by Juniper Hart
“He seems okay,” Reuben replied. “He’s breathing. I think he’s just unconscious.”
They sat in the steaming hot car for a second. The right door randomly snapped off and clattered to the floor. Adrianna sat in the backseat, holding her gun and wincing from where they had shot her with the electrical bullets. Cara just sat on Eddy’s lap, hands still tightly gripping the wheel and staring straight ahead at nothing.
Reuben sighed. “Long day,” he muttered. “Long damn day.”
5
Everyone sat still for a moment, trying to come to terms with what had just happened. Reuben was the first one up. He tried to open the back door, but it was jammed. He clenched, turning his muscles into a hard knot of sinew, and ripped the door off. He let it clatter to the ground.
Adrianna got out first, but Reuben looked straight past her to Cara. He helped her out of the destroyed car, searching her body with his warm eyes. He kissed her on the lips passionately before bringing her into a hard hug. It was lovely, but he was trembling from the fear of potentially losing her.
Adrianna grabbed the weapons box and, after a moment of thought, picked out four smaller handguns and handed one to Cara and two to Reuben. Cara clambered out of the driver’s seat and instantly felt sore. She hadn’t thought about it, but her entire body had been clenched the entire drive from stress. To relax was almost painful.
Reuben dug Eddy’s unconscious body out of the car and tossed him over his shoulder.
They stood outside the car’s hulking remains, trying to decide what to do next. Reuben and Adrianna talked about something, debating their options. Cara wasn’t listening. Cara was thinking. Or at least she was trying to. The adrenaline still pumping through her veins was making it hard to concentrate. They’d all nearly died trying to get away from goblins. Surprisingly, Adrianna had helped. Eddy had been unconscious, and based on how Reuben was standing with a dazed expression, he had been close to being knocked out as well. It was by sheer miracle that Cara had managed to drive them to safety.
What would happen when they went to the guy who hired the goblins?
What would happen when they paid Ezekiel a visit?
The very idea made Cara even more nervous, which is all it took to push her over the top. She stumbled off the road and puked her guts out.
“Oh, that’s just disgusting,” Adrianna said. “Hey, quit that! It’s gross!”
Cara didn’t understand why Adrianna was still there. She had the gun. The only reason Reuben was armed was because she’d handed him a weapon. If she’d been smart, she would have realized that she had all the power. Eddy couldn’t stop her from taking them hostage right then and neither could Reuben. But the idea had either not occurred to Adrianna, or it had occurred to her and she had just ignored it. Either way, Cara didn’t care. They were mostly safe. Eddy would probably recover.
Hopefully anyway.
Thus began the latest adventure in trying to escape from the police. They’d done it many times already, after retreating from hotel after hotel. But in that moment, they were not so lucky. They heard sirens about five minutes after they had come to a stop.
“Uh-oh,” Adrianna said aptly. “That is not good.”
They couldn’t see the police yet, but they could hear them coming. Cara wasn’t an expert, but she’d be willing to bet they were a couple miles away and closing in fast. Not too fast though. The dirt road they’d gotten off on would rip the engine out of any car speeding along it that managed to get unlucky and hit a pothole. But they were moving quickly enough and definitely faster than their little gang could run. They could go onto one of the farms, but that wasn’t a good plan. A farmer might shoot them, and the police would eventually find them in the fields. Cara wasn’t sure what they’d do, but she hadn’t expected what they actually did.
Reuben stopped running and put Eddy down.
“Eddy.” He gently slapped Eddy’s face.
Eddy wasn’t quite back yet, but he was starting to get there. His eyes were open and he appeared to be seeing things, but Cara wasn’t sure he was really seeing them.
“Eddy, wake up. You’re not done yet. We need you.”
Eddy slumped forward before Reuben caught him. He moaned and held his head up with a groan. “What happened? Where are we?” His eyes widened. “Are those sirens?”
“Yes, and the rest doesn’t matter. Put up an invisibility shield now.”
