Fire Of Love

by Preston Walker

  He got to work again, wriggling and yanking. He felt the tape tear away in swathes from his skin. More needles of pain, like the gnawing teeth of some ocean creature. And then his wrists were loose, and he could move his fingers, and he yanked away the last shreds of tape from his arms.

  Yes! He crowed inwardly, his wolf howling joyously inside him.

  Still blind and mute, he felt for the tape around his ankles and legs. That came off flawlessly and painlessly, in less than a minute. He was wearing jeans, which meant none of the duct tape had actually gotten on his skin.

  Tossing away the last sticky shreds of that, Moody grabbed for the tape on his mouth. A single strip, stretching from cheek to cheek. Bracing himself, he yanked.

  This was the only time when he really regretted part of his plan. He was already yelling before the tape even got to the corner of his lips, and then he yelled louder, more sound able to make it through his gag.

  He definitely wasn’t enjoying the experience of having all the little hairs on his face ripped out by the root. Yanking didn’t even seem to be helping, as the tape on his face had adhered better than the stuff on his arms and legs. He was taking off skin and hair, especially when he got to his lips. Heat blossomed in the wake of his efforts, and he tasted blood.

  Then, gasping, gulping in deep lungfuls of dusty-yet-damp air, he was almost free.

  Reaching out so he could find the puddle of water again, Moody brought his face to it and angled the top of his face down. The cold made his lungs ache and he tried to breathe in. Sitting up, sputtering, coughing, he tasted the water for the first time and immediately regretted it. If someone had told him he was drinking bug guts, he would have believed them. There was a high, sour taste to the liquid, a slimy feel that coated his tongue even though he only imbibed a few droplets.

  Clearly, if there were pipes leaking this, they were not in a building that had been used or loved recently.

  His eyes stung as the foul water got in them. That gave him hope that the tape had lost its integrity, and he grappled with it for one final time. Knowing he couldn’t just rip it off or risk losing his eyelids, he peeled it away as slowly as possible. Even so, it was a struggle and he could feel quite intimately the tugging and pulling at his eyebrows, his eyelashes.

  When he got to his eyelids, the thin flaps of skin stuck so firmly to the tape still that he had to hold them down as he went. Then, once both eyes were free, he tore off he last bit without caring and threw it aside.

  “Isaac!” he exclaimed, opening both eyes. Nothing but darkness and a sense of isolation, since not even his wolf eyes could automatically adjust to these conditions. Nevertheless, he thought he might be able to make out a huddled mass back the way he’d come. He half-walked, half-crawled over to where Isaac lay, then placed his hands on the alpha.

  Isaac’s skin was very warm despite the chill down here. Little tremors still shook through his muscles. Four rapid electric shocks that Moody knew of, and perhaps more on the ride here. A human would be dead. For Isaac to still be hanging on meant he had to be determined as hell..

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to get you out of this, okay?”

  Isaac, of course, didn’t respond.

  Moody felt his way down to the tape on Isaac’s legs and summoned his wolf claws. He shredded strip after strip of the sticky stuff, then grabbed the loose ends to tear them away since Isaac didn’t seem inclined to help himself right now.

  He repeated the process with Isaac’s arms, careful not to nick his skin. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was glad that he had been the one to do all the work initially. Scrapes were incredibly minor in the grand scheme of things, but he wanted to spare Isaac as much as he could right now.

  He moved on to Isaac’s mouth. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll be gentle. Just hold on, okay?”

  In careful increments, he peeled the tape away from Isaac’s lips. Isaac had more facial hair, though he luckily didn’t have a moustache. In any case, he hardly seemed to be registering any pain at all.

  When he was done, he tossed the tape aside and placed a hand on either side of Isaac’s face. “Can you stand? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” Isaac grunted, sounding as if composing those two words took every ounce of strength he had.

  “There’s some water in a puddle over there,” Moody spoke low and urgent. Now they had come this far, he was more aware of the fact that they had a time constraint. Each second which passed without action was another second closer to the time their captors came back.

