by Lynn Red
With a grunt, Damon sat down and then gave a weary sigh. Sitting on the table in front of him was a folder with a bunch of printed out papers that he opened and started absent-mindedly thumbing through.
“Now, good. Take a few breaths.”
Damon grunted his assent, but stared intently at whatever it was in front of him, which in turn, drew Joe’s attention.
“What is all that?” he said. “Lily’s story?”
Sucking a breath through his nose, Damon said, “No, it’s just notes but...”
“Anyway, how do you know that this young Carak has her?”
“Who else would?” Damon answered. “Wouldn’t make sense.”
Pushing his glasses up on his forehead and pinching the bridge of his nose, Joe leaned back in his chair. “What if she just needed some time alone? I mean, you two have been pretty intense these last few weeks.”
“Uh-huh. Could be.”
“Damon? Are you paying attention to me?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Joe relaxed his legs and the chair legs hit the floor one after the other, jolting Damon upright. He went right back to rifling through the papers. One after another, he stared at whatever was on them, scanned from top to bottom, and then went on to the next one. Soon, a pile of roughly stacked papers sat underneath his right hand as he stared at another.
“Have you read any of these?” he said as he turned another one face down. When he finally looked up at Joe, Damon’s face had gone a little gray.
“No,” Joe replied. “Why? They’re just papers for her story.”
Damon’s hands were trembling. “She,” he swallowed, “she talked to Poko. He told her more than he ever told me. About my parents, the clans, everything.”
“Ah,” Joe trailed off, pulling in a deep breath and rocking his chair backward again. “I suppose you had to find out sometimes. Is that the one about—”
“We used to be one clan? One clan? Why was I never told this? Why did he lie to me?”
It was the older man’s turn to stand up. He took his cup of coffee with him, more for something to hold onto than to drink. “I never liked it,” he said. “I didn’t understand what happened then, and I still don’t.”
“I just... how is this possible? Why did he never tell me?”
“Tell you what, son?” Joe circled the table and bent over Damon’s shoulder.
“That when he killed Devin’s elder, he separated the clans? That the Carak and Skarachee used to be the same clan?” Damon’s heart sank as he read further. “Oh no,” he said, his voice trailing off. “Oh my God, this can’t be true.”
Joe read ahead and knew what he was about to say, but all he did was squeeze the younger man’s shoulders. “He did it for a reason, Damon. They were wild, they wanted to be—”
“He’s my brother.”
Damon stood up from the table, pushing the chair backwards, scuffing against the linoleum. “It’s true, isn’t it? Why the hell did Poko never tell me? He’s been getting me ready for some... I don’t know, some ritual transformation, feeding me all this stuff about Lily being my mate. And he just left off the part that the Carak alpha, Devin, the guy I’ve been talking about murdering if he hurts Lily... is my brother.”
“Does it make any difference?” Joe said. “Do you still think he has her?”
“I know he does,” Damon said. “And no, it doesn’t make any difference. Except that now I know why I can feel him. Now I know why I can smell him even when he’s a hundred miles away. And I know why he keeps healing just like me.”
He slammed his hands on the table.
“Where are you going?” Joe said, suddenly very afraid for the answer.
“To get my mate. Poko didn’t tell me because he wanted to protect me.”
Joe tilted his head in agreement.
“I don’t need his protection anymore. I’m doing this on my own, I don’t care what happens. I’m getting her back.”
He pushed past the table, straight out the back door. The swinging screen caught a wind and thumped against the house before coming back closed.
“Good,” Joe said under his breath. “You’re exactly the man he thinks you are.”
As the young man pushed open the door and stepped into the late afternoon sun, Joe turned back to the living room and addressed what seemed to be a discarded pile of laundry.
“I don’t know why you insisted on hiding, Pokorann, but you can come out now, old friend.”
