by Hunter Blain
“Wardens? Wait!” I called after him while holding a hand up.
“How did he find us so quickly?” Joey asked, bringing up a damn good question.
“I don’t know,” I drawled as I scrunched up one side of my face and jogged to where Collin had vanished from sight.
As I crossed the edge of the building, I was met with a sight that surprised even me: nothing. There was nothing down the street except a few parked cars. A cold breeze tickled my skin before the warm air returned.
“What the hell…” I mouthed as I sent out my senses in search of Collin, who had just been here not five seconds ago. My preternatural eyes shifted from the purple of sunset to a dark crimson and saw through cars and even just past the first layer of the buildings. Ears sought the familiar sound of footfalls on pavement or the humming of a nearby engine. Only flaring nostrils offered a trail that I followed, which disappeared into a brick wall. I placed searching hands on the cool, coarse brick and let them roam, searching for a hidden passage. There was none.
Joey came up beside me, noticed my confusion and crimson eyes, and began sniffing the air as he caught on. He walked in a ten-foot circle, only to arrive precisely at the spot I was standing.
“What the hell,” he said.
“I know, right? That’s what I said. Dude just up and freaking vanished.”
“That’s not unsettling at all.”
“My sentiments exactly. Maybeeee,” I said with a long, high pitch, “it’s best to stay on his good side.”
“Sounds reasonable to me. Plus, I kinda like him.”
“Ditto. What a charming, mysterious fella.” I thought for a moment. “I wonder what he meant about the wardens?”
“I mean, seems pretty straightforward there, dude. They are looking for you.”
“That’s—how can I put this in words you’ll understand—that’s not good, Joseph. Warden’s equal bad for supes,” I said slowly and loudly as if he were hearing impaired, though I imagine that was annoying to people who were actually deaf.
“Dude, I know,” he said as he leaned backward to put room between my mouth and his ears. His face was scrunched in irritation.
As my hands touched the brick wall one more time, Joey asked with a soft seriousness, “What did you do for the wardens to come looking?”
“Let’s worry about it later. Time to go save Deppyweg,” I answered while my thoughts raced with his question. A dark feeling in the pit of my guts sprang up like a text message that woke you up from a nap. I took a deep breath as I let my hand fall away from the wall, no longer interested in the government agent’s magic trick.
5
We made our way to a secluded area, did a double check all around to spot for prying eyes as my wings manifested, and shot into the air. The lights of the city shrank as the darkness of the surrounding desert came into view like the water of a surging river spilling over the banks and washing away everything not bolted down.
I looked up and was in awe of the vast ocean of stars that looked like clouds. Entire galaxies floated overhead, completely careless of what happened on the speck of sand we called Earth, sitting on a vast beach with countless other grains all around. It had been so long since I had seen the stars this clearly. It made me ache for the simple times at home, when I had been a mortal living with my parents. At my age, I should have been off with a family of my own, but I had never been good with the fairer sex. Plus, I had enjoyed the company of my mom and dad immensely. Helping them on the farm had given me a sense of pride.
As my eyes bathed in the magnificence of the universe, my heart panged for my mother and father, God rest their souls.
Shaking my head, I cleared my mind and focused on the now.
Every half hour I checked my map and made any needed flight adjustments while soaring just below the sparse cloud cover. I had figured that was the best altitude to keep my were friend breathing and not frozen.
“What do we do when we get there?” Joey said over his shoulder, breaking the silence.
“Well,” I thought about my answer for a moment, “if we get there at the same time, then I guess we have to take out a bunch of army dudes wielding supernatural-killing weapons. I’m not letting Depweg die.”
“And…and if we are too late?”
“Then I’m still going to kill a bunch of army dudes,” I said coldly, unintentionally letting my eyes flash red.
Joey didn’t respond, either because he agreed with the idea of vengeance or knew it was useless to argue when it came to something as monumentally important as my brother.
