by Martha Woods
“What. The fuck. Was that?”
“I…” She looked down at her own hands, plainly shocked as either of us that it had worked. “I don’t know, it just… felt like it would work, I didn’t know for sure that it actually would. I just figured that if we fought them we were going to die, we may as well try it.”
“You trapped us in a wardrobe with no method of escape, while a group of murderous shifters were tracking us down to kill us, to test something? I don’t know what’s fucking me up more, the fact that you did that to begin with, or the fact that it actually worked. The hell did you even do anyway? Hold my hand and make my smell go away?”
Cara was having a hard enough time believing that she’d actually managed to do anything, I could at least help her explain. “She can block auras, when she held my hand this morning in Faye’s store they couldn’t sense me at all, being able to see me was all they could manage to do. All the energy that magic gives off, the beat of your heart, the little things that let us sense each other, they all just… vanished until she let go of me. I guess… it extends to smell too, she can more or less make us invisible it turns out.”
“So if you can do that just by touching us, does that mean that you can… what, basically be invisible to shifters unless they physically look at you?”
“I guess… that’s what that means, yeah,” She said, “This is so weird, when I woke up this morning I didn’t expect this to be the way things went.”
“Fuckin’ tell me about it,” He groaned, collapsing to the ground and rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms, “I swear, the more I learn about you people the more I miss just being an idiot who shot at paranormals, everything was so much simpler back then. You were bad, I was good, I didn’t have to think about what I was doing or the things that you could do, that was it. Now we’re actually fighting on the same side and I feel… more scared than ever, that’s not how it was supposed to work.”
“You don’t feel safe with the alliance?”
“Of course I do, half of you are vampires that I’m almost convinced could walk in daylight, and the others are witches that can… blow up buildings with a snap of their fingers or… turn into fuckin’ invisible ninjas just because. And don’t even get me started on the werewolves, that’s a whole bucket of worms that I’m still trying to work out. Now I just know how easily a bunch of you could kick my ass, it kind of weirds me out sometimes, that’s all.”
“Well lucky for you that most of us like you,” I said, extending my hand to him, “Come on, let’s get out of here, this day’s been weird enough already, I’m eager to get it over with.”
“Yeah, yeah…” He sighed, taking my hand and hauling himself to his feet, “I should call someone, let them know that some of our boys need to be picked up and buried, and to double forces on the next patrols.”
“I’m sorry Julian, I know that this mustn’t feel good.”
“No, it doesn’t,” He said, “But you should be prepared to take action soon. The rest of the hunters are going to be keen on getting a little revenge, and at this rate the rest of the paranormals are going to want to take the fight to them as well. Talk to Claire, tell her to start talking to whoever she feels she needs to talk to, and then be prepared to kill whatever shifters come across us next time. They drew first blood, we shouldn’t let them draw second as well.”
“You’re right,” I sighed, much as I didn’t want to admit it. After all my talk of wanting to give them a chance, now there were at least three men that were dead that shouldn’t have been, and they were only growing stronger and planning every day. There was only so long that I could delay the inevitable, I just didn’t want to admit that a fight was inevitable. “Tell them that it’s not just defense anymore, if you come across any shifters that aren’t outright surrendering or making themselves not look like a threat, you do whatever it is that you think you have to. Just… I don’t know, just don’t shoot anyone who doesn’t deserve it.”
“Even with this, I’ll treat them fairly, you know that,” He said, “If they want to give up, then we’ll take them in peacefully and keep them away from the fighting, we’ll protect them just as much as we’re protecting the shifters in the hospital. But all the others? I’m not going to let any more of my men die, and you should extend that warning to the rest of the groups before they get the wrong idea. So far the number of dead is three, that number shouldn’t get any higher.”
“It will though, won’t it? Regardless of what I do.”
“Of course it will,” He said, pulling out his phone and placing it to his ear, “But that’s war. At least you can say that you tried.”
He stepped out of the room, speaking to some nameless hunter to organize for the bodies to be collected, and as morbid as it was… I almost thought that maybe it was only a matter of time before they got called out here again.
Barely ten minutes after escaping with our throats barely intact, Cara and I were more or less doubled over in an alleyway after we’d felt the need to sprint as far away as we could, me dry heaving and barely keeping the contents of my stomach where they were, and her having let them go next to a dumpster long before.
“What… the fuck is going on Amy?” She coughed, wiping at the corner of her mouth, “I couldn’t do anything like this last week! That’s only seven days! How am I suddenly… making people seem invisible all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know Cara,” I said, and I was absolutely being truthful when I said it. It was definitely a highly unusual turn of events, if it was enough to stump seasoned witches like Alexis and Faye then… shit, how am I supposed to know what’s going on with her? After all this time I’ve barely started to get a hold over my powers, I’m far from in the position to know anything about anyone else’s. “I’m not gonna lie this is… kind of above my paygrade, but I’m not going to let you try and figure it out on your own. If you need anything, anything at all, you come right to me and we’ll help you.”
