Prowlers: Wild Things (21 page)

Ten or twelve feet from the bottom of the steps, he stood facing Olivia, his fists clenched at his sides. This was not only crazy, it was stupid. He knew what his reputation was amongst the Prowlers, but even so, how could they believe even for a moment that he was capable of killing one of them with his bare hands? Not that it mattered anymore. This was the plan, and they didn't have a better one. It had to work.

Of course, they'd stacked the deck in their favor a bit.

"Molly," he said, voice low. "The second we're at it, you start screaming. Only a few seconds."

Though she made no verbal response and Jack did not turn to look at her, he could almost feel her assent. They were in this spot together — a crappy plan was better than no plan at all. Though it was hard for him to be so casual about it when he thought about exactly what he was about to do. Olivia stood before him apparently completely at ease and stared at Jack as though she were waiting for him to ask her to dance.

"What are you waiting for?" she demanded.

Jack flushed and felt stupid. He knew what she was, but in spite of that, he looked at this tall, lithe girl and that's what he saw. Olivia studied him a moment, a deep frown creasing her forehead, and then she got it.

"Oh, hell, you're kidding me!"

With a shudder, she changed, fur sprouting all over her flesh, joints popping and stretching, changing the shape of her body beneath her clothes. From beneath the striking, commanding appearance of this human girl, a monster erupted. Her fur was black as her hair. Her snout snapped and gnashed and her razor teeth gleamed as she took a step toward him.

"Is this better? You need me to start something?"

Jack grimaced. "Oh, yeah. That's
much
better."

He felt keenly the emptiness of his hands. Whoever Olivia was, she was a Prowler, and you just did not fight one without a weapon. Even as that thought went through his mind, Jack put his hands together, fingers twined, and brought both fists around in a sweeping arc that knocked Olivia off her feet. The Prowler did not even try to defend herself or dodge, but took the blow full on. It knocked her, staggering, several feet back. And it was the best shot Jack had in him.

Olivia snarled, loud and ominous.

"Jack, no, don't!" Molly screamed, back by the stairs. "She'll kill you! God, Jack, no!"

Her fear for him sounded a little too real for comfort.

Olivia lunged at him, fangs gnashing, and drove Jack down to the concrete hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Trying to catch his breath, he glared up into those feral eyes and saw not a trace of the girl with whom he had hatched this plan. Olivia growled and raised a clawed talon above him.

Jack drove his right fist up into her throat. The Prowler reared back, clutching at her neck and he sat up and drove punches into her abdomen, once, twice, three times, like working a heavy bag at the gym. Jack was a little bit more than average height, but he had been carrying cases of beer and alcohol around the bar his entire life, and there was power in his arms and shoulders, enough to really hurt this beast.

He hesitated.

A massive Prowler hand flashed down, a single claw tore the skin on his right cheek. Jack hissed in pain and glared up at her.

"Don't hold back," Olivia whispered, the words raw and guttural from her bestial throat.

"Fine," Jack snapped. He hammered her in the side of the head with a powerful blow behind which he put all his weight. It drove the Prowler back again and this time Jack followed up on it. His legs were free and he swept them under her. Olivia tumbled to the concrete and then Jack was up, kicking her in the side, feeling the sting of the slash on his feet and the blood trickling down over his chin. Tasted the copper of his own blood on his lips.

In the back of his mind was a picture of this girl and a knowledge of their alliance. She was Bill's niece, and that counted for something. It wasn't that he disliked her, though there was a kind of animal swagger to her that made him uncomfortable. But that cut on his face had galvanized all his fear and hatred for the Prowlers and so even though she barely struggled, he kicked her one more time before falling down upon her.

Molly screamed again, a short cry of alarm that he was not certain was feigned. Jack grabbed Olivia by the throat and slammed her head into the concrete.

At the top of the stairs, the door banged open. Jack had his back to the Prowlers who rushed through the basement door, their feet pounding the landing at the top of the steps. He gripped Olivia's throat tighter and slammed her head against the concrete, maybe a little too hard, for she snarled loudly and bucked against him. Jack did not dare to turn around, but he listened closely to the sounds behind him and he prayed that there were no more than two of them. Certainly it would have been overkill to put more than two guards on the steel door at the top of the stairs.

