Chapter Six: The Long Road to Reality
Her head hurt.
It was a sharp yet throbbing pain that forced her up to the surface of consciousness much faster than she would have liked.
When she did come to, her stomach roiled and she wanted nothing more than to sink back down into the blessed nothingness.
“Whoa there, you okay?”
She winced at the noise as it and about a dozen other sounds hit her all at once. The rumbling of a car engine, the rush of wind as it whipped by at top speed, the heavy breathing of Dannon as he snoozed in the front seat.
“Head. Hurts,” she managed to grind out between throbs of her brain.
“I’m not surprised. You gave us quite a scare there.” He nudged Dannon beside him. “Hey, Jaelle’s up. Get her some pain meds and water.”
The blind man jerked awake and Jaelle couldn’t help but commiserate. “Wha? Huh? Oh.” He fumbled with some things that she couldn’t see before twisting and leaning over the back of the seat. “You don’t got any allergies I should know about, do you? Aspirin, antibiotics, latex?”
“Shifters don’t have allergies, we heal too fast.”
“Who the hell told you that? An allergy is an allergy, healing abilities or not.”
“Oh. Then, no. No allergies.”
“Good. Take two of these.” He handed her medicine and an already opened water bottle that she gulped down emphatically. She felt a little less like death as she rehydrated and the throbbing in her head dwindled down into a dull ache.
“You think you’re ready to eat something?”
“No,” she groaned, her whole body protesting at the thought. “Not yet.”
“You sure?” There was a touch more concern to the man’s voice than there should have been and Jaelle noticed it even in her compromised state.
“Yeah. Why?”
“No reason.”
“You’ve been asleep for a little over two days,” Dannon answered, chuckling lightly as he unwrapped a cereal bar and take a gratuitous bite. “Long enough for us to cremate the corpses, head to town, call in the Wendigo situation, and hit the road.”
“Geeze. No wonder I feel like shit.” And no wonder her body was thoroughly tired of laying down. Although there was a deep ache running through her, she slowly sat up. It was daylight, all right, and they were on a civilized highway instead of some sort of rocky backroad. What a pleasant change.
But when she looked out the back window, she noticed that one of the vehicles was missing.
“Hey, where’s the other Jeep?”
“Had to ditch it,” was the terse reply.
“Why?” She didn’t remember a Wendigo going anywhere near it and if something dramatic happened after the battle, she wanted to know.
“Because we don’t have enough drivers now. Jason didn’t make it.”
“Didn’t make it- oh…” Her mind flicked back to the thick scent of blood in the air and what she now recognized as Javi’s voice screaming for a medic. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s a risk we all accept when we choose to take up the mantle of a Hunter. We gave him a warrior’s funeral and called his death in to the Clan Leaders. He was a good man, and he died taking down one of those beasts.”
“Speaking of those beasts,” Dannon said. “They tell me you became one.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
“And apparently you had a hard time coming back.”
“Yeah, I guess that happened, too.”
“That ever happen before?”
“No, not that I remember. Sometimes I have a really hard time holding onto an animal’s form, and especially half-shifts, but I never have trouble going back to my human body.”
“Huh. Interesting. You think that’s because of the creature you shifted into, or your emotional state?”
If she had the energy, she would have rolled her eyes. She liked Dannon and all, but after everything she had been through, she was in no mood to be psychoanalyzed.
“I dunno. It’s not like anyone has ever shifted into a Wendigo before.”
“That is very true. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible if I hadn’t seen it myself. We’re certainly lucky that you’re on our side.” He chewed on his lips for a couple of beats before continuing. “Does your, uh, Creed fellow have the ability to do that?”
“Come on, Dannon, how’s she supposed to know that?”
“Actually,” she chimed in. “I don’t think he can. I’ve been able to watch him shift a few times and it’s very different from what I do. If I had to guess, he can’t hold as many animals in his mind like I can, and he can’t learn a beast on the fly. But when he does transform, he’s the perfect specimen. If he’s a wolf, he’s the strongest, fastest wolf to ever exist. And knocking him out of an animal form doesn’t seem possible.” She shrugged. “I mean, I could be wrong, but I’m just going off what I’ve observed.”
“No, that makes sense considering all we’ve seen as we’ve tracked him,” Bradley said. “And I’ve spent my entire life hunting and studying Aberrants, but I’ve never heard of any being able to take on the form of something as big as hippo, let alone into a cursed creature like a Wendigo.”
“I guess I’m just special then.” Jaelle shot back.
“Yeah,” he said, leveling his gaze at her through the rearview mirror. “I think you are.”
Oh.
Well.
That hadn’t exactly been the response she had been expecting, and if she wasn’t so damned tired, she might have blushed. Instead, she closed her eyes and slumped forward, resting her aching head against the cushion of the front seat.
She had a whole lot to think about, but it would wait until her brain didn’t feel like it was recovering from the world’s most intense marathon.
****
It took longer for her to recover than she would like to admit. Normally she could shrug off even the most grievous of wounds in forty-eight hours, but her body was just sluggishly moping toward healing.