“I can’t do that,” Eddy said with a slow blink. “I can barely think.”
“You hear the sirens, don’t you? Looks like you’re going to have to shake it off.”
“I need time!” Eddy replied sharply. “I’m not strong enough yet.”
“How long?” Reuben looked up towards the sirens that were quickly getting louder. “A minute?”
“Five,” Eddy said. “At least.”
Reuben snarled and tossed Eddy over his shoulder. Eddy’s body flopped over like a ragdoll. He hadn’t looked too weak on the ground – just tired. He had only looked weak once Reuben picked him up. He looked like he could take only three or four steps before falling flat on his face.
Their little group jumped a barbed wire fence and went straight into the closest field. It wasn’t like a normal field. It was more like a traditional South Dakota farm—wild and unforgiving. Oak trees twisting all over the place and fields as far as the eye could see. It was mid-winter, so nothing was green or growing, which meant there were less places to hide.
They were still in sight of the road when the police showed up. The police yelled something, but nobody was listening. Cara dashed across the rugged landscape quickly with the men’s tennis shoes that Eddy had been kind enough to give her, though they matched horribly with her jeans. Also, it seemed that running in jeans was just about one of the worst punishments. Well, not really. Not after what she’d been through.
Cara couldn’t keep up with Adrianna or Reuben. Even though Reuben was carrying Eddy, he could still outrun Cara with his werewolf pace. Reuben saw Cara struggling and slowed down to help her along, staying behind her to catch any bullets that might be coming their way.
Adrianna wasn’t a runner, but still, she was faster than Cara. It’s almost as if she bounded, using her powerful leg muscles to spring her along in a way that confused Cara. It seemed like it was breaking physics, but then again, Adrianna appeared to be superhuman in every other way.
Eddy, meanwhile, tried to muster up his strength, snapping loudly with his fingers and trying to make the invisibility spell work. With each snap, a little spark of energy formed in the air.
“I’m not warm yet!” Eddy declared.
“Then maybe you should be running!” Reuben barked.
Reuben wasn’t too amused with the whole scenario. He knew as much as anyone that Eddy couldn’t run right then, but he was fully aware of how hard it was to sprint with a grown man around his shoulders.
Boom!
One of the police shot at them. Reuben howled and stumbled, nearly tossing Eddy off the front before he caught him.
“That fucker shot me!” Cara almost stopped before he waved her on. “No! I’ll be fine! Run!”
Cara did, but Reuben was obviously hurting. Even though the bullets weren’t silver, there was still a bullet lodged in Reuben’s back. He was grunting in pain, limping along with a growl. The police shot again, hitting him in the leg.
Adrianna whipped around with the gun in her hand that she’d grabbed from Eddy’s weapon box. She fired off one shot before Cara pushed the barrel down.
“We aren’t shooting at the police!” Cara yelled.
“Adrianna!” Reuben snarled. “What the hell are you doing?”
Adrianna fired one more shot before following them.
“They’re just a bunch of humies! Eddy, you better be getting warm! I’m not getting shot again!”
The sparks around Eddy’s hands were getting brighter as Reuben stumbled to his feet, limping, but continuing to run. He was practically indestructible. Eve
n though he’d been shot twice, he was strong enough to run with a grown man on his back. Eddy kept working on the spell.
“I’m almost there! Another minute!”
Cara caught a cactus in the foot. She’d seen cacti before in nature shows and the one time she’d traveled down south to visit family, but she didn’t know cacti grew in South Dakota. They looked scary with their pads full of long spikes. She’d heard that the very ends had poison on them. Whether that was true or not, Cara didn’t know. It sounded real enough.
Getting stabbed with one felt like hell. Literal hell.
“Ow!” she yelped, stumbling, and falling. Bad move. She ended up falling towards another cactus. She twisted to avoid catching it full in the face, but ended up landing on it and piercing her back. She felt a hundred jabs all at once. She tried to stumble up, but the pads came with her, locking her clothes to her sensitive back. She shook them free, but the spines stayed in her.
