Cry Wolf

by Aurelia T. Evans

  Kelly shouted, the sound becoming a growl as her body tried to protect itself by turning. It could only manage halfway—Abraham’s grip on the tattoos kept her in her human skin. She lost control of the wind, and her hair whipped around her face once more. Her rose branches waved and pulled her to and fro, tugging at flesh and the hair that had tangled within it.

  “Two can play at that game,” she snarled from her half-transformed mouth, wide and sharp.

  When she called, the fairy answered, fluttering its wings over her thigh like a moth before flying out into the rain and unleashing its mischief. Its size was prohibitive, especially in the storm, but it avoided Abraham’s flailing arms as it tugged at his ripped clothing then crawled in. Kelly had no idea what her fairy was doing to him, but Abraham suddenly released her from her invisible suspension and started batting at himself like a man with a bee stinging his chest and a mouse crawling up his pant leg. It would have been funny if Kelly hadn’t felt like a garden trellis.

  Gritting her teeth, she thrust her arms out and sent the roses he had used against her to vine and wrap around his arms. They clashed together, rolling over and over in the air. Kelly didn’t know which way was up. Lightning flashed around them on all sides. A tree trunk split in two with a horrifying crack, and Kelly tried to guide the lightning back into the clouds away from her people.

  Attempting to control her own weather preoccupied her. Abraham took the opportunity to make the fairy disappear back into her skin. He clutched her elbows, even though it dug some of the thorns deeper into his palms. The mist of his influence seeped through the foliage, but he couldn’t sneak that past her anymore. She recognised the signature far too easily now.

  Kelly slapped him across the face.

  In retaliation, the snake at her thigh dug in deeper as though holding on for dear life. A whine escaped her, and he wrenched her roses from his arms with a snap, making her cry out because he was actually breaking her skin.

  “Why do you fight me?” Abraham said, taking her face in his hands.

  “Because you’re a sick human being,” Kelly said.

  “I’m not sick,” he replied. “You’re the one who is sick. Your soul festers each hour you let that wolf remain. Your magic is tainted like tar coating the lungs. All this power you harness, it might as well be flowers and snakes with the way the wolf destroys it piece by piece. You aren’t like the others, the ones that I free from themselves. You can hold onto this world when I purge you. I can help you. I can save you, Kelly. You never have to be alone. We never have to be alone again.”

  Her tattoos sank back into her skin. With the perfume of wet roses surrounding them, Abraham pulled her closer. His will-breaking magic wrapped around her to remind her of the magic they shared, but he didn’t let it seep in yet.

  She couldn’t help it. The same way that her wolf desired pack, so did the witch desire a coven, even a coven of two. When he pressed his lips against hers, she welcomed his rain-slick skin, the texture of his suit against her blood-speckled and sensitised flesh. She accepted him, curled her tongue in his mouth as if to beckon him closer. He cradled her cheek as he moved down to kiss her neck, biting lightly before moving up to her ear.

  “Please,” he whispered.

  The rain, thunder and the cries around them by their friends and followers were louder than ever, yet Kelly and Abraham could have been in a quiet room alone.

  “Come with me. Let me save you, Kelly. Please,” he urged.

  It came to her in a flash, like the afterimage of lightning.

  Tim had a short, silver sword, his shoulder bloody from a werewolf bite. There was madness in his eyes, to have become the very thing that he despised. But he didn’t have to stay that way. With nothing to lose, he ran at the werewolf that had bitten him and shoved his knife into the wolf’s stomach from below, a white and grey mix that she recognised as Landon. As soon as the silver had poisoned Landon’s blood, Tim pulled the blade out and slashed his wrists, then his neck.

  Kelly jerked as though it had been she whom Tim had stabbed. Her head fell back and she closed her eyes to keep the rain from mingling with tears.

  Then it wasn’t even a choice.

  She pushed Abraham flying in the other direction. Abraham threw up his hands as though that would protect him. The makeshift shield he constructed in a state of panic might as well have been made of eggshell, and he knew it.

