Fell Beasts and Fair

by C. J. Brightley

  "Nu…" Wil began again, half to him. Half to Varza. "I don't… În vestiar?"

  "The locker room?" Jack confirmed. "At your school?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay. Thank you, Wil. I need to talk to Varza."

  Easy, achievable action. That's what Tannis had said. Give him reachable goals, something to occupy his mind.

  Varza came back on the line wordlessly.

  "Mundane or Gifted," Jack said. "Can you see anything?"

  Varza was silent and Jack gave him time to walk through the locker room in Wil's school while he tamped down the urge to blow through the next three red lights he came up on.

  Varza spoke then, but it wasn't to him. "Wil, go into my closet and find a coat. There's boots in there that should fit you."

  Jack tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He listened to the sound of Wil moving away.

  "Mundane," Varza said, voice pitched very low. "There's no trace of Faen energy besides Wil’s. But there is significant damage to the locker room. And Wil is injured."

  Jack had to remember he was driving. Varza continued, anticipating him.

  "Bruises. Abrasions. Nothing serious."

  "Meet me there in ten minutes," Jack said through clenched teeth.

  The line went dead.

  Varza was glad to be able to confirm that whatever had happened in the locker room was mundane. If it had been Gifted the protocol would have changed drastically, their timeline moved up. But Wil had been injured, and the locker room… He helped Wil into a hooded sweatshirt with a zipper down the front. Some of the abrasions were starting to mottle with bruises. Dried blood flaked off his pale shoulders when he shrugged into the offered clothing. One stripe across Wil's pale collarbone was weeping a clear fluid, the skin torn in places. It would need a bandage.

  Wil stepped into the boots and didn't bother lacing them fully before letting Varza help him into a coat. Before they left the office, Varza opened a sterile white package and began kneading a square of clear plastic filled with an electric blue gel in his long, elegant hands. Wil watched him with interest. When the packet began to cool against his palm, Varza stepped closer to Wil. He reached out his free hand, looking for any signs of uncertainty from the boy. Giving him the chance to step back. Then he took Wil's uninjured cheek in his hand, and pressed the ice pack to the other.

  "Hold this here, like that. I'm going to walk in front of you. I go first, just like you practiced with Kade."

  Wil nodded, held the ice pack against his face and waited for Varza to put on his coat. Wil moved with him when he turned and walked to the door. It was an uncanny, liquid motion, as though he could anticipate movement before it became decisive action.

  In the glass window over the door, Varza caught a glimpse of Wil, hovering over his shoulder, ice pack pressed to his face. Hair in his eyes. One hand on the door latch, Varza pulled an elastic from his wrist with his teeth, and handed it back to Wil. Then he pulled the deadbolt free, checked his watch, and they were gone.

  * * *

  Jack had circled the building twice, avoiding the security cameras. The only thing he had found out of the ordinary was the disturbed gravel outside one of the double-doors that lead into the basketball court. As if someone had fallen, and scrambled to get back to their feet in a hurry.

  It didn't take Jack long to lose patience after that. He was now the only one who didn't have any idea of what they would find on the other side of those doors. It was driving him mad. His only comfort was that if it were The Order, or one of his own personal enemies, Varza would have known.

  It couldn't have been the Faen traffickers who had taken Wil and sold him to the necromongers in the first place. Jack had seen to that. Personally.

  But mundane didn't mean harmless, just potentially more manageable. Possibly not as serious as it could be. If Wil had transformed in front of someone, killed someone…

  He pressed his fingers into his eyes. The color had been orange. No casualties.

  When he saw Wil, he thought he would be furious. He had braced himself, reminded himself that this was the first time something like this had ever happened. Wil had remembered what to do in maddening fragments, but he'd remembered. This wasn't the place for his anger, even anger fueled by worry. He was surprised to find that when Varza walked Wil across the football field to meet him, Jack only had one thing on his mind.

  As soon as Wil was within arm’s reach, Jack pulled him into a hug. The kid huffed in surprise, before he closed his long arms around Jack's shoulders.

