by Lynn Red
He returned to human form, pants legs ripped, shirt torn to shreds. He trotted after, jogging to where the car had peeled out.
Sitting there on the road, West saw a pair of torn jeans, a torn up shirt, and... a phone.
West bent, the wind flapping his shredded pants, and picked the phone up off the road. He swallowed hard, and started to tap the screen.
When he was finished, he held the receiver at arms’ length and shook his head. He’d remembered the number without even thinking about it. He never imagined he’d call this number again, but for Elena? Anything.
The phone was already ringing.
“Hello? Elena? You okay? Some of my guys said they saw a couple whack-jobs running away from the department and—”
“No,” West said softly.
Ralph let out a long, low whistle. “Shit must have gone raw,” he said. “Good to hear your voice again, partner.”
West cleared his throat. “Look,” he said. “I need a favor.”
“You saved my life twice, West,” Ralph said. “I’ve got an idea what’s going on, but ask anyway. If you needed an army, I’d try my best. Can’t promise anything, but I’d certainly try.”
West chuckled bitterly. “Actually, I just need an APB.”
-14-
“APB? Shit, that’s serious.”
-Elena
When she opened her eyes and saw nothing, she immediately thought she’d been blinded somehow, but the burning of her wrists and the way her shoulder ached told a different story.
“Where am I?” Elena asked, when she heard footsteps near her in the darkness. “Where is West?”
“You’re gonna help me!” the furious woman screeched, the sound of her feet going back and forth on what Elena thought must be concrete floors. “You’re gonna help me or you’re gonna poison everyone. Every single yapping idiot, every single moron in this town who can’t see how great I am? How important? You’re gonna wipe ‘em out for me. Every single one.”
She gritted her teeth, refusing to talk.
Elena scrunched up her nose. It was dark in the room, but she felt that there was regular texturing on the wall. Her back ached, and the back of her head throbbed from an impact she’d not seen. Reaching back, she touched her head to check for blood, but felt nothing slick. Her left shoulder felt like it had been wrenched, or twisted, or stuffed into a space far too small for her body.
And for Elena? That must’ve been a real small space.
She clenched her jaws tight and her fists too. The plastic zip-ties on her wrists burned, and she knew there was no ripping through those things. Her knowledge of zip-ties may or may not have come from a slightly off-kilter date that ended very off-kilter.
“Where am I?” Elena hissed. “Who are you?”
In the pitch black, she could see absolutely nothing. There wasn’t a shred of light down there. All she could do was smell, and hear. She knew who she was with before she asked, but with fear clenching her gut, babbling seemed like a better idea than letting this whacked out rabbit keep ranting.
Petunia didn’t answer, she just kept pacing.
“Who am I?” the rabbit asked, laughing with a sickening sort of thickness to her voice. She sounded desperate and angry, like she was just about to break. “You know exactly who I am.”
Elena immediately recognized that she could use that.
“Are you Daniella? Or maybe Ella?” She listed off her two best girlfriends’ names, and thought about how long it had been since they went out for drinks. “Paula?”
Elena screeched and flopped to the side when something that felt like a bunch of tiny knives chomped into her between the hip and the ribs. When she slumped forward, hissing in pain, her arms wrenched back, agonizingly stretching her shoulders.
She was bound both hand and foot, and apparently, attached to the ceiling somehow. She swayed back and forth, reeling at the scratch of wall texture on her bare skin.
“Who am I?” Petunia demanded. “You know who I am. You were hunting me, trying to find me and trap me. And now I’ve got you.”
Elena shook her head. “I have no idea,” she insisted. “I was just playing around with my boyfriend and then something happened and now I’m here.”
That’s partly true, anyway, Elena thought. Life is full of almost truths. May as well add to them if it helps me, I guess.
“Oh, playing around with the boyfriend, huh? Agent St. Claire?” The question was filled with hissing and lisping.
