The Dark Messiah Read online

  She could smell the Were scent coming from them.

  Shit, she closed her eyes. Way to fucking go, meathead! When she opened her eyes, her look of fascination was replaced with a focused determination that didn’t look like it understood the word passively.

  Michael had beaten that out of her back in Denver, and he hadn’t let up on the airship. She might not beat four of these toughs, but there was no way she was accepting any recruiting offer they had.

  And besides, Michael was out there somewhere, right?

  As the first tough to speak stepped towards her to grab her shoulder, she kicked back and caught him in the kneecap, pushing his leg in a direction it wasn’t supposed to bend.

  So, it snapped. “You fucking bitch!” he screamed, going down to the sidewalk in a spasm of pain.

  She twisted in place, leaning to the side to allow the club used by the second to miss her, smashing against the window. “It will heal, asshole,” she told him as she backhanded the second in the nose with her right knuckles. She grabbed his right hand, the one with the club, twisted the wrist up, taking control of the club as his scream alerted the fourth that the fight behind him wasn’t going the way it was planned.

  “Listen, you cunt!” the first yelled, “The Enforcers are going to…”

  “Not have a fucking clue I was here,” she replied, cutting short his conversation with a solid swing of the club to his forehead.

  She dodged the second backhanded swing from her opponent but failed to dodge another club aimed at her head from the third guy. The blow caused stars in her eyes. She threw herself to the side to get some space, and a little time to get her focus back.

  Unfortunately, the two remaining toughs weren’t idiots, and now Jacqueline was on the defensive, dodging a swing from one club while blocking the other with hers. She was constantly being pushed backward and then jackass number three came at her from another angle. She dodged his attack and found herself in an alley.

  Oh, for fuck's sake!

  “We got your ass now, sweetheart,” the fourth spoke for the first time, “Might as well give up, cause our beat down is only going to be more painful for every bit of pain you cause us,” he grated out.

  Wonderful, she was now sixty feet back in the alley. It was dark, it was smelly, and these three didn’t have any reason to play nice.

  “You know,” the fourth guy grinned and stepped back out of her reach and put a hand under his jacket. Now, all three of them started grinning like they were in on some grand joke. “We’ve only been playing with you, pussycat.”

  The rod he brought out started arcing up and down with electricity. An eerie blue light causing shadows to play along the stone walls. “This baby is called the persuader because it will encourage you to do anything we ask just to stop the pain.”

  “Kiss my ass!” Jacqueline told him, spitting to the side, “Shock me or not, I’ll never do anything for you.”

  “Oh Johnny,” the second spoke in a high voice putting both hands up to his face, “she isn’t going to do anything for us, whatever shall we do?” he asked and then laughed at his own joke.

  “Well, I guess we need to …persuade… her to listen to us, don’t we guys?” he asked as the two of them stepped aside so he could get in front of them. Jacqueline looked around, and she was blocked in. There wasn’t an exit and changing to a wolf wasn’t going to help much against three other Weres.

  Johnny’s voice became soft, almost loving, “You are going to join the Enforcers, little one, or die,” His laughter, such a contrast to his previous tone, seemed maniacal.

  At the far end of the alley, a figure, eyes faintly glowing red, dragged a body into the alley. He tossed it away, the body hit a wall, sliding down to lay in a clump.

  All life gone.

  Jacqueline considered pointing out the death standing behind them, but then gritted her teeth. She was safe enough, but she wasn’t finished here.

  Jacqueline darted forward, raising her club to block the first swing of the electrical rod and kicked out, connecting with his stomach, causing him to bend over, but also causing him to swing widely, catching the edge of her right leg with the...

  “Holy fuckazoid!” She screamed, the pain racing up and down her leg.

  “You…” the guy said, grabbing his stomach and trying to catch his breath, “have only tasted a little.” He slowly stood back up. “That was a lucky shot, bitch.”

  Jacqueline flexed her leg, trying to get full movement back.

  “That was just the tiniest taste, sweet cheeks,” his grin made her feel dirty. He stood back up and waved the club around. “No Mr. Nice guy, this time.”

  “So, you want me to call you Mr. what, now?” she asked him.

  “You don’t have to call me anything, except perhaps master,” his grin became feral, his eyes slowly looking her up and down, “and you look good enough to…”

  Her scream split the night. The three men stepped back as her eyes flared yellow, the humiliation, fear and despair she had felt while she was blind rose up in her mind like three demons and the guys in front of her provided the opportunity to release the pent-up fury.

  The pent-up rage.

  She forgot about the electricity, the three to one odds, the pain in her leg. She ran into the middle guy with the electric rod and slammed her club at his head, making him use his for defense. She kicked out to the one on her right, nailing him in his crotch and Were or no Were, a man doesn’t heal quickly from that punishment.

