Darkness Returns (23 page)

Cage’s goatee filled back in and began to spread into a full beard. He slammed Scuds head down on the desk like a giant rubber stamp. The desk thrummed. The smell of blood and aging flesh stuffed the room. “She didn’t do this. No bitch could do this to Scud.”

Teresa crossed her arms. “Go check the warehouse. There’s enough evidence there to tell an interesting story.”

“He went there to punish you for your failure.” He looked down at Scud’s head, now planted on the desk like a grotesque bust. “He went there to kill you.”

Teresa cocked an eyebrow. “He meant to. But he wanted his fun first. He was no different than any of you horny dogs. And one of the first things I’m going to do as Alpha is make sure the bitches get more respect.” She approached the desk and leaned over it to get in close to Cage. “Which means you can stop using that word to describe the pack’s women.”

Cage coughed. His breath came out in labored puffs. “You’re not the Alpha.”

“According to werewolf law, I am. The sitting Alpha’s blood is on my hands. The second I ripped his fucking head from his shoulders, I took over as your leader.”

He shook his head, kept shaking it as if that could make the whole situation come loose and fly out of his life.

Biker grunted. “She’s right.”

Cage pounded a fist on the desk. It rang like a gong. Scud’s head tipped over onto its side. The glare he threw Biker’s direction looked close to setting his mustache wax on fire. “Whose side are you on, Trent?”

Trent lowered his gaze. His shoulders rose and fell as he took a deep, long breath. “The Alpha’s side. The law’s simple. She proved herself stronger. It don’t get much clearer than that.”

Cage raised his pistol and aimed it at Teresa’s heart. “Then the three of us could gun her down now and we’d all be Alphas. It’s a dumb, old law. Anybody can kill anybody these days. It doesn’t prove anything.”

“It’s gotta be one-one-one. It’s gotta be a challenge. Scud made that challenge when he meant to kick her from the pack.”

Cage cocked the hammer back on his pistol. “Then I’ll kick her from the pack.”

For the last section of this exchange, Track Suit had remained quiet and pressed up against the wall, hadn’t even scratched his balls once. Now he stepped away from the wall and aimed his gun at Cage’s head. “You can’t threaten the Alpha like that, Cage. It ain’t right.”

Cage’s eyes widened to the size of a pair of incandescent bulbs. His beard had grown so thick it trailed off his chin, the ends a golden blonde where most the rest was a dark brown. He looked back to Trent. “You with him on this?”

“I don’t want to hold my gun on you, but I will if it means protecting the Alpha.”

Cage bared his teeth. They had all turned to points. His voice took on an animal rumble and his body odor competed with the stink of Scud’s coagulating blood. “I should be the Alpha. And you two know it.”

“Then make your challenge,” Trent said as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

“And risk getting plugged by the two of you protecting her? Fuck that.” He pushed the hammer on his pistol back into place, thumbed the safety, and slammed the weapon on the desk. The metal desk toned a third time like a church bell. But this last also acted as a signal—Cage had accepted the truth.

No matter how much he didn’t like it, Teresa was the Alpha now.

The way her heart raced and her hands so badly wanted to tremble, she couldn’t believe it herself. She held in any sign of fear, though. She even found she could hold back her own scent if she focused hard enough. Not many of the wolves she’d met, besides Scud, could do that. Maybe she was Alpha material after all.

“Now that we’ve settled that, we have another issue to take care of.”

Cage had been staring at Scud’s tipped over head with an almost loving affection, but his face soured at the sound of Teresa’s voice. “If this has to do with the hump you’ve got on for the vampire chick, forget it.”

“After what I saw today, you might think a little different. She’s changing. Evolving faster than a normal vamp. All she needs is to get her mojo back, and everything you take for granted around here, including your disrespect for your new Alpha, gets put in the danger zone.”

“If she’s out to end the world, why give a fuck about us? We’re supernaturals ourselves?”

“Because Lockman gives a fuck about us. And he’s just as likely to bring her back here to finish what he started.”

Cage leaned back in his chair. It creaked as it leaned back with him. Hands folded behind his head and a smirk on his face, he gave a little shrug. “If it’s killing you he’s after, I don’t really have a problem with that.”

