Chapter Seventeen, The Showdown

“Take him,” Lily turned to her husband and waited as the tall, black-haired, blue-eyed man gently took the infant boy out of her arms. “My phone is vibrating.”

“I know. I can hear it,” Daniel said.

“Of course you can, Superman.” Lily strode to the purse that was sitting on a divan across the room and unzipped it. She pulled out the phone, glanced at the number on the screen, and frowned.

She hated it when it said “private.” Unfortunately, she knew a good number of people who might have numbers that were “private,” so she couldn’t afford to let it go. She sighed and popped it open. “This is Lily.”

“God damn it, Kane, why didn’t you tell me?”

Lily blinked and went stone cold. It was Cole’s voice on the other end of the line and she had never heard him so livid before.

“You knew! You knew and you didn’t tell me! Why?”

A flash of a vision and suddenly Lily was remembering. Shit, she thought. “Calm down and tell me what’s going on, Cole.”

“What the fuck do you think is going on, Kane? The marks transferred to my mate. That’s what is going on. And now they’re heating up and hurting her.” There was a brief shuffling pause and Lily imagined that Cole had removed the phone from his mouth and was squeezing it in his hand, trying with all of his might not to break the instrument in his rage.

She waited for him to put it to his ear again, and as she waited, she glanced at her husband. Daniel’s blue eyes were glowing. He could hear Cole loud and clear and the man’s anger was forcing Daniel into fight mode.

She tried to give him a look of reassurance. His own expression didn’t change. He held their son in one arm, gently moving him back and forth, but his handsome features were hard and unforgiving and his gaze was locked on hers.

Eventually, she heard Cole’s breathing once more. She interrupted him before he could speak. “Cole! Listen to me carefully. There isn’t much time, okay?”

Silence. Rage and Wrath and Redness. But silence.

“You didn’t transfer the curse to her, Cole. Not exactly. It lifted from you, yes. And she has a bit of it now, yes. But it’s different – ”

“I swear to God, Kane, if you don’t tell me how to fix this right now, I’ll-”

Lily gasped as the phone was suddenly torn from her hand and Daniel placed it to his own ear. “Speak like that to my mate again, Cole, and I don’t care how fucking powerful you are, I will die trying to kill you.”

“Put your wife back on the phone, chief,” Cole hissed into his ear.

Daniel closed the phone, disconnecting the line.

Lily stared at him with wide eyes. “Daniel, no! How could you do that? Charlie needs me right now!”

“She has Cole – more power to her – and the only people who need you are standing in front of you, Lily.” He pinned her with a stark sapphire gaze. The baby in the crook of his arm made a low mewling sound.

Lily glanced down at him. “Give him to me,” she said softly. Daniel handed her their child and the infant immediately wrapped his fingers in Lily’s long golden hair, pulling gently.

“This is too important for you to go all machismo on me, Daniel.” She turned toward the hall that led to the nursery. “I’m going to call him back, unless you call him back yourself.” It wasn’t so much a threat as a promise. At least she was giving him a choice.

She put her son in his crib, swaddled him, and then returned to the living room. Daniel was strapping on his shoulder holster. She watched her husband as his ample muscles stretched and flexed, taut beneath the black t-shirt he wore.

“Daniel, did you hear me?” she asked as she looked around for her phone. “What’s happening is very serious.”

Daniel shook his head. “Out of my jurisdiction,” he replied coolly. Then he turned around, pulled on his wrist watch, and shoved his loaded guns into the shoulder holster. “And I also don’t care.”

“Daniel, where’s my phone?”

“Good night, cher,” Daniel strode across the room, his long legs eating up the distance easily. He ran a hand through his wife’s soft, silken locks and pulled her in for a deep, possessive kiss. When he broke it, almost a full minute later, he gazed down into her golden eyes and whispered, “I’ll be home soon.”

* * * *

Cole re-pocketed the phone without giving it another thought and focused his attention once more on Charlie. Now was not the time to lose control.

