by Deanna Chase
Of course, I’d blown my clothing to bits when I converted, and didn’t know how to create new ones.
“Is she always like this?” Gregory asked me, gesturing toward Candy. “No wonder Althean is trying to exterminate the werewolves if they’re all as annoying as she is.”
“She’s alright,” I chuckled. “I’ll bet she fucks with all her clothes on and the lights off, though.”
Gregory looked around, no doubt sensing my energy usage.
“Do it again, over here a bit. I don’t think that will be close enough to the house to suffice.”
Fuck, this was going to be even worse if I had to do a conversion multiple times at each house. I really would be running low if he kept this up. Was this some way to determine how much I had stored? How much I could do before I collapsed exhausted in a heap? I complained again that this was a stupid idea and that there was no way I was going to be able to keep doing this.
He stopped and looked at me sternly. “Did we not just have this conversation? Let me see. Yes. Yes, it was the same conversation. There was some whining from you, then I threatened to do physical harm to your toy, then you grudgingly complied. Perhaps we can just skip all the middle part and get to the part where you comply? Otherwise, I’m liable to get angry and do all sorts of things I’ll really enjoy now and mildly regret later.”
I hated this angel.
I walked over closer to the house and again converted myself violently in an explosion of pressure and sound. Wyatt and Candy stayed farther back this time and managed to stay on their feet.
“I had forgotten about the clothing thing,” the angel said as he turned his back on me and walked toward the car. “You’ll need to strip each time you do this since we don’t have a truckload of outfits for you to ruin.”
I glared at him as I followed him, naked, to the car, and noticed him rub a hand over his ear. Blood. That was interesting.
The next house he stood back farther. I smiled to myself and blew everything apart and back with even more force. Candy clutched her head. “Can Wyatt and I be somewhere else for this? If she keeps it up I’ll be tossed into the adjacent county. Maybe we can just wait for you all to finish this at a local coffee shop?”
Gregory shot Candy an irritated look, and didn’t reply. He clearly had a slight nose bleed this time. “I don’t think you need to change your whole self next time,” he said rubbing his nose. “Maybe just a portion of you, instead.”
The following few houses I experimented, changing just portions of me, using less energy, changing the residents’ dog into a rat, which Candy insisted I change back. I can easily convert myself, but I’m not so good at changing other beings. The dog didn’t quite go back the same as it originally was. The owners would never be able to tell, but the unfortunate thing would die in a few weeks. I should have left it a rat. At the next house I burned a circle in the lawn with green fire. None of these seemed to have any noticeable impact on Gregory.
“The fire isn’t going to have the effect I want,” the angel scolded. “The energy signature is too vague and like natural fire. You need to actually change something, preferably yourself.”
Men. They always want you to change yourself, why can’t they just like you the way you are? I recreated a foot, but did it with a vengeance. Pop, pop. Candy stuck her finger in her ear, and Wyatt stretched his jaw, trying to normalize the pressure in their ears. And there it was, the light trickle of blood. So it wasn’t the size of the conversion that affected him. Was it the pressure change, or the sound, or both?
He stood back further the next time. I was bored with just recreating Samantha Martin, so I decided to experiment with some of my forms from back home. This time I snapped back as a gryphon, making it extra loud. Gregory looked grim as he approached me. He was coughing this time and I could see the specks of blood.
“You can’t drive around in the car looking like that. You need to change back into human form.”
I didn’t wait for him to back away, I snapped out and in with a huge sonic boom. He staggered, then shook his head. Blood dripped from his nose, and trailed down from one ear.
Sound. Everything he’d done with his energy, everything Althean had done had sound or color. Plasma and the usual destructive forces didn’t have maximum effect on them, even my raw energy glanced off them with less than expected damage. I couldn’t do color, but sound I could do.
“This isn’t going to work,” Gregory said, turning away from me and surreptitiously wiping the blood from his face. “It’s way overkill. You’re leaving a huge signature and he’ll suspect something.”
