by K A Faul
Mina sighed. “I’m just saying, we’ll be defenseless unless you don’t take one and watch our backs.”
Thomas plucked a mushroom off the wall. “Are you trying to get me shredded by the portal, Mina?”
“I’m just saying, you can give us directions or something and watch our backs while we’re not high. Or one of us could wait and take it later.”
The alpha shook his head. “We have no idea how long it’ll take anyone to come down off the high. We can’t waste time, and we can’t move on if one of us is still incapacitated.”
Mina swallowed, and her heart kicked up. “I don’t like this.”
Anna frowned. “Maybe she has a point.”
Thomas’s eyes narrowed on Mina. “I’m surprised. This isn’t like you. I’ve never seen you so afraid.”
Mina sighed. “I’m not afraid. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to let our defenses down.”
Anna moved to Mina’s side and squeezed her shoulder.
Jorge and Ryan moved away from the wall but didn’t say anything.
“What’s going on, Mina?” Thomas said. “Did you see something?”
“The animals are off,” she said. “Every animal we’ve run into in this forest is terrified. Way more than they should be.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. From watching them. You don’t think it’s weird?”
Thomas grunted. “An entire pack of werewolves is traveling through this area. Of course, they are afraid.” He nodded toward the darkened tunnel leading to the mouth of the cave. “Besides, that’s why we’re resting here. If there is something out there, it’s not going to stumble on us as easily here.”
“But Thomas—”
“Enough.” The alpha’s voice echoed in the cave. “We don’t have a lot of extra time. This isn’t the first Rite. I’m glad you’re being cautious, but we’re not going to delay things because you’ve let yourself get freaked out by a few birds flying away.” He plucked four more mushrooms off the wall.
“It’ll be okay,” Ryan said. “I’ll protect you if anything comes.”
Mina slapped a hand to her forehead. “Please kill me now before I end up owing anything to you.”
“Damn, you don’t have to say it like that.”
Thomas held out his open palm, the mushrooms resting in it. “Everyone grab one.”
Ryan and Jorge each grabbed a mushroom. Anna hesitated, her gaze locked on Mina.
Am I just being paranoid? I mean, maybe I’m just letting my head play tricks. It’s not like I really know what some birds, rabbits, or chipmunks are thinking.
Heaving a great sigh, Mina reached out and grabbed a mushroom. Anna picked hers up a few seconds later.
Thomas opened his mouth and popped the mushroom into it. He only chewed a few times before swallowing. “Oh, I forgot to mention. It tastes like ass.”
Mina opened her mouth and tossed the mushroom inside. She munched for a few seconds before swallowing. The heavy earthy taste lingered in her mouth, like she’d swallowed a mouthful of dirt.
They all stood around, looking at one another in silence.
“I don’t feel any different,” Mina said. “Should I, you know, be tripping balls or something?”
Thomas shrugged and sat against the cave wall. “It takes a good twenty or thirty minutes usually. Why don’t you all just relax,” he motioned around the cave, “and enjoy the ambience?”
Sitting in a darkened cave without a watch made it hard to tell how much time had passed, but from what Mina could tell, around thirty minutes had elapsed. Anna, Jorge, and Ryan had all fallen asleep.
Thomas’s eyes were closed, but every once in a while, he opened them and glanced at the other wolves.
Mina wondered if they should chat about something, but she didn’t want to. It annoyed her Thomas hadn’t listened to her warning. Even more, she couldn’t help but be annoyed she’d done such a poor job of articulating what she’d experienced.
The Rite might have been enhancing her senses somehow. She couldn’t be sure. That wasn’t something anyone mentioned as a possibility, but it was the main explanation she could generate for why she seemed so attuned to the animals.
Mina was still mulling over the animal situation when she realized she wasn’t in the cave anymore. She jerked her head back and forth, trying to figure out where she was.
The trees surrounding her looked normal enough, but the colors of the flowers were wrong, not unnatural, but wrong for the forest she’d been traveling. For that matter, she’d been in a cave, and there wasn’t any sign of the cave or the rest of the pack.
“What the hell?”
Mina slowly looked up. A massive spiraling tower sat upon a platform of rock in the sky, floating without any visible means of support. While several normal birds flew past, others she didn’t recognize fluttered past, including more than a few that would put the largest birds she’d ever read about to shame.
“Okay, floating towers. Strange animals. Maybe I’m on Esper.”
The werewolf furrowed her brow. It seemed like she was forgetting something important, but she couldn’t remember it.
A few glowing orbs zipped past.
“Yeah, definitely not in Washington anymore.”
An overwhelming sensation of being watched settled over her. She spun around, looking for the source, but no one presented themselves.
“Humiliation must be repaid with humiliation,” a cold but feminine voice whispered in her ears. “A century has almost passed. You will be my instrument, little dog.”
Mina recognized the voice from an earlier dream. It was Little Miss Chokes-A-Lot.
“What’s going on?” Mina asked. “Did you bring me here? Snatch me through the portal so you can make my dream come true?” She threw an elbow behind her but only found air.
“Time to make him choose.”
“Whatever. If you’re all that, then you’ll show me your face, bitch.”
