Neither Jake nor Grant answered him; he assumed not even their heightened senses could have understood a word he’d said amidst the noise around them. His fellow vampires turned to look at each other instead.
The scientist turned around to face him again, “There was nothing we could do,” Dylan tried to read Grant’s lips to understand his reply. “I’m sorry!”
Although he couldn’t help but feel worried for her, afraid even, he knew his feelings wouldn’t help get her back. Besides, he was confident her vampiric body wouldn’t really sustain any permanent damage. Not in the long run. Rebecca was resourceful and, after having killed several werewolves only minutes before, she was also a powerful weapon. If anything, whoever found her should be careful.
It was enough thinking, they needed to act. “We have to jump,” he shouted back at the others.
Jake’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets. “What?”
Dylan wasn’t sure if he hadn’t heard or if he thought his suggestion was insane. “Jump!” Dylan repeated as loud and clear as possible, grabbing onto the seats’ backs to get closer to them. “We are going down and if we crash and burn, we’ll die.”
Grant was already nodding incessantly, “He’s right. We can survive a fall, but we can’t help but burn to death if we crash with this airplane.” He began shaking his head, “I’m not ready to die.”
The three of them looked at each other, understanding the gist of what they needed to do.
“Where’re the chutes?” asked Jake.
Grant turned to look at the place where the tail used to be, answering his question.
“Shit,” muttered Jake. They could all hear him.
Dylan let go of the plane, “Let’s go.”
Watching him disappear, the remaining vampires followed him out into the open sky.
Dylan, he heard someone calling his name. Was it Becca? Dylan.
He opened his eyes to find Grant’s blue ones staring back at him. There was pain, but not as he had expected. Clearly, his body had begun to heal even before he came back to consciousness. Around him, he saw the trunks of tall trees in full bloom, heard the forest animals chirping, and smelled about a hundred scents coming out of the foliage.
Grant helped him up even when Dylan didn’t really need help.
“Where’s Jake?” he asked.
“I’m here,” the lawyer spoke from a few feet away, closing the distance between them.
Dylan stared at him in terror, “What in the world happened to you?”
The lawyer’s once white dress shirt had been punctured by a thick branch right in the middle of his blood-stained chest. The fabric had been torn significantly.
“I was impaled,” commented Jake through gritted teeth, “by a tree.”
“Are you all right?” Dylan asked.
He grimaced, “Uhm… no, not really.”
Grant approached him, “I have to take that out.”
“Please don’t,” added Jake.
“You can’t really mean that,” Grant said, “It must be painful walking about with a branch sticking out of your chest.”
“I do have a little trouble breathing, but I’ll live,” Jake announced.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” After Grant had said the words, his right hand quickly held the branch on one end, pulling it out. Jake screamed in pain his knees giving out as he dropped on the floor, his hands holding his chest.
“You ok?” Dylan asked. “Jake?”
It took a while for Jake to feel in good enough shape to finally sit up. When he did, he looked down at where the hole in his chest used to be. “I hate werewolves. I hate guns and I hate the agency.”
“Then quit,” Dylan told him.
“I did. I am a lawyer,” Jake continued, “I am not an agent. I am not a werewolf hunter or a vampire hunter, and I don’t like pain.”
Grant began laughing behind his back. “Don’t be so melodramatic, you’re perfectly fine now.”
“It’s not about that,” he grunted, “It’s about pain and… I have been clawed, dropped from a plane, impaled by a branch, and I’ve not had anything to eat or drink in a long time. I’m hungry and tired and I just want to go home to Maggie.”
“Stop crying, you baby,” Dylan snapped, “Now, we both know that’s why you quit, it had nothing to do with me. So, stop saying it is. You’re just a cry-baby.”
“Don’t call me a cry-baby,” Jake raised a finger at him, “Just because I so happen to be a vampire doesn’t mean I need to be fighting werewolves, getting impaled or jumping off airplanes.”
With a roll of his eyes, Dylan left him talking as he started walking away. Grant followed and soon Jake had no other choice but to start walking, too.