  This is what I am, Kelly thought. This is what you’ve made of me.

  The place in her chest that ached blasted outward. Part of her wished it could have really broken through her ribcage, because then she wouldn’t have to live with the consequences of what she was doing. Abraham would only be her third kill, but that was still three people too many.

  The lighting came down in a deafening, blinding charge to the now jerking form of Father Abraham Kinkaid. The smell of ozone and burnt fabric and burnt meat filled the clearing. Kelly screamed as pulse after pulse of magic passed through her—a vessel, a conduit, merely the passage of something much greater and grander than her and not laden with all the moral complications she carried. She screamed because she knew that no one could hear her. No one had to know that she was tearing another scar onto her soul.

  When the lightning strikes ended, the charcoaled remains fell to the ground. Kelly dropped herself as well, landing on her feet. The rain thinned immediately.

  She wasn’t done, though, not if she wanted to save more blood from being spilled, the shot of silver through veins, fur stripped away.

  “Hey!”

  It wasn’t very commanding or dignified, but when she amplified it to reach several hundred feet in every direction, she at least got everyone’s attention.

  “Your fearless leader is dead. Many of you are wounded. Your leader couldn’t defeat me, so your power might as well be magician’s tricks in comparison to what I am capable of. You’d do well to listen to me.

  “You have two choices. Leave now and never come back. We will not pursue you. If you’ve been bitten or if you feel like your philosophy might actually be shit, you can stay and we’ll discuss your future options. There is no third choice. If you stay to fight, I’ll do nothing to stop my pack from feasting on your flesh. I don’t want my pack to eat you. It’s a personal principle that I hold. But I won’t stop them if you insist on putting their lives in danger. You have ten minutes.”

  At her own volume, she muttered, “Have the sense not to stand out in the rain.”

  Most of Abraham’s followers left, slinking off into the forest away from the sanctuary—the ones that weren’t already dead. More than one of them had committed suicide after a bite.

  They wouldn’t go to the police—magical conflicts were not the law’s realm of concern, nor their area of expertise. If anyone asked where Father Abraham was, his followers could just say that he had gone missing on a trip up north and that they didn’t know where he’d been going. Perhaps they would say that he was on some kind of journey for further enlightenment. Kelly didn’t care what bullshit they scared up, as long as no more police came sniffing around the sanctuary, and as long as none of Salvation foolishly came after her.

  She heard murmurs of their justifications not to engage with the Valkyrie in the middle of the clearing. They told themselves that they could do more good with those willing to change, that they could continue Abraham’s legacy better if they were alive, and that all they had to do was wait until one of them amassed the same power as Abraham. All excellent arguments for Kelly going back to Missouri and torching the spell book in case it fell into the wrong hands, someone who could discover a way to read it. In fact…

  Kelly closed her eyes and focused on the book in his room. Abraham had put it back in its place. Fire magic wasn’t her speciality, but she put a mere fraction of her subsumed fury into the casting and made sure that only the book received the brunt of the punishment. Whatever she felt about Salvation’s hosts, she didn’t want to burn down the farm.

  Kelly left
the Salvation building standing. She decided that destroying the building would not only harm the people still in it, but it would fail to end the slow slaughter of self-hating magical creatures. If anything, torching the facility might elevate their Father’s death into more than the fall of a martyr but instead a call to war. There was danger of that happening anyway. Kelly saw no point in stirring the cinders.

  If they decided to avenge the death of their leader, then Kelly would return the favour, but Kelly didn’t feel comfortable with preemption. If she could allow the shifters and the werewolves to join her in this fight, in spite of every natural instinct not to, then she had to let the people of Salvation follow their own paths, no matter how despicable. The werewolves and shifters stumbled out of the forest into the clearing, most of them worse for wear. Ironically, most of the damage to the shapeshifters had been done with silver blades from the shapeshifters protecting the werewolves. And there must have also been some special magic in the blades. Nothing short of death should have transferred injuries from their dog skins to the human skins, and none of them were dead, although Malcolm carried a semi-conscious Ki in his arms and Leslie and Lotus had to lean against each other to stay upright.

