by Debra Dunbar
Where the heck did this rift lead to? The danger of monsters in downtown Juneau didn’t escape me, but I held back judgement on these guys. For all I knew they were just as confused as I was, and might not be violent. Well, at least not violent to anything but jewelry cabinets.
“Hey, it’s all good.” I put my hands up in what I hoped was the universal sign of peaceable intent. “I know this is as weird for you as it us for us.”
The stick swept my way, and pain seared through my chest. The next shot skimmed the broken counter top, carving a black groove in the surface before boring a hole in the wall behind me.
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were full of blood, my heart stuttering. It hurt, but luckily the brief pain was the only thing I’d suffer. Placing my hands on my chest, I focused. A white light burst from my fingertips and my lungs filled with air, my heart rhythm stabilizing. Now if I could just get this pole out of my shoulder, I’d heal that too.
Another shot ricocheted off the cash register inches from my hip. I decided the pole in my shoulder was the least of my worries right now and scooted behind what had once been the door to the back room. The guys-in-rags continued to shoot at me, but I managed to make it behind the broken metal door without further injury.
Once there I realized my dilemma. Keeping their focus on me meant that hopefully they wouldn’t be shooting at the humans in the street, but I couldn’t keep taking and healing damage. I needed a distraction so I could get the weapons from these guys and take them down.
What I really needed was an angel. Where was Raphael? Why couldn’t there be a romantic psychic link between us that would let him know I was in danger of having my head blown off? For all I knew the guy was on my couch watching CSI reruns, or perusing my collection of VHS tapes.
“Brent? Ahia?” The shouts were from a voice I recognized. I heard the sound of shots fired directly after, the ping noise of them bouncing off something metal, and a hurried curse.
I didn’t have an angel, but I had the next best thing. A werewolf.
Chapter 21
“Zeph!” I shouted, yanking the pole from my shoulder and popping my head above my shelter to see the werewolf by the ruins of the front wall. He had a car hood in one hand and was using it as shield to deflect the shots. He was still in human form since most werewolves took ten to twenty minutes to change form. It was definitely a genetic drawback.
The raggedy guys turned their sticks back to me. Just before I ducked back down for cover I saw Zeph launch the car hood like a giant Frisbee at them. There was an ear-piercing shriek, then the rapid-fire sound of shots. I crawled to the other edge of the door and peeked out to see one down, the edge of the car hood impaling him against a shelving unit and nearly severing him in half. The other guy was clearly panicking, alternating his aim between me and Zeph.
One shot took the top off a clothing rack and clipped Zeph’s shoulder, spinning him around. I couldn’t wait any longer to act, so I jumped on top of the counter and launched myself at the monster, plowing into his back and knocking him to the ground. The guy emitted series of growls and those weird clicking noises. Now that I had my hand on this guy, he was done for. I’d killed boobie-birds and a hydra today. This guy wasn’t going to get the best of me. He was going down, but first, I needed to take care of his weapon.
I might be reckless, but even I knew better than to break a stick that somehow shot lasers out of the end. So I broke the raggedy guy’s arm instead. That’s when I got my next shock of the day. What I’d thought were worn and dirty bits of clothing were actually part of his body. Instead of soft flesh and a bone core, the arm had floppy rag-scales that were like boiled leather covering a brittle skin. Under that was gooey flesh and light gray liquid that I was going to call blood.
I had no idea how to use the laser-stick, so I tossed it and the amputated arm across the store, giving a quick prayer that the weapon wouldn’t go off when it hit the floor. That’s when something needle-sharp stabbed into my neck. I couldn’t move. Icy cold poured through my veins, locking muscles and misfiring neurons. I gasped, but as quickly as I could repair my body, the toxic liquid attacked again.
This sucked. This really sucked. If raggedy-guy got the best of me and Zeph had to swoop in for the save, I’d never hear the end of it. Zeph rescues Ahia from a monster. There was no way that I was letting that happen, so I gave up my fight against the toxin and did the other thing I was good at, I shot a bolt of lightning into the raggedy-guy.
