Prowlers - 1 (33 page)

"What?" Molly rasped.

Before Jack could respond, Artie snapped his name. Jack looked at him and saw that the ghost was staring through the doors of the hotel.

"They're coming," Artie said.

Then he was gone.

"They're coming," Jack muttered.

Molly's eyes went wide. So many questions. He knew she had so many. But now was not the time.

The automatic doors opened. Jack pinned himself back against the hotel, shotgun now held loosely in his right hand. He couldn't see them at first. Then they stepped farther out onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel, and the woman, looking human now, stared up at the sky, letting

the rain fall on her face.

If Artie hadn't told him, Jack would not have been certain it was them. They looked so ... normal. Until the man turned ever so slightly and he saw the three scars running down his cheek. Jack stopped breathing. Tanzer. This was the creature who led all the Prowlers, who set the monsters after him, who terrorized his city and many others. He was centuries old.

How the hell did I think we could go up against him? Jack wondered, terror seeping into his mind and heart. But then he remembered a horrible truth. They had no choice.

Molly, be careful! Jack thought.

Tanzer and the female turned away from him. They were about to pass right by Molly. Jack stepped out from the shadows and raised the shotgun. The female sniffed the air and hesitated.

"Jasmine?" Tanzer asked.

So that's her name, Jack thought.

Jack had his finger on the trigger when they spotted Molly. Tanzer stiffened and started to change. The transformation came so swiftly that Jack had yet to take another breath. Jasmine was changing as well, the beast erupting from within. Monsters tearing off their masks.

Molly shot Tanzer in the chest.

The Prowler stumbled back several steps just as Jack fired the twelve-gauge shotgun. Jasmine moved too fast for him. In the eyeblink it took him to fire she lunged for Molly and pinned her against the wall.

"Molly, no!" Jack screamed.

The monster with the pretty name slashed at Molly's chest with her talons, drawing blood and a scream. But Molly never lost her grip on the gun Bill had given her. Jack swung the shotgun over to blow Jasmine's head off, but the Prowler was too close to Molly and he hesitated.

Molly didn't hesitate. She fired three times at Jasmine's chest and torso. At least one bullet went wild, shattering the windshield of a BMW across the street. The other two shots were solid hits, one in the shoulder and one in the chest.

Blood spattered Molly's face as Jasmine went down hard on the sidewalk.

But it was far from over.

Tanzer roared in a voice that sounded almost like a human scream when he saw Jasmine shot. With a fury unlike anything Jack had ever seen, slavering jaws snapping, he went for Molly with

talons flashing.

Jack pumped another round into the twelve-gauge and blew a chunk out of Tanzer's shoulder, splintering bone and sending the beast into a spin that drove him stumbling to the ground. Yellow-green eyes blazed with hatred. The monster, this ancient creature who had preyed on thousands of men, women, and children, gazed at Jack with pure hatred. "You'll die now," the beast growled.

"One of us will," Molly snapped.

She stepped in close to Tanzer, gun pointed at his head, just as Jack was about to fire. The twelve-gauge held five rounds. He had three left. More than enough to turn the monster into roadkill.

"Molly, get back!" he snapped.

Too late.

Despite the beast's wounds, Tanzer lunged behind Molly, slapped the gun out of her hand with a blow that snapped bone and tore skin, and then Jack was face to face with the monster, and Tanzer was holding Molly between them. With his damaged arm, the beast held her against his chest. Its snout jutted over the top of her head and bloody saliva slipped out into her hair from his jaws. Molly winced.

Tanzer growled low and deep, like a coming storm. But the storm was already here.

Yellow-green eyes blazing with fierce intelligence, the three scars torn across his face, Tanzer gazed at Jack. "Drop the shotgun, boy. Give me your throat and I’ll let the girl live. You've cost me too much already. It's time for me to go, but I won't go without your blood."

Jack was frozen. He couldn't feel his pulse racing in his veins anymore. Couldn't feel the rain on his skin. Couldn't hear the sirens or the shouts. At any moment the police would be there. They must have heard the shots and they were just around the block. But seconds were an eternity.