He struggled with Olivia, afraid to bang her skull again. Their eyes met, hers flaring with a bestial light that made him glad there was someone else here for her to punish for the pain she had just endured.

"Ah, shit, he's gonna kill her!" a voice snapped, and Jack recognized it at once. John Ford, the Prowler who had driven them off the road.

Heavy footsteps slammed into the wooden steps and yet still he did not turn. The last thing he wanted to do was alert them that their arrival was far from unexpected. Or have them notice that Molly was nowhere in sight, that the light bulb near the stairs was shattered, the stairs themselves cast in darkness. It would not do to have them realize that Olivia had used her prodigious strength to tear up one of the wooden treads, nails and all.

A stair was missing.

With a grunt of surprise, the Prowler in the lead put his entire weight down on the spot where the next step ought to have been. Jack spun just in time to see it happen. John Ford's foot passed through open space, his entire leg shot through the hole in the stairs and he roared as something snapped inside him. His chest hit the next stair and one of his legs twisted up at an odd angle. Ford cried out again in agony and snarled, changing, even as he tried to claw free.

The one behind him saw instantly what had happened. Even in the darkness of that corner where they had shattered the bulb, Jack could see the very moment where he got it, where he looked up from Ford's painful writhing and put it together. Jack didn't recognize the human face on it, but clearly this one was smarter than the average Prowler. Old cartoon voices drifted like ghosts through Jack's mind and were instantly dispelled as the thing leaped over the broken and grunting Ford and landed in a crouch on the basement floor.

He was changing even as he rose from that crouch.

Molly stepped from the shadows and swung the heavy wooden plank that had once been the missing step. Nails still jutted from it, and when she slammed it into the Prowler's face, it tore flesh.

The thing screamed in a voice that sounded all too human and rounded on Molly, but by then Olivia was up. She bounded across the concrete at it, slammed into the beast, and her claws began to rise and fall in powerful sledgehammer blows, pummeling and slashing the guard simultaneously. Its blood flew, spattering the clothes Olivia still wore. The other had the weight advantage, but Olivia had momentum and surprise in her favor. She was brutal, even savage, and Jack watched in horrified fascination as she beat the other Prowler down. In those few moments as she was killing the guard, he found he could not even bring the picture of her human face into his mind. Or he did not want to.

She was beautiful, even like this. The way a jaguar or a tiger is beautiful. And he realized that that beauty, the lithe, confident menace of a jungle cat, was the same thing that made her human countenance captivating. No matter how buried she became beneath a human façade, he knew he would never be able to separate the two in her again because Olivia could not hide the truth of her nature. The truth was, she reminded him of Jasmine, and Jack did not like that thought at all.

Then, still trying to pull his broken body from the hole in the stairs, the mangled Prowler, Ford, began to call out in alarm for the others. "Down here!" he shouted angrily. "Move it, they're trying to get out! Jasmine will kill us all! Down here, you idiots!"

Molly ran to the bottom of the steps and hit him again with the board, bloody nails tearing his fur and flesh. Ford grunted with the first blow and tried to reach her, but the second thump of the wooden plank dazed him, and the third left him barely conscious. When she stepped back, there was a tuft of fur and a hank of something that might have been flesh on one of the nails. One of Molly's strikes had taken out Ford's left eye, and the empty orbit leaked blood and clear fluid.

"Move it!" Olivia snarled at Jack when she spotted him just standing there staring. She kicked the dead Prowler at her feet once. "Show's over. There's gonna be more —"

As if on cue, shouts came from above and Jack looked up to see several thick-bodied figures blocking the light from the kitchen of the diner at the top of the stairs. Carefully, the one in front started down.
No element of surprise left
, he thought.

Olivia fished a set of keys out of the pocket of the guard she had killed. They jangled in her hand and she tossed them to Molly, who started for the back door and handed the plank to Jack. He tried not to notice how frightened and hollow her eyes seemed. Instead, he stood shoulder to shoulder with this beast that was his ally, this girl who was his friend's flesh and blood. He and Olivia would fight side by side.

