“Dunnae look at me like it's all in my head, son!” he roars at me. His entire face is changing color. “I've got my own ideas what's going on in yours.”
“I'd love to hear them!” I snap back, only half a lie.
“Dee—”
Duncan ignores her, which annoys me, but I already have a queue of issues with him to get through. “Aye,” he yells at me. “Maybe I'm getting a wee bit sick of you taking all yer insecurities out on us.”
“What!?”
“How long have you liked her?” growls the Scotsman. “And ye've done nowt!”
“Well, apparently you were already doing her enough for both of us…”
“That's ENOUGH!”
We both whip around at the sharp sound of Penny's voice. Her eyes are on fire in a way that both terrifies me and totally turns me on.
“And I'm saying that as your captain,” she affirms. “Not your fuckbuddy. Or booty-call. Or mistress.”
“Wait, what?” asks Duncan, taken aback.
“While I'm starting to get the idea that my arse is apparently a hot commodity around here,” she's saying, one hand on her hip, the other still holding her bucket, “I'll have you both know that I and only I get to decide who's allowed inside of it. Do I really have to put out some feminist Disney princess PSA about this shit? Really?”
I stare at my feet. “I'm not jealous,” I mutter, quiet and strained. “I'm not insecure.”
Duncan huffs out a sigh.
“Aye. I know yer not, laddie.” He cuffs me on the shoulder. I don't respond other than to lean into it a bit.
“Right,” Penny says. “Now that that's sorted, we need to figure out how to set this place up to, what was it he said?” A smirk settles on her lips. “Make it worth their while.”
18 Oliver's Initiation
He's got his whole hand up inside your brain.
In and of itself, the metaphor is creepy. But that's the track my thoughts are tied to.
Rails of silver and steel and stone—spattered with blood, scattered with bones. It stretches into the mental mist, guiding the way, or at least, the way it wants me to go. Every nerve in my body begs me not to trust it, not to follow. Where it leads me, I hope I never have to know.
His whole hand. Like a puppet.
Regardless, on we trudge. On through the thicket, through the dense underbrush and tangled roots of trees that died long ago. There is apparently an aspect of hunting for game some people find enlightening, enthralling, or in some other way entertaining. I am here to firmly announce that I am not one of those people.
And yet, there's an insistent urge within that drives me forward. Something strange, something new. Something primal. As if my very survival, and my worth as a person, depends on the outcome of this mission, but not in the same way as with B.L.A.Z.E.
This time, I'm not the underdog. I'm not the weakling. I'm not the prey.
This time, I get to be the predator.
You aren't a puppet, that chilling (sense) asks me, are you, Brother Vulpes?
That's not my name, I answer it, as forcefully as I can. Because it's not. That's not the name I was born with, and it's not the name I do business under with my brigade. It's the name some crackpot old preacher decided suited me better than my own.
Elder, corrects the gnawing at the base of my skull, somewhere in the depths of the rolling fog, and the insistence with which it does so is frightening. Father.
“Pick up the pace, Vulpes,” comes the aggressive command from up ahead. “Whatever Elder Beaumont sees in you, I don't. So consider this your golden opportunity to prove me wrong.”
I ignore Brother Lynx's berating. Or at least, I try to. The chaos it stirs in my mind is like an influx of emails and alerts, all marked as urgent and all requiring my attention at the same time. Everything from a nagging boomerang with a list of hunting tips and techniques and etiquette, to a reminder that none of this even makes sense.
Up inside your brain.
“OP…?”
Keeping perfect pace at my side, Sister Juniper puts a hand on my forearm. “OP, are you okay?” she whispers, hushed enough not to be heard. Neither Lynx nor the other two Novanite warriors we have been left under the guidance of appreciate her using that name. It's not 'correct'. “You're even paler than you were this morning.”
I don't know if it's possible to 'feel pale', but if it is, I do. Dry, pinched, parched, and tired, and I can feel the size and weight of both of the bags that are clinging under my eyes.
I shake my head.
Like a puppet, pretty puppet.
