needed to remember why we were here and get on with it.
He made that difficult by saying, “I think I could spend a hundred years with you and never know you any better than I do right now.”
“Sun will be up soon.” I turned the conversation back to business. “I think we should go scout out the church grounds when the place is deserted, see if we find any trace of Hank there, or anything that might tell us where he is. I want to know what we’re up against. And if we can get in and out of town without Deerling and his lackeys knowing we were here, all the better.”
He nodded. “We better get walking, then. It’s only a little ways up the road, and the bike makes a lot of noise when you consider there isn’t any.”
Anywhere else I would have laughed at this concern. His bike was relatively quiet after all. But given how barren the landscape was and how deafening the silence seemed to be, I understood why he wasn’t willing to take the risk.
“Good thing you didn’t wear heels.” He smirked.
Heels?
Argh. This idiot was going to drive me crazy.
“I left them back at home with my skintight leather cat suit. I didn’t realize we were breaking into the Tower of London to steal the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Next time I’ll dress up.”
“The Koh-i-what?”
“It doesn’t matter.” A lesson on the finer points of priceless diamonds could wait for another time. “Did you bring a weapon or anything? I’m guessing the church will be empty at this hour, but I don’t want to take chances, especially considering those guys on the highway seemed to be gunning for us specifically.” A lot of supes liked to think they were tough enough on their own against humans and guns or knives were for pussies. In a one-on-one brawl this was probably accurate.
I was sticking to my initial plan, which was primarily recon. We knew Hank was in town somewhere, and the church was the most likely place, but there was no way to know for sure. We couldn’t waltz in, guns blazing, not unless we wanted to get ourselves killed.
But the two guys in the truck worried me. If they worked for the Church, there was a chance they might have called ahead and warned someone we were coming. I was just hoping we might be able to get a look at the building before anyone else showed up. We could figure out a more aggressive plan of attack when we had more information.
Wilder returned to his bike and opened one of the leather saddlebags on the side. From inside he withdrew a small handgun, much more compact than I would have expected from a big guy like him. He checked to see if it was loaded and made sure the safety was on before tucking it in the back of his pants and lifting his shirt to cover it.
“Satisfied?” he asked.
“Probably as satisfied as I’m going to get, considering the situation.”
Frankly, even if we had a bazooka, I wasn’t going to feel prepared enough.
We trudged onward, soon wandering off the cracked sidewalk and into the middle of the street. The town was so empty it felt like we were on the set of a zombie movie. My nerves were on edge because it reminded me far too much of my previous experience with the walking dead. Zombies might not be real, but if you get enough powerful necromancers in the same place, it doesn’t matter that the bodies are being animated by magic. It feels like the end of days.
This was different. There were no bodies around us, living or otherwise. No ambient noise, nothing to indicate anyone else existed in a ten-mile radius. We were driven only by the glow on the horizon that was too bright to be morning. It must be the church.
A chill crept up my spine, and I couldn’t shake the sense of dread following after me. Obviously this was all wrong. We shouldn’t be here in the first place, not by ourselves and not so unprepared. But even with a dozen other werewolves in tow I didn’t think anything could keep this situation from being super creeptastic.
Not to mention I half-expected a truck to peel up behind us at any moment and run us into the ditch.
I kept close to Wilder, but his presence did little to make me feel better. Once the teasing had stopped, he seemed to remember what it