Well duh, he’d suspect something anyway if he could see I’d been to thirty nine of forty houses, conveniently leaving one house free with a big bow on top and a ‘kill me’ sign on the door. I wasn’t sure what the fuck Gregory’s game plan was with all this. Was Althean’s drive to kill the werewolves in a bizarre pattern overriding his common sense? Were we just herding him toward our trap? If so then the overkill wouldn’t matter. I couldn’t believe Althean would be so stupid, but I really didn’t know anything about angels. A demon would never have gone for this. We’d have been merrily killing werewolves halfway across the country if we saw a blatant trap like this being laid down.
“What do you mean it’s not going to work? I’m exhausted from all this, and now it’s not going to work? Plus we have twenty six more houses to go,” I whined. There was no way we could watch twenty six residences. Althean had the odds in his favor. He’d strike again and get away, hopefully moving closer to Sharpsburg where I could take my chances of escape through the wild gate.
Gregory paused for a moment. “We’ll split up. I’ll take ten houses and hex them, and you take sixteen. Just make sure you leave one open. Meet me back at the cabin whenever you’re done.”
What, leaving me unattended with Wyatt and Candy all day? With plenty of time to escape? And no very specific orders to be here at this time, and there at that time? Did he want me to run, so he could snatch me back out of thin air, deliver a smack down, and teach me a lesson? Maybe he needed some private time. Candy had been annoying as all hell, and spending the day in the company of a demon couldn’t have been easy for him either. Or possibly he was just tired of the constant nosebleeds my conversion was causing him. Either way, he had to have some faith that I’d stick around, or that he could find me if I tried to bolt for it.
I puzzled over this and my tattoo as we drove to our allocated houses. Did the mark allow him to find me and bring me to him, or only let him know if I strayed outside a certain distance from him? That kind of constant monitoring would probably require a deep connection, and a sharing of personal energy. If that were the case, then the red–violet inside me could hold a portion of him, and he might have even taken on a portion of me. Oh, that would be unbelievably ironic! My kind does this type of personal energy swap when we breed, but we don’t keep the connection to the other person. We just combine their energy with ours to make a new being, then isolate it. There’s no desire to carry around a portion of someone else inside you, or maintain a kind of link with them. How much would it irk him if he had a chunk of me inside him, or if his own precious self was tied up inside me? If this were the case, no wonder he was in a crappy mood.
By late afternoon we were down to the last five houses, and I was tired and bored. I’d been riding around naked. I hadn’t brought a spare set of clothing from the cabin and had nothing to change into until Candy raced into a Walmart and picked up a pair of jeans and a tank top for me. I refused to wear them since taking clothes off and putting them back on at each house was a pain in the ass. After a long argument, Candy insisted the least I could do was wrap myself in a blanket from her trunk. She claimed it was so we wouldn’t get arrested. I’m surprised she didn’t put newspapers down on the seat.
I’d gotten creative with my form, doing a goat–lion cross I’d put together for one of the elf parties decades ago, and variations of the stereotypical devil theme from
artwork throughout the ages. Wyatt particularly liked the sexy red one with big boobs, and long rope tail that I twirled around suggestively. It looked like something out of Heavy Metal. He did not like the muscular black one with the huge two foot phallus and testicles like bowling balls.
We pulled up to a lovely McMansion, with a professionally landscaped yard out back, complete with a grotto pool and hot tub. These werewolves had it good. Wyatt and Candy sat in the air conditioned car while I took my time admiring the pool. Half the pool was edged in flagstone with a wide set of flagstone steps rising from the water to the naturalized patio. The other half consisted of a man–made cave and a twenty foot molded boulder with tiny streams of water trickling down the edges. The cave was partially underwater with a ledge to hold drinks and snacks. My pool was the standard issue, and I thought about possibly adding a feature like this. The molded boulder was probably fine by human and werewolf standards, but its fakeness annoyed me. If I did this at my pool, I’d create my own boulder. I missed my pool, and since I was naked anyway I jumped in to do a few laps.