  Jake immediately ran to where Britt and Max held Renee. He ripped off the sleeve and wrapped it around her upper arm to create a tourniquet. Fortunately, the gunshot wound didn’t seem to be very bad, aside from the fact that it was a gunshot wound. Renee was unconscious, but her bleeding had already slowed, and her lips still had most of their colour. Kelly would tend to it when they arrived back at the sanctuary. Renee would be scarred, and maybe that hand wouldn’t work as well as it had before, but she would certainly survive.

  The werewolf pack wasn’t in much better shape, since they had lost a member. They’d left him in the woods—their friend was gone from that body. They would mourn later in their own ways. The werewolves’ skin, though, was already knitting back together from the burns and enspelled infections the Salvation members had flung at them. Landon had been the only one poisoned by silver. Kelly counted them lucky.

  But the shifter and werewolf packs were not the only ones who came out from behind the trees.

  Two men—it always seemed to be men with Salvation, Kelly noticed with some residual anger—came out towards them. One of them threw his weapons down, both the half-staff that acted as a wand and his long silver knife. He held up his hands so she would see he was unarmed.

  The other didn’t surprise Kelly at all. Ahmir approached, hanging his head. His knuckles were bloody but already healed, and his forearms showed signs of dog bites. But if he had really applied himself to hurting the shifters to the fullest extent that Abraham had wanted him to, the shifters likely would have died. The werewolf was the size of a rhinoceros. She doubted that a boxer and a kelpie could have even made a dent, although he certainly could have made a dent in them.

  The werewolves and shapeshifters were immediately on their guard.

  Leon and Damien snarled, baring their teeth at Ahmir, offended that one of their own would attack them in Abraham’s name.

  Leslie winced away from the human. Kelly noticed that the man had more than average magic simmering inside him—the way she could tell that a soup was hot by the steam. The human was wary. Ahmir was defeated.

  Kelly squeezed Ahmir’s arm in encouragement, letting him know that there was at least one person in the group of people who didn’t want to sink her teeth into him.

  “Still believe you’re an abomination?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Ahmir said. “But Father Abraham is dead and so is his secret to saving me. The people he left behind don’t like us much. Abraham tolerated us better. No offence, Sebastian.”

  “None taken.” Sebastian was a tall drink of water, younger than he looked. He wore his buttoned-up clothing like a shield and looked overwhelmed by the presence of so many naked people, most of them creatures he had been taught to fear.

  “And you, what’s your business with us?” Jake said, not bothering to conceal his antagonism.

  “I’m what most of them call a—” Sebastian began.

  “Traitor,” Ahmir finished for him.

  “Coward. Look who’s talking,” Sebastian snapped. “The word Abraham used was ‘seeker’.”

  “The only reason he let you stay was—” Ahmir started.

  “—because I actually came by magic naturally. I didn’t know that until I came to Salvation,” Sebastian said, ignoring Ahmir and addressing Kelly instead. “He taught me how to use it. At first I believed in the cause. Everything else he told me was true, and the rest sounded right.

  “But after a while, I noticed that the people who came to him for help weren’t leaving. The lower leaders told me what was going on, and it just didn’t sit right with me. I’d thought he was saving them. Abraham knew how I felt, but he was confident he could convince me. I’d already burned bridges with my family, didn’t know where else to go. But then you told us… They won’t miss me, I promise you that,” he said.

  Kelly ran her hands through her hair, dense with water. The rain had thinned to a sprinkle, and to the northwest blue sky peeked through the clouds.

  “I wasn’t expecting a human when I offered my invitation, Sebastian,” Kelly said.

  “Oh.” Sebastian stared at her breasts, the thin downy hair between her legs and the tattoos bright over her body—now back in their original places as though they’d never been torn from her—but he wasn’t leering, so Kelly assumed that it was involuntary.