“What if they kill us?” Joey asked. I caught his true, underlying meaning.
“I won’t let them kill me, dude. Don’t worry.”
“How many people have said those exact same words throughout history?” Joey retorted.
“Welp, considering ‘dude’ hasn’t been around for very long, I’d wager somewhere between one and ten hundred thousand million.”
“I’m serious, man. I want Depweg back as much as you do, but if you die and the universe ends…” He lifted his hands in a gesture I took as, “Need I go on?” The wind plastered his shaggy dark brown hair against his skull as he craned his neck to try and make eye contact. As I looked into his eyes, I was reminded of how much he had aged from the first time we had met. What was worse, I knew the deterioration to be in large part to losing his twin brother rather than a simple act of years passing by, considering weres aged much, much slower than mortals. Hell, Depweg was over a hundred and still looked to be somewhere in his thirties.
I brought myself back to the now and focused on his question about my safety. Sighing, I scrunched up my mouth and nodded before I said, “You’re right. I’ll have to be extremely careful, especially if the military has silver rounds as Collin suggested.”
A slithering snake made of ice from the surface of Pluto crept up my spine, making me shudder. I looked all around, sensing something was off.
“What was that?” Joey asked, feeling my body tremble through the apparatus that connected us together.
“I don’t know, but I sure as hell don’t like it,” I said as my eyes scanned the horizon. When I didn’t see anything, I tilted the front of my wings skyward, and we rose through the cloud cover. I wish we hadn’t.
In the distance, illuminated by the pale full moon, was a roiling black mist that flew at incredible speeds. I judged its size by comparing it to the blotted-out cloud of galaxies as it moved.
“What the…” I breathed as Joey stared in stunned silence.
The mist must have heard us because two red orbs shot in our direction, locking on to where we flew. To my relief, it didn’t change its trajectory, but kept those all-seeing eyes locked on us.
Realization struck like a bolt of lightning across a pitch-black sky, bathing my entire being in a new dread.
“It’s after Depweg!” I cried out as I furled my wings and became an arrow that pierced through the cloud cover again. After we picked up enough speed, I unfolded my wings and began flapping with renewed vigor. “Hold on!” I yelled through my teeth as I focused on picking up as much speed as possible.
Joey’s hands latched onto his straps in an attempt to secure himself tighter.
I flapped with a ferocity that only a race to the death could bring, determined to get to my best friend first.
An eruption of hellfire on the desert ground in front of us stole my attention and focus as a doorway rumbled into existence from the sand. The familiar door opened, and out stepped a man clad in red-and-black armor that reminded me of Locke’s battle robes.
In his hands was a glowing wand, which he pointed directly at us.
“Oh fuck!” I cried out as I tucked one wing in and rolled toward the ground in an evasive maneuver. A lance of hellfire rocketed out and enveloped my extended wing, incinerating it in an instant as if it were made of tissue paper.
I shrieked in pain as my body went limp from the loss of energy, the desert floor rushing to catch
us.
As we fell, I focused on regaining my senses, like shaking a limb that had fallen asleep, coming to just feet above the eager ground covered in sharp rocks, coarse sand, and even a cactus or twenty.
I wrapped us in my remaining wing and focused on making it as rigid as I could, given the constraints I was under. We smashed into the ground and began tumbling like a spherical rock down a steep hill.
I grabbed the packed earth, digging my fingers in deep until we slowed and then stopped. A trio of forty-foot-long mounds of dirt and sand marked where my hands had dug deep, pushing the earth up. I pulled my wrists from the ground and quickly shook the debris away. Grit had turned the tips of my fingers a dark brown and packed itself deep into my nail beds.
Joey was already out of the restraints and stripping off his clothing by the time I got to my feet. Though I knew it shouldn’t be a priority, my eyes scanned over my custom trench coat Da had made for me. It was completely unharmed.
“Neat!” I exclaimed right as a skull made of hellfire rammed into my chest and exploded like a water balloon, covering me completely in hungry flames.
