stopped Con cold. It was harsh and twisted, deep and menacing, thick with anger. It was madness, a howl beaten into words.
“No mistake!” the beast shouted again.
Oh, yeah, baby, you’re a mistake, all right, Con thought, tightening his grip on the Wilson, even more of a mistake than I am.
Head shot, straight into the kill zone—that’s what he was looking for, one second’s worth of a sight picture and that bastard was dead.
Another bolt of lightning cracked and sizzled across the sky, and for one endlessly long moment of time, the loft was lit.
There was no missing Monk. The bastard was huge, easily six feet four with a tangled mass of long white hair. He was built like a Mack Truck, a carved slab of granite, an extrapolation of Souk’s science taken into the bizarre zone. He barely looked human—and for that long endless moment of lightning-lit luminosity, when Con squeezed the Wilson’s trigger, all the beast’s attention was focused on the woman’s voice.
The report of the .45 sounded. The smell of cordite followed, bitter and sharp. Then again, the whole process: trigger squeeze, the gun’s report, the smell of burned powder.
In the split second of the two shots, the creature named Monk was looking up toward the ceiling. After confirming the two hits, Con’s gaze shifted, following Monk’s, and he saw what had been holding his attention: a long-haired blonde in a skin-tight gray dress and combat boots, and Jane, bruised and beautiful, and in mortal danger of electrocution.
He was moving before the thought even hit him, moving to haul his ass up the rafter and get them down from the tangle of steel and roof and exploded stairwell, before the lightning found them—but between the thought and the deed, in mid-flying stride, he got hit by Monk.
The beast slammed into him, knocking him into next week, moving him back ten feet, the concussion of the hit blacking him out. It was an explosion of light and pain, and then it was nothing.
Nothing for a heartbeat.
Nothing for two.
The sound of battle, a woman’s scream, a cry of pain—they all brought him back.
Flat on his back, dazed, he waited for his breath to return, waited to feel his body kick back into gear. He waited, and he heard the screams—screams of rage and fear.
Monk had grabbed both of the women and was dragging them off the stairwell, fighting and cussing. Good girls. They had nothing left to lose.
But he had something to win: this damn fight.
Forcing a breath into his lungs, he got back to his feet and went after the bastard. He’d lost his gun in the fall, but he had a knife, and he had the will.
There was only win, only win, no other option, and he would cut the bastard’s head off, inch by inch, if that was what it took to drop him.
Partway down the rafter, Monk leapt off and landed next to someone on the floor. Con barely looked, but even a glance was enough to tell him his mission had ended without him.
Randolph Lancaster was dead, a limp pile of old man in a crumpled heap on the floor. There was no mistaking the identity of the body, that thick mane of snow-white hair, and Monk seemed transfixed by it, momentarily distracted.
Con moved in fast, holding the knife in a reverse edge grip, ready to carve the bastard a new face—but Monk was fast, faster than him, faster than the two slugs of .45 Con had leveled at him. The bullets had only left grazing wounds on his head when they should have exploded inside his skull. Somehow the bastard had outmaneuvered a pair of jacketed hollowpoints rocketing at 1,100 feet per second. Con barely caught him with his knife strike, a slash up the left side of his face, but it was enough to get the beast to relinquish the blonde. With a flick of his wrist, Monk tossed her hard against the window. She hit with a sickening thud and dropped like a stone—but in a move of supreme athletic grace, she landed on the balls of her feet, conscious and ready to go, except one arm wasn’t working now. Crashing into the window had dislocated her shoulder and put her out of the fight—or so he thought.
He’d thought wrong. She wasn’t giving up, not for a second.
She needed to. There was no place for her in this, no safe place.
Con stepped in front of her and blocked the strike Monk had