by Marie Hall
Chapter 11: That’s a funny joke…oh wait, you’re not kidding
Sable gripped the base of the large tree, watching the night around her like one would a horror movie, expecting at any moment that Jason or Freddy would jump out and cleave her in half. The rattling of a tree limb several stories high made her feel like she was ready to puke from the nerves. She didn’t even want to think about what was up there. A sleek, black panther—it’s green eyes locked on her neck—stalking forward on silent pads, seconds from jumping her.
She shivered, her forearms broke out in goose flesh, and she couldn’t help but glance up. “Stop it,” she reprimanded herself impatiently and for the like the thousandth time. When the hell was Hunter gonna come back?
The sky was black, dipped in diamonds and shrouded with a smoky veil of shimmering indigo. It still amazed her how well she could see. She was a predator now too. She needed to remember that. The next alarming quiver of leaves made her forget just as quickly though.
The air in front of her shivered with a pulsing blue and Hunter stepped out with a frail looking china doll of a woman gripped tight in his arms. She was passed out; actually she looked dead and cold. Her skin, which had probably been a warm shade of buttery brown, was at the present ashen with a pale gray ring around her mouth. Black hair trailed on the grass, picking up bits of bramble and pebbles.
“Lift her head,” she ordered, “trust me, she won’t appreciate all the snarls later. And what did you do to her anyway? Is that our healer?”
He shook his head, but did as she’d said. He cradled the cargo like she weighed no more than a feather. Her clothes, if you could even call it that—nothing more than a couple of well-placed strings of hide and long grass—were scorched and tattered. She was pretty much naked—a fact that obviously wasn’t escaping Hunter as he kept glancing down at her every two point five seconds with a look in his eyes that made Sable tingle. No man had ever looked at her like that before. Like he didn’t want to just touch her, but consume her.
“I didn’t do this. It’s the guerrillas after her. They’re coming here now,” there was an urgency to his words she’d never heard before. “I’ve got to get her to safety. She’s too valuable to us to let anything happen to her.”
“Okay.” She nodded, spooked by the thought of machete toting lunatics hard on their heels. “Let’s go then.”
The tip of his tongue stuck out the right side of his mouth and moving back and forth.
“What?” she asked, overcome by déjà vu. She knew that look, had seen it many times before—though it made her feel totally crazy—but she had seen it. And it had never preceded anything good.
“I have to take Arianna back.”
“Ookay,” she said very slowly, knowing somehow there was a but in there. He wasn’t acting like himself. “Spit it out, Hunter,” she said a moment later when he still hadn’t said anything.
He cleared his throat. “You will have to find our last piece of the puzzle.”
“What! Without you?”
He closed his eyes, his arms wrapped around Arianna’s now shivering shoulders. “Arianna needs time to heal. I cannot trek her around. Besides, Slayde is a hot head.”
“So what makes you think—”
“Because you have a bond.”
She snorted, a mix between fear and sheer incredulousness. “You are kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding, Hunter. That bond would have been with Errol anyway, not me.”
He hefted the healer higher, who by now was starting to wake and moan loudly. His eyes were large. “We’ve got to go now, Sable.” He did his hand wiggle thing and this time opened up two portals of time. “Tell him he will be paid enough to set him up forever; he’ll never need to work again.”
“What is that supposed to mean? And don’t ignore me! He knew Errol, not me,” she huffed, planting a small fist on her hip.
“Tell him,” he said with a sharp note of impatience.
She bristled, feeling like she’d suddenly been pushed to the side for that doll he now carried. She didn’t like this feeling, but there it was. Maybe she was only human after all.
“Oh great and powerful Oz, how am I supposed to get back to my time when, or if, I should actually say, I do find him? Hmm?” She pointed to her chest. “Not a Jedi warrior here.”
Suddenly the sound of a very quiet, sneaky something disturbed the brush about a hundred yards back. The machete goon squad was obviously here.