I screamed through gritted teeth, my eyes squeezed shut out of reflex, when a humming reverberated on my collarbones and in my ears. I barely opened one eye and looked down with a, “Huh?” as I saw the silver crosses glowing white-hot on my coat. They were sucking in the hellfire like water down twin drains.
“Thank you, Papa T!” I whispered as the last of the flames were sucked into the pendants. A feeling of raw power coursed through my veins, violent in its sudden surge. I clenched my fists and screamed into the air as hellfire enveloped my body in an aura of green and red. I was untouched by the flames, as if I were burning off excess energy that my body didn’t know how to store properly. I’d have to seriously contemplate the implications later. Now was the time to find out who the hell—
Another skull flew at me, bigger than the first, and I dodged out of the way like Neo at a limbo contest.
There was a massive explosion behind me that billowed my coat flaps and the black hair spilling from my gray beanie. As I righted myself, my eyes glowed a fierce red as I bared my fangs in indignant rage while my gaze locked onto my attacker. He was chanting, hands outstretched to the sky as a swirling mass of ebony clouds spilled forth a rain of flaming asteroids.
Joey had just finished shifting to his were-suit, so I grabbed him by the scruff and darted with preternatural speed at the warlock.
He saw us coming—which wasn’t possible for a mortal, no matter how strong they were—and slammed his hands from above his head to the ground in front of him. A shock wave shot out, growing in volume and intensity like a tidal wave cresting the shoreline. Just behind the opaque force, the earth itself began to rise and tumble toward us.
“Oh, shit…” was all I could get out as first the shock wave itself smashed into and disoriented both Joey and myself, followed closely by the tonnage of dirt and rocks. I wrapped Joey in my arms and turned my back to the oncoming wave just as a massive boulder fractured both itself and my vertebrae on impact.
Air whooshed out of me as Tweety birds swam in my vision, proclaiming that they thought they saw a pussycat, only to confirm that they did, they did see a pussycat.
The earth swallowed us whole and I did my best to create a pocket of air within my coat for Joey to breathe in.
After what felt like minutes of tumbling and being struck at by rogue rocks, the momentum subsided and we came to an eventual stop, Joey whimpering softly as I held him against my chest.
“It’s okay, buddy. We’re okay…right?”
Joey responded with a whine that let me know he was probably not okay.
My hands ran down his length, feeling from tip to tail and then down his four legs. Only problem was, there were only three. One had been ripped off and was gushing precious blood into the dirt, creating mud with its volume.
I grabbed the end of the stump, much to Joey’s dismay, and willed my blood to cover his wound, staunching the flow of blood. I kept my hand there and whispered in Joey’s ear, “Shh. He’s coming.”
Joey growled in warning, and I put my free hand around his muzzle and repeated my whisper, “Shhhh.”
There were footfalls above us, hard boots on the disturbed dirt. I could feel an ethereal hand washing over us, searching. It paused on us for a second, and I instinctively pulled Joey closer to my chest and the protection of my crucifixes. The hand continued on in search of the bodies.
There were more footsteps that I could tell were beyond where our hidden tomb was, and I let go of Joey’s muzzle and sighed ever so gently in relief.
“John Cook! Come out and face your fate,” a strong voice demanded with a thick German accent. “My master, Samael, demands your subjugation and your submission to his will.”
“Shit,” I whispered, both to myself and to Joey, “he isn’t going to leave without our bodies.”
I focused on the hand holding Joey’s nub and willed my blood to flow and form a matching appendage to his other three. Joey struggled slightly, feeling what must be the oddest of sensations as his limb grew back, before understanding dawned in his mind.
As my blood energy was transferred into his new flesh, I instantly became hungry. The equivalent of a growling stomach echoed from somewhere inside me. I ignored it, promising myself I’d get some fast food after this. Maybe there would be a few cartel members left for me to snack on.
