The Book of Broken Creatures: (A Broken Creatures Novel, Book 1)

by A L Hart

  The rain fell with a merciless vengeance, drenching everything in sight. I could barely see the stretch of the alleyway where the sisters had retreated. Above, the dark sky’s color was off despite the hazy sheets, the tumbling clouds a burnished black and blue hue. Through the wet blear, the alley’s electrical beams stood erect, their wires jouncing in the winds. A putrid stench rose from the row of dumpsters starting from mine and ending somewhere far down the strip of venues. The smell curdled into the rain fiercely, and only grew stronger as I started down the direction I’d seen them flee.

  Wamego wasn’t a frequent victim of flash floods, just as we seldom received such hideous weather in the middle of August. Nothing about this night was particularly normal. Despite it, I was cautious of my footfalls, the pavement slippery, puddles hiding pothole depths as I attempted to go as fast as I could. Squinting through the gray scene for two small figures in black was more difficult than I’d imagined when the spike of heroism hit me at my desk. It’d only been ten minutes since they’d run off. Surely they couldn’t have gotten too far. Right?

  I kicked into a light jog, resisting the urge to call out their names and accidentally wake the few residential homes in the area. The crackle and clash of thunder and sudden blare of a car alarm only shot my nerves higher as I imagined them navigating the streets.

  I wound up behind Shabby’s Bar, the only venue in this city open after 9 at night. The bar’s lights were still on, music bumping out into the pelting rainfall with little consideration for any neighbors. The storm did close to nothing in stopping its patrons. And their cars.

  What if one of those cars veered? If I could hardly see in front of me, what were their torrent-laden windshields like?

  I was running now and calling out, “Ophelia!” Nothing but the bar’s receding noise. “Jera!”

  Would they have gone into the bar?

  I gritted my teeth to think of what an audience like that would inspire onto a woman already out of it and another woman who was quick to trigger. None of the possibilities rang good. Men and excessive alcohol didn’t mix. Men and excessive alcohol and two women desperate for help was a catastrophe waiting to happen.

  I stopped and turned to backtrack—

  Fleeting shadows halted me.

  Their images blurred into the haze as they ran, fast moving, farther down the alley. Away from my shop.

  “Hey!” I called after them, running again with no regard for the deathtrap of gravel and slippery cement. “Hey, wait!”

  The venues blended past me as the shadows moved faster. How was it possible for them to move that speed with one of them injured? Or was I that out of shape?

  After blocks of dodging dumpsters and broken litter, the alley broke off into an open field where the local park sat abandoned in the downpour. The rustic swing set, twisting slides and monkey bars were but staunch black patches in the night, waiting for the the weekend and its chance to come alive again.

  It was here that I got my answer.

  Those shadows hadn’t been the two women. These were men. Big, lean figures draped in black, slinking through the darkness as they closed in on the swing area, oblivious to my presence.

  I blinked away saltine droplets and barely made out the two cornered figures that were Jera and Ophelia.

  That’s right. They had mentioned someone was after them. I’d written it up as another one of their delusions. Suddenly I wished they were right.

  The cloak of night and incessant rain cast the scene into a vague perception. Trees surrounded the lot in a crescent, their canopies rustling, bending branches creaking, creating a dreadful symphony of solitude, reminding me just how desolate this park was. How anything could happen and no one would be the wiser until day broke and the sun revealed it all.

  What did these men want with them?

  My first thought was drug money owed, but that was likely Hollywood taking reign in my head. Regardless, I had the good sense to melt back into the shadows of the alley, watching from a distance, because there was a difference between being a hero and being an idiot, or a dead wanna-be hero. Particularly when I noticed the weapons the men withdrew as they circled in the park’s rubble with slow, eerie grace.

  Guns?

  I wiped my face with soaking hands and squinted, raindrops dripping from my lashes into my field of vision.

  Definitely guns.

  My heart pounded, those last remnants of heroism flushing from my system in place of fear. What weapons did I have outside of my general unapologetic apathy?

