The Alpha's Desire 4 (2 page)

Chapter Two

“We are ready to move out,” Nira said. “Having better vision at night, I see no movement in there save for the flickers of a small fire or something; that one light from time to time on the top floor. We head to it.”

“Being the one having the better hearing,” Alex added, “I don’t hear anyone either. Our enhanced sense of smell usually gives us information on our prey, but I can only smell the fires, the poor homeless, and the scent of decay, which includes a lot of moldy paper probably. In a way, that worries me that we are walking into a trap. We have force and numbers, though. This isn’t just wolf against wolf this time. They should be the ones worried.”

“Exactly,” Nira added, her voice all brass, solid, stable, not at all like I assumed mine would sound if I attempted to use it right now.

“Let’s do this then,” Alex said, ending the last bit of actual pep talk in our huddle. “Move in to your designated spots slowly and quietly. Watch for the light signals.”

At that point, those who were naked in the group transformed back into wolves. The smell of fur, dog like, though more musty, like wet dog, hit me first. The scent of nature they brought with them, the smell of trees and leaves, earth, brought the bite of tears to my eyes, reminding me of Lex, making me ache for him, for my wolf. My sense of him, born of our connection, since arriving here had been so faint, barely existent. It worried me that I couldn’t hold onto it for any amount of time.

I knew without a shadow of a doubt he was here, but I’d thought our connection would get stronger rather than weaker once we got this close. It could be a result of their sorcerer’s magic. I had to believe that, other than the alternative of him being on the brink of death.

Moving with the pack, if you will, each sense grew heightened. As adrenaline surged through my body, just the sound of feet against the gravel seemed too loud, as if it would be an alarm for those who awaited us. With each surge of my power that shot through me, the need to take someone out rose, blurring my vison at times. I blinked and tried not to stumble as we moved along at a crawl. Luckily, I had a vampire and a wolf on either side of me. Guessed I was as safe as I could be, especially with the ticking time bomb of power waiting to go off inside me.

I smelled the decay the closer we got to the building, and it only reminded me of death, of loss. I could practically taste it, along with the arid smoke that wafted to us at times from the fires in the trash cans on the ground outside the building. Bile rose up, but I swallowed hard to keep down what little I’d managed to eat.

All the while, my hands begged to grab onto something, anything to ground me. Craving stability in this moment, all I felt was the tingle of my power. A light grew from my hands, alerting the crowd I moved with before I could shove them in the pockets of my pants. I wrinkled my nose, pursing my lips, my frustration easily readable. To have so little control over oneself, especially of something potentially dangerous that lived inside of you, was unnerving, bordering on insanity at a time like this.

I’m not cut out for this life
, I cried out in my head.
I thought life didn’t give one more than they could handle, and yet, mine just keeps doing just that, repeatedly.

“You okay?” Nira asked.

“Yeah. It’s just coursing through me, this power. Sorry. I didn’t expect to see it. I’ll keep my hands hidden until I need to use them.”

She nodded at me as we moved along. My brief light show had caused a few near me to stop, causing the herd of us to stumble a bit. In an instant, though, these paranormal creatures with grace and great abilities recovered, and continued the cautious and stealthy, steady move toward their prey. Even though I, too, walked straight, sandwiched really with no other choice, I still felt like I wasn’t walking in quite a steady fashion.

The word ‘trap’ echoed in my mind the closer we got to the building. The possibility that none of us would make it out alive grew in my mind, hovered throughout my body, until I just moved, not really feeling anything namable, just a barrage of emotions that made no sense any longer. I looked around, truly unseeing, on instinct, in accordance with those around me.

I didn’t know how my life had come to this moment. Yes, true love could push anyone to do insane things, but this seemed somehow beyond anything I’d ever imagined outside of fiction. I was living out a moment in a book. If I had read the scene of this moment, I’d have gotten through it by telling myself it wasn’t possible, not in real life. Still, here I was, off to rescue my lover from the tower, not an evil witch, but a dark werewolf having taken him. Ludicrous, definitely. True, unfortunately yes.

