Darkest Hour (2 page)

Lockman had helped to build that.

Now he wouldn’t have the chance to see it move forward.

He no sooner had this last, depressing thought, when the wolf disappeared.

At least, that’s what it looked like at first. Then Lockman felt the bloody mist fall over him like red rain. He saw the dark red stain on the ceiling. An electric crackling filled the room as if someone had stuck a fork in a socket. It smelled about the same as well—that electrocuted air scent that made the hairs in your nose stand on end and the back of your palate itch.

Lockman sat up and saw three other red stains on the floor and walls to match the one on the ceiling, one blotch for each wolf.

Standing right where she had during the whole meeting, Jessie held a pen knife in one hand while her other hand bled from a cut through the palm. Sparks of blue light flashed in the wound, the source of the static sound. The wound in her palm closed a second after Lockman noticed it, cutting off the crackling sparks with it.

Jessie folded the pen knife and tucked it in the pocket of her black jeans. “I take it this means no werewolves in our army.”

Lockman caught himself with his jaw hanging open. He clapped his mouth shut and looked around from where he sat to check on Teresa and Adam. They stared at Jessie as slack-jawed as he must have. Teresa even trembled slightly.

He got to his feet and wiped some moisture off his cheek. His fingers came away covered with red. “What did you do?”

“I blew them up.”

Granted, Jess had shown more and more power and control over her magical abilities since the vampire king had turned her into a vampire. But this…

“Fucking mojo,” he whispered.

“We should probably leave,” Adam said and pumped his shotgun.

Lockman looked down at himself. He had wolf blood splattered all down the front of him. “Going to be a trick getting through the club looking like this.”

“We can flank you,” Teresa said. “Then we rush for the exit and ignore any questions.”

“Any other wolves will smell it on me.”

Jessie waved a hand. “Screw it. I’ll just use it.”

Teresa’s eyebrows rose. “Use it?”

“Trick I learned few days ago. I can store the power I get from blood to use later.” She closed her eyes and put out her hand, palm facing Lockman as if she were telling him to “halt.”

The air took on that static feel to it again.

Lockman’s face and one hand tingled. He watched as the blood on his fingers took on a faint glow then seemed to evaporate before his eyes. The blood on his clothes did the same. Not a single red speck remained.

Jessie gasped, opened her eyes. Her breath came a little ragged as if she’d just come in from a jog. She curled closed the fingers of her outstretched hand and let the hand gently drop to her side. She grinned. “Neat, huh?”

Teresa stepped forward and looked Lockman up and down, her eyes wide and clearly panicked. “How did you learn to do that?”

Jessie shrugged. “I just figured it out.”

“All by yourself? It just
came
to you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Did you learn that the same way you learned to make these wolves explode?”

Jessie looked to Lockman. “Dad, can you tell her to back off?”

Lockman put a hand on Teresa’s shoulder. “We need to get out of here. We can talk about this later.”

“Bullshit, Craig. For the last six months, this girl has grown stronger and stronger, and no one has bothered to wonder how or why.”

She was right. The increase in Jessie abilities had to have some explanation. He even had, way in the back of his mind, a suspicion. But the back room of a werewolf den wasn’t exactly the ideal venue to discuss it. “I promise we’ll talk when we get back to HQ.”

Teresa waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah, right. You’ll go right back to coddling her.”

“You know,” Jessie shouted, “I’m really getting sick of people talking about me like I’m
not here
.”

In the space of a second, the air thickened like it does right before a thunderstorm. The lights in the room flickered and then the bulbs exploded, dropping the four of them into darkness. The bass beat from out in the club stopped like a shot heart. All the music quit, in fact, allowing the sound of more exploding light bulbs to carry through the wall. Shouts and screams from the club’s inhabitants soon followed.

“Oh, shit,” Jessie said in the dark.

Chapter Two

Teresa clicked on small flashlight, shined the beam in Jessie’s face.

Jessie didn’t squint or try to block the light. She stared directly into the beam as if it wasn’t there. Her eyes had gone a solid black. The dark veins under her pale skin darkened. When Jessie scowled, she showed off the fangs behind her lips.