Reuben scooped her up, still limping. The back of his pants was stained with a golden liquid that was running down into his shoe. Cara tried to keep running. Well, hobbling. Her foot was stinging, but not nearly as much as her back. Why was nature so cruel?
She fell again. Her feet were stinging horribly. She tried to get back up, but the adrenaline made her hands not work properly and she couldn’t get up fast enough. Boom! The police shot again and Reuben stiffened with a feral growl. He transformed into his werewolf form for a second, scooping Cara into his powerful arms. Now carrying two people, Reuben used his werewolf strength for as long as he could, sending them flying across the ground and over a hill.
Eddy finally warmed up enough and yelled, “Everyone stop running!”
No sweeter words had ever been uttered.
Reuben shifted out of his werewolf form and set Cara to the ground, dropping to one knee and gritting his teeth. Nothing happened. She could see Reuben with Eddy on his back with Adrianna standing beside them.
“Just don’t move!” Reuben told her through his teeth. “Don’t say a thing!”
She looked back at the police, who had been just a tad behind them over a small ridge. A moment later, their heads broke the ridge. They didn’t hesitate. Four or five of them rushed straight past Cara’s agonized body. She could feel the air as they went by. It looked like they’d run clear into Reuben, so he stepped aside and let them past.
They couldn’t see them.
Eddy’s magic was back.
Reuben gave it a minute or two to let the police run well out of earshot before speaking again. Eddy jumped off his back. His legs were wobbly, but he was starting to get the hang of it.
“Cara, you okay?” Eddy asked.
“I feel—” She tried to think of a word that could paragraph how much pain she was in. “I feel like a million knives are stuck in my body right now.”
Reuben got up to one foot, groaning.
“Ugh...”
He tried to walk it off, but most of his clothes around the broadest part of his back and around his thigh were stuck to his body with blood. Cara hobbled over to him.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, tight-lipped. “I’ll heal. I always do…”
“You saved my life!”
He managed a gentle smile. “I’ll always be here to protect you.”
She gingerly embraced him. He saw the cactus all across her back.
“Are you okay?”
Adrianna interrupted. “You are an unlucky little bitch, aren’t you? How did you even…they’re everywhere. And seriously? Who finds a cactus in South Dakota?”
Adrianna rolled her eyes, seemingly seething at the stupidity of the human.
Cara was in entirely too much pain to be even remotely bothered by the statement. She could feel the spines sticking through the front of her tennis shoe into her foot. She reached down and pulled the shoe off only to find it was attached to her foot. Okay. Like a band-aid. Quick. She jerked it off and just barely held in a scream. She felt like she ended up biting through her lip.
Eddy, who was still looking woozy, grimaced. “Oh, that’s going to hurt.”
“It does,” she whimpered. “Trust me, it does.”
Adrianna, the most spry of the group right then, started back towards the police cars a couple hundred meters away.
“Hey, they don’t need these things anymore. I think I might help myself.”
“We’re not stealing the police cars,” Reuben said. “We need to hole up and heal. They can’t find us until the spell wears off anyway. But nobody’s stopping you from leaving.”
Adrianna paused. “You’re not going to time freeze me?”
“Eddy’s nowhere near strong enough to do that right now, and I’ve got more important matters to deal with. You’re free to go.”
“You know I’ll come back,” Adrianna warned. “You’re being an idiot.”
Reuben held Cara up. She was balanced on his powerful body. He stared the assassin down.
“Here’s the deal. You leave. You come back? We kill you.”
“Or I get the bounty.”
“We kill you.”
Reuben’s voice was hard. He had shifted away from his kind normal demeanor to what Cara assumed was his deadly, mercenary personality. It terrified her.
Reuben reiterated, “You come back for us and I’ll kill you myself. You come with us to fight Ezekiel and you get a fourth of his treasury.”
Her eyebrows shot way up. “I’m listening.”