Charlie, herself, was trying to be calm, and he was impressed with her bravery. She had no idea what was happening to her or what was about to happen, and yet she faced it with her shoulders rolled back and her chin raised and her teeth bared.

Right now, she had her hands wrapped around her wrists and clenched to her stomach. “You’re good at a lot of things, Malcolm, but I gotta say that diplomacy isn’t one of them,” she said softly through clenched teeth.

He moved forward and gently took her arms to gaze down at them. “I would have to agree with you on that one, luv,” he said. “Now, listen. I’m going to explain this to you, because I don’t know how much time we have.”

She waited.

“These marks were placed on my wrists several decades ago by a Roman gypsy.”

“Your curse?” Charlie asked.

“Yes.” He frowned. And then he realized that Lily must have let Charlie in on his little secret. “Kane told you?”

She nodded. “I’m sorry you have to go through all of that.” She winced as the pain from the marks must have intensified.

“Ah Christ luv, you’re about to be a hell of a lot more sorry. Because that curse may have been transferred to you.” He gazed deeply into her eyes. “And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

Charlie gazed up at him steadily as she seemed to digest this. And then she looked down at her arms. “You mean I’m going to pop into some gory, bloody place where a murder has just happened and get to see mutilated bodies of innocent women and children?” She barely whispered the question. It was as if she were simply thinking her worst, nightmarish thoughts aloud.

It tore at Cole’s heart in a familiar, horrible way. It was reminiscent of walking into the camp at Dachau for the first time or witnessing his first serial murder and not being able to get the stench of innocent shed blood out of his nostrils for what felt like months afterwards…. And now that sickening pain was back because he knew that Charlie would be feeling it for him.

His gut clenched tight and he felt nauseated. Desperate. His head began to pound with the frustrated helplessness that was riding him. He would do anything to prevent her from having to witness what he’d witnessed. But this was one thing he was powerless against.

“Charlie, we have to get you to safe ground,” he said quickly. He noticed that his voice was shaking. He had to get her to some stable place where no one would be walking and no cameras would be monitoring her and no one else could be standing when she popped back into place the second time. And he needed to do it fast. He looked up to find that his men were all watching him, their stricken looks reflecting his own. They couldn’t believe this was happening any more than he could.

In the next moment, Jake was beside him as if he’d sensed that something was wrong and had pulled himself away from whatever he’d been doing with Mary Jane. Jake gently took him by the elbow and drew his attention.

“The men’s restroom. We can rope it off – out of order,” the blonde werewolf suggested.

Cole nodded. It was the only place in the hotel that wouldn’t have cameras, and they didn’t have the time to make it all the way to the suites at the top. “That’ll do.” He took Charlie’s hand and began to lead her down the walk toward the six-foot wall that Caige had helped her down. He climbed up first and then waited for Jake to boost her up. His men climbed the wall around him and, as a large group, they headed back into the casino.

They passed a man in gray overalls with a mop and a bucket, and Caige stopped to speak with him. Cole left him to his bribery and continued through the casino, the rest of his pack in tow. When they arrived at the men’s restroom, he reached in with his mental feelers and forced everyone out.

Three human men left the lavatory, seemingly at once. When the last shuffled quickly past and out of the way, Cole hurriedly took Charlie inside. Jake turned his back to the door from the outside, guarding it until Caige and the janitor could arrive with their sign.

The door shut and Cole turned to his mate. “Charlie, listen to me,” he began. “The pain is going to get worse. And then you’ll experience a sort of…” He searched frantically for the right term. “A ripping sensation.” Even as he said it, he broke out into a cold sweat. Why did she have to hear this? Why did she have to go through this now?

He hated the world in that moment.

“When that happens,” he continued, though Charlie had visibly paled, “you’ll flash out of here and wind up somewhere else. I need you to do this one thing for me, Charlie. Promise me that you will keep your eyes closed. Don’t open them, little one. Not for anything, understand?” He gently cupped her face in his hands and implored her with his stark, verdant gaze. “Promise me, Charlie. Promise me you’ll shut your eyes tight.”

