They saw the smoke before they saw the fire. Mattis and Harper were already on-scene, standing twenty feet away from the smoldering wreckage of the various vehicles that had been parked outside the beach house. None had been spared from the attack, and flames poured from smashed windows and caved-in windshields.
Someone else that Lee recognized was there, too. Bryan wore a Hawaiian shirt, tan slacks, and sunglasses. His face was sweaty, and despite having one hand heavily bandaged, he was grinning almost from ear to ear. He waited until all the initiates had assembled behind the instructors before holding his arms up like a carnival barker welcoming the audience to the show.
“Students of Primhaven,” called Bryan. “Some of you know me, most of you don’t. You can call me Bryan, and you can think of me as something of a mentor. As you can see from the tire fire behind me, none of you are going to be going anywhere anytime soon.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t strike you down where you stand,” said Harper.
“I’ll give you several dozen,” said Bryan.
He whistled, and the reply came instantly: a chorus of overlapping howls, snarls, and other animal calls.
“I’m a member of the Melting Pack, a supernatural organization which you may or may not have heard of,” he continued. “We’re recruiting. You’re all invited to join, welcome to become a part of our happy little family. Unfortunately, if you don’t join, we’ll have to view you as enemies, given the persecution we’ve faced at the hands of the Order of Chaldea.”
Lee stepped forward, pulling free from the rest of his classmates. He went to stand next to Harper and Mattis. Bryan’s eyebrows shot up when he saw him. Lee grinned.
“Surprise,” he said. “How’s the hand? And any luck on getting those charges I made to your credit card reversed?”
“Fine, and the company is still investigating them,” replied Bryan, through gritted teeth.
“I had a chance to kill you,” said Lee. “I’m feeling a bit foolish for not taking it, now.”
“I was just thinking the same about you,” said Bryan. “I guess brothers really do think alike.”
A few whispers spread through the initiates.
“You have a brother, Lee?” asked Toma.
Lee waved a hand at him. “It’s, uh, complicated.”
“Speaking of brothers,” said Bryan, his eyes settling on Toma. “Yours is doing quite well, Toma Fujino. Kei has come to terms with his transformation. He’s even begun making friends within the pack. A true convert, it seems.”
“Where is he?” shouted Toma. “Did he come here with you?”
“It’s easy enough to find out,” said Bryan. “Come along with me. I’ll make sure the two of you are reunited.”
“Initiate Fujino, stay where you are,” said Harper. “As far as this ‘offer’ of yours goes, I refuse on behalf of Primhaven and all of the students present. If you attack us, lycanthrope, it will mean your death.”
“Is that so?” Bryan chuckled. “You can’t speak for everyone, regardless of how much you’d like to. Students, please use your critical thinking skills to make up your own minds, especially if the idea of being eaten alive by a pack of wolves doesn’t appeal to you. Oh, and Alora? You can drop the act now.”
Mattis looked as though she’d been struck in the face. She stayed where she was, brown hair and sundress blowing in the gentle breeze, gaze fixed squarely on the burning cars.
“Ben?” called Bryan. “Why don’t you come out now? I think your presence would help reassure your wife.”
A massive jet-black panther slowly made its way out of the jungle, yellow eyes wide and intelligent. It flashed with light as it came to a stop, morphing into a humanoid form. A handsome man with tanned skin and an open smile appeared in its place. His hair was cut short, black flecked with specks of grey, and he wore an A-shirt that showed off broad shoulders and a lean, muscular physique.
“Alora…” The man held out his hands. Mattis gasped, her face contorting with a complex mixture of relief and shame.
She went to him, the first hesitant step followed by several more committed ones. He pulled her into a tight embrace. It was a beautiful reunion, outside of the fact that it represented a betrayal of Harper, Lee, and the rest of the Primhaven initiates.
Several of the students began shouting. Mattis didn’t turn around to face them, even as one hurled a rock at her back. The projectile landed wide, and Harper was quick to extend her arms out and glare at the thrower.
“Control yourselves,” said Harper. “The situation is more complicated than you realize.”
“You’re certainly right about that, Harper Black,” said Bryan. “Tonight. That’s your deadline. You’ll be given one final chance to come along peacefully. We won’t be merciful to those who refuse.”
He turned and walked off into the jungle, followed closely by Mattis and her husband, who walked hand in hand and didn’t look back.
CHAPTER 38
The mood was frantic as Lee and the initiates arrived back at the beach house. He tried to pull Harper aside to get her thoughts, especially on Mattis’s apparent betrayal, but she was too busy maintaining order, or at least attempting to.
“Initiates,” she called, voice barely audible over the ambient rising panic. “Initiates! Stay calm. Help is on the way.”
This was news to Lee, so much so that he was pretty sure she’d made it up on the spot.
“The Melting Pack is a hostile supernatural faction,” said Harper. “We’ve known about Mattis’s affiliation with them for some time now. Her betrayal here is unfortunate, but not unexpected.”
“She’s the Lead Instructor!” cried one of the initiates. “If she’s joined up with them, what does that mean for the rest of us?”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Lee. “We can’t surrender. It’s not an option. They wouldn’t just accept us with open arms, even if we did. I doubt half of us would survive whatever ‘initiation’ they have in mind.”