“It's almost twilight,” says Lynx, pausing at the edge of the treeline. The messy grass stretches out like a hand-woven blanket ahead of us, threading into the beach dunes and, just shy of the horizon, the ocean. “And tonight will be brisk. Our prey will go to shelter, wherever they can find it. The fire Anomaly will need to retain his body heat so we should keep our eyes peeled for smoke signals.”
I nod distantly. After a few long drawn-out moments of natural silence, the big blond Anomaly whirls on us, his hands planted firmly on his hips.
“When I give you a command, boy, you answer me!”
Again, I nod. “Yes, Brother.”
“Now, you both know this quarry intimately,” the feline Anomaly says, as his partner steps away to do perimeter checks or something of that nature. “And that knowledge will come in exceptionally handy when you are tracking prey.”
“My brigade aren't prey.”
I don't know why I say it. I don't mean to. As if thought and speech, speech and thought, are suddenly interchangeable. I don't know what's in my head, and what's coming out of my mouth. I don't know which emotions and instincts are mine, and which are somebody else's being forced upon me.
Lynx's face drops, and he starts toward me. Each step seems to take an age. I brace for a swipe of pain, for something, but nothing comes.
“They may not be yet,” the warrior of Nova growls, leaning down to my level to look me right in the eyes. “But they will be.”
“OP…?”
My head jerks up, yanking me out of the hypnotic fog. That was my real name.
“OP?” The voice belongs to Sister Juniper. I can sense her, sitting in the grass at my side. “Is that smoke?”
The words I didn't want to hear. The reality I didn't want to be brought back into. Instead of trying to locate what it is she thinks she's found, I affix my eyes firmly to my muddy shoelaces.
Brother Vulpes, sings that unwanted sixth sense. I can tell it's mocking me. You should take the Hunt more seriously.
Juniper sighs with a helpless hopelessness, an outward mirror of my inner self. “OP,” she hisses, shaking me by my arm. I barely react. The fact that the lives of my brigade could be teetering on the edge right at this very instant doesn't even register with me. “OP, let's get up. Let's tell them you think you know where they are. Let's lead them away from here, the opposite way…”
My upper lip peels back, baring my teeth, and I let out a low, animal growl.
“Brother Vulpes?”
Lynx's heavy footfalls bring him to my side. His presence makes me squirm uncomfortably, pressing my back against the gnarled trunk of the tree I've taken refuge under from the rain.
“If you feel an instinct tugging at your tail,” Lynx says, his gruff voice carrying more weight in my mind than it should, “chase it down. It's nipping at your heels for a reason.”
The tension is thick, palpable, wrapping around my throat. Around my mind. Juniper is deathly silent, rebelliously so. She's staring him down with a fire in her eyes that would make Alfie proud.
There's no smoke without fire, without Diesel.
“Smoke,” is the only thing I say, and even though I've not once lifted my head in an attempt to locate it, my arm raises, and I know exactly where to point my finger.
Good puppet.
19 Penny's Standoff
We had no choice but to wait until nightfall, and well into it,
too. We were chosen for our resolve, our tenacity. Light a fire too early, and they'd smell the trap.
“I'm excited to check being hunted for sport off my bucket list tonight, lads.” The joke is partly for their moral, partly for my own. The longer we leave Oliver, Rhys, and Juniper in the hands of these overzealous lunatics, the more concerned I'm becoming about the state we'll get them back in.
Alfie chuckles lazily, shivering against the wall opposite. While we were outside setting one of our signature pyres, Duncan was at work punching a series of finger-width holes around the entire circumference of the lifeboat station. They're not ideal, but they give us some form of vantage point. The three of us have taken up positions around the raised gangway where we can watch the north, west, and south of our shelter simultaneously.
Even garrisons in the Middle Ages were better kitted-out than we are.
“I got something on my side,” Alfie reports after several minutes of silence. I hear Duncan shift somewhere in the darkness.
“How many, laddie?”
“Er.” A beat passes, then another, then another. “Most of them, I reckon. If not all.”
