by Lynn Red
A blow came from behind that made him wince and grunt in pain, and then a second later, that black claw grabbed Ale’s hair and brutally crushed his head against the windowsill. Luckily the glass had all been cleared out at some point, or his throat would have been nothing more than a gushing laceration. As it was, he’d had enough.
Ale smiled at me. Blood ran down his chin where he’d been slammed into the window face first, and he mouthed watch this. The creature behind him finally showed his face. Instead of a semi-bear’s face, I saw a feral, scarred half-man-half-panther. He was covered in scars; a long, jagged pair of them crossed his face as though someone, or something, had ripped an X across his face. Either side of his head was framed with a long, white, puffy scar that was so old that it had begun to fade.
The panther dug his yellow claws into Ale’s shoulders. Those nails drew blood as they sank into the golden fur that lined Ale’s shoulders, Nana Singer was whirling around in a musical tornado. The faster she went, the more my consciousness whirled with her. There was something like a drum-beat in the back of my mind that went right along with the thudding in my chest.
“Enough!” she shouted.
Everything went dead silent all at once. Even the thunder, it seemed, froze.
Ale slammed the back of his head into the panther’s face, shattering the creature’s nose and breaking his front teeth. A smile broke out on the bear-man’s cracked lips, and he reached back, grasping his attacker’s head on either side.
He turned. “If you come back,” he snarled, breaking the dead silence all around us, “you better bring a goddamn army.”
5
“What the hell did I just see?” I asked after a few minutes had passed and the tension in the room reduced enough to breathe comfortably. Nana Singer wasn’t, you know, singing any more. Aloysius—which I still can’t say, or even think, without laughing a little bit—had managed to shuffle back into the cabin, through the door this time instead of the window mind you.
He sat heavily on the bunk bed. His head, when he sat up fully, his head poked at the underside of the top bed, making a comical bump that looked sort of like a springy wart. “It never hurts until it’s over,” he groaned, pressing his balled-up fists into his temples. “When you’re in the moment, it never catches up with you until the moment’s gone. And then,” he trailed off, but the point he was trying to make couldn’t have been any clearer.
Ale’s eyes were clouded over, and he looked like he was constantly trying to make them focus, but couldn’t quite get them to work the way he wanted them to work. He shook his huge head back and forth, and every now and again, he’d rub the sides of his face with his closed fists, like he was trying to massage out a strain in his jaw.
Outside, the wind whipped up again until droplets of water sprayed through the busted window. “Put a tarp over that,” Nana Singer said to Ale, though she’d sat down on the floor, and collected her gigantic heap of skirts around herself, and was shivering as though she’d caught a fever. She was all huddled up, shaking and appeared very concerned about something. “The wind is...is too strong. This shouldn’t be.”
Aloysius got unsteadily to his feet, and stumbled over to the window. He opened a nearby dresser and pulled out a blue plastic and canvas tarp. “Not the first time this has happened, I guess?” I asked.
He laughed, and to my surprise, even Nana Singer smiled. It was a grim sort of smile, thin-lipped and gray, but at least it was something. I made my way to the bunk bed, sat down, and gathered my legs up, wrapping my arms around my knees and hugging them tightly.
“You’re afraid,” the old woman said, apparently picking up on the fact that my face was ashen, and I was breathing in shallow, panicky bursts. “You don’t understand what’s going on, and so you make jokes.”
“Jokes?” I laughed cynically. “I just saw someone turn into a goddamn bear. I just woke up from being dragged away from an exploding car, and I just saw an old woman spinning around in a circle and singing in a way that made me feel a little like I was back in college and just tried my roommate’s pot for the first time. Not a fan, by the way.”
She smiled another ancient, mummified smile, but this one at least had some mirth to it. She kind of chuckled, but the sound was dry and ended very quickly. Then, the old woman shook her head, which caused all the junk tied in it to jingle, shake and clang. She clutched herself, lurched backwards, and then collapsed straight onto the floor. I jumped up off the bed to try and catch her, but Ale stopped me. “Leave her alone. The magic drains her energy. She’ll be all right in a while.”
