Courts and Cabals 2

by G. S. D'Moore

  “Let me call the docs to get you something,” he suggested.

  I appreciated the offer, but the last bout seemed to clear everything out. “No, I’m good,” I sagged against the wall, as my stomach started to settle. “Let’s get this over with so I can get the hell out of here.”

  The miracle in all of this was that I hadn’t shit or puked all over myself. I washed up, and rejoined the two shifters in the hallway. Becky gave me an apprehensive look, but I ignored her.

  “Last door on the left,” Vernon stated, and led the way.

  I made it about three steps before a spasm shook my whole body. This time, it wasn’t my stomach. It was like someone hit my bones with a tuning fork. Pain exploded everywhere, stars burst in my eyes, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor.

  “What the fuck, Dupree?” Becky wasn’t buying it, but Vernon looked genuinely concerned.

  “I . . .” I couldn’t get anything else out. My throat closed up like I was having an allergic reaction; except, I wasn’t allergic to anything.

  “Fuck it, I’m calling the . . .” Vernon was cut off as the door behind us burst open and a team of EMT’s rushed in with a stretcher. “Thank the gods, I . . .”

  “We’ll check on him later, we’ve got . . .” the team leader was already running past them and down to the last door on the left.

  “What the hell?” Vernon watched the EMT’s head for their destination. “Somethings wrong.”

  “No shit, sherlock,” I coughed. Dark red splashed across the rug. “What the hell is going on?” I groaned, as more pain lanced through me. You could have offered me a billion dollars to move an inch, and I couldn’t have done it. That’s how much this fucking hurt. That was saying a lot since I’d literally been impaled on the end of a troll’s sword.

  “Come on,” Vernon scooped me up in his arms like I was some helpless baby.

  It hurt like a motherfucker, and I’ll admit I started to cry. My entire body was rebelling for no reason.

  “He’s fucking with you, Vernon,” Becky still looked skeptical.

  “He’s coughing up blood,” the werewolf shot back. “Somethings up. I can feel a disturbance . . .” he trailed off, because the EMT’s came bursting out of the room with a body on the stretcher.

  Whoever they were, they looked like battered shit. My guess would be some woman who’d just been curb stomped by an angry mob of sexists. It was that fucking bad. Her face was black and blue, lips split and bleeding. Blood streamed from her nose, mouth, eyes, and fresh puke was all over her front. As they wheeled her toward us, her body went into convulsions.

  I could relate to that. As the EMTs got closer, the more pain racked my body. It felt like an angry god was hammer-fisting me for shits and giggles while I lay there helpless. Even Vernon struggled to hold on to me as I thrashed. At some point in the epileptic fit, my eye met the battered woman’s.

  I had no idea what she looked like under the blood and bruises, but her eyes – the blue in them – triggered something in my memory. The eyes were windows to the soul, and I felt like I was falling into them, and she was falling into me. I saw flashes of a desert with wild animals running all around. A kid laughed and played. Then there was a beach, people everywhere; and water, it curled over me to form a tunnel I slid through on a board.

  “Not me,” my brain told me as the electrical signals in my nervous system went into overdrive.

  I didn’t know how to surf. The girl was in my head, and I was in hers. It was so familiar, and at the same time, so foreign. I thought I’d been mindfucked before, but this girl had a huge fucking dick for her mind and it was fucking the shit out of me.

  “Wait,” Vernon yelled as the EMT team raced toward us. “We need to . . .” he never got to finish.

  They kept coming, and once they were a few feet away, I felt power inside me activate. Not my Fae power, but the thing that made me other. Fire and lightning raced through me in an avalanche of sensation. All the pain vanished, but my back arched as pure power raced through me. I didn’t see it, but the same thing happened to the girl.

  “Stop!” Vernon yelled.

  The EMTs pumped the brakes when confronted by an angry werewolf, but it was too late. My finger gently grazed the outstretched hand as the girl on the stretcher skidded by me . . . and the whole world went to hell in a handbasket. I felt reality lurch, and it wasn’t just in my head. The whole building heaved like it had its own bout of food poisoning.