Charlie’s mouth opened as if she were about to speak, but no sound came out. And then her eyes widened and her body went rigid. Cole could hear her heart hammering hard and smell the adrenaline running through her veins. They both looked down at her wrists, as one, and watched as the marks etched there began to glow.

“No, no… Charlie….” Cole pulled Charlie into his arms and shut his eyes. He couldn’t let her go. He couldn’t let this happen. It wasn’t right. There had to be some justice in the world. At some point, the pain – the wrongness – had to end, didn’t it?

Charlie made a harsh sound, one of pain and fear, and Cole’s grip tightened. “Shut your eyes, Charlie!” he commanded, one more time.

And then things were changing around him. He felt drunk, suddenly. Topsy-turvy. The world slanted around him and fell away, flashing into a redness that was all-too-familiar. Confusion hit him hard, fuzzing up his consciousness, but his grip on his mate never lessened. It never let up.

She screamed beneath him as pain undoubtedly ripped through her body, riding up her spine – as it always had his. It was the most miserable moment of Cole’s life.

But it was short-lived. The world settled in around him once more, the bright reddish light melting into individual colors and the ground beneath them once more leveling itself out.

“What the –”

It was a man’s deep voice. Familiar and hated.

Cole opened his eyes and looked down. Charlie was still in his arms and, bless her, she held her eyes shut tight, just as he’d asked.

“Well, I must say that this is unexpected. You’re early, Cole. And you’ve brought company.”

Cole whipped around to face Phelan, his fangs and claws instantly extending, his eyes at once glowing like flame-lit emeralds. Across the room stood Gabriel, his demeanor and dress one of a man who had never been injured and was not about to do what he had obviously been planning to do.

Cole’s stomach twisted nauseatingly as his eyes fell upon the young woman strapped to a chair beside the werewolf. Her left eye was swollen and bruising. Her face was sticky with streams of dried tears. Cole could smell faint traces of blood and his eyes skirted down the woman’s form to find that her wrists had been rubbed raw where she’d attempted to wiggle free of the ropes binding her.

“David…” Charlie had stepped back from Cole and was glaring at Phelan, her body still giving off residual shock-waves of receding pain, her blood now more cortisol and adrenaline than white and red cells. She was livid and hurt and shocked and her lithe form stood rigid and trembling with pent-up emotion. The small, sharp extended fangs in her mouth and the glowing ice-blue eyes were testament to that much.

Cole’s gaze cut from her back to Phelan.

Gabriel was staring at Charlie. He was apparently as surprised as she was. But there was something darker in that gaze. Cole recognized it easily for what it was. He’d felt that kind of desire, himself.

Phelan’s gaze skirted to the red marks on Charlie’s wrists – and then to Cole’s wrists, which were bare. “My, my,” he half-whispered. “Isn’t this an interesting development.”

Cole’s growl was low in his throat, but it was so deep and powerful that it shook the windows, which rattled in their panes. Necklaces and Mardi Gras beads that hung from the mirror on the dresser began to tremble against the glass. One of the pictures of the little boy and girl slid from its casing and drifted to the carpet.

The woman tied to the chair whimpered. But there was hope in her eyes where there had been none moments before.

“You sick, ruthless bastard,” Charlie hissed, moving to take a step toward the man at the other end. Gabriel’s sapphire eyes flashed in challenge and the corners of his mouth turned up in anticipation.

Cole’s hand shot out to press against Charlie’s chest, staying her in her advance. He turned a warning glance on her. She pulled her gaze off of Phelan to stare up at Malcolm and he hoped that she would understand.

He saw it in her eyes. She understood.

She just didn’t care.

He could sense the string of reason snap within her a sheer, split second before she bolted into action. He should have been expecting it. She’d been through too much at Phelan’s hands. There was only so much a person could take, werewolf or not.

Charlie’s form blurred beside him as she yanked off the sweater he’d given her and then raced toward Phelan, all fangs and claws and deadly intent.

