by Ben Reeder
“Inside my right shoe,” I heard Collins say softly. His eyes were open, but glazed with pain. My jaw empathized with him. I tucked my fingers inside the top of his loafer, and found the key duct-taped in the lining on the inside of his ankle. A few seconds later, his hands were free. Lucas moaned as he tried to sit up, then his bleary eyes found me.
“You brought the cops at least,” I told him by way of greeting.
“Told you sidekicks never listen,” he shot back, wincing as he rubbed the back of his head. He turned when Wanda stirred, and went to her side, murmuring softly to her as she came to.
“What in the Hell are you mixed up in, Fortunato?” Collins asked, as I handed him his gun.
“A bunch of stuff I'll explain after we leave, officer. For the moment…you're going to have to trust me a little.”
“I have to get you kids out of here is what I gotta do,” he argued. Stupid grownup.
“Good idea. You got a plan to get us out of here without anyone knowing?”
“Through the storeroom,” Alexis answered from behind me. I hadn't heard her even move. Collins nodded, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief. I hated to leave my wand and Dr. C's paintball gun behind, but I wasn't about to risk my friends for a couple of replaceable toys. I grabbed Lucas and Wanda's stuff and handed it over, then followed Alexis to the door to the store room.
“The delivery door leads to the back of the lodge,” she explained as she pointed to the double doors not twenty feet away. “Go to your right once you're outside, that'll keep you downwind of the pack. You should be able to see the road from there.” Collins took the lead as I nodded and gestured for Lucas and Wanda to go in front of me.
Alexis touched my arm as I turned for the door. “The pack's territory ends at the edge of the camp. If you can make it to the road, you might be able to claim safe passage from there. The boys won't like it, but they'll deal with it if you're out of bounds.”
“What about King?”
“He…I don't know, Chance,” she answered after a moment. “The only rule he follows is the Law of the Wolf.”
“I'll make do,” I told her. She nodded and stepped back as the door closed, and I was on my own. Collins waited at the outer door with his hand on the knob. I gave him a nod, and he pushed the door open. There was a dry groan of metal on metal as rusty hinges grated against what had to be years of disuse. Collins winced as he pushed the door open hard and sprinted to his right. Lucas pushed Wanda ahead of him as we followed. When he got to the corner of the building, Collins stopped and peered around the edge before he waved us forward. The open field of the parking lot beckoned to us, awash in the orange glow of a sodium security light. My friends started forward, and Collins followed as soon as I passed him, his right hand tucked beneath his left arm, on the butt of his pistol.
We made it only a few steps into the lot, where we were nice and exposed and yards from any cover, when the first yells erupted from inside the lodge. Our jog had barely turned into a sprint when four black-clad forms streaked out of the front of the lodge. They blurred around in front of us, and I heard more feet on turf as the rest bounded up behind us. Collins’ gun came out, held with the barrel pointed at the ground between the jocks and us. His eyes flicked toward me when I put a hand on his shoulder.
“You'll only piss them off if you shoot them with that,” I explained. Truth was, the only weapons that would even slow them down were somewhere in the lodge, and without them, we were wolf chow. Collins didn't look like he believed me, but he didn't try to shoot the Weres, either. The boys circled us, standing with their fists clenched and eyes glowing.
“Well, well, well,” King sneered as he came into the light from the front of the lodge. “You're a tricky bunch.” Collins’ gun came up, and a red dot appeared on King's chest as he spoke.
“Stand down!” Collins ordered, but King ignored him, instead glaring at me.
“A tragic animal attack is about to claim the lives of three stupid kids and a New Essex police officer.”
“Aren't you just a criminal genius,” I remarked.
“Old tricks are old tricks because they still work, punk,” he said. I felt the wave of warped energy sweep out from him and slam into the pack. In a heartbeat, they all changed. Smooth skin split and sprouted fur, and their bodies changed shape like wax melting off a mold, revealing half human, half wolf shapes laying curled up on the ground in steaming, wet heaps. They growled in unison as they straightened and rose, baring sharp fangs and red eyes. Crap.
