by D. N. Hoxa
“All right now, the show is over,” he said, waving at his men. “Leave her with me. Take the rest.”
“No!” I shouted out of sheer panic. They couldn’t take Red and Amara away. They’d kill them!
But before Haworth even turned to acknowledge that I had spoken, Amara jumped to her feet. She’d taken the ropes off her wrists, and she had both her hands in front of her while she chanted.
Haworth turned, perfectly amused, and his men drew out their guns to shoot at her. They couldn’t.
I mean, they did, but the bullets didn’t reach her. She was moving her arms on both sides of her slowly, chanting furiously while bullets rained upon her shield. I didn’t wait a single second. Even if it killed me, I was getting that thing out of Red.
I kneeled in front of him and grabbed the arrowhead. “This is going to hurt,” I said in a shaking voice, and I ignored the expression on his face, that of pure horror. I took in a deep breath, and I pulled the silver out of him with all my strength.
He growled like a wounded animal, his fangs in clear view, but I was way past getting scared of them. I fell back on the floor on my ass with the silver arrow in my hand covered in cold blood. Red had his head up to the ceiling, his hands pulled in fists by his side, and by the time I got to my feet, the wound in his chest had closed. He was no longer bleeding.
When he looked at me, he was in beast form. He hadn’t bothered to shift back to normal. He took one look around the room, and the next second, he was gone.
I jumped to my feet and ran to Amara, who was still chanting, her arms stretched wide on both sides. I put the arrow against her chest. She could use it as a weapon, much more efficiently than I could.
Red had already begun. To our right, a witch screamed as she hit the wall, and then Red was in front of her, his face under her chin. He was sucking her dry. I got that he needed strength to regenerate from the silver wound, but God, it was horrible to see him like that. I was going to die before I forgot the picture.
When he was done, others were already shooting at him, but he moved fast. It was his style to jump from one end of the room to the other, on people’s shoulders, breaking necks and tearing chests open. It gave me hope that maybe we could make it out of this.
Amara completed the hundredth spell and grabbed the arrow I was holding against her chest. Without looking at me, she ran with it toward Haworth.
The man was completely calm. Amused even to see the scene unfold before his eyes. I reached for the Reaper again, determined to use it like I had on Amara. Maybe I could get his spell thrown back at him.
And I found the perfect opportunity when he raised a hand toward Amara, who was just two feet away from him. The three wolves were in front of him, baring their teeth at Amara, who’d just…suspended on air. She’d frozen with her arms raised, her mouth open and her eyes focused on Haworth.
Haworth, who was smiling. He was going to kill her now, and he’d take great pleasure from it, too.
I ran forward with a simple plan in my mind. My finger was in the Reaper’s ring, and I was ready to swing my arm. The second its string touched Haworth, I was going to turn back and I was going to unleash it on him again. Give him a taste of his own medicine.
But I never got the chance.
Amara fell to the ground when I was right next to her, and Haworth froze in place.
The whole room seemed to hold their breaths. Even Red was no longer fighting the others.
Stepping to the side, Haworth slowly turned around to see… Nadia. His daughter. And when he turned, I saw the knife buried in his back, right between his shoulder blades.
Nadia slowly backed away toward the door as Haworth reached his long arm behind him, and got the knife out of him in one swift movement without even flinching. He looked down at the knife, then back at Nadia, who was crying silent tears now.
“Why?” Haworth whispered, completely lost, same as the rest of us. I rushed by Amara’s side and helped her up.
“Leave her alone,” said Nadia, her low voice shaking. “Haven’t you already taken enough?!” There was no mistaking the accusation in her voice.
“My own daughter,” said Haworth, shaking his head as he looked at the knife covered in his blood once again. “Have you no shame?”
“You are not my father,” Nadia said, then spit at his feet. It took all of her will to say those words. I didn’t know her, but for this, I would always respect her. “You’re nothing but a monster.”