Gabriel crouched low and met her, his arms up in defense, his own sharp fangs extending as she took them both to the ground in a flurry of indistinct and hazy forms. They moved far too fast for the human eye to follow and Cole could tell, with a single glance in her direction, that the human woman tied to the chair was bewildered. Perhaps she thought she’d gone mad and had snapped beneath the traumatic pressure of this nightmarish series of events.

Everything was happening too fast, even for him. Nothing made sense. Charlie moved with a speed that, until now, only Malcolm had ever displayed. Her moves were sharp and impossibly quick and incredibly strong. In the space of a few short seconds, she and Phelan seemed to become one super-human fighting machine.

Cole pulled his gaze off of them long enough to focus on the woman in the chair. He moved forward to untie her when someone spoke behind him.

“You always let your women fight your fights for you, werewolf?” Cole spun to face the source of the foreign voice.

Half a dozen human males were standing in the doorway just inside the bedroom. In their hands were automatic weapons. Cole could smell the gun oil, the gun powder, and the faintest hint of weapons discharge. He registered all of this as all six men opened fire on him, emptying everything they had into his tall, strong form.

Cole’s body jerked violently beneath the impacts, but he managed to turn once more and dive toward the woman in the chair, knocking her surprised form to the floor behind the bed as he went down in front of her.

Bullets ricocheted within the room, bouncing off of door handles and the metal frame of the bed. Cole heard the pinging and the thunder of the weapons as if through a tunnel. It was distant and rumbling and reminiscent of wind chimes. He had been hit far too many times. He knew that. He was losing too much blood and with it, he would lose consciousness.

He had no doubt that when that happened, the Hunters would kill him.

* * * *

There was no forethought to Charlie’s actions. It was as if that part of her brain – the part capable of weighing things carefully before she acted – was simply turned off. Blocked off. Burned out.

She saw the woman in the chair and the pictures on the dresser and felt the receding pain that had burned through her body and she remembered the whip across her back and the years of David Reese, aka Gabriel Phelan, touching her as she was trapped in his arms. She thought of her father. Of her mother. Of the funeral on that sunny Sunday that had seen the last rays of light before a storm had come that night and washed away every flower left at their graves.

In that moment, something inside of her changed. Something went away.

Before she realized what she was doing, she was racing across the room toward the man who had trained her, built her up, and made her into the vessel of rage that she had become. She didn’t know where the strength and speed had come from. They should not have been her own. But it was inhumanity at its finest, faster than she could control, stronger than she could have dreamed.

She and Gabriel went down like weights. They hit the floor with a fierceness that splintered the hard wood beneath them. Sound went away and the world painted itself red. Charlie’s hands flew on their own. An upper cut. A shot to the solar plexus. Her palms boxed his ears.

Phelan rolled beneath her, shoving her hard and sending her flying into the opposite wall. A distant reverberation like a motorcycle engine shook the air around them, shock-waves of something repetitive and quick. But the sound was muted and all that existed was the slow-motion alacrity of their furied struggle.

Something hard and sharp sliced through Charlie’s left arm. Another went through her right leg. She ignored them; all pain was dulled or nonexistent. She shoved away from the wall and lunged once more. Phelan met her dead-on this time, his own hands flying with a swiftness that defied logic. A back-hand, an elbow to the back of her head, a crunch somewhere in her left thigh and Charlie fell, rolled, and came up once more.

Again, they rushed each other, the smell of blood now thick in the shrinking space of the bedroom. He blocked her first kick but missed her second, and it found his chest, breaking a rib and stealing his breath. He recovered, the space of a fraction of a second passing before he was returning the favor.

Glass shattered around them, detectable only as a muffled tinkling and the occasional crunch. Something was floating in the air – feathers. Dust. Splintered debris.

Time had come to a near stop, the world frozen in this snap shot of conflict. A woman tied to a chair now lay on the ground, bleeding. Her eyes were closed, her face slack. A man lay beside her, slipping away as balls of lead seared through his body and embedded themselves in the floor beneath him.

