by Cheree Alsop
A grim grin that probably appeared like a snarl to the spectators crossed my face. I had this.
Each second matched the beat of my heart as I twisted and dove, ran, then paused before throwing myself into the next available watching position. No matter how many times I wanted to dart forward, I made myself wait for the count. The fresh air at the end of the tunnel drew closer. I didn’t allow it to make me careless. Instead, I counted to ten the way Julianne had taught me and willed my thoughts to remain calm. Within each beat, I memorized the motions of the blades. They lost their power as life-ending instruments able to cause pain and death; instead, I saw only objects to be dodged, game pieces to be avoided. In the back of my mind, I pretended I battled Drake for a chance to win the game. The thought kept me calm with its familiarity, and I found myself at the other end of the tunnel before I even realized it.
“I lost a finger,” Ross was in the middle of complaining when I emerged.
Ross and Rhett both shot me surprised glances.
“You’re harder to kill than you look,” Rhett said. His expression left little doubt how he felt about it.
I phased in the corner and pulled on my shorts. When I turned back around, I caught him staring at my back that had begun to bleed again as a result of the phase.
“What?” I snapped. “Happy to see me bleed?”
Rhett appeared momentarily ashamed. He shook his head as he turned away. “I didn’t know you weren’t healed from the lashing.”
I crossed my arms in front of my bare chest. “It doesn’t make a difference here.”
“Yeah,” Ross said as he wrapped a piece of cloth he had torn from his shorts around his hand to stop the bleeding from his missing index finger. “At least the blood means he’s not some kind of demon.”
“Demons bleed,” I replied quietly. I kept my gaze on Durnin’s tunnel. “Any sign of him?”
Rhett shook his head. The thick scent of blood from the tunnel was impossible to miss.
“I heard a scream,” Ross said.
Rhett nodded. “I did, too. I just hoped it wasn’t bad, but he’s not here.” His voice was gruff to hide how he felt about it. He turned away. “Come on. We’re almost done.” The cold detachment in his voice didn’t fool me. He couldn’t hide his sorrow at the loss of his friends, but he knew he had to keep going. I found myself respecting his strength even though I couldn’t understand the way he blindly followed Meg’s command.
Ross and I followed the werewolf out of the tunnel. The setting sun lit another branch of the canyon in golden light below us. Five ropes hung suspended from stakes in the ground.
“So we climb down and that’s it?” I asked hopefully.
Rhett glanced at me. “You can tell yourself that.”
“What?” I asked. I looked from him to Ross. “Tell me what I’m missing.”
Ross pointed without a word toward the other end of the canyon fork. I followed his finger to a huge cement barrier across the entire canyon.
“We climb another wall?” I guessed.
Rhett shook his head. “We survive.” He grabbed one of the ropes and walked toward the edge.
“We’ve done enough surviving,” I said. “This is stupid.”
When Ross ignored me and joined Rhett at the edge, I finally snapped. I grabbed Rhett’s throat and lifted him up so that we were eye to eye with his feet dangling over the edge of the canyon.
Surprise by my strength and his precarious situation showed on the eighteen-year-old’s face.
“What do we survive?” I growled.
“Th-that,” Rhett said, his voice tight past my grip. “Ross sh-showed you. Th-the dam.”
I took a step back so Rhett’s feet could touch the ground, but kept my grip on the taller boy’s throat. I looked at the wall and then back at him. “That’s a dam?”
Rhett nodded. “It’s holding the water back.”
“And then?” I prompted.
“When we reach the bottom of the canyon, they send the water down,” Ross said from where he waited at the edge.
Chapter Five
I let Rhett go. He hunched over with his hands on his knees and drew in a breath. The realization of what he was implying sunk in. My hands clenched into fists as I stared at the canyon.
“So we survive a flood,” I said. “That’s just great. And these are normal situations for werewolves?” I looked at Rhett and then Ross. “It doesn’t bother you that you have to survive these extremely unnatural scenarios in order to become a member of your pack? You know this is ridiculous!”
Rhett glanced at Ross, then met my gaze. “It may be ridiculous,” he began. His eyes found one of the cameras on a pole above us. He looked back at me and said, “But you don’t understand. There’s nowhere else to go. If we don’t pass the Gauntlet, we gladly go to the bears.”
I stared at him. “Why?”
His voice was heated when he replied, “Because a werewolf without a pack isn’t a wolf at all. We need each other to survive, to give us purpose, to exist for something other than ourselves. Without the Pack, we’re nothing.”
I shook my head. “Do you hear yourself? I’ve survived sixteen years without a pack of werewolves. You know why? It’s because I have friends! And they have my back just like I have theirs. They may not be werewolves, but they’re the only pack I need.” I motioned toward the canyon. “I don’t need this, but do you know why I’m doing it? I need to survive to free my best friend.”
“The vampire?” Ross asked with a tone of disgust at the word. He had lowered himself to sit on the edge of the wall as we talked
I nodded. “That vampire has saved my life many times, and I have saved his. We’ve bled together, been tortured, chased, stabbed, and burned, but we’re still here because we’ve got each other’s backs.”