  She ducked under the return swing, the electricity humming over her hair and used her momentum to lift the club up from the ground, slamming into the last guy’s head. She used her momentum to pivot outside of the middle guy’s easy swing range. She blocked the second strike from the glowing blue weapon and kicked out, breaking his leg as she swung her club in an arc, trying to deliver a smashing hit to the back of his head.

  Unfortunately, her club didn’t beat his stab and the two hit each other at the same moment. He went down, the back of his skull fractured and she screamed as her body spasmed against her will. The rod’s electric charge coursing through her. She slammed into the concrete, her eyes open, but her body trembling violently, taking away any ability to control her movements.

  The last guy standing, the one she kicked in the nuts, walked carefully over and reached down to pick up the arc rod. His eyes, cruel in the faint light, as he spoke. “Well, that was a hell of a fight, I’ll give you that,” he said. Jacqueline was barely able to follow him with her eyes.

  He turned the club to show her a switch on it, “See this?” He knelt down so she could see, “Here, it’s kind of dark, even for our kind. Now,” he looked annoyed and slapped Jacqueline, “pay attention!” Jacqueline tried to get her eyes to focus back on the asshole, trying hard to move, to get out of the way of the pain that was so close to her, the electricity arcing.

  “Now, we have it on half power, thinking a small little female like you … Oh, sorry, seems like Johnny moved it to two-thirds power.” He looked over at her, impressed, “That drops a two hundred and fifty-pound Werebear, you got some big ovaries. But,” he went on to say, “I’m going to move it on up to max because my nuts hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.” He shrugged, “And they really want a little payback.”

  Jacqueline could only stare in horror as the man looked down on her. Then, another voice cut in.

  “I think, not,” Michael spoke from her left. Jacqueline could see the tough turn in surprise, not realizing another party had been there in the alley with them.

  “Who the hell are you?” he spoke gruffly, “We are part of the Enforcers, we are taking in this person for questioning…”

  “No, you will not,” Michael told him. “In fact,” Jacqueline heard a bit of noise, then a sudden CRACK, loud and moist. A neck being broke.

  “What the hell!” the tough’s eyes were surprised, and then he backed up a step, and Jacqueline could see Michael’s legs.

  The tough swung the electrified
rod at Michael who merely caught it, the electricity buzzing loudly in her ears, the electricity arcing into his hand. He yanked the club out of the tough’s hand and grabbed it by the bottom.

  “That tickles,” he told the stupefied man.

  “Perhaps it might be malfunctioning?” he asked the guy. In a flash, Michael was touching the tough with it, who was blown backward to land some ten feet away.

  Jacqueline could just see the tough’s feet twitching.

  “Guess not,” Michael said, and the buzzing and humming stopped. He stepped back to her left, out of her vision. She heard another loud CRACK and then Michael walked into her line of vision and past the last tough’s feet, and a final crack and that person’s feet stopped quivering.

  Michael came back to her and bent down. Then, she felt him pick her up, gently. “Let’s go, Jacqueline, I think you have had enough therapy for this evening.”

  She felt a calmness overcome her, and her eyes closed to darkness.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Michael made sure to walk outside of lower Manhattan. Away from all of the lights and activity, he could see there. He carried Jacqueline, keeping to the darker streets. A lot of the buildings and homes seemed to have electricity here, but not all of them had people.

  He pushed a little fear out into the night, enough to cause people to shy away and leave the two of them alone as he considered what he knew.

  Michael had noticed Jacqueline’s interest in the jewelry and stepped across to the other side of the street and watched from a corner.

  The four toughs had been walking by, noticing her figure until one caught her scent and then it became business to them. Apparently, these Enforcers needed Weres in their efforts.

  Michael had pulled the information out of their heads. Their jobs were to hunt other Weres and vampires.

  Especially vampires. His eyes had narrowed at that. He had seen enough of what was going on. While he wasn’t very supportive of vampires that were Forsaken, who was leading them to the right path in this day and age?

  Jacqueline started moaning, her eyes started fluttering, and her heartbeat changed. He stopped at the next block and laid her down on a soft patch of ground. While he waited, he looked around.

  So much had changed. The buildings, in general, were in a state of neglect. Brick and concrete either broken off or cracking. More than one building had the foundation broken.

  And yet, others looked in good repair.

  Obviously, they had people with skills to build, to mend and to design here. But the dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots, from what he could tell near the airship port, seemed substantial. It was as bad as before the fall, if not worse. The large tower that rose into the night, he figured, was where the elite lived and worked.

  Jacqueline lamented, “God, my head hurts,” she rolled over to her side, clutching the side of her head, “Can you just kill me now?”

  “Time to get up, work yourself through it,” Michael told her, his voice calm. “Or I will be forced to give you something worse to worry about.”

