The Warrior

by Rebecca Royce

The other three Warriors rushed to our side. I could hear them breathing hard and in the same way that I knew all of Chad’s attention had turned to the impending Werewolf fight, I knew the others felt the same way. Keith called it the camaraderie of the fight. It was the moment when you knew all the people around you were focused on one goal. Only, in this case I wasn’t sure we weren’t all silently quaking with fear.

  Only Chad had a weapon that was worth anything in this situation. He shouted over the growling. “We have to get out of here.”

  At first, I wasn’t sure what I heard. It started as a small vibrating noise, like an alarm going off somewhere in the distance made the room shake a bit. The Wolves lifted their heads and sniffed the air. I didn’t know what that was about but I knew it couldn’t be good.

  I grabbed Chad’s arm. “Something is happening.”

  “Oh damn.” Rosa yelled at the top of her voice. “Icahn’s going to bring down the building on top of all of us just like he did at Liberty.”

  I swallowed. Was there anything more terrifying than being buried alive?

  The Wolves took off in a sprint and I decided it seemed like a good idea to follow them. Chad grabbed my arm at the moment I realized we should follow them.

  The small noise that had started out as a vibration was a downright roar now. Chad and I crossed over the threshold of the room together.

  That’s the last thing I remember.

  I can’t really tell you what it feels like when the ceiling caves in on you. I guess I must have been knocked out cold. Or maybe I’ve blocked out the parts of it where I was actually conscious. But it does feel that fast. One second I was crossing a doorway at top speed, the next nothing.

  ***

  I blinked, the darkness of the night filling my vision. Behind me I heard the crackle of a well-lit fire and for a second I thought I was back at home in my tent above Genesis. But then it all came crashing down on me. Everything. Unless I’d suddenly become insane, I couldn’t have invented the events of the last few days.

  I groaned and tried to sit up. “Chad?”

  I didn’t know how we’d gotten out of that place, with the ceiling coming down. I needed him to tell me.

  “No, no, Pixie-Girl. It’s not Chad. It’s me.”

  My heart stuttered at the sound and I risked dizziness to turn around. I really didn’t have to bother. Across a crowded hall I would know his voice over all others. It was Jason. Apparently he’d come back.

  Sitting to my left, just out my range of sight, he looked like a fallen angel as he sat, his blond hair practically glowing in the firelight. He gazed at me with his lids slightly lowered, regarded me from a slight distance.

  “Where is everyone?”

  My heart pounded and a sinking sensation took hold in my shoulders. This wasn’t normal. We shouldn’t be alone together. Where was everyone else?

  “I barely found you before the explosion.”

  I swallowed. His words weren’t making a lot of sense. “What explosion?”

  “After the ceiling came down, the whole thing blew up. I’d barely dragged you out of the rubble before there was no way to go back.”

  His words were clipped like he didn’t want to say them or as if he resented having to explain at all.

  “So everyone else….”

  This time it was me who didn’t want to say the words. Rosa, Dave, Ken, and Chad. They’d all been with me. If they weren’t here, if he hadn’t gotten them out, then the unthinkable had happened. They couldn’t all be dead. They couldn’t.

  Even as my mind denied the inevitable, my body reacted to the news like it had been struck. I doubled over, my head touching the ground as I tried not to heave.

  “No, no, no, no….”

  I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the words aloud until I heard my own voice as if from a distance—so defeated, so despondent, so completely out of control.

  The world couldn’t be so cruel. It wasn’t possible. I couldn’t have gotten Chad back only to truly lose him. Was my pain somehow amusing to the universe?

  Jason scooted over next to me and rubbed my back in circular motions meant to soothe me. But I didn’t want to be soothed. I pushed his hand away as I darted to my feet.

  “Why?” I stared down at him. In that moment, he could have been anyone. It didn’t matter. I just wanted him to have pain because I had pain.

  He stood, slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. “Why what?”

  “Why did you come and get me? Why didn’t you leave me there to die with them?”

  He inhaled his breath, a loud hiss of a sound. “Because I love you. I’m enormously grateful to have gotten there in time to drag you out. I heard a crash, a loud tremendous bang, and the ground shook. I ran down the ladder faster than I’ve ever moved and followed my nose to you….”

  I shook my head, moved my hands to shield myself from him. I turned my back. “You should have left me there with them.”

  Because they were gone. The three Warriors I’d barely had time to get to know and the guy who had never let me down and most likely never would have. They were dead. I was here. And there was nothing fair about that.

  “I’ll never let you die, Rachel. Not ever.”

  “No.” I whirled around. “You’ll just leave me in the snow waiting for you while you run off with your pack.”

  “I’ve spoken to my father.” His face was passive now. No emotion showed in his blue eyes. “He admitted to lying. He had his reasons. They don’t matter. I’ve left him.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  Jason took a step toward me. “I’ve left him, left the pack. Even if you never want me again, I can’t go back with him. I can’t trust him. He took from me what was mine and now I’m not sure I can ever get it back.”

  “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here listening to you. I’m not an object you lost.”

  He sighed loudly. “Rachel, I know that.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t talk to you about this. I have to go.”