“You go in from behind. He seems fixated on me and me alone.”
Joey chuffed once in agreement as I finished sucking my blood back into my palm. I grabbed Mjolnir, which manifested at my command, and placed it against the packed earth in the direction I thought the voice was coming from. Closing my eyes, I focused on the elemental power of wind and formed a raging bubble of air between the hammer and the dirt. Joey began to squirm while opening and closing his mouth before I realized I had condensed all the air in our dirt coffin into the attack.
“A few more seconds,” I tried to say, realizing that there was no air to carry my words as more seeped in from the dirt, causing the ground to vibrate. I could feel my vocal cords engaging, but nothing traveled to my ears.
My predatory eyes focused through the dirt to latch onto a hazy, crimson image. The footsteps above stopped, as if sensing my lock on him, and I sent the collected air out in a focused beam toward the man’s center mass. An explosion of dirt and debris rocketed outward from where my hammer was, flinging the screaming man backward eighty or ninety feet.
I dropped the attack and air whooshed into the vacuum I had created with an earsplitting pop. Joey sucked in precious oxygen in heaving gasps as I pushed him to the side and got to my feet, keeping Mjolnir at the ready. A section the size of a car had been blown outward, creating a generous doorway to the outside world.
I stomped forward, dirt and dust falling away from me in a billowing cloud that flowed to the ground like a fog. I focused on my weapon and began to summon lightning from the obsidian clouds that roiled above, now under my command.
“Tell your master,” I bellowed at the man, who was struggling to get to his feet, “to Suck. My. Di—”
An eruption of hellfire beneath my feet sent me cartwheeling into the air, making me lose focus on my attack and dissipating all the pent-up electricity in random arcs. Lightning tore into the ground, creating little craters a foot deep in all directions.
One struck the warlock, whose hands had been once again outstretched to the sky, and knocked him to the dirt as if he had been hit dead-on with a truck that had been dropped from the sky.
The geyser of hellfire stopped as the warlock’s concentration fell, and I tumbled to the desert floor, gasping. We both lay on the ground, sucking in lungfuls of air like stranded fish on the shore. I lifted my head to see my attacker staring back at me with hate-filled eyes. He had a thick goatee and neatly cropped hair that looked like it belonged on a banker.
I got to my feet first and sprinted toward the recovering
warlock, who raised a hand in my direction as he stood up. A lance of purple energy shot out that I caught with Mjolnir, which began to glow with the stolen power.
“Whoa,” I marveled as I aimed the gathered energy and shot it back at the warlock.
The man clad in battle robes did something then that made my eyebrows climb to hide underneath the safety of my dirt-covered beanie: he placed his palms together and separated them, leaving behind a staff with a spearhead attached to the tip. I couldn’t explain why, but I knew that spearhead was of significant importance and wasn’t to be fucked with.
The arcing energy slammed into the spear tip, which glowed an ominous crimson, and the warlock cried out as the attack was once again redirected. This time, however, it was amplified, and I grew unsure if Mjolnir would be able to stop what was coming my way. The air around the energy became dark like a room with a dimming light bulb as the purple changed to a terrifying red with a screaming skull at the center.
I set my jaw, willed a cone of electrical energy to form in front of my hammer, and took the attack head-on.
Look, I’ve been known to make a few mistakes in my unlife; I remember putting my cell phone in the microwave because I saw a video that said it could charge it faster. It did not.
There was that one time I was vacuuming my Fortress of Solitaire and was trying to reach a particularly hefty cobweb on the ceiling with the extended tube, only to realize, after enough time as to be labeled hilariously embarrassing, that the tube was not connected to the vacuum itself—I was just holding a disconnected tube waving it in front of the unmoving web as the spider stuck its tongue out, taunting.
Lastly, I can recall getting stuck at a red light for several songs streaming from my phone before I realized it was a stop sign. So I have a history of, let’s say, questionable decision-making or absentmindedness. This was no exception.