“What the hell?” Collins asked. I held up a hand to shush him, and to my surprise, he shut up. There was hope for the grownup yet.
“So, you're gonna hide behind your pack like a bitch,” I taunted, playing a hunch. “You ain't got the balls to take me. And they're gonna see that.” My words sank home, not only with Dominic, but with the rest of the pack, too. The growls stopped, and wolfish eyes went to Dominic. My hunch had paid off, and I had a few more seconds. The wolves shuffled back half a step, unsure of what to do, until Dominic opened his mouth again.
“You wanna insult me, you do it to my face, boy, and you insult me,” he sneered, “but, no, you come here, smash up our den, and insult the whole pack. I don't gotta face you.”
“You've never given a damn about the pack unless there was something in it for you,” Alexis said from behind me.
It was an even match between Dominic and me, as to which one of us had the more surprised look on his face. His spell had forced eight Weres to change, but Alexis didn’t look like she’d gone even a little furry. Either she wasn’t a werewolf, or she had some serious mojo going on. As surprised as King was, I was betting on the mojo. The rest of the pack went to King's side, as if taking some sort of strength in being close to him. Knowing how King worked, it was probably the other way around.
“How the…” King muttered in disbelief as Alexis stepped up beside me and handed me the paintball gun in its holster and my red TK wand. I buckled the holster around my hips quickly. As I was doing that, King gestured at her, and the same energy he'd used earlier flooded over her, driving her to one knee, but she stayed human.
“Chance, what the hell's going on?” Wanda asked in a tiny voice.
“A little macho posturing, followed by a lot of running and screaming,” I replied, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt as I buckled the second strap around my left leg. When I looked back at Alexis again, though, the tide of the contest of wills between her and King had turned. She was slowly straightening, fists at her sides, her head bowed as she fought to stand.
“Get back down on your knees, you little bitch!” King barked. It was the wrong thing for him to say. She let out a feral snarl as her head snapped up and she leaped at him. He barely had enough time to react before she planted her hands on his chest in a stiff armed shove that knocked him on his back.
“Never again,” she spat. The pack eyed Alexis as she turned her back on her former leader and walked away. She walked among them, head held high, moving slowly, like some wounded goddess. As she came toward us, she laid a hand on each half-changed wolf. In her wake, each of them calmed a little, no longer trembling in the eagerness for the hunt, and where her hands had been, there was a little more intelligence in their eyes. It was only a few moments before she had laid her gentling touch on each of them, except the biggest of them: the huge gray one I figured was Brad. Her hand went to his massive jaw and slid up behind one ear. He closed his eyes and tilted his head into her palm, rubbing his jaw forward into her touch. Her touch lingered on him for just a moment, then she turned to face me with a sadness in her eyes that made my gut go tight in understanding. Her look told me what no words could. She was leaving the pack, and I could see that it hurt her deep.
She took one long look over her shoulder at Brad and stepped up to me, then reached out and laid her hand on my cheek. Her touch was warm, soft, and electrifying. My skin tingled beneath her fingertips as she leaned in toward me. I thought she was going to
say something to me, right up to the moment her eyes fluttered closed and her perfect, red lips touched mine.
If her touch was electrifying, her kiss was like being struck by lightning. My knees felt like they were melting, but my back went ramrod straight, as well as a couple of other things, and I almost dropped the paintball gun and my TK wand. My lips were telling me that hers were soft, wet, warm, smooth, and–damn it!– they were gone! Every other part of my body agreed with my mouth that the whole thing had ended way too soon. Her hand left my face and fluttered to her own mouth, and I could see her tongue flicking over her lips. Then, a single tear slid down her cheek, contrasting to the tiny smile that pulled on the corner of her mouth.
“Wow!” I gasped. “But…why?”
“Because I didn’t have to.” Her words hit hard. This was probably the first time in who knew how long that she wasn’t being forced to be someone’s plaything. It was her first kiss by choice, and she was giving it to me in front of Brad and Dominic. Stunned silence fell as I stared at her and fought the urge to kiss her again.
