Shadow of Nevermore

by Lilly Black

  "Go straight to me about what?" Dani asked as she entered the office debuting a second long, flowing purple dress, and though Olivia and Liana gave her strange looks, they had more important matters to discuss at the moment.

  "Why, Liana? What was the spell for?" Olivia demanded, and Liana looked down and sighed before continuing.

  "The reason I went to the witch in the first place was because I wanted to see if she could..." she trailed off. She knew how painful her problem had been all of her life, but she didn't expect them to understand, especially Olivia who always seemed to live such a perfect, charmed life. "I wanted to see if she could make me feel beautiful."

  "Are you fucking kidding me?" Olivia spat.

  "You are beautiful, Lilo," Dani assured her as she shot an impatient look at the queen.

  "Not everywhere," Liana said cryptically.

  "If you did all this just because you think your thighs are too thick, I swear to all that's fucking holy..." Olivia began.

  "That's not it!" Liana shouted. "You don't understand! Nobody understands because neither of you have ever had to go through puberty over and over as an adult! You don't know what it's like...how it hurts...what it does to your self esteem..."

  "Then tell us, shug," Dani said. "We're your friends, and we're here for you."

  "Do you remember when my parents put me in Catholic school in the ninth grade, then I ended up coming back to our high school after just a few weeks?" she asked, and they nodded. "It was because of this.

  "I started hanging out with a girl I knew from church, and one night she invited me to a party. When we got there, it was just us and two sophomore boys, and they had some vodka, so we drank a little. Their parents weren't home, and my friend went up into one of the bedrooms with one of the guys, and the other one was cute, so when he tried to kiss me, I let him. I even let him unhook my bra, but that's as far as I was willing to go. He tried to get his hand up my skirt, but I kept stopping him. Then when I looked away for a second, he slipped it in there anyway, right between my thighs.

  "I pushed him away, but he kept asking what it was that he felt there. When I wouldn't tell him, he held me down and pulled up my skirt to look. It was just really bad acne. That's all, but teenagers are idiots. He thought it was an STD. I tried to tell him otherwise even though I was embarrassed, but he didn't get it, so I left and ran home.

  "The next Monday at school, everyone was calling me Lianarea, like gonorrhea, and I had to explain that to my mother. That's why she finally let me come back to school with you guys because I convinced her that I would never have lived it down. She didn't know that they stopped doing it after my brother beat the boy half to death, but it didn't matter because the damage was done."

  "I had no idea," Olivia said. "But those were just stupid boys, Liana. Grown men know better. They know things aren't perfect. I have scars all over my body from surgeries, and..."

  "It's not the same, Olivia."

  "Of course, it's not the same," Dani said, sitting down and putting her arm around Liana. "Still, she is right. Aiden is an adult, and he loves you."

  "You don't understand," Liana said. They didn't understand. No one ever would because they had no idea what it was like to live with her shame.

  "Do you remember how bad my skin was in high school? I do understand, Lilo. It was embarrassing, and I hated it, but I don't think I would have consented to being turned into a werewolf to avoid it," Dani said with an uncomfortable laugh as she tried to sooth her friend with her attempt at a joke, but Liana grew more upset until she finally jumped to her feet in a frenzy of tears and frustration.

  "You think you could live with this?" she demanded, feeling backed into a corner as she began stripping off her clothes.

  "Shug, you don't have to..." Dani began, but Liana silenced her with a stern look.

  "I love those jeans. I didn't want them ripped to shreds," she explained when she stood naked before them and began the transformation into a wolf. Her friends watched in fascination and horror as she morphed into a terrifying amalgamation of a human and a wolf before quickly shifting back to her natural form so she could allow her body to show the scars and blemishes that she used to have. She sat down on Olivia's desk, covered her vagina with her hand, and spread her legs. "This. This is why I was willing to become a fucking monster who could kill everyone she knows once a month if I'm not locked up. Happy?"