She didn’t even have the energy to ask where they were going, or what their next step was since their medic had ended up in the belly of a Wendigo. Mostly, she just slept in the back of the Jeepexcept for when Bradley forced her to walk around when they stopped for gas and eat food.
The leader put an awful lot of effort into taking care of her. She would have been flattered if she had the energy or emotional capacity available to think about it. But as it were, she just existed, going through the motions as he made sure she didn’t waste away.
It wasn’t until at least a week of driving that she started to feel like herself again. The weight of leaving David behind was less like a crushing pressure and more like an unpleasant papercut, or splinter, and the cold clutch of the Wendigo spirit seemed to have waned entirely.
She wondered what Creed was up to, however. He could do a whole lot in a week. But thinking about that just made her wonder when he had time to set up the whole Wendigo trap and thinking about the Wendigos made her remember how they used David’s voice and then she was stuck thinking about David again.
Dammit. She needed to get out of her rut.
“Hey, when are we stopping tonight?”
Bradley nearly jumped in the front seat, almost jerking the wheel to the side. “Oh, hey,”
“What?” she countered. “Why are you looking at me like I’m a ghost.”
“Because you haven’t said anything of your own volition in over a day,” Javi answered, noisily eating chips in the back.
“Well, it’s almost nightfall and we haven’t been able to take as many shift changes as we normally would. So, I would guess an hour or two, tops.”
“Good,” she said with a nod. “I don’t suppose you have any cards, do you?”
“Actually… I think Dannon might,” Javi said. “If you don’t mind them having Braille on one side. He taught me how to play Speed. That man is ungodly fast.”
“What’s Speed? Besides slang for a drug.” She h
ad learned that one very quickly when she was a teenager living on the street.
“Oh, man, it is such a great game, especially with Shifters. When we stop tonight, I’ll have to show both y’all.”
“Sounds good to me,” Bradley said, looking over to her with a soft expression on his face.
Although there was nothing salacious, or even remotely inappropriate about his gaze, it still made her blush a bit. Maybe it was because he had seen her so vulnerable. Maybe it was because, if not for him, she could very well be stuck in that Wendigo body, her mind lost to whatever crazed spirit drove that thing.
“All right then,” she said, nodding and trying to act natural. “Speed it is.”
Chapter Seven: A Well-Earned Respite
Javi had not been lying about how ridiculously fun Speed was. She had been skeptical at first, never having been one for cards until she became a mechanic, but as the youngest of the Hunters explained the rules, she found excitement coiling in her for the first time in ages.
It had been days since her last laugh, or even smile, and she couldn’t stop from doing either as she lost repeatedly.
The rules were fairly simple. It was a two-player game that used a standard deck. Each player had five cards in their hand and then fifteen cards in their own personal draw pile. In the center were two face down cards that would be the ones the players would go off of, and beside them was a five card ‘stuck’ pile on either side. The goal was to flip the center cards and then lay down one either above or below the number shown, then pull from the draw deck to keep the hand at five cards. The first person to go through all of their hand and their draw pile won.
It sounded a bit complicated, but most of the matches lasted less than three minutes once both players got the hang of it.
And boy, was Jaelle terrible.
It wasn’t that her reflexes were terrible, she just had a knack for getting distracted at the absolute worst moment, or accidentally knocking her draw pile over. Nevertheless, she had a blast.
Maybe she needed a reminder of what it was like to actually live. She had been so concerned with running for her life, and then facing death, and then trying to prove that Aberrants weren’t monsters that she hadn’t taken any time to just… breathe.
“All right, you ready to lose again?” Bradley asked, switching out with Micah to sit across from her on the blanket they had laid out.
“I dunno,” she admitted with a sloping grin. “My pride has taken a lot more hits tonight than I’d like.”
“Oh, please, I’ve seen you literally rip a man apart with your tusks. You could use a little humbling every now and then.”
“Fair enough,” she replied, taking a moment to look him over now that they weren’t fighting mythological creatures or driving for hours or chasing a mass murderer. He really was a striking fellow for living such a rugged life. His jaw was defined like a model, and his eyes were always sharp and watching.
But that didn’t really matter. Handsome men were a dime a dozen and came in thousands of different colors, sizes, shapes and muscle tones. What mattered was the sense of duty he obviously felt toward protecting others. Jaelle knew if any other Hunter group had found her, or had been assigned to Creed, she would long be dead in her tracks and there would be no one standing in the way of the mad Aberrant and his quest to revolutionize Shifter culture by killing every Clan Leader.
“I’m out!”
Jaelle blinked and looked down, most of her cards still in her draw pile while Bradley was completely out of anything to play.
“How did that happen?” she asked.
But the leader just laughed and laughed. She would have found it a bit condescending if there wasn’t a faint sound of near-breakdown in his mirth. She actually hadn’t spent much time considering how he was dealing with the aftermath of everything.
