When He Was Bad (3 page)

Zipping up her backpack and placing it back on her shoulders, Irene stood but she froze in her tracks when she heard the crack of a tree branch.

Squinting, she stared into the darkness but couldn’t see anything. She could, however, feel something. Something had cut off her way back to the car. Scanning her memory, she pulled up the map she’d looked at about seven years ago when she first moved out here. About a mile away was the Löwe house. She couldn’t risk going to the Van Holtzes with her being the potential murder suspect of their firstborn son.

Controlling her fear and desire to run like a girl, Irene took a slow step back and then another. Moving purely on instinct, Irene knew she had to make a run for it…from what, she really didn’t know. But she knew she had to.

So she spun on her heel and ran into the clearing, but came to a sliding halt as her feet touched the wet dirt.

Irene watched as it lifted its head from the elk carcass before it, face covered in blood. It stared at her and she quickly searched her brain to identify it.

Hyena. Irene swallowed and took a careful step to the left. She would be heading into Van Holtz territory, but she’d face Niles Van Holtz’s family and manslaughter charges over this any day.

Irene took another step and another, carefully moving. She gripped the straps of her backpack, ready to yank it off. There was only one. She could fight off one.
There’s only one
, she said to herself again.

At least that’s what she thought until the second one slammed into her from the right, taking hold of her backpack and swinging her around like a doll. Then it tossed her, and that tree it aimed for came up excruciatingly fast….

“Pull over,” Van snapped.

His sister patted his back. “You going to be sick?”

“No.” The limo pulled over and Van stepped out.

“Van, what’s wrong?”

Wiping the still-oozing blood from his eyes, Van stared at the very old Pinto.

“Well?” his sister demanded.

“This is Irene’s car.” He remembered it clearly. She’d almost run him down with it once. At the time, she’d said it was an accident but he hadn’t appreciated her smirk when she’d said it.

Van looked around, sniffing the air.

Carrie shrugged. “And? So it’s her car. What? You want to set it on fire?”

Ignoring his sister’s question, Van glanced at her. “Look where we are.”

Carrie glanced around and then she looked off into the woods. “Oh, God. The Rubicon.”

He was already moving, parts of him shifting as he crossed the road. “Call to the Pack.”

“But Van—”

“Do it!” was the last thing he could tell her before he’d shifted completely and charged into the woods after Irene. If she’d already crossed the Rubicon, he might already be too late. But he couldn’t think about that. He had to get to her. At the very least, he had to try.

Irene hit the tree hard, but she turned in time so it was her side that slammed into it as opposed to her face. She landed on the hard, unforgiving ground, and jaws, stronger than any other like-predator on Earth, tore the backpack off her, flinging it aside. Then it came for her.

Short, blunt claws slapped against her back, tearing past her T-shirt and ripping into soft human flesh. Focusing on one goal, Irene tried to pull herself out from under but its fangs grabbed firm hold of the remaining bit of her T-shirt and yanked her back, tossing her into the middle of the feeding ground.

More of them came out of the woods toward her. They made a strange laughing sound, calling to each other. They didn’t run toward her. They didn’t have to. They all knew she’d never outrun them.

Irene crawled backward and pressed up against the remains of the elk they’d been feeding on, her mind racing with a way out of this that would leave her face and most of her limbs intact.

Quickly scanning the ground, Irene saw her backpack. If she could only get to it…

But the hyenas must have seen what she was looking at. One of them ran toward her, jaws wide open. But before it could get to her, a blur of gold tackled it from the side. The hyena rolled away and scrambled up, trying to avoid the charging male lion. The male wasn’t having it, though. He slapped at the hyena casually, seeming to enjoy the “little chase” around the clearing. Another male joined in and Irene saw her chance. But before she could move, nine lionesses came out of the other side of the woods and ran straight for her.

Again, Irene scrambled back, panic trying to set in. She wouldn’t let it, though. She needed her mind clear to get out of this. To survive. Her only goal was to survive.

More hyenas came and they charged the female lions, keeping them away from Irene and, apparently, their food source for the evening.

She knew she had only one chance and she either took it now or ended up finding out if so many religious belief systems were correct about there being an afterlife.

On hands and knees, Irene made a mad dash for her backpack. She’d just gotten hold of it when fangs gripped her side and flung her back into the midst of the fight. She landed hard, rolling to keep any of her bones from breaking in the process while maintaining a death grip on her pack.

