Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes (48 page)

Away.
Would I have to give Tamanny back? Her mother was dead, not that I’d have let that bitch get her daughter back. Did Tamanny have other family?

No. Mine.

My Athanate had made another adoption, absolute and unwavering. How that might play out against the Californian legal system, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t care at the moment.

Yelena didn’t look pleased that I’d taken off the Kevlar jacket, but she followed suit, wrapping up another couple of youngsters.

When she’d done that, I pushed her sleeve back and licked the wound on her forearm to stop the bleeding. To hell with what the bodyguards thought of it, if they were watching.

It wasn’t a bad wound. My House had come through almost untouched.

Tamanny and Dante were safe.

But Forsythe had run.

I needed to find him so much my legs started to shake.

Deep breaths. Slow. Slow.

Concentrate.

“Team leaders to me, please. Sky One team, keep guard. Sky Two team, secure the weapons and find the keys for these shackles,” I called. “And some clothing if you can.”

Altau security split up and got to their tasks, not as slick as Ops 4-10, but they’d do fine.

The two team leaders appeared in front of me, and a Pasadena wolf joined them—the lieutenant I’d met at the concert.

“Casualties?” I asked.

“One dead, sixteen wounded, eight seriously, including three hostages,” Sky One said. He knew which casualties I meant, too. Ours. The casualties among bidders and their bodyguards I could find out later. “Already in hand, Gunny,” he finished.

Once a marine…

If it hadn’t been for the death, I would have smiled. We’d been lucky. That and Athanate emergency life support, no doubt.

I turned to the Were. “Pasadena?”

He smiled. “Just a lieutenant, Ms. Farrell. We got one ass broke his leg. Nothing much else.”

I snorted.

“Thank you for coming,” I said. “You really made the difference, saved a lot of innocent lives.”

Especially considering I broke your alpha’s shoulder.

“New times. Y’know, part of all us paranormals sticking together.” He seemed almost embarrassed. “This kinda thing needs doing anyway. And, well, you helped Paige change. Gotta lot more of that.”

Ah. The young halfy from Denver.

“Helping halfies doesn’t come with a price tag,” I said. “You need to call Denver and arrange with them for your other halfies to turn up at the next ritual. They’re handling all the admin.”

He nodded, ducked his head. “Thanks, Ms. Farrell. Anyway, we’re glad we could help. We couldn’t get the whole pack here, but we got a couple more guys in the parking lot and around the front of the building, some off searching the ranch house an’ other buildings. Probably got a few late arrivals coming up the road if you need anything more.”

They’d mobilized a lot of the pack in a short time. That was probably why we hadn’t been able to get through.

“There was one group of men who got spooked and ran early,” I said. “Did you see them as you came in?”

Please. Tell me you have Forsythe.

“Oh, yeah. There was an SUV trying to come out as we came in. When we blocked it, five or six guys took off and ran up that way.” He waved in the general direction of the San Gabriel range north of the ranch.

My wolf thrashed.

On foot. Prey. Chase.

“Should we chase, Gunny?” Sky One asked.

“No. That one’s mine,” I said. It came out as a growl.

I felt a slow burning in my gut. I had him. I didn’t care how good his bodyguards were. They were running up into the San Gabriel in the middle of the night. They probably didn’t even have a flashlight. I’d hunt them down like rabbits.

“Take a couple of SUVs, send teams to make sure they don’t double back down to the road,” I said to Sky Two.

She needed something to do. She was pale with anger, so angry she could barely look at the bidders and their bodyguards lying on the floor.

She spun on her heel and walked out, calling some of her team to her side as she went.

Almost all the bodyguards had been wounded: some by gunfire, the rest beaten by Were. The bidders had done better, mainly because they had gotten down on the floor early and stayed there.

Any of them who needed treatment were going to have to wait.

“Once you’ve freed the prisoners, shackle these men, every single one of them, wounded or not,” I said. “Stack their dead in the corner.”

“We’re handing this over to the police?” Sky One asked. I’d told them that while I’d briefed them at the studios, but his tone left me in no doubt what he wanted to do.

“Yeah.” I didn’t want to. But we needed to keep Ingram onside. I had to hope he’d overlook a few dead bodyguards for the sake of being able to jail the bidders and break up this network.

Another Were came in and whispered something to the Pasadena lieutenant.