For a moment, I saw through the stalwart wall that Rhett hid behind. His dark gaze flickered and the bravado that held his shoulders back and made him appear confident slipped.
“You might have all that,” he said quietly, “But we don’t. Our only chance at a real life is to receive the brand and be accepted into the Pack.” The wall came back up and he glared from me to Ross. “In order to do that, we need to survive the flood. I’m going down.” He grabbed the rope and swung over. “It’s your funeral if you choose to stay up here.”
I watched them climb down several feet before I eased myself over. It wasn’t like I actually had a choice. I may have had a pack back at the Academy, but I wouldn’t be returning to it if I didn’t survive the flood. The last thing I wanted to experience was being fed to bears. I had already faced one demon-possessed bear in my lifetime, and one was more than enough.
True to Rhett’s word, the floodgates on the dam opened the moment our feet hit the ground. The roar of the raging water echoed so loud within the canyon walls I had to fight back the urge to cover my ears.
“Find something to grab onto,” Rhett told Ross and me. He met my gaze. “And whatever you do, don’t let go until we’ve gotten past the first rush. You’ll be swept under by the debris.”
He grabbed the trunk of a twisted tree that grew at the base of the canyon wall. Ross ran to the other side and did the same. Panicked and with nowhere to run, I found a thick root that had pushed its way through the wall at about shoulder height. I grabbed the root with both hands and gritted my teeth.
Within seconds, the wall of water was upon us. The raging, twisting, rushing wave carried trees, bushes, branches, dirt, leaves, and anything else that it swept up along its course. A huge trunk thicker than I was tall swept past inches from my face, and then the water crashed over me.
It took every ounce of strength I possessed to maintain my grip. The suffocating water pounded against me with the force of a dozen raging bears. Branches battered me from side to side and a trunk slammed into my head so hard my skull rebounded off the rock wall behind me. Dazed, it was only the fact that I had slipped my arm through the root and held it with my other hand that kept me ther
e.
Sometime during the pounding, I had let go of the last of my air. I had to breathe. The sensation of drowning wasn’t new to me, yet it carried the same panic-edged urgency of the night Sebastian drowned. Though the current was still too strong to fight, I was out of options.
I shoved away from the wall in what I hoped was an upward direction, but the moment I let go of the root, the force of the water sent me tumbling end over end. I swam, but didn’t know which way was up. The debris that rushed around me flipped me in a summersault into a log with such force I lost what little remained of my breath. Water burned in my nose and my eyes could make out nothing through the mud-filled liquid. I clawed at anything I could reach.
Just past the log, my hand closed on something that didn’t belong in the sharp tumble of debris. The texture was softer than the branches that scratched against me, but firm. I realized with a start that it was a foot. Following it down, I found that whoever it belonged to was trapped beneath the log. Scrambling with the last bit of strength I had left, I managed to free us both from the log.
Clear of the debris, I yanked backwards and the body followed. Glancing up through the dark haze that pressed against the edges of my mind, I saw a glimmer of light. I pushed off the log and dragged us both upwards.
My head broke the surface just before the darkness in my mind won. I sucked in a deep breath and coughed at the water I had gulped with it. I shoved the body up and went under again. With a final, desperate surge, I managed to grab the other person around the chest.
My watery gaze made out the side of the wall just feet away from where I struggled to keep our heads above the surface. With slow strokes impeded by the body I towed, I fought to reach the wall. Finally, my fingers brushed the rough side. The water carried us for several yards until I managed to snag the branches of a bush. My movements slow and exhausted, I inched the body out of the water onto the small outcropping where the bush grew. It felt like hours before I could pull myself up as well.
“Rhett,” I said, my voice scratchy from breathing in the water. “Rhett, breathe.”
A mouse wouldn’t have heard my whisper.
Using the very last of my reserves, I slapped Rhett’s bare chest.
“Breathe,” I growled.
When the sound of his breath refused to meet my ears, I did the very last thing I could. I struggled to my feet on the little shelf and then collapsed on top of him. My shoulder hit his chest with such force that he started to cough. I pushed him weakly to his side and watched as he coughed out more water than he probably drank in a day.
“Breathe,” I was finally able to bring myself to say again.
Rhett looked up at me. “Finn?” he said with confusion in his gaze.
I nodded. “You just survived the final Gauntlet.”
Together, with slow, agonizing movements, we climbed to the top of the canyon and the group waiting beyond. I collapsed to my knees and watched Roundy run up and gather his son in a tight hug.
“I’m so proud of you!” the werewolf said. “You did it! You really did it!”
“That was amazing,” another werewolf told Rhett.
“Good job,” a woman said.
I caught several curious gazes and turned my attention to the ground in front of my knees. In the growing darkness, the earth looked soft and inviting.
I was contemplating curling up to sleep then and there when a hand touched my shoulder.
“You saved my son’s life. How could I ever repay you?”
I looked up to find Roundy standing above me.
“A blanket?” I replied. My body shivered. I didn’t know if it was from the freezing water we had just survived or if shock was setting in from what we had been through.