  “Not thirsty.” Isaac’s voice held wry amusement, amazing given the circumstances.

  “No! We can use it to get the tape off your eyes. It’s going to hurt really bad otherwise.” Moody hesitated. Now wasn’t the time to sugarcoat anything. “It still hurt even when I used the water, but it probably would have hurt more without it. I’ll guide you. Come on. Get up.” He reached down, grabbed for Isaac’s hands to encourage him to get to his feet.

  Now that his eyes had adjusted to the lack of light, Moody figured that he could look around the basement to get a better grip on where they were. Instead, he just looked at Isaac. The alpha lay on his side on the concrete floor, his shoulders slumped.

  The tape covering his eyes looked pretty stupid, too. Like he was playing the dumbest superhero on the planet. However, Isaac didn’t seem to be able to care about much at the moment. He pulled in a deep breath, then forced out words in slow succession. “Just stop it, Moody. I think I might be beat.”

  Moody sat back on his haunches, gnawing on his lower lip. He glanced anxiously over his shoulder in the direction of the staircase they had descended to get here. Steep, narrow steps led up to a windowless door.

  He looked back down at Isaac, keeping his hands to himself for a moment. “What’s the matter with you? We have to get out of here!”

  “We can’t. I can’t.” Isaac sighed. His chest heaved with a huge sigh. “What don’t you understand about this?”

  “All of it!” Growing frustrated, overwhelmed by the responsibilities which were bearing down on him now, Moody did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed the corner of the piece of tape covering Isaac’s eyes and tore it off as fast as he could.

  Isaac cried out, pain giving him new strength. He threw his hands out, pushing Moody away.

  Putting his hand behind himself, Moody managed to catch himself so he didn’t land on his ass. He sat down again, then placed both of his hands in his lap. Isaac lay in the same position as before, eyes closed. He was now missing much of his right eyebrow and a strip from the bottom of the left. Miraculously, he seemed to have all of his eyelashes in order.

  Moody whispered, “You can’t chase me away this time. There’s not even anywhere for me to go.”

  Silence for a long moment. Then, Isaac sighed again. He actually seemed to be doing better now, impossibly. Maybe ripping the tape off had caused a surge of adrenaline, and he was currently riding on that. “I’m sorry, Moody. For everything. I’ve fucked up with you a whole lot and now look at the situation we’re in. It should just be me.”

  “Maybe that’s because you keep trying to do everything by yourself, you jerk,” Moody said. He wanted to sound angry and couldn’t manage it. The pink patches around Isaac’s eyes reminded him of badly-applied makeup, amusing him despite the situation. “I said I would be there for you. I meant it. We don’t even really have a choice right now, do we?”

  “Even if I leave, they’ll just find me again. Moody.”

  “We can go to the police and tell them we were kidnapped!”

  “And then what?”

  “And then… I don’t know. Okay? I don’t even really understand what’s going on. You’re not being very helpful. Why would Arlo throw us in here?”

  Isaac moved, and Moody’s heart jumped in his throat. However, the alpha only sat up and leaned back against the wall. Even that small journey must have been exhausting, given the state he was in. “He threw us in here becaus
e you’re right. We shouldn’t have trusted him. He was being weirder than normal, and I should have seen why.”

  “Why?”

  Crawling across the floor on his hands and knees, Moody sat beside Isaac. He leaned against him so their sides touched, then let his head lay back against the wall. He let himself look around, taking in the surroundings while waiting for Isaac to reply.

  They were indeed in a sort of basement, or maybe cellar was a better word. The space was massive, yet gave a sense of being cramped. The walls didn’t seem to line up quite right, which suggested the foundation of the building itself wasn’t entirely flat.

  Aside from the stairs, the only outstanding feature was a line of machinery going along one wall, near the place where Moody stuck his head in the puddle. The machines were rusty and looked incredibly old, bearing a network of pipes that wrapped across the ceiling and to destinations unknown. Many of the pipes were cracked, and their slanted angle meant that all the condensation ran off to one end. Coincidentally, that was the end with the stagnant puddle.

