Burned

by Dean Murray

  I'd spent weeks learning how to use a sword, but Vicki managed to pick up something that hadn't ever been meant to be thrown, and turned it into a spear, a spear that hit the werewolf with enough force to bury itself six inches deep into the werewolf's arm.

  It was little more than a flesh wound for something that big, but the attack did its job—it knocked the werewolf's blow just enough off track that our hybrid took a glancing blow to the shoulder rather than a fatal blow to the chest.

  I let out a roar as I pounded past Vicki, who'd lost her lead on me when she'd planted to throw the pipe. The yell had been more instinct than anything else, but it served to bring the werewolf around in a charge at me rather than finishing off the hybrid who was even now spinning across the blacktop in a spray of blood.

  I let it take two steps in my direction, and then I ripped the cover off from the rift inside of me. I'd learned my lesson in the past. Opening my gift all of the way up usually resulted in me spending the next several hours on my back, so I normally used only the barest amount of power possible. That all went out the window this time.

  I took off all of the stops and I landed my absorption field directly on the werewolf as the sparse streetlights around us momentarily flickered back on.

  It was like trying to drink down a hurricane using a straw. It should have been impossible, but somehow I managed to get my metaphysical hooks into the werewolf enough that I felt the stream of energy start to ground out in the center of my body.

  It was worse than standing at ground-zero for a lightning strike. The energy that I'd sucked out of the vampires had stressed my ability to the very limit. It had been a raw, angry kind of power, but it had nothing on what I was pulling away from the werewolf.

  The energy I was sucking down from the werewolf was distilled malice. It burned my insides, but it was coming down, and that was all that I cared about until I felt the rift start to destabilize.

  Up until that moment I'd never worried about where all of the energy I was absorbing went. I understood physics better than the average layperson, but I'd forgotten one of the most fundamental rules of the universe. Energy doesn't just disappear. It can be redirected and it can be transformed into another form, but it doesn't just vanish.

  I'd somehow thought that I could just dump an endless amount of energy into my rift without any concern for anything other than how wide I could crank that rift open. Before now, the strength of my absorption effect had been the limiting factor, but something had changed over the last few days.

  Maybe it was a result of the practice I'd put in experimenting on Carson and my friends. Maybe it was just a new level of power brought on by raw need. Either way, I opened up the portal inside of me wider than I'd ever managed before, and for the first time I noticed that the energy was going somewhere else, somewhere that had limits of its own.

  The rift inside me wasn't destabilizing because it couldn't handle the flow of energy I was feeding into it, the rift was destabilizing because whatever place I was sending that energy into couldn't accept it—at least not that much, not so quickly.

  The werewolf missed a step and nearly tripped. I could see it in its eyes, the savage orbs that usually conveyed only the most violent of emotions. The werewolf had been taken off guard by the sensation of me stealing its energy away, but as the werewolf righted itself my rift slammed shut, and it was me who was falling.

  I was dead. There was no other possible outcome—not with more than a quarter-ton of deadly werewolf crashing toward me—but Vicki didn't function under the same constraints as the rest of us.

  She shot past me in a blur, a blur that defied all common sense by arrowing in straight at the werewolf rather than dodging to one side. The werewolf had all of the cards. It was bigger, heavier, had a longer reach, and was faster than Vicki.

  No hybrid could go toe-to-toe with a werewolf and survive more than the first pass, but Vicki did. The werewolf moved like barely-leashed lightning, but no matter how fast it struck, she always managed to be a fraction of an inch ahead of the blow.

  My legs were weak. I knew I needed to get back to my feet and help Vicki, but I couldn't seem to get my body to respond. Vicki danced in, claws scoring on the werewolf's arm, and then threw herself over the counterattack, body clearing the deadly claws that otherwise would have ended her life.

  For a second I thought she was moving faster than she'd been moving on the way into the fight, but that wasn't the case. She wasn't moving any faster than I could have moved if I'd been able to get up. The difference was that there was no wasted movement to anything she did.

  It didn't matter what the werewolf did, or how fast it moved, Vicki always moved from wherever she was to wherever she needed to be in order to avoid its attacks. She chained together combinations of movements that were unreal. She was using techniques that should have gotten her killed several times over.

  Her fighting style was all of the commitment that Carson had spent weeks beating into me, but it was reckless in ways that he never would have condoned. A slip, a hesitation, if anything had gone wrong in the first three seconds of her fight she would have died a dozen times over, but time and time again her crazy, reckless actions proved to be exactly what she needed in order to survive against an opponent that she had no hope of beating.

  The sound of wolf pads on asphalt told me that the rest of Vicki's people were only seconds away from joining the fight. A surge of relief crashed through me at the knowledge that Vicki wouldn't be forced to continue fighting by herself.

  Somehow my mind hadn't been able to process what I'd been seeing ever since Vicki had engaged the werewolf. I still thought that she couldn't win, still expected her to back off and wait until the rest of her people joined the fight.

  The way to take down a werewolf was the same way that wolves took down hybrids. Surround it with greater numbers and harry it until it made a mistake that let one of the smaller combatants get into position to kill it from behind.

