Brutal Asset Read online

  Brutal Asset

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Cha pter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Brutal Asset

  John Conroe

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2011 John Conroe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ISBN:

  It wouldn’t be possible for this book to exist without the help of a lot of people. I need to thank my pre-reader, Bob Braun, for catching my mistake as well as my brother, Scott for his continued support of my writing habits.

  Jack Barry for helping with the cover photo.

  Mostly I need to thank my family for understanding and supporting my need to write… gotta get these stories out of my head! So thank you Emilee, Allison and, of course, my wife, Robin.

  The Demon Accords series:

  God Touched

  Demon Driven

  Brutal Asset

  Chapter 1

  A single lonely coyote howled in the desert night. It sounded much different from the Eastern coyotes I was used to. Different pitch, different tone. A single voice.

  I also heard the individual engines of the six motorcycles that escorted us, the heartbeats of their riders and the fact that the pickup needed a valve job.

  The blood on my cheek was drying and becoming sticky, so I carefully moved my head to rub some dirt and rust into it. The bed of the beat-up old truck was full of filth to choose from. Heavy sisal rope bound my hands and feet, digging into my skin, the fibers needling the insides of my wrists. All in all, things were going well.

  The hard part was behind me. A lot of prep work had gone into getting me here. My hair and beard were grown out, my jeans, tee and leather jacket artfully weathered and worn. We even thought about a tattoo, but my skin won’t take them anymore, and a fake one might be too much of a giveaway. The worst was the itchy blue contacts to hide my violet eyes. The best was the vintage Harley shovelhead motorcycle that had been confiscated from a Spawn member in New York.

  Walking into the New Mexico bar had been natural, like a soldier in hostile territory. Pretending to be drunk and flirting with the girls that immediately hit on me was much, much harder. I don’t flirt well, in fact I’ve trained myself to be an anti-flirter. But the hardest part, by far, was managing to take the beating the Loki’s Spawn members had inflicted when they recognized the bike and pegged me as a cop. Being all weres (in this case wolves), they were much stronger and faster than humans. The punishment had been brutal; in fact, I distinctly heard at least three bones in my face break. But as bad as that had been, it was the fight to control the berserker inside me that was hardest. That part of me had raged to kill them, struggling to get free. To tear them limb from limb, smash their skulls, shred their soft were flesh. And he/ I would have, that demon-bound part of me that I keep jailed deep down in the recesses of my psyche. They were to him what humans were to them – prey.

  My wounds had long since healed, which is why I was trying to get dirt on my face. It wouldn’t do to look too healthy when I was presented to the leader of this particular nest of Spawn. My third nest in as many weeks, this one only sixteen or seventeen Spawn members. The others had been bigger at twenty-three and forty-one. They were gone. The first I had just simply snuck up on, the guards not really believing anyone would be foolish enough to tackle almost two dozen hardened weres. They lasted two minutes and seventeen seconds.

  The larger group I had dropped in on, literally falling from the sky like fury from Heaven. Well, fury from the back of a C-130 Hercules transport, anyway. I had the hang of it, falling that is. By Lightening my weight and Pushing off the ground below, I could glide down with a fair amount of control. Those vampire energy techniques are downright handy.

  That group had lasted almost a full five minutes.

  But the plan this time wasn’t to just kill them all, like a surgeon cutting out a tumor. Instead I needed to grab the leader for questioning; a biopsy of sorts. The rest, well, they weren’t needed for any particular reason, so they wouldn’t be seeing the dawn of a new day.

  The lead Harley downshifted, the rest changing pitch almost instantly as the whole convoy turned onto a dirt road. I know it was dirt, ‘cause the dust and sand thrown up immediately covered me head-to-toe. The one wolf riding in the bed of the truck with me coughed once to clear his own clogged airways. The pace was slower now, the road rough and choppy.

  Left alone with nothing else to do, my thoughts turned to Tanya. I would be heading back East after tonight and I was anxious to see her. Three weeks was by far the longest I had gone without seeing her and I was worried she hadn’t been eating right while I was away. Lydia would make sure she had a good supply of bagged blood on hand, but she tended to let meals slide when I wasn’t there. I made a mental note not to bleed too much in the coming fight, Tanya would need it all.

  A cool wind blew across the back of the pickup, sweeping away the dust cloud and filling my nose with crisp desert smells. A welcome change from the sour-sharp, unwashed canine odors I had been inundated with during most of the drive.

