Fangtastic Four

by R. L. Merrill

  “On it, boss,” Freddy said.

  While he was looking, I asked Mac a question that had been bothering me.

  “Mac? How did you and Zelda know you were mates?”

  Mac snorted. “Uh, we met, we bickered, and we boinked like bunnies. Why?”

  I chuckled, an image of a wolf in a bunny suit flashing through my mind.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Sorry,” I said, picturing the dead creatures in my room to clear my mind of that image. “Anything else?”

  “Well yeah. I just knew she was mine. It was pretty clear she felt the same,” he said, his cheeks going a little ruddy. “Even if she’d tried to fight it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “She kept fighting me, which was kinda hot, actually. But then she tried to leave.”

  “Leave? Like, what did you do?”

  Mac grew as serious as I’d ever seen him. “I couldn’t let that happen. I didn’t go all stalker on her or anything, and I promised I wouldn’t make her stay…but I had to make her want to stay.”

  “I get it.” I frowned. “I guess my problem is going to be making Wilma see that I want to stay.”

  Mac squeezed my shoulder. “You’ll figure it out. It’s not like you have a choice. Mates are bound to each other. You’ll suffer apart. Keep that in mind.”

  “Got it.”

  I was already suffering, and she was under the same roof as me. How was I going to make things work with her and still go to visit Havoc? She was needed here. And what about music? My career?

  “Oh shit. Look!”

  One by one, the sconces lining the walls began to blow out, bringing darkness toward us like a locomotive.

  “Hurry up, guys. Find us something!”

  “Over here,” Freddy called out. He’d pushed on a random stone and a doorway opened in the hallway. “This way!”

  “Wait,” I said, turning to tell Mac—

  “Gus! Watch out!”

  Mac pointed behind me and when I turned, I was caught around the middle by the stuffed bear from my room. The thing barreled out of the darkness and moved in a jerky rush. It carried me away from Mac and Freddy, its arms like steel bands around my midsection, despite me struggling with all my vampire strength, which was more than human Gus but less than, like, Superman.

  Freddy and Mac ran toward us, but the bear ran too fast. We flew through the dimly lit hallway and headed straight for the tapestry.

  “No! It’s a wall,” I screamed, squirming once more to break free. If we crashed into the wall at this speed, it was not going to feel good. As we approached, I thought, Wilma, I love you. I hoped she’d hear me.

  My gut lurched as the bear launched itself at the tapestry and I squeezed my eyes shut. Would it kill me? Maybe, maybe not…

  I braced for impact—

  The bear and I went tumbling through space and landed with a thud on a stone floor, once more wrapped in the damn tapestry.

  “Didn’t we just do this?” I shrieked, trying to get my bearings. I peeled the fabric off of me and as it pulled away, it kicked me in the shin with one of the bottom corners before stomping back to the doorway.

  “What was that for?” I shouted back at it.

  “There’s no telling,” Bertram said. “I’ve been trying to have a civil discourse with that infernal creature for years now.”

  “Bertram? That you?”

  “Indeed,” he said with a heavy sigh. “I’m over here.”

  I brushed cobwebs off of my pants and shoulders and took a moment to look around. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw Bertram—until I got a load of his predicament.

  “What happened?”

  Bertram was trapped in a cage in the middle of a dungeon-esque room. He floated behind gaseous purple bars above a fire pit that snapped and crackled.

  “I’m not entirely sure. One moment we were in the parlor conversing with the lad from Louisiana. The next? I was sucked into the darkness and I wound up here.”

  “And where’s here?” I asked him as I walked around the cage he was trapped in. “And who did this to you?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest. Something came through the portal Zelda opened, but I have no clue who or what it might have been.”

  I tried to touch the bars but the flames licked up when I reached for them and nearly caught my t-shirt on fire.

  “Not a good idea, my friend. Fire is prohibited for your kind.”

  “Right,” I said. “But what does it do to you?”