  Though my fear couldn’t have been anything compared to what the two females were feeling in that moment, staring down the mouth of a barrel. Of course, they’d gotten themselves into whatever bind they were in. The best I could do was call the police, except, I was fairly certain my phone was sitting somewhere in my office, where I’d forgotten it in my rush to play the big man of the hour.

  Helpless, I watched.

  “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, girls,” one of the men bartered. “But either way, it will get done.”

  From this distance, I couldn’t discern which sister was which, but if I was going by the postures, Jera was the one poised in front.

  “Well now, I do like it hard, boys.” Yeah, had to be her, the razor bite in the words too familiar.

  Unlike me, these men didn’t hesitate to act with their weapons. Blindingly quick. And without holding back.

  But it was the guns they fired. Instead, metal refracted in the night, whipping from one man’s grasp and darting straight at Jera. A chain.

  I stood there, jaw dropped, and watched as she grabbed hold of the link midair, a mere breath before it made contact—and tugged with a strength that sent the man at the other end of it lurching forward into the damp rubble.

  Witnessing this, the second man actually fired his gun, the resonating pop swallowed by the storm.

  Rooted, unable to tear my eyes away, I fell witness to what this woman truly was.

  Once, I’d visited a wildlife rehabilitation center up in Nebraska, courtesy of Liz’s begging. We’d arrived just at feeding time in the lion’s den where we’d watched from the viewing dock. I remembered how they’d released the sheep into a hidden section of the den. I remembered the way the beast had moved, the way the audience’s gaze tracked each of its movements with morbid fascination. Because though the sheep was oblivious to what it ambled towards, we the audience knew: a natural born predator.

  Just now, Jera was that predator, the men around her the sheep.

  With the chain she’d claimed from its wielder, she sent it flying at the other man with a precision that coiled it around his throat, tightening, stealing the air from his lungs. And this woman . . . this woman in which I’d held a mere bat up against, lunged forward, twisted his neck clean around, and in the same swift movement, landed a kick to the other man’s chest that sent him hurtling back against the swingset. I could hear the snap of his spine against the pole.

  That was when I knew she’d spared my life back there in the shop.

  Thunder boomed overhead, and it was as though that sound alone summoned more of them.

  I hadn’t seen them at first.

  Five—no, ten?—men, descending from the outskirts of the trees surrounding the playground, wearing their malice like a second skin, moving with a traceless fluidity. How could two small women have garnered such a precaution? What had they done?

  The men’s attention was singularly on Jera. They attacked as one. And for a while, the woman was a war machine, disabling every threat that came near her or her sister, moving with a speed my eyes strained to track—

  Until her movements grew slower.

  One of the men saw this opening and cast a second set of chains at her.

  The link found its home around Jera’s throat. Still the woman struggled, fending off the mass with sheer will and dexterity alone.

  Beside her, Ophelia fell to her knees and wretched.

  “Lia!” Jera roa
red, only to have the chain pulled, dragging her away from her sister. Another chain was cast, whirling in a perfect arc, binding one of Jera’s wrists. Then the other. Then her legs. As if they were lassoing sheep for culling. “Lia, it’s okay!” she shouted when clearly it wasn’t.

  Why weren’t the men going after Ophelia?

  Ophelia looked at Jera long and hard, something passing between the two of them I didn’t understand but reminded me of those private conversations Liz and I used to have with just our gazes when Mom and Dad were in the room. I swallowed the memory, catching some salten rainwater.

  And that was when it crept into me. A stab of something sharp behind my eyes like a sudden migraine, peeling the edges of my nerves until I couldn’t feel a thing. Not the cool raindrops sinking to my scalp and not the ferocity in which I clamped my teeth when a sudden surge of something inexplicably wholesome took over the space in my chest. A floating starlight, ambling, drifting. Expanding, exhaling.

  What is this?

  This thing, this light, it grew bigger, flared stronger, transcending beyond me and ending all hopes of my comprehension.

  Until, all at once, time stood still.

  —No, not still. But slower.