“They’re here,” he snarled, coming to the same conclusion she had. “Say my name when you’re ready to go. I’ll hear you.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him if he was serious, but his face was a tight mask of anger and impatience. Obviously he wasn’t joking.
“Go, now!” he commanded and without a backwards look at her, stepped through his spiraling vortex of doom.
It was then that it dawned on her she’d never even asked for a description of the mysterious Slayde. Oh man, this sucked the big one.
She took a deep breath, the first bullet zinged past her head, brushing its hot little body across her forehead. She stepped through.
He’d better be right, because so help her if she got stuck in a strange place she would make it her personal mission to come back and haunt him forever.
Chapter 12: Meet Eric Slayde
Eric kept his head low and his eyes open. He studied the heavily crowded bar, looking for a table far enough back that he wouldn’t be bothered. He was only twenty, but a reliable source had told him this place never carded and didn’t care, so long as the money was good.
And his money was very good.
Finally he spotted a two top all the way to the back, between the black doors of the employee’s lounge and bathrooms. He moved with no hurry toward it and when he got there, sat.
The nasty tacky tabletop threatened to stick to his skin. Slayde pulled off the book bag he always wore and opened it. He pushed aside a soft plush toy he should have thrown away years ago but could never seem to bring himself to, and several nines that before might have landed him an easy deuce in jail. Cops no longer had time to deal with minor infractions like illegal weapons possession. They were busy rounding up super freaks sprouting scales and bony horns from every part of their body. Those down and out losers who’d sat on Skid Row, high on dope and beggin’ or theiven’ so they could get that next bump of whatever.
Skid Row had never been the safest place to begin with. When it fell off the grid ten years ago taking thousands of users, pushers, prostitutes, and runaways with it and turning them into literal freaks of nature, it was even less so. Way he figured it; it was his civil duty to carry something.
His weapon of choice was a nine mil—compact and accurate, if it had bullets. His wasn’t loaded. But it didn’t have to be to have deadly consequences.
He finally found what he’d been seeking. He pulled out a pack of sanitizing wipes—a habit he’d developed recently—and cleaned the crap off the table until it gleamed. Resting his arms on the tabletop, he jerked his chin toward the petite, red headed waitress.
She popped a large wad of gum. “What?” she asked, staring at him with glazed blue eyes.
He sniffed. She smelled sweet, like she’d dipped her head in powdered sugar. Her soiled long sleeved shirt was rolled up, exposing forearms that looked like she’d been infected with scabies.
He curled his nose in disgust and leaned away from her. It wasn’t contagious, it was one of the symptoms of the new street drug—Verve—whipped up overnight by some entrepreneurial dealer knowing super freaks would need super drugs.
“Get me a bottled beer.” He didn’t want anything that came out of the tap poured into any glass he hadn’t washed first.
She didn’t move, but kept eyeing him. “What kind?” she finally said after a ten second stare down.
“Do I look like I care?”
Her lip pulled back and he could see the gums at the top starting to turn black. Teeth would fall out next. He curled
his lip. “Just get me what I asked for!”
The drug was notorious for dulling the senses, she didn’t even jump. Just kept popping that damn gum until he felt he was gonna do something stupid, like grab her mouth and force her to swallow it.
Right before he acted on instinct, she turned back to the bar. He shrugged back into his seat and studied the crowd. No one looked up; everyone was lost in their drink and huffing drugs.
Even the bartender didn’t look around and he was a big dude. Easily six foot four with muscles that looked stacked one on top of the other and veins that popped. Bald, with one gold hoop in his right ear, yet as dominant as his presence was, even he knew to keep his head down and his mouth shut. The real monsters were everywhere, and sometimes where you least expected them.
The place was dark; the only light was red and coming off the wall lamps affixed to corner booths. Posters of past rock stars and thousands upon thousands of signatures—both famous and non—littered the walls.
Things changed, but also stayed the same.
