They used the long crash of thunder to crawl behind the man who was still oblivious to their position. She saw Avice’s figure crouch a mere five feet away from their attacker, resting fleetingly on his heels. He looked at her, then gestured for her to hide behind the counter with the cashier. That at least would offer her more solid barrier of protection against further gunshots.
She shook her head, too petrified to be apart from him. But he knew that time was of the essence. The longer they hid with no action, the higher the chance was that they would be found unprepared. With a huge spurt of adrenaline-driven energy, he pushed the bookrack in front of him, toppling the object over onto the gunman’s body. The magazines and books fell, followed by the heavy wooden object.
Their attacker, too surprised by the sudden move, did not have time to move out of the way. The bookrack crashed into his arms and the gun slipped out of his hand, skidding along the tiled floor.
“Yarra, get the gun!” Avice said, standing on the now horizontal bookrack, pinning the man down with his body weight in addition to the weight of the display itself.
She ran and held the revolver; it felt warm in her hands, still hot from when he fired the shot that felt like it had been only seconds earlier.
The man groaned in pain before Avice delivered a punch to his face. As the man grimaced, her lover began to transform in the dark. His metamorphosis was not as significant as that of a werewolf, but Yarra could see his usually tanned skin turning pale, almost pearl white – more so in the darkness. The color spread over his skin in blotches, that rapidly joined together seamlessly. The nails on his fingers grew longer and sharper. Avice then slashed at the man’s body, making her flinch with how viperously fast it was.
For a moment, she thought that Avice had slashed the man’s chest to kill. But the man did not howl in pain, as only his leather jacket had been torn apart like pieces of paper cut in the middle. There on his chest was the tattoo of a silver blade on his hairy chest. The man was also a member of the Keepers of the Blade, just as she had seen in her vision.
“How did you find us?” Avice shouted. Yarra had not seen him so angry before. The man, however, did not immediately answer, and merely continued groaning. Another punch landed on his right eye, and that time he howled. Only, the howl was not human, but more of a crude animalistic cry of pain. It made the fine hairs on Yarra’s neck stand straight.
Suddenly, the lights she thought had burnt out earlier came flickering back on. She saw Avice squatting over the bookrack clearly and in more detail. The man below had a bloodied lip and a swollen eye from where Avice had hit him. There was no denying that from the sallowness of the man’s skin and his now sharp claws pinned under the rack, and the four protruding fangs growling at her and Avice, that he was also a vampire. Was that how he had been able to track them so well?
“It is useless,” the man said, spitting a loose tooth and bloodied saliva at Avice’s face. “They are on their way!”
They did not need to ask the man who he was talking about. Instinctively, she looked out through the now cracked window where the bullet had pierced through. All was quiet. She looked back at Avice and shook her head despairingly, but also to indicate that nobody else was there. Nobody out of the ordinary anyway.
“Are you getting any visions?”
“Nothing too accurately prescient,” she said. She was shaking from head to toe, as shock started to kick in, in addition to the fatigue lingering from the escape. That was the first time that a vision had come mere seconds before it had happened. Usually, it would have warned her an hour before. Was she beginning to lose her power?
The man then struggled under the combined weight of both Avice and the bookrack. Trying to move, his attempts were soon put to rest when Avice landed another blow to his head. The ponytailed man was then laid out on the floor, unmoving.
Books and magazine were strewn everywhere. Avice got up and brushed the dust off of himself. They saw the cashier peer out of the counter nervously. What was he more nervous of however – the fact that a gun had been fired, or the pale fanged man standing nearby?
“Call the police,” Avice said sternly, taking the gun from her and putting it in front of the old man still nervously peering out from his safe spot. “If this guy moves, or tries to run…,” Avice pointed at their attacker, “… shoot him.”
The cashier had a look on his face that clearly showed that he was the least likely out of those present to hold a gun, much less actually pull the trigger.
They got out of the convenience store in a hurry. The bus station was deserted. Those who had heard the gunshot knew better than to stick around and investigate the commotion.
“He… he said that there are others on their way, Avice.” Her voice was quiet, with the barest suggestion of a tremble.
“We will have to get out of here as soon as possible. If we are surrounded, that is it for us.”
Without a proper plan, he held on to her hand and they walked out into the uncertain darkness. Taking a road to the left, they headed for an open field nearby, walking through the muddy patches without a care as to what it was doing to the state of their clothes. Here, his eyes were the better suited to see if anybody was following them. Yarra struggled to keep up, as their footsteps sloshing into the deep recesses of water and soil. Mud flooded into her shoes, making her toes itch uncomfortably with every step they took.
Then he stopped, but not so suddenly as to give her the impression that something was wrong. “Baby…,” Avice said, turning to her, “…, I need you to tap into your precognition. It is the only way to find my friend.”
“How can I help?” she asked, slightly bewildered.