  Much, much slower.

  The flash of lightning to scar the sky next, I watched as it was born. Each stage, from a tiny, eerie nimbus dot into a long, jagged blade through the hazy mauve clouds. Its pale glow hushed over the scene and stayed like that, as though, in that interstice between the rampant fall of rain and the man pointing the gun to the woman’s head, the world had taken a breath.

  And then I was running towards her, adrenaline steeping my brain in acid, making me aware of four words that’d been echoing silently through my veins.

  I can save them.

  Time snapped forward, returning us all to the perpetual darkness as the lightning died.

  In my adrenaline shot state, with logic dismantled, I was distinctly aware that if time had slowed, then the gun would be firing any moment—

  “No!” I threw the word across the expanse and saw all the heads in the night swivel in my direction.

  The man closest spotted me first, but it was too late. Just as he was beginning to turn the lethal weapon on me, I collided with him, the gunshot firing off somewhere into the night.

  “Jera!” That was Ophelia’s screech, the sound of pain so rich the skies stopped their weeping, making way for true sorrow.

  And that was when the night had its second strangest episode.

  Body dozered over the man beneath me, my eyes peering through the dark to the twins, I watched as lightning took over the scene.

  Though this time, the source wasn’t from above.

  But Ophelia.

  As she screamed her sister’s name with the fiery components of rage, misery and desperation, her body, the very lining of her, illuminated a detrimental blue no different from the strikes forking through the sky.

  What exploded out of her was everything but.

  Of all things, what I saw then was what shot absolute terror down to the base of me.

  This lightning that could not really be called lightning was utterly and completely black at its core. Vacuous dark streaks lined by a grey charge as it combusted—and slammed into us all before anyone had time to prepare. The force, the sheer electric expulsion, was enough to send each of us reeling across the playground as though we were nothing but tumbleweed in the path of a vengeful tornado.

  It wasn’t until I felt my spine burrow into the ground that my vision clipped out, my consciousness trembled, and with one sharp heave . . . something flitted across my mind.

  A sound.

  A vision.

  A dark room. Noises scuttling somewhere deep in the trenches of my awareness. It reached my ears in musical notes. Someone chanting, no, singing, one name. Over and over again. Gleefully. Lovingly. Reverently. “Ophelia, Ophelia~. Sweet darling, Ophelia~.”

  And this voice . . .

  It was my voice.

  Before I could fully grasp this haunting truth, the images and sounds snapped away. My body hit the ground violently, tearing up the dirt beneath me and scorching my spine. It paralyzed me to the ground. My chest was on fire. My lungs clawed by searing flames.

  Burning, withering, I stared up into the falling rain, unable to move a limb or make a sound.

  Something wasn’t right with my head. Something . . . wrong.

  I can feel it.

  My breaths dragged in with raking scathes. My head . . . the pain. I was aware of everything around me. Aware of life. How the gray patches of clouds rolled by while raining its clear misery down on the rest of us. The humidity clinging to the burned air I lashed in. I could feel it. Too much it. The pulsing life around me like thorny vines digging into my skin.

  They clustered in my chest, pricked the gray, lifeless bits of me and threatened to tear it apart. Threatened to make me feel something other than numb.

  Violent thunderheads drifted, growled, resuming their ferocious tears and me . . . as I lay there, feeling as though I were burning up alive from the black lightning, I couldn’t stop what I knew to be tears streaming from my eyes. From pain?

  No.

  I didn’t know why they were there or what they meant, but they were hot and so, so heavy, I squirmed to realize they’d been there all along. Inside the chamber of my chest, rusting my heart until something struck down the cage in a fury.

  Was I going to die?

  I didn’t want to tear my gaze from the clouds, afraid I might find the afterlife resting next to me, prepared to wrap its talons around me and cart me off to Ma, Dad and Liz. Wouldn’t it be okay, though, to join them? What reason did I have to linger here?

  There was only Natalie, but Natalie had Camille, and she’d said so herself, the only reason she came around was because she couldn’t bear to watch me drown.

