by E. A. Copen
Creven grabbed my arm and pulled me back a step. “I think you made it mad.”
The giant swung his club wide with a frustrated roar. Creven and I ducked but the club wasn’t aimed at us. Instead, the giant had targeted another set of support pillars behind us. Tires squealed as Kim hit the gas, moving the car out of the way of falling concrete and metal support fibers. I turned to try and get out of the way, but I already knew I wasn’t going to be fast enough, not with my leg the way it was.
Thankfully, Creven knew, too. He threw his arms wide. A blue bubble extended out from his fingers, stretching to cover a narrow three by three area. The tumbling cement bounced off the surface of the barrier he threw up, cascading down the side and leaving little white ripples in its wake. The giant swung his club in a rage, tearing at floors, ceilings, and furniture, pulling all of it down on top of us. Every once in a while, he’d stop and pound directly on the barrier.
Creven gave a grunt of effort and set another layer of protection on top of the barrier after just such an attack. Every time the giant struck it, huge cracks appeared and some debris from above got through. “I can’t hold it forever,” he said through gritted teeth.
If it’s fae, I thought, iron will work. But where am I going to get enough of it to make a difference?
“Whatever you think you’re going to do, you’d better bloody well do it!”
I turned my attention back to the giant, watching as its club tore apart the mansion above us and mentally scrolling through my options. I had cement a plenty and there were some bits of steel falling from above, but none of them were pieces I could pick up and stab a giant with. No, I was going to need something special for this, but I didn’t have anything with me. I needed another option and fast.
Okay, I thought, what else can I use? I glanced around and found myself wondering what Chanter would do in this situation. If anyone would know what to do, it would be him. He’d cut the giant down to size, stuff him into a box and throw the box in the ocean after setting it on fire, I mused. Well, I couldn’t set the box on fire and toss it into the ocean, but I could put the giant in a box of sorts with Creven’s help.
“Creven, do you know what a Way is?”
He hesitated and glanced down at me before giving a definitive nod of his head.
“I need you to open one.”
“You’re insane,” he answered. “Those things are even more dangerous than a marauding giant. I’m not going in one.”
“It’s not for us.”
The elf gave me a quizzical look and held it for a moment before his eyes gleamed with understanding. “I don’t know if that’ll hold him long,” he said.
“But can you do it?” I shouted over the noise of hundreds of roof tiles coming down on top of the barrier. One made it halfway through before it stopped.
“Aye, but the barrier’ll have to come down. We’ll get crushed in the process.”
I readied my broomstick. “Do it.”
“Count of three,” he shouted. “Ace, deuce…Three!”
The barrier unfolded from the top down. Debris scattered on top of us. Broken roof tiles became missiles hurled with enough force to impale them into the cement. One grazed the inside of my arm as I turned and brought the broomstick down against the cement floor.
The concussive wave hit the giant and it slid back a few inches. For a moment, it hesitated, the massive club raised. His mouth spread into a Cheshire grin. “You’re strong, human. It will be a pity to extinguish such strength if you won’t fight me in earnest.”
“Thanks,” I said, stepping forward and spinning the stick. “But no thanks.” I brought it down with a loud THWACK! The extra energy I’d gathered by spinning the stick a few times lent itself to the spell. The concussive wave slammed into the giant and forced him back several feet. This time, though, instead of lifting the stick and ending the spell, I held it. The force stayed on the giant and he continued sliding back, albeit at a painfully slow pace.
Creven extended his staff forward and, with a snarling grunt, he sent a wave of power rippling through the air.
“Your magick cannot harm me, elf!” the giant screeched as Creven’s wave of energy passed right through him.
“Doesn’t have to hurt you to work,” Creven said, his face betraying a bemused smirk.