  “I have never attempted to find out, but the heat is rather intense. It has weakened me.”

  Sure enough, Bertram’s movements were lethargic and he didn’t present as clearly as he had before.

  “We’ve gotta get you out of here,” I said, turning to search the room for something. Anything.

  “Lord Cravenly is going nowhere—and neither are you.”

  Chapter Nine

  Wilma

  * * *

  “Is not.”

  “Is too.”

  “Is not.”

  “BOYS!”

  Mac’s decision to send me with Jacob and Vinny was fine, but adding Woodrow into the mix had turned our search-and-rescue mission into a bicker-and-fuss session.

  “Groundhogs do not use scientific methods to determine the length of winter,” Woodrow argued with Vinny. “It’s all magic.”

  “Or hormones,” Jacob said. “They actually come out looking for mates, not their shadow.” He gave me a funny look and I frowned.

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not really my place…”

  I rolled my eyes and gestured for him to speak. “You’re my mentor, right? Aren’t you supposed to tell me?”

  “I guess. How can I put this delicately?”

  “The mating?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know. I believe he’s my mate, and we’ve had a few heated moments. But no, um—”

  “Consummation?”

  I put a hand over my eyes. “Right. Close, but, um…”

  He patted my shoulder. “Give it time. Under normal circumstances, I doubt there would be anything that could get between you two, but under these circumstances, you have plenty of issues competing for your attention.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I guess we just need to work our way through the issues, huh?”

  “Just like any other couple, yes, you do.”

  Woodrow cleared his throat dramatically to get our attention.

  “Furthermore,” Woodrow said, shooting Jacob an irritated look. “There is no evidence they’ve seen their shadow. Maybe they’re just cold, or they heard their mate calling them to take out the trash.”

  “But it’s on the news! And it’s almost always right,” Vinny continued. “You can’t tell me there’s no proof. They’re proven, scientifically accurate weather predictors.”

  “Vincent, my friend,” Jacob said, patting him on the shoulder. “You need to accept defeat.”

  “It didn’t start with groundhogs,” I muttered. We were on the landing of the third floor, about to head to the attic, when the males stopped.

  “What do you mean?”

  I sighed. “In Germany, we used hedgehogs, and we’ve been using them for hundreds of years. The Germans who came to America continued the practice with groundhogs. It’s derived from the Candlemas celebration.”

  They looked at me as if they wished me to continue, but we had more important things to worry about than Groundhog Day.

  “She’s right, you know,” Woodrow said with a self-righteous sniff. “I’m a magical creature, a familiar, and as such, I am above science. I am not bound by the laws of science. Don’t get me wrong, science is lovely, and it has its place, but not when it comes to Groundhog Day. It’s all magic and illusion.”

  “Speaking of magic,” Jacob said. “Can you detect any woo woo juice around here?”

  Vinny shook his head. �
��Man, no wonder Mac sent you off with us. You got some kinda imagination.”

  “No,” I said, hugging myself to ward off the chill. If you followed science, heat should rise, and therefore the attic should be the warmest part of the house. But it was freezing up here, which had me wondering whether I’d found some sort of magical energy. Drawing on my studies from a hundred years ago, I remembered that temperature changes could be a sign of magic.

  “You feel it too?” Woodrow asked me.

  “I do, but I’m not sure…”

  “Trust your instinct,” Jacob said. “If you feel magic, something out of the ordinary or other than you expect, it’s usually right. Remember what I told the guys about how they’d know magical creatures in the bar?”

  I nodded. “Dread or attraction for magic, power for Shifters, and a little energy for vampires, right?”

  “Exactly. Close your eyes,” he said. “Inhale…exhale…now, describe what you sense.”

  I smelled… “Candle wax. Paraffin and cloves. Brush of straw against my arms.” My body began to sway to the sound of… “I hear chanting. In German.”

  Woodrow, who was still in my arms, placed his paws on my temples. He hummed, and his little squat body wiggled against me.