“I’ll give you as much of a head start as I can,” she whispered, “if you’ll do one thing for me.” She only wanted one thing? Just then, I would have done a hundred things for her.
I raised an eyebrow. “Name it.”
“Wait for me.”
“Until the sun never rises,” I said, quoting an old oath.
She turned back to face King and I stepped back until I was beside Collins.
“So much for the macho posturing,” I muttered.
“Cue the running and screaming?” Wanda asked.
“Like a pack of werewolves is after you.”
“Yeah, because that's pretty much the case,” Lucas added. He grabbed Wanda's hand and pulled her into a sprint for the road. Collins looked at me for a second, then we took off after them. The faint starlight gave us enough light to follow the road as it turned to the right around a sharp ridge, then back to the left again. We sprinted up the road for what felt like only a few seconds before I heard the howl of the pack lifting into the night sky behind us.
“We’re so screwed!” Lucas moaned, but they kept running.
I heard the half-human yelps and barks as the pack found our scent, then the distant crashing and snapping of wood as they took to the woods after us, not bothering with the turns in the road. I turned when I heard twigs and branches snapping above me and to my right, and caught the outline of a quasi-human shape cresting a boulder on top of the ridge. I pointed the TK rod in its general direction and called out “Ictus latior!”
Magick coursed from my center and down my right arm, and there was a louder snapping of tree limbs and tree trunks as I sent a broad wave of force crashing through the woods, figuring if I didn’t catch him with the force itself, maybe one of the chunks of terrain I was throwing around might hit him, or at least scare him as it went by. I was rewarded with the yelp of a werewolf moving away from us, hopefully not under his own power.
I kept on running, and felt a surge of hope as I saw the flashing hazard lights of the Falcon a couple of hundred yards ahead. It died in my chest when I heard the triumphant howl erupt from the woods, not twenty yards behind us.
“Oh, Goddess!” Wanda cried. “We can’t outrun those things!”
“You don’t have to outrun them,” I growled as I caught up to them and shoved her forward. “You just have to be a little faster than me.”
Lucas grabbed her hand and put his head down, almost dragging her along as he picked up his own pace. Collins struggled along behind them with his gun probing in front of him. A rush of adrenaline surged through me as I turned back to face the oncoming pack. I started walking backwards as fast as I could, wand and paintball gun sweeping back and forth, searching with my eyes and ears for a target. When it came, it was from an unexpected direction.
I heard Wanda shriek from behind me, and turned in time to see her and Lucas stumble to one side as one of the Weres leaped out at them from the brush on the side of the road. This topped the list of bad plans it could have chosen. I pointed the wand at him and started to release a spell, but Collins opened fire before I could. He put three rounds into the half-wolf in a split second and knocked it out of the air. As he pushed Wanda and Lucas forward, he fired three more rounds into the yelping Were as he passed. From what I knew about Weres, I figured he’d live, but he wouldn’t be happy about it for a while.
A short growl was all the warning I had before another one leaped at me from the side of the road. I threw myself to the ground and rolled in time to avoid a nifty new set of scars, but my jacket was probably going to turn furry with the next full moon. When the Were landed on my left, I pointed the wand at him across my body, and he crouched to leap, probably thinking I couldn’t get the words off before he was either on me or out of the way. I knew that, too. I pulled the trigger on the paintball gun three times instead, and he went down with a yelp.
A ton of fur landed on me then, and I found the air knocked out of me while one of the Weres growled at me from three inches away. It grabbed my left wrist in a grip like iron, closing his hand around mine and squeezing. He grabbed my right hand as I yelled in pain, and I felt the bones of both hands grind together. The TK rod fell from my fingers, and I did the only thing I had the leverage and presence of mind to do: I brought my knee up. Werewolf, human, it didn’t matter; if you were male, that would always hurt. His grip on my hand and wrist went slack and he slumped with a gasping yipe! I brought my knee up again, this time hard enough to pitch him over my head in an ungainly flip. He hit with a whoof of air. I grabbed the TK wand with aching fingers, then added insult to injury by doing a backwards somersault onto his chest. It wasn’t neat or slick looking, but it forced more air out of his lungs, and gave me a few more seconds to get to my feet and start backpedaling.
