by Erin Hayes
Jesus FUCK, he’s fast! Isaac’s head was a blur as he tried to follow their attacker’s movements. I mean… I knew they would be, but… GEEZ!
The force of the next impact shifted Zoey’s hold and the snarling monster gained several feet at that moment, seeming to have broken through before she reinforced the point only several inches from Isaac a split-second before he crashed against it again.
Drop it! Isaac was already hunching down, readying himself. NOW!
Zoey wanted to protest—wanted to beg her lover to stay within the protective sphere she was fighting to maintain—but anything she’d want to say would’ve taken too long, and she knew there was no way to hold off this creature long enough to wear him down.
So she dropped the shield in that instant, the exact instant that Isaac, trusting her wholly, was leaping with breakneck force into what could have either been an auric shield or his intended target. He struck the latter in the next instant, a startled sound somewhere between a therion’s snarl and a vampire’s hiss belching from their target’s muzzle as Isaac’s jaws locked around his throat. The force of the attack sent them both sailing away from Zoey, who lost focus of the mass of fur and claws and teeth as they tumbled across the rooftop. Her feet left the solidness below her as instinct and passion drove her after, her aura a blur to even her own vision as a series of bolts shot ever forward to carry her.
Keep… his feet… off… the ground! Isaac’s thoughts sputtered the instructions around his struggle to keep his jaws clamped around the throat of their enemy while fighting the powerful arms and legs that worked to pull and kick him free.
Though the growing levels of her lover’s pain on his aura gave away that he was already starting to lose the leverage he gained, Zoey heeded the request. The greatest strength that the hybrid possessed over them was his speed, something that could mean the end of their lives before they’d even realized it. But his speed, like any other strength, relied on conditions. If he couldn’t stand—couldn’t gain any sort of traction or momentum—that speed could not be gained. It had been what had saved them moments earlier when he’d fallen out of overdrive while jumping from one rooftop to the next, and it was their only hope of surviving now.
The hybrid drove a set of fists into Isaac’s sides again and again, the powerful blows breaking several ribs and taxing his already tortured lungs in an effort to loosen the grip around his throat. By some miracle Isaac held firm, sacrificing any chance of guarding his exposed sides by raising his arms and digging his claws into the hybrid’s back. Howling in rage, their target pitched and struck him several more times before starting to push himself against the thrashing weight to stand. Seeing the ball of his left foot find the rooftop, Zoey carried herself around in a quarter circle, hovering over the hybrid’s right side, and dropping out of the air towards him. Her foot connected with the side of the hybrid’s head, toppling him to the left and forcing him to sacrifice both his footing and his fists in an attempt to catch himself. Landing a short distance away, Zoey cast out her aura then, wrapping it around the hybrid’s head and sucking all the air from his lungs in an instant. Panic flashed behind dark, murderous eyes—the first sign of true concern she’d seen from them—and she felt a wave of hope that they might actually be rid of half the threat they’d been sent there to neutralize.
Desperation, however, was the greatest motivation of all, and a too-early celebration was the greatest cause of defeat.
Rolling into the fall and letting the full weight of his sagging form do the work for him, the hybrid moved to crush Isaac, forcing him onto his back and beginning to crush him.
“NO!” Zoey jumped forward, pulling her aura back and seizing the hybrid’s entire body so that she could yank him free.
Heaving from the sudden freedom from the suffocating force, Isaac’s jaws parted and allowed the hybrid to slip free. The sacrifice seemed a worthwhile trade, however, as Zoey had the injured hybrid off of Isaac and off of his feet.
The hybrid’s speed, however, worked for it without the use of his legs.
In a flash of movement that was more recognized after the fact for what wasn’t seen, a clawed hand yanked the still-heaving Isaac from the rooftop and hurled him back at Zoey. The act, however, seemed like a sequence that had been lost from a film reel: one moment the hybrid was dangling, helpless, several feet in the air and in the next there was a mass of confused therion whining through the air towards her. In a moment of reflex that startled even her, Zoey sacrificed her hold on the hybrid to catch Isaac in her aura. At the same time, as she pulled her stunned lover to her and wrapped her arms around him, she propelled the two of them backwards into the night sky while using a separate auric tendril to launch the hybrid in the opposite direction—their paths growing farther and farther apart as they each tore through the air in a growing V-like arc.
City lights passed below them, the buildings lumping into a massive singularity below them as they gained more and more distance from the threat. Despite everything, though, the moment was anything but calming. Isaac, who might have just discovered a previously undiagnosed case of vertigo, erupted into a blind panic—fears that their situation were somehow the hybrid’s doing—that Zoey had to work to calm while suppressing her own worry about how to survive their eventual descent.
Despite her concern regarding their own survival, however, she was painfully certain that the hybrid would find a way to walk away from his own fall.
Zoey had never been so exhausted in her entire life.