In no short amount of time, he had given up his esteemed status as a Hunter and lost half of his men while basically becoming a fugitive. Then he had ended up in a fight with the world record for most Wendigos in one place and lost another one of his men. Then he had to babysit the Aberrant who started it all while she tossed, turned and sweated in his back seat. And that wasn’t taking into account all the times he walked her, made sure she took medicine and drank water, or even the food she made sure she mechanically chewed and swallowed.
For being sworn enemies, this man had done everything for her. Much more than anyone had a right to ask. And yet here he was, playing cards with her so she could have some sense of normalcy after all the shit that had happened.
What had her mother once told her? People often concerned themselves with the outside of others, but rarely the inside. Jaelle got the distinct feeling that Bradley cared about the inside of every single one of his men. Maybe even everyone he met that wasn’t a murderer.
Being in a presence of such a good person was intimidating and she lost the next round of Speed as well. To think that she had been so terrified of him for so long. Maybe if she had just stuck around and talked to him, a lot of the stress in her life could have been avoided. But how could she have known?
Finally, she couldn’t take the inner flood of thoughts anymore. She stopped trying to place the next card down, and instead just looked to the leader. It took him several seconds to realize she had halted and he caught her gaze curiously.
“What’s the matter? You stuck?”
“No,” she answered quietly. “Just thinking that I’m really, really lucky that I met you.”
His expression went through several shifts, from flattered, to a bit sorrowful, to finally a small smile and a gracious nod. “I’m glad I met you, too. Even if you have completely managed to turn my entire ideology upside down.”
Jaelle let out a choking laugh at that. “I suppose I did do that, didn’t I?” Since he was distracted, she saw her chance and began laying cards down in rapid succession. Naturally Bradley caught on, but it was too late.
She won her first round of Speed and threw up her arms in celebration.
“See what I mean?” he asked. “Suddenly, I’m in a world where monsters are the one who are supposed to win.”
“Well of course,” she added primly, slowly uncurling from her spot to let Micah have a try. “It would be a sin to have me lose. Have you seen how cute this lil’ monster is?”
“Yeah, I definitely have.”
Oh.
That she had not been expecting. She didn’t exactly have a comeback ready, so she just gave a little half-nod them hopped to the truck, cheeks red.
She needed to be careful. Her heart was still aching over David and she wasn’t about to fall prey to the siren call of the rebound.
Even if that rebound was a handsome, rugged Shifter who oozed dominance and masculinity like cologne and had risked his life for hers multiple times.
…dammit.
****
“So remind me, where are we going again?”
“You are literally driving right now. How the hell do you not know where we’re going?!”
“Shh!” she hissed to Javi, taking her hand off the wheel long enough to elbow him in the ribs. “Bradley’s sleeping.” She glanced to the back to make sure their leader was still passed out, and fortunately he was. He looked pretty cute with his mouth hanging open and his head tilted back against the back of the seat. She couldn’t recall a time when she had seen him look so relaxed. “And I know that I drive on here for seventy more miles before getting onto the interstate, but I don’t know our end goal. I was a bit out of it, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. That was a hectic couple o’ days, man. Micah took Jason’s death pretty hard. I think they might have had a thing for each other, but sometimes I have a hard time telling between brotherly comradery and romantic butterflies.”
“Really?” Jaelle asked. “You have a hard time telling between friendship and love?”
“Well, they’re both love, if we’re being honest. Just different types. And I know the difference between the two for
me, I’m just shit at telling it between others.” He winked at her. “I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic like that.”
Her stomach did a little hop. “You’re… you’re not hitting on me now, are you?”
He laughed at that and she had to remind him to be quiet again. “No, girl! Don’t get me wrong, you’re badass and all sorts of easy on the eye, plus you got that ethnically ambiguous thing about you, but I don’t know you well enough for anything like that.” He let out a bit of a sigh that surprised her. “I don’t know anyone like that. When I took on the mantle of the Hunter, I knew I would be focused on the mission for the next chunk of my life. I just didn’t realize how lonely that could be.
“A lot of times we travel alone, and when we do get assigned to a group for a specific mission, it’s hard to make friends because you don’t know who’s gonna die, or if you’re gonna die, and those wounds hurt less when they happen to strangers.”
“That sounds,” she tried to think of the right words to say, “less than pleasant.”
“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, I am honored to be a Hunter. Or, uh, I guess to have been a Hunter. And I still hope to be one again once we figure out your whole… situation. Protecting people is what matters to me. And if that means I have to be alone and watch what few friends I do have die one by one until I’m forty, then that’s just what I’ll do.”
“Wow, and here I thought I was morbid.”
Dannon’s voice shocked both of them, Jaelle very nearly jerking the wheel to the side. Thankfully she recovered without a car accident, although she was still looking around the cab for the source of the blind man’s muffled voice.
“Oh, I’m sitting on the walkie,” Javi said, pulling it out from under his thigh.
“How did you not feel that?”
“My leg’s asleep. Has been for the past few hours.”
“That’s definitely not healthy,” Dannon’s voice crackled over the line. “But to answer your questions, Jaelle, we’re heading to another outpost where there might be a guard that used to work at the facility.”
The Aberrants Box Set (Books 1-5) Page 29
