Omega's Run (3 page)

I had little to do after that, so I spent it drinking and playing pool. It was nearing midnight before she showed up and it marked the beginning and the end of all things for me. A chaotic mess that made the issues with my former pack seem like child’s play.

I leaned over the table, jacket draped across a nearby stool with the cue held in my large hands. A hard tap and the cue ball was sent rolling with just the right English on it. I could feel it. The second the ball moved, I knew exactly where that shot was going to go and I straightened up to stare at her across the table. The ball’s momentum carried it halfway across the nine foot table before the spin I had put on it took over and it curved around a cluster of balls to strike the one ball, sinking it gently into the corner pocket right in front of her.

Long, wavy, dark hair hung past her shoulders and a pair of gleaming, pale, jade colored eyes studied me from within a heart shaped face. She had a great body, encased in a short dress of a dark material. A Joe Rocket biker jacket hung perfectly on her frame.

“Nice shot,” she said, her voice coming to me from across the distance of smoke filled bar and alcohol consumption. I blinked, somewhat blearily at her for a moment before I shrugged and leaned on my cue.

“It’s not that difficult, once you get the trick of it.” I didn’t want company. I didn’t want to be bothered. But... she was attractive, and she smelled wonderful, like jasmine, bright and floral with a hint of something sharp beneath it. I breathed in through my nose as subtly as I could, taking in the scent of her as it wafted across the table toward me. Over the stink of cigarettes and alcohol she was a pleasant enough change.

I came around the table and I noticed a pair of long, well-toned legs, half covered in knee high black boots. I stopped right in front of her, my chest almost bumping into her and she looked up at me through dark lashes. “You want to back up so I can shoot, Sugar Tits?” I asked and she laughed, a deep, throaty kind of laugh that made you think of dark rooms, sweat, skin, and the slick, slapping sounds of frenzied sex.

She backed up obligingly though and I leaned over the table to line up my next shot. “Was there a reason you decided to come interrupt my game?” I asked.

“Well, I see a tall, good looking man, all alone and playing with himself and I just can’t help but wonder… what’s made you into such a sad sack?” she drawled casually and I snorted, unable to help the small laugh. She was funny, and hot, I’ll give her those two, but that didn’t mean I was going to give much else.

“None of your fucking business.”

She shrugged, an action that did some very interesting things to some portions of her anatomy that I did my best to ignore. I wasn’t in the mood, as much as my body disagreed, based on its reaction to the sight.

“True, but my boyfriend stood me up and I figured why waste this dress that I picked out special, just for tonight? That, and you’re definitely better on the eyes than him so...” She trailed off suggestively and I glanced up at her after dropping another shot. She was leaning over the table, jacket hanging loose around her and giving me an excellent view down the front of her dress, enough to tell by the way her tits hung that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

“So, what? You think you’ll hit on the only guy in the bar that’s alone and make your boyfriend jealous?”

“That was sort of the idea. But I wasn’t thinking of hitting on you.”

“What do you call this then?”

“I call it asking you directly, take me to a hotel and fuck me until I can’t stand up straight,” she said and winked at me.

It was an enticing offer, I’ll be honest, but for some reason alarms were going off in the back of my head. Something I couldn’t quite reconcile with the beautiful woman that stood in front of me.

I’ve learned to trust my instincts over the decades though, and right then, my instincts were telling me that she was bad news. It wasn’t the boyfriend. I could take down any boyfriend, no problem. Even without the prodigious strength I was gifted with as a Blood Born wolf-kind, I still had more than enough muscle mass to make me an intimidating and formidable opponent. Plus, I had more combat experience than most people.

I just couldn’t put my mental finger on what was bothering me about this bitch. She was still staring at me, her jade green eyes almost looking into me, and another alarm bell started ringing in my head.

“Sorry, Sweetheart,” I said and dropped my pool cue on the table. I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline.” She blinked, startled and for a second I thought I saw a flash of anger burn through her eyes, but it was gone as quickly as it came and I couldn’t honestly be sure it had ever really been there in the first place.