The next thing Teresa knew, both Trent and the ball scratcher in the track suit moved. Trent came off his chair faster than his bulky body suggested he could. Track Suit made it to Cage’s side first, knocking the pistol on the desk out of reach before gripping Cage’s shoulder like a Vulcan death grip. Track Suit then pushed the barrel of his pistol into Cage’s temple.

“Give the word,” Trent said.

It took Teresa a second to realize he meant her.

One word, and these two would kill Cage for disrespecting her.

She laughed, shaking her head. After all the bullshit bureaucracy she’d dealt with at the Agency, and the holier-than-thou attitude she’d swallowed from Craig…now she could just nod her head and two men would murder a third on her behalf.

Power trips had never been her thing, but this was heady stuff. She couldn’t deny the thrill it sent through her was on par with a genuine orgasm.

Cage was a liability. If she turned her back at the wrong time, he would make his challenge, and she wouldn’t have the likes of Trent and his ball scratching buddy to protect her. Business. Strategy. A means to an end.

Teresa tilted her head forward. The slightest move. That was all it took.

They didn’t shoot Cage.

Track Suit slipped out of his easily shed outfit—revealing his lack of anything underneath—and shifted while Trent kept Cage at gunpoint.

Cage begged. He reasoned. And he made the most interesting chugging sound when Track Suit, in wolf form, chewed out his throat.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

When the doctors finally finished their examination of Jessie, they let Lockman in to see her.

She remained seated at the end of the bed, arms wrapped around her, mostly naked except for the bandage around her chest and the nylon shorts she usually only wore during workouts and sparring practice with Lockman. She trembled. Shifted from side to side as if she couldn’t get comfortable.

Great docs, leaving her like that.

Lockman tore a sheet off the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. The tent-like bulge her wings made under the sheet sent a chill through him and he hated himself for it. He opened his mouth, because he knew he should say something, but he didn’t have so much as half a word in mind. He had seen a lot of shit in his lifetime. Nothing had prepared him to see his teen daughter grow wings. Her initial turn into a vampire seemed like a bad case of acne in comparison.

He felt that cold touch at the back of his neck again. This time he didn’t bother turning around. He knew the touch either came from his imagination or something non-corporeal. He had his hopes about what—
who
—it could be. Everything he knew said that was impossible, though.

Still, after that second touch, he thought of something to say.

“This doesn’t define you.”

Her eyes remained cast down at her bare knees, as the wet wrinkles around the kneecaps. Up close, her skin looked grayer than ever. Lockman tried to convince himself it had to do with the room’s harsh fluorescent lighting. Who ever looked like themselves in a hospital for crying out loud?

Jessie’s throat clicked when she swallowed. For a while, she didn’t say anything.

Lockman waited her out. He had nothing left to say anyway.

She took the edges of the sheet he’d wrapped her in and pulled it down off her back, revealing the knobby, jointed points of each wing. They were made of the same gray skin that covered the rest of her body, had the signature black veins running through them, except for the thinner flaps of skin that made up the bulk of the wings themselves. Here the veins turned a lighter color, matching the corpse-like pallor of the skin itself. Until Jessie jerked the wings.

One short flap.

The veins awoke with a fresh flood of dark blood, turning them a matching black to the rest that lined her body.

“Neat, huh?” she said with a voice so flat Lockman hardly recognized it as hers. “Doc seems to think they don’t require much blood circulation unless they’re in use. A way of…how’d he put it? Conserving resources.” The smile that opened her mouth wouldn’t have fooled a child. “I’m fuel efficient, Dad. Aren’t you proud.”

“Stop that.”

“Feeling sorry for myself? Fuck you. The day you grow a pair of freaky ass wings, I’ll let you wallow all you want. I’ve never been much for substance abuse, but I could use a fucking drink about now.”

Lockman thought certain he could get her a bottle of Jack. She must have saw the thought in his eyes, because she rolled her own. “You know vamps can’t get drunk.”