Flashes of light pierced the dust motes and chunks of fabric that floated in the thick air. Lightning. Thunder. Blood.

Charlie’s head snapped to the side beneath another blow, and she caught sight of the man beside the bed, his green eyes closed, his clothing soaked in thick, red liquid.

They say you can’t stop time, that it is a constant and waits for no one. They’re wrong. Time slows when you want it to speed up. It goes too fast when you’re having fun. And it stops. It stops, dead in its tracks, when the unthinkable occurs. Time is not neutral, it makes no sense, and it bears no logic. It has nothing to do with nature or fairness or physics.

Time is cruel.

And it’s as simple as that.

Charlie knew; she’d been trapped in it before. At least this time, the ceasing point in seconds and minutes played to her advantage. It took no time at all whatsoever for her to spin in place, slicing a round house kick through the air that connected with Phelan’s jaw and knocked him into the adjoining wall.

A nothing second later, Charlie was punching him in the neck. If it hadn’t been for the breaking wall behind him, the werewolf would have lost his head. As it was, he curved into the plaster at his back, and it absorbed the impact, shaking the rafters and sending more gypsum and mortar crumbling to the ground around them.

A bullet sliced through Charlie’s kidney. Another entered her left shoulder, followed by a third in her right thigh. She jerked at each contact, not hearing them and not recognizing the pain for what it was. There was only the distant, distinct knowledge that she’d been shot several times, and that was it. Her body kept moving of its own volition.

Phelan took a blow that broke his nose, another that knocked out a back tooth. Then he pressed his palms to the wall on either side of him and raised his legs to shove against Charlie in a double kick that sent her literally flying across the room. On the way, she picked up several more balls of lead, each kissing her skin and searing a burnt-up tunnel through her body on its way back out again.

Somewhere in the background of her consciousness, Charlie heard a man yelling. The thunder slowed and then stopped, trailing away, and she hit the opposite wall and crumpled.

She forced herself to stand. And herself didn’t listen.

Her body remained on the ground, healing beneath and around her, the holes closing up, the bones mending. Again, she told it to stand, determined, merciless – and this time, it obeyed.

But as it did, she found herself surrounded by forms in black. She paid them little heed, blurred as they were, but they seemed to notice her with much more force.

There was a hard, sharp jab of a needle at the back of her neck and her legs once more gave out. Liquid fire spread across her skin, eating her up, burning her down. She fell forward, barely able to catch herself.

Blood roared in her ears, effectively cutting out the fuzzy, mixed-up reality around her. She hit the ground and her head shifted, her right cheek slicing against slivers of glass on the wooden planks beneath her. Malcolm’s arm stretched, slack and unmoving, beneath the bed across the room. She could see the side of his face, peaceful in his slumber.

She would have given anything, in that moment, for him to open those light green eyes and look at her one last time.

She felt arms lift her, pulling her off of the ground and against a hard chest. She looked up into Phelan’s sapphire eyes and saw triumph in his completely healed and once more handsome visage. She tried to rip it away from him, to peel it off of his face, but her arms wouldn’t obey. They hung useless at her sides.

His lips moved as he said something to her. But she couldn’t hear him. It was useless. Everything was useless. Hopeless. And this was the end.

No little one. We’re here. We’re coming. The voice rumbled through her mind, the desert wind on a summer’s night. It dried her internal tears and warmed her from the inside out. It was her grandfather – the Overseer. She would know his voice anywhere.

We’re here, Charlie. Answer, me, angel. Guide us to you.

I’m here, she thought. Malcolm’s hurt.

Above her, Gabriel’s triumphant smile faded. His sapphire eyes glowed more intensely. She felt the growl that rumbled through his chest and into her body.

I can’t move…

Dannai will help you, Charlie.

Gabriel spun with her in his arms as the empty window frames across the room began to curve inward and Charlie imagined that they must sound horrible. The walls around them bucked and crumbled. Something was coming through.