A large, black circle appeared behind the giant in Loony Toon fashion. The giant did a Wile E. Coyote style double take and then let out an angry growl. He tried with all his might to move forward, shoulder muscles straining, but I pumped even more energy into the spell, forcing him back. The giant dug the spikes of his club into cement and it peeled as he slid backward toward the opening. His limbs thrashed wildly, pulling at anything they could find, throwing everything at us. More broken debris fell from the ceiling above. I pushed everything I had into the spell.
Inch by inch, foot by foot, at a painstakingly slow pace, the giant slid into the Way.
“Now, Creven!” I shouted when the creature was inside of the entrance. Only the club remained outside now and soon even it would be beyond the opening. “Close it!”
The elf waved his staff. The giant let out a frustrated yell. My ears ached. The Way snapped shut with all the energy of a rubber band.
“Th-th-that’s all, folks!” I shouted in excitement as soon as the Way was closed.
Above, the house groaned. A wall toppled, triggering a cascade of falling items. A metal bar with a jagged edge slid down among bricks, drywall, and broken glass. I ducked but made the mistake of putting more weight on my injured leg, causing me to go down. Something thumped against my back but, otherwise, the only thing that hit me was a light spray of dust.
Behind me, I heard the distinct sound of metal punching through meat. When I pushed off whatever had fallen on me and turned, I found Creven teetering on his feet. He was staring at the blood on his hands while a large hunk of the metal bar jutted up out of his stomach. His eyes went questioning to me but, when he opened his mouth, blood spurted out in a cough.
Creven swayed and collapsed, letting the staff fall to one side.
I reached him just in time to keep him from hitting the cement floor. Kim fought her way through some of the rubble to kneel beside us.
“Blood,” she cursed as she reached out to touch his face.
I pushed her hand away and felt for a pulse. “He’s alive,” I announced. “But he needs a hospital.” I reached for my phone to call a squad, only to remember it’d been broken in the scuffle upstairs.
“No,” Kim growled, grabbing my hand. “No hospitals.” She hesitated, glancing down at him before adding, “Creven’s got a record.”
I immediately wanted to ask what kind of record. If Creven was a convicted murderer, I was obligated to arrest him. But if his crime was petty, I could turn the other cheek. He had, after all, just saved my life. There wasn’t time. While I stood there trying to decide the right course of action, Creven was bleeding out. He’d stood beside me and fought a giant I could never have dealt with on my own. That would have to be enough for now.
“Shit. Okay. Just…give me a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute!” Kim panicked, grabbing for the steel sticking out of his gut. Blood spurted up out of Creven’s wound when she tried to dislodge it. Her body quivered, and she turned her head away.
I jerked her hands away from him as soon as I realized the mistake had been made. She lifted her blood covered hands and stared at them, wide-eyed, the way a hungry dog looks at a bone. A pale tongue ran over her trembling lips. I was out of time to decide.
“Kim!” I shouted. “Creven is going to die!”
The announcement shook her out of her hungry daze. She made a choking sound and lowered her hands out of her vision. “You have to save him. Take that out of him! It’s iron!”
“It’s the only thing slowing the bleeding,” I told her. “If we remove it, he dies.”
“Leave it in and you’ll poison him!�
�
“I know someone who can help but you’ve got to trust me. And I’ll need your phone.”
“Tell me what you need me to do.” She pulled a white phone from her pocket and tossed it to me.
I pocketed it and slid my arms under Creven, pulling him into the back seat of the Ferrari while Kim got back into the driver’s seat. “Take us to Paint Rock. Werewolf Way, there’s a little white prefab with green shutters and a bunch of broken down cars out front. Go there.”
Kim slammed her foot down on the accelerator. Tires squealed and we jostled a bit in the back seat as she navigated the car through fallen concrete and broken furniture. The car hit a ramp and we flew out of the garage and onto the white, sandstone path, narrowly avoiding hitting my Firebird on our way out of the gate.
While she drove, I did my best to stop the bleeding by tearing clothes and packing fabric around the protruding bit of metal. There wasn’t much else I could do but try and control the bleeding.
