by S T Branton
I still didn't want her to know where I was staying. Especially after our encounters with the Harbingers, I knew every minute I was near her increased the danger she faced. Merely going by her house would be like sketching a target on it. I wouldn’t do that to her. She deserved to have at least one space that was relatively safe, even if I knew in the back of my mind either the Guild or the Harbingers would eventually trace her there. Hopefully, I would stay a step ahead.
Once the station wagon disappeared around the corner, I hurried through an alley and down the street to the hotel. Breaking with his usual protocol, Splinter tried channeling his inner parrot and perched on my shoulder. It was his angry chattering and digging of his sharp little claws into my skin that alerted me to the shadowy form in front of the door. I took a few steps closer and realized it was the dog from the night before.
He sat outside the door like he was on guard, his head swinging slowly back and forth to scan the parking lot. His eyes locked on me, and he got to his feet. Splinter kept up the fussing, and I could only imagine all the nasty things he was saying to the dog. I reached up and grabbed him, then shoved him into my pocket.
“Hey there,” I said to the dog. “It's good to see you up and about. You feeling better?”
He looked back at me and his head dipped, almost like he was nodding. Oh, hell. It was finally happening. I had officially lost my ever-loving mind.
Whether I’d lost it or not, the dog seemed to understand what I said and looked at the door like he was asking to come in. Considering the sun had set and he was probably waiting for the crew of drunk dude-bros to come back and finish him off, I could understand. I opened the door and nodded toward the lobby beyond.
“You're welcome to come in with us.”
He trotted inside and I used the glow of my locket to lead the way to my room. I had spent the last decade of my life living in darkness, knowing that the light illuminated me as much as the surrounding threats. But here, out in the world, using it felt luxurious and a little indulgent. Maybe I'd even put it on my nightstand for a night light. That beat the hell out of the bioluminescent eyes of the cellmate I had for six months in The Deep, especially since he spent those six months hovering over me while I slept.
Imaginary housekeeping hadn't come, so the bed was still a mess. That didn't stop the dog from jumping up onto it and settling down. Usually I'd push him away and reclaim the spot, but he'd been through a lot. Besides, there was a perfectly good chair waiting for me to plop down into. Which I did and promptly fell asleep.
My mind immediately filled with the image of a dark hooded figure hovering in front of me. I didn't know who it was but had the distinct impression this was Hobbes. My fingertips tingled with anger and I launched toward him, but before I could grab him, he dissolved and nothing was there but a swirl of colors. It looked like I was stuck in a spiral of red and purple light. It reminded me of when I was fifteen and the guards pushed me through the door in reality to bring me to The Deep. The colors were brighter and more defined, but the sense of disconnection and panic was still there. I ran. Maybe if I went fast enough, I'd be able to escape it.
It didn't work. No matter how hard I ran or how fast I tried to force myself, the colors followed me. I looked back over my shoulder to see if Hobbes was chasing me, but there was nothing. When I faced forward, he was there. I skidded to a stop, my heart pounding in my chest as stress made my body shake and my vision blur. His hand reached out to me, and I fought the compulsion to recoil. Instead, I grabbed his hand and yanked him toward me so I could reach up and push the hood away and reveal his face.
The hood dropped back and the sound of Splinter chattering rose around me. It was so loud it drowned out the sound of my breath. The end of the world was coming. It was pressing down around me. I hadn't been able to stop it. But Hobbes was there in front of me, and I had removed his hood. Everyone would know who he was now. I turned my attention back to him and saw the cloak had disappeared.
A steady dim blue replaced the swirling colors. And there was no longer a hooded figure standing in front of me, but a massive man. A massive and very naked man hovering over me with a knife. He drew closer and Splinter got louder, his little voice sharper and higher-pitched. It occurred to me that he could see the man, too. He must've come with me to confront the end of the world. The naked man moved closer, and something struck me.
I couldn't smell him. After all the years spent in prison and learning exactly how to identify different species only by their smell in long periods of absolute darkness, I'd become very attached to my olfactory abilities. It wasn't exactly a superpower, but it was enough to give me the reassurance that he wasn't actually there. I was dreaming. Why I was dreaming of a huge naked man with a knife coming at me was something for me to analyze on another day. Now was the time to wake up.
Come on, Slick. Wake up. Wake up. Pantsless McStabby won't be there anymore.
Finally, my eyelids popped up. Shit. It wasn't a dream.
The part about Hobbes and running through the portal to escape the end of time had all been in my head, but the naked man wielding a blade certainly wasn't. He was all muscles, rugged face, and long dark hair, and he really was standing over me. Splinter was doing his best to give him hell from his perch on the nightstand where he crouched on the edge, his bristles up like spikes as he prepared to attack, all the while screaming bloody murder. I reached for my switchblade, but it wasn't there. My eyes locked back on the man and I realized my knife wasn't in my pocket because he was holding it. He was threatening me with my damn blade.
This was so not how I envisioned my first time in a room with a naked man. Family Life classes freshman year did nothing to prepare me for this.
Worried thoughts flowed through me, and I looked around the room for the dog. He was nowhere to be seen. Splinter made his angry sound again, and the worry faded into shock as it occurred to me what I was looking at.