I heave my body to get my boots under me, scampering down the platform in the direction of my friend, using the railing as a guide in the near-blackness and taking my bucket of goodies with me. “Any features?”
“Well, I'd put my money on it that the tubby little geezer striding out in front is Beaumont,” he mutters, squinting between two different punctures in the sheet metal. “That big lion bloke's with them, or leon, or lynx, or whatever it is. And ah, shit, Juniper.”
My muscles tighten, all at once. I take a knee beside him.
“Fantastic,” I say with gritty resolve. “She's leaving with us.”
“One of them's coming 'round the back way,” Alfie rattles off distractedly, peering through his pin-prick vantage holes. “One of them's going for the same door what we came through, one of them—”
His voice cuts off all of a sudden, mid sentence, and is replaced with a strangled whine. His jaw drops, tongue down, choking on thin air. His eyes bulge out of his head.
From the space between us, I hear an idle, serpentine chortle of amusement. And then, a voice.
“One of them's already here.”
Neither one of us is given time to react before Alfie is thrust into the air by the neck, limbs stiffening, and hurled across the entire width of the lifeboat station. His bare torso hits the metal with a sickening crack and he drops to the floor out of sight, sending a toolbox and other items clattering.
“Diesel!”
The gangway pitches and shifts, clanging noisily as both Duncan and I haul ourselves to our feet. My motion is interrupted, and everything goes even darker than black as pain explodes from the bridge of my nose through my entire skull, knocking me senseless.
My spine and hips connect with metal.
A second wave of jarring agony threatens to pitch me back into the darker-darkness. Snarling with the effort required to block it out, to drive it back, I roll to the side, feeling the weight of something invisible crash down in the exact spot where I was just lying, supine and vulnerable.
Invisible. Jesus to fuck.
Duncan comes barrelling down the gangway, swinging both fists in a wild haymaker. He's clued in on our guest's identity, too. Unfortunately, tackling somebody who can't be seen only has about an eighteen per cent success rate; Duncan trips mid-step, landing hard on his shoulder and skidding into the wall with a bang and a grunt.
Invisibility is one of those Magickal abilities that just doesn't seem fair. It's the sort of thing Oliver or Alfie would call 'super overpowered'.
The raised platform trembles, and the invisible force seizes the back of my hoodie, wrenching me up off the ground as the zipper holds me trapped. I close my eyes and focus; the threads of the fabric unravel as they melt and I fall free, leaving the invisible Anomaly with nothing but water dripping from his fingers.
Thankfully, I know a thing or two about being 'super overpowered', myself.
And, I can execute it with style.
Hitting the gangway wet and rolling, I scramble to my feet and vault the rail. I land in a graceless heap, feet-first, as my knees bend to absorb the shock. Alfie— is where my instincts immediately go, but an annoyingly familiar nasal tone stops me in my tracks.
“I have to say, Captain. I was hoping this wouldn't end with us cornering you all like mice in a barn.”
So much for our ambush. That was a fantastic idea while it lasted.
“Oh, this isn't the end yet,” I utter darkly, as Elder Beaumont appears via the same office entrance we used in a flourish of royal purple robes. Behind him, several Anomalies I recognize a his Novanite warriors file in. One of them is frog-marching a familiar figure in front of him, one hand fisted in the nape of his scarf like a leash.
“My legit thanks for bringing Felix out here with you,” I say coolly, as Alfie noisily untangles himself from whatever he landed on somewhere to my left. “It'll save us having to look for him later.”
To my lack of surprise, Rhys just beams at me, cheerful as ever despite his unfortunate predicament. “Well,” he pipes up, chipper and charming. “That's awfully lucky, isn't it!”
Above me, Duncan appears at the railing, only to be forced forward against it by Spectre, who still hasn't revealed himself. He roars and rears up, easily throwing the less powerful Anomaly off, and stumbles into the center of the gangway, mostly likely shaken up and unsure of how to fight something he can't actually see.
“His presence was entirely necessary,” replies the Elder.
