by Harry Nix
He quickly caught the sensation Stephen wasn’t a body, but a doorway. On the other side of it was a rope, not as strong and heavy as Jacob’s had been, but strong enough as Stephen had only just died. Alex carefully grasped it and then began to pull as though he was hauling a net of fish up from the ocean. He got a brief flash of Stephen’s face coming out of the darkness, the kid terrified, and then his body was alive again and Alex was back, splattered with the blood gushing from Stephen’s neck. Alex immediately cast his healing flame spell, charging it up, and Stephen gave a wet gurgle as his neck healed, the veins coming back together. Alex held the spell on him until every injury was gone before finally letting it go.
The kid sat up, his clothes wet with his own blood, his face still pale. Alex was on the ground kneeling beside him, still in his hybrid form. He shifted back to human, which didn’t do much to lessen the wet metallic scent of blood.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. Despite his promise to Nia, he didn’t want to let the kid go, to make him leave. He’d seen what they could achieve in just a morning. After a week, he could have great and terrible weapons such that the mages and vampires coming against them would be decimated.
“I’m leaving now, like you said,” Stephen murmured. His voice was flat and his eyes glossy. He managed to get to his feet and walked out, leaving Alex sitting on the kitchen floor, covered in blood and wondering what the hell had just happened. Barely thirty seconds passed before he finally got himself together and jumped up, rushing out of the house.
He was thinking there must be some way to repair this, some way perhaps he could bring Nia around, or if worst came to worst, hide the kid away, tell lies for the greater good.
He followed the trail of blood which went out down the small cracked path to the sidewalk. Alex rushed out, following the blood droplets as they turned left, but a few paces down the road they vanished as though the kid had been plucked up into the sky. Alex looked around, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. There was no way he could vanish so quickly. He went to shift to hybrid, hoping he could at least sniff him out if the kid was just hiding in one of the nearby houses, but the Great Barrier stomped down on him before he was even halfway done, forcing him back to human with a roar of pain that surged through his body.
Alex stumbled, but finally got to his feet again. There were normals nearby, at least one watching him from one of the windows. Alex looked down at his clothes, which were saturated with blood, and decided not to risk it. The normal who’d seen him might even now be calling the police.
Alex rushed back inside the abandoned house and found himself in the kitchen again, the scattered food where he’d dropped it. He grabbed the two enchanted crowbars sitting on the table and took them out to the front room, dropping them on the floor before suddenly realizing he’d stained them with blood.
“Fuck!” Alex swore. With that, he shifted to hybrid, making his bloody clothes disappear, though he still had blood on his body. He couldn’t feel Nia anymore, although he could sense some of his pack in a few nearby houses. His mate had gone directly against his will, had ruined everything, and he had no idea where she’d gone.
Feeling a sudden surge of rage, Alex punched the wall, ripping a hole through it and out to the other side. He felt like he wanted to keep going, punching and kicking at the house until he reduced it to rubble, but he managed to restrain himself. What was done was done. He had no idea what he was going to do about Nia, though—no idea what he could even say to her. This felt like an immense betrayal.
He eventually calmed somewhat, found the shower, which was cold water only, and an old dried up piece of soap, which he used to scrub the blood off himself before shifting back to human and trying to get most of the blood out of his clothing. Alex was just coming out of the shower, still fully dressed and sopping wet, but mostly clean, though still with a few faint bloodstains on his clothing, when he heard someone at the front door. He knew it was Jeremiah before he even opened it. The werewolf marched in, quickly slamming the door behind him and switching to hybrid form at the scent of the blood, just as Alex appeared at the end of the corridor putting his hands up.
“We have a problem, but it’s okay now. We definitely need to clean this place up,” Alex said. Jeremiah didn’t say anything but came over to look through the kitchen door at the pools of blood.
“So Stephen’s no longer with us,” Jeremiah said.
“He’s alive but he’s gone, I think this time for good,” Alex said. Alex felt a ripple then, like a slight wave coming through the magic that surrounded him. It was light and delicate, a gentle touch, but he saw the pool of blood start to shimmer, changing color as pieces of it broke away. Somewhere, someone had cast a cleanse spell on Stephen’s blood, removing any chance Alex had of tracking him.
“Well, at least that makes cleanup easier,” Jeremiah said as the blood vanished as though it had never been.
16
Alex sat in the Grease Trap, watching Jacob and Jeremiah shovel down food. Despite the pile of food sitting in front of him, he had no appetite whatsoever. Things had gone from bad to worse at such rapid speed that Alex was starting to wonder if he truly was cursed. He even cast Know Thyself just to check whether there were any spells working on him that he could detect. He’d taken two enchanted crowbars back to the main house and put them in the office, but then April had appeared saying that Nia had come by and in all of five seconds had grabbed some clothing, taken a car, and disappeared. That was the bad.
The worse was when April touched him and suddenly her face went pale and she started babbling about Alex touching some dead thing. He gave her the abridged version of Nia killing Stephen and then pulling the kid back out of the dark, and April had gone into full panic at that point. She’d told Alex before that there were other things out in the dark that hungered for life and then said that Alex had touched one, that the kid hadn’t come back alone but with a passenger.
