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  The five of us knew what we had to do. We needed to get to the junkyard.

  We jumped back into our cars and made our way to find Marcos. Hopefully, when we found Marcos, we would also find Dave.

  We drove our two vehicles to the industrial district of Anaheim, taking a couple of lefts and ended up right in front of the junkyard. The junkyard was completely surrounded by barbed wire and metal fences. Across the street was Orion Commercial Stickers. There was an open parking lot in front of the sticker factory with a few cars parked in the driveway.

  We parked our two cars on the street, and all of us jumped out of the two vehicles. We stood on the sidewalk that led to the junkyard.

  “Does everyone here know Marcos Fausto?”

  “I’ve heard of him but I never met him,” Albert said.

  “I met him once a while back,” Steve said. “He was a big prick.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “Well, this is his Hotel for Dogs. And by dogs, I mean Carni. Behind those fences, he has some of the nicest and fanciest cages anyone can imagine.”

  “I heard he charges $1,000 for a three-day stay,” Eli said.

  “Apparently, his bar and this place aren’t covering his gambling debts. That’s why he was putting a lot of pressure on Dave.”

  “Why Dave?” Evan asked.

  “Dave knows me and Marcos knows that we became friends. Marcos wanted to control me with my fighting. Typical Don King bullshit.”

  “But you said no,” Steve said.

  “No one controls me. Especially, a backward asshole like Marcos Fausto,” I said plainly.

  “Well, how do we get in there?” Eli asked.

  I looked at the property and it was fairly secure.

  “How do we get his attention?” Ethan asked.

  “Why don’t you and your brother rip off your shirts and start flexing,” I said. I knew it wasn’t the time for a joke, but we needed to break some tension. Just then, I saw a couple of his henchmen walk outside. “It looks like they know we’re here.”

  The two men walked over to us. We were only separated by the fence. “May we help you?” the man said from behind the fence.

  “I’m here to see Marcos. He’s probably expecting me.” I stared the man in his ugly bald face.

  “Are you Kyro?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tommy-Kyro?” the guy confirmed.

  “Just let him know that Kyro and a few of his friends are here to meet with him.”

  The men left for a couple of minutes. Then they returned and opened up the gate, I noticed they didn’t lock it once we entered. They were obviously planning on us leaving quickly. The five of us went through the gate. The junkyard was exactly that, a junkyard. There was crap everywhere out front. I suspected that we would be taken to the back of the property, where they kept the cages and living conditions. But to my surprise, Marcos, and about ten of his men, came from out back and met us in the front.

  “What can I do you for, Kyro?” Marcos asked as he walked up, staring me down like a teenager ready to throw down at a moment’s notice.

  “I’m going to keep this short, Marcos. Where’s Dave?”

  “Where’s Dave?” he asked, mocking my question. “Did you lose your little friend?”

  “He’s my friend,” I said firmly. “He was your acquaintance first,” I said. “He never showed up last night, and I thought I’d come by and see what you know.”

  “I am not your ‘Dave’s keeper.’ Did you check his apartment?”

  “Yep, it looks like you went in there and trashed the joint.”

  Marcos was quiet, and then broke his silence with a smile then followed by an awkward laugh.

  “Let me get this straight. You think I know the whereabouts of your friend and I went to his apartment and turned it upside down?”

  “Look, dude. Man up. Quit this going around in circles bullshit. Dave was under the impression that unless I fought on your behalf, you would kill him. Now he’s gone. So, in my book, you’re prime suspect number one. Don’t make me call out the Tandra police.”

  He laughed at that. “And who are you, fucking Columbo? Even if I knew where your friend was, why would I tell you? And just who the fuck do you think you are to dictate these terms with your lame threats?”

  “I’m ‘nobody,’” I said. “A ‘nobody’ who will rain a whole lot of hell on you. If owing some thugs a few bucks made you nervous, you haven’t tried being on my bad side. You wanna see MMA fighting? I can and will go MMA on your person if you don’t cough up Dave, safe and sound.”

  I looked up and I knew we were up against the elements. It was going to be dark real soon. That would mean there would be the second full moon in which all the Carni in the junkyard would surely turn.

  Marcos caught me looking at the sky, and he grinned. “Worried?” he asked.

  “About?”

  “About ‘turning,’ and not being in a safe place when the moon rises?”

  “Do you see my friends next to me? As long as I’m with them, any place is a safe place,” I said, with about as much confidence as a man could possess.

  “What do you expect to get from this meeting, Tommy Jensen?” Now he was calling me by my real name, my Tandra name. He knew from other werewolves that I didn’t like that.

  “You tell me where Dave is and I might let you live,” I said.

  “Let me live?” Marcos laughed. “No one knows where Dave is!” he yelled. “Unless you believe in the afterlife and maybe he’ll come back as a slug or a daffodil.”

  I kept quiet, holding in a howl of grief as I saw the murder in his eyes. I looked at my guys and then looked at the sky. The sun was going down, and it would only be a matter of time until we would all start to change. I wasn’t leaving. Marcos’ smug face was enough to make me feel like I needed to throw up. Or kill him.