  I looked around. I wasn’t sure how I was going to find the way. This wasn’t on my grid. I hadn’t been trained to know instinctually how to get around.

  Jason touched my arm and I was ashamed by the way my skin tingled below his big hands.

  “You need to go where?”

  I choked on a sob. “I have to go home and tell them that Liberty fell. I have to go tell the Lyons that their son died rescuing me.”

  “It’s not your fault, Rachel.”

  I pulled my arm away. “At some point everyone has to stop telling me how things aren’t my fault. Eventually, when bad things keep happening over and over to everyone around you, you have to acknowledge that it’s you, that it is something about you that causes these things. That’s where I am, Jason.” I wiped at my eyes. “Can you point me in the direction of Genesis? I have to walk. It’s going to take months.”

  But I would do it. I would walk until I got there. Everyone had to know the things I had to tell them. Even if they hated me forever.

  “I can get you there faster.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. He could carry me on his back in his wolf form. The last time he’d done that, we’d sped through the snow to report to his pack about Vampire activity.

  “It’s not going to work. We don’t have the carrier.”

  “You could hold on.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. What was the matter of me? It would get me there faster. Did I want to delay telling the leadership what they needed to hear because I was afraid to remember how it had felt to be on Jason’s back?

  I could picture Chad’s face as I’d last seen him. The way he’d burst in the room, a slight grin on his face as he’d taken down so many Vampires and beaten Payne.

  His family had to know how brave he was; they deserved to know what happened to him. My eyes filled with tears. Going with Jason wasn’t disloyal to Chad, even if it felt like it was. And still I couldn’t make myself agree.

  “Rachel?” Jason�
��s voice broke. “I can smell your pain and it’s eating at me.”

  “I’m not going to hide it, Jason. I can’t. I’m not capable of it. If it bothers you feel free to point me towards home and go away.”

  “I don’t want you to hide.” He fisted his hands at his side. “I want to help you. You think I don’t get it? I just told you that the guy you’re in love with is dead, which I know caused you tremendous pain. At the same time, I can’t help but feel relief that I won’t have to fight him for you anymore.”

  I think I stopped breathing when he made his statement. I’m not sure. All I know is that we stood there in silence as I tried to absorb the horror of what he’d just said to me.

  “Even if you were thinking that—which clearly you were—why on earth would you say that aloud? Chad is dead. You never would have won in a contest with him. I would have chosen him every time.”

  Jason shook his head. “Liar.”

  I screamed like I could bring down the moon with my fury alone. “What is the matter with you? Why are you doing this to me now?”

  Jason held out his hands in a gesture of surrender. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I just have so many emotions going on right now, Rachel, and I know you don’t even want me touching you.”

  I cried in earnest. I couldn’t help it. My tears wouldn’t stop, and after a while I stopped trying to make them.

  “I had this idea.” It was hard for me to speak through my hysteria but I was desperate to say what I needed to say. “That you and I would somehow make it work even though I knew it was virtually impossible.”

  Jason started to speak and I stopped him as I held up my hand. I wasn’t done.

  “Then you abandoned me and I thought for a while I would never smile again. But I did. Eventually I did because of Chad. So, when I could breathe again I started imagining there could be a future with him. One we would build together at Genesis. Now he’s dead. I guess it’s a different kind of abandonment. He’s gone, even if he didn’t choose to be.”

  My tears stopped abruptly and I wondered, distantly, if I would ever cry again. Right now, I felt dry like all of the tears in my body had suddenly evaporated and gone to take up residence elsewhere. What was left was a feeling of nothingness.

  “Go back to your Pack, Jason. You’re a Werewolf. You can’t exist without them.”

  I’d been brutally assaulted by one the whole time I’d been underground. Payne had gotten off on it and given me a whole new definition of discomfort. I didn’t want anything to do with Werewolves right now.

  “Which way is my home?”

  Jason paused. I didn’t know if he was going to tell me. I didn’t know if he was even going to respond to what I’d just laid on him. I didn’t care.

  He pointed. “That way.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  Putting one foot in front of another seemed like a good idea so I did just that. I moved at a steady pace in the direction that would eventually take me home. Perhaps I should have asked Jason to show me where everyone had been killed but I couldn’t. In my mind’s eye it was clear.

  I could even taste the smoke in my mouth.

  No, I didn’t need to see where Chad, Rosa, Dave, and Ken had met their fire-filled end. They were buried in my heart now. It was the only grave marker I would ever need to visit.

  I heard Jason walking behind me. He could stay. He could go. I really didn’t care. How could Chad be dead if I could still taste his kiss on my lips?

  Chapter Thirteen

  It is possible, I discovered, to go through living life in perpetual darkness, even when the sun is shining outside. It had been days since Jason and I had communicated. I wasn’t sure if he was angry with me for not speaking, or if he had just come to understand that I needed the silence, but he had long since stopped asking me if I wanted to ride on his back.

  I looked up at the sun and blinked as the strong rays hit my tired eyes. I hadn’t been able to sleep since I’d woken up to a world where Chad had been blown up.

  “It’s not you. It’s this whole damn crazy world.”

