Alpha Breed: Werewolf Bikers (Sex & Violence Book 1) (4 page)

Arn was nearly upon the hunter as the two enemies closed distance, and Brienne knew it would only be a matter of seconds before the hunter’s night vision goggles revealed the wolf stalking him. Brienne began to envision the burning light of the sun, reaching out to touch the solar energy that coursed through the plant bodies of the flora that surrounded them. Plants were incredible batteries for solar energy, and for druids solar magick wasn’t as much about connecting with the sun as it was connecting with the very plants that depended on it for life. Her hand began to grow hot, and she knew without looking that to the eyes of anyone who could see power it would look as if she held a mini-sun in the palm of her hand. As it was, the hunter was a mundane, and what he saw was a young woman emerge from a clump of ferns holding her hand up and palm out. At the same time he saw the giant wolf crouching in the underbrush nearby, though as he raised his shotgun to fire at the wolf a flash of light burned out his night vision goggles.

The hunter screamed in pain as Brienne’s sun spell blinded him. Arn leapt upon the man and the wolf’s weight brought him to the ground. They brawled for a brief moment, then as the wolf got its jaws around the hunter’s throat it ended with the sound of tearing flesh. Brienne heard more shouts and the sounds of running feet as more hunters converged on their position. Arn raised his bloody muzzle and his eyes locked onto Brienne’s. The wolf gestured with his head, and the druid could see that he wanted her to go deeper into the forest. She could see from his stance that he intended to go back and distract the hunters, perhaps to kill as many as he could before they took him.

“No, I’m not leaving you to face that alone,” said Brienne as she brandished her shotgun and burning sun.

The wolf’s hackles stood on end and his lips drew back in a brutal and bloody snarl, the mere sight of which put the fear in Brienne’s heart. It was one thing to argue with a man, but another entirely to disagree with a wolf. Brienne let out a deep sigh and nodded, then rushed into the darkness as Arn turned to face whatever was coming.

ACT IV

The door exploded inwards in a cloud of smoke, fire, and splinters as the concussion grenades ripped through it. The force of the blast knocked Roland and Iri to the ground along with the two bikes they’d been tuning. In seconds men in matte black body armor swarmed through the shattered space where the door had once been, pumping rounds from their shotguns into the garage. Roland roared and rolled from his stomach to his back as he reached out for the massive sledgehammer that had been knocked off the wall to clatter to the concrete floor nearby. Iri sprang to her feet even as she shifted to her half-wolf form and tackled one of the armored men. They crashed through a low workbench and soon blood and pieces of armor were flying in all directions from where they’d landed.

Roland grasped the hammer and stayed low as he rushed behind one of the few bikes still standing and managed to stay out of sight long enough to flank the other two men who had entered the garage. The alpha’s entire left side, from his arm down to his leg, burned with a white-hot intensity and he knew that he’d been hit with silver buckshot. Iri howled in pain as the two men emptied their shotguns into her and the dying man she had pinned beneath her. Roland bellowed in rage as he leapt out from cover and swung his hammer with all of his might. The blow caught the nearest hunter in the temple and was so powerful that the man’s helmet shattered along with his skull in a spray of blood and ceramics.

The last hunter leveled his shotgun at Roland’s chest, though before he could pull the trigger Iri’s clawed hand lashed out and tore into the back of his thigh. The hunter’s shot went wide as he fell to the ground. The dying shifter used her claws to climb atop the hunter as they struggled for position. Roland had taken another pellet of buckshot from the hunter’s errant shot and struggled to limp his way over to the two combatants. By the time Roland reached them the hunter had managed to slip a thin silver blade under Iri’s jaws to finish her. Before the hunter was able to get out from under the dead shifter’s body Roland growled and raised his hammer.

“Wait! Wait!” begged the hunter as he dropped the knife and held his hands out in front of him, “It’s a kill or capture, if you just came peacefully…”

The hunter was interrupted in his plea as Roland brought the heavy hammer down on the man. The shifter knew the score, and had been pack alpha long enough to know that there could never be peace between hunter and shifter. No quarter asked and none given.

The force of the blow crushed the man’s faceplate and pulped his skull. Roland leaned up against the engine that hung on chains suspended from the ceiling as he tried to catch his breath. The silver shot was burning its way though him, and the alpha knew that no matter what was happening in the rest of the clubhouse that he had to get the silver out before he would be of any use. The alpha was growing weaker by the second as he limped, then crawled over to the tool chest and found a set of needle nose pliers. He rolled over onto his back and unfastened his belt so that he could fold it over on itself and place it in his mouth. Then Roland took several deep breaths, and pushed the pliers into the first of the ragged holes in his side.