Molly stared at Jack. Her eyes were filled with terror.

He was not sure if the droplets of moisture on her cheeks were rain or tears, and he did not want to know.

"Kill him, Jack," she said weakly. "It's the only way."

Tanzer laughed at that, deep and throaty, mouthful of razor fangs showing with the rhythm of his amusement. "Humans," he said, with a snorting chuckle. "Do you think she meant that?

Didn't you hear the quaver in her voice?"

Jack wasn't listening to either of them. All he could hear in the surreal landscape where his mind and body now existed, a world where only Molly's eyes seemed to matter, was Artie's voice.

The voice of a ghost.

The voice of the dead.

It's cold here, and when people touch me, I can't feel them. Just keep her alive, Jack.

Jack held the shotgun out in front of him with both hands and let it drop to the sidewalk. The monster grinned. Sirens wailed. Tires screeched. The cops were coming.

The weight of the Beretta was cold and heavy at the small of his back.

"Go on and kill me then," Jack said staring at the beast in human clothes, its leather coat torn to reveal the fur beneath. Rain dampened the fur on its head, and its ears twitched with each new sound. A thick black tongue slid out of its mouth and over its lips.

Its grip on Molly tightened.

Its tongue snaked out again and tasted the flesh of her throat.

"Salty," the beast growled. "Sorry, boy, but I may not be able to control myself. I may have to eat her first."

Molly's hands had been moving all along. Jack had seen them, but the beast had not. With a grunt she thrust the Taser up into the monster's face and shocked it with thousands of volts of electricity.

"Eat this!" she screamed.

Tanzer roared, dropped Molly, and stumbled backward. Jack could see now how much damage he had done with his shotgun blast. One of Tanzer's arms was barely functioning and blood soaked down the denims it wore, dripping off its boots.

It recovered quickly, but not quickly enough.

Jack whipped the Beretta out from under his jacket. Without bothering to aim, he slapped both hands on the nine-millimeter and fired. The Prowler grunted as blood sprayed from its wounds. Jack fired again and again until he found himself standing over the beast in the rain with an empty gun.

Its blood eddied away in a little rivulet of rainwater and slipped down a sewer grating.

Molly snatched up the shotgun and looked around desperately. Prowler blood ran with the rain

on her face like deep red mascara.

"Where's the other one? Where'd she go?" Molly demanded.

Jack looked around quickly, empty gun held useless in both hands. But despite the two bullets she had taken, Jasmine was gone.

"Damn!" Jack snapped.

Police cars, lights flashing, screamed around the corner. Jack tossed the Beretta into the sewer where it skittered and fell down into the drain Molly dropped the shotgun and the two of them sat down on the sidewalk in the rain next to the corpse of a monster.

"Like to see them try to arrest us," Molly said, her voice pitched somewhere between hysteria and glee.

Jack slipped an arm around her and held her close.

Molly was taken to the hospital. There, with an officer keeping an eye on her, a doctor put stitches in her chest where Tanzer had clawed her. Jack spent only a single night in jail as a guest of the Boston Police Department. Both of them had been arrested on a variety of charges including unlawful possession of firearms, unlawful discharge of firearms, and hunting without a license.

"Hunting?" Jack had asked Jace Castillo, when the detective came in to question him.

Castillo had smiled. "Wolves."

There were countless holes in the cover story. Jack and Molly had been at the other recent shooting involving wild "wolves" wandering south into the city. Scavengers, the press was told. Their own hunting grounds offered only meager pickings this year, and at least five had been sighted in Boston in recent weeks. Four had been killed.

But there was no police report placing Jack and Molly at the previous wolf shooting, in City Hall Plaza.

Likewise, no connection was made between the gun battle with gang members in front of St. Luke's Church and the shooting of the wolf in front of the LaFayette Hotel. A block apart, the events had taken place almost simultaneously. No one seemed to notice. Or, perhaps they were asked not to notice, and complied.

Jack was certain that at least some members of the Boston media had to have been in on the cover-up for it to work. But work it did. Though it rankled him not to have the truth come out, he

understood that as long as the threat was over, it would not serve the people to know there were monsters in their midst.