This had immediately set off a surge of activity as April ordered every werewolf they could find to search for Stephen. They’d gathered over a hundred werewolves in under half an hour and combed the streets, going through every abandoned house, but there was no sign of the kid.
Realizing it was a futile task, Alex had finally gone back to the main house to discover they had finally generated enough cash to pay the private detective. Using a burner phone, Alex had contacted him. Bronson had told him he discovered the identity of his employer and would be happy to meet somewhere public. So now Alex was at the Grease Trap, staring at food that he had no desire to eat.
“Could I have some of that if you’re not going to?” Jacob said, pointing to Alex’s pile of hash browns.
“Go for it,” Alex muttered. Jacob couldn’t read a room to save his life so he dived in, starting to consume Alex’s plate of food as well. Jeremiah was eating steadily, but he knew things were bad. Still, he ate in silence, appearing to share Alex’s position. What could they do? To have things go from happy to utter and complete chaos so rapidly still had Alex’s head spinning. Would Nia come back? What if while she was out there on her own, mages attacked her? In the rush to find Stephen it appeared Nia’s whereabouts had been pushed aside, April far more concerned about the dead passenger than the missing mate.
The wolf inside was warring with his human side. Part of him was furious at her betrayal, her disobedience. Some colder part was just deeply pissed off that she couldn’t even give him a damn week to work with the kid, before she tore his head off.
Alex realized the last two weeks of peace had showed him a calm life that, now it had been torn away, he desperately missed. He didn’t want to feel like this, he didn’t want to be at this stupid diner sitting before a pile of food waiting for a goddamn private detective to bring him more problems. He already had enough problems. He had an address from Henry that was out on the edge of town where the wealthy district backed onto farm land. Alex hadn’t gone himself, but some of his pack had, returning with news that it was a former ho
rse farm and now seemed to be private property, but definitely had structures built on it that appeared to be barracks, and from what they observed there were at least a hundred people living there, coming and going at all hours. Alex had even seen photographs and it reminded him of April’s home that looked like a school.
There was no information online about it of course, and he could only wonder if that was what Henry had given him, a school. Some of the people there had looked young and Alex wondered if Henry thought he was the kind of person who would murder teenagers.
So there was that problem sitting out on the edge of town plus the three wards they’d come across. There was also a phone number that Eric, the mage, had given Alex. He’d claimed Alex’s parents might be alive and that he could help find them. Alex ignored that, thinking it was likely bullshit, or at best, was probably a trap.
Eric had been there the night they’d been trapped in a house that had been set on fire, the same night that Alex had killed Jasper and taken over his territory. He had no idea whether the mage was behind the binding spell but he didn’t trust him on any level. After seeing him with Wind’s pack, that distrust had only grown deeper.
Adding on to that was the fact that Julius had learned of a pack somewhere deep in the wild who had vanished twenty-three years ago. An alpha and a witch who could possibly have been Alex’s parents.
The location was in the midst of wild packs who tolerated no outsiders and would kill on sight.
Alex let his thoughts go like he was taking each problem and beating himself with it over the shoulders, trying to draw blood.
Finally, of course, was the power, the one that he’d been able to grasp when he was around groups of werewolves. Alex was starting to think that perhaps running his pack by some kind of democracy was a stupid idea.
Julius listened to his pack too, but it was clear he was in charge. Alex didn’t want his pack members to ever live in fear of him, the way that Jasper had inspired fear in the Greenacre pack, but he was starting to think that if he asserted his dominance more overtly, perhaps Stephen would still be with them.
There were crazy ideas bubbling on the outside of his mind, like taking the entire pack all at once, marching out into the territories to find the nearest pack and camping close to them long enough for Alex to exert his will to make them his, and then continue marching on like a rolling wave across the land until he got to the wild packs and he had thousands of werewolves with him. If those lunatics wanted to fight them, he would shred them to pieces to make his way through to try to find a single clue to his past.
Alex came back to himself as Jeremiah gently touched him on the back of the hand with the end of his fork, pressing the tines into his skin. Alex realized he’d begun growling under his breath. Alex stopped growling, but he couldn’t let the feeling go. A thousand Corvus mages dead and things still weren’t okay. They’d had two weeks of peace, but his enemies were still looking for him and cutting off teenagers’ fingers. He’d been forced into a deal with some monster who sold children.
Children!
The bell above the door jingled and in walked Bronson, Alex almost growling at the sight of him. The guy was a grade-A asshole, and now that he was in public and felt safe, he was strutting like he owned the place.
He came over and sat beside Alex without waiting for an invitation, waving the waitress over to order more food before telling her to add it to Alex’s tab. For a mad second, Alex wanted to grab the nearest knife and jab it through his hand, pinning it to the table, but he managed to resist.
“You have something for me on this fine, fine day?” Bronson said. He was sweating from the heat outside and probably from the effort of walking. Alex had the sudden dark vision of dragging the private detective out of there, dumping him in the trunk, taking him out to the wilderness, and setting him loose, hunting him down in wolf form, making him run until he puked, before he tore him to pieces.