Consoling a beaten and battered therion with a newly discovered fear of heights while in free fall, however, was the least complicated thing she’d had to do in what had ultimately become the single worst thirty seconds of her life. Had she known then that those thirty seconds that would go on to be Part One of the worst twenty-four hours of her life she might have reconsidered saving their lives and saving them the pain and misery of what was to come, but her catalogue of psychic powers stopped just shy of seeing the future. By the time she’d convinced Isaac that their situation was, in fact, her own last-ditch effort to get them away from the hybrid and that she needed him to relax so that she could get them safely back onto the ground, she had approximately ten seconds to do just that. Though her lover, still in his therion form, might have been able to survive the impact from such a fall, his injuries were extensive enough already to make it an uncomfortable uncertainty. Zoey, however, who had neither the strength nor build to withstand such a fall, would be lucky if her injuries killed her before she could feel the pain of just how badly broken she’d be. The taller buildings of the city had begun to grow out of the mass of light and dark splotches that the city had become, and Zoey had begun using her aura as a makeshift rudder to steer them towards the nearest.
The nearest, however, was too close to both successfully navigate towards and guard against the impact of…
At the last moment, with Zoey throwing out her aura in blind desperation to guard against the incoming mass of glass and steel, Isaac had pulled her into his chest and wrapped his body as best he could around her, taking the first impact, which passed them through a window just shy of the top floor, on his shoulder and rolling haphazardly across through a series of cubicles. A flurry of fabric-coated walls, computer monitors, and tasteless office knick-knacks exploded around them as they tumbled at a sharp angle that, rather than carrying them further into the vast space of the office, wound up throwing them out through a second window.
How in the hell…? Isaac’s spike of pain was outdone solely by the confusion that rode across his entire aura.
Zoey, having taken her own battering from their brief time “traveling” through the building, could only remind herself to explain what a hypotenuse was to him at a later time. The chaotic interruption had, fortunately enough, slowed their fall and offered several new solutions to not dying at that moment. Casting out her aura and snagging the opening they’d passed through, she’d swung them back towards the building—this time doi
ng Isaac the favor of breaking the glass before they went through it—and bringing them back inside in a landing that was only slightly more controlled than the first.
Thirty seconds…
It couldn’t have been more than that—just half-a-minute—but it had been enough to take Isaac’s already sizable injuries and add to them more than she could bring herself to fathom at that moment. She wasn’t much better off, though, having cut herself badly on the glass they’d passed through—twice—and suffering from what she hoped were only sprains and what would become really bad bruises in a few short hours. Her lover had already been badly hurt, and while she’d be able to mend the majority of his wounds before the next day she would be no good to him until she replenished her strength. Though she prided herself on reserving energy and rarely needing to be the life-draining force that her nature dictated her to be, she’d drained the last of her expendable auric force in the pursuit, fight, and hurried retreat from the hybrid. It was only been by desperation—it was, after all, the greatest motivation—that she’d been able to save them from the fall resulting from that retreat.
“Save,” however, felt far from being the right word for it.
Zoey had never been so exhausted in her entire life.
Between the emotional hurricane her day had been from the moment Delilah had kicked through their door to the sheer physical exertion she’d experienced in the past—what?—several minutes (at most!) there was little left that could phase her.
But then, tired and beaten and drained and feeling a brand new level of concern for what they were going to do, they’d gotten back to their temporary home.
“Wait… what? Please, slow down!” Zoey pleaded.
She didn’t think it was possible to feel much worse after everything they’d been through, but finding Delilah sobbing against the wall just past the entrance to her apartment building proved her wrong. Eyes wide and aura frantic with something between relief and terror, she’d jumped to her feet and begun babbling incoherently; one moment conveying her concern for her and Isaac’s wellbeing at being “out there” and the other spouting a desperation to return “out there” to find Declan and Trey. She mentioned several other names in her rambling, but it was only the two that Zoey recognized and could put faces to at that moment.
Isaac, now dressed in nothing but pair of jogging shorts Zoey had stolen for him from a gym bag they’d found left behind in the office building, gripped Delilah by the shoulder, only able to do so with one hand as his other arm was still unresponsive; probably broken. “Dee,” his voice was calmer than Zoey would have thought possible given all they’d been through and the pain he must have been feeling, “you need to breathe. You’re not making any sense!”
Delilah blinked, seeming to not understand at first, but finally dragged in a labored breath as she let herself slide back down the wall. The exhale that followed was carried out by a fresh sob, and a new well of tears opened and began to pour down her cheeks.
“H-he said it was their duty!” she whimpered, slamming the palms of both her hands against her forehead before Zoey caught her by the wrists to stop her. “Dec-Declan… he must’ve… must have heard us talking back at the—oh god! We kept going on and on, Zoey!” She looked into her eyes, a guilt so raw and bitter rolling behind them that she imagined the therion had never known anything like it before, “We kept saying it: bigger and badder; ‘bigger and badder’-this and ‘bigger and badder’-that. We…” she choked on the next inhale and tried to hit herself again, only to have Zoey’s grip stop it again. “We were barely through the door before Declan—oh god, no!” her voice croaked around the name and turned to whimpers for the last three words after it.
