by Nicole Thorn
“I have no idea what you want,” I said, “but I don’t have it. You could run away right now and be fine. Or, you can come at me and die.”
He chuffed at me, still stalking forward. Weird that a short, wide eyed human girl didn’t appear to be a threat to a werewolf. That meant I would die here, and I didn’t even know why. My parents wouldn’t get to know why either.
The wolf braced to leap at me, his paws locking onto the ground. I shut my eyes as tightly as I could, not wanting to see myself get torn apart. I would have to hear it, and that was bad enough.
Then a yelp sounded off, bouncing off the trees. I heard a thump, and a whoosh.
When I looked, I saw the wolf on the ground, an arrow in his shoulder. Blood poured around the arrow, making his black fur look somehow darker. His looked around as I heard another whoosh.
A blur appeared right before the sound of another arrow being shot. It landed on the wolf’s side, making him yelp again. The wolf still tried to stand, probably not wanting to let something kill him right there. I could respect that, but I sort of wanted him dead.
That blur appeared in front of me, seemingly out of nowhere. I saw that it was a person; a massive person, but not the magical blob I’d been thinking before.
It was a boy non-blob, I noticed. He might have been almost as big as Zander, but just a tiny bit shorter. While Zander was really a big fella, this one looked bulkier. I wouldn’t have been able to lock my hands around his arm, and I was willing to bet he could have lifted me up with one hand. That aside, I noticed he had on a button up shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows to reveal even more of his dark brown muscles. I had to crane my neck up to see his hair, short and curly and black. I couldn’t see his face.
The wolf tried to rise again, and I noticed that my blob boy had a crossbow with him. The design looked elaborate, and it reminded me of the weapons that my friends had. Fancy and made so they couldn’t break.
“I mean, go for it if you want to,” the blob said, pointing his crossbow at the stalking wolf. “I wouldn’t, if I were you, but whatever.”
The wolf let out a growl before it tried launching himself at the stranger, and another arrow flew through the air. I yelped when it went into his left eye, killing the werewolf in less than a second. It dropped into a heap in my backyard, bloody and still.
I had my hands over my face as the boy turned around, tilting his head all the way down to look at me. “You good?”
I stared, wide eyed up at a kind yet stern face. I noticed his eyes were a lavender-ish shade of purple I’d never seen before. The color looked brighter when the boy smirked at me as I squeaked out a ‘fine.’
“Who are you?” I asked.
He hung up his crossbow on the back of his vest, and he put a hand out to me. “Micha Alexander. Nice to meet you.”
I made myself shake his massive hand. “Okay . . . neat. I’m going to need a lot more than that, if you don’t mind.”
His hands slipped into his pockets as he lifted up on his toes, looking even taller. “Well, I know who you are, so I guess I get to skip the more in-depth explanation. You know who the Hunters are, right?”
Somehow, my eyes went even wider as I whispered, “You’re a Hunter?” As in, one of Artemis’ Hunters. They went after werewolves specifically, because a lot of bad stuff had happened, and they got overpopulated. I didn’t know the story all that well, but Zeus wanted them dead, so Artemis helped.
“Yup,” Micha answered. “I kill werewolves for a living. And when I say for a living, I mean, Artemis gives me a very small amount of help in the form of weapons, and I have to sell clothes online so I can eat.”
I gulped, wanting to get away from my savoir. “Well, thank you for your help, but no offense, I don’t like what you Hunters do. Not all werewolves are like our bloody friend over there.”
Micha held his hands out in front of him. “I get it, I get it. I’ll have you know that we aren’t like that anymore. At least, not all of us. I hunt down the wolves that hurt people, and the ones Artemis sends me after. Most of the people in my family who would kill the other ones, are dead now.”
I couldn’t be happy about that, but it made me feel slightly better to know that this person didn’t have those ideals. As grateful as I was that he’d saved me, it would have made me feel bad if I knew he was a shameless murderer hellbent on taking out a whole species.
