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ould barely hold his head up, let alone look at her. What were they playing at here?
One of the men in suits handed Timothy a slim rod, and I recognized it as the cattle prod from the video.
Fuck.
My immediate thought was exactly what I’d been holding Wilder back from this whole time. I wanted to break through the window and pull Hank away from them. I knew it was stupid, but all the same it was what I wanted to do.
Timothy jabbed Hank in the gut with the cattle prod, making Hank’s body jerk and spasm in ways that looked so painful I almost turned away. I owed it to Hank to keep watching. From the corner of my eye I could tell Wilder was equally focused on what was happening inside.
The longer we watched, the less likely I thought it would be for us to follow Cain’s directions of bringing Timothy in alive.
Death was too kind for this prick. I hoped Cain had something cooked up for him that was so depraved it would make the Marquis de Sade blush.
When Hank stopped jerking, things went from bad to worse. An injured werewolf is akin to an animal caught in a trap. The wild part of our brain takes over and we’re less human than we normally are. Hank, who had been sustaining regular beatings and was now free of his shackles, focused his rage on the first thing he saw.
The half-naked woman standing in front of him.
The horrible depths of Timothy’s plan struck me like a closed fist to the face. He wanted to make us hurt. He wanted to show the world werewolves and supernaturals were monsters, not people. That’s precisely what he’d get if he put an easy target in front of a heavily injured wolf.
“We have to stop this.” Panic made my voice sound higher than I’d expected it to. I wasn’t hysterical yet, but if they let Hank do what I thought they were going to, shit was going to hit the fan in an epic way. I felt wholly responsible for this mess, even if there was no way I could have seen it coming.
Just as Hank lunged for the girl, lights snapped on behind us. The mixed scent of gardenia and magnolia had been so suffocating I hadn’t smelled anyone approach. As I turned, a flashlight beam aimed directly in my eyes forced me to lift my hand to protect myself.
“All right, y’all. Show’s over.” The voice was thick with a Southern accent that didn’t belong to Louisiana. More Texas by way of a John Wayne movie.
When the light lowered and I blinked away the bright spots in my vision, I was facing a middle-aged man wearing a beige button-down uniform shirt and a black baseball cap emblazoned with the Louisiana State Sheriff department logo. The cap shielded his eyes from me, but he was chewing on something—gum or tobacco I couldn’t tell—and behind him four deputies were itching to draw their weapons on us.
“This is private property,” he announced, and a thin smile spread across his lips. “And trespassers will be prosecuted.”
“Can’t you see what’s going on?” I shouted, frustrated beyond the point of civility. I pointed towards the church, but when I looked, Hank and the girl were gone. Her clothes remained in a heap on the floor, but she had vanished.
That couldn’t possibly be good.
“All I see is two folks getting arrested,” the sheriff told me. “Now we can do this easy or we can do it hard. Whatever you want.”
I glanced at Wilder.
I could tell he wanted to go the hard way. Ultimately we compromised.
Wilder punched a deputy and got tased.
We got arrested anyway.
Chapter Seventeen
I once watched a movie where someone said only guilty people can sleep in jail.
I would challenge whoever wrote that movie to stay awake for over twenty-four hours and then be offered a cot.
While it might not have been the most comfortable sleep of my life, I’d had worse. I’d slept inside a tree for four years. There weren’t a hell of a lot of places I couldn’t get a little shut-eye. I woke up stiff and groggy, and for a few seconds I didn’t remember where I was, so the surroundings were alarming.
Right.
Jail.
Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I got to my feet and did a quick stretch to work the kinks out of my body. No one else was in the cramped cell with me, not that there would have been room for another person. My solitude made me immediately nervous for Wilder.
The walls were made of concrete, so I wasn’t able to look through into any other areas. There was a toilet on the back wall and the small cot I’d slept on, but nothing else to distinguish the room. It was probably their drunk tank.