  "I'm sorry, Rook," Wil said, muffled by the fabric of Jack's shirt. "It's all ruined."

  "It's okay," Jack said, glancing at Varza. The blonde vampire shook his head. Wil still hadn't actually said what happened. "We'll fix it, kiddo. I'm just glad you're safe."

  It was Varza, bless him, who kept the conversation moving. Jack suddenly just wanted to take Wil home. But they had a job to do.

  "Tell us what happened, Wil."

  The redhead stepped back from Jack, scrubbed at his face with the heels of his hands. Jack didn't miss the cuts and white scrapes there. He glanced back in the direction of the basketball court, then again to Wil.

  He marked the set of Wil's jaw, the stiffness there, the way he ran his hands through his hair to rub at the shell of his ear. His right cheek was bruised. Knuckles raw and starting to purple. A few of his fingernails were cracked.

  Jack made himself wait. Counted the seconds. Willed himself not to push. Wil put his hands in his jacket pockets, squared his shoulders and began to speak.

  * * *

  Practice had ended late that afternoon, and Wil had been agitated on the field. They weren't allowed to have their phones on them during practice and on a normal day that made him nervous. His phone was his safety net. But he was supposed to meet Maggie at The Wellspring, and he would be upset with himself if Jack showed up early and he wasn't where he said he would be.

  He'd gotten off the field first, barely hearing his coach announce that he would be leaving early, and to lock up the equipment before they left. He was in the middle of typing a text to Rook, already planning the one he would write to Maggie in his head, when two of his teammates crowded him from behind.

  "Hey, Scarlet, the team is going to Cassidy's place tonight. His parents are out of town. You coming?"

  "Sorry," Wil said, taking a step back as though he were planning to close his locker door, forcing the other boys off his shoulders. "I can't."

  He heard Kade in his head: If you're in too close, create space. There's a radius for everything. Calculate the length of your opponent’s arms. Their legs. Outside of those distances, they can do whatever they want, but they'll never touch you.

  "Don't have daddy's permission?"

  Wil ignored the question. He was still unsure of the reasoning behind making true statements in a nasty tone, as if he should be ashamed that he listened to Rook. The two boys stepped back.

  They were still too close, by combat standards. Inside the threat radius for a solid kick to the small of his back or the soft side of his knee. But Wil was mostly satisfied. He didn't bother turning to see which one of his teammates it was. He didn't know them all by name yet. Numbers were easier, and everyone seemed to have a nickname—or most of them did, like when Rook called him Marigold. He was still working out the details. But he did know these two by name. Rickey, the team captain, and Seager, his best friend, one of the cornerbacks.

  "It's team building, Scarlet, you have to come," Rickey said.

  In fact, Wil didn't have to do anything. He'd had enough of that for a lifetime. The words alone got his hackles up.

  "I can't tonight," Wil muttered. He wasn't good at typing and talking at the same time. "Sorry."

  He'd barely finished his message, about to press send, when Seager reached around him and tried to pluck the phone from his hand.

  "Calling daddy already?" He snorted, too close. "Couldn't wait?"

  Wil's hand shot out, his fingers clo
sing around the other boy's wrist easily, and the next steps were in his head; hours and days and months that bled into two years of the same motions happened in a matter of seconds before he ever realized he was doing it.

  Wil pulled Seager forward, jamming his arm up to the elbow into his open locker. Stepping back, he calmly kicked the door closed on Seager’s arm.

  The metal door bounced with a solid crack on Seager's bent elbow and his teammate yelped at the pain of it. At the last second Wil had pulled the strength of his kick, and he knew that the most Seager would suffer was a painful bruise. But he had done something far worse, something he understood from a time before Rook, an instinct that made the hair on the back of his neck stand in end. He had presented a challenge for dominance. He had two choices now. He could grovel and spend his life exposing his belly for these other boys. Or he could fight.