At one point, when things looked bleak for the elf, Kim glared into the rearview, bared her fangs and hissed at Creven, “Creven O’Caiside, by the blood, I forbid you to die.”
“Aye,” whispered the elf, and it was all the response either of us ever got out of him.
As soon as I could, I pulled out the blood splattered and borrowed phone and punched in Sal’s number, praying he hadn’t turned his cell phone off for the ceremony yet. “Come on…Come on!” I mumbled in desperation as the tone rang on.
On the fifth ring, Sal picked up. “What’s up?”
“Sal, this is Judah. I need you right now.”
“Well, that’s a little sudden.”
“The thing from Aisling, I just had a close encounter. I’ve got an elf bleeding out in my lap, Sal. We’re on our way to Valentino’s. I need you prepped for us.”
“Shit, Judah.” He adjusted the phone and continued a little quieter. “You can’t bring him here. Valentino’s got a kid and the whole pack is already in bad sorts with the full moon and all.”
“I owe him my life, Sal. He might be the only person alive who can help me take that thing down.”
There was a short pause. “We can clear a place in the shed. How soon?”
I looked out the window, trying to guess where we were compared to where we needed to be. “ETA in five minutes.”
Sal hung up. I didn’t wait. I dialed the next number I needed: the gate at the edge of the reservation. If the border patrol stopped us, we would lose valuable time. Some commander whose name I didn’t catch picked up on the second ring.
“This is Special Agent Judah Black. I’m in a yellow Ferrari, ETA two minutes. I need to bypass the gate. Official BSI business.”
“Badge number?”
“Four-one-six-five-nine.”
“Say again?”
I cursed him inwardly. I didn’t have time for incompetence. In less than a minute, we were going to crash through the gate, open or not, and I didn’t want them opening fire on us. I repeated the number a little slower.
The car jerked off the highway and to the left as we made the turn. The mechanical arm blocking entry to the reservation barely got high enough. We cleared it, but only barely. I breathed a sigh of relief and proceeded to give directions to Kim.
Creven’s fingers tightened around mine. I looked down. Even for an elf, he was pale but at least he’d regained consciousness. The whole back seat was shiny and red with blood. The bump in his throat bobbed up and down. “Thank you.”
“Don’t talk,” I said. “We’re almost there.”
“Need to say it.”
“Shut up, elf. I don’t like to be second-guessed.”
Creven tried to laugh and succeeded only in coughing up more bright red gore. His chest heaved with the effort of breath. He attempted a word and failed several times before he managed, “Oh, Jaysus…” Then, he closed his eyes. His head tilted to the side and his breathing stopped.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Our car slid into Valentino Garcia’s driveway, narrowly avoiding the El Camino he had up on blocks. Valentino was a mechanic for the Silvermoon pack and, by de facto, most of the people of Paint Rock. Normally, when cars tore into his driveway, it was because of a loss of steering or a brake failure and not because I was in the backseat, frantically performing CPR on an elf.
The door behind me opened and Kim swore, somehow managing to utter half a dozen curse words in a single breath. The rear passenger door jerked open wide and there was Sal, pressing his fingers to Creven’s neck to check for a pulse.
A long time ago, Sal was an army medic, trained by the United States government in the fine arts of triage. On the battlefield, his primary role would have been to determine who was worth saving and when and how to best delegate others to the task whenever possible. His healing magick helped but skill with mundane medicine was always his first choice. That side of him came out in the driveway as he barked for Daphne to prep an IV and get the emergency surgical kit from the bathroom. His orders weren’t like mine would have been, driven from a place of worry and panic. He was calm, collected as if he were doing something as simple as washing a car instead of saving a life.
“How long have you been doing CPR?” he asked me. At the same time, he pulled Creven from the car and laid him out on the pavement.
I was too stunned to answer. The effort of all the magick I had used was taking its toll on me, along with a day of no sleep. It was all I could do to stay upright.