Roundy chuckled and helped me to my feet. “Get these boys some blankets!” he called out. He pulled me into a tight hug that surprised me. “Thanks for saving my boy. I don’t know what I’d do without him,” he said sincerely.
When he let me go, a woman wrapped a blanket around my shoulders.
“Come on, Finn,” Rhett said from behind his father.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Rhett smiled at me for the fist time since we had met. “Time to get branded.”
Roundy and Rhett walked on either side of me. To my surprise, instead of returning to the Den for some sort of ceremony, the werewolves with Roundy had already started a fire. They moved so Rhett and I could get close enough to dry ourselves with the warmth.
After a few minutes interspersed with congratulations and teeth chattering, Roundy pulled something from the fire.
He held up a length of metal that glowed at the end in a shape that matched the wolf head on his forearm.
“Time to become a member of the Pack,” he said to us.
Rhett gestured to me. “Finn first.”
I shook my head. At his surprise, I said, “You’ve waited a lot longer for this.”
With a grin that showed the gap in his teeth, Rhett held out his forearm. A hiss escaped him when his father pressed the brand to his arm, but he didn’t pull away. When Roundy removed the brand and placed it back in the fire, the red, angry, raised mark on the boy’s arm showed in stark contrast in the moonlight.
“It’ll heal quickly,” Roundy said, indicating the moon above us. “I’m proud of you, son.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Rhett replied. He turned to me. “You’re next.”
The thought of Vicken waiting chained and wounded with my brand as his only means of escape made me hold out my arm. I sucked in a breath when Roundy put the brand to it. His gaze traveled down my arm to the name written across the inside of my wrist.
“Who’s Sparrow?” he asked.
“My dragon,” I replied. At their surprised stares, I said, “She’s with a friend right now.”
A pang of sadness filled me as soon as the words left my lips. The baby sylph dragon who had chosen me on her hatching day and sacrificed herself to save my life had been with Alden when I left Haunted High to free my parents from monster killers, but she had vanished a few days before I returned. I had no idea where she was or how she was surviving in the city. I fought back the feeling of hopelessness at trying to find her. The only hope I had was that she would return to the Academy on her own. But how could a baby dragon ever hope to navigate such a huge city and return home?
“There,” Roundy said, pulling the brand away. “Now it’s official.”
He handed the metal rod to one of his pack members and clapped Rhett and me on the back. “Welcome to the Pack, boys!”
Applause and cheers followed his words. The other members of the Pack were in the middle of their congratulations when headlights appeared further down the road. Two sets, then four, then a dozen trucks bounced up the dirt road at speeds far faster than should have been safe. The first truck slid to a stop near Roundy.
“What the—” he began.
“What’s going on here?” Meg cut off when she shoved the door open and climbed out. A cloud of dirt puffed up when her shoes hit the ground. She slammed the door and stormed over to Roundy. “I demand answers!”
“We branded them,” Roundy said with a grin. “They survived the Gauntlet. They’re members of the Pack now.”
“They’re members of the Pack now,” Meg repeated in a mocking imitation of his voice. “Did you see what I saw, Roundy, or did I miss something?”
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Roundy said with a confused expression.
Meg looked back at the Pack members who were climbing out of the trucks to join her. “Did these two survive the Gauntlet according to all of the rules?” she asked.
Fear flickered on Roundy’s face. I saw him take a step forward to place himself between Meg and his son.
“No,” Stix said when he reached Meg’s side. His face was hard when he continued with, “They didn’t obey all of the rules.”
“What are you talking about?” Roundy demanded. “Of course they did. They survived,
didn’t they? They’re standing right here!”
A hint of sorrow brushed Meg’s face only to disappear so fast when she looked at Rhett that I could have imagined it. “What happened under that water, Rhett? Did you swim to the surface all by yourself, and by yourself, did you climb onto that ledge to get free of the flood?”
I caught Rhett’s intake of breath before he shook his head. “I was trapped. I-I couldn’t get free from the log. I was drowning until—”
“Until what?” Meg prompted with a falsely sweet voice.
Rhett swallowed audibly and then said, “Until Finn managed to free me.”
“That’s right,” Meg replied in the same sweet voice. “And what is one of the rules of the Gauntlet?”
Rhett hung his head. “No assistance is allowed.”
Meg snapped her fingers. “Yes, that’s it.” She repeated his words in a singsong voice. “No assistance is allowed.” She turned on Roundy and all mockery vanished to leave only steel in her gaze. “You branded them falsely, Roundy.”
Roundy’s eyes were clouded with tears when he shook his head. “No. They survived, Meg. You have to have a heart. They deserve to be members of our Pack. They showed their strength. They were the only ones who survived!”
“Survived falsely,” Meg spat. “I won’t welcome cheaters into our Pack, and you did so knowing they broke the rules.”
Her gun cleared its holster before Roundy could defend himself. Two shots rang out.
“Dad!” Rhett shouted.
He caught his father as Roundy collapsed to the ground. Blood trickled from the two holes in the man’s chest. More blood spilled from where Rhett’s hands clung desperately to his father’s back. Roundy gave his son one last smile, and then his breath left him in a rattling gasp. Rhett could only stare as the life left his father’s gaze and his head fell to the side.