  I heard concrete crack, steel buckle, and glass shatter; all to the backdrop of people screaming in horror. The lurch threw everyone in the hallway to the side, so we landed in a heap. Despite the jarring movement, my finger was still attached to the girl like some type of magnet.

  “Get them apart,” Vernon yelled, as he tossed aside EMTs like dirty laundry to get to me. “Becky, quick, or we’re all dead!”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. All the pain was gone, and I felt good; really fucking good. The connection with this mysterious woman gave me strength, power, and some unknown reassurance. I didn’t believe in a capital G god like the monotheists; not when I’d met people like Lark and Venus. However, at this moment, I felt a higher power smiling down on me. It felt awesome.

  Vernon wanted to end that. He grabbed me around the waist and pulled, while Becky grabbed the battered woman. They stretched us out to our full length, so only the tips of our fingers touched like Michelangelo’s fresco of The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I felt Vernon’s muscles strain around me as he pulled, and I saw a vein on Becky’s neck protrude as she put all her effort behind it. Still, our fingers wouldn’t come undone.

  I felt the double wave of magic as the two shifters exploded into masses of muscle and fur. Suddenly, eight feet of hulking werewolf surrounded me, and I was looking at a hot-as-fuck lioness who’d shredded a good deal of her clothes in the transformation. From the look on Becky’s face, she didn’t care one of her tits had busted out of her bra. She looked afraid.

  “But it’s so glorious!” I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The fire and lightning that filled me was a blessing, not a curse. I knew that now. I was meant for this, whatever this was.

  “On three,” Vernon commanded. “One . . . two . . . three!” the two shifters threw their combined, considerable strength into it.

  I felt the power connecting me and the woman give, and something ripped. We flew apart from the pressure being exerted by the shifters. I went flying backwards, still enclosed in Vernon’s arms. There was a jarring sensation as we hit the door more than a dozen feet behind us, and went through it into the impressive foyer. Blinding light swarmed all over me, and I closed my eyes with a groan as exhaustion seeped into every fiber of my being. It felt like I’d just run a marathon, as a human, with a hundred pounds sack on my shoulders, and on only one leg. I was fucking beat.

  “Get him out of here!” someone yelled before I shut my eyes and gave into the exhaustion.

  “I’m just going to rest my eyes for a minute,” I told myself before the darkness took me. “Then I’ll figure out what the fuck is going on.”

  ***

  The car door slammed shut and woke me out of my stupor. “I’m up,” I groaned, but it was drowned out by the revving of the car’s engine.

  “Shut up and stay down,” Vernon snapped.

  That wasn’t a problem. I felt like hammered shit. Laying down, with the cool leather seat pressed against my aching face, was fine by me. I slid back against the seat as Vernon floored it. We wound around in circles, so we must have been in some underground parking garage. Finally, the car tilted upward and burst into the light.

  There were also screams, sirens, and every other sound imaginable associated with a major tragedy.

  “What . . .?” I started to lift my head up.

  “Stay down,” Vernon reached behind the seat and shoved me back into the leather; but not before I saw it.

  The ground level of the UN building wa
s a clusterfuck. Emergency vehicles were lined up bumper to bumper trying to get into the scene. People littered the sidewalks and road around it; some wrapped in gauze, and others caring for the injured. It was mankind at its best; helping others, but it only came out under the worst circumstances. Cops were everywhere roping off a perimeter several blocks wide, but they waved the UN SUV through the chaos.

  Seeing the chaos was enough to know some serious shit had gone down. The last time Manhattan had seen something like this was the 9/11 attempts. Sure, the wards on the Trade Center turned the planes that tried to take them down into metal pancakes, but the hunk of mass had to go somewhere. The ruined planes dropped to the earth and still caused dozens of deaths, hundreds of injuries, and millions in property damage. Even with magic, nothing was perfectly safe.