“You're a werewolf.”
“Not exactly,” he replied in a growling voice. “I'm a Loup.”
“A what?”
It was hard to pay attention to him while also not acknowledging the fact that he was dangling in the breeze.
“A Loup,” he repeated. “Essentially the opposite of what Nearsiders think of as a werewolf.”
That struck a chord in my memory, but again, focusing was difficult.
“Listen, before you go on, would you mind grabbing a sheet and throwing it around you? Kind of a toga situation?”
He did as I asked. When he was almost presentable, he continued,
“What you think of a werewolf is a human who occasionally changes into a wolf. My kind are wolves who turn into humans only when the full moon is at its peak.”
Now that he was at least symbolically presentable, I seemed to remember Solon saying something about the Loup.
“I've heard legends about that, but I always assumed they were myths.”
“No.”
Wow. Talkative.
Splinter took a flying leap from the nightstand and landed in my lap, pushing back against me while still facing off against the man. I couldn't tell if it was a position meant to be protective of me or if he was too afraid to turn his back. I held his tiny paw between my thumb and finger to comfort him.
“This is Splinter,” I told the man. “What's your name? What do I call you?”
He shook his head.
“We don't name ourselves.”
“Okay. Well, I have to call you something, so I'll stick with Dog.”
“If that amuses your little human brain, fine.”
“Why are you here, Dog?”
His new title didn’t delight him, but I was getting a feel for it. I figured if he wanted to stand there with my blade still pointed right at my face, then I got to call him what I wanted.
“You must tell me the truth,” he said firmly. “The absolute truth, do you understand?”
“The truth about what?”
“Anything I ask
of you. My inborn abilities mean I will know if you're lying and as soon as I know you are, I will kill you without hesitation.”
“Wow. That's the thanks I get for saving your furry ass from the guys last night?”
“I’d gladly give my life a dozen times if it meant finding the truth. I need to know, will you give it or should I kill you now?”
I thought about trying to talk tough or make a joke and try to attack him while he was distracted. But something about the seriousness in his voice and the steadiness with which he held Solon’s blade made me want to play it straight.
“I’ll tell the truth.”
He looked at me with those dark eyes, like he was assessing my soul. I must have passed his test because he didn’t stab me.
“The deeds for which they imprisoned you, your heinous crimes against my kind, did you do them?”
He crouched slightly while inching closer to me and I knew it was so he could sense me. Like I had tried to when his presence in my hotel room had crossed over into my dream, he was smelling me. All the legends of the Loup I'd heard included the warning that these creatures could literally sniff out lies. If I said one word that wasn't true, he would know instantly.
Fortunately, there was no reason for me to lie about that.
“No.”
The answer satisfied him enough to lower the blade, but before he could say anything else, a loud sound cracked through the silence and the door to my room smashed open.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The door burst open and I moved. I leapt from the chair, scrambling for a wall to put my back to. A series of guys streamed through the door. All of them carried some type of melee weapon, some with chains, bats, or pipes. It looked like an old fighting game had spat out a series of generic bad guys at me. At that point, it wouldn't have surprised me. The Guild controlled everything else. Why shouldn't they have the ability to sic video games on me?
It only took a second to realize these weren't henchmen sent by The Guild. One man stood out from the rest of them, leering at me with a toothless grin. It was one of the guys who had been beating on Dog when I saved him before, and it looked like he'd shored up his reserves before coming for me again. His buddies—both the guys from last night and new ones, a dozen of them total—filled the room before anyone made a move. I looked at Dog, hoping that he was on my side in all this.
Before I could meet his gaze, he’d already charged forward. His speed was impressive, and he ripped right into a couple of the men before they reacted. Fists flew as the men got their bearings, and some aimed their weapons at the blurrily fast mass of a man that was tearing through them without mercy. It was only appropriate. He was dishing back everything they'd given him. I grabbed my locket while everyone was distracted. The room turned dark, and I felt its power flowing through me.
I’d faced these men without the rune before. I was looking forward to seeing how I could hurt them with it.
I jumped forward, using my momentum to springboard off my hands and dive feet-first into two of them. I regained my feet in time to jump a chain swinging at knee-height. It hit another of the charging guys instead and wrapped around his legs, sending him barreling toward me. I dodged out of his way and he tumbled into a guy that had gotten behind Dog and was brandishing a knife. They fell into a nightstand and it exploded into shards of cheap, shattered wood.
It wasn’t a very large arena.
I turned my attention to Chain Man and saw he’d whipped it behind him like some kind of inner-city Indiana Jones. I spun in a tight circle and snapped my leg out, catching his jaw with my heel, then turned my attention to two other goons holding baseball bats and coming for me. I ducked and one missed me, smashing another of his buddies in the teeth, and I hit the other in the back of the knees to take him off his feet. He crumpled, and I uppercut him hard in the throat. After spinning into him, I grabbed the bat out of his unprotesting hands and golf-swung at the back of his head. He went down in a pitiful heap and I blocked the first bat guy’s swing with mine.