Yet, here I was, surrounded by paranormals, who not only understood my plight, my need to have Lex back, but who I knew would have been out here after him, to save him, with or without me. This fight of theirs between the true and the Royal werewolves had begun long before me and Lex had fallen in love. We were just now a convenient play, a pawn in their game. Having me upped the ante, getting them a source of the Royal magic as well as a bargaining chip for what they wanted. With my shortcoming being new to it, I’d become what I’m sure they saw as easy prey. I cursed my mind. Its barrage of constant thoughts came in handy for a writer, but didn’t bring any sense of calm or even reason before battle.

The group paused just before the building, the vampires looking around, using their excellent vision in the night to scope out the building again as they fanned out around it. All of the parking lot lights had probably long ago burned out, but no one here in this group complained. Instead, I could hear the wolves sniffing as they moved. Me, I just relied on them, and what I could see with the partial moon.

I stood sandwiched between Nira and Alex, who stood a little too close for comfort, her arm and his furry body actually pushed against my body. Putting a weight on my torso that had me struggling for breath even more. I wouldn’t complain, though. Not at all, what with the sense of safety that came with it. Outside of holding onto hope of soon seeing Lex, their protection was all I had to get through this. I just couldn’t count on my magic with its unknowns, even if it raced through me, burning to get out. As the first group to enter, I stood on the front lines with them as others peered around, staking out the surrounding areas before we went inside.

Even this close, there wasn’t a sound or sight of any movement, of anything living outside of the homeless who luckily either slept like the dead, or, seeing this group, decided it best to play dead. If I were them, I’d have done the latter in their situation, I guessed, though I would have found it just as hard to control my breathing as I did now. Probably would have told myself it was all a hallucination.

From this angle as we moved around the side of the building, working toward a back entrance, I could no longer see the flicker on the top floor. Still, I kept it in my mind. I knew it was there. In a surge of feelings, I felt Lex. Though, what I got was a sense of his pain. It bit into me, making me have to fight not to curl over it. Tears stung my wide eyes while I attempted to swallow hard, despite a dry, closing-up throat. I chewed on my lip until I tasted the tang of my own blood.

Hold on,
I said in my head to Lex, trying to send the message out to him over our connection.
I’m here. We are here. And, we’ve come to save you. Soon you will be healing in my arms.
Even the voice in my head wavered, ringing out more toneless than normal.

Remaining standing now itself a task to complete, I had to also hold myself back from foolishly running into the building and to him. It wouldn’t help anyone to do so, though. I knew that. Not a one of us truly knew what lay between us and him. We’d figure it out soon enough. I braced myself to enter, waiting for a signal to move forward. As I did so, I gave myself a much needed pep talk about the power of being positive and all, as I attempted to come up with and then embrace those positive thoughts that felt so flimsy they might at any time disappear into a mist into my head, never to be heard from again.

Chapter Three

Finally, we stepped into the abandoned building. The darkness grew deeper once we entered, so my only guidance was the two bodies on either side of me until my eyes adjusted. I could look up and see the moonlight still, cut and divided like a kaleidoscope by the broken windows. At least both Nira and Alex could see well at night. Though, that meant that so could the other wolves. So, nowhere was truly safe. I braced myself, ready for something to jump out of nowhere at me. If the definition of true horror came with the fear of the unknown, what one couldn’t control, then this was it. I was experiencing it.

Mixed in with that moon in places, as we moved, I could see the glare of the trashcan fires outside on the windows, adding yellows and reds to silvery blue light. The windows being covered in a thin layer of filth, the flames reflected like specters, alive and taunting me. The idea of ghosts at this point should have been nothing, given I was with a vampire and a werewolf, having my own powers inside of me, but somehow I still grew spooked. The hair on the back of my neck prickled, as a cold sliver of fear raced down my spine. I shivered, gaining me a look from Alex. His large wolf eyes shone in the night.