“What do you mean, the magic? She wasn’t the one that turned you into a bear, is she?”
He snorted a laugh. “I guess it depends on who you ask. Have you noticed that since she stopped whirling and around doing all that singing, the storm stopped?”
“No way,” I said. “There was still some thunder after she—no way,” I said again. “She was making the weather?”
I just stared at the exhausted lump of blankets and sallow skin on the floor as she began to snore loudly.
“The Singer thing isn’t her name. We’ve all known her as Nana for as long as I remember, but there are four other singers. She’s just the most...powerful, I guess is the word. She didn’t make the storm, but she certainly controls them. Don’t ask me to explain the particulars because, uh, well I’m not the best at delving into the mystical.”
“Is it some kind of,” I gulped. I don’t know why, to be honest. After all I’d just seen a man-bear fighting with a weird panther creature while an old woman whirled around singing. I guess just saying the world was too much for me to deal with in my slightly comprised mental state. I laughed. “It wasn’t magic, right? It was something else. An illusion or something.”
He didn’t say anything, which is exactly the opposite of what I hoped to hear. “Right?” I prodded again.
“Right,” he said with one of those wry grins that made my lady parts tingle. And yeah, I said that. I really did. “Not magical at all. No sir, no magic here.” Ale flexed his fist, squeezing so hard his knuckles cracked. “Yep, absolutely no weather controlling voice magic. Not here, I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
I laughed softly, but my guts were churning around and around just like the old woman had been doing. “You don’t have to be a dick about it, you know. This isn’t exactly something I see a whole lot outside of bad TV shows.”
Instead of continuing with our cute and witty repartee, Ale held out a hand to shush me. He leaned nearer the busted-out window, as though he was listening for something deep into the forest’s darkness. He wrinkled his forehead and cocked his head slightly. “That’s not right,” he whispered. “Panthers never move alone. There’s something going on out there I don’t like.”
“But panthers are territorial loners, aren’t they?” I piped up. “At least, I mean, that’s what I learned from watching Planet Earth about eight times through. They always stay to themselves except during the mating season. Also, did you know they have really weird...uh...dicks.”
Ale snorted a slightly over-the-top laugh. “Why do you know about panther dicks?”
“Documentary,” I said. I felt my face flushing bright red. “You know, just a movie, uh, thing. I don’t...I don’t really have much experience with panther dicks. Look, this went in a really weird direction and I’m not sure why we’re focusing on the dick of a cat.”
“You brought it up,” Ale said, lifting his left eyebrow.
“You were talking about panthers and said they travelled alone, and I was just pointing out that—”
“They have weird dicks,” he said flatly. He delivered the line with such a masterful deadpan that Bob Newhart would have been proud. “I was just talking about the guy who tried to murder me, and here you are going on about dicks. Look, I’m trying to be serious.”
He couldn’t hold it together for much longer. As soon as I opened my mouth again, undoubtedly to say something else stupid abo
ut cat dicks, Ale snickered, and then erupted into booming, explosive laughter so loud it made me jump at first. Then, the sound filled me with an odd, warm, comforted feeling. He put a hand on my shoulder and the warmth from his fingertips spread through me like a shot of whiskey. From the pit of my belly to the bottom of my feet, tingles wriggled through my entire being. If there was any magic in the world, I thought, it was the way he’d made me feel with nothing more than a look, a laugh, and that soft, brushing touch. I felt myself smile, even though I was still in the full throes of a breakdown.
It didn’t take long for me to revert to horror. After the momentary relief passed, I started shaking just like Nana Singer had been doing before she passed out. A wave of cold struck me, and then suddenly, the unmistakable feeling of throwing up gripped me. Ale apparently read me, because he put an arm around my shoulders. “I know,” he said softly. “I know this is all really, really strange, but you’re going to be all right. And...I’m sorry.”