They were still toying with her. She knew that because the lioness that grabbed her could have broken her spine but strategically dug into her side. They didn’t want to kill her too soon. Where would the fun be in that?

Focusing on her task, Irene tore open the zipper on the bag, spraying her papers, files, and computer printouts everywhere. She ignored all that and took hold of what she still had buried inside. Her fingers wrapped around the metal as sharp teeth sank into her thigh and dragged her back.

Somehow knowing this would be her last chance, Irene waited until it had dragged her off into a corner, away from the current battle between lifelong enemies, and then it released her. Before it could get another grip on her or tear into something vital, like an artery or her brain, Irene turned and slammed her homemade weapon against its throat.

Amazing the things one could come up with when bored and reading an electronics magazine. At the time she’d figured if someone named Jack Cover could create the device, why not her? So she’d created three nonlethal ones exactly like his, the one some police stations around the country were using. But she found the nonlethal devices boring. So she’d increased the voltage on the last three as much as she could. Still she’d never used them before but merely kept one in her bag for those long, late-night walks to her car across campus. Until now.

Irene pressed the side buttons she’d added to the device and squeezed. Those increased volts now tore through her attacker.

The hyena’s entire body jerked in surprise—until it began to smoke. The smell of burning fur didn’t deter Irene from keeping her weapon against its throat. She sat up when it started to stumble back and fall over, never stopping the charge or allowing the device to move away from the hyena’s neck.

After sixty seconds, she figured enough had been done and she stood and stumbled away, the hyena remains nothing more than a charred and bloody mess.

Irene quickly remembered there were more, and she spun around with the weapon held up in front of her. Rough breaths came out of her and she could feel blood trickling down her back and thigh, coating the inside of her jeans. As one, they all looked at the hyena’s remains and back at her.

Trying to control her shaking but knowing that with any animal a show of weakness would be her undoing, she yelled, “Well?
Come on!
”

At first, they didn’t move at all, staring at her with those cold eyes. She thought for sure they’d seen through her. That they could see and smell her fear. But she never looked away and slowly they stepped back. All of them.

They kept their eyes on her as if they thought she was as dangerous as they, and they took another step back. And another. And another. When they had a healthy distance between them, both lions and hyenas turned and trotted off back into the woods, heading to their own territories.

Irene waited until she could no longer see or hear them, then she turned and froze again, briefly wondering how much more she could take. They watched her with eyes much less cold but no less frightening.

It had to be an entire pack of wolves. She lifted her weapon, unable to stop her shaking this time, and waited. The one in front trotted forward and she watched it, waiting for it to make its move.

It did, shifting from wolf to human. And suddenly Niles Van Holtz walked toward her. Irene raised the weapon higher, where his big neck would be if he stepped any closer.

Van Holtz stopped and stared at her. “It’s all right, Irene.”

“I have to go.” Irene ignored the fact that her entire body now shook with fear and panic and pain. “I have to work. I need to go back to my lab. I can’t stay. You can’t make me stay.”

“Irene, I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise. But you’ve gotta trust me and come with me, baby.”

“No. I’m going back to my car. Stay away from me, Van Holtz.” She kind of jerked the homemade stun gun and a few of the wolves stepped back. But not him. “I’ll do to you what I did to him,” she warned, motioning toward the charred hyena. “So stay away from me.”

“They won’t let this go, Irene. They’ll come back for you. You’ll never make it to your car. You have to come with me.”

He sounded so reasonable. He sounded like he cared. But no one cared about her. They cared about her brain and what she could do for them or what she could create. But no one—except maybe Jackie—cared about her at all. Especially Van Holtz.

She had to give it to the man, though. He was persistent.

“Irene, I know you’re scared, baby, and I can explain everything to you. But I need you to come with me.”

“Explain? Explain what?”

“About what you just saw. About me.”

She shook her head. “You don’t have to explain anything. I know all about you, Van Holtz.”

“Because of Jaqueline Jean-Louis, right?”

Irene nodded, but one of the wolves moved and she pointed her weapon again, taking a quick step back.

“Irene.” The snap in Van Holtz’s voice drew her attention back to him. “Tell me what you know.”

“What?”

“About us. About the Van Holtzes. Tell me what you know.”

So she did.