“Delilah,” Zoey let go of the therion’s right wrist with her left hand to sweep a curtain of tear-and-sweat drenched hair from her eyes; though she wasn’t proud to “feed” under those circumstances, she used the continued contact to begin draining some of Delilah’s panic and sorrow. Though the act felt dirty, it both served to calm her enough to be understood while beginning to replenish some of the energy Zoey had lost in the skirmish. “I need you to relax, okay? For everybody’s sake—your own and everyone else’s—so we can communicate. Please,” little by little the energy fueling the panic melted away and the therion’s eyes began to grow hooded with the forced calm. “Just talk slow and take even breaths.”
Delilah nodded, a lazy and distant gesture, and blinked up at Zoey with eyes that regarded her with the still-young sisterhood as though it was the only way she’d ever seen her.
No loyalty stronger than that of a therion’s, Isaac thought to her in private, seeing the same trust and adoration in those eyes.
Zoey nodded, both for Isaac and for Delilah, and then urged for her to continue with her story.
“Declan,” Delilah’s voice still carried pain with the name, but it was diluted and manageable now, “said that, because they were deputized and just as able to handle the threat now as you two, they should go out to try to end this all tonight. I… I pleaded with him to wait,” she tilted her head lazily to look up at Isaac then, “y-you know how stubborn he is, though…” She shook her head and on the second pass it dropped her chin to her chest, where she seemed to get lost in her own vision.
Will she be okay? Isaac asked.
Yes, but I needed some energy to heal you and she had too much to make sense. She would’ve torn herself apart—either mentally or physically—if I didn’t do this for both our sakes. Zoey gave a slight nod, moving to cradle Delilah’s head and hum to her while she probed her thoughts the rest of the way, relaying the story back:
Declan took his role as a deputized warrior too seriously and issued a call to the rest of the pack. Delilah tried to stop him—ordered him and the others to stand down—but they didn’t listen. She managed to deter a good number of them, ordered them back to their rooms, but too many followed Declan. He… Zoey cringed at the memory as it played out in her mind, He told Delilah he’d make her proud; that he would be the sort of… she stopped herself from finishing, seeing what the two of them had been saying in private before Delilah had convinced her to deputize the rest of them. She’d been ashamed of him then, telling him that an outside male and his “slut-vamp” were taking more initiative on behalf of their pack then he was. Her bitterness towards Zoey then had driven her to condemn her own brother for not doing all he could to protect their pack and their city, and those words had motivated him to take action while Zoey and Isaac had been facing off against the other hybrid. She saw Delilah, desperate and terrified, wondering where they could be—knowing that, as powerless and she’d felt then, Zoey could have stopped them all with a single thought; then the overwhelming worry that the two of them might have already been killed: a man she’d once loved and known as a comrade and her newfound vampire “sister”—and collapsing there at the entrance where she’d been forced to see so many of her pack march off to face what she saw as their deaths.
What? Isaac pressed, setting his good hand on Zoey’s shoulder and pulling her back to the now. What happened?
Delilah snored gently in Zoey’s arms and, confident she wouldn’t awaken for some time, she looked up at her lover and chewed her lip, trying to filter the information. They’d come too far in the past few hours with Delilah and the rest of her pack to stir up the old hatred. After everything that had happened, she didn’t want to give Isaac a reason to think the hatred from the past that had driven an act only a few minutes ago was anything but an unfortunate turn of events.
But it was what it was, and she couldn’t lie to him.
“Declan was threatened by our involvement in their pack’s safety. Delilah had said some things she didn’t mean in the heat of the moment, and it made him think that she thought less of him than… well, than a crummy vampire like me.” She saw him frown at that and shook her head, “It’s not how any of them feel now—I can see that from Delilah’s memories, too—but the old wound was still there, and he’d overhear
d out half-formed plan to give the hybrids a specific target to draw them out.”
Isaac rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh man… so Declan and Trey went out there?”
“And a bunch of others, too,” Zoey nodded. “They all felt they had something to prove. To be a contributing member to the newly deputized pack or show their support of their new sister…”
“How long ago did they leave?” Isaac asked, already taking a step towards the door to glance outside.
“Not long,” Zoey admitted, gently setting Delilah’s head back before standing, “but long enough.” She shook her head at him, calling him back to her. “We can’t go after them,” she explained. “I’m not strong enough to fight in this state and you can barely stand. Until I’ve fed and healed you we’re no good to anybody!”
Isaac sighed, daring one more glance out through the door before turning back and nodding. “There’s still a lot of the pack here, right? Enough for you to feed off of, I mean?” He blushed and added, “I’m not saying you should drain them to their dying breath, of course, but—”
Zoey nodded and gave him a gentle smile. “It should be enough,” she said, “and even if it’s not I can reach into the neighboring apartments to get the rest. Nobody needs to die, but there will be a lot of people waking up tomorrow with headaches.”