Netherworld II: Blood Potion No. 9 (26 page)

Bane hadn’t been sitting still waiting
for Princess Charming to save his butt. Battered and bitten all to
heck, he still somehow got his legs under himself and launched at
the surprised C.K. The men hit the gravel-strewn ground hard, C.K.
taking the worst of it as Bane landed on top. A ring of keys, a
multi-tool, and some change spilled out of the werehog’s
pockets.

Bane’s hands were still cuffed behind
him, but he was on his feet in an instant, kicking the living crap
out of C.K. while he was down. C.K. rolled away, managing to get
clear long enough to stand.

The two shifters glared at each other.
C.K. grimaced a smile. “I see your ghost girl deserted you. Just
you and me now.”

Oh. He was right, I could feel the
energy I’d sucked down dissipating from all the effort I’d put out.
I was invisible to the living again.

As I thought about this, C.K. gloated,
“Okay, let’s see how you like this, mutt.”

With that, he started to shift. His
face elongated, wiry tufts of orange-ish fur shoving out of every
pore. His tusks grew, and he fell to all fours as his bipedal body
stretched out, turning him into a quadruped. His clothes split all
down their seams and fell from his body.

Oh man, this was not good. For anyone
who has never tangled with a feral hog, you have no idea how much
damage they can do to a person. They are built like tanks, and as
short as C.K. was as a man, he more than made up for it as a hog.
He swelled like a feeding tick until he would have come to chest
height on me.

Bane was cuffed. There was a collar
with silver around his neck. He was so screwed.

I looked at the ring of keys that had
fallen from C.K.’s pocket and was on them faster than you could
holler soo-ey. At this point, my love for BDSM turned out to be a
huge bonus. I recognized both the key for handcuffs as well as the
one that would fit the collar.

Who says being kinky is a bad
thing?

I grabbed for the keys and my fingers
passed right through them. Panic wormed its way into my head. C.K.
was almost done with his shift, and Bane was awkwardly trying to
climb on top of the car in an effort to find some way to protect
himself. I fought the terror aside and pushed all my power into my
right hand. I grabbed the keys and transported them and myself to
Bane’s side.

He made a strange yelping sound when I
shook the keyring in front of his face. It must have looked darn
surprising, a jangling collection of metal floating in midair.
Fortunately, he recovered. “Hurry, Brandilynn! The collar
first!”

I was shaking as I got behind him,
locating the lock imbedded in the back of the collar. It took me
two or three stabs to get the key in. A quick turn, and the collar
separated into two half circles and fell away.

The next instant Bane’s body started to
go snap, crackle, and pop like a certain brand of tasty cereal. I’d
been going for the cuffs around his wrists, but with a squall of
metal, he yanked them apart, breaking the chain that held them
together. There’s a very good reason law enforcement doesn’t use
standard cuffs on weres. Those puppies – pun intended – are
strong.

There was a furious shrieking squeal,
and C.K. in full feral hog mode barreled into the still shifting
Bane. The werewolf was knocked several feet past me, and the fight
was on.

The din of pig squeals and roaring
growls rang in my ears. Bane had a nice mouthful of fangs, which he
used with some success, but he was still more man than wolf at this
point. C.K. was charging and trampling for all he was worth, intent
on killing his enemy before he could attain full animal form. The
werehog was merciless, keeping Bane off balance and at a
disadvantage while dealing out lots of damage. Bane couldn’t shift
fast enough to defend himself.

I went to C.K.’s gun, pulling it out of
the weeds with an ephemeral grip. Yeah, I’m a Southern girl who
believes in the constitutional right to bear arms, but I’ve never
owned a gun. Heck, I’ve never held a gun before. The one time I got
a clear shot at C.K., the bullet went wild, and I lost my hold when
the darn thing kicked.

The two shifters were too tangled up
after that for me to try again. I was likely to shoot Bane, and he
had more than enough problems on his paws. So I settled for running
up to the bloody, struggling pair and thumping C.K.’s skull with
the gun butt.