  Jason’s voice startled me and I gasped, whirling around.

  “What?”

  I tried to make sense of the words he’d spoken but my brain felt fuzzy, like I couldn’t quite concentrate on what he’d said.

  “None of this is your fault.” He leaned casually against a tall tree like we hadn’t been walking for two days in silence.

  “Whose fault is it?”

  I was curious how Jason saw the turn of events that had led us to this very moment. The world was, somehow, continuing to spin even though I wanted to fling myself off the ride. If this Werewolf in front of me could make sense of it for me I would take his explanation for no other reason than I wasn’t sure I could go on much longer in chaos. I needed order to reappear, or at least the illusion of it.

  “It’s this whole damn time. Nothing is as it should be. I wish you could have known the world before, Rachel.”

  I kicked the tree in front of me lightly with my foot. “Oh yeah? Who would I have been in that world?”

  “A teenager. You wouldn’t have to think about anything other than getting good grades, figuring out where you wanted to go to college, and fending off the guys who wanted to date you.”

  I shook my head. Jason could be exasperating. “Why would I be fending them off?”

  “Because I’d have to kill them for looking at you.”

  Groaning, I sank to the ground. I needed a break. I had to take one. There was just no choice. I’d eaten and drank when Jason had found us food and water.

  “In this scenario, you’d be an old man, Jason. You stopped aging when you were under your bad Werewolf spell. You’d be in your forties. I have to imagine it would be illegal for you to even look at me that way.”

  He laughed as he came to sit next to me. “Semantics, Rachel. Where is your creativity? I’m clearly envisioning a world where we are teenagers together.”

  “The only world where that is possible is this one and we’ve already tried it. Didn’t work, remember?”

  He shook his head. “It will work.”

  “No.”

  He turned his head to look at me, a piece of his wild blond hair falling over his eyes. It was already a mess and I tried not to smile about it. There were some things about Jason that were just charming, whether I thought we should be together or not.

  “Why not?”

  “Because even though he’s dead, I’m still in love with Chad.”

  “Ouch.” He exhaled loudly. “That felt like a stab wound.” He grabbed his chest and I felt a moment of guilt for speaking so bluntly. Perhaps, when I wasn’t wracked with grief, I could have found a nicer way to say that to Jason.

  “See the problem I’m having, Rachel, is that while you don’t smell like you’re lying when you say that, you don’t smell exactly truthful either.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to find patience. Jason’s smell discussions had irritated me even when I’d been in love with him. Finally, when I thought I might not scream, I opened my eyes.

  “How do I smell then?”

  “I think you do love Chad.” He said love like he wanted to tear the word apart and spit it out on the ground. “But I think you love me, too.”

  Okay, so maybe the problem with Jason’s sense of smell was how darn accurate it always was.

  “I think a part of me will always love you, Jason.” There was no point in not telling the truth. “But it has to be a memory. The river that separates us is about to become an ocean.”

  “No.” He fisted his hands. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “It does.” And the fact that he didn’t see it that way was a big problem. How was it that I could have learned something so pivotal—that in the world we lived in monsters and humans could not mix—and he hadn’t figured it out yet?

  “Damn it, Rachel, I didn’t kill him.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “What?”
<
br />   “I didn’t kill, Chad. You can’t act like I did. You can’t stick something I didn’t do between us and let it make a void so big I can’t reach you.”

  I sat up a bit to look at him. “You think I blame you for Chad’s death?”

  “I don’t think you do. I know you do.”

  “No, I don’t.” I coughed into my hand. Great, that was all I needed. I could get sick on top of everything else. “I think you should have left me to die. I know you didn’t have anything to do with Chad’s death.”

  His eyes flared hot at me. “If you think for one second that I could leave you to die then you don’t know anything about me at all.”

  “I don’t dispute that. I know nothing about you. Nothing that is real, anyway.”

  He grabbed me so fast I never saw it coming. Before I could blink his soft lips pressed into mine, demanding attention. I moved to break the kiss but he deepened it before I could.

  My treacherous heart turned over in my chest. I sighed. How could I like this so much? It was completely and totally disloyal to Chad’s memory that I loved the way Jason felt pressed up against me. It spoke volumes to what a despicable person I actually was that I could have drowned in the familiarity of Jason’s beloved smell surrounding me.

  After a minute, I managed to pull out of his arms. We both panted like we’d run for miles. I looked down at my hands to avoid the intensity of his gaze.

  “I don’t know what you want from me, Jason. I can’t go back in time. I can’t make you not leave. I can’t make it so I never knew Chad had feelings for me. I can’t leave Genesis. Six months ago I could, but not now.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  He sounded so resolved I wanted to scream. “Jason, what would you do when you needed to shift? Run off? That will happen at least once a month. What if one of the Warriors accidently cut off your head thinking you were another Werewolf.”

  “Rachel, these are not insurmountable problems. Work with me.”

  I stood up. My need to escape this conversation was larger than my utter exhaustion. “My boyfriend just died, Jason. You didn’t die, you abandoned me. I took six months to date anyone else. This is death. It’s a little disturbing that you won’t leave me alone.”