He dropped her and Charlie hit the ground to lay motionless, unable to move or call out or stir in any fashion. She closed her eyes, the division between sight and sound causing a wealth of vertigo to steal through her system.

“Can you hear me, Charlie?” It was a soft voice, tender, feminine and deep. It sounded a little like Demi Moore. Maybe she was dreaming. Maybe she’d finally passed out and Indecent Proposal was playing in her mind.

But the roar in her ears was receding and the woman’s voice came through once more. “You’re alright, Charlie. Open your eyes.”

Charlie opened her eyes in time to see a woman above her standing and turning away in a flurry of long, jet-black hair and dark gold skin and multi-colored eyes. The woman was racing away from her, off to some other destination, before Charlie could get her bearings and sit up.

She was healed. There was no pain or even stiffness in her body any longer. She sat up and the world cleared around her, coming into sharp focus. Time moved at its normal rate once again, which was very fast. She smelled blood, sharp and metallic. She smelled sweat and gun powder and dust. There were several werewolves in the room now.

With a gentle, but comforting kind of shock, Charlie recognized Jesse among them.

Across the room, the woman who had been kneeling beside her a second ago was now kneeling beside someone else. It was Malcolm.

At once, Charlie on her feet. Her gaze searched the wrestling bodies for a man with blonde hair and blue eyes, but Phelan was gone, and her grandfather was also nowhere in sight.

Charlie blurred into movement, ducked beneath the flying body of a male human, and leapt forward, flipping in the air over the sudden rolling ball of fur and black fatigues as a second werewolf took down yet another Hunter. She landed, found her feet beneath her, and continued until she was kneeling beside her mate.

The woman next to him glanced up. Charlie was caught in a powerful gaze of gold, green, purple and blue, and her breath was instantly trapped in her chest. He is healed, Charlie, but tell no one, came a voice in her head. It was gentle, but insistent.

The woman smelled human. But the power rolling off of her was unnatural. Tell no one what you’ve seen me do, the voice commanded gently. Please, she added softly.

Charlie gazed into the woman’s eyes for what seemed a short eternity. And then she was ripping her gaze away and looking down as Cole groaned low and turned his head. Without thinking, she caught his face in her hands and willed his eyes to open. To look up at her.

They did. Light green sliced through the waning light, trapping her in their stark beauty. Charlie stared at him, once more in awe of his exquisite perfection.

“Duck,” the woman beside her suddenly ordered.

Without thinking, Charlie ducked down. A body went flying over the three of them. When it passed, they sat back up, Cole included. Then the two werewolves were on their feet, both moving as if they’d never been injured. The woman with the long, dark hair and extraordinary multi-colored eyes remained on the floor, turning her attention to the unconscious woman strapped to the chair.

Charlie was now certain that the young mother was going to live. There was no absolute logic behind it; it was just an instinctive knowledge combined with the fact that Charlie could hear her heart beating. She also knew that the woman tending to her was some kind of witch. She’d healed Charlie and would do the same for the young mother who had been trapped in this Hell. Maybe she would even help her forget.

Charlie scanned the room, once more searching for just one man. But, even as she searched, she felt her mate beside her, whole, alive, and strong. She thought of this moment in time – a gift she would have given anything for only minutes earlier.

Jesse dispatched a Hunter, ripping his heart completely out of his body, and then turned toward another as the man came through what was left of the doorway.

Charlie had never seen this side of her best friend. She’d never seen the wolf in Jesse. His amber eyes glowed like yellow fire. His fangs were stark white, long and sharp and wicked. His claws were fiendish and dreadful and his entire countenance seemed to have grown a foot taller and gained the breadth of the same. He was massive and monstrous and awesome.

He was beautiful.

Two other werewolves wrestled with one another in a corner. One must have worked for the Overseer. An enforcer, perhaps. The other must have been with Phelan. They were both in wolf form.

The same scene was repeated near the center of the room and Charlie watched as one furry body was thrown into the bed, forcing the mattress and box springs it to go skidding across the room and smash against the opposite wall.