“But what if I turn out to be dangerous?” She asked, and it was easy to see the fear that she had kept so carefully just out of sight the entire day, “I mean this is one thing, but what if it keeps transforming and changing? What if I end up… wiping you guys out next time I try to hide you? That’s something that could happen!”
“Cara, I need you to calm down,” I said, “If you were going to kill any of us I’m pretty sure you would have done it by now, there’s been enough stressful situations that we’ve been in together that could have easily caused you to lose control, but you didn’t. Now that you know that you have these powers, you’re not going to let yourself get out of hand, you need to trust yourself on that.”
“I want to, but…” She sighed, slumping against the wall and hiding her face in her hands, “I just don’t know what to do about all of this, I wasn’t supposed to be a paranormal, I was just supposed to… to be the human best friend who sits around and shakes her head at all the weird shit going on around her. Now I’m the weird shit! Me!”
“Well… look on the bright side at least,” I said, cracking an awkward smile, “At least we have something else in common now.”
“Heh, yeah,” She chuckled, massaging her temple, “‘Hi, I’m Cara, this is my best friend Amy, we’ve been friends since college, also we have powers that mean that we’re not completely human, do you want to buy us a drink?’”
“Why are we letting someone buy us both a drink in this scenario?”
“Oh please, like almost every witch that we’ve both met doesn’t have an absolutely raging libido.”
“Ok, that’s a fair point.” I shuffled myself over to her, propping my leg against the wall and leaning back next to her. “Come to think of it, I don’t think Faye’s ever shown any interest in that sort of thing, even Tabitha’s turned out to be… well, you’d better ask Alexis about that.”
“I don’t think she’s really interested to be honest, she’s always been more interested in… tinkering and studying, every time we talk at one
of the meetings it’s always about an interesting paper that she read, or about where I’d gotten my hair done, never about sex.” Cara shrugged, closing her eyes and smiling. “Good for her, if being a witch is this complicated I can’t imagine throwing sex into the middle of all of it.”
“Yeah it’s… well, you’ll find out, it can get kind of complicated alright.”
“You’re sleeping with two men at once, that’s complicated by default.”
“And I’m pretty much in charge of everything, which means that I have about twenty important decisions to make every day on top of all the normal ones,” I laughed, rubbing at the back of my neck, “Wow, I’m a real idiot. My schedule is way too full for this.”
“You need your down time, no one can work on something as big as this twenty-four seven, they need time to unwind.” She straightened up, placing her hand on my shoulder and squeezing gently. “Thanks… for listening to me panic. I just needed someone to talk me through all of this, and I’m glad that you were here.”
“Of course I was,” I said, placing my own hand on hers, “You’re my best friend Cara, I’m not going to leave you alone to suffer if I can help it. I… I already did that once, I’m not going to do it again.”
“That wasn’t your fault, I wanted to blame you at first but… I think that was just because of everything else we were going through, all our other friends that were constantly talking about you, it was just this big toxic cycle that wore me down over time.”
“Do you still talk to them?” I hadn’t, not in months now. I’d never really had the desire to ever since Cara had disappeared that first time, otherwise it was just the guys constantly eye-fucking me and their girlfriends scowling at me even though I’d made my disinterest plainly clear. You shouldn’t surround yourself with people like that.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I feel kind of bad about it sometimes, but they could reach out to right? I think that they might have just decided to cut me loose because I was still hanging out with you.”
“God, I thought we’d gotten over that schoolyard bullshit,” I scoffed, “Did you see the way half of them looked at me when we hung out? Like I’d just dragged their boyfriends into the bathroom for a quick fuck before we sat down at the table.”
“You did date one of them before, I guess they never got over it.”
“They should have, we weren’t children anymore.” I giggled, leaning in close and whispering, “You want to know a secret?” She nodded, getting that same look of glee that you always got when someone shared a secret with you. “His dick was kind of tiny, which is fine, but he insisted on believing otherwise. Like every time we were alone it was always something that he would bring up, just accept it and move on right?”
She laughed, the noise bouncing off the walls around us and seeming to brighten up the sky, “Oh that’s so mean! But to be honest… he was always overcompensating for things, I guess he was just that kind of guy.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being small, I don’t want to say that, but god… just find something else to talk to me about once in a while.”
“Oh god, I can never hang out with them again even if I want to,” She said, “That’s all I’ll be able to think about from now on.”
“Trust me, it’s all he’s thinking about too.”
Slapping my arm, Cara pushed herself off from the wall and laughed, “Don’t be mean. We’re both happier now anyway, aren’t we?”
I thought about the two wonderful men I had waiting for me at home, while she was no doubt thinking about Tariq, wherever it is that he might be. In a lot of ways… “Yeah, we are happier now. No question.”