  There were no windows, though Moody thought he could detect thin beams of light filtering in through cracks high up on the wall.

  Maybe this is just a side-effect of having a fist bash into my head.

  Isaac stirred, as if he’d only just realized that he forgot to answer. “Lance is dead. My pack leader is dead. Arlo has his car, and now Arlo is commanding my packmates like he’s the boss. Because he is. He’s pack leader now.”

  “An omega pack leader?” Moody repeated doubtfully. Such things happened, though they were rare in the world of wolves where physical power tended to equal dominance. “I’m not doubting you or anything, but even if he managed that, how is he staying at the top? Anyone could come along and challenge him, and beat him.”

  “Maybe no one wants to,” Isaac said. He tilted over to the side a little, not quite leaning against Moody so much as letting him feel more of his weight. “After all, would you want to take over Destiny’s job? In charge of everyone, solving problems all day? Even if our pack isn’t like Shadow Claws, that’s still a lot of responsibility Arlo has to deal with now.”

  “So, why would Arlo want to take over the position in the first place?”

  Isaac shrugged. Moody was pushed to the side by the motion of his shoulders, and then ended up leaning even deeper against the alpha. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we can’t just give up until we know the truth!”

  “I know.” Isaac sighed. He lowered his head, staring down at his hands. They lay limp against his thighs, like jellyfish tossed up on the beach. “I tried, trust me. I just don’t think I have anything left in me. Getting shocked takes it out of a guy. Three strikes. I’m out.”

  “Well, it was more like four strikes. But it doesn’t matter. There’s no one else on your team,” Moody said. “So, you have to get up to bat again. Can we stop with the sports metaphors, please? I’ve pretty much expended my knowledge of the subject.”

  Isaac chuckled, incredibly. Hearing it warmed Moody’s heart. “You would know about metaphors, wouldn’t you? You called yourself a poet before.”

  Moody blushed a little, glancing away. He didn’t move, however. “I did. It just slipped out.”

  Isaac sighed. “Just another thing I messed up. I never really got to know you.” His limp hands curled into fists, nails clawing over denim and leaving paler streaks in their wake. “You told me everything about you, and I never bothered to actually listen.”

  “Well, if you’re going to make us sit here until morning, when everyone comes back, we’ve got nothing but time to talk.” Taking a chance, Moody leaned his head over so that his cheek rested on Isaac’s shoulder.

  The alpha shifted, resting his head gently on top of Moody’s. “So. Poetry.”

  Moody smiled a little, one side of his mouth curving upward. “Yeah. Poetry. Pretty cool, right?”

  “I’m not much of a reader.”

  “Neither am I,” Moody admitted. He leaned his head deeper against Isaac’s shoulder, turning his face ever so slightly so he could feel as if he was talking to the alpha instead of the empty basement. “I like poems. I just think a lot of them try too hard to be pretentious. Writing is, for me, a way of getting down the thoughts in my head that I can’t talk about with anyone else.”

  “It’s my fault you don’t have anyone.”

  “Hey,” Moody said, a little more harshly than he meant to. “Look, this is about me for a moment, because you asked. That’s how conversations work. You can stop interjecting your pity-party into my story time.” He knew he sounded pouty and he let the sound build up, almost to the level of a whine.

  Isaac groaned. “Oh, fuck. A whiner.”

  Moody laughed. “That’s what you get for interrupting. And anyway, this really doesn’t have anything to do with you. I’ve always written poems, off and on. I got some awards for it at school. There are just some things you really can’t talk about without sounding stupid, but you can write about them.”

  Isaac’s hand came wandering over, settling on his knee. Comfortable warmth flooded through Moody. Reaching out, he placed his hand on top of Isaac’s and left it there.

  “I’m not going to pretend I’m any good at it. I don’t think I’d really want to try to be. I’m not doing this to develop a skill. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I just don’t think I could get by without it.”

  This is exactly how we were before. I’ll talk and he’ll pretend to listen, and then we’ll move on to something else.

