Prowlers: Wild Things (28 page)

"Jesus," Molly whispered in his ear.

Jack ran a hand over the thick stubble on his skull and glanced at her, seeing in her wide, haunted gaze what he imagined was a reflection of his own. Then he turned to look at Courtney.

His sister was no longer standing beside him. In the moment he had been looking at Molly, Courtney had climbed over the bar and taken up a place there. She grabbed a rag and began wiping down the counter, moving away from them, not even meeting Jack's eyes.

Further along the bar, Bowden did the same. Anyone looking at the bar from across the club, even walking up to it to get a drink, might notice that the staff had changed, but beyond that, they would have no idea that two inhuman beasts had just been slain. Jack knew that despite the odors of sweat and beer and perfume in the club, it was only a matter of time before one of the Prowlers caught the scent of the blood.

They would just have to hurry.

"All right!" a voice shouted. "Get the hell out of the way!"

Two huge bouncers, Jack figured they had to be Prowlers, lifted Mags off the floor and carried her, legs flailing, toward the exit. She protested, screaming that she had paid to get in, swearing and cussing, and everyone in The Voodoo Lounge watched the spectacle as she was physically tossed out the front door. No one made a move to stop it.

Jack scanned the club again, looked up, nervously, at the stage, and then across at the clutch of bodyguard types whom he was certain were shielding Jasmine. Two grim-faced members of that living wall had let curiosity get the better of them. They had stepped forward and craned their necks to try to see what the ruckus had been about.

Past them, sitting on the bench that ran along the walls of the club, he saw a mane of straight, blood red hair and a flash of smooth copper skin. Jasmine was stunning as always, dressed all in red like some dark and brutal goddess come to Earth. She wore a look of annoyed impatience as she whispered to a male who knelt on the ground before her as though bowing to a queen. Beside her, seated on the bench, Jack saw Bill.

"Molly," Jack said, voice a harsh rasp.

She moved to his side and squeezed his arm, letting him know that she had seen them as well.

Jack tried to mentally will Bill to look at him, but to no avail. There was only a moment when he could see his friend's face, and Bill was quite pointedly studying those nearest him in the crowd.
Looking for a familiar face,
Jack thought.
It's time you got to see one.

Then, just as the pack began to gather around their Alpha and her prisoner again, about to block Jack's view once more, Jasmine glanced across the bar. Her orange eyes gleamed in the dim light as they focused on him. Jasmine narrowed her eyes, obviously not recognizing him but clearly wondering who this was who was staring at her.

Jack smiled.

He waved
.

Jasmine could not believe what she had seen. Her pack moved closer around her, blocking out her view of the guy standing in front of the bar on the other side of the club. In her mind's eye, she tried to lay an image of Jack Dwyer over the face she had just seen. The scrub of bristly hair on his scalp, the shadow of a beard on his chin. No way to pick his scent out of all these mingling odors.

But that smile.

And he waved
.

A flicker of anxiety, even trepidation, passed through her as she thought of all the stories she had heard about this hunter in the past months. But she had been there at the beginning, before the stories had been told. He and his mate, Molly, had killed Tanzer and nearly killed Jasmine herself, but they were only humans.

Only humans
.

Why, then, did her trepidation not fade? That was the question she truly wished an answer for. Jasmine snarled, reached within her own heart, her own mind, and pushed those feelings away. They were replaced in an instant by the rage and hatred she had been kindling since that very night. She could picture it in her mind even now, the gunfire as the police moved in on their lair, herself and Tanzer forced to flee to the rooftop of a nearby hotel. Working their way down through the hotel, furious but also exulting in their escape, their freedom. Only to be ambushed at the door by this boy and his girl, these human
children
who were armed with guns and luck and had no fear that she could see.