This time, I heard the snapping of twigs to my left and pulled the trigger as fast as I could without even looking. The Were’s graceful leap at me turned into a stumbling sprawl as the gun clicked empty after the fourth shot, but I had hit him with at least one of them: enough to put him out of the fight for a couple of minutes.
I backed up as I put the TK wand between my teeth and pulled the release for the hopper. I dropped the hopper and fumbled another one blindly into place, not knowing what I’d grabbed. The release rod clicked back into place, and I remembered to press the safety button just in time to see another half-wolf come charging out of the brush at me. I thrust the gun at him and pulled the trigger twice, hoping for knockout balls.
Fur flew from his nose and forehead as he took what had to have been two wolfsbane and silver pellets right in the face, and I knew a brief moment of elation. I had hit him on the fly with both shots. Of course, the range I was shooting at, I could hardly miss, but I was still impressed with me.
His yelp of pain turned into a human cry as the wolfsbane and silver temporarily suppressed the transformation and reverted at least part of him back to human. He rubbed at his eyes, and I knew a moment’s pity for him, but it was a short moment. I backed up another few steps while I grabbed the TK wand again and saw the half-wolf that was curled up in the middle of the road start to get up. A quick TK bolt sent him sprawling still further back. A few more steps, and I was almost stepping in bloody wolf chunks, and I looked to my left to see the half-wolf Collins had shot still writhing on the road.
Behind me, I heard car doors slamming, and a heartbeat later, the sound of the Falcon’s engine turning over. I turned and ran for the gate, now only a hundred yards or so away: twenty seconds or less from making it to freedom. That, of course, was when Brad and the last of his cohort leaped out in front of me. Both arms came up as I did the last thing they expected me to do.
I charged them.
“Ictus!” I cried as I pulled the trigger. I sent two paintballs at Brad, but I only heard one hit him. His buddy took the TK blast in the chest, though, and went skidding along the roadway, leaving a trail of fur and blood.
&n
bsp; I almost ducked past Brad’s punch and pulled the trigger three more times, this time catching him in the face with two more of the balls while my left cheek exploded with pain. He doubled over, and I finished the hopper on him while I staggered backwards, then threw a telekinetic shot at his partner that caught him a glancing blow and sent him spinning. My right arm was aching from all the magick I was using, and the shot I had hit him with was nowhere near as strong as the first one I had thrown. I backed up until I felt the iron beam of the gate hit me across the back of the legs; I did a clumsy flip over it, managing to land on my back and only lose most of my dignity.
A black-clad Alexis leaped over me a second later, her red hair streaming behind her. She landed gracefully and turned to face the road, her eyes ablaze. I scrambled up as Lucas turned on the Falcon’s headlights. Dominic strode out of the darkness that pressed in at the edge of the cone of light, flanked by two naked Weres in human form. Behind me, I heard the Falcon's doors open, and I heard shoes scrape on the gravel to my right, and Collins stepped up beside me, his gun up and pointed at King in a two-handed grip. I brought the paintball gun up and copied his stance. The hopper was empty, but I was betting King didn't know that.
“Stop right there,” Collins ordered as King got to the gate. It worked about as well as it did the first time.
“So, the bitch shows her true colors,” King smirked as he got to the edge of the gate. I stepped forward, ready to shove those words down his throat, but Alexis stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. I lowered the gun a little and looked over my shoulder at her.
“Fuck you, old man,” she snarled. “You had this coming.” Her shoulders were straight and pulled back, but I could feel her hand trembling on my shoulder.
“You backstabbing little bitch!” he snarled as he stepped forward. I brought the paintball gun back up to eye level, and he stopped in his tracks. His eyes darted back to Brad, who was still writhing on the ground in his half-turned state, as his body tried to decide whether it was wolf or human.