  As if reading my mind, Vicki did exactly the opposite of what I'd been anticipating. She didn't fall back, she upped the intensity of the fight. She charged forward into deadly, foot-long claws, and it was like she was made out of nothing more than air.

  The claws flashed by, passing within millimeters of her, and then she lashed out, a single impossible blow that ripped out the werewolf's throat. The death throes of something as big and dangerous as a werewolf were more than capable of taking an unsuspecting hybrid with it, but Vicki danced back out of range shrugging off blows that should have opened her up from hip to collarbone.

  She watched the werewolf bleed out to make sure that it wasn't going to lunge forward and kill her, and then turned as though planning on going to check on her downed hybrid. In the heat of the moment I'd forgotten all about the hybrid who'd been backhanded by the werewolf, but I looked over to find three of Vicki's people clustered around their teammate.

  Vicki was halfway over to the group when one of them turned around and gave her a thumbs up to indicate that they'd managed to stabilize the injured hybrid. I was astonished—very few hybrids would have survived that kind of blow. Apparently Shawn hadn't been kidding when he said that he would be sending down some of his very best.

  Vicki sighed in relief at the confirmation she hadn't lost anyone, and then turned back to me.

  "I assume we passed muster?"

  Chapter 11

  Alec Graves

  The Socorro Motel

  Tucson, Arizona

  I managed to walk back to the SUVs under my own power, but it was a close thing. Under other circumstances I probably would have been worried about showing so much weakness in front of a hybrid I didn't know very well, but the idea that Vicki might decide to take advantage never crossed my mind. She was the consummate professional.

  Getting back to Vicki's motel was easy. The challenge arose when it was time to discuss me getting back to my RV.

  "You've got tinted windows, Alec. Drive me back to your RV and just
leave me in the car."

  "They'll be able to smell you—not well, not with the small amount of airflow in and out of the vehicle, but well enough that James, Jess and Jasmin will recognize you if they get close enough."

  Vicki scowled. "You're right. I'm not used to being in a location where someone outside of the pack will recognize my scent. You'll have to relocate your operations here. I'll send one of my people out for food, and then we'll hole up inside of our rooms so that nobody has a chance to see or smell us."

  Now it was my turn to frown. "I can't uproot my entire operation and move them here. That would look incredibly suspicious to anyone watching a satellite feed. We worked really hard to make sure that we arrived in staggered waves precisely to avoid that."

  "I can't protect you from all the way over here, Alec. That's not the way that my gift works."

  "Then tell me how your gift works, Vicki. I need something to go off of if we're going to figure out a solution that puts you close enough to help out if things go south without blowing your cover if they don't."

  She waved the rest of her team out of her room before speaking.

  "I'm doing this under protest, but I suspect that you already have a pretty good idea of what I'm capable of now that you've had a chance to see me fight. I can see the future."

  "That's incredible!"

  "Not as incredible as you might think. I can't predict stock market crashes or tell you who's going to win the Super Bowl. All I can see is the next few seconds. It's enough to give me advance warning when something big goes down around me, and if I'm really concentrating I'll know what an opponent is going to do before they do it."

  The possibilities were incredible, and with every second that I continued to think about her gift, additional uses unfolded before me.

  "I was suspecting something like that, but to be honest I was leaning towards some kind of telepathy to explain what you were doing earlier. No wonder you were freaking out earlier when I cut off your power. You're used to knowing everything that's going to happen before it happens. Losing that would be worse than going blind."

  "It wasn't pleasant, but it probably wasn't as bad as all of that. I don't see everything that happens, but I'm used to knowing if I'm in danger with plenty of time to react and get myself and Shawn out of trouble."

  "How do you process all of that information? Is it like light or sound, or something completely different?"

  Vicki looked at me oddly. "Nobody has ever asked me anything like that."

  "Sorry, I didn't mean to pry. I'm just still in the middle of figuring out the limits of my own power, so I'm extra curious right now. An ability like the one you've just described is fundamentally different than something like Brandon Worthingfield's. His is solely an increase in his physical attributes, yours has nothing to do with your speed or strength and everything to do with receiving a completely separate feed of information, one that normal brains aren't equipped to handle."

  She shook her head. "I wasn't angry, just surprised. Most people just want to know what I can do rather than how I can do it. In answer to your question, I get…premonitory sensory feeds from all three major senses. Sight, sound, smell, I constantly get information coming in from all three of those senses that tells me what's going on in real-time and what could happen in the future."

  "Could happen?"

  "Yes, the concept of destiny is a bunch of rubbish—at least in the short term. Every action I take causes ripples in the possible futures that I sense. Right now the future I'm sensing indicates that we're going to spend the next few seconds just talking, but if I threw myself at you and tried to rip your head off, all of that would change."

  She said it so calmly that I almost failed to react, but my beast was more on the ball than the rest of me. He lashed out with the energy required to trigger a transformation to hybrid form, but I managed to intercept the surge. I wasn't fast enough to stop the flare of energy completely, but I grounded enough of it out to stop from transforming.

