The Last Stand
The travel from The Rustic Moon Motel, outskirts of town to Shadowmoon’s hidden safehouse, underground bunker consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk. Inside the sedan, Iris kept one hand on Milo’s knee while her other pressed a damp paper towel to the gash on his forehead—the cut from the motel room floor, from when Beckett’s men had kicked the door in. Milo didn’t cry. He watched the dark trees slide past, his small fingers curled around the edge of the booster seat.
Marcus drove with both hands on the wheel, eyes scanning every patch of shadow between the headlight beams. Silas sat shotgun, a compact rifle case across his thighs, his gaze fixed on the rearview mirror every twelve seconds. Three miles back, a pair of headlights had matched their speed for two full minutes, then peeled off at a gravel turnoff. *Watching. Reporting.*
“There,” Silas said, pointing at a rusted mailbox half-hidden by overgrown sumac.
Marcus killed the headlights and turned onto a dirt track that sloped downward into the earth. The bunker door was camouflaged as a storm cellar, concrete and steel set into a hillside. He killed the engine, and the silence rushed in—crickets, the distant hum of a highway, the ticking metal of the cooling radiator.
Inside, the bunker was a single room: cots, a propane stove, a shelf of canned goods, and a shortwave radio. Concrete walls two feet thick. A single vent grille near the ceiling. No windows. Iris laid Milo on the nearest cot and checked his cut again—superficial, but the bruising around it had deepened to purple.
“He knows about the motel,” Marcus said. He stood by the door, arms crossed. “He knows about the house. He knows about every place I’ve ever used. There’s only one way to end this.”
Iris turned. “Don’t.”
“He’s not coming for you,” Marcus said. “He’s coming for me. He wants to bleed me out in front of the cameras, prove to the other packs that the Blackwood line can be broken. If I give him that fight—on neutral ground, no witnesses but his own—he’ll leave you alone. He’ll have his trophy.”
“And then what?” Iris’s voice cracked. “He kills you, and we spend the rest of our lives running anyway, because his father will know we exist.”
Silas checked his rifle’s magazine. “The quarry. Granite Quarry, twelve miles east. It’s a known neutral zone for the Sterling pack. Beckett has used it before for challenges. Flat terrain, high ridges on three sides. If I can get to the north ridge, I’ll have a clean angle on the arena floor.”
“No,” Marcus said. “Iris and Milo stay here. You cover from the ridge. I go alone.”
“Then you die alone,” Silas said flatly.
Iris stood. Her hands trembled, but she pressed them flat against her thighs. “I worked for Sterling Architectural three years ago. I did a structural audit on their old office building. I saw blueprints for a lot of their hardware—including a portable frequency emitter designed for crowd control. If Beckett is using a disruptor, it will have a power node. A battery pack, usually worn on the belt or strapped to the thigh. If you break that, the field collapses.”
Marcus stared at her. “You never told me.”
“I never thought you’d fight a man with a science project.” She crossed to the small table and grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a pencil. “The node is about the size of a deck of cards. Red casing, two indicator lights. It’s magnetic, so it attaches to any ferrous surface. Most likely on his left hip.” She sketched quickly, handed the drawing to Silas. “If you hit that, the disruptor goes down.”
Silas studied the sketch, then folded it into his pocket. “I’ll be in position in forty minutes. You give me a signal—any sound louder than a gunshot—and I take the shot.”
Marcus looked at Milo. The boy sat on the cot, watching the adults with a stillness that didn’t belong to a six-year-old. His eyes caught the weak light from the propane lantern, and for a moment, Iris saw them flicker—gold, then back to brown.
“Dad,” Milo said. “The bad man has a light. It hurts your ears.”
Marcus knelt in front of him. “You can hear it?”
Milo nodded. “It buzzes. Like the bees in the garden. But mean.”
Marcus touched his son’s cheek. “Stay with your mom. Don’t open the door for anyone but Silas. Can you do that?”
Milo gripped his father’s wrist. “You come back.”
It wasn’t a question.
Marcus pressed his forehead to Milo’s, then stood. He took a long knife from the weapons cache—silver-coated, the only one they had—and tucked it into his jacket. “Forty minutes.”