The world was different. People were different. But like ants, they couldn’t help rebuilding. Within months the shiny new shops had morphed back into the shanty’s they’d been before. The humans were freaks now, but they were still humans with the same goals, hopes, and dreams.
This place was a beehive for groupies and rockers making the New Skid Row scene.
A sixth sense had him returning his gaze to a shadow in the corner of the room. A pair of bright gray eyes, a shade he’d never seen before studied him with the intensity of a laser light. He lifted his brow, letting whoever those eyes belonged to know they’d been made.
“’Bout time, Red,” he snarled when the druggie returned and handed him the warm bottle.
“That’ll be nine bucks.”
“Happy hour. Four bucks. Don’t try to screw with me.”
Finally he saw her feeling something as she panted with anger, “nine!”
A couple of faces turned, the barkeeper one of them, and he pointed at her. “It’s four bucks, Katy.”
“Nine,” she insisted and crossed her arms.
The barkeeper came around and hauled her by her ear, dragging her back screaming and snarling that she was gonna get her money.
“You want a fix. Don’t be stealing from my customers to get it, you nasty piece of trash. I gave you this chance, do it again, and you’re fired,” his words brooked no argument.
She threw his arm off and began to transform. She got skinnier, tall like a reed. Her head came to a point, her arms becoming insectoid looking. They hung well past her knees, fingers divided up into five digits with long hooking nails that might as well have been claws. Foam dripped white and frothy from the slit she’d once called her mouth.
This time when she swiped at the bartender, her nails sliced through his midsection, severing him in half. The smell of blood overwhelmed. Large round tusks emerged from either side of her nose, splitting through the skin.
The smell Slayde found repulsive must have been ambrosia to her, because she fell on him like a rabid animal.
Her slurping chilled him to the marrow. Even the lifeless expressions of the drug induced recognized the brutality of her attack.
He might have done something...if he cared. But everyone on the streets knew if you wanted to live past twenty, you looked the other way. Always.
A small shape whizzed past like a blur of shadow and then gray eyes was staring down the weird amalgam of walking stick and wart hog.
“You should stop that now.” The girl was young, very young, with thick hair and large sloping eyes. She seemed too young and fragile to stand up to that...thing.
But looks were deceiving, because her voice carried like the roll of thunder through the quiet room.
Baldy’s long tongue came out and licked blood off her chin. Smothered in it, all it did was smear it worse. Her laugh echoed with haunting undertones. The sound of it made his arm hairs stand.
An unwelcome sensation began to fester inside him, one he hadn’t felt in years and it pissed him off, made his gut burn and his brain seethe. He cracked his knuckles.
Gray eyes didn’t move, her nostrils flared...barely. He probably only noticed because for some reason he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.
“What are you gonna do about it, tiny?” The creature’s voice was like maggots rolling on raw meat. He shuddered.
The girl clenched her fists with a look of supreme concentration on her face. The bald bug didn’t seem to notice or maybe even care, as if feeling she was the big bad wolf and nothing could touch her.
He smelled the smoke before he saw the fire, it all happened so fast he could barely process what he saw. One second she was a gangly, awkward girl, the next she was engulfed in fire. A literal walking flame sparking red and gold.
Then she screamed. The sound was pain. So much pain. It swept through his body like shards of jagged ice dipped in acid. He pressed his palms to his ears, desperate to dull the agonizing sound ripping through his brain. He couldn’t stop the convulsive shudder that tore down his spine.
The bald bug dropped to her knees. Drops of blood welled from every pore.
Chaos ensued, the other occupants screamed and tried to get away. Some couldn’t move, could only moan and clutch at their heads. But no one bled like baldy.
The shriek ended as quickly as it’d begun and with it the pain. Though his ears still rang. He took a shaky breath, trying to regain his equilibrium. When the flame cleared a bird, easily twice the size of the bug stepped out. Black eyes swirled with rings of silver and dots of snow white light. She kicked out her foot, dropping bug girl the rest of the way to the floor.