  Vicki smiled. "That was also a possibility, but it wasn't very likely until I said what I said just now."

  "And you can see all of it at the same time?"

  "I wish. No, it's like you said, our minds aren't really designed to handle an infinite stream of information coming at us. In theory I could see all of it at the same time—the information seems to be there—but I discard most of it. It's like standing in a normal room and picking out a single conversation from all of the background noise. It's taken a lot of practice, but I've mostly managed to train myself to pick out the most important bits and ignore everything else."

  "You had a hard time when you first manifested your gift, didn't you?"

  "If by hard time you mean I was borderline catatonic for more than a month while my mind tried to put itself back together after being fractured by more information than any mind was ever supposed to be exposed to at one time, then yes, it was a hard time.

  "It was Shawn who helped me. We'd known each other since we were kids, but we weren't that close until then. He sat at my bedside for weeks. More importantly, he ordered everyone else to leave me alone. The fact that he was Ulrich's son meant that he had enough pull to make an order like that stick. That was when I first started to be able to cope with things.

  "He'd reduced the number of futures facing me, and then as I started being able to tell him what was happening, he moved me even further away from people. It took another three months of gradually exposing me to more and more varied environments before I could function more or less normally, but even now I sometimes have to shut down one or more of my senses in order to focus on the futures headed at me. While I was fighting that werewolf I shut down my sense of smell and my sense of taste. That bought me almost a full second of extra foresight."

  "So you just see the future play out in your head alongside the present?"

  "No, it's more like a series of ghost images that play along in real time. The most likely events are more defined, but the further you get into the future the harder it is to pick things out."

  She'd just given me part of the secret to beating her, and we both knew it. I hated myself for doing it, but I added that piece of information to the files I kept inside my head detailing the weaknesses of all of the hybrids with known powers. In a one-on-one fight Vicki was going to be nearly unbeatable, but if I could throw her into the middle of a bigger fight where she was up against more opponents, she would have a harder time dealing with all of the stimuli coming at her.

  She sighed. "So that's why I need to be nearby. If I'm three miles away from you, I'm not going to be able to see anything smaller than a bomb going off. I considered just phoning in this particular guard assignment, but I've never let Shawn down before this, and I don't want to start now."

  "Okay, the closer you are to me, the better you're going to be able to protect me. I'm sure we could find a way to mask your scent from everyone if we were to stick you in an SUV, but it wouldn't be a comfortable solution. I can only see one other way to do this. I'll go back and get my RV, and meet you a mile or two away from our camp. You'll spend the next few days in my room until I can get someone to pick up another RV for you. We'll stick some air fresheners out in the main living area, and I'll just keep everyone out of my RV between now and then."

  "They'll know that something is up. They'll know that you've got someone in there with you."

  "Yeah, but they won't know who."

  Vicki considered the plan for several seconds and then nodded. "Okay. I'm not sharing your bed though—you'll be sleeping on the couch."

  "Of course. I'll get started back now—my phone has been off for long enough that people are going to be worried about me."

  Chapter 12

  Alec Graves

  The Caravan RV Park

  Tucson, Arizona

  When I stepped into my RV, I found Jasmin and Jess both clustered over Brindi, giving her motionless form CPR.

  My mind was whirling as I sprinted over to the
three of them. I couldn't remember for sure when I'd last seen Brindi—when she'd last gotten the fix she needed. I'd thought that she still had a few hours before she would be getting to the critical zone, but it seemed I'd somehow lost track of time and not been here when she'd needed me to be.

  "Have you called 911?"

  Jasmin shook her head as she continued with chest compressions. "We didn't know if that would be okay. You were pretty clear about the need to keep a low profile out here."

  I already had my phone out and was dialing.

  "How long has she been like this?"

  "We've been here for ten minutes—she's not cold yet, so she can't have stopped breathing very long ago. Check her pulse, Alec, I'm having a hard time getting back into position after taking my hands off of her to check."

  I grabbed Brindi's wrist right as Jasmin stopped compressions and Jess leaned back down to resume mouth-to-mouth, and felt a shock that was an order of magnitude more powerful than just static electricity. I recoiled instinctively from the spark, but Brindi started gasping for breath and my insides started to unknot.

  "Alec, you came back."

  Jasmin was trying to take Brindi's pulse now, but she batted Jasmin's hands away with one hand while reaching for me with another.

  "Of course I came back. I'm so sorry I wasn't here when you needed me. I thought we still had time before you were going to need me. I guess I lost track of an hour or two in there somewhere."

  She looked around disorientedly, searching for a clock. "I thought we did too. I would have called you otherwise. I was starting to get nervous, but I wanted to give you your space. I was feeling so tired. I sat down to rest my legs—I guess I fell asleep."

  I was trying to fit the pieces together, but nothing was matching up with our experience so far. Brindi had fallen asleep dozens of times leading up to needing her next fix, but before this she'd always woken from the shaking that accompanied the onset of the severe withdrawal symptoms. If she was getting to the point where she was going to slip into the danger zone without actually experiencing the shakes, then we'd just entered dangerous new territory.