—
The quarry was a scar in the earth, two hundred yards across, its floor littered with shattered stone and rusted machinery. The walls rose fifty feet on three sides, jagged and black in the moonlight. Marcus walked to the center, hands empty, and waited.
He counted seconds. Sixty. One hundred twenty. Two forty.
A black SUV rolled to the edge of the quarry floor, headlights blinding. The engine cut. The driver’s door opened, and Beckett Sterling stepped out.
He was alone. *Smart.* Dressed in a tailored charcoal suit that caught the light with an oily sheen—silver lining, woven into the fabric. A subtle hum emanated from his left hip, where a small red box sat clipped to his belt. The disruptor.
“Marcus Blackwood.” Beckett’s voice carried across the stone. “I expected more theatrics. A howl, perhaps.”
“You came alone,” Marcus said. “Your father won’t approve.”
“My father doesn’t need to know the details. Only the result.” Beckett unbuttoned his jacket, revealing a host of tools on his belt—a collapsible baton, a roll of silver wire, and a pistol with a suppressor. “You’ve cost me two good men and a lot of clean-up. I’m going to take that out of your hide. Literally.”
Marcus didn’t answer. He shifted his weight, testing the ground. Loose gravel, poor footing. The disruptor’s hum grew louder as Beckett walked closer—a pressure behind the eyes, a vibration in the teeth. *That’s the field. It weakens the wolf inside.*
Beckett drew the baton, flicked it to full length. Silver-tipped. He circled wide, forcing Marcus to turn, to keep his back away from the cliff face. “The problem with you old-blood wolves is that you think strength is enough. But strength doesn’t matter when your nervous system is being scrambled.”
The first strike came fast. Marcus dodged—the baton whistled past his ear—but the disruptor’s frequency spiked, and his legs buckled. *Like a muscle cramp in every joint.* He rolled, came up with the silver knife in his fist.
Beckett smiled. “There it is.”
They clashed. The baton rang against the knife blade. Marcus was faster, stronger, but every time he closed distance, the disruptor sent a wave of nausea through him. His vision blurred. His reflexes lagged by a quarter-second—just enough for Beckett to land a blow across his ribs. The silver lining of the suit seared through his jacket, burning skin.
On the north ridge, Silas lay prone, the rifle’s scope trained on the red box at Beckett’s hip. But the two men moved too fast, tangled together. One bad shot would hit Marcus.
Below the ridge, hidden in a defile, Iris pressed Milo against the rock. She had followed. *She had followed.* She’d told herself it was to help, to spot the node, to be close if everything went wrong. Now she watched Marcus take another hit, blood blooming on his shirt, and she bit her tongue to keep from screaming.
Milo’s hand tightened on her arm. “Mom. The light. It’s getting brighter.”
She looked down. Milo’s eyes were fully gold now, luminous in the dark. His small hand lifted, finger pointing not at the disruptor, but at a spot on the ridge opposite Silas—a cluster of boulders where a second figure crouched. *A spotter. Beckett had brought a spotter with a secondary disruptor.* The first was a decoy.
“Silas,” Iris whispered into the earpiece. “There’s a second node. Ten o’clock from your position, behind the split rock. The one on Beckett’s belt is a dummy.”
A pause. Then Silas’s voice, barely audible. “Confirmed. Relocating.”
Marcus slammed his knife into Beckett’s baton, wrenching it from his grip. Beckett stumbled back, reaching for the pistol. Marcus lunged—and the second disruptor activated from the ridge. The frequency hit him mid-stride, and he dropped to his knees, claws digging into gravel, a snarl locked in his throat.
Beckett drew the pistol, aimed at Marcus’s head. “You’re strong, wolf, but not strong enough.”
The shot came from the north ridge—a single sharp crack. The second spotter crumpled, his disruptor skittering down the slope. Beckett spun, and in that instant, Marcus surged forward, driving the silver knife into the fake node on Beckett’s belt, shattering it.
Nothing happened.
Beckett laughed. “Told you. Decoy.”
He kicked Marcus in the chest, sent him sprawling. Then he reached down and pulled a secondary silver blade from his boot. The metal gleamed in the moonlight, etched with Sterling’s crest.
“You’re strong, wolf, but not strong enough.” He lunged—and Marcus fell, a silver gash across his chest.