“Got a problem, bitch?” Jess asked.

“Damn right I do,” Teresa answered from the darkness behind the beam.

A hot bolt shot through Lockman’s veins. They didn’t have time for petty infighting. “Cool it, both of you. In case you forgot, we’re trapped in a werewolf den with the obliterated remains of high ranking members of their pack.”

The black in Jessie’s eyes faded, revealing her natural irises.

Teresa swung the flashlight beam off Jessie’s face. She trained it on the doorway leading out to the club proper. More screams and shouts filtered in through the closed door. “Probably not a good idea trying to make our way through a pitch black strip club filled with panicking civilians.”

“And brother wolves to these guys,” Adam’s gravel voice said from the dark.

The flashlight beam danced around the room, illuminating the walls, the ceiling, the corners, the blown lights, the bloody remains, the poker table and the chairs around the table. The light did not, however, highlight another exit.

“You’d think they would have a back way out,” Teresa said.

“You think there’s a secret passage or something?” Jessie asked with a light buttering of sarcasm.

“We have to go through the club,” Lockman said. “It’s the only way.”

“Maybe…” Jessie started then trailed off.

Lockman turned to where her voice had come from. His eyes had adjusted to the dark as best they could. With the flashlight’s indirect glow, he could make out her general shape. “What?”

“Nothing. I don’t think it will work.”

Teresa spotlighted Jessie with the flashlight, only this time aiming at her torso instead of her face. “Spit it out. More mojo?”

Jessie shrugged a shoulder. “I’ve never done anything like it before. But he says… I mean, with all that blood I absorbed, I should have enough power to do it.”

“Who says?” Teresa’s words carried a sharp edge.

Jessie turned away, putting the flashlight beam at her back. “What do you suppose is beyond the back wall?”

Lockman pulled up mental images of the club’s layout he gathered from the surveillance they’d done before the scheduled meeting. “The parking lot.”

“So we could get out that way.”

Teresa aimed the light at the wall in question. “Maybe you can conjure up some mojo and walk through walls, but we’re not so lucky.”

“No. I can make it so we can all walk through.” Jessie stepped up to the wall and back into the flashlight beam. “Just keep the light there and…” She rested her palms against the wall. “Probably should back up a little.”

The light bounced slightly as Teresa took Jessie’s advice.

The sound of Adam’s large feet shuffling along the floor came next.

Whatever you say.
Lockman scooted back about five feet. He noticed the tension in his abs as if prepping to take a punch in the gut.

Jessie whispered something under her breath. Her voice creaked a little. Almost didn’t sound like her.

The air in the room turned instantly warm. The barometric pressure seemed to drop thirty degrees. Lockman’s ears popped. His eyes felt swollen in their sockets. When he tried to take a breath, what little air he held in his lungs was sucked out and he was left gasping silently as if a couple of tons had been dropped on his chest.

A second later, a section of the wall around where Jessie touched it exploded outward. A flurry of drywall dust, fiberglass insulation, and shattered brick flew through the air and dusted the blacktop parking lot outside. A hole about the size of a standard doorway let in the moonlight.

Only when he noticed the dry taste of desert air did Lockman realize he could breathe again. The pressure had normalized.

Jessie turned around, the proud grin on her face marred by her vampiric features. Despite this, Lockman still caught a glimpse of teenage innocence in her expression, her smile similar to one she would wear just after winning the middle school spelling bee. But she would never get a chance at anything so mundane as a spelling bee.

And it’s all my fault.

“What in hell?” Teresa shouted.

“A way out,” Jessie answered as if that were the dumbest question she’d heard all day.

Lockman crossed the room to Jessie. He stared at her. “How?”

Her smile faltered. She furled her brow. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a freak.”

“Because you are.” Teresa stepped into the circle of moonlight let in through the hole and clicked off her flashlight. “And you have a lot of explaining to do.”

“I don’t have to tell
you
anything.”

“Want to bet?”

