by Martha Woods
I didn’t know what to say, so for the moment I just stayed quiet. Sure I could spin some whole spiel about “Great power comes great responsibility”, or to tell her that she’s better than she thinks she is, but that would just be ingenuine, and she would be able to tell. She deserves better than that, she deserves a better answer than that, and if that means that for the time being she doesn’t get an answer… I think that’s maybe for the best.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t try to cheer her up at least, if only a little.
“If it makes you feel better,” I said, “It could just turn out that you’re some super huge weakling who doesn’t even have enough power to heat a cup of coffee. Would that be better?”
“Now I want enough power to be able to kick your ass, do you think I can get that?” Reaching up and punching my arm, she grinned down at the street before heaving her body in a great sigh, “I’m not even too old for this, but I feel old right now. I’m too old to be discovering new shit about me at least.”
“At least life isn’t boring, I’ll say that much.” Patting her on the shoulder, I threw my thumb behind me and smiled. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I need something to eat, and you look like you need something to drink, let’s go take care of both.”
“I definitely need something to drink,” She said, kicking herself off the wall and following me along, “I am way too wired by this to spend the rest of the day sober.”
Chapter 3
“My friend, the witch,” I laughed, poking her as we walked along the street, “You need to help me think of a name, Cara the Teenage Witch doesn’t really sound that good.”
“I’m also not a teenager, you on the other hand are acting like one.” She grabbed me around my neck, dragging me down and ruffling my hair. “If I’m such a big, bad witch now, give me your lunch money!”
“Ah!” I squawked, batting at her arms from my awkward position, “Lemme go, I’ll kick your ass!”
“I’ll let you go when I want you- who are you?”
“Please, don’t let me interrupt,” Julian said, staring down at the two of us with plain amusement, “In times of war, it’s always nice to see children still playing.”
“Julian… I didn’t expect to see you here,” I said, pulling my head out of Cara’s hold, “What are you doing in this part of town?”
“It’s so close to the edge of town, me and some of the new boys in town wanted to come out here on patrol, make sure the area is tight and held down in case any of the shifters got smart and tried to make a move.” He shrugged, placing his hands behind his head and stretching. When he did, it was easy to see the pistol tucked into his waistband. “Haven’t seen anything yet, don’t really want to see anything yet, but we’re prepared either way.”
“One of those will really do the trick?” Cara asked, pointing down at his pistol, “It just seems so… ordinary.”
“Shifters aren’t the same as vampires, shoot most things in the closest thing to a brain it has enough times chances are it’ll die. The only real thing you can’t fully predict is if they’ll have shifted already by then, and I don’t know about you, but the odds of killing a bear with a shitty little pistol aren’t exactly high.”
“You don’t carry anything bigger?”
“Course I don’t, that can stay in the car. I’m not aching to prove that I have the biggest dick in the city, if shit is out of my league then it doesn’t matter how big the gun is.” Julian tilted his head, staring at Cara. “You alright? You look kind of pale.”
“Y-yeah!” She stammered, snapping out of her moment of distraction, “Sorry it’s… been kind of a rough morning.”
“Alright, well, don’t take it too hard. I have a feeling this winter’s gonna be a bitch to get through as it is.” He took a step forward, heading towards a nearby cluster of buildings before stopping himself and glancing over his shoulder at us. “This’ll probably just be a routine search with a couple of the boys, you two want to tag along? I’ve got a couple things I wanted to talk about, may as well fill you in at the same time.”
“I don’t really have anywhere else to go,” I said, looking at Cara, “Do you mind? You can head on home if you need to.”
“No, this could be good. It’ll be a good chance to think about something normal. Plus who knows, it could be exciting.”
“I’m gonna dispel all illusions right now and say no, it’s not going to be exciting.” Julian pulled open the chain link fence separating us from the buildings, each of them more decrepit than the last. “At most we’re going to find some dogshit and some homeless people, and in that case the gun stays in the pants and my wallet gets in my hand, they don’t need any more trouble than they’re already dealing with.”
“So what, is this like a charity drive?”
“Yeah, sure. I drove out here, and now I’m giving out charity, it’s a bit literal but I’ll take it.”
We could see a few of his other men standing and waving off in the distance, each of them picking their own building to search and walking inside. It seemed maybe a little risky to search each of them by themselves, but I figured they were dangerous enough on their own that any risk should be pretty minimal. Taking a moment to stare up at the upper floors from the outside, we walked up the stairs and pushed the door open, stepping inside and glancing around the entrance way.
“Wow,” I said, “No one’s been here in years.”
I wasn’t exaggerating when I said no one, I know signs of homeless people squatting, of bored kids coming in and wrecking some stuff for fun, there wasn’t anything like that. Just… dust and whispers that something might have been here once, before for whatever reason the entire place shut down and the people moved on to the next project.