  Jacqueline turned to look over her shoulder at him, rolled her eyes and started pushing off the ground, knocking some of the grass off of herself when she stood. Looking around, she asked, “Where are we now?”

  “A few minutes from my old home,” he answered.

  “You think it still exists?” she pressed, looking to him for confirmation.

  “Oh yes,” he told her, “it still exists.”

  —

  The police car’s red and blue lights flashed in the dark street, the light’s colors highlighting the buildings around it. A few who lived nearby looked out of their windows and figured someone had tried unsuccessfully to break into the jewelry store.

  The store's front window was cracked.

  Odd, one thought, the police car was in front of the alley half a block from the store. He let his drapes drop back and went to sleep. Life these days was hard enough; he didn’t need to get involved in any police action.

  He mumbled as he pulled the covers over his shoulders, “I ain’t heard nothin, I ain’t seen nothin … I was asleep.”

  And, soon enough, he was.

  —

  Michael could hear the two heartbeats in the trees ahead of them. He had decided to take the shortcut through old Gramercy Park South, which in his day had been a private park. Now, it looked like it was near the North Wall. Michael wasn’t sure why they put up a wall, but he could see the horizontal line a few blocks from here.

  “Seriously?” Jacqueline murmured low enough so that Michael could hear, “This is bullshit. Chicago isn’t this much of a pain in the ass to walk around.” She started walking faster down the path, heading towards the two people that had moved into positions behind trees ahead of them.

  Michael wasn’t convinced that Chicago was any safer. He wondered if possibly Jacqueline just knew which locations were dangerous and avoided them. He shook his head at her behavior and then stepped off the path into the shadows of the trees and disappeared.

  —

  Jacqueline was pissed. Angry that she had been attacked. Pissed she had lost her situational awareness. Pissed that she had been shocked and laying helpless in the street requiring Michael to save her. And finally, pissed he hadn’t been there in the first place.

  He could have stopped her from making a painful mistake. What had happened was a blow, both physically and to her ego.

  This time, it was one guy and one girl that stepped out of the shadows. He had a gun pointed at her, “Far enough, toss me your money and any food you have.”

  The girl was brandishing a knife, her eyes glittering in the moonlight.

  “What, are you just going to steal from me?” she asked, her anger boiling over quickly. There was something funny about the way they only focused on her … Jacqueline turned to look behind her and noticed Michael was nowhere to be seen.

  Again.

  “You motherfucker,” she whispered before turning back around to face the two.

  “Hey,” he grated out, “I’m talking to you!”

  “Well,” she replied, “I wasn’t talking to you. I was upset with my companion that had been with me.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. Both looked back down the path, but their grins suggested they thought she was lying.

  The girl waved her knife, “This isn’t stealing, consider it a toll to get through our park.”

  Jacqueline crossed her arms, annoyance with Michael coloring her tone, “That’s a steep toll and I have no money, nor any food. The guy I was with had both.”

  “Well, I guess that leaves shooting you, or cutting you,” the girl pronounced. Jacqueline looked closer and noticed that the gleam in her eye seemed off-balance. She had naturally assumed, the guy with the gun was the most immediate threat. But, sexism aside, she was now thinking crazy bitch here was the more dangerous of the two.

  “You couldn’t cut me with that little knife if you tried, sister. So, screw you,” she turned and pointed at the guy, “and if you shoot me, I swear, I’ll rip your throat out.”

  Crazy bitch took a step forward, waving her knife, “Big words for a little-too-stupid-to-live slut like you.”

  “Dammit!” Jacqueline threw her hands up, “I. Am. Not. A. Slut!” She ignored the woman in front of her for a second and yelled into the trees, “You hear that Michael? I AM NOT A SLUT! I have been with two guys, two!” She paused and thought about her words for a second before yelling again. “NOT AT ONE TIME!” She stomped on the ground. “Just because this body is amazing, doesn’t mean it’s always open for business.”

  “Here,” the woman started walking towards the paranoid delusional woman, “Let me cut-up your pretty face and you won’t have as many problems with guys hitting on you.”

  “You crazy-assed bitch,” Jacqueline spit out when the woman tried to slash her face. The second time she took a swing at her, Jacqueline pivoted and struck, she caught the wrist with the knife and bent it. The woman shrieked
when a bone cracked in her wrist, and Jacqueline took her knife away. The loud BANG caused her to release the woman’s arm and roll to the side, coming up with the knife prepared to throw.

  Not that there was any need to throw anything. The guy was struggling, his feet dangling off the ground, Michael holding him up by his wrist, the pistol pointing up in the air. “Now that,” Michael hissed, “would have been unfair.”

  He turned in Jacqueline’s direction and raised an eyebrow, “Kill them or let them live?” he asked.