  The UN building probably had better wards than any other New York skyscraper, but those wards were designed to protect from external threats. “Gods,” my jaw dropped as I looked at the top of the UN HQ.

  It looked like a pissed off dragon had taken a swipe at the building. A section of the top half dozen floors had been ripped out. Smoke was pouring out of it from electrical fires that were still raging inside. Even fifteen minutes later, papers and debris were still raining down everywhere.

  I poked my head up and shifted my gaze to the people on the sidewalk. New York City was called the city that never sleeps, and that’s because people were always on the move. Not today. Today, everyone was motionless and staring at the UN. A hallmark of the New York skyline had been gutted, and the surprise, shock, and fear on people’s faces was palpable.

  “Did I do that?” I felt myself getting sick again, but I swallowed it like a man.

  It was hard to piece everything together. Everything had been muddled by pain, and then . . . a glorious sense of total completeness. I’d never felt that before . . . never. Not when I was adopted after spending years in an orphanage. Not when I’d made my first lasting friends at St. Vincent’s, and not when I was balls deep in a perfect 10 like Dani or Xamira. Nothing even compared to the totality of that moment when the mysterious girl and I were connected.

  That overshadowed everything else, and I barely remembered the ripping sensation. “Not my fault,” I told myself so I didn’t put that kind of body count on my shoulders. “Not my fault,” I didn’t like the fact that I was having to convince myself of that.

  “Okay,” Vernon’s eyes darted around the area looking for potential threats. “You can sit up now.”

  The action sent a shockwave through my system, which helped fight off the grogginess. I still whimpered like a beat dog as I settled into a sitting position in the center of the middle seats.

  “What the fuck was that?” Vernon snarled, as he tried not to look like he was fleeing the scene of the crime.

  “What was what?” I wasn’t trying to be a smart ass, but the werewolf took it that way.

  He slammed on the breaks, nearly making the next car rear-end us, and twisted around in his seat to grab me by the neck. His giant hand engulfed my throat, and he squeezed gently. His fingers were like the jaws of a mechanical vise; easily strong enough to compress the arteries and my windpipe. If he wanted to, he could end me right here and now.

  “I felt what happened back there,” the shifter’s composure was gone. His eyes shone like the harvest moon, and I could tell he was losing control. His inner wolf was trying to break free and tear my throat out.

  “I felt reality itself rebelling against what you were doing,” he snarled, spittle flying into my face. “The very fabric of this realm was trying to stop you. So, for the last time, tell me what the fuck you were doing; or I swear to all the gods, high and low, that I will rip off your fucking head and leave your body in a dumpster.”

  His hand clenched a quarter inch tighter and I gagged as air refused to work its way into my lungs. It took the big guy a moment to realize I was trying to answer before he eased up on the asphyxiation.

  “I don’t know,” I coughed. “I don’t go about giving myself raging diarrhea or epileptic fits,” I massaged my throat and glared at him. “You’re a fucking mage, tell me what the fuck was happening. You seem to know a hell of a lot more than me.”

  The shifter swore under his breath as he turned back to the road and hit the accelerator. People all around us were honking, but the werewolf obviously didn’t give a shit.

  “I don’t know what was happening. All I know was it was profoundly wrong.”

  “No shit,” I didn’t push him, but it was obvious to me that spewing rancid things out of the majority of the holes in my body was profoundly wrong.

  “Who was the girl doing a great impression of hamburger helper?” I asked, when he didn’t say anything else. Her eyes had burned themselves into my brain, and despite never seeing her before, they felt so familiar.

  “A girl from Australia,” he replied bluntly. “We found her when we searched the globe for incidents similar to what happened at St. Vincent’s,” he turned his head to give me a look. “If you want to come clean about what happened there, now’s the time.”

  “What is it with you people and thinking that I have any idea what the hell is happening? I’m just a kid who everyone; including, apparently, the universe, is fucking with,” I played the kid card because it was true, and because I tried to force it through the dude’s thick skull that I really didn’t have a clue.