“Humiliation must be repaid with humiliation. You’re a tool, little dog. Nothing more. And you will be disposed of once you’ve served your purpose.”
Mina kept turning, trying to find a source of the voice. Every time the woman spoke, it sounded like it was right next to her ear, but she couldn’t see even a glimmer or a shadow suggesting the location of the fae woman.
“Stay out of my head,” Mina yelled.
“Tools exist to be used and discarded.” Cold hands wrapped around her throat and squeezed.
Mina choked and clawed at her throat but couldn’t get a hold of anything.
Her lungs burned, and her throat ached. She fell to her knees, and the choking sensation vanished. Mocking laughter filled her ears.
Mina gasped, sucking in precious oxygen. She touched her neck. No tenderness, no irritation.
“This is crap,” she muttered. “Fight like a wolf, you fae bitch.”
The laugher grew distant, and Mina sat on her knees for a moment, taking several deep breaths.
A small robin peered at her from what looked like a eucalyptus tree.
Two legs spits fire.
“Huh?” Mina peered up at the bird. It hadn’t felt like wolf thought or actual speech, but she was certain the bird had somehow communicated with her, not just a sensation like before, but actual concepts.
Two legs spits fire. Go.
The robin fluttered off.
Mina didn’t want to bother to try to figure out the meaning of a telepathic robin in Esper.
I still don’t remember how I got here, and I feel like I’m forgetting something very important. Something about mushrooms?
A dim silhouette appeared in the distance. She squinted, trying to make it out. It was familiar somehow, even though she couldn’t make out the details other than the pointed ears.
Mina’s heart kicked up. “The literal faerie man of my dreams,” she muttered. “At least he’s not ranting and choking me.”
She considered for a moment what she should e
ven do. If she was, in fact, in Esper, then the faeries were probably responsible for bringing her over. She didn’t know enough about their magic to even begin to guess how they might have pulled that off.
The werewolf took a breath and then walked toward the man. After a couple of minutes, she realized he wasn’t getting any closer.
“Oh, come on. What’s your damn game?”
The fae man vanished. Mina pivoted on her heel, hoping to catch Little Miss Chokes-A-Lot. No fae female appeared, and no one choked her.
Mina turned around again and blinked several times at the sight before her.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
A housecat sat in front of her, specifically a gray-blue-haired Persian Blue. It stared at her with a bored-looking expression and yellow eyes. In another circumstance, she might not even have cared, but like most things in her hallucination, a small detail was off.
Even though all the other features, from fur to face, were normal, the cat before her was gargantuan, a huge furry wall much larger than even the largest building in Golden Oaks, the town hall. If this housecat started wanting to break things, they’d need the National Guard to stop it.
“You’re a damned kaiju housecat,” Mina announced. “You’re freaking Megasnuffly!”
“Your manners are quite lacking, miss,” the cat said in a posh and deep English accent.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I’m unsure if the issue is more the fact you’re a dog, or if it’s that you’re an American.”
Mina frowned, not sure if she was more offended on behalf of her species or her nation. “Screw you, you tea-drinking fleabag.”
Megasnuffly shook his massive head. “You’re only proving my point.”
“You think you’re all that?” Mina asked, shaking her fist at the kaiju housecat. “I’m going to turn into a wolf and rush up your back and bite your ears off.”
She wasn’t even so sure why she wanted to fight the giant cat. Something about his sudden appearance and his declarations fed on her existing frustrations to push her to attack inadvisable targets.
Megasnuffly sniffed disdainfully. “I don’t do battle with little puppy girls.”
“Okay, that’s it. I’m through with this.” Mina cut through the air with her hand. “Stupid floating castles, fae bitches choking me out, and now arrogant cats. You’re going down.”
She charged right toward Megasnuffly. The plan was to scale the kaiju housecat and figure out a weak spot once she was on his back.
Her plan did not survive contact with the enemy because the enemy vanished without a trace.
Wait. None of this is real. I’m hallucinating.
Mina shook her head and ran her hands through her hair. The trees and animals might look slightly different, but everything was positioned as it was before when they’d walked to the cave.
“I’m still on Earth, not Esper. I need to return to the pack.”
Chapter 17
Mina awakened to the taste of leaves, pine needles, and dirt. Her eyes slowly opened to darkness. A few seconds passed before she realized she was lying on her stomach, facedown on the forest floor.
I fell asleep? Or was I always asleep? And I guess there are worse things to wake up to.
She rolled over, squinting at the sunlight streaming through the trees. Her head throbbed a little, and she took a moment to spit out some of the dirt in her mouth.
I’m not in the cave, but it’s not dark. So I was probably out just a few hours. All that Esper crap mixed with the shrooms must have had my brain interpreting these woods as Esper.
Mina stared up at the sky, at least as much she could manage through the dense forest.
No. The sun’s all wrong. Crap. It must be the next morning. Great. Perfect. Lucky some bear didn’t decide to eat my face while I was passed out in the middle of the woods.
“Anyone out there?” she called. “See, Thomas. You should have brought a babysitter who doesn’t go through to Esper in case of this sort of thing. Or put a gate on the cave. I bet we couldn’t get out of a gate under the influence.”