“Where are we?” Grant asked, “I don’t recognize this place.” He turned to the others, “Do you?”
“No,” confessed Dylan. “We were flying east and didn’t reach the city, so we should be close to Nashville.”
“How close?” asked Jake quickly.
Dylan looked at him calmly, “I don’t know, Jake.” After saying that, he took out his phone from his jacket. No signal. “Wherever we are can’t be that close to civilization. My phone is dead. Do you have a signal, Jake?”
Taking his own mobile device out, Jake began to walk around holding it up to the sky. “No. And the screen is cracked, damn it.”
“Grant?” they both turned to the scientist.
“Don’t look at me, I don’t have one of your fancy phones. And even if I did, all my equipment died with my plane. Those things are expensive, you know? You people think I’m made out of money.”
Jake snorted, “Being funny can’t possibly be appropriate right now, Grant.”
“I wasn’t being funny,” the Brit said, confused.
“Whatever,” Dylan said. “It’s getting late, so I suggest we keep moving east, keep checking for a signal and-“
“Shh!” warned Jake. “Listen.”
Dylan knew it couldn’t be a werewolf. He would have sensed them before Jake did. “What are we listening to?” One thing Dylan hated was not knowing what was going on.
Grant said, “The river, I suppose.”
Grant was right. Cumberland River was somewhere between The Pecan and the city of Nashville; Dylan had lived in the area long enough to know that. South of the river was the agency, although there was no way to tell which part of the river they were listening to. If they followed the river going East they would find civilization, that was a fact.
“Well, I say we just follow the river, then,” he announced.
It was the sensible thing to do.
Dylan and his companions walked quietly. All the time, the werewolf hunter though about Rebecca, hoping she had made it safely out of the plane. He wondered if she had found Will. If she had, then not everything would have been for naught. It would be very embarrassing if they had lost the werewolf so soon.
For a second Dylan considered Rebecca and William together. Would they be okay? At least Rebecca was stronger than Will, so she couldn’t really be in any danger from him. In addition, if what William had revealed was true, he was one of the most defenseless supernatural creatures to ever roam the Earth. Will. Will and his request to become a part of a vampire agency. It just didn’t make any sense, did it?
Part of Dylan was still adamant to reject the werewolf just because of what he was, but the more he thought about it the more he found nothing to condemn Will for. He had never done something wrong, and if his job was to keep humanity safe, then what right did he have to endanger an innocent, no matter his race. Because that’s what Will was, an innocent. A victim. Someone who needed help.
As much as he wanted to doubt him, to put him in the stereotype he had all werewolves in, he couldn’t. It just didn’t feel right.
Rebecca was wrong after all. He wasn’t prejudiced. He wasn’t going to execute someone who didn’t need executing. If there was something not to be trusted about the boy, he had missed it. He had a si
xth sense, didn’t he? Perhaps the reason why he couldn’t find anything was because there wasn’t anything to find.
Did Will deserve his trust, then?
“What do you think that was about?” Grant interrupted his thoughts.
“Excuse me?” Dylan asked, too lost in his thoughts to notice Grant and Jake talking.
“Do you agree with Jake?” Grant clarified, perhaps knowing he had been distracted. “Do you think it was a trap? You think we were played by this… this William Woods?”
Dylan couldn’t answer the question. There was so much at stake. His reputation was at stake. Did that matter? Or was it because he didn’t feel it was right to support a werewolf even after they had been attacked by an army of werewolves because of him? It felt really easy to damn and condemn him, that was evident. Then, why did he fail to do so? Why did he keep thinking they should trust him?
“They knew where we were,” Jake added to his case. “If that didn’t seem suspicious, I don’t know what will.”
“So, you think he’s a fake,” Grant continued. “A spy?”
Jake shrugged, “I don’t know. He must be a spy… right?”
“The witches said he wasn’t lying,” Grant said.
Finally, Dylan spoke: “He was right, I stopped checking for bugs after I found the key. I was… foolish.” He could feel it inside his pocket as they walked. The key that would lead him to the werewolf they called The One.