“Ahh…we found equipment in the building next door,” he said, and peered up at the roof. “There are cameras hidden up there somewhere. This whole thing was recorded.”

Ingram would want that recording.

I sent a couple of Altau security to strip it down and take the recording.

By that time, the prisoners were freed, the bodyguards were separated out and shackled. Sky Two’s team started to pull bidders to their feet and pat them down for weapons.

Americans. Mexicans. Saudi princelings. Three guys who had to be Italian Mafiosi. Central African men with hard, scarred faces and five-thousand-dollar suits. A couple of billionaire playboys from Brunei or Indonesia whose faces seemed familiar, as if I’d seen them in the news. Russian arms traders. Gulf oil magnates.

I stared them down until Sky Two came back in. I could feel the fury coming off her.

“Kill them all,” she hissed. Sending her out hadn’t calmed her down.

She brought up her hand, holding something.

“On the ground outside,” she said.

A tiny bear. Grubby. Lopsided smile. He’d lost most of his fur, and one ear. A child’s toy. Maybe their last possession, snatched out of their hands and thrown away as they were herded in here.

I took a deep breath and took my finger back off the trigger. “Try and find his owner.”

I watched as she walked to where the girls and boys were huddling.

One of them pointed wordlessly.

A young boy, no more than eight. Curled up and shivering.

Sky Two knelt down and held out the bear.

He reached out one disbelieving hand. Touched. Now the tears came.

Sky Two gathered him up into her arms and rocked him.

One of the Saudis tried to jerk away while he was being shackled.

“I demand access to my embassy,” he yelled at me. “I am a diplomat. You cannot arrest me.”

“If he speaks again,” I said to the team watching, “shoot him.”

Sky One tapped me on the shoulder. “Urgent from Tarez. Clear here and everyone back to the studios immediately with prisoners and the captives. He requested the Pasadena Were as well.”

No!

“Everyone?” I managed to say.

“Except you and your House. He says good hunting.”

The path was dry and dusty under our feet.

They had a forty-minute head start on us. The night felt vast, and between the San Gabriel Mountains and Angeles National Forest they had over half of a million acres to hide in.

There were hiking trails and a couple of highways cut through the mountains.

From what I’d seen, Forsythe had chosen some capable men: maybe one of them knew the area, or, more likely, they had GPS-enabled smartphones.

They’d be thinking that they’d only need three or four hours to get to one of the highways, even with Forsythe slowing them down.

They’d be sure from the way we’d attacked the auction that we weren’t police, so all they needed to do was get on that highway and flag down a car. No roadblocks to worry about.

They might have assumed they were safe.

In fact, every minute they were getting less safe.

Alex and I were in front, Yelena trailing a short distance behind. Athanate senses are good, but they’re nothing compared to werewolf.

Julie and Keith had returned to Bembridge Studios with everyone else, apart from Victor. He was back at the ranch, waiting for a call, wondering how this crazy bitch was so certain she could track men in the night.

And probably how she knew guys who could jump down twenty-five feet from skylights, bounce up and take out armed men in the dark.

He’d have to keep wondering for the moment.

Forsythe’s party numbered six. It’d taken them about fifteen minutes to find a hiking trail. They’d made better speed after that. One of them, not Forsythe, was bleeding slightly. There was a lot of adrenaline in their scent to start with, but it had faded. They weren’t panicked. They were professionals.

They hadn’t been prepared for this, but the pace they kept up meant they weren’t going to get cold. Most of them had shoes that they could easily run in. They had no food or water, but I’d done hundreds of night runs in Ops 4-10 without anything to eat or drink.

I knew what was going through their heads.

They’d be wondering if they’d made a good choice of employer. They’d be thinking about getting clear, finding a safe place with a meal and shower and a bed. And then whether they wanted to stay employed by a man who clearly had powerful enemies.

Forsythe would know that. I’d lay good odds he was increasing their bonuses.

Just get me to Palmdale, he’d say.

It was cold, and there was no moon, no stars. We made little sound other than our panting and the thud of our feet on the trail. I didn’t care how good Forsythe’s group were, they were only as fast as their slowest runner, the man who was paying their salaries, and none of them were any match for the pace we could keep up.

Even if I was still human in body, I’d let my wolf out as I promised. She seemed to fill my head and she was fixed with lethal intensity on the scent of Forsythe fleeing ahead. A scent that was stronger with every step.

Hunt. Kill.

