[Chapter Thirty-Three was broken into two parts - this is the 2nd part]

One of the assistant stage managers greeted me as I exited stage right and whispered something about the nearest facilities.

“I’m fine,” I muttered as I pushed quickly past her, my eyes darting around to see where I might be able to get to the catwalk. I dashed well past her before I heard Knell speak again.

“Three!” Knell said. “And then, I’ll rip your heart out.”

There! I leapt toward the metal stairs that I was certain led up to the catwalk with superhuman speed knowing that Knell could hear the metal clanging that my feet made as I raced up the stairs three at a time and that I was getting near.

“Two!” Knell said. “And perhaps I’ll feast on them both!”

I reached the top of the stairs, turned to my left and could both see and smell Knell and Gail about mid-way down the catwalk – they were a good fifty feet away from me and I raced towards them, conscious of every precious inch that I cleared as I moved steadily toward them. As I approached, I was considering how I could grab on to Knell’s free left hand, the one I supposed he would attempt to deal a death blow to Gail with, while debating whether, with my other hand, I should go for his throat, or for the other hand where he held Gail in a tight grip just below her left shoulder.

I was less than halfway toward them when Knell said “One!” and I realized with a disturbing chill that I wasn’t going to make it to them in time.

I pushed myself to move more quickly, and was still a dozen feet away when I could detect the change in Knell’s heart-beat and breathing that signaled he was about to attack.

“Zero!” Knell yelled, and raised his left hand back in an open clawed gesture, readying for the strike. “Now watch her die, Andrews!”

Gail’s heart leapt in a similar fashion to Knell’s, which I interpreted as her preparing for the killing blow.

Only I was wrong.

Just as Knell’s arm began it’s descent toward her, Gail twisted toward Knell and drove her fist directly between his legs. It was a solid punch, a direct hit and I could actually hear one of his testicles pop. Knell let out an anguished groan, the left hand he’d been in the process of striking with bounced feebly off her right shoulder, and his right hand released her left arm.

I was still a foot away when Knell’s right hand batted up, striking Gail in the side of the head and knocking her onto her back.

A split second later, I was upon Knell, gripping him by the shoulders and driving him backwards onto his own back on the catwalk with the force of my forward momentum.

I then delivered three quick punches to his face with my left hand, relishing at the fact that I didn’t need to pull my punches on him; knowing that, with the super-human strength he possessed, the blows wouldn’t kill him the way they would a normal man.

Knell grinned up at me and the blood from his smashed lip drizzled between his teeth.

“She punches harder than you do,” Knell said, laughing. Pushing his right elbow into my throat, his left hand grabbed my belt and his knees drove up, flipping me up into the air and overtop of him. I managed to twist in the air so that I didn’t land on my back; but by then, Knell was up and racing down the catwalk in the direction I had come from.

I looked at Gail who was now sitting up, the side of her head red and swollen where his knuckles had connected with her face, a trickle of blood dripping from her left nostril.

“You okay?” I asked, reaching for her. “You’re bleeding.”

“I’m fine,” she said and pointed toward Knell. “Go! Stop him!”

Knell was at the far end of the catwalk and heading up a series of stairs that led to a door at the top of a flight with an emergency EXIT sign on it. He pushed through it. I was just a few seconds behind him and found myself in a short hallway that led to another door with an EXIT sign; that door was just closing. I raced to it and out onto a fire escape on the back side of the building.

Above me I could smell Kneel and hear the sound of him ascending the metal stairs toward the roof, his labored breathing giving away the fact that the blow Gail had dealt to his testicles had taken quite a bit of the wind out of him. But he was still more than three floors ahead of me

I rushed up the stairs, following him. His heartbeat changed and I could tell that he had either spotted or smelled me as he turned one of the flights. He was still a couple of floors ahead of me, slowed by the injury to his groin, but still moving steadily. My leg still throbbed where I’d been shot the night before while in wolf form; and my right hand throbbed almost to the same beat.

Slowly gaining on him during the ascent, I was only a floor behind when he reached the top of the building, some thirteen floors up and disappeared over the edge of the roof.

“Run, Knell!” I yelled as I watched him clear the edge of the roof and approached the final flight to the top. “Like the chicken that you are.”

I couldn’t smell him too easily, the wind wrapping over the top of the building contorting the air flow in a dozen directions, but I could hear the effect of my words on his heart. He was angry and was shifting from flight back into attack mode.

