Dawn Unleashed

Maggie saw her sister from across the crowd. Black leather clung to her graceful curves. A blade of gleaming sliver was strapped across her back. Her messy blonde curls tucked under a black stocking cap poked out at odd angles. As the younger sibling, there had always been a constant rivalry between her and her sister. Lori got everything first and Maggie got it after it had been through Lori. Maggie didn't envy her older sister, not any more. She was worried about her. Lori was a vampire. But, in so many ways, Maggie still saw her as fragile, as human as she.

Lori saw Maggie and moved around the people blocking her path with graceful ease. Lori knew the worry in Maggie's eyes because her own was reflected in their green depths. Their relationship had never been an easy one. As the oldest sibling, Lori had been charged with the task of setting the bar. Maggie skated underneath of it time and time again while she had to raise it higher and higher to make herself stand out from Maggie's general cuteness and constant need of their parent's affection. Over the years, they'd come to a fragile peace with one another. No matter what, they were still sisters and they loved one another. "Hiding from mom?"

Maggie nodded. The speed in which her sister could cross a crowded room startled her. "I won't do her any good if I pass out and become one of her patients."

Lori chuckled lightly, "I still remember the time you cut your finger when we made mom and dad breakfast in bed when we were kids. You hit the floor before you'd even started bleeding."

"I got the shot and the stitches anyway. Wasn't it your idea to have me hold the oranges still while you cut them with a butcher knife?"

"Sorry, it wasn't one of my better ideas. But hey, I was only ten at the time." Lori blushed at her sister's needling comment. "Mom and dad never did get breakfast that morning."

"But, I got ice cream afterward," Maggie said.

"Yeah, you did. I got to clean up the mess and ended up grounded for a week." Lori frowned.

Maggie knew what her sister was doing. Lori was focusing on the past to avoid the present and her worry. Gently, she touched the slick leather on her sister's shoulder, "Hey, is Keene ok?"

"None of us are ok, Maggie. Keene is fine, though. I can feel it. I just wish I could say the same for everyone. Some of the warriors aren't coming home. Ever." Lori grabbed onto her sister and squeezed her tightly. She blinked back her tears and set her jaw. Now was not the time for tears. Later, when the job was done, then she could fall apart. She clung to Maggie harder than she ever had. Her voice was a whisper, a reflection of her pain. "I felt them die."

Maggie swallowed back her tears. At first, when Lori had announced the life that she'd chosen, Maggie was jealous. Now, she felt her sister's pain and the price of her decision. Her sister had always seemed larger than life, bigger, smarter, braver, always hanging so high and unattainably over her head. Lori leaned on her for comfort and for support. Something in their relationship changed the moment Lori grabbed on to her, forced by circumstance and realization. For the first time Maggie saw her sister as something other than an older sister and sometimes nemesis. For the first time, they were equals. "What can I do?"

Lori released her sister and in her saw the very thing she needed to survive. Without her sister, she was nothing. Long life meant nothing without the means to sustain it. Her sister was a vital link. In Maggie's hands rested all of the power. "Do what you can."

Maggie nodded through her unshed tears. "I will."

Lori gave her sister a weak smile and released her. "I've got to go." The moment between them was too serious. To leave it like that was too much for either of them. Playfully, she slapped Maggie's butt. "Oh, by the way, I'm supposed to tell you that mom thinks that you and Glenn will make beautiful grandbabies."

Maggie rubbed her sore butt cheek with one and swatted at her sister with the other. "Glenn is so yesterday's news."

Lori raised a brow at the warrior making his way to Maggie. "And I bet I know who today's headline is," she said in a sing-song teasing whisper.

Maggie spared her sister a pained, over exaggerated eye roll. "Don't you have bad guys to catch?" Maggie grabbed at Lori's hand and gave her fingers a hard squeeze. "Love you."

Lori returned her sister's grip and slid her fingers free. "You too, sis. Don't worry, I won't tell mom." She winked and dipped her chin toward Cole. "I'll let you do that."

"Thanks," Maggie shouted after Lori. The sarcasm in her voice was lost to the din of the crowd. Everything was going to be ok? Wasn't it? She stretched up on her tiptoes and watched her sister's stocking capped head disappear into the crowd. A cold, hard knot of dread in the pit of her stomach grew from a tiny seed into a giant prize winning watermelon. Everything had to be ok. Right?