The witch with kaleidoscope eyes managed to gather up the woman she’d untied and roll with her as the bed slid by, saving them both from its crushing momentum.

Charlie watched as another enforcer flashed into wolf form and charged the two Hunters who were now racing through the door after their comrade. All three bodies went rolling back out into the hall.

Machine guns littered the floor, along with the bodies of the fallen Hunters.

And, still, Phelan was no where to be seen.

* * * *

Alexander waited with stark, calm patience as the man who had killed his son slowly stood from where Alex had thrown him against a hollow, dead tree trunk. Gabriel Phelan gained his ground, rose, and seemed to collect himself with incredible ease. Alexander watched as his wounds healed and his blue gaze focused on the Overseer.

“Here to finish your son’s fight for him, old man?” Gabriel finally whispered. The words filled the silence of the desert around them. How they’d gotten there, Alexander was certain that Phelan did not know.

Alex had taken them there. He could move through short spaces like that. In the blink of an eye – in a flash. And sometimes, if he willed it enough, he could take someone with him. His older brother possessed the same gift, but was able to travel vast distances with it. Kavanagh was confined to smaller areas. It was a lapse in power that his other abilities more than made up for.

This was the desert that spanned out toward the airport behind the young mother’s dilapidated house. Phelan wouldn’t know that. But he also didn’t care. They were there now, and they were alone. This moment had been a long time coming.

The moon shone brightly in the midnight tapestry above them. Power lines hummed softly several yards away. The rocks and dirt and bushes and lightning-struck tree husks were starkly outlined in the yellow-white light it shed.

“You should have given her to me, Kavanagh. I would have spared you, then. Out of respect for her,” Phelan told him as he slowly pace away from the dead tree. The Overseer’s eyes carefully followed his movements. “But now I’ll have my men Hunt you down. And when they fail to find you, they’ll find your granddaughter.”

“You’ll never touch her again, Phelan,” Alexander said. “Never.”

Gabriel threw back his head and laughed, the sound coming from deep inside. It was truly hilarious to him, the idea of him leaving Charlie alone. “You’re a powerful old man, Kavanagh. I’ll give you that,” Gabriel finally said. He shook his head, once. “But you can’t stop me.”

“I already have,” Alex replied. You’re here with me, Gabriel, and the woman you want is somewhere else, with her healed and chosen mate. He shot the words into Phelan’s mind. “In essence, I’ve won.”

Gabriel’s expression froze. His gaze hardened.

Alexander didn’t let up. The air around them began to grow hotter. Desert nights are mild in nature. The heat of the day leaks away to leave a gentle breeze that carries seventy degrees of comfort to everyone it touches. But now, that seventy degrees was rising. Seventy-five. Eighty. Ninety.

At one hundred and five degrees, Gabriel glanced around. He sensed the power and smelled the magic and knew, in that instant, what he was up against.

I will boil you alive from the inside out, Phelan, Alex told him. And then I will freeze you. And burn you – over and over again.

The power lines overhead began to buzz. Louder and louder, they hummed in their casings until one snapped and snaked for a moment as it fell to the Earth. Sparks scattered and hissed as it hit the ground and skittered madly with the electricity running through it.

Gabriel’s blue gaze cut to the line and then back to Alexander. Alex could smell the fear in him now. It was faint, but it was there.

One hundred and fifteen degrees and climbing.

Sweat broke out along Phelan’s brow, but his gaze narrowed. If I die, my Hunters will scatter, Kavanagh. They will go into hiding until you least expect it. And then they will come after those you love most.

Alexander listened as the werewolf spat mental words back into his mind.

“Your granddaughter will die, but not before her precious husband,” Gabriel said aloud. And her precious child, he added mentally. She will live to see every member of her family murdered. And then, by the time my men have finished with her, she’ll beg them to kill her.

Fear was often a good determinant in a battle’s outcome, but anger was another. Both were a bane for any man wishing to gain the upper hand in a fight. And as Alexander rushed the other werewolf and Phelan met him, head-on in hand-to-hand combat, that point made itself decidedly clear.

