Page 90 of Meeting Her Mate
Before Will or I could get the chance to take down the remaining soldiers, gunshots roared from the clearing on the roof. Five gunshots to kill the five remaining soldiers who had been left standing. As their corpses fell limply on the floor, I looked around to see who this unseen ally was.
“Useless, every last one of them,” Blair said, emerging from behind flames, holding a revolver with a smoking barrel. “I guess you get your money’s worth when you pay for subpar mercenaries.
He truly was a madman, having just shot his last few remaining soldiers himself. Why anyone would do that was beyond me.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are, you dirty grim dog,” Blair yelled, firing more shots in the sky. “Congratulations on the mess you’ve made of things.”
I understood a little later that the reason he wasn’t able to see me perched on top of the air conditioner unit was that his visor was blocking off his peripheral vision. This lent me an unexpected advantage. I could strike him from above and kill him in one blow. As for Maurice and Ralph, those two were already relatively weakened. They would not pose that much of a problem. I hoped.
While Blair was still talking aloud, I waited till he was directly under me and then dropped from above and wrenched him in my grasp.
“Argh!” Blair yelled as his gauntleted hands grabbed tufts of my fur and dug into my skin. “Not even your she-wolf can save you now, Will.”
He pulled me from behind him with unbridled force and threw me across the clearing. I clanged against the fence and fell with a thud but got back up within a second. Whatever armor he was wearing was mechanically modified to grant him more strength than he possessed.
I did not get a chance to retaliate; Will soared from behind me, roaring as he landed on Blair and thrashed him on the ground.
My heart swelled with happiness that, for once in my life, someone was looking out for me. Not from above, as my parents’ souls did from heaven, but here, with me, in this mortal realm. And he wasn’t just anybody; he was my mate. A reformed man who had gone to great lengths to conquer his demons and cast light into the dark recesses of his mind.
Will’s brutish attacks brought Blair down to his knees, despite all the armor he was wearing. Blair recoiled the pistons in his gauntlets and punched Will in the stomach, causing him to fall on his back.
I couldn’t let that happen on my watch. Before Blair had a chance to attack Will again, I slid across the floor, wrapped my mouth around the gauntlet on his right hand—his dominant hand—and jerked it. The gauntlet came loose, revealing a gloved hand. But I never got a chance to take off the other gauntlet. Blair recoiled it and punched me straight in the face with it, knocking me back.
My head throbbed with pain as dull flashes danced before my eyes. Blood dripped between my eyes where the mechanical, dull, punching piston had hit me. Through the blood and the flashes, I saw Will wrestling with Blair’s other gauntlet, tearing it off his hand.
The punches that Blair landed on Will’s body did not have the same effect as those mechanically enhanced gauntlets. However, seeing Blair’s hands free drove a new fear into me. He could use the Wolf’s Bane on Will now that his hands were not occupied with the machinery we had just torn off.
Be careful!I called out to Will as I watched him tussle with Blair’s armored body. If it had been any other opponent, Will would have torn their body by now, given the strength he was using, but this new, impenetrable armor that Blair wore protected him from all the blows that Will landed on him.
Right as I thought that the battle was in our favor, some soldiers appeared from behind the rubble of the topmost roof, all of them holding tazers and batons. Just as they appeared, so did Maurice and Ralph.
This was it, the last stand. I could feel the finality in my bones.
Chapter 34: Will
Those pistons packed a punch. Although Alexis and I had managed to take them off, Blair was still very brawny with his gloved fists. It did not take me long to deduce that someone like Blair, who was normally so scrawny, was only able to channel this much power because he had imbued himself with some chemicals, possibly a serum of his own creation, to grant him strength. He was, after all, an occultist’s son and a renowned pharmacist in his own right.
As we grappled with each other, our strengths an even match, to my surprise, Alexis called on me to be careful. At first, I thought she wanted me to exercise caution as Ralph and Maurice had re-emerged along with more soldiers carrying batons and tazers. But then it became clear. She had warned me that without the gauntlets holding his hands back, Blair could now use his hands to inject Wolf’s Bane into me.
I wouldn’t let that happen as long as I had my resolve. Despite his unnatural strength, I overpowered him in our tussle and threw him on the ground. What startled me was when Blair hit the ground, the floor below him cracked under the weight of the armor. He was a juggernaut in this Herculean armor, his weight almost close to mine. My blows were merely superficial against this armor. I could not understand what it was made out of. Was it some sort of plastic, some metal, or an alloy? How was it so heavy yet flexible enough to allow Blair such dexterity?
Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Alexis singlehandedly taking on the swarm of soldiers rushing towards her with their weapons. Having seen her in action multiple times throughout the night, I did not worry about whether she could hold her own against that many soldiers. I knew that she could.
It was Maurice and Ralph that I was concerned about. So far, they had been witnessing my fight with Blair from the sidelines, unquestionably a little apprehensive about joining in, given their present condition. But the longer my fight with Blair went on, the less hesitant they became, slowly coming closer to the makeshift arena where my foe and I wrestled.
I saw Blair fidgeting with some buttons on the panel of his armor. This was followed by the sound of electrical humming coming from the suit. He stomped his feet on the ground and broke into a sprint toward me. There was no room for me to swerve to avoid this oncoming armored man. He collided with me, gripped me by my shoulders, and lifted me in the air. For a brief moment, it seemed that he’d bring me down on his knee and break my back, but that seemed like a faint possibility. His suit, armored, electrified, mechanically enhanced, and powerful though it was, had its limits. Under the weight of my wolf form, it buckled, causing Blair to fall with me on top of him.
It was then that Maurice and Ralph finally stopped standing by and joined the fight. Maurice shifted once again, now completely healed from the moonlight and the downtime, and pounced on me, pinning me down as Blair delivered punch after punch to my face. Then, Ralph descended upon me, looking more bat-like than ever, and kicked me in the side.
I did not stay down for long. I wedged my claws into Maurice’s body and cast him away, watching as blood trailed along his falling trajectory. Then I kicked Ralph back with my hindquarters and watched with satisfaction as he struggled to stay standing. Blair, no longer punching my face, stood against me, trying to subdue me with the enhanced force coming from his armor. However, the more he pushed, the more firmly my feet planted in the ground, providing me the support I needed to leap in the air, taking Blair with me. He unleashed a flurry of punches on my chest, driving the air from my lungs.
Unable to take this barrage any longer, I finally bit down on his helmet and threw it off his head, revealing his rancid face contorted in rage, strain, and confusion.
“Why won’t you give up?” he growled as he landed one more punch against me, but it was too late for him. Our airborne trajectory had completed its course, leaving me standing on top of him and him hanging at the edge of the roof.
In light of the carnage I had dealt with tonight, restraint was out of the question. This was the end of Blair, as I saw it. He might be armored and enhanced, but there was no suit or armor nor any chemical that would save him from this high a fall.
I stomped on his hand that was holding onto the ledge and watched him fall off the roof into the fog below, screaming as he flailed his arms in the air. I did not stick around for the satisfaction of watching him die. There were still two more foes left to deal with.