“Okay then,” I said in a breath. I felt like I hadn’t yet calmed down from the threat of certain death, and I could almost promise I would have bad dreams later. “Now the most obvious question . . . why are you here? Your timing is insane.”
“I got a tip,” he said. “I’ve been living here for a few months now, over in an apartment Artemis bought me. She didn’t bother telling me why I should come here, but you know how that goes.”
I did, unfortunately. That had happened to most of the people I associated with, and that included me. The gods kept on ushering people over to this area, not bothering to mention if there was a reason for it. I would have liked to believe something nice, like that they wanted us to be friends. It was never that innocent when it came to the gods.
“Why was that wolf trying to kill me then?” I asked.
Micha gave a shrug, still utterly calm. If this had been a normal day for him, then I didn’t want to see what his version of excitement was. “I don’t really know, but I assume someone sent him here. I can’t imagine it was for anything good. You get into trouble lately?”
I hadn’t really left my house in . . . ever, so I wasn’t all that familiar with being in trouble. In fact, the only time I’d left the house had been because of the gods . . . oh . . . That might have had something to do with this, come to think of it.
But we hadn’t figured out who took the souls out of the Meadows. I’d only been able to tell the gods that a man and woman had done it, and that the man sounded a little like Hermes. That didn’t pin it on anyone, and I couldn’t get more information just sitting around the house. If that person had been the one to send the wolf after me, then it would have been a preemptive strike on a person who was no threat against them. Not fair. Not fair at all.
With a deep breath, I said, “I was just in the underworld trying to figure out who was stealing souls. Do you think that’s it?”
Purple eyes stared at me, a brow arched. Micha looked serious and sarcastic at the same time, and I had no idea how a person could pull that off with such ease. “It . . . it might. Do you go to the underworld a lot?”
I shook my head. “Only the one time. Hermes and Artemis came to get me and Aster.” I stopped, then looked at the dead wolf. He’d come after me, probably because of what I’d just been up to. But Aster had been up to that same thing.
I stared up at the Hunter with panic. “Aster!”
“What? Is that a name?”
I put my hand on his arm, squeezing with worry. It almost hurt my hand. “My friend, he was with me. Something could be trying to hurt him too! Did Artemis tell you anything about a wolf attacking him?”
“Nothing.”
That wasn’t good enough for me. I wouldn’t settle for assuming Aster didn’t have something coming his way, because nothing ever worked out like that. I took a handful of fabric from Micha’s shirt, yanking him in the other direction.
“We have to move!” I shouted. “Anything could be hurting him. Come on!”
Micha stared down at his shirt as I pulled on it. He plucked my hand from him. “You only had to ask.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
I Didn’t Ask For This
Aster
MOM’S SILENT TREATMENT had started getting to me. Normally, she would only stay quiet for as long as it took for me to apologize. I’d apologized four times, and none of them seemed to matter to her one way or another. She had barely come out of her room since this morning, which made it all the harder to get her forgiveness. I’d stood outside her bedroom door, apologizing to no avail.
Eventually, I
gave up and went to work on one of my paintings. Callie seemed to like them a lot, so I thought I’d do one for her. Something simple, like a picture of Seattle from a distance. Since she seemed to like it here a lot more than I did. Seattle itself wasn’t a bad city, nor was Washington a bad state. I just missed the sunlight.
Mom came out of her room about halfway through the painting. She glared at me, putting her hand on her hip. I waited for some scathing comment about how I clearly had gotten over what I’d done to her. At least then the silent treatment would be over, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.
The comment never came. She turned away from me, walking back to her room with her nose in the air. Sighing, I got up and walked to her bedroom door. I knocked, calling through, “Hey, Mom? I’m sorry about what happened, I really am. Why don’t I make you something to eat? I could make your favorite.”
That usually got her to forgive me if all else failed. She liked ravioli, but hated making it herself. When I turned twelve, she forced me to learn so that she didn’t have to suffer through it whenever she got a craving. The fact that she stayed silent now didn’t bode well for me.