Julian sniffed at the air, placing an uneasy hand on his pistol and walking forward. “This is kind of giving me the creeps, but I can’t feel anything yet. Just keep an eye out if you want to continue, if not the entrance is right there, you can still leave.”
One look at Cara was all I needed to know we were continuing, so when we fell into step with him he continued the conversation easily. “Could just be rats, I never really liked the things, and there’s bound to be at least a couple here if no one’s lived here recently.”
“Really? Julian the big bad hunter, is scared of rats?”
“Wow, you’re just in a dicky mood today aren’t you?” Cara giggled, head on a swivel to look through each doorway we passed, “It’s not nice to make fun of someone who has a legitimate fear.”
“I never said I was afraid of rats, I just said I don’t like them. Now sharks on the other hand, those I’m afraid of, but I don’t think we’ll run into any of those here.”
“That you know of.”
“Ok now you’re being a dick.”
We checked the first floor, our boots crunching down on glass broken years before, brushing aside leaves and small branches that had started springing from the earth once more to claim the building for its own. Seeing no sign of life, we walked up the stairs to the second, Cara and I still standing behind Julian as best we could manage, I had my powers, but this was his life, I wasn’t ashamed to admit when someone had more experience than me.
“What was it that you wanted to talk about?” I asked, the quiet of the building starting to get to me as well now, “Do you have a plan for what we should do?”
“Not really,” He said, shrugging his shoulders, “I just wanted to ask you how convinced you are that these shifters could be turned around, if you really had the time to try it. If you had an entire week to stand in front of them and try to argue them around to your point of view, do you think you could manage it?”
“Me? Against a probable lifetime of brainwashing and loyalty? I don’t think I’d have much of a chance at all.” The only reason that we had Claire working with us was because she had been a doubter to begin with, but even then I’m not convinced that we would have gotten anywhere were it not for the fact that Damon is her br
other. Without that, she likely would have retreated into the forest only to appear again the next time they attacked, with no qualms about trying to tear us to pieces. “I think that the only way to get through to most of them would be through convincing their leader, and look at him. He’s insane.”
“So if you know the chances are low, and that doesn’t change no matter how long you would have,” He stopped, looking back at me with a look of pure puzzlement, “Why do you even care about giving them a chance to begin with? Why not just… run on ahead, drop them where they stand and deal with the consequences later?”
“Because even if I know it’s not going to get through to them, I still have to at least try first. If I don’t try and convince them to come around first without violence, then I’m afraid that it might just get easier to solve everything with blood to begin with.”
“That can be dangerous, extending peaceful words to someone who has made it clear on every occasion that they don’t care about the harm that they bring to others.”
“Then that’s a risk that I have to take,” I said, “No matter what the enemy is, I can’t help but want to give them a chance.”
“That’s admirable, but eventually that’s going to get someone killed that shouldn’t be.” Julian turned himself quickly around the corner, standing for a long moment in front of the doorway staring in before being convinced that nothing was actually there. “What I’m trying to say, is you should keep an eye on what the enemy you’re fighting actually has a history of, and then work from there. Giving a chance to an enemy that has shown that they do nothing with them except regroup and kill doesn’t make you civilized, it makes you naive.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He had a point, if someone has a history of sucker punching people once their guard was down, it was nothing except foolish to extend your chin to them while trying to talk peace. And these shifters… for the last few months they’ve been doing nothing except going on a cross country rampage to try and kill a group of people that for the most part are completely innocent of the crime that was committed against them in their eyes. If it wasn’t for Claire, and if it wasn’t for what Anthony had told me about them, I very well may have given up on them by now, gone to Damon and Vincent and told them to gather everyone for an all out attack, but I’d seen enough to convince me to stay my hand.
In fact… if Claire had been convinced because of someone that she knew, surely she could extend that to others in her group? What if there are just as many doubters in there that could make a serious difference, but they’ve got no one to convince them to take that next step, so they’re afraid of ending up alone? What if all it would take was some kind words and encouragement from her to tell them that we would accept them if they wanted our help, all they would have to do is help us stop this war?
That was why I had shown mercy up until this point, I’ve gotten enough chances to seriously turn things around that it would be foolish to just rush in with a knife between my teeth. “For this fight… I’ve got some plans on what we can do that don’t directly involve blood, but if we handle them correctly they could deal a blow far more devastating than a knife or a bullet.”
“Those tend to be pretty satisfactory blows in my experience, but I suppose you are the one in charge, not like you got that position for no reason.” Reaching the stairwell again, Julian pulled out his pistol and held it at his side, staring briefly up into the darkness of the upper floors before taking his steps upward. “Whatever you’ve got planned, I want you to know that I’m with you one hundred percent, I couldn’t deal with two of my boys personally and not be all in, I just want you to be sure that you’re making the decisions you do because you know it’s the right thing to do, not because you’re scared.”