The water was wonderful. They used a saline system instead of chlorine, and the minerals made the water slide like silk over my skin. I explored the little cave a bit and floated around in the water. Candy and Wyatt had to be wondering what was taking so long. Screw them. And screw that pissy angel, too. I’d get done whenever I felt like it. I did a few more laps, swimming low to see the decorative tile work in the bottom of the pool.
That’s when I noticed an odd shimmer in the pool wall. Diving down, I took a closer look and just about swallowed the water in excitement. It was a gate. A wild gate. Well, it was actually more like a wild jagged tear. It extended the entire depth of the pool, but it was narrow. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to squeeze through it and not leave a chunk of myself behind. It was wider down at the bottom thankfully. I came up for air and went back down again. I couldn’t really tell where the gate came out at, but I was running out of options.
This was my only chance. There was no way I could manage to sneak away tonight and come back here. We’d never be close to this house, again. If I didn’t go for it with this gate, my only other chance would be the long shot that we’d somehow come close enough to the one in Sharpsburg. This was my bird in the hand, and I needed to grab it. I’d been told my whole life that I took insane chances with minimal regard to my safety, and that’s saying a lot coming from my kind. This was the time to prove them right. I went up for air one more time, then swam down and slipped through into the gate.
It was a bad, bad idea, and I realized how bad the moment I stepped in. The gate engulfed me in blackness, snapping shut behind me. It felt like I was encased in black Jell–O. I tried to push through it, but it resisted against me bouncing back. I could rip and tear it, but it was slow going, and it flowed back to itself, leaving no trail of where I’d been. I couldn’t tell how far I’d come, but it felt like I’d been plowing through the stuff forever. I had a horrifying feeling that I was going to spend eternity in here suffocating in black Jell–O. It could be worse, I thought.
Never think that. The Jell–O was starting to become sticky and cling to me. I shook it off, trying to push it away and noticed red bloody marks where it had tenaciously stuck on my skin. As if one hickey mark wasn’t enough, it seemed I was about to be covered in the things. I wasn’t one to give up, so I kept slashing and pushing, making my way each precious inch at a time. Hope filled me as the Jell–O began to soften and liquefy, and a glimmer brightened the darkness. Finally, I though, I might be reaching the other side of the gate. I hoped it didn’t open up into a black hole or something equally deadly. The glimmer expanded and I was blinded by a white flash. I felt something more solid than Jell–O encase me and with a second flash I realized I was underwater. Maybe I had gated into a rock in an underwater cave. I hoped so.
No such luck. As my vision cleared, I realized that the rock was covered by wet cotton fabric. Shit. I should have known. Gregory’s grip shifted, but instead of being swept up in his arms, I was dumped over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes as he carried me up the steps and out of the pool.
He had to be furious. I’d had no idea how he’d managed to find me in that horrible Jell–O mess of a gate, let alone get us both out of there. I can’t believe he bothered. He must have known what that gate was. If it had been me, I would have said “screw this” and let him die in that thing. Why had he risked himself to pull me out? Was I really of that much use to him? Or perhaps he was too proud to allow me to escape him at all. Maybe he had a need to have absolute control over me and my demise. He slid me down off his shoulder and held me tight against him, my face smashed into the wet cotton of his polo shirt. I waited patiently to be crushed to a pulp. Instead I was held in place, with the angel’s ragged breath warm against the top of my head.
“I have no idea how you’ve managed to survive this long, little cockroach,” he said, his voice tight. “How did you make that gate? That was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my long, long life. Crippled lobotomized elves with one eye could make a better gate than that.”
I didn’t know specifically what having one eye had to do with gate creation, but I got his point.
“And you didn’t end it anywhere. The edges weren’t stable; it didn’t really have edges. The whole thing was slowly collapsing in on you. I honestly don’t know how I managed to find you in that thing, let alone pull you out of it in one piece.”