My wolf’s Call, echoed by Alex.

I was getting flashbacks of the last time I’d hunted at night. Carson Park. I’d hunted Amaral down and killed him.

Life simplifies down to that one thing—killing.

Rogue. Rogue.

No.

I hadn’t killed indiscriminately. I had a reason to go after Amaral. I’d attacked him for that reason. That wasn’t the behavior of a rogue. Rogues didn’t reason.

I had gone rogue after I’d caught him. And I’d come back. Alex and Jen had brought me back, and Diana had cured me.

Thinking of her made the pain of my losses start all over again.

Fragments of what was going through my mind must have leaked to Alex. He ran closer to me, and the sense of him was comforting.

If I went rogue and killed Forsythe, no one was going to blame me. Except me.

We could change to wolf, and I could depend on Alex’s dominance to keep me from going rogue again. But that would mean losing the use of the P90s strapped to our backs. We might need them.

Instead, I tried to lose myself in sensations—the scent, the rhythm of our running, the sounds we made. It was easier to avoid thinking about what had happened today and all the reasons that I was chasing Forsythe. All the reasons I had for killing him.

I had to treat it like an Ops 4-10 mission. Overhaul his group. Take them prisoner. Hand them over to Ingram. End.

Hunt, kill
, said the wolf.

Forty minutes later, I could almost taste the men ahead. They’d found a side road that they could follow up to the highway.

They were still hurrying, but they might be starting to think they were home free.

We ran after them and we picked up the pace; in the cathedral quiet of the night our wolfy hearing could make out the distant sound of the occasional car on the Angeles Forest highway.

We were a hundred yards behind as they came to the junction with the highway.

I could hear them arguing how to make sure the next car stopped. Up in the hills, at this time of night, there weren’t many.

We slowed. Alex and I slipped off the road and started to come around uphill of them, hidden by the bend in the side road and the pine scrub. Yelena went downhill.

I could hear them panting and arguing long before I saw them.

“Just wait here. Next car comes, we stand in the road and stop it.”

We crept closer until we could see them.

One of them was peering back along the way they’d come. “We have to keep moving. We’re being followed,” he said. “I know it.”

“They’d need dogs to track us. I don’t hear nothing.”

“We should walk, put more distance behind us.”

“I can’t.” That was Forsythe, slumped down on the raised wall of a storm drain, head in his hands.

“That much commitment to take out the auction doesn’t just let us walk away. Who the fuck are they, anyway?”

Forsythe just shook his head. “Some gang wants the business,” he said, but even he didn’t sound convinced.

“They got choppers, for fuck’s sake, they’ll have night vision. They could be overhead any time. If we stay here, we can hide where the cover’s good. If we walk, we might get caught out in the open.”

Alex and I had made our way directly above them, flicking the safeties off the P90s and checking we had single round selected.

Our wolf eyes could see them clearly, glowing with the heat of their exertions.

They could barely see each other. They certainly couldn’t see us.

I could make out Yelena as well. She stopped out of our line of fire.

I nodded at Alex. His voice would make more of an impact on them. Not that I expected that to do any good, but I wanted them alive for Ingram.

“Put your guns on the road and lie down,” he called out.

Good or bad, dumb or desperate—they reacted.

Two went for handguns in shoulder holsters. Two of the others flat out sprinted along the highway in different directions.

Alex and I fired at the same time, the rounds knocking over the guys who’d gone for their guns.

With a couple of jumps we were down onto the road.

The guy still standing took a swing at me. I got a glint of a blade as my only warning.

I ducked inside his arc. He hadn’t been expecting that. He probably wasn’t expecting me to break his ribs with my fist. Or dislocate his shoulder as I took the knife off him.

I slammed him face down onto the asphalt.

The two we’d shot weren’t going anywhere and there was a startled cry as Yelena brought down the one who’d run in her direction.

Alex sprinted up the road after the last of the bodyguards. That wouldn’t take long.

Forsythe?

He’d taken the opportunity of the confusion to run. Where?

Down the slope. I could have followed him on the noise alone.

I retrieved the bodyguards’ guns first. Not good to come back to a nasty surprise.

I vaulted the storm drain.

My wolfy eyes could see where I was going. Forsythe didn’t stand a chance, but he was running with all the desperation of fear, even when there was a steep drop right in front of him.

I grabbed his jacket to jerk him back. A rock twisted underneath my foot. We both went over.