“She has the ability to hide herself and her home objects at whim. The only way you can find it is if you knew where exactly it was located.”
Yarra understood. If she could see into the future - a future where Avice and she are in this friend’s house - she would be able to retrospectively trace their way to their destination from her ‘memories’.
“How does your friend look like?” Yarra asked.
And Avice told her. “Old…, just imagine an old lady. Someone who is kind looking like that lady in our campus cafeteria!”
“Mrs. Thatchdale?” Yarra asked, amused. She would have never imagined that belligerent old hag to be described as ‘kind looking.’
“That’s the one!”
Yarra took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She imagined an ancient old lady, almost in her eighties – her experience evident in the heavy lines on her face.
Nothing appeared in her vision.
“I’m going to need more, Avice. Anything particularly different about her?”
“She also has wings on her head.”
“Say what?” Yarra opened her eyes in disbelief at that next part of the description, and the mental image that she had constructed vanished for a moment, such was her surprise. “Wings?”
“Yes, bat-like wings at the side of her head. They are quite small.”
Yarra did not know whether he was joking at first, but she was then starkly reminded of the fact that a year ago, she had not known that vampires and werewolves existed too. Sighing, she then imagined in her mind’s eye, an old lady with black bat wings.
Precognition was a funny thing. Sometimes it gave her what she wanted. Sometimes, it didn’t, particularly when she tried to force it. But tonight, it did.
Her mind’s eye saw Avice and her sitting in the warm living room of a small home. A small fire was crackling in the mantled fireplace, and an old lady sat on a plush armchair across them. Yarra saw herself and Avice talking to the lady in hushed voices. She was a mere observer of this future, unable to gain their attention. The old lady had a kind face that seemed very weathered, and a small scar that was too hard to ignore. Though minute in actual size, it had a grotesque keloid forming at the side of her neck. But aside from the scar, the other thing about this woman which caught Yarra’s attention was her head. T
here were batwings at each side of her head. Avice had not been lying. This woman, this friend of his was real. The vision would not have been so clear had he mistaken the details, and it would have jarred and flickered within her mind.
‘I see the home’, she thought. ‘But how do we get here?’
As if answering her own question, her vision began to peel away from the hall. It was as if she was being pulled by an unseen force, tugging at her navel. Thankfully, she had long since got used to the sensation to the point of no longer feeling sick. It took her out of the living room, then into the small hallway, and out of the house. She was then stood outside the house, next to the perimeter fencing consisting of a blue-painted wooden fence and a yellow mailbox. The force pulled her until she was being taken down the street like the rewinding of a tape recording, walking backwards and able to take in the passing details as the result. She moved away from the house, passing a lane decorated with a line of pine trees. All of the houses in the neighborhood were similar except for the colors of their walls and cars. The road continued to unfurl retrospectively, to a point, and then ceased as the vision sharply ended.
Yarra was back in the empty, dark field with Avice looking directly into her eyes with an expression of nervous expectation.
When she had fully returned to reality, she looked at him with a smile. “I know where to go.”
Chapter-3
Providence and Reunion
Just as her vision had played it on rewind, Yarra retraced the steps she had seen through her mind’s eye. They ran in the rain, with Avice’s eyes all the while darting in every direction to make sure that they were not being followed.
She took them down the lane with pine trees. “Almost there. It is a house with a blue fence and a yellow mail box.”
“That one?” he pointed out.
They stood a few yards away from the exact house. There was nothing particularly interesting about the house itself; old-style colonial house, and distinctly middle-class. Neither run down, nor lavishly luxurious.
“Odd. You said that your friend was good at hiding things. But we can see it…,” she said, as they crossed the road. Her feet crashed into a stagnant puddle on the ground, wetting her shoes and jeans.
“Well, she hides it, just not in the way that it turns invisible,” he explained. “She can render anything to become uninteresting. Imagine for a second that there is a pink elephant in the room with green polka dots.”
Yarra laughed at the request. “Okay.”
“Nainoru has the ability to make all eyes not fall on the very interesting object. It isn’t that they fail to see it. They just choose to not pay it any heed. It is the same with her and the house. The biggest form of invisibility is being ignored by the world. That is exactly Nainoru’s power,” he explained, as they pushed open the wooden gates.
The rain had reduced considerably, though it still showered upon them enough to keep them soaked to the skin – as if they were not already. She swore that they had not fully dried from the downpour that had occurred since getting off the bus.
Avice took a step forward, and knocked on the door. They both looked around the otherwise deserted street while waiting, half expecting for more members of the Keepers of the Blade to pop up. But no-one did. The distant sound of a wailing siren could be heard, possibly the local police heading to the convenience store after being alerted about a gunman. She wondered if the man would have possibly escaped. But he had seemed pretty injured from what her mate had done to him, in addition to having a bookcase land on him. Would he put up a fight if the police tried to subdue him? Or would he be smart and co-operate with the authorities so as to not reveal what he really was?
