by Lynn Red
“No!” I screamed, “Not this way! Not this way!”
“Then calm down,” the girl hissed into my ear. “I don’t want to kill anyone. Okay well that’s not true, but I don’t want to do it all messy and end up with a bunch of sticky, nasty human blood on my new dress, all right?”
I stiffened, but otherwise didn’t react. I figured my best chance to do anything was to get her off me right then. I looked again to where my mates had been lying in the gas, but they weren’t there. I couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even fathom a reason or a place they’d gone. They just weren’t where they were supposed to be.
“Good,” the girl said, still only inches from my ear. “Good, that’s it, calm down you crazy idiot, just calm down.” She took a breath and exhaled slowly. She looked squarely in my eyes, and for the first time I noticed that both her eyes, and her lips, were the same pale shade of blue-gray. “Now,” she said calmly, even though I started writhing again, “don’t make me hurt you again,” she tightened her grip on my wrist just enough to shoot another snake of pain up my arm. “That’s it, take it easy and this’ll all be over before you know it.”
“Where are they?” I asked. My breath was ragged and sharp in my chest. My ribs, if they weren’t broken, weren’t in very good shape. “Craze and Wild and Grave and…”
I caught just the briefest glimpse of confusion on the girl’s face. “They’re dead on the floor,” she said although I heard doubt in her voice. “Dead, right where they’re supposed to—“
“Get down!” I heard. The voice was a shot in the dark, like the beam of a flashlight piercing the darkness when you think you’re lost and showing you the path is right in front of your feet. “Ade! Duck!’
Over her shoulder, I saw the damndest thing I ever have – both overseers shot to the sides of the hall, cracked against the wall and slumped over where they struck. And then I saw the eyes. Burning, gold and silver and purple. Three sets of eyes pierced the hazy dark.
“Took you guys long enough,” I said with a forced laugh that hurt my side just as bad as the sharp inhale had moments before.
“Better late than never,” I heard in Wild’s growly, bear-voice. “Now get down!”
The second I hit the slick, wet stone floor, I heard a yelp, a scream, and a few wildly angry grunts. There were sounds of clashing teeth, gnashing claws, and the most horrible, startling kind of screeching I’d ever heard.
“She got me in the throat!” I heard a voice shout. I couldn’t tell which one it was. When they were hurt they all sounded mostly the same, give or take an octave. “Damn, she’s quick! I can’t catch her!”
“I can’t even get a hand on her!” That voice I was sure came from Wild. He was always getting a little more excited than anyone else, and his voice generally reflected that sort of enthusiasm. He let out another roar as he clashed again with the girl he couldn’t catch.
“You’re a slow, fat, half-drugged bear, you idiot! None of you could—ugh!”
Something hit her hard enough to shut her up though I wasn’t sure what, or who, had finally done the good deed. It wasn’t long though before she let out a yelp, and a screech that pierced me to the core. She laughed, more a horrible witch’s cackle than anything else, sent a shiver through me. “I can’t get her!”
I watched as she seemed to flash back and forth between my mates, cutting them, thrashing them, and finally latching her teeth onto Grave’s enormously thick neck. She bit as hard as she could, drawing blood from the sinew and muscle, but with a wrenching, almost viscerally horrifying thrust of his fist, he shoved her aside.
“Adriana!” Grave shouted. “Can you see her? Can you do—“
Cutting him off was another flurry of attacks from the wolf girl, who leaped on his chest, wrapped her semi-lupine legs around his waist and started thrashing at him with a flurry of scratches. She clawed him so violently that I saw blood fly like it was a comic book panel.
Without thinking a second time, I charged back at her. It seemed like my bears were moving in slow motion compared to her. For some reason though I saw her every move, like the two of us were moving at the same rate. I can’t explain how, I have absolutely no idea, but every time she moved, I moved with her. She swung her arm in a violent arc and I met it with mine. She slammed my arm backward against the wall, but I managed to block her claw from digging into my shoulder.