“Enough,” Lockman barked. “We can finish this—”

Something pounded against the door separating them from the club. Then again. The light through the hole in the wall made it possible to see the wood in the doorjamb splinter by the hinges. When the third
bang
hit the door, the door tore loose from the frame and spun inward off its hinges.

Adam still stood close to the door and he had to throw an arm up to deflect the door when it came flying at him.

A massive gray wolf, nearly twice the size as the four Jessie had turned to mush, stood in the doorway, teeth bared and a chainsaw growl in its throat. Lockman had assumed Marka was the pack leader, but this giant had to have outranked him.

Before any of them had a chance to react, the beast bound into the room, headed straight for Lockman.

Chapter Three

Lockman reached behind him for his gun and grasped air, forgetting that he’d dropped the gun when the last wolf had tackled him. If this wolf hit him, he’d lose more than his gun. He had no more time to react, though, when the wolf launched into the air and sailed toward him.

A shadow shot at the wolf and hit it in mid air hard enough to knock the animal off course. Instead of slamming into Lockman, the wolf crashed onto the poker table and the table collapsed underneath. The shadow turned out to be Jessie, who straddled the downed beast as if she meant to ride it. The wolf bucked her off and sent her careening into the wall. She left a dent in the wall before dropping to the floor.

The wolf spun on Lockman. This time Teresa interrupted its next attack by emptying her weapon into its flank.

The wolf’s gray fur seemed to absorb the bullets. Only a small trickle of blood through its coat showed evidence that it had taken fire. It swung its head around and growled at Teresa.

Teresa ejected her magazine and smoothly slammed another home in her pistol. She opened fire again, this time aiming for the wolf’s face.

The wolf leapt to one side, dodging the incoming gunfire, and continued to run a wide circle around the room to stay ahead of Teresa’s continued assault. Her second magazine clicked empty. Lockman couldn’t tell if any of her shots had tagged the wolf.

By this point Jessie had found her feet. She charged across the room, fangs bared, hands in fists, looking nothing like the young girl on his doorstep a year and a half ago, claiming to be his daughter.

The wolf met her halfway and the two collided in the center of the room so hard it sounded like two sacks of rocks thrown together.

They hit the floor in a tangle. Jessie had her legs wrapped around the wolf with her ankles locked together. She grasped the wolf by its thick coat and hung tight. The wolf’s thrashing and writhing couldn’t get her to let go.

“Get out of here,” Jessie shouted.

A second later, Teresa clutched Lockman’s arm and pulled him toward the hole in the wall.

He shook free. “We can’t leave her.”

“She blew up four others. She can handle herself against this one. But if anymore come and we’re still here, we’re all dead.”

Adam skirted the wrestling pair on the floor and joined Lockman and Teresa. “She’s right.”

Lockman had spent so much time trying to protect Jessie, it went against every instinct to leave her behind, even though she had shown herself as the most capable of the four of them to handle the wolves. But how many more could she handle? They would overrun her. She could not take on a whole pack no matter her vampiric strength or how much mojo she had gathered in the last few months.

“Lockman,” Teresa shouted. She looked him hard in the eyes. “We’ll come back for her. Let’s get the van.”

He took one last look at Jessie struggling on the floor—her bared fangs glistened in the moonlight coming through the hole—then he turned and ran out into the night. His heart pounded and his lungs burned by the time they reached the van they had rented for their time in Vegas.

Teresa got behind the wheel. Adam climbed into the back of the van. Lockman joined him. They kept the sliding side door open while Teresa started the engine, backed out of the parking space, and raced toward the hole in the back wall.

The tires shrieked when Teresa braked by the wall with the open side door facing the hole.

Lockman hopped out before the vehicle had come to a complete stop. He stopped just outside the hole and shouted in to Jessie. “Let's go, Jess.”

The wolf bucked and twisted. Jessie kept her grip and managed to stay out of reach when the wolf would try nipping at her. They had reached an awkward stalemate. The wolf couldn’t get on its feet or gain enough leverage to bite Jessie. Jessie, on the other hand, couldn’t let go or the wolf would have an easy opening to attack before she could get on her feet and move.