The others looked at him in wonder, “Hold on a minute,” Jake started, “are you saying this is all your fault?” Beside him, Grant laughed briefly, “No, I mean it, Dylan… you are accepting you made a mistake?”
The werewolf hunter took a deep breath and stopped himself from saying something he would regret.
Then, Jake said, “You do know Scott is dead, right? They got him. It was too many of them. Yeah. Scott. The two-hundred-year-old vampire is now dead, and all because you didn’t check the boy for bugs?”
“Scott died doing his job.” Then, “You expect me to say it was Will’s fault just because he’s a werewolf?” He then considered it. “Oh, you think it’s my fault?”
“Scott is not your fault, Dylan. Like you said, it was his job. He died fighting,” Grant added.
Dylan had never believed in assigning blame to anyone. In fact, it was more like he believed he couldn’t really be blamed for anything. Things happened for a reason. He was supposed to be the perfect weapon, the vampire who had taken all human behavior out of his system to become something more. How quickly all that had changed after Rebecca had come into his life. No. She hadn’t come, he had brought her in. He had created her, persuaded her to leave her life behind for him. He had brought onto himself the flaws that came with being human. How could that be what Lucius had wanted?
“The fact is Scott is dead,” Jake stated, “and now we are lost in the woods and I have no idea what we’re going to do.”
Grant listened to Jake, not really interested in hearing him complain. Instead, he kept looking at Dylan. Finally, he took his arm forcing him to turn to look at him. Although Dylan could have evaded his touch, he let him. “You believe in Will, don’t you? You think he isn’t like the others.”
“This is crazy,” they heard Jake exhale in front of them. “All of the werewolves came! Scott is dead! It had to be Will. He’s a spy!”
“Shut up, Jacob!” Grant raised his voice for the first time; his irises gleamed with the vampire red.
Dylan was silent. He hadn’t felt this vulnerable in a very long time. He hadn’t felt like he had so much to lose in a very long time. All the while, through it all, he still thought about Rebecca. He needed her. He wanted her to be by his side. “Look, all I know is I can’t kill Will,” he finally confessed. “It would be wrong.”
“So,” Grant pressed, “You believe him. You believe his story. You believe he just wants to fit in, be one of us?”
It was a hard question to answer. As much as he wanted to accept what he really felt, Dylan didn’t want to compromise his position. Not yet. He was a werewolf hunter after all, and the late Scott Wilson had been right: all werewolves deserved to die. Well, all except this boy who had come pleading for their help. Why was it so hard for him to say this out loud. Why couldn’t he say he trusted Will?
“Well,” Jake asked again, “do you?”
He had to commit. He had to answer. He had to make up his mind. “Rebecca trusts him,” he said while releasing his arm from Grant’s grasp. “And I believe he deserves the benefit of the doubt.”
The three vampires walked a long time without saying a word after their candid talk and a productive hunt for food. Every now and then both Jake and Dylan checked to see if their phones gave a signal; they did not have any luck. On top of them, the full moon illuminated the night while serving as a vivid reminder that Rebecca was somewhere out there alone with a werewolf. What if Dylan was wrong? What if he couldn’t be trusted? What if Will betrayed Rebecca while she least expected it, reaching for her heart and ending her life? She was still too naive to the way the supernatural world worked.
Although, he knew she wasn’t that naive; not anymore. Not after that day. She had defended herself in The Pecan like a true werewolf hunter. He had seen her rip the heart out of many wolves and she had done it without apparent regret. It had looked easy for her, natural.
Not that it mattered. Will wouldn’t hurt her. It just didn’t make sense that he would.
“So,” began Grant, one more time interrupting his thoughts, “tell me about your new partner… Rebecca Sawyer.”
For a moment Dylan simply ignored him and kept walking as if no one had spoken. Grant was, to his dismay, rather persistent. All it took was a clearing of his throat for Dylan to roll his eyes before saying, “What about her?”