  “Did you kill him?” I asked softly. Dave was the keeper of werewolf history, for five hundred years. And he was a hell of a nice guy, too. I was attached to him. Very attached.

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “So, he’s alive?” Again, I was talking extremely quietly.

  “I wouldn’t waste my time on a second-rate werewolf like Dave. I had a couple of my boys camp out at his place, and wait for him to come home.”

  Anger and disdain began to rise in my core. I was about to pounce on Marcos with reckless abandonment, but a strong smell came from behind me. It was a distinct smell that was filed into my memory bank. It was Maya’s unique smell that only I knew. She was here, still smelling of sex with me. I was almost freaked out of my mind with fear of something happening to her. I backed up and turned my body around to not make it obvious that I was looking for someone else. I was looking in the opposite direction. There, across the street was Maya, sitting there in her parents’ car, all by herself, like she was waiting for a burger at a drive thru. Yes, that nonchalant. Shit! What is she doing here? I turned around and looked at Marcos and made sure I didn’t tip my hand that my girl was across the street, watching in plain sight. “We are seconds away from the full moon,” I said to Marcos.

  “Looks like we are,” Marcos said to me. Then everyone spread out, getting ready to battle. Marcos and I were having a good, old-fashioned standoff. Both of us knew that if we didn’t move, we would turn into werewolves right out here in the open. I glanced over at the gate, and saw that it was still unlocked. That was the last conscious thought I had.

  The full moon had arrived.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I woke up and I was in a cage; an extremely nice cage, to be exact. It had a great tree in the middle with blankets and pillows. There were slabs of raw meat in the corner on a plate—T-bone steaks—and my mouth was watering. How in the hell did I get in here?

  I called out, “Hello?”

  Then, from around the corner, Maya walked in, sipping on a cup of coffee that smelled like a Starbucks roast. Wherever I was, she was here, too. She had a few scratches on her arm, cla
w marks. But she was looking well.

  “Where are we?” I asked. I turned and peed behind a tree that had been planted inside the cage. By now, she knew my drill, too. Wake up and pee like a racehorse. Get let out of the cage.

  “We’re in Marcos’ luxury cages,” Maya said.

  “Who is ‘we’?” I asked.

  “You and each one of your friends. You five survived,” Maya said with a big smile. My heart stabbed. Dave was not here. She would have told me if he was.

  “Where are Marcos and his men?” I asked.

  “None of them survived.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means your Five Pack killed all of them pretty easily.”

  Whoa! Wow! I digested this news without remembering what had gone down.

  Soon, I began hearing each of my friends call out from other cages that were apparently in other rooms.

  “Come on,” she said. “Everybody wants to re-bond in their human forms.”

  Maya let me out of my cage and one by one, we let out my friends from their cages. Each one of them was safe. My head was spinning because I had no idea what happened since moon rise last night.

  “Where can we debrief?” I asked Maya, who had had plenty of time to make herself familiar with the werewolf luxury kennel layout.

  “I’ll show you,” she said, and we followed her like puppies, her perfume and fresh coffee like an allure that we all scented. She sashayed down a fluorescent lit hallway like the girly Tandra chick that she was.

  There was a conference room at the front of the facility and my five friends and Maya all made our way over there to that room. She seated herself at the head of the conference table and motioned for us to sit. I had to hand it to her, she had her moments where I admired the hell out of her. She was running the show this morning.

  We all looked at each other, confused, because none of us knew what happened.

  “Introductions, please,” Maya said to me, like she was running some kind of corporate meeting. I played nice. After all, she did let us all out of the cages. And was likely the person who led us into them.

  “Maya, this is Eli, Evan, Steve, and Albert. My… pack.” Minus Dave. “Everyone, this is the love of my life, Maya, my beautiful Tandra. Apparently, she is the only one that knows what happened.”

  Evan and Eli had scratches and bruises all over their toned bodies. They looked as confused as I was.

  “What happened, Maya?” I asked. All of us looked to Maya, very eager to learn what had happened.

  Maya stood up in front of the five of us men and began to speak. “First of all, as soon as you all turned, I noticed that T—Kyro, you were the alpha wolf, and I mean it was obvious to me that you were the leader of the pack. I have the idea that werewolves follow the alpha wolf because they trust him and I was right. I sort of herded the others behind you and you led them in a full-on pack assault.”

  “You could have been killed in the fray, Maya. One of us could have turned on you instinctively, and hurt you. Bitten you.”

  She paused. “They trusted the pack leader and I trusted you. None of you tried to hurt me because you led the pack away from me and straight toward the bad guys. You guys, the five of you, were like a well-oiled machine. When the full moon hit, it was like poetry. Marcos and his wolves were disorganized under his crappy leadership. Not you guys. You teamed up and isolated them from each other. You dismantled them, tore them apart in sprays of blood that arced twenty feet in the air. They had no chance against you guys. You were more vicious and lethal than a platoon with automatic weapons. You were a blur of teeth, claws, fur, mud and blood. You were the terminators. The victors. The assassins…”

  “Let me get this straight,” Steve said. “We killed all of those guys?”