Amara began to run toward her, screaming, but Haworth was already there. With one simple movement, he buried the same knife in Nadia’s heart and left it there. I grabbed Amara by the arm and stopped her. Haworth felt no remorse in seeing his daughter on the floor, bleeding to death. He felt no shame and no guilt watching her shaking, gasping for air. He just did what he thought he had to do, and now he turned back to us again. With a wave of his hand, he sent his wolves back to the rest of his people. Maybe Red had killed them all? I certainly hoped so, but I couldn’t spare a second to look, afraid I might miss when Haworth did whatever he was going to do next.
Amara kept on screaming and screaming as if her heart was on fire, and Haworth smiled. He raised his hands again and began to chant. Amara’s scream was in my head. It was a fuel. It ignited me, made me move like I never knew I could, and I dropped on my knees before anybody could notice. I threw the yoyo as fast and as hard as I could toward his legs, and the most incredible thing happened: the Reaper String actually wrapped around his knees three times.
With Amara back in the alley, it had taken a while for the magic to reach me. Her air ball had been small, too. But Haworth’s took over the whole room. It crashed onto me like a wild ocean wave, sending me onto the floor. It felt like I’d been pressed flat by an elephant, and I couldn’t even raise my head. All I could do was hold onto the yoyo and listen to Amara’s furious chanting. The next second, Red’s face loomed over me. His lips moved as he said something, but I was losing it. I didn’t hear a thing. The view was growing dark, his pale face becoming very blurry. My wolf howled in my head. She fought unconsciousness tooth and claw like it was a living thing. She squeezed at my insides, pulling my heart into a fist until it no longer beat.
By the time my vision cleared a bit, Red was gone and in his place was Haworth. He was shining orange, and at first, I thought it was a spell, though spells have no color. But it wasn’t magic. The sun had already started to rise.
Haworth grabbed me by the hair and pulled me to sit up, the plate of the Reaper String in his hand. He brought it in front of my face and laughed.
“So you have my Reaper,” he announced, feeling proud of himself. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but watch him pull the string with all his strength. My finger broke when he took the ring off, then pushed me away again.
But before he left, he turned to me again, a shocked, confused look on his face now. Bringing his left hand over my head, he held his breath for a split second, than began to laugh.
“No, that can’t be right,” he said. “A half? Only a half?” Then he laughed some more. “Oh, this keeps getting better. A half human in my home, what are the odds?” And finally, he turned around to leave, no longer interested in me.
Half human? What the hell did that mean?
Every cell in my body screamed as I watched him back away, looking at the Reaper in his hand like it was the most precious thing in the world. If he took it, could he use it? Was the story Red’s friend told him about it working only with one witch just bullshit? I had no idea, but I knew I couldn’t wait to find out.
I felt the second it began. My bones cracked, changing shape, growing and shrinking. My muscles stretched to accommodate them and my skin filled with fur, but the pain wasn’t there, or it didn’t register. Not on the face of Haworth’s magic, still pulsating on my chest like a second heart, or the fact that he had somehow managed to put Nadia’s body over his shoulder and was backing away toward the door. I couldn’t let him leave.
&
nbsp; I opened my mouth to scream, but instead, I howled. I rose up on all fours all alone and saw everything in clear detail. The door was already open. More people were coming in, Haworth disappearing among them. Two of Haworth’s wolves jumped on mine, their jaws open, aiming for her throat, but she was twice as big in size, it seemed. I knew she’d never hurt them more than necessary, so I waited patiently until they both fell against the walls whining, and my wolf ran for the door after Haworth.
People were blocking her way, but they were just people. Before I or my wolf could make it out of the room, we sniffed the air and caught her scent.
Izzy.
She and another twenty people were already inside, fighting Amara and Red with their weapons and their magic. I called her name, but it came out as a howl. Then, my wolf jumped over the three guys blocking the door and shooting at us, but the bullets barely grazed her. There might have been blood, but the pain never came.