It took a moment for his apology to register. “What for?” I asked. “I mean, you saved me, didn’t you?”
“I’m not so sure anymore,” Ale said softly. “Maybe from immediate danger, but now we’re out here in the middle of the woods with a bunch of psychotic panther shifters somewhere out there. Damn, they really shouldn’t be this quiet,” he swore, squeezing his fists again and listening to his knuckles crack. “I’ll fix this,” he said, “if it’s the last thing I do.”
6
Exile’s head shot around when a distant sound caught his attention. The shack where he sat with two of his stooges, who were both paying more attention to their whiskey than to anything else as they poked at a fire, was almost completely dark.
Exile’s eyes though, were anything but. Bright, almost glittering yellow irises surrounded black slit-like pupils even when he was in fully human form. His jaws and chin were sharp, his eyes sunken almost to the point of gauntness and his hair was patchy and close-cropped. Scars marked the top of his head and parts of his face that looked like he’d not only been exiled at some point, but also burned. When he breathed, he grimaced as though it pained him to do so. With every exhalation came a trailing wheeze.
This was not a panther who had lived an easy, royal life, though he was now in charge.
Exile stood from the chair he’d settled into with a bit of effort, using the strength of his scarred arms to force his way to his feet. He stood uneasily for a moment, and then made his way to the dusty window. His breath scattered the particles. His left hand, permanently transformed, was stuck somewhere between paw and fist, and when he slammed it down on the windowsill, his two half-drunk goons jumped to attention.
“Sir!” the rounder one, with a shaved bald head, said as he jolted. “Do you need something?”
A low growl escaped Exile’s lips. “I need you to be less useless,” he grumbled, though when he turned back, they were both staring at him and smiling. “It doesn’t matter. She’s around here somewhere. All we need to do is get that old woman, and we’ll have the bears where we want them. They’ll fear the name Exile. They’ll fear the panther army I’ve assembled and more than that, they’ll fear every damn day they wake up in the morning.”
“Yeah,” the bald goon said. “Wait, why would they fear waking up? Wouldn’t they be more scared of being dead?”
Exile closed his deadly yellow eyes and breathed slowly. “Because, you idiot, they’ll be afraid of us.”
“Oh yeah! Yeah, that’s right. That’s a good one, boss.”
“Rug?” Exile asked. He named the bald assistant that, because he always believed that if Rug had been alone for any particular length of time, that’s exactly what he’d end up as.
“Yeah boss?”
“Shut up.”
“Yeah, shut up, Rug,” the other stooge, this one named Post because he was just about as dumb as one, piped up. Of course, he might be dumb as a post, but then again, he was also so thickly muscled and unbelievably, impossibly tough, that Exile figured he could withstand about thirty seconds of machine gun fire before he ever noticed he was being shot in the first place. Tough is one thing, but tough and stupid? Way, way more useful.
Exile just shook his head. For a moment, he reflected on how it had come to this—to him in a shack, alone with two morons, planning to kidnap an old woman that he wasn’t even sure he was going to have any use for. It was frustrating, sure, but at least he was doing something. He had a small force of enforcers lined up ready to support him, but only if he could make good on the promise to deliver the woman. It was more of a show of power than anything else, but Exile had other thoughts.
“We just need the singing woman,” he hissed. “If I can get her, I can prove to the pack that there’s something to the old prophecies after all. Maybe then they’ll realize how stupid they’ve been in denying me.”
“I mean,” Rug started, then winced when Exile looked his way. When the boss didn’t say anything further, he decided he’d be safe to continue. “Er, well, they already made you the chief. What’s they denyin’? How can you be the leader and have all this power and whatever and still be denied somethin’? Just don’t make much sense boss. I mean, uh...”
Exile seemed to consider this. His glittering eyes opened to slits and he ran his claw-hand along his jaw. The places he wasn’t burned were marked with heavy stubble, so the sound was an on-and-off rasping noise as he stroked his face. “I’m not sure you understand what power really means, Rug. I’m not sure I can possibly explain to you the difference between being named chief because there’s no one else around remotely competent and having everyone in the entire pack under your absolute control.”