The pain was worse than anything he’d experienced, despite his long life of violence and wilderness. Had it not been for the belt he would surely have screamed and alerted any nearby hunters to his position. The alpha could hear other members of his pack howling and fighting amidst the roar of motorcycle engines and the coughing bark of the hunter’s shotguns. There had long since been a contingency plan in place for such an event, he thought to himself, rolling the plan over and over in his mind as a way of keeping his mind off the excruciating pain. The pack appeared to the casual observer as just another ragtag motorcycle club, though no matter how low a profile they kept, the hunters would always find them.

It had been a good ten years since the last time Roland and his tribe had come into conflict with a band of hunters, and the alpha could not help but to feel as though they’d been caught off guard. Then again hunters were never this organized or heavily armed, the shifter reminded himself as he pushed the pliers into his flesh to dig out another pellet of the burning silver buckshot. Hunters were more often than not lone wanderers, driven by a need for vengeance against the shifters. Shifter packs did sometimes have occasion to make a few corpses here and there, though that had more to do with being biker gangs than it did being shifters.

The real menace was the Blackwatch, those hardcore shifters who had acquired a taste for human flesh and who reveled in their physical superiority over humankind. Those were the real life big bad wolves, and most hunters wandering the landscape looking for revenge were victims of Blackwatch attacks. Since the Blackwatch shifters were always on the move, and worldwide they numbered only a few packs anyway, it was the rest of the shifter breed that typically had to deal with the broken-hearted hunters wielding silver bullets.

However, this had to be the work of Raytheodyne mercenaries, thought Roland as he popped the last of the buckshot from his arm and spit out the belt, having nearly bitten it in half. These hired hunters, for what else could they be but that, had used explosives, wore body armor, and burned through ammunition as if they didn’t give a shit how much an ounce of silver cost. Most hunters were dirt poor and were lucky to have a few silver rounds or a sharpened piece of fine cutlery, these guys had some serious financial backing. Roland knew about the secret war with the mega-corporation, though he’d never thought he and his pack would be on the front lines of that fight.

After the first two years of the company attempting to capture a wolf there had been a pack of Blackwatch shifters who had assaulted the Ratheodyne corporate headquarters. The psychotic werewolves had ripped through the security forces and slaughtered the Board of Executives before hanging the CEO out the window by his own entrails. Only one of the shifters survived the attack, though she had claimed it was worth it to kill the company. The problem was that mega-corporations of that size weren’t killable, and more executives simply stepped up the company ladder to fill the vacancies left by the slaughter.

The new Board and CEO used their vast resources to perform a flawless media cover-up, gave themselves raises, and continued the relentless pursuit of the shifter tribes. Since then shifter packs had taken to living even more on the fringes of society, with regular packs becoming more and more like the Blackwatch every day. Roland knew it was a slow grind, and that eventually there would have to be a showdown. One way or another it was going to end messy, he just hadn’t thought it would be today. 

“Hope your paycheck was worth it scumbag,” spat Roland at the corpses around him as he slowly rose to his feet, slid the gory pliers into his back pocket, and hefted the bloody hammer in his firm grip.

Roland’s wounds, now free of the cursed metal, were beginning to heal, though not nearly as fast as a typical wound. Had he been hit with simple stainless steel shot then within another hour or so after digging out the bullets it would be as if he’d never been in a fight at all. As it was the silver induced wounds would likely take him several days to recover from, though had he not removed the shot when he did then by now he’d be frothing at the mouth and dead within moments. The garage was wrecked, and the sound of engines and shooting had long since faded. The clubhouse was in shambles, and with good reason, as it looked like the set of some Hollywood horror film. There were bullet holes everywhere, and it was obvious that the hunters had come in through doors and windows using the same grenade and suppressing fire method that the ones who breached the garage had done.

This had been a military or SWAT team level operation, though Roland to himself as he limped his way through the carnage. He was able to see at least six mangled corpses dressed in the matte black body armor were among the dead. A few members of Arn’s pack lay in pools of blood alongside several of his own, all of their bodies riddled with silver buckshot and still smoking as the cursed metal burned deeper and deeper into their corpses. He was the only one still standing in the clubhouse, and hoped that the others whose bodies he didn’t see had either died well or avoided capture.