  The odds were not in his favor. Rickey owned this team. They had only known Wil for a matter of weeks, and none of them particularly liked him. He didn't speak much to them. Went straight home after practice. They knew he had no siblings, that he was the child of a single parent home and that he much preferred to eat lunch with Maggie than with them.

  They thought he was slow because he was still learning the nuances of speaking English, of the social order among vanilla mortals. But he'd had them pegged the moment he'd tried out for the team. They operated like a pack, but Wil had been in a real pack once. The kind with teeth and claws—and he wasn't afraid of these boys.

  The problem was, there were 58 members on the team roster, and most of them were in this room with him.

  "What is wrong with you?" Seager shouted, pulling his arm free of the locker. He rubbed at his elbow, and Wil was momentarily relieved that his assessment of the kick was correct—no permanent damage. He knew from experience that sometimes he underestimated his own strength. He was still working on that.

  He opened his mouth to apologize, hearing Tannis in his head this time: giving ground is not always a retreat. And he was sorry. None of these boys knew what had been done to him, none of them would ever understand that his reactions were a product of nightmares and the slow patience of Rook, guiding him back to a place of control. Over himself, his own body. His circumstances.

  He didn't know exactly what he would say to explain to them why he had done what he'd done. But he was willing to try. The slap caught him off guard.

  Wil registered the movement a second too late. Focused almost entirely on Seager, he hadn't seen Rickey move. The blow took him full across his right cheek, whipping his head to the side. He was too close to the sitting bench in front of the stand of lockers, and when he widened his stance to keep himself upright, his shin hit the bench with an audible crack. He stumbled, his hip thudding painfully off the metal surface of it, and he tumbled over the other side onto the floor. His phone skittered across the cement.

  They were on top of him after that.

  It seemed like all of them, but his rational mind was still calculating and he knew that for the space available it was probably six at most. When someone produced a roll of duct tape, it occurred to Wil that they had planned for this, and he had simply provided the opening.

  Rickey slapped him again, one of his cleats grinding into his sternum, and Wil couldn't help the muted cry he pressed to the inside of his teeth. Wildly, he remembered Kade’s explanation: pressing down on the sternum is exceptionally painful, but relatively harmless unless too much force is applied. And it really was. He gasped out a breath when Rickey stepped off him, but it was only to let the others get to work.

  Someone pulled one of his arms underneath the bench, his other was dragged over it. They duct taped his wrists together so that he was hugging the bench, several boys sitting or standing on his right hip and both his legs. They were overzealous with the tape, and wound it in messy crisscross patterns around the bench and his forearms up to the elbow before tearing the length off the roll. Wil could already feel his fingers going numb. He scrambled as best he could, trying to get his legs out from underneath the crushing weight of the boys, but it wasn't any good. There were too many bodies, and a white-hot pain in his elbow froze him up for a second. Seager pulled back to kick him again, but Rickey stopped him. Wil stared at his bound arms. For a second, everyone was still. And then Rickey picked Wil's phone off the floor.

  "We were just trying to do you a favor," Rickey said, tapping the phone against his thigh.

  For a second, Wil thought he misunderstood the definition of the word.

  "Favor?" He blurted. "An act of kindness?"

  "Are you stupid?" Rickey snapped back. "That's what I said."

  Wil stared hard at his team captain. He was pretty sure he understood kindness as a word, but language was entirely contextual. He might be thinking of a different word.

  Rickey was still tapping his phone lightly, an unbroken chain of rhythms.

  "We wanted you to loosen up, be a part of the team."

  "Guess your texts to daddy were more important," Seager cut in. Some of the boys jeered.

  Wil gave it some more thought. Came to a conclusion.

  "I don't think the word ‘favor’ means what you think it means," he said, his voice trembling only a little.

  Rickey's face darkened. The tapping had stopped. And Wil watched him lob his cell carelessly into the shower room, where the water was still running. Heard it shatter when it hit the tile. Wil looked on wordlessly as the roll of industrial duct tape was passed around to each team member. Not all of them accepted it. But the ones who did tore pieces of varying length off it before handing it to someone else. The ones who didn't quietly gathered their things, and left. And on, and on.