“But you—”
Exile cut his stooge’s words off with a sharp glance and a split second later, a claw to the throat. He pricked a tiny hole in Rug’s neck that bled a trickle. “Not another word,” Exile hissed. “Not another word.”
He put a hand around Rug’s mouth and lifted a hand to shush anything that might come out of the other moron’s mouth and tilted his head slightly to the side. His ears tingled and the burned skin on the back of his head prickled to life. Rug started to mumble underneath Exile’s hand, but a squeeze that could’ve crushed his jaw in four places caused him to reconsider.
Neither of the other two could hear whatever it was that drew Exile’s attention. His burned skin ached constantly, but more importantly, it gave him just enough rage that even when he was in human form, he still had much of his panther sense. There was no sneaking up on him, not by another panther, not by a bear, not even a bird could escape his ever-vigilant hearing or his darkness-piercing vision.
He let go of Rug with another facial squeeze to make sure the dimwitted creature understood to keep his mouth shut, and crossed the room back to the filthy window. With a sudden movement, he lifted the window just a crack and crouched down in front of it. The kneeling brought another pained wince to Exile’s lips, which he drew into a snarling grin. Drawing air in through his nose, the ancient panther’s eyes twinkled with thoughts of revenge and power and bloodshed.
“They’re close,” he whispered. “But they don’t know we’re here. And if they do, they don’t know that I can smell them.”
“How far, boss?” Rug asked, drawing near the window and hopelessly peering out into the darkness. “How long until they’re here?”
“About two miles,” Exile whispered. “But they’re never getting here. Come on.”
*
“Quiet,” Exile hissed through his panther lips. To a normal human listening, it would’ve just sounded like a low-throated growl, but the other panthers understood perfectly.
He took another step toward the untransformed, trekking bears. He knew perfectly well that bears always ranged in human form to prevent the whole ‘bear crashing through the woods’ business, which made good sense, except when they got ambushed. There were three of them that he could see, and he always counted on at least a handful of others that he couldn’t. Paranoia, a
fter all, is how he got where he was in life, and he wasn’t going to give up the best friend he’d ever had. Exile might be slightly nuts, but he wasn’t stupid.
He let out another growl. Rug and Post, while they were about as intelligent as their namesakes, were flawless when they were in their element. This was, exactly, why Exile took them under his wings to try and help them grow into something more useful than idiotic stooges. Still, idiotic stooges had their place too, he’d learned. Exile stared into the distance. He still couldn’t see the bears but their smells were clear and present and obvious. One of them smelled acrid and sweaty, another like leather. The third, he thought, smelled a bit strange, maybe as though he’d been swimming recently and some vague traces of algae or moss were stuck to his skin.
It didn’t matter, Exile thought. It never did. He never lost. Not when he knew what was coming, and Exile always knew what was coming.
“Quiet still,” he hissed. “They’re coming. Quarter mile away at most. And Post?”
“Yeah boss?”
“This time, when they show up, don’t just charge out there like a moron, okay? I’ll just let them kill you and pretend no one else is here. I can’t risk this over you being stupid.”
Post grumbled slightly, just like a scolded toddler. Which, really, he pretty much was. But he nodded nonetheless, knowing that Exile wasn’t playing any games. He’d just as soon leave one of them to die as bring them home. If they followed orders they were given a chance to keep learning and living. If not? It didn’t bother him much. There were always more where these two came from, he thought, with a grim smile.
For a moment, he considered just letting them run out into the oncoming bears. After all, he figured, it’s a lot harder to remodel a house than to just knock the fucker over and start again, isn’t it? Maybe it was the same with henchmen. He grunted, frowned and clenched his paw-fist into a ball. Doing that hurt quite a lot, enough to make him wish he’d never decided to take the risk to end up half transformed and twice as strong.