Cole felt the niggle of Maggie's worry as if it were his own. He shared a tie to her through her blood. He couldn't read her thoughts precisely, but he caught the bitter sting of her emotions on the back of his tongue. Gently, he eased a hand around her waist and pulled her into the cocoon of his chest. He wanted on last stolen minute of contact with her before he left with the envoy destined for the city. Their bodies rocked with a slight back and forth motion of his hips as he nuzzled the soft curve of her neck. "You doing all right?"

Maggie sighed at the press of Cole's lips against her flesh. The slightest contact could make her forget her worry and the urgency of the things she was worrying about. "Yeah." The sleek feel of cool leather brushed against her fingertips. He'd gone from casual boy next door to lethal warrior in the blink of an eye. The hard brush of the hilt of a weapon strapped to his hip pressed against her backside. "You're going with them into the city, aren't you."

"Maggie, we still have a chance to catch the bad guy before he gets away."

Cole spun her in his arms and tipped her chin to meet his eyes. His eyes were filled with grim determination, staring down at her. She stood on her tiptoes, balancing with her hand pressed to his chest. "I'm coming with you."

"Maggie, I need to know you're safe. I can't let you come." His thoughts were filled with images of Rachael's last moments. He'd be damned if he'd lose someone he cared about the way he had her. If Maggie came, he'd be too busy worrying about her to do his job.

"And I need to know that you're safe," Maggie countered. "We're in this together, like it or not, I'm coming."

Maggie was one of the most stubborn girls he'd ever met. She wasn't going to be content with just sitting on the sidelines crocheting doilies till he got back, if he got back. She was more likely to get herself into more trouble if he left her behind than if he let her come. The Sons would never let her willingly put herself in danger. Here, there were too many people rushing around to notice it if she got a crazy idea, like coming to the city on her own. "Fine."

Maggie jogged behind Cole. Dragged through the crowd, her hand locked in his. A jagged point of fear needled her. The smart thing to do was to stay behind and tend to the home fires. But, since when would anyone accuse her of doing the smart thing? She had finally found something useful that she could do to help. Keep Cole out of trouble. The warriors had enough to do without chasing after him while he executed his own brand of vigilante justice. Keeping him safe wasn't the warrior's job. It was hers.

Chapter 95

Daniel's vision was fuzzy. He remembered losing consciousness and then waking up slung over his dad's shoulder. He remembered the blast and all hell breaking loose and then the blackness of nothing swallowed him back up. Wildly, he batted at the strong arms trying to hold him in place on the narrow cot. Strained, worried voices muttered words to comfort him while a flurry of hands worked to patch him back together. Drugs shot through an IV line anchored to his forearm shot through his system. He fought against their effects and the arms restraining him. "Where's my dad?"

"We're doing our best, son." A sympathetic voice warbled through Daniel's drug saturated mind just before the drugs snatched consciousness away from him once again.

Hunter refused the doctor's kind offer for drugs to alleviate the worst of the pain. His body had never known such raw abuse. Particles of debris, glass, wood, and things he didn't want to think about were embedded beneath his skin. Burns crisscrossed in a patchwork of agony across his back. Most of his hair had been singed away by the kiss of hungry flames. His pelvis was a shattered mess of bone fragments. He heaved breaths against the pressure of a punctured lung. Blood flooded into spaces in his body where it wasn't meant to fill. His body was doing its best to heal the damages inflicted on him. But, there was just so much even accelerated healing such as his and human medicine could do. If he had been human, he wouldn't be in such agony now. He'd be dead.

Hunter lived out of sheer stubbornness of his will. Determined that he would live to hold his soon to be born child in his arms. Satisfied that he had gotten his son out in time. He'd been told that his heart stopped and they'd brought him back, twice. He believed the doctor and his staff. The fact that he was still breathing without the aid of a machine had astonished them all. They hovered over him. Hell bent on trying all the magic tricks human medicine had to offer. He was too damaged to get out under his own power, but staying was far riskier. He would heal, faster than any human should. When he did, when flesh knitted together and bones healed right before their eyes, the truth about him and his kind would be out. He and his son were in far greater danger, trapped in this emergency room than they had been at the hands of the enemy.