Nina, Valentino’s wife, handed Sal a stethoscope which he put to Creven’s chest. After a painful few seconds, he pulled it from his ears and, without a word, went to stand behind Creven’s head. Nina grabbed the elf by the ankles and both of them heaved him over onto a sheet Valentino had brought out and spread over the ground, careful not to bump the steel in his stomach. Then, each of them lifted their respective ends of the sheet and carried Creven back toward the shed behind the house. The whole process was over in less than a minute.
Before anyone could say Jack Robinson, everyone crammed into the tiny shed, which had hastily been transformed into a makeshift ICU. They put Creven, sheet and all, onto an old army cot in the middle of the building. Daphne squeezed in beside Nina with a blood pressure cuff and took over with the stethoscope while Sal readied an IV. Between them, they called out numbers and orders so fast, it made my head swim. I got one bit of useful information from the back and forth, though. Creven had a pulse. It was weak and thready but it was there. After a few quick attempts at mouth to mouth, they even got him breathing on his own again.
Kim came up next to me, her manicured fingernails digging into the flesh of her face. She hadn’t dressed to be out in the late afternoon sun and every bit of exposed flesh was bright red. One spot on the back of her hand had blistered but she barely noticed. Creven’s blood was still all over her and her eyes were wide and black. Still, somehow, her concern outweighed her hunger.
“He’s alive,” I told her.
Sal looked up from injecting something into the IV port. When his gaze fell on Kim, he narrowed his eyes but said nothing. He turned back to his patient and gripped the metal sticking out of him. Daphne and Nina both stood by with clean white towels. “On three. One, two…” He jerked the steel straight up. Blood spurted everywhere before Nina could get her towel down over the wound. “I need to know his blood type.” He looked up at Kim, tossing the metal aside. “What is it?”
Kim hesitated, opening and closing her mouth once. “O positive.”
Sal turned back to Nina. “Find me a match. Where’s my surgical kit?”
“I can’t stay,” Kim said, her voice distant. “I…I need to feed.” She turned away and walked back out into the sun toward her car.
“Wait a minute,” I called after her. “Where are you going?”
“My father and I may have our disagreements,” she said. “But he’s still Master of this place. Every coven in the state owes him loyalty and is obligated to she
lter me if I request it.”
“And if the giant comes back? How am I supposed to protect you if you’re not here?”
Kim didn’t listen to me. She just got into her car, blood and all, and backed out of the driveway, zooming down the street.
******
For a while, I stayed at the entrance to the shed, watching Sal, Daphne and Nina work. Occasionally, Valentino wandered out with supplies but he mostly kept inside the house. I watched as they stripped off the tattered remains of Creven’s clothes, cutting away the expensive fabric with scissors. Sal packed the open hole in Creven’s body with clean gauze, stitching together what he could. He kept muttering he wasn’t a surgeon the whole time. But, if I understood correctly, they’d managed to get the bleeding under control.
When Sal was done, Nina, who was more experienced in closing wounds than I would have first guessed, got to work with a curved needle and thread, sewing the wound closed. The skinny elf didn’t have much skin to spare. After much coercing, shifting and pinching, though, she managed to get enough skin together to close it.
Daphne followed behind her with ointment, a roll of gauze, and some medical tape, covering the stitches. She rubbed the ointment liberally over Creven’s pale skin with gloved fingers, every move gentle. Somehow, just watching the way she cared for someone who was a stranger was comforting. After her reluctance to help me earlier in the day, her help relieved some of my frustration with her.
While the both of them tended to Creven’s physical injuries, Sal stood behind Creven, hands cupped against either side of the elf’s head. Sweat formed on his forehead and streaked down his face and arms. He didn’t move to wipe it away. Even after Nina and Daphne finished their work and turned on the tap of the work sink to clean the blood from their hands, Sal remained statue still.