A click came from the door, and it creaked open slightly. They saw the orange light and warmth from inside leak out in indiscernible fragments. Only when her face felt the warm air did Yarra realize how soaked they both were outside the house. And cold, tired and hungry.
A face peered through the slight gap, and the eyes of their host widened at the sight of the two young adults.
“Nainoru…,” Avice said with a sigh of relief. “It’s me…, Avice.”
The woman’s eyes registered recognition at the sight of the young man in front of her. But still, she refused to part the door wider to let them in. “I know no such person.”
She was about to close the door when Avice placed a gentle hand on the door. “Please, Nainoru. I know it is you. I recognize your smell, even if it has been ten decades since we parted.”
“I don’t owe your clan anything, after what they tried to do to me! Have you come here to kill a poor, defenseless woman?” Nainoru asked. Her voice sharp with hurt and defiance. “Or has your mother asked you to drag me back by the poorly rooted hairs on my head?”
“I am no longer with the Keepers of the Blades,” Avice said. When he said it, Yarra heard the tinge of sadness and disbelief in his voice. He too, was still in shock with his own decision from twenty four hours ago.
“How do I know you are telling the truth?” Nainoru asked.
He had been waiting for her to ask that question. With a sigh, he removed the backpack and placed it on the wet concrete floor in front of them with a low thump. He proceeded to unzip his jacket, revealing his white shirt. Hoisting his shirt up, he revealed his toned abdomen, where his tattoo laid. Yarra was the first to notice that something was different, even if she could not immediately distinguish what. She, just like Nainoru, stared at the ink on his stomach. Nounari gasped.
“The hilt!” she said.
And then Yarra saw it too. When she had first seen it, it was whole, fluid, and even beautiful to look at. The shading was austere, almost as if he had grown with it on his skin since birth, growing with him instead of distorting as he had bulked out. Now though, the weapon had lost its allure, and the hilt of the blade had a patina of subtle rust – ugly, mismatched and broken.
“A mark of my shame.”
She had to concede that the handle now looked mismatched to the still grey blade. Fine lines cracked between the tattoo, signifying that the handle was now fragmented into four pieces.
She remembered when he had first explained about the tattoo on his body. It was not made out of mundane ink, but from crushed and melted grey Gem of Malia. The properties of the gem allowed it to be shaped even after it had been etched onto a person’s body. The leader of the clan had such power and remotely, she could had broken the handle off of Avice’s tattoo; a sign that she had excommunicated him from the Keepers of the Blade.
That seemed to assure Nainoru, and she sighed heavily. When she spoke, her voice had lost its pitch of anger, and was replaced with something more sympathetic. “When did you leave?”
“Yesterday.”
“And how did you find me? This place is hidden from roving eyes.”
Avice tucked his shirt in and looked at Yarra. “My girlfriend found you through precognition.”
They both saw Nainoru’s eyes widened again, now in amazement rather than surprise. “So the rumors were true. I did not want to believe it when I heard that Alicia Selleck had gotten herself another Oracle. But I guess that history has an odd way of repeating itself.”
Nainoru then laughed bitterly. Neither Yarra nor Avice understood what she meant by that, and so, remained patiently quiet.
“Come on in then,” Nainoru said, with a tone of decisive finality. The door closed and they heard the sliding of the chain lock. Only, it was not just one but hundreds, reverberating and echoing through the door.
Yarra looked at Avice questioningly, and he answered without even having to ask what her confusion was over. “Magic. It looks as if the door is barricaded by only one simple lock, but seeing that Nainoru is also running from the vampires as we now are, she has placed an array of spells and incantations on the house to make it impenetrable from the outside.”
When the door finally slid open fully, they were granted with the sight of a petite woman who barely reached up to Yarra’s
chest. She was ancient, shrewd, and looked quite silly in her blue muumuu. Just as Yarra had seen in her vision, two small leathery batwings were neatly folded to either side of her head.
Nainoru peered out beyond the doorway, and gestured for them to enter immediately. She walked ahead of them into the living room with a slight limp, muttering in a way that was both at them and to herself all in one. “Danger, danger everywhere. Don’t even know why I am helping you…, silly boy.”
She gestured for them to sit in the living room, throwing two warm bathrobes at them which they accepted graciously.
Yarra peeled off the first layer of her clothing and donned the bathrobe. She heard Avice sniffing behind her. When she turned around, she was surprised to see tears rolling down his eyes. He stood there, bathrobe in hand, still sopping wet from head to toe, and too overcome by Nainoru’s presence to even move.
“You left without a word, a hundred years ago…,” he finally said.
Love Beyond the wall (A Rizer Pack Shifter Series Book 1) Page 45