Twelve hours was a damned long shift made even longer by the last minute arrivals in trauma rooms one and two. Gene had seen a lot of strange shit in the last ten years. Ten years on the night shift in a busy urban ER will make a man believe in the Almighty. Tonight was stranger than any night had been in a long, long time. Sometimes, the things that rolled into his ER made him question his decision to become an RN instead of a plumber like his brother or an accountant like his sister. He hated to admit it, but he liked the adreniline rush. He was a soldier in the battle between life and death. Sometimes, he won, and sometimes he didn't. Tonight, the game was on. Definitely on.

The unit of packed red cells was cold in his palm. Gene beat feet into trauma room one. Poor bastard was in bad shape. He'd rolled in on a gurney, fried to a crisp, bleeding, broken, and busted up into so much raw flesh. Gene had seen a lot of injuries in his time but that guy was one of the worst. Hanging the unit of blood in his hand was the equivalent to pouring piss on a forest fire. As long as it kept his patient alive until the trauma surgeons could work their magic, he was willing to try about anything.

"What the...," Gene sputtered. The bed was a mess of wadded, bloody sheets. That wasn't what bothered him. It was the job of the nurses upstairs on med-surg, to make the patients and the beds look pretty. What bothered him was that the bed was empty and so was the room. People with punctured lungs, shattered pelvises, and third degree burns across a majority of their backs didn't just get up and waltz away. But, his patient had.

Gene forgot about the packed red cells clutched in his fist and ran for trauma room two. The room was empty. Somewhere two patients that shouldn't be breathing were off taking a moonlit stroll somewhere together. If that didn't make him a believer in the power of God, nothing ever would. "Shit," he muttered under his breath, joining the harried staff in their search for the missing patients he knew they'd never find.

Chapter 96

Shayla rocked R.J. in her arms. She did her best not to let her worry show. R.J. cooed and slobbered down her forearm, oblivious to the breath she held in her throat. Things were bad. Out there somewhere a maniac hell bent on collecting her kind was on the loose. What was worse was that Carter might be with him. She was mated, if not by ceremony, but by her actions. It was a lovely thought. If not for the direness of the moment, she might be relishing in her newly found love. Everything was on the back burner till the situation was under control and the maniac, brought to justice.

She'd seen footage of the carnage happening in the city. The tech people were doing their best to put a lid on the leaks, but anyone with a working Internet connection had a front row seat. The damage went far beyond the loss of a few homes. Was more far reaching than the loss of life. It could spell disaster for all of her kind. A wolf was caught on film, camera, or whatever the media of choice happened to be, shifting from a man into his wolf. The video had gone global within seconds.

Toby had finally hacked into the thread and the video blocked. A nasty virus that would seep past any protection out there would infect every computer that had downloaded the feed, effectively frying the motherboard and destroying the evidence. But, over half the world had probably seen the footage before he got it contained and that was damage enough. Rumors and speculation circulated the world wide web via Facebok and Twitter. Unwanted and unneeded attention was at their doorstep and all Shayla, all any of them could do was wait for the fallout to eventually blow their way.

Shayla clung to the belief that Carter was innocent. That he'd somehow unwittingly gotten drawn into the middle of this. She had to believe it. He was many things, but he'd never knowingly put her entire race and possibly his own at risk. She wondered where he was. If he'd gotten hurt in the explosion, he could be dead. But, she knew he wasn't. Despite the emotional and physical distance between them, she knew deep in her heart of hearts that he was out there, somewhere, alive.

A part of her prayed, he'd get away before the Sons got their hands on him. She'd seen one execution in her life. Ramon had died for something he believed in, not because he'd been dragged into the crosshairs. She'd watched her husband, bound to a thick wooden post have his throat mercilessly slashed for nothing more than to instill fear and obedience in the pack. She couldn't be a witness to another execution of a man she'd once loved, and still did.