  Maya was quiet and then said, “Yep.”

  “Holy shit,” Albert said. “Where did they go?”

  “They all disappeared when they died,” Maya said. “Vanished.”

  We all had so many questions.

  “After the battle, how the hell did you get five werewolves in the cages?”

  “Well,” Maya said, with a grin, “I opened five cages and put special steaks from the kennel fridge in them. And then I found a control panel in the security booth that could play the sounds of…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Could play what sounds?” I asked Maya.

  “A female werewolf’s seductive call, something between a howl and a whimper. I read their procedure manual and they had a protocol for recapturing any escaped male werewolves with this sound effect and special steaks in the cages. Steaks with a little bit of tranquilizer in them. And so, I took them out of the freezer and microwaved them a bit. They were labeled just for this purpose, and I used them. First, I lured you all into the kennel with the recorded sexy female wolf sound played through loudspeakers, and you ate the steaks that I left in each cage. Then, you all went nighty-night on your blankets from the Valium in the steaks, and I sneaked back in the kennel and locked you all up until dawn. It was a cinch.”

  “Geez, Maya. Do you have that procedure manual?” I asked.

  Maya patted her bulging shoulder purse. “Oh, that and more, boys. That and more.”

  Albert said, “Thank you, Maya, for what you did. You risked your life last night to help us destroy Marcos’ pack.”

  She smiled but only had eyes for me. And I for her. And then the moment broke when we heard a bunch of guys yelling to be let out on the other side of the kennel.

  We went around and let others out of their cages, all of the werewolves who had paid money to Marcos to stay here. We looked and looked but there was no trace of Dave and no one had seen him. We asked everyone.

  We told them that Marcos would no longer be running this place, but if they came back the following night, it should be fine because no one was watching the place. It looked like it was going to be a free for all. No credit cards required from now until someone caught wind of an unpaid electric bill or something and shut down the place. This bit of news, that everything was now free, eclipsed any perceived sentiment or loyalty that Marcos and his henchmen were killed. The place was now operating on… greed.

  All of the other Carni guys in our Five Pack went back with Albert in his truck. I decided to stay with Maya. I had more questions about what happened. There was something that she wasn’t telling us… Deep in my werewolf instincts, I felt that she was hiding something. I knew it was so important that it was imperative that I find out what it was.

  The End

  To be continued in:

  Loving Maya

  Return to the Table of Contents

  LOVING MAYA

  by

  H.T. Night

  Immortal Warriors #3

  Loving Maya

  Published by H.T. Night

  Copyright © 2012 by H.T. Night

  All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  I dedicate this book to my sister, Elaine, and her husband, John.

  Acknowledgment

  Special thanks to Eve Paludan, J.R. Rain, Margaret Cervenkas, Alberto Silva, April M. Reign, and Liz Jones for all their help.

  Loving Maya

  Chapter One

  As the days moved forward, there was no sign of Dave. I had to come to terms with the fact that Marcos had probably killed him, but in my heart, I held on. Dave was a phenomenal person and didn’t deserve to go out like that. I would always hold onto a glimmer of hope that he was still alive.

  The other thing that was on my mind was Maya. She never seemed the same after that terrible night. I could only imagine the blood and gore she’d witnessed. It broke my heart that she was a part of all that. I never wanted her to become a part of my Carni world. We were too close. I told the guys we would never return to Marcos’s kennels. It was too risky and Marcos must have friends—when they realized that he and his pack were missing, they would probably seek revenge.

  On this particular day, it had been exactly two months
since that infamous night at Marcos’s kennel. I had to ask Maya what seriously happened. I was sure she’d told us most of the truth. I decided to ask the guys what they thought.

  The guys were my pack: Eli, Evan, Steve, and Albert. We were at the ranch up north and the full moon was just a couple of hours away. We usually sat around in the den, but tonight was going to be interesting. Why? Because it was raining. We would have no choice but to go out in the rain. I hoped we didn’t get sick. Twelve hours in the rain was rough on any human. We would be in our werewolf forms, so I hoped we’d be smart enough to seek shelter. Did werewolves even think about getting out of the rain? Tonight, we’d find out.

  “You guys ever think about what happened at Marcos’s kennel?” I asked the group.

  “What’s there to think about?” Eli said. “We were put to the test as a pack and we came out the victors.”

  “Does it bother any of you that we killed a lot of men that night?”

  “Sometimes you need to kill to save yourself,” Evan said. “If we didn’t get to them, they sure as hell would have killed us. Especially after they murdered Dave.”

  “Did they murder Dave?”

  “If they didn’t,” Evan said, “then where the hell is he? He wouldn’t keep us in the dark this long.”

  “You can’t let it bother you, Kyro,” Albert said. “It’s our way of life. If it’s not other werewolves that want to attack you, it will be the Mani.”

  “Vampires kill us when we are in our human forms. This is the life you now lead.” Eli was adamant about this.

  “What do you guys think about Maya?” I asked.