  However, neither of them were the same as they had once been. Isaac turned his hand over so their fingers could tangle together. “What do you write about?”

  How it felt to be alone. The betrayal of death. Heartbreak. Being happy about little things, like the color of a ladybug against a blade of grass. Throwing seashells in the ocean.

  Isaac.

  Casting away one identity, trading it for another.

  “Just, anything,” Moody said out loud. “Anything I feel like I need to.”

  “It must be freeing.”

  “It’s not exactly like riding a motorcycle down the interstate, but it’s pretty nice,” Moody agreed.

  “You think if we get out of this, I could read some?” Isaac’s fingers tensed briefly, then relaxed again. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if that’s rude to ask.”

  “It’s okay. And I’m sure I could find one or two that aren’t terrible.”

  Nothing about Isaac, and nothing too deep. Maybe he would look through the pile for which Cujo had compliments, and start there.

  “Moody?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why did you change your name?”

  “I didn’t,” Moody said. This conversation was going in a direction that he didn’t like, yet he felt compelled to answer. If not now, when?

  Never.

  This was their chance to communicate without anything else getting in the way, just the two of them in the dark with rectangular patches of red soreness on their skin.

  “My name is still Desmond. Desmond, Jr.” God, he hated that name. The taste of it was foul on his tongue. He wondered if that was how his father felt now, hating his own name because it reminded him of his son. “My dad is Desmond, Sr. The Original Desmond.”

  “Obviously.”

  Moody scowled, turning his head to glare playfully at Isaac. “Hey.”

  Isaac smiled. It was a very tiny smile, just like his chuckle had been rather small, but it was a smile all the same. “Sorry. Continue.”

  “I just didn’t want to be associated with Dad anymore. Not after what happened.” He pulled in a deep breath. He had never told this story to anyone before, except for Destiny, and that had only been to explain why he was asking to live at the garage permanently. “I told you how my mom was always sick. If it wasn’t the flu, it was a stomach virus. Or pneumonia. Just, always something. And that’s not supposed to happen to us. She kept going back to the doctor, but they could never really fi
gure out what was wrong with her.”

  “They gave her medicine to like, combat the worst symptoms. Stuff to help with the nausea and everything. But it didn’t help very much. Eventually, they started looking deeper. Doing ultrasounds. Taking x-rays.”

  Moody stopped. He hadn’t imagined this could be so difficult. He felt almost like he couldn’t breathe, like a huge weight had settled on his chest and was crushing him. Even his bones ached. His heart seemed to be beating slower, his blood sluggish. Sadness, bringing him to stasis.

  Isaac moved during the pause, leaning over and wrapping his free arm around Moody’s shoulders.

  The warmth of being embraced, being cared for, very nearly did him in. Tears rose up to his eyes, unbidden, unwanted. He sniffed them back, rubbed his own free hand against his sore eyes before letting it drop back at his side.

  “She had cancer. I guess it started out as breast cancer. Then it spread to her bones. They tried, but they couldn’t control it. She died two months after they diagnosed her.”

  A wolf’s body could handle a great deal of trauma, but cancer was out of the realm of anyone’s natural ability. The body couldn’t heal itself, not when its own preventative measures had gone haywire. Moody’s mother’s body had been so busy destroying itself that there was nothing left to defend against common maladies. Of course, that only weakened her further.

  “Goddamn,” Isaac whispered. His arm tightened around Moody’s shoulders, clutching him even closer. Moody let it happen, needing just this once to know he wasn’t alone. “And you were dealing with all that, alone. And your dad?”

  “He always wanted stuff from me that I couldn’t give. He wanted me to be tough. To learn how to do useful things. Said poetry didn’t put food on the table. Riding a motorcycle meant I was going to wind up a homeless hooligan. He told me stuff like that all the time. I think…” He often had this particular thought, usually while falling asleep at night, though he’d never dared give voice to it before. It was the one thing he hadn’t ever even written about, because what did he know? He was no parent. He didn’t know what it was like to raise a child. “I think he thought he was doing what he thought was best.”