And somewhere, down deep, a part of her wondered if that wasn't what gave her pause. She remembered that night so well, and she had not seen any fear in Dwyer or the girl.
No fear
. Jack the Giant-Killer, some of the whispers called him. But he had killed Tanzer, had created his own myth, and for her to achieve all she dreamed, she had to avenge that murder, and remove Jack Dwyer as an obstacle once and for all. And if he had built himself a myth, all the better, for that would make her slaughter of the boy all the more impressive to the wild ones. Jasmine would turn his reputation to her own purposes.

Damned child
, Jasmine thought.
You'll watch your mate die, just as I did.

"What's the matter?" Guillaume Navarre asked at her side. There was a playful tone in his voice, almost mocking. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

Her lips curled and she growled at him, though only softly. Jasmine rose and pushed through the gathered members of her pack, sniffing the air and trying to see if Dwyer was still at the other bar, and who else was with him. She thought she spotted the back of his close-shaven head, and she started for him.

Then the house lights went down, and The Voodoo Lounge was plunged into near total darkness.

The music on the sound system cut off abruptly. In the darkness, Bill tried to see past the Prowlers who had gathered all around him, Jasmine's pack, to see where she had gone. His skin prickled with the body heat in the club and the urge to change, to yield to the wild fury that wanted to tear loose from within him. Somewhere in the club, he knew that Jack and Molly were about to start something. Nothing else would have garnered such a reaction from Jasmine. If either of their lives were endangered, he would be forced to act. But if he did, he would forfeit the life of his niece, the only blood relation he had left on Earth.

"It's a hell of a night, boys and girls," came a voice from all around.

No
, Bill thought.
From the stage
. He glanced up there and saw six figures in the dark, shadows against shadows.
Thornbush
, he thought.
And the band played on.

The crowd surged toward the stage, clustering there, whistling and applauding and shouting their support. Bill was jostled by Alec, Jasmine's mate, as the slender, dangerous beast uncoiled from the ground and tried to follow his lover.

"Jasmine?" Alec called. "Jas?"

On the stage, a drumbeat began, a thunderous, marching rhythm that seemed almost a call to arms. The bass guitar began to fill the gaps in the beat with a jazzy syncopation that should not have worked, but somehow did. These girls were good. Bill looked up at the still-darkened stage again.

"The rain's falling, the wind's howling. Winter's around the corner, but we thought maybe we could heat things up in here!" shouted the female voice, an echo filling the room. Too much reverb.

Then the bass and drum cut off abruptly. There was a moment of utter silence in The Voodoo Lounge, and then a beautiful, lilting acoustic guitar filled the club, as a figure on stage picked out clear, strong notes that were part blues, part folk, part rock. In the dark, the crowd was enraptured, and the guitar picking went on for nearly half a minute. Then with a single, strummed note, she stopped, and Bill could see the girl toss back her hair.

The stage lights came up, the drummer brought her sticks down in a single beat, and then the band roared into an electric, shuffling rhythm with a jazz melody laid over it, a fusion of musical styles that was instantly engaging.

But Bill was no longer listening to the music.

He was staring at the girl on stage with the electric acoustic slung around her shoulders. Her long black hair draped across her eyes as she picked away at the guitar strings, swaying and grinding to the beat.

Olivia
.

Bill Cantwell — Guillaume Navarre — smiled, but only for a moment. For centuries he had controlled the beast, practiced holding it in. Never in all his life had he so relished setting his wild heart free. With a low growl that built in his chest, Bill stretched and his muscles shifted and expanded. With a shudder, he felt his snout push out from his face, his fangs multiplying, sharp and gnashing. He tore through his false human skin as though it was a prison of flesh and it flaked away like so much dust, leaving only the fur behind.

They were all staring away from him, either up at the band or searching the crowd for Jasmine. Alec was the first to turn. The expression on his face froze the instant he saw Bill.

"Oh, sh —" Alec started to say.

With a single thrust of his powerful jaws, Bill ripped out his throat.

And the band played on
.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The moment the band had hit the stage, even in darkness, Courtney and Bowden had begun to go to work. Nearly the entire club had turned toward the source of the music, the women on the platform at the far end of The Voodoo Lounge. Only a few determined souls stayed at the bar, waiting for their drinks.