Alfie appears at my side, panting a little and holding his ribs. “Yeah, mate, I mean, I see where you was going with the whole torture him to make us feel bad thing, or whatever. But the problem is it ain't really gonna work. We only met him a few months ago, I don't know if my sympathy bone's hooked up to him yet.”
“Ah.” Beaumont clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “This is awkward. You see, we didn't bring him here for you. I was actually hoping to continue a little chat I was having with Brother Felix when we received Brother Lynx's call regarding the discovery of your nest. With any luck, I can get the answers to the questions I have for him,” he says. “Before, during, or after the climax of this holiest of days, it makes little difference to me.”
Rhys scoffs, indignant. “Rude.”
“So, if you're just allowed to, like, ring each other up,” chimes in Alfie, and while the muffled grin on his face might suggest he's trying to keep the amusement out of his voice, I know he's not. “What part of it's supposed to be 'primal'?”
Beaumont glares viciously. I imagine his patience for Alfie at this point has all but run out.
“I will be more than happy to show you,” he says slowly. Dangerously. “All of you. Starting with your bold, fearless captain.”
“Oh, what an honor,” I deadpan over Alfie's protective growl.
The twisted Elder makes a gruff noise that falls somewhere between a chuckle and a cough. “Ah, at last. Someone with the appropriate attitude about all of this,” he chortles. For a moment, I frightened I'm imagining things, but then I see it again: he licks his lips. “Delicious.”
Still better than a long weekend with that Illiam weirdo?
Wrenching my brain away from thoughts of the pride of warriors literally devouring my brigade around me, I snap an arm out to the side to stop Alfie. I already know he'll attempt to dart forward in my defense.
“You won't be headed to that hall of heroes with us, Beaumont,” I aver. “I don't know if your religion has a hell—”
“It does,” hisses Alfie. “Kinda-sorta.”
“Good,” I answer. “Because I reckon they're all kinda-sorta going there instead.”
Beaumont laughs. For some reason, it angers me more than it may have done had he just responded to me verbally, called me a petulant child or uneducated whelp. But in that laugh is the lack of an answer—no, the refusal
to answer. And that in my opinion is more infuriating, more telling of anything mentally unhinged, than any proper reply.
“For all you know, a convoy of innocent people died today,” I say, “because you set them up. Because you gift-wrapped them for the enemy. People who trusted you, who trusted your goddess, your pride. How does that not bother you?”
“Because,” the Elder answers without hesitation, “look at who they were. Look at the lives they were living. They were willing to throw themselves on the mercy of another country, a country with a great deal of its own Anomaly discrimination. Ha!” He shakes his head. “It shows their naivety, that they were so easily lured with the promise of golden beaches, job opportunities, safety, sanctuary, and a democracy that actually works for its people. When this is their existence, Captain—when all they have to live for is the daily struggle to stay alive—why would providing them divine deliverance and an honorable, intimate death 'bother me'?”
I slam into a mental roadblock that's spent the past few days completing construction. My gut instinct tells me I want to grab his brain stem and rip his spinal cord out through his skull. My heart and my head are frantically trying to convince it otherwise, to remind me of the vow I was damn close to taking last night, as I slumped against my van door in my blanket burrito.
To remind me not to let them make me into a monster, too.
“Elder Beaumont,” I say, drawing a cleansing breath deep into my lungs. “All I can say is you're ridiculously bloody lucky you shanghai'd us to play Capture the Cannibal Flag today and not yesterday.”
“Yesterday, our newest acolytes weren't ready,” Beaumont says, huffing with pride. “And after the potential I saw in them, I knew: they had to be properly inducted into our pride at Vetrnaetr.”
I already know what's about to happen. It's a horror movie where, despite how every jump scare and every twist is predictable as hell, it's no less terrifying.
The small, skinny bloke who is shoved through the pride and thrust in front of us, a young black girl clinging anxiously to his arm, is not the same Oliver Porter that I remember. To use an overly-coined phrase, he's a shadow of that man. His skin is sallow, eyes sunken. I'm not even sure they recognize me when they lock with my own, devoid of the love and life and light that they once held.
Blaze of Heroes Page 11
