Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) (62 page)

Andrews preferred subtlety. He used, as strange as it may sound, a good old fashioned bow and arrows. His face streaked with black, he seemed to have spent as much time putting on face paint as he did gathering his tools. Aside from his bow, he had a black fiberglass quiver with I’d guess fifty arrows in it, but here’s the thing: they weren’t just
arrows
. He’d shown me exploding ones and arrows that had man-catching rope nets in the heads. There were drill-shaped ones and ones that spread apart when they hit anything. Even more impressive is that he’d made all of them.

While Samson’s and Andrews’s choice of arms might seem a bit perplexing, they both made a certain amount of sense. Samson is huge, and is the best fighter I’ve ever seen. Andrews has a bizarre affinity for sneaking, silence and the darkness. Crockett, though, used something that I thought was made up for action movies. He had an honest-to-God minigun. Seven barrels “of up-shutting power” as he said, and two huge ammunition belts. I looked at him for a long moment, wondering exactly how that would work when he was transformed. Out of everything – the mission, getting out of the jungle – I’m fairly sure what I was most interested in right at that moment was finding out what a werewolf with a minigun strapped to his back looked like.

“Does it have a name?” I asked, when he looked over and caught my gaze.

“Hah! Name a gun? What do you think I am some kind of half-wit?” he replied, making sure he was loud enough for Samson to hear. Samson shouted “like hell you didn’t name it! Isn’t that thing named after a movie?”

“Okay, okay fine. Yeah, I named it. You ever seen ‘Predator’? Yeah,” he nodded, “it’s named ‘Sexual Tyrannosaurus,’ after Jesse Ventura’s nickname for... er... himself.”

I must have stared a little slack-jawed, because he immediately began to imitate the movie before Bolton cut him off with a smack to the back of the head. “We’re all good, red-blooded Americans. We’ve all seen ‘Predator’ and more importantly, your Jesse Ventura sucks. Bad.”

As the three other guys had a contest to see who could drawl “sexual tyrannosaurus” the most like the former pro-wrestler, I lost myself in thought about what we were all about to attempt.

I wasn’t terrified, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Too many variables in the mission for my liking, but I had a feeling it would turn out okay. I went over my assignments. Take over the leader, yeah, that I can handle. Already did it once. But I was still mulling over how I was going to deal with the rest of my mission. I had to not only control the elder vampire, I had to use his power over the other vampires to force their radio jockey into sending an ‘all clear’ to Moreno and make him walk directly, head-long into a trap. Quite a trick I was being asked to pull. I’d figure it out.

The idea was to hit the vampire camp at exactly the time they all started to swoon and settle in after a long night of gorging on hapless locals. Dawn was the target, or actually about an hour before. Vampires, as you might guess, are dangerous. Very dangerous. Blood-drunk vampires are still dangerous, but a little loopier.

“Alright, Jungle Wolves,” Bolton addressed the men. He preferred sparse weaponry. Two revolvers in under-arm holsters and an impressively large combat-style knife tucked into his belt were all he had. All he needed, really. “Last minute instructions from HQ: spy drones picked up heat signals from six prisoners. Andrews, Crockett, those are yours. Also there was another round of incineration today, so expect that going in. No sign of the leader though, so Mathis, you’re going to have your work cut out for you. Right. Everyone got it?”

“Got it boss,” Samson said. “Let’s bring these people home.” He cracked his knuckles. Of
course
he cracked his knuckles.

Bolton nodded. “Wolves,” he began, his voice a rumble of smoothed gravel, “move out!”

***

W
hen we ran together, the five of us made the entire jungle seem to rumble. As soon as Bolton gave the order to move out, we all cinched down our equipment, crouched down and began to howl. We didn’t have to howl, but then, basketball teams don’t
have
to put their hands together and yell “go team!” before a game either, but if they don’t then the world seems wrong. So, we howl. Going from man to wolf only takes a moment, and you get used to it, but back then it still hurt like absolute hell for me. The second or two the change took seemed like minutes filled with muscles wrenching, body parts distending, and my face twisting into a sort of snout. The worst part – the absolute worst bit of the whole transformation – was the hair. How bad could it be? I mean there’s hair all over our bodies anyway, right? This hair is different. Hard, wiry, black and slick, it stretched the hair follicles and the pores as it crept out of my entire body.