  All I got was a grunt in reply as he took another turn. The more distance we put between us and the UN, the more things calmed down. You could go five blocks in the Big Apple and be in a completely different world. We were still surrounded by monuments of glass and steel, that praised mankind’s genius, when he talked to me again.

  “Okay,” he seemed to have calmed down a bit. “I know we only agreed to another two days of tests, but this changes things. What happened back there . . .” I could practically feel the fear coming off him, “. . . that was wrong on so many levels. We need to know the who, what, when, where, why, and any other W’s the big brains come up with.”

  I understood where he was coming from, but the very idea of more time with the UN made me sneer. “Talk to my lawyers,” I replied, as politely as I could.

  That got a snarl out of the big man. “Now you listen here you little shit,” Vernon’s hands gripped the steering wheel hard enough to warp it. “This isn’t a game. This is serious shit. You need to . . .”

  He never finished. The car was moving down the road at the speed limit, minding its own business, when it hit an invisible wall. Our forward motion came to an abrupt stop, and physics took over. The hood of the vehicle crumbled like a drunk frat boy smashing a beer can on his head. The back wheels of the car actually left the ground and rose a couple feet in the air. Momentum turned the vehicle counterclockwise until the windshield was facing the nine o’clock position, and it was lined up perpendicular to the invisible wall.

  At least, that’s what the witness statements said in the police report. I didn’t have any fucking idea what happened to the damn car. I was sitting in the rear center, and I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. I can now attest that all those gruesome videos you see in traffic school about car accidents, and people being ejected from vehicles, are one hundred percent true. If I was human, I’d also be one hundred percent dead; but thankfully, my survival instincts worked faster than my brain.

  I was still thinking, “Wha . . .” when my mind reached for the white fire in my gut and I wrapped myself in Fae power.

  That saved my life when I took a header through the windshield. Vernon’s face was too busy playing bumper cars with the airbag for him to notice that I sailed right through the invisible barrier that had stopped the two-ton Chevy cold. Still, the werewolf was a tough son-of-a-bitch, and he shook off the shock of the sudden stop in a few seconds. He had just enough time to hear the shriek of warping metal as another unseen force compressed the SUV’s exterior into a solid block of metal. There was no escaping that; and, to add insult to injury, a
nother wave of force swept the Chevy off the road and through the front window of a nearby Starbucks like it was a piece of loose garbage.

  I missed all of that. I was too busy hitting the asphalt, dislocating my left shoulder, getting my flesh cut by shards of windshield, and having the wonderful sensation of road rash work its way across my body as I rolled to a stop twenty feet from where the SUV had been.

  “I’m alive,” was my first thought. Followed by, “Ow!”

  I heard the breaks protest as the car was pushed aside like it was no heavier than a traffic cone. Then, a shiver worked its way up my spine that screamed, “Danger Will Robinson!” Followed by the realization the Vernon wasn’t coming to the rescue. All of that mixed together was one hell of an emotional cocktail.

  “Ambush,” I groaned as my rattled brain finally caught up to what was happening. I rolled to my good side and used a car, that had stopped just short of running me over, as an assist to leverage myself to my feet.

  “Find the threat,” I mumbled like a madman, as my eyes scanned the area.

  It wasn’t hard to find my attacker. They stepped out from the sidewalk, into the street, to face me like this was a high-noon duel at the O.K. Corral. I gave my head a shake to make sure my mind wasn’t playing any tricks on me. This was not the enemy I expected.

  First off, it was a she. That’s not being a sexist or anything. Hell, the most powerful people I knew were women. I just didn’t know anyone other than Aveena I’d pissed off enough to ambush a UN vehicle, in the middle of NYC, in broad daylight. iPhones were already out and live streaming this shit.

  Next on the list was what she was wearing. A pair of black, heeled boots covered her feet. Above that was torn jeans and a white belly shirt. I saw toned abs and decent tits, but what really caught my attention was the tattoos all over her body. Specifically, the All Seeing Eye that encompassed her navel.