“If we bring Ezekiel down, it’s going to need to be at his citadel. You said he was in Minneapolis? He’ll know we’re coming. You and I both know he’ll drop back to his nearest fortress and wait for us to show up. When we kill him, you’ll have a dozen times as much as the bounty. A fourth of whatever he’s got in his account.”
She mulled it around. “We can’t open his account with him dead.”
“Cara can get us in.”
Cara was mostly focused on the agonizing pain, but she caught her name.
“What? I can’t do that.”
“You broke into the Enchanted Society’s codes and released the spell on me. You can handle a clan’s bank account. They barely have any barriers on it.” He laughed. “They figure nobody’s stupid enough to even attack them, much less try to steal from them.”
Adrianna’s mind was going a hundred miles an hour. Cara could practically see her gears whirring inside her head. Finally, she gave a striking smile.
“Sounds like a great plan. Good to work with you again. Getting the old team back together!”
“Don’t misunderstand me. You stabbed Cara. I don’t trust you, and I will not hesitate to defend against you if you turn on us.”
She smirked and held up her hands. “Easy, big fella. I like this deal. I’m sticking with you unless Ezekiel makes the bounty sweeter.”
Reuben did not look like he was smiling.
6
Reuben wasn’t paying Adrianna any mind. He was focused on Cara. She sat down on a clear spot and pulled the little thorns out of her foot. With each movement, she could feel a dozen of them in her back. She wanted to start working on those, but she was terrified to look. Reuben walked behind her and inhaled sharply.
“Boy, you, uh, you’re full of thorns. Do you want me to pull them out?”
Cara was still confused by the whole concept of them sitting out there on some guy’s farm with the police still looking for them. She could hear them shouting from far away, but they weren’t close enough, and apparently, they were invisible. As strange as it was, sitting in the open was just as safe as hiding somewhere. Reuben had asked her if she wanted him to pick the spines out, which didn’t make her excited, but she hesitantly nodded. She couldn’t think of another way.
“That would be great.”
“I’m going to need to take your shirt off.”
“I think you mean my shirt,” Eddy said. “And I’ll be darned if it isn’t quite probably my favorite one.”
“Look away,” Cara said. “Please, bot
h of you.”
“I’m gay and she’s straight,” Eddy protested.
“It’s still weird.”
Eddy shrugged and looked away. Adrianna looked like she might have been staring before she finally turned her back. Cara lifted her arms and stopped. She couldn’t pull her t-shirt off because the needles that were stuck to her skin were also stuck through the shirt. So Reuben ripped the front of Cara’s shirt open to slowly pull her shirt off from behind, taking many of the cactus needles with it.
Cara bit down on her lip to stop the scream from escaping. She was in a lot of pain.
“I don’t know how you did this,” Reuben said. “They’re even in your bra.”
“Take it off,” Adrianna suggested from afar.
“Shut up,” Cara said.
It was apparently something she’d say a lot to the assassin. Why was Adrianna so irritating?
Cara bent down and let Reuben work on the remaining needles. Each one he pulled out felt like a knife being jabbed into her back. A tiny knife, but still a knife nevertheless. She tried to stay still, but it took forever.
Adrianna and Eddy started chatting it up and Adrianna actually went to sit by him. They’d managed to catch up on their pasts, what had been going on with them recently, and basically everything else by the time Cara’s back was clear.
The police came by a few minutes later, getting back into their cars and driving away, presumably to the farmhouse to warn the owner about the dangerous killers on their property.
Meanwhile, Cara stared at the ground.
“Did you say those guys that chased us were goblins?”
Reuben rubbed her back after taking the last needle out and took off his hoodie so Cara could cover up.
“Yes. Goblins. Nasty little creatures. Violent like you wouldn’t believe.”
“The whole tank thing kind of gave me that impression. But they’re not working with what’s-his-name?”
“Widowmaker?” Reuben guessed.
“Yeah.”
“They work for him. They’re usually designed to probe out the defenses of whomever he’s coming to kill, and then he shows up and finishes the job. He’s trailing us. There’s no doubt about it.”