“Well,” she said with another distracting shrug. “You can’t blame a girl for trying.” She winked again and turned to saunter away, a distinctive sway in her hips.

“You’re a fucking moron, Remy Dulcet,” I grumbled to myself and turned back to my solo game of nine ball.

I finished the game and downed the last of my beer in record time before I grabbed my jacket and headed for the door. With nothing else to do I decided to head back to my motel to crash for the night when I felt a finger tap my shoulder.

I was tired. I was buzzed. I was a little depressed too, to be honest. So I was more than a little surprised when I turned and found the hottie from the bar standing behind me. I was even more surprised when she pressed the barrel of a gun under my chin.

“I tried to be nice,” she said with mock sorrow. The glinting humor in her eyes gave away how much she was enjoying this. “I really did try to get you out here without threats.” She paused and her head cocked to the side slightly. “Well, honestly I guess it would have ended in a threat at this stage either way so...” she shrugged again.

“I knew there was a reason I didn’t like you,” I muttered, anger starting to build in my chest. “I couldn’t really smell the gun oil over all that cigarette smoke. But I must have caught enough of it that I didn’t feel right about you.”

“Well you’re an animal. What do I care how you feel?” she snapped. The beautiful jade of her eyes suddenly became as hard and cold as the stone they so closely resembled. Shit. I was starting to realize just how dangerous this chick was. Bad news didn’t even begin to cover it.

Somehow, I didn’t feel too upset about getting killed. I didn’t welcome it, but somehow I wasn’t as angry as I thought I would be.

“So are you going to put this dog down or not?” I snapped after we stood there for almost a full minute with the gun digging into my flesh. “If not, I’ve got other things to do.”

“You’re not going to die here, Remy Dulcet. Mathias Young extends an invitation. He wants to talk to you.”

I wasn’t afraid of dying. I wasn’t afraid of fighting. But
that
put a tingle of fear into my spine. I wanted nothing to do with the Hangman; he had proven himself to be nearly as insane as Romulus was, and that information was the galvanizing force for what I did next.

My hand came up and slapped her hand to the side. Her finger jerked spastically and the gun went off, a bullet whizzing past my face so close that it burned a line of fire from my jaw all the way to my temple. I staggered to the side, my left ear ringing loudly from the explosive sound of the gunshot going off practically right next to my head.

I grabbed her by the jacket, spun hard and tossed her as hard as I could. Admittedly, off balance and with my head ringing like a church bell, ‘as hard as I could’ meant that she flew a yard or two and rolled expertly across the ground coming up on her feet like an experienced acrobat, gun whipping around to point at me again.

I was already running down the street. My balance was fucking shot and I swallowed back a wave of nausea that was, thankfully, already starting to recede. With every step the pain in my ear faded as it healed. The pain in the side of my face, however, failed to get any better. In fact it seemed like it was getting worse.

Fucking bitch was actually using silver coated bullets!
The pain was only going to get worse as my allergy kicked in. I wasn’t one of those wolf-kind that could shrug off the touch of silver. I reacted badly to it, and I could already feel the side of my face swelling up and my vision in my left eye starting to get blurry as it began to swell shut.

Yeah, this wasn’t going to be good.

“You’re not getting away, fucker!” she yelled from a half a block behind me. “Out of the way people! Move!”

Vision gone in one eye and the entire side of my face feeling as if someone had just poured a vial of acid across it, I bounced off of something hard, my right shoulder catching it and spinning me around like a top before I fell hard to the concrete, rolling awkwardly back to my feet and continuing to run.

How the fuck did I let a damn human get the drop on me? I was a Blood Born. One of the two most powerful wolf-kind of the Pacific Northwest Pack.
Only I wasn’t a member of the pack anymore.
I had let depression get the better of me. I had let it dull my edge, and now I was paying for it.