But, once it was over, it was all worth it.

The raw, feral power was delicious. But my favorite was the incredible sense of speed that came with jungle vines, limbs and trees whipping past my face. I can’t remember exactly how far the vamp camp complex was, but certainly less than twenty klicks. We made good time, stomping and swinging through the dense green of the Amazon. Before too long, less than an hour, as unbelievable as that might sound, we approached the soot-covered camp, lurking in the jungle wall just outside their lone sentry’s field of vision. Crockett, by the way, looked suitably ridiculous with a giant minigun strapped to his back. Just in case you were wondering.

“Cocky fucks,” Bolton growled, “one? Andrews – deal with it.”

Here’s the thing about werewolf commando weapons: they have to be built
strong
. We never know when they’re going to be used, so they have to accommodate us either as humans, or as eight foot tall wolf-men. We’re all in good shape, but there’s a certain... performance enhancement, shall we say, that comes with werewolf transformation. I’m still constantly amazed at the ingenuity that these guys show when it comes to making gear.

On command, Andrews whipped the bow around faster than I could see, nocked and loosed an arrow.

His bowstrung thrummed and a split second later, the alabaster-skinned creature clutched its chest, made a strange sort of wailing sound, and slumped over the guard tower’s rail. A gout of black liquid poured out, splashing on the ground below.

“One down,” Andrews grinned. A grin from a werewolf is equal parts jovial and terrifying, unless you know the wolf. Then it’s a little goofy.

On Bolton’s command, we crept inside the camp, completely unnoticed. Right on time, the sun was still invisible, but had begun to lend a gray haze to the world. Perfect. The vampires would be in a mixture of torpor and drunkenness from whatever they gorged on the night before. Now the only thing left was to bring them out into the open air to clear my path to the elder. That was Samson’s job.

Huge as a man, Samson was, as a wolf, wholly unbelievable. He stood near eight and a half feet tall, towering over the rest of us, with a wild mane, arms the size of tree trunks, and a mocking smirk plastered across his lupine face. This was a wolf that was ready to cause some problems.

“Alright, Sam. You’re up.” Bolton signaled the big man. “The rest of you, you know what you’re doing. I’m not going to babysit you. As soon as he starts his Hulk act, get it done. Fast. We’re on a timetable here, gentle...wolves.” He couldn’t help himself. Andrews groaned and Crockett shook his head. “For shame, boss. For shame.”

“Samson,” Bolton nodded again, “get out there. Make a fucking mess.”

The huge wolfman stood to his full height, stretched his arms above his head and fingered his favorite knuckles – the simple iron rings. With a kind of stage magician’s flare, he slipped them on, spread and clenched his fists, and tromped into the dead center of the camp.

He rose up, and unleashed the most terrifying, savage roar I’d ever heard. The ground, the leaves, the trees, even the sky almost seemed to quake.

“Come out!” He shouted in a guttural way that made him seem completely out of control. Maybe he was, maybe it was an act. He slammed one of his iron-wrapped fists to the ground, stirring up a huge cloud of dust.

“Come...out...NOW!”

He stood again, stalked over to the incinerator that we all knew had been freshly used. It still had a little of a faint orange glow from within. The coals were still hot. Another terrible roar burst out of Samson, the muscles of his back clenched, and he drove a fist into the side of the concrete igloo.

I could not fucking believe it.

The first punch sent a spider’s web of cracks through the foot-thick cement. The second made it explode. I just watched a werewolf punch a concrete structure so hard that it blew up. That took a while to settle in.

As fire, coals and concrete dust filled the camp, confused vampires stumbled out of their tents, sleeping holes and wherever else the hell they stayed.

One rushed Samson. That wasn’t very smart.

The giant pointed straight at the creature and then smashed his fist into the thing’s sternum. That was the second time I’d ever seen someone hit something so hard it exploded. Wasn’t the last.

I looked over at Bolton, who had a tremendously satisfied look on his face. “When do we go, boss?”

“Just wait. We want this place to be in full chaos panic. It’ll make everything easier. Anyway, do you want to miss
this
?”