  “I had other magical beings in mind,” she said. “I mean, you can probably just slip in with any local coven.”

  “Where?” Sebastian asked.

  “There are at least four covens within a two-hour drive from here. You haven’t even looked?” Kelly asked.

  “I didn’t know I was leaving,” Sebastian replied defensively.

  “You can stay with us while you get your feet on the ground,” Renee said, a little louder than a whisper as she slowly regained consciousness.

  “Woman, if you keep being all nice and philanthropic and flinging open doors, I’m going to pull your head off and twist it back on straight,” Jake said. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Renee said. “If you harm my shapeshifters or my dogs, we’ll kick you out so fast you’ll wish Kelly had struck you with lightning.”

  “Why stop there?” Kelly asked, kneeling down next to Renee. “If he does anything, I will hit him with lightning.”

  “You’re that girl who owns the dog sanctuary a few miles away, right?” Sebastian said. “Abraham said that’s where we were headed. I looked you guys up.”

  Renee shot upright, her eyes going wide. “He didn’t send anyone there to attack them, did he?”

  Renee’s pulse raced, pounding like a ritual drum to Kelly’s sensitive ears.

  “Attack the dogs?” Sebastian asked. “Good Lord, no. Actually, he told us in no uncertain terms not to go after the sanctuary.”

  “And why should we believe you?” Britt accused.

  Sebastian rocked nervously where he stood as he struggled to find some way to prove that he was trustworthy to those he’d tried to kill. When an idea came to him, he fell to his knees near where Kelly knelt next to Renee.

  “May I?” Sebastian asked, reaching for Renee’s wounded arm.

  “Over my dead body,” Britt snapped. Jake knocked Sebastian’s arm away, but Kelly stopped him.

  She looked Sebastian in the eye. He squirmed, but Kelly could see that Abraham had done this to him, too, looked for his honesty, so he recognised what she was doing.

  “It’s okay,” Kelly finally said. “I was going to heal her when we got back, but if you’ve got something more efficient, by all means be my guest.”

  “I’ll need my wand,” Sebastian said.

  The wand came flying, smacking soundly against her palm.

  “I’ll kill you twice if you hurt her,” Kelly told him.

  �
�I’m not going to hurt her,” Sebastian replied.

  Even Ahmir leant in to see what Sebastian was doing as he pressed the blue chalcedony crystal at the end of his wand over the gunshot.

  “Good thing it’s through and through,” he muttered. “Honestly not sure what I’d do with a bullet.”

  “When did I even get shot?” Renee asked blearily.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kelly said, taking her hand. “It isn’t important.”

  Sebastian closed his eyes, and as he began to whisper, Kelly thought she heard phrases like ‘knit together’ and ‘blood flow’, but more important than the words was the magic. Sebastian had a particularly strong aptitude in healing, which was encouraging to Kelly. Besides, she hadn’t heard a single lie come out of his mouth. It was up to him to earn the others’ trust, but he was a good candidate for temporary aid, if just for a few weeks.

  “There,” Sebastian said, pulling his wand back and wiping the blood on the wet grass. “It’s not the best, but it’ll at least hold her together and repair some of the damage. Most of the damage.”

  Kelly inspected the wound. He was right—it wasn’t a full healing, but it was a damn good job. Kelly would have to give Renee one of her potions later, but Sebastian’s magic would do for now.

  “Hey, man, I’m sorry I went after you,” Sebastian said, looking at Leslie. “I knew when I was swinging a knife at an American boxer of all things that something was wrong with what I was doing.”

  Leslie nodded, but he didn’t say that Sebastian was forgiven. Sebastian didn’t seem to expect it.

  “Thanks,” Renee said. She sounded much more awake. “The shapeshifter barn has got a lot of space. You can stay there.”

  “You think we’re sleeping with this dude?” Lotus asked.

  Renee looked up at him. “Do I need to remind you of our policy? We have a system. What about Kelly’s promise? Are you going to make her a liar?”