  “I hear it too. Die Merseburger Zaubersprüche.”

  I blinked twice and was thrown into action. “Follow me! I know what we need to do.” I hurried down a corridor to the left, away from the attic, and it ended in a staircase. “This way.”

  The men followed me down the pitch-black staircase, grumbling and cursing. Occasionally, I heard shoes slipping on grit.

  “Darling,” Jacob said. “I don’t mean to be greedy, but do you think you could conjure us a little light on the subject?”

  “Certainly. Die Merseburger Zaubersprüche is a two-part charm written in Old High German that was translated in the—”

  “Wilma dear, I think he means actual light,” Vinny said.

  Several thuds sounded in the darkness and the following silence frightened me.

  “Jacob? Vinny?”

  “We’re here. Get your hand off me. Wilma, I’d love some light.”

  “Hold out your hand,” Woodrow said calmly. “Focus on gathering heat and light to the palm of your hand. If you believe in it hard enough, you’ll manifest it. Go on.”

  I tried to do what he said. I calmed my thoughts and exhaled.

  “Watch out!” Vinny and Jacob shouted.

  Flames licked the surface of my hand and I gasped, thinking I’d just destroyed myself. But then they gathered to form a perfect flame in my palm.

  “I’ll be damned,” Jacob breathed. “That’s amazing. It’s not burning you!”

  “Brilliant! Now, let’s keep moving.” Woodrow pulled my collar to get me moving.

  Vinny and Jacob hopped to their feet and hurried after us. At the bottom of the steps we turned a corner, and there appeared my favorite room in the manor.

  “Now, this is what I call a library,” Vinny said. “I thought the desert library in Avatar: The Last Airbender was cool. This place is, like, a witchy library, huh?”

  “Indeed.” Woodrow hopped down from my arms and trotted over to the stacks. “All this knowledge sitting in one place, huh? How did you manage to acquire such a depository?”

  “Bertram,” I said. “He’d been collecting for three hundred years before he was murdered. I brought what I could from Germany, but he already had a massive collection amassed.”

  The library was a football-field size cavern full of shelves of all sizes and mismatched styles under archways carved in different shapes. The collections were obviously from a variety of time periods and in various stages of disrepair. I blew out my flame and, as we approached the tables at the front, soft lights hidden along the perimeter glowed and the floor tiles illuminated.

  “Be gentle,” I said. “And beware. Many tomes are bewitched and some bite back.”

  “And stay together,” Jacob said. “Wilma, what are we looking for?”

  I’d already moved to the German section and I slid my fingers over the volumes of grimoires until I stopped at the right one.

  “Die Merseburger Zaubersprüche.” I pulled the large book from the second-to-highest shelf. I slid my fingers lovingly over the spine and my heart thudded in my chest.

  “Again, Wilma.” A woman stood before me with stark black hair, high cheekbones, and thin lips. “Read the lines again.”

  My mother refused to accept that my magic could not be touched. That it was useless. She insisted that if I worked hard enough, I could overcome my disabilities.

  I recited Die Merseburger Zaubersprüche over and over but nothing happened. Mother locked my favorite cat in a cage and made me try it again, thinking my love for the creature and the pitiful way he whined as the cage shrank down upon him—

  “Enough,” Father said. “Release the creature,” he ordered Mother. She did as he asked, more to keep the peace than anything. She was more powerful than him. The curse had gone to his sister, so he had dominion over his magic, but my mother was stronger. She came from a long line of oppositional witches, and my father had foolishly thought her reversal magic would bring the Wetters relief from the curse.

  “You didn’t try hard enough,” she said to me. “We will try again tomorrow.”

  “No,” I said, standing up for myself. I might not have possessed magic, but I did have the confidence to speak when necessary.

  “But these charms, they are about releasing the imprisoned one. They are meant to bring freedom to the oppressed.”

  I knew my mother had been duped into marrying my father. His family had kept the curse from her family during their mating, and they had affection for one another, but she never gave up on me. Whether it was for my happiness or her to save face, I was never totally sure.