  Then she removed her hand to give them a full grasp of what they were looking at. It wasn't just acne and scars, it was the total ruination of the sexual being she could have become. It had held her back her whole life and limited what she was willing to do despite her desires, and Olivia and Dani finally got it. They stood speechless as the beautiful, shapely woman that men always lusted after exposed the most sensitive parts of her body dispelling the entire illusion of confident sexuality, and they both realized how painful it would be to know that she had a perfect body but could never even wear a bikini without boy shorts, never take sexy photos that showed her inner thighs, never even make love with the lights on without blindfolding her partner and tying his hands behind his back lest he feel the rough, twisted flesh. Such simple things denied her because of a bad combination of genetics that was neither fair nor useful in any way, and Olivia took off her own jacket to cover her as tears streamed down the faces of all three.

  "I know it seems petty," Liana said as she cried, her friends holding her tight with the coat wrapped loosely around her. "But you just don't understand what it's done to me. I feel dirty, scummy, but I'm not. It doesn't matter how clean I am. It doesn't stop it. Nothing stops it, and it doesn't matter what a good person Aiden or any other man is, it's gross. Nobody wants that against their cheeks. I'm just...I'm disgusting, but I can't help it, and I couldn't take it anymore. The witch offered me a way out that I'd been waiting for my whole life."

  "No, I get it," Olivia said. All of her scars and blemishes had been on the inside, but nothing illustrated that damage better for her than to see them on the outside. "I would have done the same. I'm so sorry, Lilo. I had no idea you were dealing with that all these years."

  "I'm sorry, too," Dani added. "I should have known something was wrong, but you always seem so confident, I just never dreamed..."

  "I had to," Liana said. "I had to be perfect. Everything you could see had to be perfect because if I wasn't, I felt like people would know, like they'd believe what that asshole boy said in the 9th grade, and I'd become nothing but this fucked up skin between my legs. It just felt so good to look in the mirror and not see it. I'd have given up a limb for it...but instead, I became a goddamned werewolf, so here we are."

  "Here we are," Dani repeated, then she sighed and laughed in the same breath.

  "We've got you, Lilo," Olivia assured her. "There's a cage in the secret bunker beneath where we're standing that I had built for Evil. If Dani can stand watch while I'm away, you should be safe, and everyone up here should be safe from you."

  "And there's nothing I would rather do tonight than watch my best friend turn into a violent, deadly hellbeast, so, yeah, let's do this!" Dani said, making them all laugh.

  Knowing she should have done it long ago, Olivia was apologetic when she showed them how to access the bunker through the panic room in her bedroom. She swore them to secrecy, and Liana swore Olivia and Dani to the same once they were down there just before she transformed into her lupine form. In the harsh lights of the bunker, they had several minutes to examine their friend as she tested the strength of the bars, deeming them capable of keeping her locked in. Olivia hung the key on a hook around the corner where no one in the cage could possibly access it, and they left to prepare for the day. Liana and Dani didn't have to return until midnight as the witch had told Liana that the moon wouldn't rise until sometime thereafter. It would set at some point tomorrow morning, but they only had to make it until daybreak. Once the sun came up, the moon's power over her would be lost for another twenty-eight days.

  "Please don'
t tell anyone else about the bunker," Olivia reiterated. "We may need it to survive someday."

  "I won't," Liana said.

  "I promise," Dani said, and as they headed back toward the elevator, Olivia finally asked the question that had been in the back of her mind since Dani first arrived.

  "What the fuck are you wearing?"

  "This old thing? Psh!" Dani said with a smirk, and that's all she said on the subject because while Liana may have been comfortable telling her friends that she had made a deal with the witch that turned her into a werewolf, Dani was not ready to reveal her powers.

  Liana had planned a mission for Alek, Aiden, and Reid this morning to find some additional batteries for the recon mission later that day. They didn't have an urgent need for the batteries, but she had two good reasons for wanting Aiden out of the Deadfall for a while: She needed time to talk to Olivia about her curse, and she wanted Aiden to observe Reid and Alek together in the field to see if it really was a good idea to send them both on the mission to the Sinner's compound. The hostility between them had escalated, and even though she didn't believe they could die after both Aiden and Alek had survived fatal injuries, that didn't mean they couldn't get captured and fuck things up for everyone at the Deadfall.