Outside the door, the hallway was wide and very long. The marble beneath her paws was cold and uncomfortable, but we could spot Haworth running down a set of stairs at the end of the hallway. I don’t think I ever realized it before, but my wolf ran really fast. She jumped high and her paws barely touched the floor when she landed before taking off into the air again.
The smell of Haworth’s magic was part of me now, and I felt it again a second before my wolf slammed onto his back with all her strength. Nadia’s body flew off his shoulder, and he rolled on the stairs twice before reaching the bottom. The Reaper fell from his hand, rolling on the floor until it reached the wall and stopped at the corner. Haworth raised his arms toward me even before he’d gotten up completely, but my wolf didn’t wait to be hit by his spell. She jumped on him again, her jaw open, aiming for his throat. One clean bite and he’d be nothing but a bad memory. I watched as they collided and hit the ground again. Unlike bullets, Haworth’s magic burned my wolf, slipping through her skin like it wasn’t even there. It was like acid, destroying her every cell, and it was so painful that she had no choice but to jump away from the witch. Haworth was disoriented when he made it to his feet. His clothes were torn, blood coming out of everywhere, and again he chanted his spell for us. My wolf jumped to the side with a loud growl and ran so fast, he had no way of keeping up. She hit him with her head on his shoulder, and he flew over Nadia’s body, and hit the wall. My wolf was ready to rip him apart piece by piece, but then the spell hit us again. This time, it wasn’t acid. This time, it was ice.
The pain was crippling, and it hit so fast, my wolf fell on the ground midair, right in front of Haworth’s feet. The smell of the spell was suffocating, but the ice covering her insides was hard to break.
Get up! I shouted at her in my head. She needed to get up because Haworth was already on his feet. Her eyes, my eyes, were on him, the painful expression on his face, the hatred in his every line, and the strength of his magic leaving his fingers. I thought this was it for a second, that he’d do whatever spell he needed to do to make me as submissive to him as those other wolves, but then, out of nowhere came a knife, and it buried in the left side of his torso.
He fell a step back, as confused as I was, and the spell he’d worked over me lost its strength. My wolf didn’t need another second. With the magical ice melting all around her, she jumped on all fours and shook to get rid of the nasty smell.
Another knife hit Haworth in the shoulder, and I realized those things smelled like Amara.
Amara, who was running down the stairs with at least another four people running after. They’d all dropped the guns, it seemed. They had all turned to blades now. But before any of us could attack one another, there was a loud noise coming from outside that made us all freeze in place.
I sniffed the air even before the first words reached my ears. Weapons, spells, cuffs, cars, and fifteen people.
“This is the Executive Control Unit!” someone shouted through a speaker right outside the door on the other side of the stairway. “Come out now with your arms raised or we will open fire!”
A laugh—the sick kind. Haworth’s. He’d kneeled on the floor and was reaching out for Nadia’s limp hand.
“No!” shouted Amara, jumping three stairs at a time, and my wolf ran for him, too.
But before either of us could reach him, he disappeared into thin air, leaving nothing but his scent behind.
Time stood still as my wolf took in her surroundings, Amara’s screams, and the echoing footsteps of the others who’d followed her. They were no longer coming for us. They were running up the stairs. My wolf’s first instinct was to run, but I couldn’t let her do that. Izzy was still there. Red was still there. I had to make sure that they were both okay, first.
“For the last time, this is the ECU…” the man outside spoke, but I could no longer hear him. My wolf jumped over Amara and ran up the stairs into the room where we’d first woken up tied to chairs. There was nobody there—nobody left standing. A lot of dead bodies and ashes. One of the wolves was there, still breathing but badly wounded. The other two must have escaped. Red was nowhere to be seen. The sun shone brightly through the three large windows. Yes, the ashes on the ground were vampire ashes. Had he…had he been caught under the sun, too?