Poko stood, slowly stretching his back and extending his arms above his head. “You’re the only one who remembers that name,” he chuckled. “Skarachee can sense each other,” he said. “It took all my concentration to hide myself from him, but I needed to know.”
“Know what?” Joe asked, running his hands through his thinning hair. “If that bastard really does have Lily, I’ll—”
Poko smiled one of his Cheshire grins, sightless, white eyes gleaming. “She is safe, dear friend. She is in the clutches of the Carak alpha, but my cub is...” the ancient man shook his head. “Damon is ready. His transformation began when he cast aside his doubt and refused my help. This other one, this Carak alpha, he...”
Joe chewed on his lip. “He’s what, Poko?”
“He is wild and undisciplined. He fights, but does not know why. He cannot win. Damon, he fights for a purpose, and because he believes in something. His mind is as sharp as his body is strong.”
“What does he fight for? The clans?” Joe asked.
“No,” Poko smiled. “For love.”
*
The bike roared to life, the throttle pumping against Damon’s thighs in time with his pounding heart.
He reached to the tooth pendant that Poko gave him, the one that always hung around his neck, but it took a second when all he felt was bare skin to remember he’d snuck it into Lily’s pocket that night.
That night, he remembered, when he marked her, made her his; that night felt like a million years ago as desert road disappeared into the horizon behind Damon’s thumping engine.
His bike pointed due south, a direction Damon never went if he could help it. No matter what his relation to Devin actually was, and no matter what the Carak used to be, he avoided the south because Poko always told him that’s where they made their lairs. Somewhere out in the desert between Arizona and the southern-California wasteland, the Carak reigned.
“Hell of a kingdom,” Damon said with a snort as he pulled to the shoulder to try and get his bearings. “Hope it was worth it.”
Turning left and right, he scanned the horizon with his inhumanly sharp vision, smelled the air with his impossibly attuned nose. Aside from the three saguaro cactuses off to his left, one of which had a vulture sitting on top of it that reminded him of an old Western movie, there was nothing to see. No life, not even a tiny lizard or anything of the sort, scurried in front of him. It was just... dead.
His boots scraped against the ground. Damon dug his toe into a crack as a hot wind blew across the desert, and he pried up a scale of earth, kicking it down the way.
Lifting his head to the dusky sky, Damon stared up at a streak of Milky Way, then to a couple of dippers. With a sidelong glance, he looked over at the sun, which was still about a half-hour from fully set.
Wait, how am I seeing stars?
Then he smelled the air. How had he not noticed before? His brother’s scent was so clear to Damon that he may as well have had a marked-out line on a GPS screen. He looked back and forth, squinted his eyes in thought.
Is this the transformation? But what about the ritual? Riding a motorcycle halfway to nowhere isn’t much of a rite of passage.
Still, something was different. Lifting a hand as a slight breeze kicked up, Damon felt tiny flecks of dust strike his fingertips and roll slowly around them. When he looked back up to the sky, he saw a comet that he was certain he’d never seen before.
He wondered, but shook his head anyway, casting off the thoughts. Whatever it was had to wait, his mate
needed him. Almost immediately he said, “Lily,” out loud, like he was testing the words. “She’s not ‘my mate,’ she’s more than that,” he grumbled, throwing his leg back over the saddle of his motorcycle and kicking the throttle. “She’s more than a mate, more than a thing... she’s...”
Damon finished, but the bike’s engine blasted off, drowning out all the sounds.
Pulling another lung full of dusty air, he caught Devin’s odor further south, though the road turned west.
“You’re not getting away from me,” he growled. “Not a chance in hell.”
Digging his heel into the ground, Damon twisted his handlebars and revved the engine. His back tire spun, screaming against the pavement like a monsoon’s opening thunder peal washing over a valley.
As the rubber hit the dirt, it almost slid, but he kept his balance. Suddenly, the tires went quiet, muffled by the hard, cracked earth.