  Aiden invited Jax to tag along to help break up any fights, and the four set out to loot the houses in an out-of-the-way, affluent neighborhood that was likely to yield plenty of electronics if no one else had found it first. Perhaps no one had before today, but when they drove into the small, upscale community, they saw a van up ahead of them. It was wrecked into a light post but still running and surrounded by zombies. Aiden and Jax killed the engines on their motorcycles to keep from drawing the attention of the dead, and Alek and Reid got out of the car. They hadn't been bickering, but there was a heavy tension in the air between them, which was only exacerbated by Alek's camaraderie with the other men, making Reid feel like the odd man out.

  "Should we help?" Jax asked, scanning the area around the van. None of the other men could just walk away.

  "Well, first thing we need to do is get the zombies off the van so we can see if the people inside are still alive," Aiden said.

  "I got this," Reid offered, and he reached for the MP3 player on his armband. It was set with a death song that would play once the power was turned on with a two second delay in case they needed to throw it to lure the dead away.

  "Hang on," Alek said. "I think we should let Jax throw his."

  "Ah, shit, what have you done?" Jax asked, but Alek just smirked as Jax removed it from his arm band. He pressed the button then threw it as hard as he could into a yard across the street from the van, and suddenly, loud music started blasting, immediately capturing the attention of the majority of the dead.

  It was "Bye Bye, Birdie".

  "You fucking douche," Jax said, laughing at his friend, and even Reid cracked a smile as the men crept toward the van to see if the people in it were alive. There were still a couple of zombies who hadn't been drawn away by the sound, and Reid and Alek took them out with knives as Jax opened the passenger side door to find two scared women in the front. Then a gunshot rang out.

  Aiden turned to see a young girl, no more than twelve, standing behind them and holding up a .22 gage handgun, and behind her, the dead were approaching, abandoning the music that continued to play in a loop, drawn by the sounds of gunfire and screaming as Jax fell to the ground.

  "We're here to help you," Aiden said to the girl as Alek rushed to Jax's side. Reid slipped around the back of the van and disarmed the child before she could fire again, but with the zombies approaching, there was no time to explain anything to anyone. Reid scooped her up and started barking out orders.

  "Aiden, Alek! Get Jax in the passenger seat! Ladies, in the back seat. Aiden, we'll take the motorcycles. Alek, you drive the car." As the women climbed out of the van to follow Reid, Alek and Aiden got on both sides of Jax to help him to the car. The bullet had gone through his spine, entering at the small of the back and exiting through his abdomen, and though he could feel his legs, it hurt too bad to use them.

  Reid got the women and the child in the back of the car, then opened the passenger side door for Jax, but the dead were approaching faster than Aiden and Alek could while carrying Jax's dead weight. With his arm around Alek's left shoulder, Jax pulled off his MP3 player, pressed the button, and threw it, hoping to buy them some time, and when the song "I'm an Asshole" began playing, cued directly to the chorus, Jax cackled through the pain. Laughing with him, Aiden and Alek put him in the car, and Alek got in the driver's seat just in time since the music only distracted the zombies for a few seconds with live bait right before them. But Alek got the car started and slammed on the gas pedal. He peeled out, and Reid and Aiden followed on the motorcycles.

  When they made it back to the Deadfall, Alek drove through the gate and up the hill directly to the infirmary. Jax's bleeding had stopped, but he still couldn't walk. By the time Dr. Gorely examined him, the external damage had become nothing more than a small scar on his back and a slightly larger one on his stomach.

  "What's going on here?" the doctor demanded, confused by all of the blood with no wound to account for it.

  "Ummm..." Alek began, realizing he had no idea what to tell her.

  "The blood's not mine," Jax lied. "It's from a fresh zombie who attacked me."