Or they would have.

From upstairs, in the kitchen beyond the threatening figures who were beginning to descend the steps, they heard shouts and a brief blare of a police siren that cut off after just a few seconds. Then a voice on a bullhorn.

"Attention! This is the New York State Police. You are holding hostages within the building against their will. You will turn them over to our custody now and surrender yourselves for questioning. You have ten seconds to comply."

Jack stared up the stairs in disbelief. He figured the expression on his face mirrored those on the faces of the Prowlers who had been about to attack them. Instead of coming further down, however, they quickly retreated back up the stairs and the steel door was slammed shut and locked from above.

At his side, Olivia turned to stare at him. "What the hell is going on?" she asked.

Feeling foolish, he shrugged. "Not a clue. Not that I'm complaining."

From the other side of the basement, Molly hissed at them in a low voice. "Let's go!"

Upstairs, gunfire erupted. Through the concrete and steel they could hear muffled shouting and gun shots, glass shattering. Jack had no idea what extraordinary coincidence led to the police arriving at that moment, but he dared not even question their fortune. It might have been possible for them to escape without that intervention, but it was even more likely that they would have been killed. Even if they had gotten away, they would have been hunted immediately.

This, though . . . this was like the greatest birthday present he had ever had, and it wasn't even his birthday.

"Can we go?" Molly called to them, a bit louder. Olivia was already loping across the basement toward her and as Jack went to follow, Molly fixed their Prowler companion with a grave stare. "You might want to change back now, so just in case the police see you, they won't
shoot you dead
."

Olivia actually laughed at that as she transformed once more, her true visage retreating beneath a human mask. She paused at the bottom of the steps and shuddered as her face restructured itself, her jaws and lips retracting as new skin stretched to cover them. Molly was only a few feet from her, and she turned away from the sight. Jack wasn't certain if Molly had averted her eyes to give the other girl privacy or out of revulsion, but he had an idea it was more the latter. For his part, he stared in fascination during the change, stunned by the feeling of intimacy that came over him as he watched the process. It lasted only a few seconds and when it was through Olivia glanced over at Jack as though she had caught him watching her undress.

"Time to go," Olivia said, her face cast into deep shadow by the long, straight tresses that framed it. She looked like a human again, but Jack thought he could still see the echo of the beast in her features.

Olivia was the first one up the stairs. Molly dropped the keys on the floor and followed, and Jack took one last look at the Prowlers in the basement — one dead and one unconscious — and went after them. He ran up the stairs and out the open bulkhead doors, and nearly crashed into Molly, who had stopped short in the broken, overgrown lot at the rear of the diner with her hands up. Slowly, Olivia also raised her hands.

Both girls were silhouetted in the headlights from a pair of police cars. Their blue lights began to flash. Behind the open doors of the cars, uniformed officers stood with guns leveled at them. Jack swore under his breath. How stupid had they been to think the cops might actually forget to cover the rear? More gunfire erupted around the front of the diner, and he wondered if there was a standoff up there now.

"Police!" called a plainclothes officer who stood between the two cars. "Hands where we can see them."

Jack raised his with great reluctance. "Look," he said loudly, "this isn't what you think. We were prisoners down there." He sighed as he realized how lame that sounded. He and Molly both had little scratches all over their arms and faces, and the gash Olivia had cut on his cheek might need stitches. Olivia had blood on her clothes.

The plainclothes cop kept his sidearm steady as he advanced upon them, staring at each of them in turn, appraising their appearance, brows knitted in consternation.

"You," he said to Jack. "What's your name?"

Not the question Jack had expected. Then again, he had not expected any questions at all, just handcuffs. "Jack Dwyer."

"Got any identification on you?"

Confused, Jack slowly reached around to his back pocket and was pleased to find his wallet still there. He pulled it out and handed it to the cop, keeping his right hand up. The plainclothes officer holstered his weapon and took a step back as he opened up the wallet and pulled out Jack's license. He glanced once at the picture, then up at Jack, before closing the wallet and tossing it back through the air. Jack caught it.