Leaning forward, he pushed the bike as hard as it would go, and heard something off in the distance. Something desperate, like a scream, caught his attention from somewhere straight ahead, in the same direction as he caught Devin’s scent. A grin flashed across Damon’s face, even though he knew what was coming.
In a way, he looked forward to finding his brother, and to whatever was about to happen.
He was going to get Lily. He didn’t care what it took, or how hard he had to fight.
Nothing else mattered. Not Poko, not the clan, not the ancient mysteries of his people. All that, he thought, would work out. All of that would come.
But none of it would be worth anything unless he had his Lily.
Behind him as he roared across the open desert, the moon rose. Ahead of him the sun sank into the horizon.
Damon’s vision didn’t change. Every detail, every crack in the ground, it was all there for him to see. His eyes had either adjusted immediately to the darkness, or didn’t need to at all.
Power coursed through his veins. His nerves all seemed to come to life at once, every synapse of his brain firing in tandem with the others. He turned briefly and stared at the fat, pale disc that had just separated itself from the horizon. As the silver light filled his eyes, he felt a palpable sense of excitement.
In a way, it was similar to how he felt the first time Lily kissed him. Trepidation, anxiousness and warmth spread from his head to his fingertips, all at once.
He grunted with a smile. Was this it? Was this what it felt like when his entire world changed? Off in the distance, he heard another sound of scratching... on concrete? Was he hearing fingernails on a cement wall?
Damon cocked his head and squinted into the horizon. Silver light, impossible to have come from the moon, at least for human eyes, lit the world for him, but when he closed his eyes, he could see and sense and feel and taste everything, like his senses had become something else.
Like he had transformed.
Quickly, he glanced at his hands, which he found to be perfectly normal. No claws, no black hair, just normal Damon hands. It was still coming. This was just the beginning.
A sniff caught Devin’s scent again, confirming that all the things he sensed were in the same direction, although he didn’t much need to confirm that. He just knew.
It wasn’t just Devin he sensed.
Smelling the air again he noticed a softer scent, a fainter one. It was vaguely sweet, just a little hint of patchouli. “Lily,” he said under his breath. “He’s got you. I knew it.”
Those screams, the fingernails, the muffled, deadened scent, Damon’s realization grew as he ground his jaws together.
“You’re not getting away with this, brother, not now and not ever. I just hope you’re ready.”
Far in the distance, probably twenty miles from where he was, Damon’s wild vision saw a little clumping of houses, desert shacks, which everyone from town called the roach motels. They were supposedly little huts set up by vagrants or drug addicts or whoever else the scape-goat of the moment was. All kinds of ridiculous stories about what sorts of horrible things they got up to in them flooded his mind.
But Damon knew what they really were.
The Carak, when Poko banished them, were forced out of the forest, out of the mountains where wolves belonged. Forced away from Carey’s Bluff, that sacred place, and out into the desert.
There was a reason that people who wandered this far out in the Sonora never came back, but it didn’t have a single damn thing to do with rogue homeless people or illegal immigrants.
It was getting hard to tell the difference between what he was seeing with his physical eyes and what he was sensing with his soul, but it hardly mattered.
Lightning flashed behind him, almost blinding Damon with the pulse of white light before it immediately faded.
The wheels turned, rasping over scrub brush, over cracks in the sand.
Wheels screamed over the desert, crunching the dirt underneath them.
He sensed there were three people, and six houses, in front of him.
“Are you alone out there, brother? Are you doing this all by yourself? You won’t get away with this.”
Damon’s sense of life signs was a thump in the back of his head. A warm, pulsing thud-thud-thud, like vitals on a heart monitor, they echoed in his consciousness. Two of them he knew, but the third was a mystery.
It was weak though. Very, very weak, almost snuffed out.
Only five or six minutes separated the hunter from his prey.
A phantom pain stung Damon’s shoulder, then his ribs burned with the memory of the damage done last time the two met.
It didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered. He’d die if he had to. He’d kill if he had to, though he vaguely hoped it didn’t come to that.
Nothing mattered except Lily, and as the little clutch of roach motels came into physical view, another smile crept across Damon’s face.
He wasn’t leaving without her.
Of that, he was certain. The alpha wasn’t leaving without his mate, without his love, without his Lily.
No matter what.
“Brother,” he snarled, seeing a lurching, jerking form out front of one of the houses. “I wonder if you know about me.”
Damon narrowed his vision, revved his engine one last time, and skidded to a stop.
A moment later, he was bounding through the air with strength, with speed that he’d never had. One step carried him four feet. One bounding leap went ten.
Damon felt his brother just inside the house, and dove forward, driving his hands through a shutter, spraying wood shards all around. An instant later, he closed both his fists around his brother’s throat, and yanked with all his might, pulling him through the window and throwing Devin to the ground.
With teeth flashing in Damon’s new, silver-tinged vision, his brother sprang to his feet, snarling.
Damon unleashed a throaty, husky roar.
Devin’s dagger-like teeth glimmered in the moonlight, and he took a wild slash. His claws caught Damon across the chest, cutting deep.
“What hope... do you have... like that?” Devin said, his voice halting, mocking, and painfully tight in his throat.
Damon’s feet left the ground. Hands were now crushing his throat. No, not hands. Claws.
With little more than a flick of the wrist, Devin hurled his brother backwards, battering him against sunbaked bricks. He knelt down and stared deep into Damon’s eyes, yellow irises burning as Devin’s claws scratched the sides of Damon’s neck.
Damon sucked air, as best he could, but he was fading.
His vision went gray, then it went black.
“No,” he whispered, rasping over the clawed hand that crushed his life. “Not like... this...”
Eighteen
It wasn’t until the moon was high in the sky and the little pool of light on the floor spread along the entire bottom step of the cellar that I summoned the courage to move.
Okay, to be honest, saying that I did it on my own is a little dishonest. I was sitt
ing on the floor, crouched low and trying to listen for anything that I could when there were a few banging sounds outside, and the walls kinda shuddered.
The stairs were, I figured, about ten steps from the floor to the ceiling. That far underground, it was hard to hear any voices, or really figure out what was going from the banging and the booming, but there was definitely something violent happening.
When it all started, my first instinct was to grab the tooth that hung around my neck and squeeze it with all my strength. I clenched my eyes shut and stared deep inside myself, visualizing Damon. I saw him come through that cellar door, the moonlight framing his beautiful body.
I imagined him descending the stairs, looking down at me with those soft, smoldering green eyes, and then picking me up and taking me away from all this... this pain, and this darkness.
And then I heard the other noise.
“Are... hello?” The tiniest voice I’d ever hear called out. “Is someone there?”
“Who’s that?” I called back. “Cat?”
I knew her voice when I heard it, but she sounded so vulnerable, so defeated, that it hardly seemed possible. Knowing her other option was to have been killed by Devin, this one was better, but not much.
“Is that you, Cat?” I asked again when she didn’t answer the first time.
With my hands on the concrete floor, scooting forward to make sure I didn’t step on any nails, or bump into a saw blade or something, I moved in the direction of her voice. “Talk to me, Cat, I can’t get to you unless you make noises.”
“How’s that?” A voice boomed upstairs. It sounded like Devin, but he was so crazed, so ferocious, that he wasn’t himself.
Who could he be... oh no, no I can’t think about that. Probably just some other desert dweller. Caraks fight all the time right? Maybe just another one of them?
Momentarily I clutched the fang again, hoping against hope that the strained, ragged gasping that I suddenly heard through the floor above my head wasn’t Damon. No time to think about that, anyway.
“Talk to me, Cat,” I said again.
A few feet away, ahead and off to my left, I heard trembling breaths. The sort of frightened, shaking breath that you take when you’re trying your best not to be heard, but you still have to breathe.