  Wil had stopped hearing them when the phone was destroyed in the shower. His whole world narrowed to a point, greying around the edges. He was dimly aware of the shouted obscenities, the taunts and someone aggressively ruffling his hair, making it hurt.

  He was back in a too small cage of first-forged iron, hands crushing his chin inside sweaty palms, leaving fingerprints on his jaw, checking his teeth and the color of his eyes and the stock of his muscles.

  The first searing tear of the duct tape being pressed against his back and ripped suddenly free, snapped him out of the memories. He was grateful. It was important that he didn’t change in front of these boys. It was important for him to stay in control. Rook believed he could do it. He held onto that, pressed his lips together and just held on, because it couldn’t last. None of these boys knew what real pain was; they would get tired or bored if he did nothing, said nothing. It was just duct tape. Only words.

  They kept doing it, one for each of them, gently smoothing the creases out of the grey material before ripping it off. They cheered the first time they drew blood. Wil could feel his skin growing hot, and he drew his shoulders in close to his chest even though he knew it wouldn't help. He tried to think of Rook, who gave him a name that meant something to both of them, who stayed up with him with the lights on in the kitchen when he couldn’t sleep, who didn’t get angry when he broke half the dishes in the house because he needed to hear something breaking to get the screaming out of his head. Rook thought he could do it. He wasn’t going to change in front of these boys. Someone pulled his head back by his hair and pressed a strip of duct tape to his collar bone, patting him hard on the cheek several times before tearing it free.

  It startled a scream from him. The skin was thin there, and tore free in places, and Wil Scarlet lost his mind.

  It was his own scream that brought him back to that place. It was always the screaming. The too many hands touching his skin reminding him of the man who eventually took him, cage and all, from the dark, oil lamp-lit labyrinth of the underground market. The dolls’ black eyes in the pitted, hollow sockets, and the scarecrow grin that split wide at the seams when he'd put a collar on Wil and told him what a good dog he was going to be.

  Rook told him he would never go back to that place. He promised.

  He t
hrashed wildly, felt the familiar tightening of his skin and the bunching of muscle. They laughed until he got one of his legs free. He didn't know whom he struck, or where, only that he was certain this time he had broken something. He kept his head down, because his eyes were always the first to change, and he was half way there, just barely hanging on to his shape in his mind. He strained wildly against the bench and the duct tape, felt the bolts in the concrete beginning to pop free. He rocked it, hysterical, the aluminum bending under the flexed muscle of his bound arms. They were beginning to back off now, not because of the injuries a handful of them had sustained—some serious, some glancing, now that he had his legs free. They scattered because he was still screaming and the bench was coming free of the floor, and he didn't care what they saw. He just wanted to go home.

  They were gone when he started kicking savagely at one of the bench legs until the metal caved under his heel. The room was empty, only the sound of water running, and why couldn't he stop screaming? His chest felt tight and his cheeks were wet and he could taste blood in the air. His blood.

  He got his feet under him in a flat-footed crouch and ripped the bench free of the concrete, sending spider web cracks across the floor. The sudden release of tension sent him backwards into another row of lockers, his body meeting the hollow metal with a sound that detonated like a thunderclap. He pressed his feet into the bench on either side of his bound arms, and pushed against the flat silver surface even as he thrashed and pulled, finally, finally tearing his arms free from the surface of the bench.

  His panic mounted when he realized that he couldn't separate his wrists. He had no leverage with the mangled bench between his arms, and his screams turned into hoarse sobs as he continued twisting and pulling against that tape. But he was stuck, it was too much, and he just wanted to go home.

  He flinched violently when one of the boys from his team stepped gingerly out of the shower room, the hems of his jeans wet from the water and his bare feet leaving dark grey tracks on the floor. He approached Wil with his hands up, like Wil had a gun on him.