“Agent?” she asked. “I’m not sure—”
“Quit playing gamesh with me!” Petunia whisper-shouted. “I know who you are, and I know why you came after me. You know I know, and we both know that this game about what you know and what you don’t is bullshit! What about this?”
“What about what?” Elena asked. The adrenaline pounding in her temples subsided some when she realized she wasn’t in any immediate fatal danger.
“This!”
Elena felt something prod her in the stomach. She had an idea, but figured that antagonizing this tiny ball of rage into doing something stupid, into making some kind of a mistake that would free her or at least give her a chance to free herself, was – if not a good idea – at least an idea.
“It’s dark, you know,” she said, sounding as put out and impatient as possible.
West was chasing me, he’s got to be following, she thought. Wait a minute, what am I thinking? I’ve been in worse shit than this. What do I need him for?
Even as she was filling herself with thoughts of not needing anyone except herself, Elena’s heart swelled when she imagined West coming for her. Someone caring enough, thinking enough of her, to come after her when she was in danger? Aside from her partner, no one had ever bothered, no one had ever cared. At least, that’s what it always felt like.
And then, there he was.
She swallowed and returned to the present issue. “I can’t see what you’re jabbing me with. And I still have no idea who you are or what you’re talking about. I’m just... I don’t know.”
“Oh, right,” Petunia said. “I forget how weak you normal people’s eyes are.”
A barely-living florescent fizzed to life, flickering so violently it made Elena’s stomach knot up tightly. She had to look down to see the twisted, tiny creature.
Petunia pulled her lips into a vile grin, showing the filed-down teeth that had torn into Elena’s side moments before. “What are you looking at?” Petunia spat, waddling away.
“Well,” Elena said, a little confused. “I was looking at you, until you turned away. Still don’t know who you are,” she added offhandedly. “Wait, are you one of my mom’s friends? She’s kinda old. Buncha them wear dentures.”
That had exactly the right effect.
In a split second, the albino rabbit with the haunting blue eyes and the false teeth turned on Elena, snapped her jaws open as wide as they could go. When she looked, Elena saw the metal springs and fixtures on the dentures. Petunia resembled a shark, how the jaws jut out when they bite, then the teeth clamp closed and the lips come last. She snapped them a couple of times, and then drew close to Elena underneath the flickering, swinging light.
She touched the bare skin where she’d bitten. “So soft,” she said. “Such perfect skin. Such a nice tone. Let me see your eyes,” she said in one hissing breath. “So perfect and... and pigmented.”
There was a shade of hesitation in the little woman’s voice. “So pigmented,” she said again, before stretching her fingers to take the end of Elena’s dangling ponytail in her hand. “All my life, I wished... I wanted,” she trailed off again, apparently hypnotized by the copper and white hair.
Slowly, she stroked the hair, and then let her hand fall to the skin where Elena’s shirt split during her transformation.
Elena swallowed hard, watching the wretched, sad little woman. “What is it you want?” she asked Petunia, who moved her fingertips around a freckle, and then a mole, on Elena’s side. Pissing her off had worke
d, but only gone so far. Maybe empathy? Sympathy? Some mixture of the two? She’d sat through enough hostage negotiation seminars for continuing education and her PI license that she’d managed to retain a few things.
“I want to be normal,” she said plainly. “I want people to see I’m not who I’m supposed to be, who they think I am. I want them to see past my skin and my buckteeth and the fact that I goddamn hate carrots and see me for me.”
“Then why are you torturing me? What’s the point of all this?”
A flare sparkled in Petunia’s small, beady, blue eyes. “To get what I want. To make everyone realize that we’re not all simpering little terrified animals who run the first time a car horn honks or a dog barks.”
“Sounds to me,” Elena said, carefully choosing her words. “Sounds to me like you want what everyone wants. Just to be yourself.”
“I want to know what it’s like to have someone care,” Petunia chirped. “To know they actually do care instead of having that tiny voice in the back of my head that says they’re full of shit all the time, and just want something out of me, but don’t want me.”