Dude might be a monster with four arms, a laser stick, and poison teeth or claws or something, but electricity was not his friend. The hardened skin bubbled up under my hands. Dark gray spurted from joints, steaming in the air. The monster shrieked like nails on a chalkboard and bucked underneath me. It gave me the chance to jerk free from the needle-like talon in my neck and repair pretty much every muscle and nerve in my body.
They might be innocent monsters, attacking us out of fear, but all bets were off. My fragile leash on my anger-fueled blood lust had slipped and I was on the fast lane to berserker rage.
Everything became a blur. I grabbed the half-cooked raggedy guy and began slamming him into the floor. Another needle jabbed into my neck, but evidently my souped-up angel adrenaline overcame the toxin this time. I grabbed the creature’s shoulder, and repeated my electricity trick.
“Ahia?”
The blur, the hot white light slid away and I found myself covered in gray ooze and bits of cloth-like flesh, smashing little pulpy chunks of monster into the ground.
“Ahia, I’m pretty sure he’s dead. They’re both dead.”
Yep. And once again I’d shown one of my packmates just how crazy I was. “You wouldn’t happen to have a towel handy, would you?” I asked Zeph.
He handed me a torn sweatshirt from the floor and I stood, trying to wipe the goo off myself as best as I could. Sirens sounded in the distance. Humans stood in the street next to a traffic jam of parked cars, staring at Zeph and me. He had a blackened mark on his shoulder and through it I could see angry red flesh and white of bone. “You okay?” I asked, worried. Werewolves could heal just about anything, but I wasn’t sure how their recovery skills coped with alien-monster lasers.
He grimaced. “No, but I’ll live. Thing almost took my arm off.”
Which would have taken him months, if not the entire year, to regrow. I looked around the demolished store. We had two dead raggedy-guys, a whole lot of debris, and…wait, where was Brent? Where were the shoppers? Were they buried somewhere in the rubble of the store? I looked around, but couldn’t see legs sticking out from under anything. There was no sign of either Brent or the seven humans. I could imagine a werewolf moving fast enough to possibly get clear of the blast, but the humans couldn’t. Where were they? Or at least where was the spray of blood and guts and random body parts?
“Did Brent go outside?” I envisioned him grabbing the humans and rushing them all to safety before the blast went off, but I’d seen him when the blast went off. None of us had any warning. There simply hadn’t been time for even a fast werewolf to clear the area. Besides Brent would never have run from danger. Even if he’d taken the tourists to safety, he would have come back to fight with Zeph and me.
“No.” The look of horror on Zeph’s face was probably mirrored by mine. “Where is Brent?”
I looked to where the glowing rift had been dancing in midair as it expanded and contracted. It was gone. Walking over I reached out a hand to pat the place where it had been and felt nothing. I couldn’t even sense any residual energy to pinpoint its location. It was gone. And so were Brent and the shoppers.
Humans had disappeared through the rifts before. But before it had been clear that the humans had fallen through, like stepping into a crevasse in the ice. Rifts had never exploded like this before. I closed my eyes, remembering the mummified bodies I’d seen when I’d been pulled through one of the rifts by the boobie-birds. Oh, no. Were they dead? They couldn’t be dead. Brent dead. It would destroy the p
ack. It would destroy me.
I’d seen so many humans and werewolves die during the course of my life. Some of old age, but many from illness, injury, violence, and accident. It always hurt, but losing someone had never hurt like this. Brent. He was my friend. He was my Alpha. I wasn’t ready for him to go. I wasn’t ready for him to die.
“Ahia? Where’s Brent?” Zeph’s voice this time had an edge of panic to it.
I looked around the store once more. He’d been too far from the rift to fall in. Maybe it sucked him and the humans in, exchanging them for the two raggedy guys. It was the only explanation that made sense.
“He’s gone.” I tried to hold down my fear, my grief.
“Gone where?”
“I think…” I bit my lip, that grief breaking free and roaring through my mind to grip my heart in a vise. “I think he’s on the other side of the rift, where these monsters came from.”