Courtney thought about Jack and Molly, wondering where in the crowd they were, if they had managed to place themselves where they needed to be in the audience. Focusing, she pushed the thought away. She had her own job to do.

Fast as they were able, she and Bowden served the stragglers at the bar. By the time the stage lights came up and the band tore into the first song in their set in earnest, bodies had begun to gyrate on the floor of the club. Some dancing, some merely moving to the music.

With a silent prayer, hoping the band was loud enough to cover the noise, Courtney dropped a bottle of hundred fifty proof rum and it shattered on the floor behind the bar, not far from the corpse of the first Prowler Bowden had killed.

No one paid any attention.

Courtney glanced up at Bowden, and he smiled. Then, quick as they could, the two began pulling bottles off the liquor racks, anything one hundred proof or more. At first Courtney tried to pour them out, not wanting to draw any unnecessary attention.

"What the hell are you doing?" shouted a woman at the bar, halfway between horrified and amused.

"Mind your business!" Courtney snapped at her.

The woman held up both hands and backed away, then shot her the middle finger and pushed back into the audience. From that point, Courtney just dropped the bottles.

A scream tore through the club, audible even over the pounding of the drums and the sweet melody of the vocals from the lead singer and from Olivia on guitar. Courtney and Bowden both whipped around to try to see where it was coming from. Across the floor, people had begun to draw away from the far corner where Jack had seen that group of Prowlers. Like a wave, the crowd swept back from that spot, but still Courtney couldn't see what was happening there.

The music never faltered.

Something was happening over there, though. They had run out of time. Courtney looked up at Bowden, about to ask if he was ready, but he already brandished a Molotov cocktail in his hands, a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 with a bar rag poked out of the neck.

Courtney slid a hand into her pocket, pulled out the lighter she had brought along, and spun the thumbwheel. A tiny flame appeared and she set it to the bar rag. It smoked black a moment and then blazed up like a torch on top of the bottle.

"Get back!" Bowden said.

She wasted no time. One hand on the bar to help keep her balance, Courtney rushed along the bar toward the stage. The audience had spread out, some still sitting on the benches along the walls. There was a gap of perhaps thirty feet between the end of the bar and the corner of the stage and it was filled with people.

Courtney stopped there, turned to watch as Bowden reached the other end of the bar and then tossed the burning bottle of Wild Turkey underhanded back along the bar, where it shattered on the wooden floor amidst the broken glass from twenty or more other bottles of flammable alcohol.

It exploded with a pop and a hiss of flames, and fire engulfed the middle of the bar. Quickly, it began to spread.

"Oh my God!" Courtney yelled. "Fire!"

Though she had helped to set the blaze, she did not have to fake the fear in her voice. Whatever happened now, there would be no slipping quietly out the door at the end of the night.

Other voices followed her own, cries of alarm. Across the club she could still see some sort of melee going on, a fight, and even as she glanced that way, she saw Prowlers
turning
. Beasts emerged from within their human shells and they began to attack other Prowlers. Claws tore at air and flesh.

Then Courtney's view was blocked by the shifting tides of the crowd as the shouts of alarm grew louder and people began to rush for the doors. Up on the stage, the band members stopped playing one by one with a clang of cymbals, a screech of guitar feedback, and whispered cusses over the microphone.

A fire alarm began to blat loud and urgent as the blaze spread, engulfing the bar, and roared up the wall to begin licking across the ceiling of the club high above. Courtney stared in quiet horror and awe at the people shoving past one another, panicked into fleeing. But not everyone was trying to leave. In the midst of the receding sea of humanity stood tiny islands of three and four individuals who struggled to keep from being carried away by the waves sweep around them.

Prowlers. They were not running away. They knew that this was only a precursor to something more. But the humans fled, and that was exactly the way Jack and Olivia had planned it. The house lights went on, dimly illuminating the chaos in the club.