A second swing from Bat Guy was similarly blocked, and I thrust forward to headbutt him while we were in close quarters. Unfortunately, I missed, and smashed my head into the wall. Bat Guy hit me hard in the ribs with his weapon and I stumbled backward. Tripping over the mattress that had now gone askew in the mayhem, I landed on my ass hard, near the radiator, then looked up and saw him charging me now, bat in the air and ready to crack my skull.
Before he could reach me, Dog was on him and whaling away with punches. He beat the man senseless in a matter of seconds. I stood, adrenaline now kicking in and helping me ignore what would have been a broken rib if not for the locket. I flung the bat at the man now charging me, and it caught him in a sweet spot on the nose. He slammed backward onto the floor. Figuring I was pretty good at this chucking-stuff-at-bad-guys thing, I grabbed the lamp next to me and winged it at a guy across the room. Less luck this time, since it crashed against the wall and landed lamely in the corner.
I turned to one of the remaining standing men and noted that he’d been beaten up pretty good. Dog had finished with Bat Guy and was standing beside me, his breath not even labored, but his sheet-toga covered in other people’s blood. I looked back at the three remaining men who had come into the room and realized they were three of the guys from before. The ones who had beaten on Dog outside the hotel. Payback would be sweet.
After grabbing a now-ownerless chain, I whipped it at one of the men as he tried to run for the door. It caught him around the neck and yanked him to the ground. Another of the men tried going for the window, but Dog headed him off at the pass, shoulder-blocked him into a wall, then gave him a few shots to the stomach that seemed to remove his will to fight.
The last of the three hadn’t moved, frozen in place with his hands out to the sides like he was trying to surf an invisible wave here in the hotel room. His eyes darted between me and Dog and then back to the door where his buddy was still being choked by the chain and the window where his other friend laid crumpled against the wall, blood spluttering out of his mouth through heavy breaths.
“Okay, now, wait a minute…” he began, and I saw movement behind him.
Splinter crawled around his midsection and without warning, sank his teeth into the man’s stomach. “Not again,” he screamed and reached for Splinter, who had already moved and was now biting him at random as he zoomed all over his body. The man screamed in pain with every bite and kept reaching around himself as he smacked his body in a lame attempt to hit Splinter. I slowly approached him, and by his lack of reaction, guessed that he didn’t see me coming. I reared back with my fist and aimed, waiting for his jaw to be in the exact right position. When it was, I let fly.
When I connected, his lights went out. His knees bent and he dropped to them when his brain stopped sending signals that they should stay stiff. Gravity held him upright for a moment before he fell back on his ass, then sideways, his head smacking into the corner of the TV stand with a sickening thump. Splinter, extremely pleased with himself, hopped off his back and onto my leg, then scurried up until he found his pocket.
That seemed to be enough for the crew. They scooped up their wounded and rushed out of the hotel room with even more urgency than they'd come in. Dog stayed on alert, his hand wrapped tightly around my switchblade and ready to continue the fight until the last one disappeared into the hallway. As their voices faded, his hand fell to his side and he seemed to shrink. His expression collapsed, and he dropped to sit on the end of the bed. He was obviously upset, but I didn't know what to say.
“Well, there's another one for the record books,” he muttered.
“What do you mean?”
“My people see the full moon as a curse. You know how everyone says the full moon brings out the crazy in people? More crimes are committed, more babies are born, strange things seem to happen? For us, the full moon means shifting, and that's not something we ever look forward to. Especially me.”
“Why do y
ou say that?”
“My kind has always preferred to stay wolves. We like to live in the wild, away from human interference. But ten years ago, my pack was all brutally murdered. I was the only survivor, and I was determined to find the killer. The trail led me to your house.”
The memory from the night before struck me again, and I realized what it was.
“It was you. That night. I was trying to get into the side door. I looked into the backyard, and I saw a dog. That was you.”
“Yes, but I hadn't gotten there in time. The Philosophers Guild got there first. When I saw that, I assumed you were the one who murdered my pack. But after watching your actions this week, I had my doubts.”
The revelation took my breath away. My lungs burned and my chest ached, but I felt like I couldn’t drag in any air. His words burrowed into my brain, stinging and slicing until I was in tatters. No one had ever told me what the supposedly heinous crimes were that justified endless lifetimes in The Deep. The guards laughed when I asked, and the new prisoners that Solon and I had interrogated all had a different story about the notorious Sara Slick. I kidnapped a member of the Guild. I burned down a goblin orphanage. I made a deal with the devil. The ambiguity had kept me going. I could come up with whatever I wanted to justify what was being done to me. But nothing my mind conjured was ever as horrible as what I just heard. It proved there had been no mistake about the brutality of the crimes. Someone had done something unimaginably horrific. It just wasn’t me.
“I have no idea why the Philosophers Guild said my family had anything to do with the crimes,” I told him when I got hold of myself.
“There was evidence that your father was the one who did it. A lot of evidence. The signs were all over the place. The scent of my people's blood was all over the house. Tracks leading away from their bodies matched your father's car and there was mud on his tires. It was enough to make me confident your father was the Nearling killer I had been hunting. But then you confessed. I couldn't imagine anyone would do something like that if it wasn't true.”