The creature was moaning, rolling under the heavy clawed foot and grabbing her face. Halfway between normal and freaky, she was shifting back to human and it must have been that shift that stopped the giant red bird from the final killing blow. Her talons were curled, inches from the neck, but she seemed hesitant. Her large head swiveled back and forth, as if seeking to understand the situation. Unlike bug girl, this one reeked of power and yet seemed completely unaware of it.
He hadn’t even realized he was walking toward her until he was beside her, pulling the nine from his book bag. Up close she was even more magnificent. Her feathers were a red hue so deep they rivaled the gleam of the brightest ruby. He’d never seen anything as terrifying, or as beautiful.
Her large head swiveled toward him, alien intelligence gleamed dark but sure in their depths. She squawked, but this was not the keening banshee wail that’d made him want to fall prostrate to his knees earlier, this was a short burst. Almost like a question.
“I’ll kill it.” He held his hand up and repeated himself, “I’ll do it. I’ll kill it.” Not once did he question how out of character he was acting. It wasn’t that he wanted to help; it was that he had to.
The bird blinked, then did that crazy head swivel thing again and like a giant dog ruffling its fur, stepped back from the moaning mass on the floor.
The creature looked awful. Her nose was gushing blood and her eyes were pure red, like every capillary had burst. Soaked in piss and sweat, she stank of terror and fear.
“Don’t...kill...me,” she stuttered with lips turning blue. “Just...need...ver—”
The explosive boom of the pulled trigger reverberated through the now empty bar. He’d shot a crimson pulse of his power through the barrel of the gun. It entered her heart like a harpoon, running through her veins with an electrical surge. It shorted her heart flat.
A small hiss had him turning his head and then he jumped when the bird erupted in a nova ball of flames. He shielded his eyes, but oddly the flames that burned with magma force intensity—he knew because the plastic cushions on the chairs beside her now dripped a black puddle on the floor—rubbed along his skin like the tender caress of a lover’s finger.
Gray eyes—but that was wrong, her eyes weren’t the dreary gray of smog, but the brilliance of a smoky pearl
gleaming with luminescent lavender—replaced the bird. Eyes that he couldn’t seem to stop staring at were piercing him with barely disguised annoyance.
“I could have taken her,” she said so low he’d barely heard it.
His mouth tipped and he nodded, feeling the strangest desire to protect her fragile ego.
“You must be, Slayde,” she muttered, “figures it’d be you.”
“Who’s asking?” he asked, suddenly leery. He owed a lot of bad people a lot of money, money they were never getting back. Period. It was his fair and square. He’d fight to the death to protect what was his, even if bird girl was one helluva scary fighter.
***
Sable licked her lips, anxious and uncomfortable. It was one thing to dream of a hot guy who you felt you’d live and die for. It was another to come face to face with him.
Her visions of him from her dreams were vague, incomplete snippets of face and eyes. Her heart fluttered and she swallowed hard, fighting the urge to press her hand against the tide of moth’s wings flying with chaotic dips and dives inside her stomach.
Dark brown hair shot through with threads of deepest, midnight red. Eyes so blue they gleamed like cut glass, but when he’d manifested his crazy bolts of red power they’d turned the purest white of freshly fallen snow. There was a smattering of freckles along the bridge of his nose that might have made someone else look child-like, but there was nothing about him that screamed boy. This was a man, and he was staring at her with a mixture of confusion and barely leashed hostility.
Why did he have to be so hot? At this moment she really hated Hunter. Especially because saying someone was bonded sounded so ridiculous. Until she’d started to walk past the bar and had the most overwhelming and overpowering urge to come inside. When she’d seen him, she’d known. It was him. No doubt about it.
Her life was such a freaking mess.
She balled her hand into a tiny fist and thumped it repeatedly against her thigh. “So um,” she squeaked and blood crept up her neck, her ears were hot and she knew she was blushing something terrible, “you need to come with me,” she finally blurted out miserably.