The only response was the chirp of songbirds. At that moment, Mina would have preferred to hear Thomas chewing her out. At least it would cement her in the predictable normalcy of reality.
A quick movement caught her attention, and Mina lolled her still-throbbing head to the side to identify the source. A small rabbit hid in the underbrush, shaking.
Ugh, all that hallucinating made me hungry. Mina smirked, staring at the rabbit. Even you’re looking pretty good right now there, Peter Rabbit.
The rabbit bounded off. No eat. No eat. No eat.
The werewolf blinked several times. It wasn’t so much that actual words entered her mind as much as sensations and feelings she could associate with ideas, but that didn’t change that she was almost certain the communication came from the rabbit.
What… the… hell?
Mina stood and dusted off her pants, jacket, and shirt. Too many coincidences had piled up, and she couldn’t deny what had been happening to her.
She took several deep breaths as she rubbed her temples. There had to be some sort of explanation. The only problem was that she already knew the explanation, and it wasn’t the sort of thing that even a werewolf could accept easily.
“Okay, so I can kind of sort of talk to animals,” Mina said. “That’s… different, even for shifters. Well, maybe Rogan can do it. Not like I’d know.”
The mystical fungi seemed like a likely source for the power, but the timeline didn’t work out. She’d been having all sorts of odd experiences with animals for over a month. Months, really, if she were honest with herself.
Mina spotted a small beetle scurrying along the ground. She concentrated on it for a moment, wondering if she was about to enter a world of strange and hidden six-legged thought. All those cartoon movies about angst-ridden bugs might be on to something.
Minor and mostly flat sensations floated back to her, incomprehensible. Insects didn’t have a rich inner life or much in the way of angst from what she could tell. Big shocker.
“At least I don’t have to feel guilty about bug spray,” Mina muttered.
The ridiculousness of the situation settled in her mind, and even though she wanted to deny the truth, she couldn’t anymore. It’d been easy to rationalize away over weeks and months, but now, alone with only her thoughts and the animals, the truth shone like the sun in the desert.
She snorted and glanced around, trying to get her bearings. After a minute or so of looking, she had a decent idea of the direction of the cave. It wasn’t that far away, but it would still be a decent hike, even on four legs.
A short but painful shift followed, and the now four-legged Mina started bounding back in the direction of the cave.
Okay, let’s be reasonable about all of this. First, all that Esper faerie kaiju housecat crap was just from hallucinating. After all, I’m obviously not on Esper, but on Earth. I kind of think I couldn’t stumble through a portal accidently.
Mina mulled that over as she continued toward the cave. The acceptance that her vision of Esper was nothing more than a trick of the mind led to another possibility, something a bit more comforting than the idea she’d developed strange powers that would likely lead to people being even more suspicious of her.
Maybe I’m wrong about this Dr. Doolittle thing. Then again, I wasn’t tripping balls on mushrooms the last few times something similar happened.
She let out a low growl. Anna insisted before that Mina might have special power. Mina mocked the idea, but being able to communicate directly with animals suggested maybe the other girl was on to something about Rogan’s blood. The streak of red hair might not only be for show.
I wonder if I can communicate with a non-wolf shifter directly this way. Oh, if Linh and I can rock raven-wolf thought, a lot of people are in for a lot of trouble. Oh, Thomas. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Her lips pulled back in the be
st approximation of a grin she could manage in her wolf form. The tactical possibilities of inter-species shifter communication bubbled up too, but she enjoyed her focus on the mischief potential.
Mina paused underneath a tree. A sparrow sat well above her on a branch, its head tilting back and forth as it watched her. She could be getting ahead of herself and had only been imagining what she thought she experienced from the rabbit and beetle.
She concentrated on the bird, similar to what she did when sending wolf thought. Hey, bird, see anything strange?
Wolf four and two legs. One that is two.
The sparrow fluttered off.
Okay, Mina thought. So, it’s not exactly like non-shifters are the best conversationalists, but I got the general idea. That bird seemed to get that I was a werewolf. Okay, so I know I can talk to birds and mammals. How far does it go? No insects.
The wolf changed course to head to a nearby stream. It would add a few minutes back to her return trip, but she had a few more experiments to run.
Mina spotted a small lizard scurrying on the ground on the way. She stopped and concentrated again.
Hey, lizard. Think something funny.
The lizard shot back a jumble of sensations. It was far less intelligible than what she’d gotten from the bird or the clear feelings she’d gotten from the rabbit. If she had to guess, she thought the lizard might be hungry, but she couldn’t be sure. That put the lizard far ahead of the beetle, still.
Okay, so, guess there’s no big surprises. More complicated brains mean more interesting things going on, and none of these guys are sitting around thinking about philosophy or how to make better-tasting pop. Lazy-ass animals.
Mina let out a little snort growl. Thomas had been dismissive of her worries concerning the other animals, but now she knew that she’d been right. She had been sensing more than just normal fidgety animals. With a little concentration, she knew what they were thinking, as limited as that was.
She halted. Being able to prove Thomas wrong was always fun, but everything only reinforced that there might be a threat lurking in the forest.