Before I could search for him, Izzy’s scent reached my nostrils. She was there, too. She was lying on the ground, her head over a dead guy’s stomach. She was wounded on her chest and on her left leg, but she was breathing. So were others, but they were too weak to stand up and run like their friends. My wolf began to let go of me, to allow me to become me again. Both our eyes were stuck on Izzy’s pale face until the shifting was complete, and maybe that’s why I didn’t feel the pain of it this time, either. I fell to my knees in front of her body, my shaking fingers searching for a pulse though my wolf had heard her heart beating. She was alive. She was definitely alive.
“They’re coming,” said Amara, rushing into the room. “What the hell do we do?”
“Where is Red?” I asked in half a voice, but when I looked at her, she was staring at the ashes on the ground. Did she think he’d been stupid enough to stay under the rising sun? Had he, really?
Too painful to think about for now.
“Amara, listen to me. You need to take my sister and get out of here. There must be a door on the other side of the hallway because Haworth’s men escaped through there. Can you do that?”
Confused, Amara shook her head. “What about you?”
“I’ll hold them off. I’ll tell them what happened. You just make sure you get away and that she’s safe, okay?”
Her mouth opened, but she had no idea what to say. The first gunshot pierced the air. The ECU was already coming in.
“Just go!” I shouted. “Take her and go! I won’t tell them anything, I promise!”
“Okay, okay!” she said, and putting Izzy’s limp arm around her neck, she pulled her up easily. Izzy weighed much less than Amara, thank God.
“Here,” Amara said when we both ran to the other end of the hallway. I could smell the soldiers a floor below us, going over the entire place. I took what she gave me without looking, and when I touched the steel, I knew what it was.
The Reaper String.
“No,” I said, pushing her hand away. “You keep it.”
The soldiers were already moving up the stairs. In a second, they’d see us. “Go!” I whispered and pushed Amara through the only door in the hallway, then turned around and ran down the stairs with my heart in my throat.
“Stop!” I shouted, keeping my arms up, and when the first three soldiers spotted me, their automatic rifles immediately turned to me.
“Steady,” the soldier in the middle said. “Move downstairs slowly and keep your hands where we can see them.”
I did exactly as he asked. I had no idea how I looked to them right now, but I was as slow as was possible, and if my calculations were correct, Amara should have been out of the house and on the way to wherever by now. With Izzy. Who was alive, only wounded.
> My God, did this really happen?
I’d been wrong when I thought there were fifteen soldiers there. Now that the door was open, the sun shone through it brightly, illuminating the walls full of beautiful paintings, and the white and brown marble floors. And the twenty-two soldiers coming into the house. Their black uniforms made them all look identical. It was all I could do not to shiver for their pleasure.
“State your name and age, please,” said the soldier coming at me with a pair of handcuffs. Like a good little puppy, I turned around and offered him my wrists willingly. Whatever I could do to stall them and give Amara more time.
“Gia Hall, twenty-one,” I said in a breath. “I was kidnapped and brought here against my will by a man called Hector Haworth. If you guys hadn’t made it, he’d have killed me.”
Maybe it was the truth, maybe not, but it sure seemed to get their attention.
“If you go upstairs to the right, you’ll find a lot of dead bodies. Something happened and some strangers came and fought the guys who kidnapped me. I didn’t know any of them and I don’t remember most of it, but I’m just glad to be alive.”
When my voice broke, I realized that I meant it. I was glad to be alive. I was glad Izzy was alive. And Amara.
But what about Red?
I must have sounded genuine, because the soldiers believed me, or at least they pretended to. They took me outside where the yard was full of black SUVs, ECU issue. The house was bigger than it had felt on the inside, and it was surrounded on all four sides with big trees. Maybe Mandy had been right. Maybe we really were in Fort Totten, because I could definitely smell water not too far from here.
While the soldiers searched the house, they put me in an SUV and locked me in. At least they took the handcuffs off. When five minutes were done, I began to feel my body. Now that the adrenaline had died down, I felt the pain clearly. I was injured in more places than I’d realized. Shoulder, hip, my left ankle was a mess, and even some of my ribs felt bruised. It hurt to breathe deeply.