  The pace abruptly slowed and I heard all but one of the bikes shut down. The pickup pulled up and stopped. I couldn’t see anything, being face down in the back. My ears worked just fine, though, the sound echoing around the small clearing painting a sonar picture in my head.

  A one-story rectangular building sat in the middle of a pack of motorcycles. I’ve gotten pretty good at identifying building materials, at least common ones, by echo, and I was fairly certain the building was constructed of concrete blocks with a sheet metal roof. Loud music rattled the poorly fasten roofing and after a moment more of listening I could tell there were ten individuals inside. There were six riders, two more in the cab of the truck and one in back with me. Our estimate had been for a total of seventeen, so two more wasn’t a big deal.

  The dust covered wolf in the bed of the pickup hauled me up and threw me over the side, where his waiting pack members let me fall to the ground. Of course the one golf-ball sized rock within four feet of me happened to be right under my face. Owww. r />
  Two weres, a male and female, grabbed my feet, flipped me to my back, and dragged me to the building, the back of my head finding several more rocks in the desert sand. Weak yellow light spilled from the doorway ahead and I could hear new voices swearing and shouting raucous greetings to the returning Spawn. A single motorcycle still revved, the pitch of the engine telling me it was my confiscated ride. The Spawn driving it rode slowly behind me, letting the big front tire almost graze my head as his gang fellows laughed, pulling me over the threshold and into the nest.

  All of these perceptions were peripheral, as most of my attention was centered on the battle for control I was waging with my darker self. The berserker inside me was shaking his cell door, begging for release. I use a lot of mental imagery to help control my own demon. I have a carefully crafted mental picture of a heavy, iron-bound, reinforced cell door with massive bars and hinges fastened into the solid bedrock of my mind. Gina had suggested this technique and together we had built my dark half’s prison, image by image. Because the berserker is just another aspect of me, the images have real strength and value. The stoutness of the door was therefore vital to my plan, simple as it was. The beast would have to heel if this was going to work.

  My two draggers dropped my feet after pulling me about a third of the way into the room. The door was in the center of the long front of the building. The inside was typical of a crappy back country bar. Poured concrete floor, covered in filth and dried sour beer. My nose told me that substantial amounts of blood had been spilled in the not too distant past. The rear wall was a long bar, backed by a mirror and the requisite neon beer signs. A beat up stereo on one corner of the liquor rack banged out what sounded like George Thorogood. Two weres sat at the bar, and along with the stout bartender, all giving me a hungry stare.

  Loki’s Spawn are cannibalistic, happy to eat their victims while in animal form. It added to the terror the gang inspired. Most weres frown on eating humans, considering it a crime punishable by death.

  The rider of my purloined Harley parked in the center of the room. Three gang members lined the inside wall, just to the right of the door. Two more stood back by a couple of doors that most likely led to the kitchen and bathrooms. Three from the group that ‘captured’ me came in and took up positions in front of the door.

  A shitty old pool table was angled near the right side of the bar, two more Spawn with pool cues watching, yellow eyes glittering. That made sixteen. My sonar sense told me the last three were in the corner to the left of the bar where I could just see a raised performance platform around the legs of my draggers. One of the three in the corner headed our way, his slow measured step telling me he was the dominant wolf of this sordid little pack. About six feet tall, solidly built, with black hair and a narrow trimmed black beard that came to a point on his chin. His face was angled, skin tight without any spare flesh. Black eyes stared at me coldly while his mouth quirked in a pleased grin.

  He didn’t say anything at first, just walked around the confiscated Harley, one hand casually gliding over the chromed handlebars and flame painted gas tank. His fingers lingered on the skull engraved gas cap.

  “Did you think a shitty paint job and a new gas cap would fool us?” he asked.

  Half of the pack growled at his words and I could smell their anger begin to build.

  “Jose here helped Snyder rebuild this engine,” he said, nodding at a stocky wolf by the door. Jose growled loudly and his face shifted slightly, as though it was semi-liquid. The anger smell intensified.

  “But we haven’t heard from Snyder or any of the others that went East in quite some time, which is why you’re here and not dead in the desert,” he said, his voice even.

  Virtually all the pack members were growling now, a low pitched, hair-raising vibration that rolled through my chest and spoke to the primitive side of me. Some were beginning to Change, the ones who could control the shift from man to beast. Wet pops and cracks spoke of the transformation from human to animal.