I at least distracted him for a moment.
C.K. turned on me with an outraged shriek and charged. It was hard
to stand my ground with a few hundred pounds of feral hog coming at
me, but I knew he couldn’t hurt me. The trouble was, he knew it
too. He leveled his attack on the very solid gun, knocking it from
my tenuous grip.

With a dismissive snort, C.K. wheeled
around for another run at Bane. The couple of seconds that I’d
taken his attention away, Bane had finished shifting. And let me
tell you; a pony-sized, ticked off wolf is a far cry from a
weaponless, injured human being.

Despite his greater bulk, low center of
gravity, and general pure meanness, in the end C.K. was no match
for Bane. He got a few good hits in, including a brutal goring that
put a nasty hole in the wolf’s shoulder before Bane tore his throat
out. My stomach heaved with the momentary memory of nausea as Bane
savaged the twitching werehog.

It was with obvious effort that he made
himself back off. Still snapping and growling at the dead and
shifting back to human C.K., the agent trotted away a few paces
before returning to his manlier aspect. His clothes were mere rags
fluttering on the ground, casualties of his shift. Except for the
shiny bracelets he’d made of the handcuffs, Bane was naked, all his
injuries healed. Well, at least the view of this street was vastly
improved, so long as you didn’t look at the remains of the Beasts’
dead leader.

Bane shook himself all over, as if he
was still a wolf. “Brandilynn? You still here, honey?”

Yeah, I was here getting an eyeful.
Darn my cheating gaze. I made my way to Bane and used my dwindled
power to stroke his cheek. The one on his face. Hot bod or not, I
was done playing hanky-panky with this one.

He smiled at thin air. “Thanks,
sweetheart. You saved my furry ass. I owe you big time.”

Then he was back to work, nudeness
notwithstanding. He checked on Bottle, who remained out of
commission. Not a good sign for someone to be out for so
long.

“I gotta find a phone,” Bane muttered,
and searched her pockets until he came up with her cell. He dialed.
As he waited for someone to pick up the other end, he said, “I saw
you, Brandilynn. I gotta tell you, you’re beautiful. I wish I had
known you before you died.”

Then a voice came from the phone and he
was busy being a cop. “Yeah, this is Agent Levi Ward with the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. I need an ambulance and
police backup on Highway 341 near the water treatment
plant.”

I was coming down from the battle high,
feeling pleased as punch with myself when I realized there was
still a major baddie out there. And he had a hostage.

“Fizz!” I yelled and left Bane talking
to the 911 operator.

Chapter 14

I couldn’t transport directly to
Hazel’s house. Though I knew he lived on Whistle Lane, I’d never
been there before, wasn’t even quite sure where it was located. I
was forced to go to the Beasts Club and start from
there.

The motorcycle club was right off
Blount Highway, and Whistle Lane also branched from Blount. From
the clubhouse I teleported from street to street, looking for the
right road. The sun was bright, the air was crisp and humidity-free
with the dry crackly smell of autumn, and all in all, it was a
beautiful day to be out and about. Too bad such a pleasant day was
turning into anything but. I was terrified I was going to be too
late to help Fizz.

Heading north on Blount Highway turned
up nothing. Once I’d reached the interstate overpass, I knew I’d
gone the wrong direction. I’d wasted two minutes going this way,
two minutes that might get Fizz dead if she wasn’t already. I
materialized back at the Beasts club and went south.

Whistle Lane was only two streets away.
Mad at myself for choosing the wrong way initially, I took myself
to the first mailbox on the street to get my bearings.

Hazel lived at 689. I was at 103. I
started skipping from block to block, double checking mailboxes as
I went, barely noticing the houses and mobile homes along the way.
I had a sense it was a nice, if unremarkable neighborhood, the
yards neatly trimmed and dotted with children’s toys. That Hazel
lived on such a respectable road ticked me off for some
reason.