He sagged his shoulders, took a seat on the side of the bed around the corner from where she sat, as close as he could without risking crowding her. He didn’t give a damn about the wings. She could have grown a pair of horns to go with them. She was his daughter. That’s all that mattered, and if Kress saw that as a flaw, obviously Kress hadn’t a clue what it meant to care for anyone outside himself, never mind the show he put on about losing Mica.

“I’m just trying to help,” he said. “And keep the quips to yourself, all right?”

“You won’t let me have any fun.” This time her smile, while slight, looked real.

He wanted to reach out and touch her, cup her face, give her arm a squeeze, put his arm around her shoulders—but that’d been a trick with the wings in the way. He was afraid she might jerk away from him. The whole situation seemed so precarious.

Back at the old Agency, Rodriquez used to complain about how hard raising his son could be. All the shit the kid could give him. The back talk. The late nights without phone calls home. Lockman had shrugged it off. They fought demons. Raising a kid was, well, child’s play in comparison.

So here fate had tweaked its nose at Lockman by not only giving him a daughter to care for, but cursing her with the life of a demon.

His heart stopped a second.

Jessie caught something. “What?”

Had he really just referred to his daughter as a demon?

Was he wrong?

Did it matter?

“Why won’t you look at me?” Jessie asked.

“I am looking at you.”

“You
were
looking at me. Now you’re staring at your hands, which are big, meaty fists, like you want to punch something.”

“I’m just trying to figure this all out.”

Jessie popped a
huh
sound and slid off the bed to her feet. At the same time, she shed the sheet covering her. She let her wings expand as far as the corner of the room would allow. “Poor you. Can’t figure this all out. Like what do you mean? Whether or not to put me down?”

Heat crackled across Lockman’s face. “I never said anything like that.”

“Well, you’ll have to excuse me for not feeling sorry for the guy who doesn’t have the fucking wing problem.”

Now Lockman stood. “Are you trying to push me away? Does that make it easier for you?”

She spat air, the most derisive noise a teenager knew how to make. “You’ve spent your whole life pushing people away. You don’t get to lecture on that score.”

He pressed the fingers of one hand to his forehead and rubbed at the growing ache in the center. “How long do you get to use my past against me? How much do I have to do to prove to you I’ve changed? What’s it going to take to convince you that I love you no matter what happens?”

Her lips curled off her fangs, but she didn’t have a comeback.

“I thought this was settled. I thought after what happened…”

“With Mom? You think your part in her death made things better between you and me?”

Feeling his throat close in, the heat pulsing in waves up from his neck, Lockman’s eyes watered. He couldn’t speak.
Why was she doing this?

Her wings jerked, knocking against an EKG monitor and sending it crashing to the floor. She started, as if someone else had knocked it over behind her, then it dawned on her what she’d done. She snapped her gaze back to Lockman.

“I’m a monster,” she said.

Lockman shook his head. He tried to say, N
o, that wasn’t true
, but his closing throat only allowed a strained wheeze.

Jessie took it as confirmation, though. She folded her wings in and marched for the door.

Lockman grabbed at her elbow. “Where are you going?”

She wrenched loose. “Somewhere I don’t have people staring at me like some kind of freak. Or, better yet, I’ll join the circus and fit right in.”

“You’re being ridiculous.” His throat had opened again, but all the wrong words poured out. “Stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself and let’s get a handle on this.”

“How?” Her wings flared outward, the breeze from the sudden movement wafting a mix of sweat and rot with it, the vampiric scent of living dead flesh. Behind her, the doctor and his nurse stared through the glass as if watching the latest daytime soap.

No one thought to call security? Or a psychologist? Someone? Because clearly this was out of Lockman’s control. Of all the people in this place, she’d decided he was the last to listen to.

“Makeup,” Jessie snarled, “will not cover these.”

She flapped the wings again, then turned on her heel and rushed out of the room.

“Stop,” Lockman called after her as he followed her out. A ridiculous thought crossed his mind. She couldn’t go out like that, barely dressed. “Jess, please.”

She kept walking down the hall, her wings twitching anytime a member of the staff crossed her path. At the very end of the hall, a window looked out at the open plains surrounding Kress’s private fortress. The window had bars. But after Jessie shattered the glass with a double punch, she easily yanked the metal grill loose and tossed it out into the night.