Roland was relieved to see that Brienne’s body was nowhere to be found, and he could not smell her blood, though he was able to catch her scent more strongly once he stepped out back of the clubhouse. By the time Roland walked through the door he could already tell that much violence had occurred right at the exit. Some of the bikes were gone, one looking like it had exploded and taken a hunter with it, and by the scents still hanging in the air Roland knew that members of both Arn’s pack and his had sped off in different directions shortly after the fight had started. He couldn’t blame them, as most shifters, including himself, had never been in the military or police force, so had not experienced this kind of heated firefight before.

Womack, whose blood was splattered against the wall at the exit and spread out across the ground in a veritable lake, was the only veteran in their two packs that Roland knew of. Womack had been in the Vietnam War, having volunteered at age sixteen, and his shifter awakening had happened deep in some Cambodian jungle. The old shifter’s body wasn’t among the three corpses on the ground, though Roland did recognize one as Justin Morne, the youngest of his own pack. One other was from Arn’s pack, and the last a shredded hunter. It took Roland a moment to pick up the trail, with so many scents in the air it was tough to pick out a single one, even if it was his mate that he sought.

Once he caught Brienne’s scent he followed it down the gravel road a few yards and then realized it cut hard into the forest, along with Arn’s. There were two black SUVs parked another thirty yards or so down the gravel road, and Roland could tell from the smell and the tracks what had happened. It seemed as if both Arn and Brienne had fled down the road, then cut into the forest when they saw the vehicles. The hunters must have dismounted and chased them into the forest, and through Roland could not hear them crashing through the underbrush the way that most humans would, he could smell their presence amidst the onslaught of clean forest scents. Roland pulled his lips back in a snarl as his hackles rose with jealousy that Arn had whisked Brienne away, though at the same time he was thankful that his druid mate was with a capable shifter, considering the circumstances.

Roland was not usually a jealous man, he had in fact shared Iri with Womack several times, though she hadn’t been mated to either of them. It was different with Brienne, she was his, body and soul, as he was hers. It rankled him that Arn did not hide his lust for her, though he dared not make challenge again after the savage beating Roland have given him four years ago. Still, there was violence to be done before any of that could be addressed.

Shots rang out in the forest and Roland heard the voice of a wolf dying. He wasn’t from Roland’s pack, though it still hurt Roland’s heart for another shifter to die while in his territory. They were all supposed to be under his protection, and he could not help but feel responsible for all of them. The alpha gripped his hammer after taking off his shoes and picked up the trail of the hunters, doing his best to balance silence with speed as he ran barefoot through the forest. More shots filled the air, from different guns, and Roland gave up on perfect silence. He was a shifter, a child of the primal wilderness, so even when he wasn’t paying attention he still moved more quietly through the world than the average human being. As he ran he shifted into his half-form, as he wanted the additional perceptive powers of his wolf form, but not at the expense of his hammer.

Roland was at ease in his wolf form, though if truth were told he was more comfortable fighting in his human or his half-form. Some shifters were like that, each being more wolf or man depending on their individual personalities and nature. Now that he could see much better in the darkness of the forest Roland was able to dash through the tangle towards the sounds of battle. When the alpha reached the fight he was met with a scene unlike any he’d witnessed before, and it was at once one of the most inspiring and horrific things he’d ever seen.

Arn was lying prone, his belly having been slashed open and much of his insides spilt across the ground. The corpses of several hunters were strewn about the area, most of them with ripped throats or shredded thighs, as the wolf had gone for the arteries. There were still two hunters left alive, reloading their shotguns as they crouched behind thick tree trunks. Standing over Arn’s body was Brienne, holding her empty shotgun like a war club. To Roland she looked like one of the wolfmothers of ancient times, and he nearly wept.

The two hunters looked out of cover and realized that Brienne was out of ammo, so they stood up and began to swagger towards her. Roland’s heart surged with a fierce pride as he saw that Brienne refused to back down. The alpha sprang forward and brought his hammer down on the top of one hunter’s head. The man died immediately, though whether it was from the cracking of his skull or the snapping of his neck as the hammer pounded into him was anybody’s guess. The second hunter turned and fired, though Roland had anticipated his move and had ducked low as he spun on his heels and lashed out one handed with the hammer. His blow didn’t land as hard as the first, though the impact was sufficient to crush the man’s tailbone and send him to the ground.