“How the hell are you doing that?” I heard Wild call out.
“She’s sensing that wolf,” Grave said, the first words I’d heard him speak since apparently coming back from the dead. “She’s somehow attuned herself to the beast and…”
Listening to him was a mistake. The pale wolf girl caught me in the side of the face with a brutal rake of her claws. Her nails dragged flaming, painful scratches across my cheek, but I wasn’t giving up, not this easy.
I shook her off and managed to shoulder block her against the wall where she’d been holding me for a few seconds. Driving my legs like pistons on the ground just like I’d seen football players do with tackling dummies, I held her in place. She writhed and clawed my back, but there wasn’t a chance in hell I was letting her go.
“Little help here?” I called out. My voice strained with the effort of keeping this she-wolf pinned, but I had no choice. In the way you always hear about people flipping over pickup trucks with their bare hands to save people from car wrecks, I had some kind of impossible strength, some sort of unknown force, driving me forward. I couldn’t stop, not if I ever wanted to see my bears safe again.
“Guys?” I had her by the neck but it wasn’t doing a whole hell of a lot of good. This girl was thrashing so hard I could feel my grip slipping by the second. “Hello?”
A chorus of roars, followed by pained yelping hit my ears. I chanced a glance around but that was enough for the girl to get away. She twisted her head, throwing my hands off her neck and gave me a sharp blow—knee or elbow, I couldn’t tell—right into the side.
Craze and Wild were by me not a moment later. Grave hobbled up next, and braced himself against the wall. “Where’d she go?” he asked, with a hint of incredulity in his voice. “Don’t tell me… she got away.” His breath came in hard, short bursts and when I looked down at him in his half-shifted form, nasty cuts all down his left side were running with blood. He clutched at them, then pulled his hand away like he’d touched something hot.
The last of the gas cloud drained from the room, which I could now see was only a little larger than a hotel room. It had seemed so much bigger in the darkness, and the way sounds echoed through it made me think it was some kind of enormous space, but there in the light it seemed completely innocuous. Well, except for the cages and the lupine corpses scattered around.
“How did you guys get here?” I asked, falling into Wild’s arms. Craze embraced me next, kissing me so hard my head went back against Wild’s chest. I felt both of their hearts beating in time with mine, and for a moment, the warmth of their skin comforted me. “Where are we, anyway?”
“A place we’ve known about for a while,” Wild said, glancing at Grave, who was still trying to hold himself up. “Just never thought we’d have any reason to go here. A day and a half walk from home,” he said, “little shorter from the cave.”
The thought that I’d been taken so many miles in so little time gave me a moment’s pause. “But how did you know?”
Craze grunted, and let himself shift fully back to human. “Didn’t,” he said shortly. “But after Grave left us for dead in the woods, we had a hunch he might’ve tried something stupid, something desperate. So here we are.”
“Stupid,” Grave echoed. “More than that. Desperate, yes. Desperate and cowardly. I thought I could—“
“We know,” I cut him off. “You don’t have to make any grand statements. We all know what you did, and I at least know why you did it.”
He looked at me with narrowed eyes, and nodded. “I should have believed in you,” he said. “But…”
“Eno
ugh of all that,” Wild cut in, “we don’t have time for a bunch of teary-eyed yammering. Did you feel the ground shaking just before we came in? Did you see the flash of light?”
I nodded, but said nothing.
“Todd set off some kind of explosion,” Craze said. “I don’t know what it was, but I’ve got a feeling that this was his plan all along. Lure the leader away, give his wolves enough time to blow our home straight to hell.”
“What’s this?” I bent down and fetched a length of shimmery fabric off the floor. My fingers scraped the concrete, shaking as I did.”
Grave took it from my hand and held it to his face, drawing a long breath through his nose. He shuddered when his lungs were full. “It’s that wolf woman’s,” he said. “Watch. It’s one of their tricks.”