  Well, I wasn’t drowning anymore.

  I was burning up alive.

  “Lia!” The cry was one of incurable agony. I could identify it anywhere because I’d once used its same inflection when calling out Liz’s name as I unbuckled her contorted body in the back seat of the SUV, trying to pry the crushed metal from her ribcage.

  The familiar, desperate sound tugged me from the ledge I pondered. Life greeted me.

  I gasped. An abrupt scramble for air that sucked in the falling water and mist around me, lashed in the world, consumed it whole. In the accident, I’d coughed uncontrollably, the smoke from the exhaust coating my lungs and inflicting damage that left me in the hospital for days despite having nothing more than a few bruises. This was different. The pain, the fire, it was fading fast. So fast, that the more I tried to focus on it, the quicker it disintegrated.

  I rose to sit and clutched my chest, only to find my trench and the button-up I’d donned beneath it tattered. A large, missing patch existed instead. Singed, scorched. I could see my chest, or at least I thought it was my chest. A severely darkened burn mark rest between my pecs, thin palls of smoke rising from its center and hissing in the rain. The lightning had struck me here.

  I whipped my gaze around me, remembering there were others. Men with guns and chains and deadly weapons. But in the haze, I found no one.

  Except the two women.

  Ophelia, collapsed in the rubble beside the swingset. Jera, huddled over her body.

  Where were the men? I knew they were stealthy, likely trained killers and I also knew I shouldn’t have been able to acknowledge that with such nonchalance, but if I’d been hit by whatever that explosion was, then they should have been in similar or worse condition.

  My attention focused back on the two women. I narrowed my eyes. I wasn’t imagining what I’d seen, which meant I must have graduated to the sixth stage of grief: delusions. Or maybe the seventh: insanity.

  Or maybe that gunshot I’d heard had killed me and the flash of lightning and the black lightning strike had been nothing more than the great white flare courting me to death.
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  Fingers digging into the grime of dirt, body protesting at every turn, I pushed to a wobbly stand, telling myself I was indisputably alive, and then I waited for the vertigo to cease. When it did, I fell back to the ground and purged up whatever my last meal had been, dry-heaving moments later, then shivering.

  The second time I came to a stand was much smoother, not counting the swaying and nonstop trembles raking my spine and making me too aware of how soaked I was. I dragged my feet anyway, through the softening earth, over the wooden swingset encasement and there I stood above the two women who’d broken into my shop just minutes ago.

  One of them was unconscious (dead?).

  The other making noises in the back of her throat, clenching to the woman’s frail body. The flowing rivulets of her obsidian curls sprawled around her sister like a blanket protecting her from the dangers of the world. She was unmoving.

  Grimacing at the stab of pain in my chest, I crouched slow and steady beside the woman.

  Jera’s head snapped up and she actually hissed. An actual seething hiss, teeth bared like she just might chomp off my hand if I got any closer.

  “Crying about it isn’t going to help her,” I told her grimly.

  “Who’s crying?” she ground, and I realized it must have been the rain, because the only thing in this woman’s eyes was fury and promised murder.

  “She needs to go to the hospital.”

  “No!” she growled. “And if you come anywhere near her, you’ll be going to the hospital. Or worse, I’ll flay you worse than those men—” She stopped, her eyes scanning the field and finding the same thing I’d found.

  Said men were all gone. Vanished.

  Her shoulders tightened. The grays that peered back at me were not the same as before. There was that same simmering disdain, this time triggered by who knew what.

  I gritted my teeth. “You need to get her to a hospital. Getting struck by lightning can’t be fixed by some home remedy.”

  She snorted and shook her head. “Struck by lightning, you say? Even you aren’t that much of an imbecile.”

  Struck by lightning was the only reasonable explanation at both of our disposal. I refused to question beyond the explanation, because then I would have to account for watching a woman burn brighter than a star and explode lightning strikes from her very being. Black lightning strikes, to be exact. And admitting that would be admitting I must have had my brain cells fried in the midst.