I shoved people aside, bowling others over entirely as I ran down the street and blearily, out of my good eye, I caught sight of a fire escape running from the ground floor all the way up to the roof of a nondescript five story building. I dodged down the alley towards it. The beginnings of a plan started to form and I leaped for it, covering a dozen feet in a single bound and ignoring the startled screams of the idiots below me. I wasn’t sure how far back she was, but I grabbed the ladder and started climbing. Another gunshot rang out behind me and a spark flew into my face as the bullet ricocheted off the metal hand rail.

Below me I could hear her boots pounding on the rungs of the ladder and I ran as hard as I could up each floor until I tumbled over the corner of the building onto the gravel covered roof.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going to go now, numb nuts?” she asked, panting slightly as she came over the edge of the building behind me. “You
do
realize you’re on top of a roof, right?”

I looked back at her and laughed, a choking wheeze as the silver started to affect my throat. It wouldn’t kill me, but I really wasn’t going to be happy for the next few days.

“And you
do
realize I’m wolf-kind right? I’m not as trapped as you think.” I broke into a shambling sprint running directly away from her and right toward the edge of the building.

The street below was five lanes wide, counting sidewalks on either side. I didn’t have the slightest clue what that distance was in feet and I’m glad I didn’t because I might not have attempted what I did if I
had
known.

I heard her curse behind me as my foot hit the edge of the building and I launched myself into the air. The gun went off once again and a searing pain exploded in the back of my right thigh. The controlled leap turned into an awkward fall as I left the roof of the five story building. I flew across the street and crashed through the third floor window of the next building over in a spray of broken glass and shattered wood.

I tumbled across an empty office space and crashed into the far wall. Something popped in my back, I had officially lost all vision in my left eye, and my right leg burned horribly. A bit of blood touched my lips as something inside my body protested its current treatment. Outside I heard a frustrated scream and I laughed, coughing up a bit more blood as I slowly struggled to my feet.

“Tell Mathias Young, he can shove his invitation up his ass!” I yelled and stumbled out of the office and into the rest of the building.

Chapter 4

Ava

“Oh you can tell him yourself, asshole,” I muttered under my breath before raising my coat sleeve to my lips.

“It’s the building across the street from my location, capture him as he comes out; don’t be afraid to hurt him a little.” I pressed a finger to my ear and waited for a response, the earbud in my left ear crackled to life.

“Copy that, Ava.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly as my heart-rate began to calm. I watched with detached interest from the rooftop as the front doors burst open at street level and Remus “Remy” Reese looked up, a smug grin on his face, twisted though it was in pain.

Aw, poor baby.

The van raced up and when Reese turned to lope up the sidewalk, he turned right into one of my guys who unloaded not one, but
two
police issue Tasers into Reese’s chest. He stiffened, like a board and keeled over right onto his back where two more of my team waited. They caught the monster in their arms and pulled him into the van. The panel door slid shut, the engine revved once and pulled away from the curb to the blare of traffic horns.

“Package has been acquired, and is sufficiently detained,”
came through my earpiece a moment later.

I smiled and said, “Copy that, I’m en route.”

I took my time coming down the same way I’d come up and when my boots hit the broken asphalt of the alleyway I breathed a sigh of relief. I cracked my neck back and forth and rolled my shoulders before heading back to my bike. The safe house wasn’t far and then it would be a transfer to a Crusader facility after that, but first? I needed to get that slug out of his leg, pronto. So safe house and a little impromptu kitchen table surgery before anything.

I caught up to the van easily and trailed it out into the Illinois country. Every once in a while I would check on the package the van contained but according to my guys, he was out like a traffic light and showed no signs of stirring. Vitals were stable though, so there was that. I didn’t need him dying on me. That wasn’t the mission this time.

We pulled up to the farmhouse and Jordan got out of the front passenger seat.

“Jesus Christ he’s a big bastard!” he cried and I leaned my bike onto the kickstand and hit the chinstrap on my helmet.

“Quit your bitching, you pussy!” Harper called from the back of the van. I laughed. She was just as bad as me sometimes.

Donnell shut the driver’s side door and came around the front of the van.

“Shut the fuck up, the both of you. It’s going to take all of us to get this monster inside.” I nodded.