When I looked back to Samson, he’d picked up a nude vampire by an ankle and was using him as a flail, swinging him around and clubbing others as they approached. As soon as his makeshift weapon was got a bit ragged, he threw the monster into an advancing group, bowling them over in a spray of bone and that black liquid that passed for blood.

Three of them got up, three did not. Those that managed to get on their feet ran toward him, one with a pistol and two with some kind of hand weapons that were hard to identify in the pre-dawn gloom. You had to admire their tenacity, if not their tactical genius. The vampire with the pistol fired off three rounds, one of which caught Samson in the shoulder. He winced, but only out of surprise. He grabbed the two nearest him, smashed their heads together and bounded straight toward the one who shot him. Samson’s fist shot forward and actually
impaled
the guy he punched.

He made a noise that I think was laughter as he flung the limp corpse effortlessly into a nearby tent.

Something that confused me until Bolton explained it later: vampires, particularly this sort of vampire, normally only died if you severed the head or speared the heart. However, absolutely killing the hell out of them, as Samson was demonstrating so ably, also worked just fine.

By now the camp was a mess of vampire paste, concrete and coals. Samson was covered in it, his fur matted, his teeth blood-stained. A flurry of activity caught him up next as the camp finally came to full life.

In the space of twenty, maybe thirty seconds, he speared three of them on the same tent pole, exploded another one with a single punch, and tossed two into the fire pit at the same time.

The rest of the tents emptied. As our giant faced down twenty, maybe thirty more addled, but angry vampires, Bolton rasped.

“Okay – that looks like chaos to me. Andrews, Crockett, head in. HQ says the prisoners are in a wooden structure toward the back of the camp. Expect resistance, but probably light. And Crockett? If you’re going to use Old Tyrannosaurus or whatever you call that thing, warn me this time, yeah? I’d rather not catch another five or ten stray bullets. Thanks.”

Crockett cracked a humored snarl, patted his comically oversized weapon, offered Andrews a hand. Off they crept, around the perimeter, in two different directions. I had a feeling that those prisoners were in good hands, although if they shit themselves when they saw their rescuers, no one would blame them.

“Alright Mathis. This is it.” Bolton eyed me, his yellow irises bright. “You know what you’re doing. You’re the most important part of this whole plan. Make it happen.” I nodded and crept around the camp’s shadowed fringe. I vaguely remembered the elder vampire’s tent being off to the west, quite far from the rest of the camp. My recollection proved correct. I gave one last glance back to Samson’s display before heading in. He had somehow dealt with the small gang of vampires and was now staring down a particularly large one who had what appeared to be machine guns under each arm. I crouched behind a tree and watched. I couldn’t miss this.

Samson pounded the dirt at his feet, and hurled a tent pole like a javelin at his target. The creature ducked at the last moment and laughed.

“You’re big,” it said in a raspy, chain-smoker-for-a-century-and-a-half voice, “but you’re stupid.”

Samson had closed half the distance. He was then about fifty feet away from the armed vampire. He seemed to be grinning, unbelievably.

“Keep walking, furball. Guess what I have in here? After your boss and his lanky bitch showed up, we’ve been ready. You just got rid of chattel. Those vampires couldn’t fight their way out of a...” He considered his next line carefully. “Werewolf...fight.” I suppose that was true, if less than stellar wit. Also, I looked down at my muscular, nearly nude body and took exception to being called lanky. I decided not to dwell.

Samson charged. Maybe he was offended for me.

“Silver!” the vampire shrieked, his voice harsh, tearing and awful.

“BULLETS!” A rip of gunfire tore through the air. Two bursts caught Samson, ripping through his leg and sent him crashing to the ground.

Groaning, Samson pushed himself up to one knee, and then to his feet. Three yards from the machine gunning vampire. This looked bad. I knew I had business to take care of, but I needed to see this. If this was the end of Samson, he deserved to have it seen. Pure, unadulterated bravery, and a savage rush of adrenaline kept him upright. My lupine auditory sense allowed me to hear what they said to each other.

“One problem,” he snarled, creeping closer to the vampire, “with open barrel machine guns in the jungle.” His voice was ragged. He was obviously in pain.

“They get wet.”

The vampire yanked hard on both triggers, the cords in his forearms standing taut.