I held very still against him. He didn’t sound very angry. I thought he’d be furious, smashing me into little bits for defying him and trying to get away.
“If you’re so bent on killing yourself, cockroach, just be patient a little longer and I’ll do it for you.” He said, sounding as if he anticipated that moment. “I don’t know what to do with you. I can’t be with you every second, I can’t bind you any tighter. Now, I find you can create gates, no matter how terrible and ineffective they are. I should just go ahead and kill you now, you are such an annoyance. Any usefulness you provide is far outweighed by your time wasting and disrupting actions.”
Okay, so he risked himself to pull me out of a wild gate only to kill me himself? I guess it was more satisfying if you did the deed yourself rather than have your target die through suicide by stupidity. I could identify. It was so disappointing when your prey fell off a cliff and broke its neck before you could sink your teeth into it and have it die by your hand.
We stood there for a few moments more, then he slowly pulled away and looked me over. I was naked and covered in bloody Jello–O hickey marks. Not exactly a good sight. I risked a quick look up at him. No pointy teeth, no black filled eyes, no glowing, no sword. He actually looked rather bleak. These were hopefully good signs for my continued existence.
“Fix yourself,” he said with a sigh, and stepped back to let me work.
I stood and stared at him a moment, sure that I heard him wrong, and that any minute he was going to lop my head off with that sword of his.
“Go on,” he urged. “I don’t really care, but if we walk back to the car with you looking like that, your toy is going to go insane and try to blow my head off with his little cannon, again. I’ve killed one human this week; I don’t want to kill another. I’m way over my quota for the year, already.”
I had an odd feeling the last statement was some kind of angel humor, but I didn’t want to ask. Quickly I fixed the Jell–O marks, thinking that Wyatt was going to flip anyway with us walking back together, both soaking wet and me naked.
Wyatt was not happy. He was even less happy when Gregory grabbed the blanket from Candy’s car and proceeded to dry me off, himself.
“Here, put your clothes on,” the angel told me. “I’m going to gate you to the last few houses so I can keep you with me. I’ll hex them, and these two will follow us in the car.”
Wyatt turned red and clenched his jaw, but at least he kept his gun to himself.
It was a slow process. The gating around was fast, but
then I had to stand there a moment squished against Gregory to keep from falling over while the world righted itself. Then we had to wait an eternity for Candy and Wyatt to arrive, since Gregory informed me he couldn’t trust me to my own devices while he was occupied creating the hex. He told Candy at the first house that she was to watch me and if he found me so much as a foot from where he left me, he’d bash her face into the pavement. I wondered if angels were always this violent or if I was having a peculiar effect on him.
I was a good girl, much to Candy’s relief. Besides, where would I go? He’d catch me, and just be more pissed off. Part of me still wanted to try for the Sharpsburg gate, but part of me was really afraid to try that shit again. There were more pleasant ways to commit suicide. That sword of Gregory’s probably wouldn’t be as bad as dying in a wild gate, but I didn’t really want to give him the satisfaction of causing my death. I’d rather suffer horribly.
We finished by dark, and at least three of us were starving since we’d missed lunch. The house with the pool and the wild gate was our intended target. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t about to try Jell–O world again, especially if it didn’t lead anywhere. We grabbed take–out Chinese and headed back to the cabin to collapse in exhaustion. I didn’t even bother with the Tinkerbell shirt, and just wrapped myself up naked in a blanket to sleep on the porch. Candy took her couch, and Wyatt the bed. Gregory sat in the porch chair with his feet up on the railing so he could keep an eye on me. It was rather unnerving having someone stand guard over you while you sleep, but I was worn out and dozed off quickly.
I woke up with my heart racing. It was early, well before sun up, and it took me a moment to realize where I was and what had woken me. Something was here, something I knew, something I wanted to kill. I reached out and felt his presence, about five hundred yards into the woods to the northeast. Althean, stealthily creeping closer.
