Whipped - Drake Merwin x OC

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder (and likes to break it, too)

Quinn watched in frozen horror as the coyotes attacked the children.      

He saw Sam fire and miss.      

He saw Sam agonize for a terrible moment as Caine attacked the church.      

Sam ran toward the church.      

Quinn shouted, "No!"      

He aimed.      

"Don't hit the kids, don't the kids," he sobbed, and squeezed the trigger. Aiming at the mass of coyotes. So many more than before.      

The coyotes barely noticed him.      

One fell, twisting, like it had tripped, and didn't get up.      

Then he could shoot no more, the beasts were in with the kids. He ran for the ladder and slid and fell and landed hard in the alley.      

Run away, his brain screamed, run from it. He took three panicked steps away, toward the beach, running toward the beach, but then, as though some invisible force had taken hold of him, he stopped.      

"Can't run away, Quinn," he told himself.       "Can't."      

And even as he said the words, he was running back, into the day care, pushing past Mary shielding a child in her arms, past her out to the plaza, wielding the gun as a club now, running and screaming his head off like a lunatic, swinging the gun butt to a sickening crunch on a coyote's skull.      

Edilio was there and kids were shooting and Edilio was shouting, "No,  no, no," and then blood was in Quinn's eyes and blood was in his brain  and blood was everywhere and he lost his mind, lost his mind swinging and screaming and hitting, hitting, hitting.      

~~~~~~~~~

Mary clutched Isabella to her and huddled with John, and the kids cried hearing the madness outside, the screams and snarls and guns.      

"Jesus, save us, Jesus, save us," someone was repeating in a racked, sobbing voice, and Mary knew in some distant way that it was her.      

                              ~~~~~~~~

Drake heard the coyote (or rather, what parades as a coyote) howl in the night and knew in his black heart what it meant.      

Enough of licking his wounds.      

The battle was joined.      

"Time," he said. "Time to show them all."      

Time to get her back.

He kicked his own front door open and marched toward the plaza, shouting, shouting, wishing he could bay at the moon like the coyotes.      

He heard guns firing and pulled his pistol from his belt and uncoiled his whip hand and snapped it, loving the crack it made.      

Ahead, two figures were moving away from him, also heading for the sound of battle, two figures. One seemed impossibly small. But no, it was the other that was impossibly big. Sumo big. A shuffling, slumping, thick-limbed creature.      

The two mismatched ones moved into a pool of light cast by a streetlamp. Drake recognized the smaller one.      

"Howard, you traitor," Drake shouted.      

Howard stopped. The beast beside him kept walking.      

"You don't want any of this, Drake," Howard warned.