It wasn’t exactly the ghost thing that got to me, but the whole of this moment, the anticipation, the waiting to be attacked, for a body of fur to come flying out of the darkness. I cut myself some slack. When fiction turns to real life, or one finds themselves walking through a horror movie, one should be allowed to pant, cry a little, vomit, and think all sorts of wild thoughts. I’d earned it.

As my failure of a pep talk continued, shadows gave way to dark outlines, and my eyes adjusted. Large machines seemed to rise out of nowhere to loom over my head. We creeped around these massive beasts of metal. The closer we got, the more gears I could see, and the more formidable they looked. In this light, I guessed anything could look angry and predatory if you factored in my stressed-to-the-max imagination.

Each of our footsteps along the paper debris that littered the floor grated on my nerves, and made me edgier, if that was even possible at this point. I needed silence to hear if anything came our way, but the old paper, and who knew what else in that pool of darkness surrounding my feet, crunched with each step. The four large paws beside me making it even worse. Silly, but for a moment, I concerned myself that something could get stuck in his paw.

I stumbled in an ungraceful sidestep when the wall of fur between me and the machine bumped me. Biting my lip to not cry out, I caught out of the corner of my eye something looming over my head. Ducking, as if it would fly at me, I realized it looked like a steering wheel attached to the side of the machine.

Alex had saved me from banging my head against the metal. I snuck a shaking hand, light radiating from my palm, between where it had been in my pocket and the underside of the animal beside me, giving him a rub of thanks. A deep sound came from his chest that I felt rumble where we touched even more than I heard it.

I wanted to use these hands of mine as flashlights, to have a way to make out some of the haunting shadows that moved with us, and on their own. I’d only serve as a beacon, though, lighting the enemy’s way to us. The word, enemy, sounded odd in my mind. I didn’t think I’d ever truly had one. And as an orphan with a full figure, no one bothered to be jealous of me either. Too bad, once this was over, I couldn’t do a look-at-me-now magic show with my sexy man at my side at the next high school reunion.

I actually grew angry with myself for having all of these random thoughts at such a time. I couldn’t control my mind, and felt I needed to focus solely on Lex. Still, I think as a protection mechanism from the weight of the grave situation, in a way, my brain was trying to protect me from some sort of mental breakdown, throwing out random distractions.
Yes, that had to be it. Sold.

Coming to the end of this loosely five foot in length machine, really more of a rectangular box than anything, when the rest of the room came into view, we saw that at the far corner stood the steps. As predicted, these looked like a maze of thin strips of metal. They went up in a narrow line you could see right through, only strips for your feet, before there was a landing and another set, turned in the opposite direction. They seemed hung from the ceiling or something, just to take one up higher, but I couldn’t really get a good, full look at them from here. Seemingly suspended in front of rows of broken windows, shadows swallowed as much of them as the moon lit, causing a very fragmented image.

Once we stood close to them, our backs pressed to a machine, in a dark spot to hide ourselves, I could see all the way to the top floor. There was no protection there, nothing but more piping that served as handrails to prevent a fall to one’s death. Looked like a lot of fun. I could only envision getting half way up them before a wolf came bounding down them at me.

Actually, with the distance we still were from the steps, I found it questionable that the body of fur beside me could even get up them. But, obviously others had, the true wolves that is. Unless they had climbed as humans and then turned here. I admonished myself again for slipping from looking on the bright side, a phrase that would have brought a chuckle in different circumstances, given how dark it was in this place.

My mind at this point went more to a house of horrors that appeared every Halloween around these parts, a haunted warehouse. I’d never been myself. No desire. But, I had friends that had told me all about it, and I’d dared to look at the pictures online once to ensure I would never let myself be talked into going. That warehouse had an elevator, but I wasn’t sure being in a box suspended from a cable with a large wolf beside me would have made me feel any safer, if he could have even fit in such a thing. At the Halloween haunted warehouse, things were expected to jump out at you. All the years I’d refused to go with Chloe, and look at me now.

Now, here I stood in a true abandoned warehouse, or factory or whatever, with real dangers waiting to jump out at me. How that had happened, I’d no idea. For a fleeting instant, I grew inclined to run the other way, a self-preservation instinct soon squelched by feeling my Lex again. 