The last mailbox I found before the
neighborhood ended and wooded lots began was 516. I peered down the
shaded road and spotted a mailbox all by its lonesome. Hopeful, I
materialized next to it. Nailed to the wooden post supporting the
mailbox were the numbers 689. I’d found him.

Well, I’d found the long driveway at
any rate, winding through the thick stand of pine trees that
blocked my view of any buildings that might lie on the property. I
had to hop down the long trail, transporting three different times
before I finally found Hazel’s house right off the
marsh.

The instant I hit the clearing where
the dilapidated two-story colonial stood, I felt the thick
electricity of magic in the air. I stopped short, realizing that if
Hazel had detection wards for ghosts around his place, I would get
no closer without alerting him to my presence. That would be really
bad for me and no help to Fizz.

I looked around, noting the silver
Toyota I’d seen earlier at the storage place. Somehow the car
didn’t look right, and though I could feel the seconds ticking by
way too fast, I made myself look at it hard. It took a moment
before I got what was different. Slightly dented and dinged, dirty
with the paint faded, this was not the nearly new vehicle I’d
fleetingly admired back at Simply Storage.

I studied the car as hard as I could,
making my eyes focus on one particular ding on the drivers’ side
door. After a moment it disappeared, confirming my suspicions. I
then looked over the house, seeing how the chipped paint became
whole in places, how one shutter that hung haphazardly suddenly was
straight and flush to its accompanying window. The warped boards of
the wrap-around porch with the splintered railings were also a lie.
Now that I was looking, I could see the haze enveloping everything
here, making it look not well maintained.

I’d seen spells marketed to make an
ugly house look nice, a cheap alternative to remodeling, but this
was the first time I’d seen the reverse. It made me think Hazel
might be hiding some unclaimed income, pretending to live
poor.

A high, thin scream floated on the air,
and at first I thought it was a seagull’s cry. Then it repeated; a
woman’s shriek of extreme pain. Fizz.

I had to hope the all the magic in the
air was only Hazel’s remodel spell, because Fizz needed help now. I
had to get into the house. I teleported to the front porch, which
now that I was on it was really, really nice to look at with
perfectly straight gray painted floorboards and blinding white
rails. The door was one of those high-end affairs with a beveled
glass insert. A couple of rocking chairs, only needing a sweet
little old grandma and grandpa to sit and knit or whittle in them,
waited to my right. It was bizarre to think Hazel’s dark heart
possessed a yearning for such a homey entryway.

Another scream cut through the shaded
yard. Readying myself for the worst, I rushed through the
door.

I ran through the house towards the
screams, barely taking in the rooms I passed through in my rush to
find Fizz. Before each shriek came the well-known crack of a whip.
And those cries … if the pure force of sound could shred vocal
chords, Fizz would never speak normally again. Something more than
a whipping was going on to produce those horrific peals.

Uncaring about caution in my haste, I
pushed through the closed door at the end of the hall, behind which
the sounds where coming from. Hazel was too intent on what he was
doing to notice my entrance, which is probably all that saved me
from capture by the witch.

The smell hit me first: fresh urine and
feces. In her terror and pain, Fizz had lost control of
everything.

The room in this lovely old colonial
was set up dungeon-style with restraints and heaven knows what
else. I was focused on what Hazel was doing to Fizz and didn’t take
much time to look around. The stripper was hung by her wrists in
chains from an exposed beam in the middle of the room’s ceiling.
Her face was a wide-mouthed rictus of agony. Hazel had already
marked her pretty good with the whip that he sent swirling through
the air to line her body with vicious cuts and welts.

I will not tell you what else I saw
except to say Fizz was bloody, screaming, and had battery cables
connected to her, the stiff clamps embedded deep in her flesh. It
was monstrous what Hazel was doing. I was happy I no longer slept
because if I did, I’d

have nightmares forever. I wanted to
scream along with Fizz. He was killing her slowly, and I wasn’t
sure which sickened me more; what he was doing to her or that he
was naked and sexually excited as he did it.