  "Then why are you here?"

  "I took a rubber bullet to the spine, and it hit an old injury," he explained because he didn't know what else to say, but Alek realized that sooner or later, people were going to notice that their leaders were immortal.

  "He's in a lot of pain," Alek told the doctor because even though Jax had healed, that part was evident, and Dr. Gorely was willing to treat the pain as well as give him antibiotics in case there had been internal injuries they couldn't see. Though the Sinner had taken most of their medical supplies, Olivia had actually stashed the majority of their inventory in the bunker, and she doled it out to the doctor as necessary. With Dani wringing her hands and crying, Dr. Gorely started Jax on an antibiotic and gave him some oral pain meds, then the men helped him to his cabin where he relayed the story for his worried wife.

  "I don't understand why you're still in pain," she said. "The wounds have healed like they did with Alek and Aiden."

  "Yes, but Aiden said he was sore for a few days, and Alek said he got some headaches. I was shot in the spine, Dani."

  "I know," she said with tears in her eyes. "You scared the hell out of me, but at least now you know for sure that I love you."

  "I love you, too, baby girl," he said, feeling groggy from the medication and not even realizing that his survival seemed to prove her love as it proved her story of the spell cast in Pittsburgh.

  "I'll let you get some rest," she said as she kissed him on the forehead. "I'll bring you some lunch later, okay?"

  "You're too good to me," he muttered, his words fading at the end as the narcotic overtook him.

  "So, how'd they do?" Olivia asked when she ran into Liana on the way back from Rena's workshop where she got her MP3 player for today's mission. She also had to get a new one for Alek, and this one would play the actual song he had chosen, though she did see the wisdom in letting friends pick something that would give a doomed person a last laugh before being ripped apart by zombies.

  "Aiden doesn't know how they did alone in the car together, but when things went bad, they worked as a team," Liana said. "What's the deal with the people they brought back?"

  "They're all sisters. They had been on vacation at the beach when it hit, and they had been working their way home to their parents house ever since."

  "So, are they going back there?"

  "No. They found their parents dead, had to put their mother down, and got chased out of the house by their dad. They were so distraught, the eldest drove them straight into a light pole, and they probably wouldn't be here if not for our men. I'm going to keep them under guard in the deer stand for
a few days, but I think it's safe to say we have three new residents."

  "Good," Liana said. "That little one is apparently a damn good shot."

  "Guess she doesn't know that you need to shoot zombies in the head," Olivia said with a smile, but the truth was that the kid did know that. She and her sisters had just run into their share of men like those at the prison, and the youngest one had developed a sadistic desire to wound and leave rapists for the dead. The challenge that lay ahead was to teach her to spot the difference before she wounded any good men who weren't immortal.

  Olivia continued on to the lodge where she went into the bunker through her panic room. There she put in an IV port and mixed a small bag of saline, Demerol, and Phenergan. If she were to get bitten and have to play her death song, she could quickly and easily fill her veins with 50 mg of liquid oblivion, and despite that she had come to believe that the spell at Madam Levinia's made the women and their children immortal as well, Olivia was unwilling to take a chance on that untested theory in the event of a zombie bite. There was nothing to suggest that the virus mixed with the spell wouldn't just lead to an indestructible zombie. If it happened to one of the others, they could chain them up until they rotted away, but she just couldn't face the idea of Reid and Alek having to go through that if it happened to her.

  Better, she thought, to take the drug, drift away, and let the zombies consume me until there's nothing left to come back.

  With Dani set to take care of Liana tonight and Dr. Gorely set to take care of Jax, the recon mission for the Sinner's compound departed with only Olivia, Alek, Reid, and Ravi. It was almost nightfall, and after an hour's drive, they would have to walk through the woods to get there on the only route where they did not expect to run into any scouts watching the entrance using a map Widow had marked up for them. She had never been there, but she had been forced to service some of the Sinner's men when she was held captive by the Widowmaker. The men talked a lot, and she remembered every detail.