Phelan had been training to fight for years. His reflexes were quick and strong and Alexander failed to get a grip on the man. Their bodies flashed from human to wolf and back again. All the while, the air continued to grow hotter. Another power line broke free, snapping in half, the rubber tube casing scorched and smoking. Sparks showered down on the two struggling forms below.

Alex shoved free of Phelan for a moment and lashed out with his power. The electric lines whipped down toward the other werewolf, hot and sizzling, and slammed into Gabriel’s back, singing the material of his shirt and carving a deep red gash into his flesh.

Gabriel’s eyes flashed at the contact and he rolled forward, only to be buffeted back by another lashing line, a make-shift whip that carved across his chest, drawing more blood.

How does it feel, Phelan? How does it feel to be in my granddaughter’s place?

A third power line snaked down, faster than the others, and slammed into Gabriel with enough force to knock him off of his feet. His back was now sliced open in two places, his chest a third, and blood welled around the burnt injuries as the wounds fought to heal. They would never heal entirely. If he survived, he would scar. Fire was one of the few things that could truly harm a werewolf. Electricity was nothing more than a kind of fire; one that burned hotter than the sun.

One hundred thirty-five degrees and the air was becoming difficult to breathe. Waves of heat rose from the ground, blurring the bushes and cacti and rocks into a strange sort of yellow and purple haze beneath the color-stealing cast of the moon.

Phelan didn’t reply to Alexander’s taunt. Instead, he rushed the other werewolf, this time angered by pain and the knowledge that he’d been marked.

But Alexander was expecting it. He spun as they contacted, using Phelan’s weight against him and taking them both to the ground. As he did, Alex sank his fangs into the other man’s neck and pulled hard and deep against the artery he had opened.

Phelan barked a harsh sound of pain and surprise and tried to pull away, but Kavanagh had him. The air continued to heat up. One hundred forty degrees. Kavanagh imagined that Gabriel was beginning to feel sick. Heat will do that to an animal. As will loss of blood.

He pulled and drank and swallowed and felt Phelan’s grip lessen, ever so slightly, on his own body. Then he sensed that familiar flutter in his thoughts – that touch of another mind against his as someone else used his own power to communicate with him wordlessly. Soundlessly.

But this communication was different. While Alexander expected to hear Gabriel’s voice in his head, perhaps for the last time, he instead began to see things. Images. He began to feel things. His enemy, his eyes closed and he was standing in a dungeon. A beautiful woman hung naked from leather straps in the ceiling. In his hands, he held a bullwhip. His heart beat sped up. Lust coiled deep within him, awakening his hunger. His pupils expanded and he raised his arm.

Alexander’s arm swung expertly through the air and the whip cut across the space between him and his granddaughter. The leather braid made the most beautiful sound as it hit her back and marked it with a red line. She cried out in agony and Alex grew hard. Painfully so.

His heart skipped in his chest and bile rose in his throat. He pulled away from Phelan, trying not to vomit, hatred and revulsion and agonizing guilt rushing his mind and body until the world was painted as red as the blood that now dripped from his fangs.

Gabriel was standing back up. He was weak, but he was standing none the less. “You haven’t won anything, old man,” Phelan whispered as the air around him began to cool once more. “This has only just begun.”

Alexander turned where he knelt in the dirt, and gazed up at Phelan through tear-stained ice-blue eyes. Gabriel had known how to get under his skin. He’d known to show him those images and make him feel those horrid feelings. He’d known the effect it would have on him. He’d found a chink in the Overseer’s armor.

Alex watched in stunned, repulsed silence as Phelan’s eyes turned from blue to brown to gold. His body began to morph, to melt, and to change. There was a flash of light.

When it had faded, Gabriel’s tall, blonde form was gone. A golden eagle sat on the tree stump a few feet away. It stretched its wings and flapped them hard once, twice, and then rose into the night.

Nearby, a power line sparked. It sputtered and hissed along the ground. And then its electric fire went out.