Zeph sucked in a breath. “Can you get him back? You can see the rifts. You’re more powerful than any of us wolves. You’re more powerful than any Nephilim is supposed to be. Please tell me you can get him back.”
“The rift is gone. Trust me, if it were still there, I’d already be on the other side trying to get to him.”
The werewolf’s eyes filled with tears. “Then what? Can you open a gateway? Or maybe if we sit here and wait, the rift will reopen? I can’t…I can’t just accept that he’s gone. Not Brent.”
I was a crazy angel living with werewolves. I’d always been a freak. And what good was it to be a freak if I couldn’t do freakish things, like find or somehow create a gateway and go through to find my friend, my pack’s Alpha? Five thousand years of hanging out and watching the humans, and werewolves, live and die around me. I’d had enough of death. I’d had enough of loss. I was a fucking angel. It was time for me to do angelic things. It was time for me to pull a miracle out of my ass. Alive or dead, I was going to bring Brent home. And if I had to spend the rest of my insanely long life doing it, I’d find him.
Chapter 22
Brent
I hit the ground with a force that knocked the wind out of me, gritty sand doing little to cushion my fall. Screams and cries told me I wasn’t alone in this bizarre situation. I’d been in the tourist store, arguing with Ahia about what at best would be a heartbreaking affair with an angel, then everything blew apart and I’d found myself falling — falling through a red-orange tunnel then falling from the sky. Spitting the sand from my mouth, I caught my breath and opened my eyes.
And saw a landscape that had nothing to do with a tourist store, or even Alaska. Gone were the jagged mountains, deep blue rivers, thick forests. Heat washed over me in waves, shimmering up from the coarse sand. Scattered away from me were others. Humans. Even with the odd smell of iron and copper in the air, I smelled humans. There were humans in the tourist shop, seven or maybe eight? They must have fallen through with me.
Last year I would have had no idea what had happened. I’d never seen a rift come into being before, but us being on the other side of one was the only reasonable explanation. Either we’d fallen through a rift or I was dead and this was a very unexpected sort of afterlife. If I was dead, I’d just have to go with it. If we were alive, there was a chance for rescue, as long as Ahia was somewhere around here. If that Raphael angel felt anything at all for Ahia, he’d come after her, and he if didn’t, Nisroc would certainly enlist help. Plus with Ahia here, we had a good chance of surviving until help came. An Alpha took all the help he could get. It was the spirit of teamwork that made a pack strong, and there was no one in my pack I’d rather have by my side in a crisis than Ahia.
But was she even here? I didn’t smell her nearby. Had she been thrown outside the range of my heightened senses? Had she somehow been left behind when we had been taken? I refused to think about the chance that she might have been trapped in that rift, or died in the explosion. I refused to think that, especially when the cries I’d heard meant humans were hurt and needed my help.
A woman about twenty feet away stirred, moaning. I tried to stand to go to her and immediately fell back to the ground. Heat burned through my leg, a thousand needles of pain as a torn ligament began to heal. Super-healing was one of the advantages of being a werewolf. It would hurt, but I’d be completely fine within the hour. In the meantime, people needed me so I crawled over to the woman, careful not to twist my healing knee. She looked to be in her late thirties with shoulder-length highlighted hair. Her khaki pants and white T-shirt were torn and she was missing a shoe. As I reached out to touch her shoulder, she turned to face me, her cheeks streaked with blood and tight with pain.
“My boys.”
Her first. “Where are you hurt?”
“My ankle. My head and it hurts to breathe.”
I checked her head. The cut had already clotted and didn’t look too serious, but I was no expert. Werewolves all knew basic medical training. Given our rough and ready lifestyle, even those who healed quickly needed to have wounds bound and sprains wrapped. Concussion. Cracked or bruised ribs. Hopefully the ankle wasn’t broken.
“Which ankle?”
She grimaced, trying to sit up. I helped her, realizing that her ribs must not be bad if she had this much mobility.
“The one with the shoe.” She shook her head. “Figures. I somehow manage to lose one shoe and it’s from the uninjured foot.”