“You don’t know that!” shouted someone else. “We should at least—”
“Shut your fucking mouth.” Kristoff, surprisingly, was the one who cut in. “If they want a fight, how about we give them one? It isn’t as though we’ve just been resting on our laurels at Primhaven. We have plenty of magic to work with.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I agree with Kristoff,” said Toma. “We have no other real choice. We have to fight them.”
The steel in Toma’s voice was reassuring, not just to Lee, but to the entire room. He really wanted to talk to Toma about Kei, and about what he’d do if he was put in a situation similar to the one Mattis had been in, where fighting meant opposing someone he loved. The room was still too raucous to allow it, however.
Lee spotted Harper and Eliza walking toward the hallway. He thought about splitting off to check in with them, but the discussion had shifted toward potential defenses for the beach house, and questions were being thrown his way.
“What if we barricaded the door?” asked Kristoff. “Could that be effective?”
“Too many windows,” said Lee. “Better if we find a way to secure the stairs to the second floor and hole up there.”
“Hole up and what? Wait to die?”
Lee scowled. “Harper said that help is on the way. If that’s the case, then our goal should be to gather supplies and treat this like a small-scale siege.”
If that was the case. It was a big “if” to base a strategy on. He glanced around, looking for where Harper had wandered off to.
“They’ll be attacking us at night,” said Toma. “We should build more bonfires outside. If we can light up the area around the beach house, it’ll be that much harder for them to get in close.”
“Good idea,” said Kristoff. “If we’re on the second floor, we can fling spells at them from a distance.”
“What if they do the same to us?” asked an initiate. “If they light the beach house on fire, we’re fucked.”
Panic rippled through the discussion anew. Lee felt as though there wasn’t much more he could contribute for the moment, so he went looking for Harper. He found her coming down from the second floor, frowning slightly and adjusting her blouse.
“Hey,” he said. “We could seriously use your authority down here.”
“Oh!” said Harper. “Um… okay, sure. I… should just tell them to calm down. Right?”
“Yeah.” Lee frowned slightly. “To calm down, and to listen as you, well, explain whatever plan you have.”
Harper nodded slowly and took a deep breath. “Okay. I can do that.”
“Where’d Eliza go?”
“She’s… in her room. Asleep. She said she wasn’t feeling well, so she’s sleeping, and you probably shouldn’t disturb her.”
“Uh-huh,” said Lee, raising an eyebrow.
Lee followed behind Harper as she continued to tug and readjust her blouse. She moved to stand at the center of the beach house’s main room, which had broken out into complete chaos. Everyone was trying to talk at once, shouting out ideas as quickly as others could shout them down.
“Um,” said Harper. “Excuse me. Everyone, if you’d all… listen up.”
She was barely speaking over her normal voice volume, which wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the tumult, let alone draw attention. Lee moved to stand next to her and cleared his throat.
“Hey!” he bellowed. “Everybody, shut up!”
It did the trick. Harper smiled and blinked nervously. She held out her hands and looked around the room.
“We’re going to wait here until the help that I’ve called arrives,” she said. “We’ll be okay. Until further notice, um, we’ll use the buddy system, and nobody ventures beyond the beach directly in front of the resort. Does that sound okay?”
“How did you call for help?” asked Kristoff. “There’s no cell service here.”
“I… can’t talk about that just yet.”
Harper waited, and the initiates, surprisingly, held their silence. It wasn’t until she lowered her arms and took a step back that the room descended back into concerned shouts and anxious whispers. Lee shrugged and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Not half bad,” he said. “Can I talk to you about something, Instructor?”
“Oh!” said Harper. “Yes, of course, Lee.”
Lee led her down the hallway and into the beach house’s laundry room. He shut the door, then pulled her into a quick, aggressive kiss. Harper let out a small squeal of surprise, her body growing pliable as he pulled her against him.
“Eliza,” said Lee.
“What?” said Harper. “Oh, no. She’s still in her room.”
“She’s in this room, right in front of me,” said Lee. “Your illusion veil is excellent, but a few details are off. Mostly the fact that you and Harper are several inches apart in height, but the difference in personality is pretty jarring. Harper has never once called me Lee before, always Eldon.”
Harper, or rather Eliza, brought a hand to her mouth as her face flushed with color. She sighed and slumped her shoulders. Tess let out a small gasp as she also began circling and examining the disguise, scrunching up her eyes in search of flaws.
“Also, Harper would never have let me pull her into the laundry room and start making out with her,” said Lee. “Which is a shame.”
He kissed her again. Eliza brought her hand up to stop him as he started running his hand along her very grope-able thigh.
“It was her idea,” whispered Eliza. “She knew that the initiates would panic even more than they already have if she left them here alone, but someone had to go for help, and it was too dangerous for it to be anyone but her.”
“It’s a good plan,” said Lee. “Even if she doesn’t manage to bring in reinforcements, she’ll still either serve as a way of distracting the Melting Pack if they discover her or gain the element of surprise if they don’t.”