  The two wolves on either side of me grabbed my arms with hair covered hands and pulled me to my feet to face the leader. My personal guards were skilled, as they were transforming into the beast-man form (beast-woman in one case) while holding my arms. The male was almost seven feet tall in beast form, the female well over six. Both were corded with massive muscles. Only the leader held his human form while he stared at me with cold black eyes.

  “Scary isn’t it?” he chuckled.

  A whimper sounded from the corner platform by the bar, and when he turned to look back at it, I got my first good look at the two individuals that crouched there.

  I don’t remember if it was Carl von Clausewitz or Helmuth Moltke who first coined the famous military phrase ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’. Probably Moltke, but I’m not sure…I wasn’t there.

  My plan had survived first, second and third contacts with my enemies. The point where it all fell apart was first contact with the children.

  Chapter 2

  There were two of them, very obviously brother and sister, huddled in the corner, terrified by the Changing weres in the bar. The girl alone would have been enough to ruin my plan. At first I thought she was thirteen or so, but I realized her fear and posture made her seem younger. Probably closer to sixteen. Like her brother, she looked to be close to full-blood Native American, her long black hair snarled and matted with dirt. She was wearing lime green sleep shorts and a stained white cami. I only know it was called a cami from my exposure to Tanya, Lydia, Nika and every other female vamp who thought parading around Coven quarters half-dressed was natural. She literally shook with fear, the smell of it finally reaching me past the wet-dog stink of half Changed weres. But she had positioned her slight body between the pack and her little brother. He was eight or nine, wearing just X-Men pajama bottoms, as he tried to make himself smaller. Suddenly, I flashed to my own childhood.

  I’m curled on the floor of my brother’s closet, my hands over my ears, trying to keep the horrific sounds of my family’s death from reaching my brain. But the wet thunks of the ax and the sharp screams of my father, mother and big brother cut straight through to my soul. Marcus had shoved me into the little space in the back of his closet where he kept girly magazines and stuff he didn’t want Mom to find. Then he had rushed to his death, which I was hearing in stark detail now. When the quiet came it was a relief…at first. But the slow steady footsteps of the stranger with the ax became almost as bad as my family’s death cries.

  The carefully constructed, steel-reinforced vault door on the prison cell in my mind shattered like cheap window glass, and the beast was out.

  The leader turned his head back to me, a sneer on his face. Immediately, he sensed something different about me, his expression changing slightly.

  “That’s not scary! You wanna see scary?” a voice not my own said, using my mouth.

  He blinked, which meant he almost missed the whole thing.

  I felt the mono-molecular edges form themselves around the outside of my hands and arms, the heavy rope cut instantly. Formed of my strange violet aura, they are, I’m pretty sure, the sharpest blades on the planet. They sliced through the two weres holding me, cutting through their torsos without resistance, which was kind of too bad, ‘cause I wanted some resistance. Leaving the suddenly bisected guards, my arms slammed forward in front of me.

  My hands came together, back of thumb to back of thumb in the center of the leader’s torso, my middle fingers just exiting his back. His eyes were only half-way through his blink. They opened as his upper body slid to the floor, following the split bodies of his two minions. At least he got to see a little bit of scary.

  Three down.

  The 360 degree display that forms in my head at times like this plotted everyone’s position, inside the building, the vehicles outside the building, the soldiers standing watch a mile away, even the AC-130 gunship that circled at 40,000 feet two miles distant with thermal cameras rolling.

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nbsp; I turned to my right side, slammed my left hand through the chest of the were on the Harley, not bothering to use the mono edges, just raw power. My hand crushed his heart, then gripped his spine like a handle. I pulled, lightly, and tossed his body across the room behind me, hearing it splat into the wall. My right hand grabbed the front fork of the Harley and then I pulled, heavily, smashing the big bike into the weres lined up against the wall. I managed to crush two of the three before I swung the bike forward and threw it across the room at bar. The physics of a two hundred pound man throwing a six hundred pound motorcycle one-handed are complex, but my manipulation of them was instinctual. Posting my body to the floor with a column of energy gave me the anchor necessary to launch the heavy bike. The sitting weres had risen in time to get in the way of the Harley as it crashed through the bar, the mirror and, finally, the concrete block wall behind it.

  Five more down. The bartender, still in man form, had managed to slip out of the path of the six hundred pound chrome and steel missile, and was starting to grope for something in the remaining part of the bar. I ignored him, moving instead to crush the skull of the last were on the wall with a left punch. I also managed to punch completely through his head and the wall behind. Oops, my bad!