“Who is she?” Grant asked the obvious question; behind them, Jake was also attentive to the conversation.
“She’s my new partner,” Dylan stated the obvious.
This caused Grant to scoff in amusement. Dylan knew Grant since he had first joined the agency; even so, he didn’t know him as well as he knew Jake, who had at some point, been his partner.
“You don’t know him, Grant,” Jake, who had been walking quietly behind them, said. “You didn’t spend the most frustrating years of your life working with him.”
“Ah, yes,” Grant said, “I can only imagine what that was like.”
“It happened only because you left the agency,” Jake protested.
Dylan knew their story. Grant hadn’t always been a scientist. Before he invented synthetic blood he had had his share of adventures. During several periods of his life he had worked for the vampire agency and for about fifty years, the longest he had been employed by the agency, he had taken Jake as his partner while acting the role of vampire hunters.
When Grant had left, Jake had been left without a partner and Lucius had paired him with a werewolf hunter, Dylan. The change from vampire hunter to werewolf hunter hadn’t suited Jake at all. He hadn’t lasted long before he quit the agency’s field department to pursue law practice instead.
One of the drawbacks to being a vampire, Dylan had always thought, was that you lived for so long you eventually knew all the other vampires. It was a very small world. Relationships between human beings were hard; with vampires, they weren’t just harder, they were never-ending. Fortunately, vampires were very logical, which meant conflict usually didn’t last for long. Usually.
“Well, I think we’re all better off, don’t you think?” offered Grant. “I have my science,” he looked at Jake, “you have your law,” finally he turned to Dylan, “and you still slay werewolves.” He smiled at the thought, “Everybody happy, right?”
No one replied.
The three vampires, all of different backgrounds and interests, walked together in the now dark wood. Their eyes glimmered red to allow their night vision to be active as they moved guided by the running water they could hear ahead of them.
After a long
moment of silence, Jake spoke. “I know who Rebecca is,” he announced.
Dylan’s heartbeat quickened betraying his true feelings to the others. “Do tell, mate,” Grant prompted. He surely had heard the heart beside him quicken in pace.
“I handled her case, after all,” the lawyer continued, glancing in Dylan’s direction. “You know. When you turned her?” Then, “I may have erased her file from the public, but I still have it. I have read it.”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” came out of Dylan’s mouth.
For a moment, Jake stopped to look at him. He then shrugged off his hesitation and continued walking. “Don’t be so melodramatic.”
“Come, Jake, I am dying with anticipation,” the Brit said. “Who is she?”
“Well, at first I was just as dumbfounded as you are,” the lawyer told Grant, “but then I followed the trail and found a record where a one Dylan Torrence delivered a little three-year-old girl to the same town Rebecca has called home since she was three-years-old. Coincidence? I thought not,” Jake laughed, “so I dug a little deeper and I found that indeed, Dylan was near her town when she was three-years-old and he just so happened to rescue her from the car crash were little Rebecca lost her family.” He stopped for effect, “Is this correct, Agent Torrence?”
Dylan could only offer a grunt just before Grant burst into laughter, “You saved a little girl, Dylan?”
“It’s my job,” he said simply.
“I thought your job was to protect us from werewolves, not save little girls from car crashes.”
“She was being followed by werewolves.” Dylan had just said this when he realized his mistake.
“What do you mean she was being followed by werewolves?” asked Jake, truly curious. “Why would a three-year-old be followed by werewolves?”
Dylan stopped him, “Don’t make such a big deal out of this. A lot of people are attacked by werewolves and-“
“No, no,” Jake interrupted them. “A lot of people get attacked by werewolves, but werewolves don’t just follow any random person. They are especially bad at following cars and you know it; unless they have some kind of reason to do it. They either get on top of the car before it drives away and shred it to pieces, or they tire from running behind it. They aren’t that fast. So, why were they following her? Or perhaps they were following her parents? Why were they important enough to be followed on the road by werewolves?”
Werewolf Phenomenon: N.A.V.S.A. Series Book Two (The North American Vampire Secret Agency) Page 16