  “Wilma?”

  My attention returned to the present. Woodrow’s little furry face gazed up into mine. “Are you all right? I sense a deep—”

  “I’m fine. Just some old ghosts. Here,” I said, setting the tome down on a pedestal. “I think this is what I heard.”

  Jacob and Vinny stared at the illuminated text and had nearly identical frowns. “I can’t quite make it out,” Jacob admitted.

  “It’s all Greek to me,” Vinny said with a shrug.

  “Well, German actually,” I said. “It tells the warrior to jump out of the shackles and escape the enemies. In the second part, it refers to putting bones, blood, and joints back together.”

  Vinny’s fangs elongated, showing below his lip, and his eyes turned black. “I could use some Crown Moo-yale right now.”

  “Cut it out,” Jacob said, elbowing him, and Vinny’s eyes turned back to their lovely shade of brown that was so similar to Gus’s. I was fond of Freddy and Vinny and loved to watch Gus with them. He was my mate, and that meant they were my family now. Or we would be if we could get out of this nonsense in one piece.

  “Read the passage in the Old High German,” Woodrow said. “Maybe there’s a clue.”

  I cleared my throat and took a deep breath, calling upon all of my linguistic knowledge. I read the charms, letting the old words roll over my tongue, emitting each guttural tone of my native language. My hands tingled, the sensation running up my arms, through my throat, and into my mouth. I nearly panicked, feeling as though the words were choking me, but then they were forced from my lung with a thump on the back from Woodrow.

  “Gesundheit,” he said, shaking his little head. “That was a mouthful.”

  “You can say that again,” I said, hating the way the words had felt in my mouth.

  “No.” Woodrow’s eyes went wide. “Wilma, don’t say it again. I fear the warriors have been set free!”

  I turned around—and Jacob had just completed his transition into a snarling werewolf. Vinny was levitating above the ground, his eyes black, fangs even longer than before, and his hands had turned to claws. He hissed at me and I panicked.

  “No sudden
moves,” Woodrow said as he creeped behind me and crawled up my back. “When I say go, you make for the nearest exit.”

  I closed the book and wished I could recall some protection spells, as much for the two men as for myself and Woodrow. I couldn’t bear for any of them to be hurt.

  “Ein…zwei…drei!”

  I poured on the gas and we moved faster than the speed of sound. I knew this because just as we reached the back wall of the library, a sonic boom rattled the entire place and sent books and pages flying.

  “Where’s the lever?” I pulled at the various books on the shelf that I knew held secrets behind it, but nothing worked.

  “Try the bust!”

  I looked down, and sure enough, there were two busts with black masks over the eyes, and one had a discolored shoulder. I pushed the top of the shoulder down and the bookshelf moved just enough for us to slip behind it before it closed, the two men pounding on it from the other side.

  Just as my feet should have hit a solid surface on the other side, however, I forgot about the childlike delight of—

  “Wheeeeeee!”

  Woodrow hooted and hollered with glee as my feet went out from under me and we slid down a curvy metal slide, going deeper and deeper into the manor. Past the bottom floor and into the depths of the caverns below, we glided like out-of-control children on the longest slide likely ever invented.

  “Where does this end up?” Woodrow shouted.

  “I don’t know! It changes all the tiiiiiiiime!”

  It felt like hours before the trajectory changed and we began to climb upward, which slowed our velocity. We went through pitch blackness for several minutes until we were airborne. Woodrow wrapped his little arms around my neck and I held on to him for dear life. We sailed through the darkness until—

  “Oomph!”

  We hit the stone floor hard and bounced three times before coming to a stop.

  “Wilma!”

  I sprang to my feet and spun around—spotting my love wrapped in purple tendrils of dark magic. “Gus!”

  “Amor,” he shouted. “Be careful!”

  “Yes, Wilma,” our dark host said. “Please, try to rescue your menfolk. I can’t wait.”