Oh my God I feel every shred of that, Elena wanted to say. “And how does that make you feel?” she actually asked, sliding into her Sigmund Freud therapist’s couch, and beginning to understand how the strange mind in front of her ticked. In an instant, she watched the twisted face relax, and immediately seize up again into a sour pucker.
Petunia narrowed her beady eyes. “You’re trying to trick me,” she said. “You’re trying to pretend to be my friend, to care about me, thinking it’ll get you out of here. I’m not stupid enough to fall for that. You know me better than that. You’ve seen what I’ve done, the destruction,” she relished saying that word, Elena noticed, “I’ve caused.”
Trying again to distract the little woman with the horrible dentures, Elena cleared her throat. “You never showed me what you say I had on me that let you find me.”
Petunia rolled her eyes and glared for a second. “Oh fine,” she said. “It’s my other dentures. You had them in your pocket. I put a tracking chip in there from one of my dolls. But,” she sighed heavily. “This is so stupid, you’re wasting my time. I saw you and your giant boyfriend go into my house, I watched you go in, come out. I knew you took that top fixture, I know everything.”
She spun on her heel and jabbed Elena again in the chest with the dentures. “See? If you don’t believe me, here you go.” Petunia held the ghastly teeth up and picked at something on one of the gums. “See? Lo-Jack chip. You fell for the James Bond-est trap more or less ever.”
It was Elena’s turn to sigh, and to come up with a different approach. “Well, what do you want us to do? Those deer were tearing up those fields, and there was talk from some people on the force because of some bullshit circumstantial evidence. I just wanted to prove that it wasn’t you, that you hadn’t done anything wrong.”
Elena saw the tiny woman wince. She had hit on something she never imagined. “I wanted to prove you hadn’t done anything... at all. You were just caught up in it all, somehow blamed for some random, pointless act of nature.” She shrugged. “That’s it, I mean, how could someone like you do anything as incredible as destroying all those crops.”
It worked.
If, by “worked”, Elena wanted to put the tiny thing into a blood-seething, screeching and howling rage. If that was the case? It worked better than anything.
*
“We can’t find the car,” Ralph said as soon as West answered the phone. “You sure you gave me the right number?”
“Yea, that’s the one,” West said when Ralph repeated it into the phone.
“It’s like it just vanished into the mists of night. There’s no trace of it, or that rabbit. And, for what it’s worth, everyone still thinks I’m a lunatic. Maybe worse now since I just called an APB on a car that no one managed to find.”
Something caught West’s ears. He’d ridden back toward the house they’d examined earlier, just out of a sense that everything moves in circles – a notion he couldn’t really explain, but thought it was right. “Gotta go, thanks partner,” he said. It wasn’t until he clicked to end the call that he realized what he’d said.
By that point, it didn’t even matter.
The screams hit West’s ears louder and clearer than he imagined. They weren’t pained though, they weren’t screams of fear or torture. They were screams of pure, unadulterated rage. He pushed through the tangled tomato vines, dangling orbs bouncing against his body, until he reached the door. Overhead, the moon was a sharply pointed crescent hanging low over the haunting dollhouse.
“I’ll burn this town to the ground!” Petunia screamed at the top of her lungs, so loud that West could clearly hear. “I am important! I won’t stop with carrots. If you, if they, keep talking about deer doing what takes me so much energy to do? Me and my friends are gonna burn this damn town to the ground!”
She was wheezing, sucking air in the way people do when they’re so ramped up they can hardly bring themselves down. “Burn it down just to do it! No damn reason!” she added, as an afterthought.
“Friends?” he heard Elena ask. “What friends? You mean the dolls?”
Damn, West thought. She’s good at working this woman. Of course, if it all goes south and she tips this crazy rabbit into hurting her, that’s a different story, but—
Another screech erupted from within, it was really obvious that Elena’s tactic was working beautifully. The screech was followed by some crashes and then some more incoherent yells.