The last time she had gotten this mad, things didn’t settle down for months, and Mom screamed at me every single day for that entire time. Sighing, I went back to my painting, adding a few flourishes that I thought Callie would enjoy looking at. I even put sticky notes on one of the cars, a small detail that I didn’t think she would notice. I still added it, because it made me think of her.
I lost track of time while I worked. Hours slipped by, and each line that I put on the painting became more precise, more detailed than anyone without Apollo’s blood in their veins would bother with. I only stopped when my stomach really started to rumble. I went to look for something to eat, but the fridge didn’t have much in it. My mother had thrown out everything that she bought for me, which didn’t surprise me. She had never been one to hold her anger in when things didn’t go her way.
I’d almost settled on having some kind of canned food when someone knocked on the door. I glanced over, then back at the bedroom where my mother had vanished.
She finally said something. “Are you going to answer that, Aster, or are you going to make me do it, like normal?”
“I’ve got it,” I said, smirking to myself. There she had spoken to me. Which meant that we would be on good terms, or as good as we ever got, within a few days. I went to the door and pulled it open to find a monster standing on the other side.
All right, monster wasn’t quite fair. But if one had never seen a werewolf in mid-change, they couldn’t judge me for freaking out. I caught the werewolf right before its fur started to come in, so that it looked like wet inside out skin. I leapt back, not screaming. Not screaming at all, because demigods didn’t scream over something as harmless as a werewolf. No, we were tougher than that.
Much tougher.
“Aster?” Mom called.
“Stay in there!” I shouted back, looking around for some kind of weapon. Since I’d dealt with werewolves all the time, I grabbed the smartest thing that I could. A vase. With skills like these, it was a miracle that I had made it to adulthood, or close enough that it didn’t matter.
The werewolf finished changing and turned to me. He was black with white streaks; the way an older man’s hair would look if he had been in human form. He also looked large enough to break down a door without really trying if he wanted to. The werewolf leapt at me, his teeth flashing immediately.
I threw my vase.
I missed.
However, all was not lost. The vase broke about two feet in front of the wolf, mostly because I had misjudged my grip on the thing. The werewolf also misjudged his own strength of character and ran right through the glass, cutting up the pads of his paws. He yelped, bleeding and leaping to the side.
Unfortunately, werewolves healed extremely fast and the blood had started to dry. And since my luck was just wonderful, my mother started to come out of her bedroom. “Aster, what the hell do you think you’re—” she abruptly stopped upon seeing the large canine intruder.
“Um, hey, Mom. Do you think you could go back into your bedroom for a few minutes?” I asked as the werewolf launched itself at me. I leapt to the side, barely avoiding getting teeth in my shoulder and neck. The werewolf landed in a jumble of legs, fangs showing and snarling so loud that I couldn’t hear my mother’s reply.
I figured that it had been scathing, because she slammed the door so hard that the glasses in the cabinets shook against each other. The werewolf leapt up again, mouth already opened and teeth flashing. I had about a second to really think about my life choices and how I had gotten here. Then I ducked.
I couldn’t get close enough to the floor to really save myself unfortunately. The werewolf landed on my back, claws digging through my shoulder to rip into the skin along my spine. I ground my teeth together as pain flared, then rolled trying to dislodge the werewolf. The skin along my spine started to heal immediately, but that didn’t make the experience any more pleasant.
The werewolf turned around, sinking fangs into my leg. I kicked him in the face, and the wolf let out a yelp as I broke something. He backed away, shaking his head. I’d broken a bone in his snout hard enough that it had become crooked, but I could see it healing right before my eyes, the bones not even having to be set to straighten out.
“Okay, look,” I said, getting to my feet. “We both heal too fast to do too much damage to one another. Why don’t we call this a draw, go our separate ways, and pretend like this never happened?”