“Can you move it at all? Do you think it’s broken?” I was afraid to take the woman’s hiking boot off, worried that a break would be better supported by the structure of the shoe than leaving the woman barefoot in what seemed to be the desert.
“A little bit. It’s not like I can move it much in hiking boots anyway.”
I reached out to touch the foot, gently squeezing and turning it. “What’s your name?”
The woman panted as I tried to turn her foot. “Renee. Where are my boys? Are they here too? Am I dead?”
Renee hadn’t screamed when I’d moved her ankle, so I was going to hope it was just a sprain and move on. “I don’t think we’re dead. I’m going to check for others including your boys. Stay here, okay?”
She nodded, tears filling her eyes.
My leg twinged as I crawled, reminding me that I should be holding it still as it healed. Gritting my teeth, I moved on, encouraged by the sight of movement ahead. As I drew near I saw two boys that looked to be about twelve or thirteen wearing jeans and the requisite Alaska themed T-shirts that all the cruise-ship tourists seemed to sport. The closest one was covered in dust and dirt, curled into a ball. And right next to him was a torn hiking boot. At least the mystery of Renee’s missing shoe was solved, although I wasn’t sure how it had managed to come off her foot.
“You okay? I just came from your mom and she’s all right.” I should have asked the woman to give me their names. I was assuming these were her two boys. I thought back on the tourist shop right before everything blew. Ahia. Renee with these two. Two girls — late teens, maybe. An older guy. And some woman waiting by the door with a backpack.
“I think I’m okay. Sore. Had the wind knocked out of me. Is David okay?”
“Aside from eating some sand, I’m fine.” The boy a few feet away stirred, pulling himself onto hands and knees to shake the grit from his hair. “What happened?”
I examined the first boy, then shifted over to check the other boy — David. Bruises. Possibly concussions. Hopefully the others weren’t any worse than these three were. It would be a huge stroke of luck if I, the one with the ability to heal rapidly, had suffered the worst injury. “I don’t know yet. Your mom is worried about you and your brother here. She’s over there? Can you see her? Do you think you can go over to her then stay there until I check for others? Oh, and take her shoe over to her, please.”
The two boys nodded, getting to their feet and grabbing the hiking boot. I did the same, wincing as I put weight on my knee. David. Renee. And… “What’s your name?”
The first boy coughed, brushing his arms
and shirt. “Jason. I’m eleven. That’s David. He’s thirteen.”
“All right, Jason and David. You two go over to your mom and wait. Don’t let her get up until we get back. She’s hurt her ankle and I don’t want her to stand.”
Both boys staggered through the reddish-brown sand over to their mom. I limped to the next closest person, fighting back a wave of nausea as the pain in my leg increased. Lights danced in front of my eyes, sweat beading on my skin. Clearly this was more than just a torn ligament. And a fever? Since when did a soft tissue injury and a possible fracture cause a fever?
About twenty yards off an elderly man gasped quietly, his nose a flattened mess of blood. That was the least of his worries. One arm was at an angle that made me wince.
“Hey there, sir. Anything besides your arm and nose hurt?”
The man’s dark eyes met mine “My face hurts so bad. And my arm. I think it’s broken.”
“Legs okay? Any pain in your chest or back?”
How the heck was I going to set this man’s arm, let alone find something to splint it? I could tear up a shirt into strips to bind Renee’s ribs, and support this man’s arm. Were there sticks anywhere? This place didn’t seem to have any trees. What could I use as a splint? And how would I manage to keep their wounds clean unless I found some water? Water. They’d need it for more than cleaning wounds. Where were we?
“No. I don’t think so. No. Just my face. What happened?”
I sat up and yanked my shirt over my head. “I agree that your arm is probably broken. I’m gonna make a sling. I can make it immobile, but I’m not a doctor. Hopefully it doesn’t require anything besides this. Bad news is it’s gonna hurt worse, once the adrenaline fades. Your nose too.”
The old guy shot me a twisted smile. As horrific as the grin looked with all the blood and his mangled nose, the effort made me like this guy all the more.