Panic would ensue.

Part of him believed that perhaps panic would be appropriate. Then people all over the country and around the world—could be on guard. That guy next to you on the subway with the hungry eyes? Maybe he really was an animal. In the end, though, Jack had to make a deal with Castillo. They all kept their mouths shut, and the gun charges went away. Jack assured the cop that none of them would say a word. At the hospital, Molly apparently agreed to the same thing.

What else would she have said?

Besides, no one would have believed them. Jack knew that much . They'd be laughed at, and that would bring Bridget's Irish Rose Pub the wrong kinds of attention.

Of course, at Bridget's they had proof right behind

the bar, but Jack wasn't exactly going to point that out. If people did start to believe there were monsters among them, they weren't likely to differentiate between the predators and the pacifists. The last thing he wanted was to endanger Bill.

All of these things went through Jack's mind while the long hours ticked by in the city lockup.

They let him out at just after eight in the morning. Molly met him at the front desk. Apparently they'd cut her loose from the hospital a lot sooner than they let him go, because she wore fresh clothes and had obviously taken a shower.

"You all right?" he asked.

At first she didn't respond. Would not even raise her beautiful sparkling green eyes to meet his. Then she pushed her hair away from her face and regarded him carefully.

"Do you think she's gone?" Molly asked.

Jack didn't have to ask who she was talking about. Jasmine.

"She's gone," he told her firmly. "She's alone now. And wounded. If it was Tanzer I'd say no. But he was the Alpha. Without him she's just another animal. She's on the run, most likely."

He only wished he felt as confident as he sounded.

But Molly was barely listening. She took his hand, twined her fingers in his, and together they walked toward the doors, moving around uniformed officers who all seemed in a hurry to be somewhere else.

"I'm not sure we should let her go," Molly said.

His hand on the door, Jack paused and stared at her. "What do you mean?"

"She's going to keep killing, isn't she? It's what they do. We should stop her."

The words echoed some of Jack's own thoughts from his long, sleepless night. They haunted him. But he shrugged. "There's nothing we can do. How could we track her even if we wanted to?"

"We could at least keep our eyes open," she countered.

He'd nearly forgotten that she was still holding his hand, and when she squeezed his fingers now he became self-conscious and pulled his hand away.

"We could do that," he agreed, staring at the floor. At anything except Molly's eyes. Jack knew he felt something for her. He knew he'd be constantly in her company from now on, that she'd be living and working at Bridget's with him and Courtney.

Artie had practically given his blessing to the idea of something developing between them. But Jack couldn't do that. It didn't feel right. At least not now. Artie's death had been a horrible trauma for both of them.

They needed time.

"We'll just watch the papers and the Net to see if anything turns up," Molly said. "Castillo and everyone else may be able to pretend it's over just because they killed a few monsters in this city. But I can't. We can't, Jack."

Jack looked up, gazed into her eyes. He smiled. "Absolutely."

On the concrete steps in front of the police station, Courtney sat waiting for them with her cane across her knees. The rain of the previous night had passed and the day was warm, with just a hint of the summer that was not far off now. The sky was beautiful and clear, and the sun glinted off the brass lion s head that tipped Courtney's cane.

Jack shuddered when he saw it.

Then Courtney was up and hobbling toward them, using her cane to help her manuever the stairs. Her eyes were wide and impossibly blue, as though they reflected the sky itself.

Without a word she threw her arms around him. He felt her cane thump against the backs of his legs. Courtney leaned on him a little to keep her balance and hugged him so tight that he could not breathe.

"You're killin' me, Court," he managed to choke out, along with a terse laugh.

Her grip relaxed, but she still held on. He could feel her warm breath on his neck, her chest hitching with emotion. But Courtney Dwyer did not cry.

"Nothing's funny here, Jack," she whispered to him, her voice shaky. "I was so scared for you last night. And scared for me. I've got nothing without you, little brother."

"Hey," he said softly. "I'm right here."

Courtney met his eyes, and brother and sister smiled knowingly at each other.