Pressing the cloth to his side, blood soaked into it, and then seemed to vanish in thin tendrils of smoke into the air. “I’ve always wanted to get ahold of some of it, but never figured it’d happen this way.” When he peeled the cloth back, the wounds were dry, and closed. “Still hurts, but what the hell, better than it was before.”
“It healed you?” I took a step back, bumping into Wild. I was still so spooked that feeling him behind me gave me a jolt of surprise. “But how is that…?”
“A month after falling into a world of shape-shifting bear people and killing a bunch of werewolves, you’re still confused about how some glowing cloth could heal a wound?” Wild chuffed a laugh. “Although I guess we do most of our medicine by stuffing yellow goo into cuts, so I can see the confusion.”
“So it’s magic?” I asked, rubbing the silken fabric between my fingers.
Just as Wild was opening his mouth to say something else, a screaming peal of noise shattered the silence that had come over the room. Immediately, all three of them shot their eyes around, looking for the source. Grave winced, bending over and holding his head in his hands. The other two didn’t show any discomfort if they felt it.
“Alarm,” Craze said flatly. “My guess is that wolf girl, whoever she was, set it off when she got away. She didn’t look like your garden variety stooge, so I’m guessing she’s either related to Todd, mated to him, or something like that. You don’t get werewolf royalty in places like this otherwise. Either way, we gotta get out of here, or they’ll probably open up the gas vents again. We were able to will power our way through one dose, but another won’t go so well. Come on.”
He grabbed my arm by the wrist and the other two followed close behind. As we neared the door, I looked back one last time, still trying to process everything that had happened in the last few seconds. That’s when a slight glint caught my eye, something in a box near my former cell.
“We can’t leave yet,” I said, pulling away from Wild’s grip and trotting over to the box. The smooth wood of my spear-axe’s handle warmed me to the core as I wrapped my fingers around it and squeezed. “There’s only one way to make sure he doesn’t do anything else to hurt you,” I paused for a moment. “To make sure he doesn’t hurt us.”
“She’s not…” Wild glanced at Craze.
“She is,” Craze said back. “I knew she had it in her, but…”
“Damn,” Grave finished. “There’s a lot for us to learn from her.”
When I looked back at them, they were all watching me, studying my movements. I flicked my wrist to detach the blade, then clicked it back in place decisively. “I’ve learned a lot from you three,” I said. “About love, about courage,” I stared at Wild, then Craze, and finally Grave. “About myself. I’ll be damned if I let him hurt anyone else. Especially those cubs before I ever get a chance to really meet them.”
“Like he said,” Wild whispered, looking in Grave’s direction. “Damn.”
2
I can’t say what kept pushing me forward except an impossible amount of adrenaline, and the knowledge that if I didn’t kill him, this would never end.
I couldn’t stomach the thought that a month from then, or a year, or ten years, this nightmare was going to come back around. It didn’t matter if we stopped him, and it didn’t matter if we saved the clan for the moment; if it ever happened again, it was a thousand years too soon. And anyway, the whole bear thing was rubbing off on me pretty heavily. I’m not one to admit that I want revenge, but… well let’s be honest. After what he put my mates and I through, revenge sounded pretty good.
My bloodthirst notwithstanding, there was an entire complex between us and Todd, assuming he hadn’t yet hit the high road and made off like a bandit, never to be seen again until the next time he decided to try and burn the world down. I’d be damned if I let that happen when I had the chance to stop it.
Gritting my teeth, I just kept walking, one step after the next.
“I doubt we could find our way out even if we were trying to escape,” Craze said as the four of us stepped into an intersection that looked exactly like all the ones before it. “At some point, going right all the time has to lead back in a circle, right?”
“Hell of a circle,” Wild said. “I’ve been scratching the wall every time we’ve turned. Haven’t seen one of my marks yet, so we’re still just going along.”
The alarm still blaring every so often reminded me that we didn’t have much time. “If that alarm is still going, does that mean he’s still here?”