Chapter 97

Maggie gripped the headrest of the seat in front of her, straining against her seatbelt to pull herself closer to the edge of the slick leather of the backseat. The windows to the sides of her were the dark, inky black of night. Ahead of her, the orange glow of the city punched through the darkness like a fist through water. A billowing, thick haze of smoke rolled from the center of the glowing orb and inched its way along the periphery.

"Oh my god," she muttered.

Cole sucked in a breath and scooted up beside Maggie to peer through the valley between the front seats. The city ahead of them pulsed with the glow of electricity and all the life within the sheltering dome. A brilliant haze, orange like the tongue of a fire, lapped at the fragile center of the dome. "Shit."

Robert lifted his foot off the gas and signaled to take the first exit he came to. Approaching the city from the fringes rather than barreling right down into its nerve center seemed like a better idea now that he'd seen the damage for himself. There was no way the authorities were going to let anyone get close to downtown tonight. They were going to have to try the side roads and sneak in.

He'd always had a mental picture of what Armageddon would look like. Billowing fires, chaos, the wail of sirens, and oceans of tears. He wasn't even close. What waited for them in the city might not be Armageddon. It was close enough though, as close as he ever wanted to get. Even in the quiet grace of suburbia, people stood on sidewalks in their pajamas, huddled together, staring toward the glow of fire, blinking against the smoke carried on the warm night breeze with jaws slack with disbelief.

Robert had volunteered to drive. Cole's link to the brothers put him at risk. Cole couldn't guarantee that, even though he felt fine, another wave of psychic pain from his brothers wouldn't hit while he was driving. Maggie was nervous enough without being asked to take the wheel and drive in an unfamiliar city at night.

A forth passenger had hitched a ride with them. Doctor Thomas Sterling. The only conversation the man had engaged in for the entire drive was with his cell phone. Even from a distance, he was appraising the wounded, barking orders, and caring for the wounded. The man was an enigma to Robert. He'd never heard of a licensed physician rattle off lists of herbs and potions. Thomas spoke of blood as if it were magic, powerful enough to heal the injured.

A roadblock had traffic held up for miles ahead of him. He cautiously pulled out of the line of taillights and turned down a narrow alley lined with overflowing trashcans. His battered Jeep was taking a hell of a beating from potholes big enough to swallow them whole. If his memory served him correctly, he could follow the maze of alleys and parking lot jump to get to their destination. Otherwise, it was the end of the road and they'd have to make the rest of the journey on foot.

They were still miles from the warehouse set up as a temporary command center. This wasn't a bad part of town and even if it had been, it wasn't the humans that scared him the most. The night was filled with things scarier than any thug with a gun ever could be.

Chapter 98

Drew felt better, not great, but better. He'd shed his torn and battered leathers like an unwanted skin and put on a borrowed pair of jeans and shirt. Only his boots had remained unscathed by the attack. Slowly, his men, the wolves, and Guardians trickled in, sometimes in groups of two or more, sometimes alone, sometimes dragging wounded along beside them. There were still plenty unaccounted for. He doubted if they'd seen the last of the injured or the dead.

Hours after the initial assault, the neighborhood was still a hellish blaze of fire. The humans were doing their best to put the fires and the panic to rest. Drew was proud of his men and humbled by their bravery. The ones that were able bodied enough to go back out were regrouping. Reinforcements were on the way. There was little left of the original scene to contain. The only thing left to do was to pick up the pieces and put them back together again.

Michael with Bianca, a limp figure in his arms, made his way to the temporary command center. She moaned softly as he shifted her weight in his arms. Normally, the extra burden of her weight wouldn't be difficult to manage. But, with them both injured, the task of getting them both to safety was tricky. He'd had to retrace his steps to avoid human detection a dozen or so times. Finally, the crumbling brick structure was within eyeshot.

He didn't know how he was going to look the Great Father in the eye and tell him that he'd failed. The bad guy had escaped and it was no one's fault but his. The bad guy or Bianca, those had been his only options at the time and he'd acted. If he'd gone after O'Sullivan, Bianca might have died. He'd chosen to save her instead. It was a noble gesture, maybe, but not very practical. He had no excuse for the actions he'd chosen. Bianca meant more to him than killing O'Sullivan. How could he look at his leader and expect him to understand his logic in the heat of the moment when he, himself, did not?