I was thus prepared for his assault once I cleared the edge of the roof, but Knell’s diving tackle still carried me off of my feet. We both rolled along the roof up against the foot-high ledge and Knell grabbed my right hand with his left as we tumbled, squeezing it. A burst of white-hot pain flared through my head. An unadulterated aura of pleasure filled Knell as he could sense the intense pain that it caused me.

We stopped rolling with Knell atop me, his left hand continuing to squeeze my crushed fingers beneath his. His dark heart was filled with an intense and overwhelming sense of pleasure at the pain he was causing. He brought a knee up and pressed it against my chest, continuing to squeeze my injured hand.

“I smell fresh blood,” Knell whispered, and I realized that the bullet wound on my leg had opened some time during the run up the fire escape and the tumble we’d just taken. “How’s your bullet wound?” he cackled and, locating the source, thrust his index finger into the bullet hole.

A fresh blast of pain bombarded me; mixing with the assault coming from my other appendage.

Both of his hands occupied, Knell head-butted me. Flashes of bright white filled my head while I struggled beneath him, unable to break free from his grasp, unable to avoid the repeated bashing of his forehead against mine.

The overwhelming sense of pleasure he was feeling knowing the pain he caused me flooded through me. Then, his heart skipped a beat as I could detect something else was causing him a delightful surprise.

“She’s following us up here,” Knell said through gritted teeth. “So I can easily finish you both off.”

I concentrated past the flashes of white-hot pain coming from my hand and my leg and could hear Gail’s heartbeat as she raced up the fire escape.

“No!” I managed to say, between gasps of pain.

“Michael!” Gail called from somewhere over the edge of the building. Her feet clanging on the metal staircase as she got closer.

I could tell that Knell was distracted by Gail. Knowing his desire to see me tortured, to have to watch him kill the woman I loved affected his judgment. Just enough.

I managed to twist. Knell’s finger, which was still pushed inside the bullet hole in my leg, pulled him forward, and I managed to trap his hand between my hip bone and the roof-top. With my other leg I kicked out, flipping Knell off of me in the same manner he had flipped me on the catwalk. His lower back cracked against the roof ledge, and I twisted out from under him, driving my right hand towards his head.

His head snapped back as my right hand connected, but the brilliant new flash of pain that came from punching with my severely injured hand told me the punch hurt me far worse than it hurt him. I twisted and punched him again, this time with my left hand, striking a solid blow to his temple.

It was a lucky punch, stunning him quite effectively, and he stumbled, the back of his right foot pinned against the roof ledge.

As I stood there trying to catch my breath through the waves of pain in my hand and leg, Knell blacked out and crumpled backwards off the roof.

Diving forward, I managed to reach out, and, with my injured right hand, grabbed him by the shirt collar. My crushed fingers sent waves of pain up my arm, screaming into my brain as Knell’s unconscious body slammed against the wall of the building below me.

My left hand gripped the building ledge along with my left knee, keeping me from tumbling down the side of the building with Knell, I moaned from the pain shooting up from the right hand that held fast to his shirt.

He was an enemy, he was a killer. But I wasn’t about to let him fall to his death.

It was something I learned from Spider-Man after all.

Knell was a killer.

But I wasn’t.

He was incapacitated. I had won. Now I just needed to pull him up, figure out a way to secure him, and then worry about how the hell I was going to anonymously convince the police that he was somehow a deranged lunatic and killer.

Shit, I hadn’t thought any of this through. And the overwhelming pulses of pain shooting up my arms didn’t help any. How the hell was I supposed to pin the wolf murders on Knell without revealing his lycanthropy?

I suppose you can’t blame a guy for not thinking about this given all that had gone down in the past half hour or so. I had, after all, been a bit busy trying to look normal on the set of one of the world’s most popular late night shows while a serial killer rock star threatened to kill the woman I loved in front of me.

Time for that later, I thought, and tried pulling Knell’s body up with my right arm. The pain throbbed even deeper and I felt dangerously close to blacking out.

Just then, Knell twisted in my grip, and his eyes opened.

“You fool!” Knell said, looking up at me. “You never show an enemy mercy.” He then reached up with both of his hands, squeezing my right hand tightly between his own. “And I’d rather die than be saved by a weak fool like you.”

I screamed in pain as his crushing grip forced me to release the grip I had on his shirt.

Knell glared at me as he fell, his eyes never leaving mine and the twisted grin of his bloodied mouth sent new waves of cold shivers down my spine as I watched him plunge to his death.