“Who knows?” Grave said. “But only a coward would abandon his people when there are four dangerous prisoners roaming the halls.”
“Don’t say that,” I said softly, “I doubt he’s the sort of captain to go down with the ship. Picard he ain’t.”
The deafening silence got the hair prickling on the back of my neck. “What?” I asked. “You’ve seen professional wrestling, but not Star Trek?” I had to laugh. That momentary splitting of tension, just the imaginary thought that we weren’t staring death in the face at that very second, gave me a shot of courage. Immediately after though, as we jogged down the next length of corridor to another junction, it all faded away in a big, long, rush.
“What if we don’t find him? What if we can’t even get out?” I asked no one in particular. No one responded as I’m sure they were all thinking the same thing. I couldn’t have that though. I forced myself to shut off the part of my brain that’s given to constant worry and anxiety. Gritting my teeth and squeezing the handle of my spear was enough to ward those feelings away for the moment.
Letting my arm relax also meant that the back end of my spear bounced along the cracks in the wall. A hollow, sickly echo beat back to my ears, in time with the plodding of my feet and the thumping of my heart. Swallowing hard got rid of a little trepidation, but not as much as I would’ve liked.
Still, every so often I felt Craze, or Wild, or Grave’s hand brush against me, and knowing that whatever happened, we were all together, gave me enough courage to keep going. Finally we hit the end of the road.
“Well, that’s not what I expected,” Craze said, speaking what everyone had been thinking. “A dead end instead of another junction. I’m not real sure how to take this, but I think I’m pissed.”
I turned, my face flushing hot with a mixture of anger and terror. If this really was the end of the line, then we had a hell of a long way to go backward, with no guarantee we’d end up any better off than we were. As I did though, my spear tapped the wall, and instead of the standard thunk of metal against stone, back came a metallic clanging sound.
“That’s different,” Wild said flatly. “Real different. Not that it matters if we don’t know how to open it.”
“There are three gigantic bears here,” I said, “and you can’t figure out how to get through a wall? I’m ashamed.”
“I’ll take that as a challenge.” Wild backed off, hunkered down and with a roar so loud it actually hurt my ears as it careened off the walls around us, charged forward with his head down and his shoulder out. In the instant before impact, I winced, narrowing my eyes to slits, and not knowing what to expect.
He leapt from about a foot
away and I closed my eyes tight.
I’m pretty sure that the last thing I expected was the first thing I should have.
With the most horrible crunching sound of flesh and blood smacking against metal I can imagine, Wild impotently bounced off the wall let out a light whimper, and collapsed to the floor. Immediately I was down there with him, cradling his head, that from the blood on the side of it, he must’ve somehow cracked into the wall, and trying to figure out some way to comfort him.
I almost forgot that I had the shimmering, silky, shirt-looking thing wrapped around my wrist.
The instant it touched him, he let out a sound that reminded me of the sound I make when I pour alcohol onto a cut. He wiggled underneath my hands, trying to get away from where the fabric touched him. Grave, I noticed was laughing.
“It works,” he said, “but I never said it didn’t hurt.”
“Thanks, asshole,” Wild offered. Only seconds later though, his bleeding was staunched and he was moving his shoulder around. That, and the brief verbal spar the two had went a long way to making me feel a little more human again. He climbed to his feet, and patted the wall.
A soft beeping sound issued from it. He did it again, with the same effect, and then leaned backward against the metal. I placed my hand on the smooth, cool, gunmetal gray panel. It matched the rest of the walls exactly in color, but the texture was slightly different, as though someone had tried at one point to camouflage it, but hadn’t been entirely successful.
Or they ran out of time.
“A scanner.” The idea popped into my head like a match flaring from the strike. “There must be a scanner around here somewhere. There has to be some way to open this panel.” Frantically I started running my hands back and forth along the panel, then the walls on either side.
“A what?” Craze asked.
“Scanner, something… there’s got to be somewhere to touch that will let you in. Like if the right person puts their hand on the wall, it—”