“I don’t know. It took you all of five minutes to figure out that it was really me. What happens when the rest of them figure it out? They’re not going to take it as well as you did. They’ll start panicking.”
“They’re already panicking, in a sense.” Lee shrugged. “Their energy will run out at some point, and they’ll calm down. The best thing you can do is just try not to talk much outside of giving directions, and frown a lot. That’s Harper in a crisis for you. I’ll handle everything else.”
“Thanks,” said Eliza. She pulled at the front of her blouse again. “Her clothes don’t fit me, either. She’s bustier than I am, so it billows out in all the wrong places.”
“She’s not that much bustier than you, is she?” Lee took a closer look at her breasts. “Say, we should experiment with your veil the next time we fool around. I have a few ideas about how we could have some fun.”
“Eldon,” said Eliza in a stern voice.
“There we go!” he said. “That’s Harper. Use that tone and keep that expression.”
“This is serious.” Eliza folded her arms. “What should I tell them to do? The situation is only going to become more panicked if it seems like I don’t have a real plan.”
“I can handle that. Just make sure you back up my ideas.”
CHAPTER 39
It was a bit unnerving how effectively Eliza’s illusion veil fooled the rest of Lee’s classmates. She set about calming everyone down once they were back in the main room, and despite the subtle differences between the mannerisms of the two women, nobody questioned her.
The fact that the veil extended to her voice helped, but even Eliza’s speaking cadence was different from Harper’s. Still, the initiates went along with it, and Lee began explaining his plan, splitting the class into smaller groups to focus on different tasks.
“We’ll build a barricade to secure ourselves in the upper floor of the beach house, like we were talking about before,” he said. “Along with an escape route, a ladder made from sheets, maybe, in case they try to light the building on fire or bring it down in some other way.”
“We can’t just hide from them here,” said Kristoff.
“Of course not. We’ll keep patrolling the surrounding area and the edge of the jungle until it gets dark. Toma, can you take the lead when it comes to setting up more bonfires, like you mentioned before? We have to be able to see them coming if they attack after nightfall.”
“Got it,” said Toma.
Eliza cleared her throat and lifted her chin. “Well then, it seems we have a solid plan! Let’s all do our best to put it into action.”
Tess tugged on Lee’s sleeve as the other initiates began hurrying off to their various tasks. “What can I help with?”
“Stick with Eliza, for now,” he whispered. “Help her stay in character if you can.”
“That should be easy. Well, maybe not easy, but I can at least give her advice on how to be sufficiently bossy.”
“I have no doubt about that.”
Lee took on the job of attempting to arm as many of the initiates as he could with makeshift weapons. The main hall had a fire poker, which he gave to Toma, and the downstairs lounge had a pool table with five pool cues, each of which he splintered in half for maximum pointiness.
“What in God’s name do you expect me to do with this?” asked Kristoff, upon receiving one of the stakes. “We have magic, Amaranth. Why would I bother with a stick when I can generate flames from my palm?”
“Have you ever fought a lycanthrope before?” asked Lee.
“No.” A bit of the old Kristoff returned as he flashed an annoyed sneer. “None of us have.”
“I have. And guess what? Wolves and panthers don’t just stand around like targets in the Spell Range. They’re fast and extremely dangerous up close, so you’re going to need a weapon if you don’t want to get your throat torn out.”
The entire process left Lee missing his pistol fiercely. Even if he’d only been able to load it with regular bullets, it still would have been extremely useful, both in a p
inch and as a tool for intimidation. A few gunshots out a second-floor window would have made for a suitable greeting for a pack of dangerous lycanthropes.
He spent most of the afternoon helping Toma set up the bonfires. It took far more wood to prep each one than he’d been expecting, and there weren’t that many fallen tree trunks and broken branches near enough to haul onto the beach. There would be blind spots in between the fires once night arrived, but there was little they could do about that.
The hours ticked by in an arduous mixture of grueling work and growing tension. It was one of the longest days of Lee’s life, and it was filled with tiny little tests. Eliza checked in with him every half hour or so, asking his opinion on various small issues raised by the initiates and trusting his judgment as much as her own.
It was leadership of a different kind than he was used to. The gap between their preparations and the imminent attack left him with an unshakeable sense of not having done enough, not being finished. The reality of the situation was a bitter pill to swallow. It wasn’t about winning the fight and being done with it, not this time around. This time, he needed to protect his classmates, without Harper’s help, and without any tricks up his sleeve.
Or rather, with only one trick up his sleeve. Lee split off from the others late in the afternoon, slipping back into the beach house. Preparations were still underway upstairs, where the guest rooms were, so he locked himself in the lounge, the next most private interior area.
Tess had followed him as soon as he’d come back inside, and she raised an eyebrow when he started pulling closed the window curtains.
“I can guess what you have planned,” she said. “Summoning the lamia, right?”
“Yup,” he said. “Ophelia is going to be key to this defense. I’m not sure how yet, but, I mean, she’s a snake girl. A formidable ally, if there ever was one.”
“I noticed that you’re closing the windows.”
“Of course. It’s part of my plan to hide her in here.”
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