“The Van Holtz Pack are descendants of the Holtzes from Gaul. Barbarians used by the villagers to stop the advancement of Caesar’s armies across the Rhine River. They used pagan rituals to force this”—she motioned to the Pack—“on you. Used your kin as war dogs of a sort. But once it was over, they couldn’t control the Holtzes. No one could. You finished with the Romans and turned on the locals, using them as cattle to feed on until the Christian church took power and went after anything remotely pagan. That’s when the now
Van
Holtz Pack, due to a marriage involving Dutch wolves, broke apart. Some left Germany altogether and went to other parts of Europe. Eventually, they ended up on the shores of North America and briefly settled in a small town called Smithville.”

By now, almost half the Pack had shifted to human and they stared at her. She wondered how many of them didn’t even know this background information about their own Pack. Probably all of them.

Finally, Van spoke up. “That was amazing, Irene. How did you know all that?”

“I found a book in the library of an old German monastery. Buried in the back and under a ton of other books. It was in Latin, Greek, and some old German.”

“And you understood it?”

“Latin and Greek I already knew. I had to do a little deciphering to figure out the rhythm and structure of the older German. It was quite fascinating,” she added.

“Is that how you found out about Jackie?”

“No. I knew about her first. It was an accident. Her puberty hit early, while we were at a camp for gifted children. She was only twelve when it hit her one night. She must have shifted six or seven times in less than an hour. She couldn’t control it. She told me everything and I never told. I never would.”

Van nodded. “I know that, doc. I really do.”

Irene realized she’d lowered her arm to her side and her body no longer shook. She took another deep breath and it no longer went in or came out shaky. Somehow Van Holtz had calmed her down, simply getting her to focus on the one thing she loved. Knowledge. And that’s when she finally realized Van Holtz was right. She
had
to trust him, because the hyenas would want her dead for killing one of their own, and the lions, the more pragmatic of the shifters, would want her dead for seeing too much.

“I’ll come home with you,” she told him. “I can call Jackie from your house; she’ll be worried.”

Appearing relieved, Van Holtz nodded and held out his hand.

Irene took a step—with absolutely no intention of taking the man’s hand—and quickly found herself face down on the ground. Before everything went black, she thought,
Ah, yes. Blood loss. I should have accounted for that.

Her wounds worried him. A meaningless scrape on her forehead, but deeper gouges in her torso and thigh. A lovely, still-bleeding gash on the side of her face, a black eye. Her fingers were torn up from dragging on the ground when she was trying to get away.
You put up quite a fight, didn’t ya, my little PhD?

“Are you sure about this?” Carrie asked close to his ear.

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

“The hyenas are going to want her blood and the bitches will just want her dead,” Carrie needlessly reminded him.

“Call a meeting with the Pride and the Clan. We’ll figure this out, but I’m not letting them kill her.”

Carrie nodded as Van stood with Irene tucked safely in his arms.

“And get Vasquez for me,” he ordered while they walked back into the woods and onto Van Holtz territory. “I’d prefer she not bleed to death in the middle of the night.”

It was that brutal snoring that woke her. How could any human being sleep through all that noise? As it was, Irene wasn’t much of a big sleeper anyway. So any additional noises she found simply annoying.

Irene lay in a wonderful bed on her left side, naked, and she immediately knew why. The slightest movement sent a shock wave of pain through her system. Turning her head slowly, she looked down the length of her body, barely covered with a single white sheet. Some parts were bandaged up and she guessed that was to protect the stitches she could feel every time she moved. The rest that hadn’t been bandaged had lovely black and blue marks. Good thing she didn’t have an ego about her looks; otherwise she’d probably be sobbing right now.

Irene turned her head toward the snoring. Damn. Van Holtz. Had he really stayed by her side the whole night? She wouldn’t put it past him to sleep in his own room and then stroll back here around five a.m. trying to give that impression.

Still, he’d saved her life last night and she couldn’t ignore that. He’d taken a risk by bringing her to his home and not letting the others kill her. As Jackie would say, “This is one of those times where your emotion should be one of gratitude.” And Irene was grateful. Few people ever helped her and she was quite loyal to the ones who did. Although the thought of being loyal to Van Holtz made her butt itch. She knew the man well enough to know he’d take any advantage he could get. So, she’d be loyal but she didn’t need to announce it. Quiet loyalty had its benefits as well.

She stared at him, asleep in that chair. In sleep, he almost looked innocent. Yet he wasn’t innocent. Far from it. Because even in sleep he still had a smirk. Who smirked in their sleep?

He wore only a pair of jeans and nothing else. Since he’d graduated from the university seven years ago, Irene normally only saw the man in a tuxedo. Sometimes a casual dinner jacket. But half-naked except for jeans…yes, this was quite new.