West tried the door. He squeezed as hard as he could, unconsciously trying to break the damn door off the hinges. Elena might be in charge, she might even be winning this mental duel, but he didn’t want to take any chances. His forearm swelled, the muscles bulging and filling with blood.
He grunted with effort as he strained, but the door simply wouldn’t budge. West stooped down and planted a shoulder in the center of it. With a heavy thump, he was able to move the door slightly, but that was all.
More screaming from inside, this time becoming more violent and less coherent.
“Elena!” West shouted. “I’m here! I can hear you!”
Suddenly, all the noise stopped. The hair started to push out of West’s arms, his fingers flattening into paws. He hadn’t meant to do this, it was just desperation, it was just the fear that something was happening to Elena that needed to be stopped.
The next shoulder block came from a half bear with a wild look in his eye. He was angry, but he was in control. The rage hadn’t taken him, it was helping him. Again and again he beat against it until finally, in one singular moment, he heard a crack, then wood splitting along a seam.
West backed up, still there was silence within, and rammed with every ounce of force he could muster.
With a roar that shook him to the core, he drove through the door, sending it careening backwards, off the hinges. The three deadbolts were all fully intact and still locked. Metal sheathes around them were dented, but whole, just blasted back out of the wood. He swept through the living room, careful to avoid damaging the dolls.
“Shut up!” Petunia wailed. “Shut up, you idiot!”
It sounded like the noise was coming from underneath where he was – some kind of basement or cellar. But there were no stairs, no trap doors or anything of the sort, at least that West could see. With clothes hanging in tatters around him, his fur-covered arms ached to break something else, to smash through a wall or bash through the floor, and hold Elena in his arms.
“She if he can find ush,” he heard the rabbit shout, this time lisping for some reason. “Let’sh just she.”
All around he stomped, listening for hollows, but found nothing. Through the bedroom, through the kitchen, West trampled around, desperately trying to find a way to Elena.
And then it hit him.
The bookcases, lined with dolls. One of them must move. But he didn’t have time to find the trigger. He start
ed tugging at them, horrified as one of the dolls fell and shattered. He stared down, almost heartbroken at what he’d done, but those things didn’t matter right then. Not at all. Only one thing mattered.
He swallowed and kept pulling, hoping to notice any sort of movement at all.
If only I were a little stronger, a little more pissed off. I can’t get out of control though, or God only knows what I’ll do. I need to harness it, I need to—
He turned his head to the table, upon which sat an incredibly large, completely raw hunk of steak. His stomach turned at the idea of eating it, but he knew if he did, he’d get a burst of energy, a burst of strength. And maybe that was the only one he’d need.
“I can’t,” he said under his breath.
Another scream met his ears. “No! No! You’re biting me? Ah!”
West shook his head, fur going everywhere, senses flaring to life. He was close, so close, to his Elena, but he needed just a little boost.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I can find her without it. I can do this, he told himself.
But then he heard another scream. This one was pain, no denying it. That angry little rabbit was hurting his Elena, his mate.
Clarity streamed into West’s mind. He broke before, he failed his partner. He wasn’t going to fail again. “Not a chance in hell I’m gonna let her down, or let her get roughed up. Not a chance.”
Gritting his teeth, he steeled himself to do one of the things he hated most. He could already taste the foul, metallic flavor, the slightly-not-fresh juices. He swallowed hard, staving off the nausea he felt.
West wrapped his transforming paw around the steak, lifted it up, and gulped again.
Elena screamed. “You’re not getting away with this,” she shouted. “Ow! Stop fucking biting me!”
The sound of scuffling came through the floor. He only hoped that part of the scuffling was Elena fighting back. More screams, more shouting, more fight sounds.
“Enough,” he said. “That’s enough.”
One second, he was staring at the glistening hunk of cow ass. In the next, he was chewing. West winced, but he chewed through the discomfort. Almost immediately, when he swallowed the first bite, his muscles hardened, his mind grew instantly sharper.