Hell Bent

Yes it does. With Jack, it does.

She gripped her own weapon more tightly and thought about the rounds she’d already fired. If Jack was preparing for another fight and had put away his gun, that meant he was out of bullets. That was surprising. She knew how well prepared he normally was. He always carried bullets to spare.

Was she out of bullets? She was pretty sure she’d fired five times. How she knew that, she had no idea. But she somehow remembered squeezing the trigger five times. One bullet had been wasted. Four had been fired in, at least, the right direction. That left her one bullet in the gun. One more shot.

One bullet was better than none any day.

In front of her, Jack Thane was contemplating death. Not his. Not Annabelle’s.

Sam’s.

Because as soon as he could manage it, Jack was going to wrap his gloved hands around his mentor’s neck and squeeze until the breath left Samuel Price’s lungs for good.

Up ahead, a light split through the dim of the dank, forgotten corridors. It highlighted the tunnel and the channels that connected to it like tributaries. Two more connecting hallways were passed up, and then they turned to the right to find themselves faced with a brick wall that dead ended a particularly long tunnel.

This tunnel, however, was well lit, because near the end of the tunnel, a trap door had been opened into a level above them. The highly rotted wooden door had come fully away from its hinges when tampered with and was now lying on the ground directly beneath the opening.

Jack made sure his body was in front of Annabelle’s and once more went entirely still.

Annabelle held her breath and swallowed down the bile rising in her throat.

Up ahead, a pair of legs appeared over the lip of the opening, and then a man dressed in black lowered himself through the cavity, landing solidly on bent legs. The discarded trap door splintered beneath his weight. He glanced down at the sound.

Jack took the opportunity and rushed forward, moving with a speed that Annabelle had never before witnessed.

She stood transfixed, watching as his blurred form was suddenly beside the other man, who was a good six or seven inches shorter than Jack. Jack’s thick, leather-clad arm snaked around the newcomer’s head and face, at once pulling him off balance and choking off his air supply. With another quick movement, Jack swiped the dagger’s blade across the man’s exposed throat and blood splashed against the corridor’s opposite wall.

Jack pulled the gun out of the dying man’s shoulder holster as he went limp in Jack’s arms. Then he let the man drop and pointed his newly acquired weapon at the opening above him. In a few seconds, a face appeared over the edge. Jack hesitated only long enough to study the face, and then he pulled the trigger.

Annabelle wasn’t aware of it, but her entire body flinched with each pull of the trigger as Jack proceeded to shoot and kill another of their unwelcome visitors. There was a scramble above them as whoever was left on the other side of the trap door decided to attempt to scurry away rather than face Thane and whoever else might be with him.

Jack wasn’t about to let them get away, though. As if driven by a demon, Jack leapt up, the dead man’s gun still in his right hand, and even though the grip should have been tentative, at best, he as able to grab hold of the edges of the trap door’s frame and hoist himself into the space above them.

Annabelle stayed where she was, frozen in place, as Jack disappeared.

There were several more shots fired, in quick succession. And then he re-appeared in the opening, his blonde hair haloed in the light from the room beyond.

“Annabelle, come here and give me your hands.”

She didn’t move. From her right, in the corridors they’d left behind, came the growing sound of boots splashing through mud.

“Bella, you need to move, now!” Jack yelled at her.

Still, she didn’t move. She couldn’t move. It was like the blood on the wall was a similarly-charged magnet, repelling her. She only managed to stay where she was, instead of retreat.

Jack cursed under his breath and jumped back down through the hole, deftly managing not to come near the body of the man he’d slain. He raced toward Annabelle and had her in his arms just as quickly as he’d overcome the bad guys. He jerked her over to the opening and then turned and captured her face in-between his hands.

“Bella, I’m going to lift you and you have to climb through, do you hear me?”

She blinked.

“If you don’t, we’ll be stuck here, without bullets, when Osborne’s hired guns come around the corner. If we aren’t killed out-right, we’ll be tortured first.”

She blinked again. Nausea roiled in her belly. Her mouth was dry.

“I’m going to lift you up now, do you understand?” His tone was urgent and his expression entreating, his blue eyes boring into hers as if mining for some small sign of intact sanity.

She parted her lips and inhaled a very shaky breath. “I…” Her voice trailed off and then came back. “I think I’m going to ralph.”

“Do it upstairs.” He grabbed hold of her waist then, and lifted her through the opening. She had no time to argue or think or do anything but act, and she acted by grabbing the sides until her hip bones were banging against the edge and she could slide the rest of the way in. It seemed like the most difficult thing she’d ever done to bend her right leg and pull it up and through until the tread of her boot was against the cement of the ground beneath her. But she managed it, using the solid grip to push herself the rest of the way through. She fell, side-ways, just inside, and then rolled away from the hole.

Jack was right behind her. Before she could attempt to push herself up on to her hands and knees, he was once more lifting her, one hand under each of her arms.

“Let’s go, luv. Just a bit further.”

She went with him, limply, to the other side of what appeared to be a room filled with steam pipes and water conduits. Un-labeled metal containers sat against one wall, behind a chicken-wire fence sealed off with a chain and lock. Multi-colored wires ran from the containers and connected with pipes or other containers throughout the room. Steam made the room warmer than the tunnels below them had been, and moisture condensed on the exposed skin of Annabelle’s face.

There were three bodies on the floor here, all of them male, all of them young. Annabelle spared them only a cursory glance, already too numb to fully appreciate what it was that she was seeing.

Jack sat her against a far wall, behind an outcropping of metal and PVC pipes of different sizes. She sank down against the wall and sat, unmoving, as Jack ran back toward the trap door opening, yanking a second gun from one of his fallen victims as he did so.

Below them, the sound of boots running through mud grew louder. Jack waited.

Seconds ticked by, the men came nearer. And then they were there.

Jack shielded himself with part of the floor as he levered his arms over the edge and pulled the triggers on both guns.

One of the guns clicked empty after only a few final shots. The other, unfortunately, was not outfitted with a silencer, and the shots reverberated off of the walls around them, echoing like nothing short of several small explosions. Again, Annabelle could see Jack’s lips moving, and she knew he was cursing softly. The shots would gain unwanted attention.

They would make it hard for he and Annabelle to escape.

But that didn’t stop Jack from using the gun anyway. Some things were more imperative than others.

A chunk of the ground beside Jack’s head shot upward, splintering into dust and fragments of cement as he jerked back and rolled out of the way. With a deep breath and a set to his jaw, he stood and moved around the opening, attempting another angle.

In the brighter light of this room, Annabelle was able to get a clearer look at him as he moved. And though the black leather clothing did a good job of hiding most of it, when she looked closely, she was able to see that he was bleeding in several places.

He’d been shot.

More than once.

Annabelle’s eyes widened. Her heart stopped beating. Literally, for several seconds.

When it started up again, it was with a fair amount of pain. It hammered hard against her rib cage. A rock