Alex saw that Jacob and Jeremiah had both stopped eating and that Jacob was watching Bronson with undisguised hatred. Alex’s emotions were starting to affect the two of them, spreading out like a droplet of ink in water. Alex grabbed the packet of money and handed it to Bronson, who opened it briefly and looked through it before stuffing it into his pocket. He then handed Alex a crumpled yellow envelope which had clear food stains on it.
“I was right. I was working for a guy who was working for another guy, who was working for another guy who was working for a corporation that had another guy who eventually reported back to the guy. It’s got to be a fake name, but I couldn’t get any further with it,” Bronson said. Alex opened the package and pulled out the single photo within, a man he didn’t recognize meeting with another that he certainly did. Written in thick black text across the bottom of the photo was his name.
Prince.
“Yeah, I know him,” Alex growled.
“Easy there. Don’t do anything crazy,” Bronson said, putting his hands up in mock fear.
“Get the fuck out of our booth,” Alex said.
“But I got food coming,” Bronson protested.
“You heard him, fat man,” Jacob growled. Bronson looked at the two of them and then at Jeremiah who was gripping a butter knife like he was about to plunge it into Bronson’s neck.
“I can see I’m not wanted. Good doing business, if you need my help again you have my card,” Bronson said, then he scurried out of there, the bell on the door jingling as he went. The waitress returned with his food, depositing it on the table.
“That vampire just keeps showing up, doesn’t he,” Jeremiah said, finally letting out a breath. He put down his butter knife and picked up his glass of water, gulping down the last of it.
“They’re like cockroaches. You kill one and there’s always another, they hide in the dark and even if you can’t see them, they’re always there,” Jacob said. Upon seeing the photo, Alex’s anger, which had been climbing to a white-hot peak, had suddenly dulled. It was becoming cold and hard again, like a solid mass at the core of him, and thankfully, that didn’t affect his pack as much.
The list of problems was long but the vampire, Prince, was rapidly moving into first place. The power was still out, they’d gotten nowhere on the homes being condemned, and the urban redevelopment issue was slowly creeping its way through the city council. It might take a year but eventually Alex knew that bulldozers will be coming through the north of the city taking everything that was theirs.
“We’re going to pull this cockroach out into the light and tear him to pieces in front of all the rest so they know not to fuck with us,” Alex said to Jacob. With that, his appetite finally returned so he grabbed Bronson’s plate of food and started eating.
17
At two a.m. Alex gave up on trying to sleep and rolled out of bed, leaving Juno behind snoring, dead to the world. Dressed in just shorts and a t-shirt, he headed outside intending to go to his office in the factory to get some work done, but then heard a faint chime somewhere in the distance. April hadn’t come to bed, and apparently she was up, casting spells.
For a moment Alex stood there in the warm air, split between which pathway he should take. He knew that going to the office was a punishment of sorts. After the heat of the day, it was still as hot as hell in there and he knew he’d end up sitting there for the rest of the night enchanting rings in some kind of masochistic punishment for how things had gone with Nia. He could feel the lure of it, though, the urge to force himself there, to enchant away. Could maybe even fool himself that he was doing something useful and good. A moment more and hearing the faint chimes of April’s music in the distance, he gave up on that idea, and listening careful, headed in her direction.
He knew the reason for his insomnia: too many problems piled up with no action, no advancement in solving them. He had a photograph of a vampire and knew where he lived, considering they’d robbed him, but it wasn’t a solution, just a new problem. Another address from Henry and what was he meant to do? Stake it out? Get
his pack together and rush the grounds, perhaps walking them into a meat grinder that would kill many of them? And in the end, what was it for? Did he really think that if he managed to get Prince by the throat, the vampire would make a call and suddenly they would have their power reconnected, the condemnation notices removed from their doors? The vampires worked in houses so it wasn’t exactly the same as cutting off the head of a snake. They were more like a hydra and he doubted wiping out Prince would really do anything.
As Alex walked through the dark, he could faintly sense the pack around him. A werewolf up on a roof keeping watch, another leaning in the shade of a house. He continued walking along, listening for the chimes of April’s magic. His mind chewing over the various problems knowing that he had to solve some of them or the insomnia would come to kick his ass. It happened before, back in college when he was overburdened with work. It was how it always went. The body and brain were both incredibly clever and ridiculously stupid at the same time. Pile enough unsolvable problems and the brain would start breaking things, making it worse. Handing out doses of insomnia so the next day you couldn’t go to college or to your horrible job or to visit your terrible girlfriend.
It would wreck you, make you so tired you couldn’t participate in those things that were killing you. But of course, bound by the obligation to pay rent and eat food or to complete a college course, you had to keep going, putting you at war with your own mind. So it would often pull out the big guns, making you sick for weeks on end, tired as well, hoping to break the structure you were in and eliminate problems by ceasing to engage with them entirely. Alex wasn’t quite sure if werewolves got sick or how it worked if you had a healing flame to apply to yourself. He knew if he didn’t fix some things soon, there’d be insomnia, and when he finally did sleep, he would probably start sleep-talking and sleepwalking again.
