on bond, might have planted a tracking device and followed
even though they hadn’t managed to find one.

Lucien hadn’t wanted to take a chance
that that was a possibility, at any rate.

So had they spotted the watchers and
stayed just out of range? Had they been here, in the shadows, just
waiting for the opportunity she’d presented them with?

She thought, maybe, they
had.

And she’d run right into the web
they’d spun, she thought despairingly.

And the guys had no idea where she
was.

She was toast!

They were going to kill her and chop
her into little pieces and nobody would ever figure out where she
was! She was going to be one of those people that simply vanished
and were never seen or heard from again.

And where
were
the guys, she
wondered despairingly?

As hard as she tried to
dismiss it, Laurie
knew
where
.
They were the monsters she’d fled from at the
cabin. Lucien, Basil, and Kane had been fighting Damien and
she’d
seen
Damien
change into the same thing right before her eyes.

She didn’t know how she knew that. It
was so crazy it didn’t even come close to making any sense at all.
But she’d seen Damien change so she knew it was completely possible
the others had too—had become those … things that looked like part
man and part … beast, like a wolf, maybe. They were the same
general height and weight and build, but beyond that they bore
almost no resemblance to the sexy bikers she’d grown so attached
to!

She certainly hadn’t recognized
them!

That thought brought home an
unpalatable realization.

She
had
recognized them. She just hadn’t
wanted to acknowledge that she did because she was terrified of the
beasts they’d become—
were
, she supposed all along. She
would’ve run, she realized, even if she had been absolutely,
positively
sure
it was the guys when she’d run, because these were monsters,
beasts, and there was no telling what they were capable
of.

She’d just
thought
they were scary
when she’d thought they were part of a biker gang! This was
way
scarier!

She was on her own.

She was so fucked!

Chapter Eleven

Laurie’s scream brought the fight to a
screeching halt as instantly as if someone had dashed icy cold
water over the combatants. They froze, listening, as dismayed by
the realization that the sound wasn’t coming from the bedroom, was
in fact coming from a good distance away, as they were by the
threat conveyed by the sound.

When it wasn’t followed by another
scream, terror galvanized them into motion. They broke apart and
raced toward the door, jostling each other briefly in an effort to
get through the opening at the same time and then spilled out onto
the porch. Lifting their heads, they sniffed the air,
listened.

Laurie’s scent mingled with the scent
of several others on the air—men—human men and the sweat of
anxiety. The dull thuds of feet pounding against the earth were
followed by the creak of a door. The men shot off the porch and
down the driveway. They got to the curve just in time to see a car
shoot backwards off the drive onto the main road and then speed
off.

“
Get the tank!” Lucien
bellowed, veering off the drive and cutting through the woods in a
desperate bid to cut them off. Damien, he discovered after a few
moments, was directly beside him. Fortunately, Kane and Basil were
accustomed to actually following orders and since they’d vanished
Lucien assumed they’d gone to retrieve the tank from where they’d
hidden it.

It wouldn’t do them any good if they
lost sight of the kidnappers, however.

Shut up in a car, Laurie’s scent was
already fading fast and, with true desperation, Lucien poured on
the speed.

He managed to burst from the woods on
the tail of the car that was carrying Laurie, unfortunately not
closely enough to leap on it as he’d hoped, but close enough to
choke on the dust and get a good look at the tag.

That wasn’t going to be enough if they
lost sight of the car, though. Laurie could be dead long before
they managed to track the vehicle registration to the owner. And
that was assuming they hadn’t altered the tag or stolen it or the
vehicle.

He and Damien immediately gave chase,
but even in their beast form they were no match for a car. Someone
fired several rounds at them from one of the windows and then the
driver floored it and left them in the dust.

Basil and Kane arrived in the tank
before the dust had settled, screeched to a brief halt long enough
for Lucien and Damien to dive in, and sped after the fleeing
vehicle. They saw fairly quickly that the tank had an Achilles
heel. It couldn’t match the other vehicle for speed. The best they
could do was to try to keep it in sight and try to keep from being
left completely behind.

“
That was really stupid,”
Kane said after a tense half hour. “Now we’re going to lose
Laurie.”

“
We aren’t going to
fucking lose her. We’re going to stay on their tail.”

“
You think they spotted
us?” Basil asked worriedly. “I mean I didn’t use the headlights,
but it was pretty light when we got on the road. They could’ve seen
the tank.”

“
As long as they’re
running they don’t have the time to stop and kill her,” Damien
muttered, more hopefully than factually. Because he knew they
didn’t have to stop to kill her—just to dispose of the body, but he
hoped like hell they were too focused on running to focus on her at
the moment.

“
We’re still going to lose
her,” Kane muttered. “She saw us. She knows we’re monsters
now.”

Lucien felt a little nauseated at the
comment. He’d been trying not to think about that. “We’ll worry
about that later,” he responded, “after we get her
back.”

“
What I don’t get is how
the fuck they managed to get the jump on us! Fuck!” Basil snarled,
pounding on the steering wheel with his fist. “We combed the gods
damned woods! For miles!”

Lucien and Damien had both
been worrying that over. “Something new? Something we aren’t
familiar with? I don’t know. All I know is that they shouldn’t have
been able to get close enough to grab her. We should’ve
smelled
them or
heard
them if we didn’t
see them.”

“
Well, they didn’t have to
get too damned close, did they?” Kane growled. “She ran right to
them because we scared the life out of her with that bullshit
fight!”

“
Give it a rest!” Lucien
snarled. “We’ll settle that later.”

“
Settle what?” Damien
growled, eyeing his brother challengingly.

Lucien narrowed his eyes at his
brother. “Settle who’s leader of the pack.”

* * * *

“
It looks like they’re
heading for the river.”

Lucien had been thinking the same
thing when he’d realized that they were headed east rather than
south toward Atlanta. “You may be right,” he agreed with Damien.
“We might have to ditch the tank.” He shook his head. “It’s a
liability at the moment anyway, far more visible than the bikes
would have been. Shit!”