“Well good, then we know that we’ve got something to go back to through all of this.” She sniffed, wiping at the corner of her eye quickly. “Sometimes it can get a little hard to remember that, but I know that I’ve got all of you to get me back on my feet. And that’s why I need to go and work all of this out, to do my best to find out how I can use this to protect all of you just like you protect me.”
“Considering that we’re standing her talking instead of bleeding out in some snowy apartment block, I’d say that you’re already off to a great start.” Winding my arm around her shoulders, I guided us towards the entrance to the alleyway and marched us forward. “Now come on, let’s go home.”
Chapter 4
I’d already gotten in contact with Joseph to tell him the situation to the best of my ability, no doubt he was calling Julian to get the details personally from someone who knew the dead quite well. The vampires would be informed by the end of the hour, and Cara had insisted on going along to warn the witches, but I needed to go warn someone else personally, being that they were in a far more delicate position than any of the others may have been.
“Christine?” I asked, more called, as I stepped into the warehouse, “Are you here?”
“Amy?” She replied, stepping around the corner with a look on her face that explained how plainly confused she was, “We had a meeting this morning, has something else come up?”
“The hunters were attacked this morning, I was there, at least three or four of them are dead, and we almost were as well.” I braced myself against the wall, taking a deep breath. I hadn’t realized just how fast I’d been running to get here. “It was the shifters, they’ve started making a move it feels like, but I don’t know which group it is just yet.”
She nodded, expression grave. “And you came here to warn me personally, since this is logically the place that is most in danger. I understand.”
“Is there anywhere else we can move them to? So many of them are still injured, they wouldn’t be able to fight even if they wanted to.”
“This is the only location that we can defend them in, everywhere else is too open. And even if there were other places, it would only be a matter of time until they could get to those too.” Staring out over the still occupied beds in the main hall, it was easy to see that if they managed to get in here… it would be nothing short of a complete massacre. “One of our younger members hasn’t reported in today, a young wolf around… seventeen I think. At first I was content to give him until the end of the day to come in and apologize, everyone has a rough night here and there, but after what you’ve told me about the hunters…”
“You want to go check up on him.” Who could blame her? There was no reason to believe that the attack was limited just to the hunters after all. “Is anyone able to watch over the shifters while we go?”
She whistled, waving her hand at two other wolves walking around the main floor. “Gabe, Oren, call up everyone else and have them report here right now to keep watch. If you see anyone that you don’t recognize coming towards here, you kill them with no hesitation.”
With the issue of security handled, we ran outside to where her car was parked, me jumping in the passenger seat and her in the driver’s. I still thought it kind of strange that a werewolf owned a car, but that was just one of those things that I would have to get over. What would they do if they didn’t? Carry a building’s worth of groceries back to the warehouse on their back?
“He lives about twenty minutes away, in a little house close to the park. It’s where we put up all the new wolves, to still give them that connection to the earth before they have to make do with the city, it helps everyone acclimatize.”
“Have you ever thought about moving out of the city?”
“Every day,” She said, before looking at me and smiling, “But we all have friends here, we can’t forget that can we? Look at all we’ve managed to accomplish in the short time that we’ve been working together, you can’t do that all by yourself.”
“I suppose not,” I said, nodding along, “It’s nice having friends.”
The rest of the drive went by in a semi-tense silence, both of us thinking about what it was that we were going to find, if we were even going to find anything at all. The shifters this morning hadn’t exactly been big on subtlety when we were still so close
to civilization, they’d butchered someone right outside in the snow without a care for whoever had been watching, what would they do if they could find someone out in a place a little more isolated than that? I’d already come across enough scenes left behind by serial killers and butchers in my time, I wasn’t exactly keen on thinking about what mess could potentially be waiting for us.
Nor, I noticed, was I particularly quick to ask Christine about what kind of person this new wolf was, even though by now we’d been driving for ten of the twenty minutes. I suppose maybe a part of me was scared that we weren’t going to find much of them, and I didn’t want to get too attached to someone who I could very well find as a torso hanging from a tree. But I owed it to them to at least know their name in case the worst happened, there should be more than one person there who knows the proper way to mourn.
“This wolf,” I said, turning to look at Christine, “What’s their name?”
“Archie, well, Archibald but you can understand why he prefers Archie. He came to us about four months ago after running from his parents, they’d been in contact with hunters before and he was terrified that they would turn them on him rather than accept him for who he was now.”
“That sounds awful,” I said, “His own parents?”
“He doesn’t know for certain what they were planning to do if they found out… but you can usually get a pretty good idea from how they act the rest of the time. If they hate someone like you, what reason is there that they wouldn’t hate you too?”
“I suppose… that’s a hard thing to think about. I came across a lot of situations like that when I was still working, but it never got easier. It’s just one of those things that won’t ever change isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean that we should give up hope. We should just keep being there for the people that are hurting and protect them as best we can. And also on occasion make sure that the person doing the hurting supremely regrets doing so.”