I’d been around enough people like him to know that when he said scared he didn’t mean it as an insult, he meant it as a natural consequence of war that extended to everyone, no matter what background or gender, fear was something that could creep into your heart and control you from the inside with such tenacity that you could very well become a different person under its control. With everything that was going on, everything that had been going on over the last few years, a little bit of fear would be understandable, but I was certain that this wasn’t out of fear.
We were all about changing up the formula of what had been happening, there was no reason it couldn’t extend to fighting as well.
“You’ve got that look again,” Cara said, smiling knowingly, “That look you get when you’ve come up with an idea on how to solve everything.”
“I don’t… really have a look like that do I?”
“Yep, you have for years now. Just no one wanted to tell you in case you got weirded out by it.” She bumped my hip with hers, leaning her head in and asking, “So you gonna tell me whatever your plan is? I’m your best friend, so I have no problem telling you if it’s a completely stupid idea.”
Fair enough, I knew I could trust her on that. “I’m going to ask Claire to see if she can convince anyone else close to her to defect, if we can get enough of them then that might be a serious threat to the shifters, and the tables could turn pretty well after that.”
“Not a bad idea,” She said, “But what if she ends up revealing herself? That’d be… real bad wouldn’t it?”
“She’s smart, she wouldn’t be as trusted as she is if she wasn’t. Everyone has confidence in me, but it’d be a shitty thing to not extend that to people that I’m reaching out to as well. If she agrees to try, I’m convinced that she’d only approach people that she was truly comfortable with, she wouldn’t just go shouting it from the rooftops recklessly.”
“Who knows?” Julian said, “Maybe that’s exactly what would be needed to get them all to wake up. I definitely wouldn’t rule it-”
He snapped his head to a nearby window, cocking the hammer on his pistol at the same time and tightening his grip. “Did you hear that?”
I shook my head, but following him to the window I could feel the tension in my body starting to mount and that familiar buzz of warning in the back of my skull, instinct telling me that we were in a very bad position. The sound that he’d heard had turned out to be a window breaking in one of the buildings down the road, not something that would normally be noteworthy if it wasn’t for the clearly screaming figure standing and waving his arms in front of it, the pop of distant gunfire telling us that he was far from alone right up until it stopped. Downstairs the door to the entrance of a closer building slammed open, a terrified hunter sprinting outside into the snow, pistol pointed back and snapping shots back into the building before three shifters swarmed him, seemingly springing up from literally nowhere to drag him down to the ground and maul him until he stopped moving completely.
“Jesus,” Julian said, grimacing at the scene, “We need to get out of here, now.”
“Yeah… wait.” I leaned closer, keeping out of view from the outside but narrowing my eyes, staring down at the group of shifters as they sniffed at the air and turned towards our building. “They can smell us.”
“Shit!” Julian started running, making it to the stairway before we heard the doors below slam open, the sound of pounding feet almost deafening as they started to make their way to us. “There’s too many of them to just take on by ourselves, the best chance we have is to run.”
“We’re on the fourth floor!” If we had to jump out the window I don’t think we’d be in any position to run anywhere, and they’d just shown that they had no problems chasing someone down out in the snow even if they could make a run for it.
Basically, as far as situations went, this was fucked.
“In here!” Cara said, dragging both of us into a nearby room with a wardrobe, throwing open the door and pushing us inside before cramming herself in along with us, shutting the door and leaving us in darkness. “If anything opens that door, you shoot it with everything.”
“We’re trapped in here!” Julian whispered, his grip on his pistol tur
ning his knuckles white as he pointed it at the door. “If they find us we’re fucked!”
“Just… trust me,” She said, holding our hands tightly, “I have a feeling that this’ll work.”
“I hope you’re right…”
We shut our mouths, not even daring to breathe as one of the shifters came up the stairs, stepping into our room with his nose held up in the air and his teeth sharp. Standing at the doorway, he looked around the room with a plainly confused look on his face before sniffing even harder, shaking his head as he walked back out. “There’s no one here!” He yelled, “I smelled wrong. We got all of them.”
“So you made me waste my time running up these stairs?” One of his companions shouted, already making his way back down the stairs, “You know I hate running up stairs, you better make this up later!”
“Yeah yeah, whatever, I really thought I smelled something...” The entrance to the building slammed open again, the shifters stepping out into the snow still bickering until their voices faded out of sight. We didn’t leave the wardrobe for another ten minutes, wanting to be sure that they were actually gone and that this wasn’t some kind of ruse to draw us out into the open. Enough time passed that we felt confident stepping out, Julian still keeping a death grip around his pistol as he crossed over to the window and looked out, seeing no sign of shifters but a depressing number of signs that the other hunters were all dead. Sighing deeply and returning his pistol to its holster, he turned and looked Cara square in the eye, spacing out his words so there could be no misinterpretation of what he said next, as simple as it was.