A wash of agony seeped into my mind, gaining reality with an empathetic feel of pain that seemed to seep into my bones, and make each step rickety, agonizing. With this, a rush of panic came, a clinging to life, a desire strong and fierce to see the ones you love before you die. He wanted me, he wanted all of his wolves. He wanted to say goodbye. My heart dropped from my chest to my stomach. I grimaced, fixing my stare into the dark and seeing only Lex in my mind. Chains, cuts or scratches, so much blood, nearly unconscious – the vision stopped me in my tracks.

My hand scrambled for purchase on Nira, who’d been taking a minute to peer around us. We could only speak with our eyes, but as mine filled with tears, they probably only spoke of sadness rather than my true paranoid state. As she took her hand to rub my back, I had to wonder what part of what I was getting of him was truly sent from him, or whether it was just my fears adding in. Regardless, as we maintained our cover, waited for Nira to give us our next move, I kept a tight hold on her jacket.

She tapped me and gestured toward what lay ahead of us. The machines gave way to rows of holes in the floor. Each were rectangular, about three feet deep, and lined with wood. I could only assume a dirt floor in this light. They must have at one time served to stabilize other machines that had been sold off when the factory closed. Still, we needed to navigate them while out in the open on our way to the stairs.

Not that the openings served any more danger than maybe a twisted ankle if one landed wrong, but they did serve as just another obstacle between me and the man I loved. I tried desperately to hold onto what I felt of him, but it often left as fast as it came. Maybe he could feel me, too. I hoped so, though I had to hope that the wolves who had captured him couldn’t. I swore I buzzed like an old street light.

Alex sidestepped behind me, putting me between him and the last machine as his head gestured for Nira to go toward the steps. I felt her brush her hand down my hair before she slunk her body out, and pressed her back flat against the front of the machine. She looked around her, ensuring this first floor was indeed vacated, save for a homeless person wrapped up in blankets who had chosen to try to sleep in one of the sunken rectangles on the floor. I didn’t see movement, though, not even a sign of breathing, as I looked at the prone body on the floor. While I couldn’t even see a face for the coat and hat and blanket, to tell if it was male or female, I guessed it didn’t matter, as he or she was probably not with us anymore.

There were enough windows broken out that it all smelled like the outdoors. I prayed the lack of dead body smell was a sign that the person was just a deep sleeper rather than gone for good. I didn’t need that kind of sign along my way. My brain was doing well enough on its own, filling with thoughts of what could happen, and not in the positive thinking vein I’d strived for. Images came unbidden into my mind.

My body tensed and jumped, making my shoulders move in a violent shiver as the image of my Lex, lifeless on a floor, struck my brain. Alex pushed against me, sandwiching me between a wall of fur and a wall of chilled metal machinery. He tried to comfort as best he could. I knew that and grew grateful for it, though my stupid brain went down a path best left unthought-of.

What if we came all this way, risked all of these lives, only to die in a trap? What if I find Lex and Vivian and Riker dead anyway, or they are murdered right before my eyes? What if they capture me? What if before that happens, I have to watch all of these amazing creatures who came here with me tonight be ambushed and hurt?

I believed at that point that I would rather sacrifice myself. Without Lex, in this state, I didn’t want to go on. But, this doom and gloom line of thinking was getting me nowhere but closer to hyperventilation. My nails dug into the palms of my hands as my fists tightened in the pockets of my jacket. I had to find my way out of this. I had to find him alive. I could feel him alive. I had to believe that was correct. So, once again, I tried to center, to calm even if just a little, and to find more positive thoughts.

Taking a deep breath, getting the scent of Alex, I brought to mind memories of Lex and I together. So I tried to talk myself into the idea that it would be that way again. In my mind’s eye, I watched him kiss me as he had in real life. I let my body recall the fierce way he held me to him when we were close. These fleeting thoughts were interrupted by the blur that was Nira, moving over the floor and up the first flight of steps.