The werewolf shook his head, as if trying to get something off his snout. Then he lifted that head to stare at me with cold yellow eyes. I got the feeling that his answer to my request was a hard no. I started to back away, looking around for another weapon. Unfortunately, nothing in our apartment could lend itself to being useful, and I’d never had reason to learn how to fight. Even if I had, I’d never had to fight a wolf with human intelligence before. It seemed more than likely I would end up losing.
What happened if my throat got ripped out? Would I be able to heal from that, or could I die if enough blood came pouring out of me?
The werewolf started to gather his paws again.
I could hear my mother screaming from her bedroom, demanding to know what the hell was happening in her apartment. I looked up, catching sight of our knife stand. Grabbing one of those would be easy, but stabbing the wolf would not. He had preternatural speed for one thing, for another, he’d know what I was trying to do. So, I needed to distract him.
A thought popped into my head when he flashed his teeth at me. Large, white teeth, that would be perfect for shredding demigod flesh into a thousand pieces.
I didn’t have time to think, just react.
Closing my eyes, I reached into myself, to that part of me that actually felt like Apollo’s son. The well of power in my chest rose up as I called it, filling the entirety of my body, and calming the frantic thoughts in my head and the jittery nerves dancing along my hands. It felt like I could breathe for the first time since I had last accessed this power. It filled me up until tingles ran throughout my body.
Opening my eyes, light poured from them, touching everything around me. The kind of light that generated a lot of heat. The tile underneath me started to turn brown, but I couldn’t focus on that. I turned my attention toward the werewolf, who had made his leap. I slid to the side as if moving my body were the most natural thing in the world. His claws landed on the tile, scratching through the brown spots that I had left.
The werewolf started to whine, ducking his head, trying to escape the light as it got brighter and brighter, as it started to burn the tile even more. I could smell the smokiness of it, as it filled every nook and cranny of the apartment. I reached up, grabbing the knife from the stand.
The plastic handle immediately started to collapse underneath my hand, but I didn’t worry about that. I had one shot before the knife would be useless.
Soon, I’d be burning so hot that the apartment got set on fire and the metal of the knife would start to be malleable.
I launched myself forward, slammed my knife into the wolf’s side. He let out a howl of pain as I sank the blade in to the hilt. Blood started to pour from the wound. It became a waterfall of red as I jammed the knife up and then down, widening the wound even more. I yanked the blade out, falling backward as the wolf’s blood stained the ground, started to sizzle, and then dried with the heat baking off me. With conscious thought, I started to fight that power I had brought out from within me. It didn’t want to go back into the hidey hole that I’d put it in, but eventually I managed to strangle it into submission.
The light died down, the heat started to dissipate. I looked at the wolf lying on the ground. He cried sadly once, then fell still. Blood had soaked into the grout of our kitchen tile, but most of it had dried into a hard crust. The werewolf had charred fur, and it looked like the edges of his wound had gotten crusty as well. I started to sit up, shaking with every movement as I did so.
The werewolf didn’t budge.
I nudged him with my foot, because, ya know, that sounded like a smart move. I should definitely try and wake the beast that attempted to kill me.
The wolf didn’t move still.
Sighing, I dropped my ruined knife onto the counter, rubbed my forehead, and then grimaced when I heard the bedroom door open. My mother stepped out, her mouth opened. Her eyes moved over to me, and for a second, I thought that I saw relief. Maybe even a little affection. Then it all vanished, and she stormed into the room like a tornado, her eyes blazing. “What the hell did you do?” Her voice grated along my nerves, making me hunch my shoulders, grind my teeth, and try to hide.
“I defended myself,” I said. I’d intended to sound serious and a little angry. All that came out was a soft kind of plea.
“You . . . you killed something, in my kitchen!” Mom shouted. “What did you do that would have brought this creature into our lives to begin with?” she demanded, rounding on me. “It has something to do with where you disappeared to, right? You brought this creature here from wherever you went? Gone three days, then when you get back, you bring more trouble with you. I swear, you get worse every year!”
