by Peter Hartz
He stood up, and slapped both his hands down on the table loudly, expecting to scare her. Then he started to bellow, “You better start talking, you –“
Something happened. Before his very eyes, the slender teenage girl disappeared in an instant, and a nightmare appeared, towering over him in the room. The glowing red eyes stared down at him out of that green-black face as he shrank back suddenly, and the horrifying visage jutted towards him with lightning speed. A clawed hand reached out and fastened onto his right wrist, not letting him go as she spoke to him in a deep voice that was filled with anger, hatred and the potential for violence.
“Or what? What are you going to do to me, you puny little turd?"
He tried to pull his hand free frantically, but the strength of the grip that held him was beyond anything he could imagine. He tried to reach for his gun, but it was on his right hip, the same side that was now held fast in the gargoyle’s grip. The green-black scaly hand was both warm and cold on his skin, and he mewled in terror as the huge winged beast held him fast, slapping aside his left hand as he awkwardly tried to reach across his body and get to his gun.
“You really don’t want to do that. As much as I want you to, you really don’t want to.”
He suddenly lost control of his bladder for just a moment as he realized that he was looking at the being that had shredded the slavers.
“Let me make it easy for you.” He was suddenly free, and he fell back, having been trying to pull away with all his strength. “Go ahead, worm. Give me a reason to do it again.”
The gargoyle was suddenly gone, and the young girl was back. She sat down primly, and resumed picking at her food. A part of his mind wondered where her clothing had gone when she’d been the other thing, but he couldn’t voice the question, or anything else for that matter.
“Or don’t. I don’t care. But if you get in my face again, one of us will enjoy the result much less than the other.” She stared up at him with a malevolence that was a physical thing in the room, hounding him, driving him to fight or flee.
She stood suddenly, slapping both palms down hard on the table in an exact mimicry of his earlier tactic, and he jumped nearly a foot into the air as the effect slammed into him.
“Get out of my face!”
He turned to go, and made it to the door just as it opened, and the young female patrol officer darted into the room.
“What are you doing in here? Didn’t you hear me earlier? Svetlana, are you ok?”
She looked up at Oksana as the lieutenant bolted out of the room, a very slight odor she almost recognized following him as he fled.
“I’m fine.” The words came out calm and relaxed, as the younger girl looked up at the policewoman with an innocent look on her face. She was about to say more, but there was a quiet cough behind her through the open door from the hallway.
She turned, and saw that the captain was beckoning her out into the hallway.
Svetlana had finished eating some time ago, and was just reading the paperback book someone had found for her to help her spend the hours waiting until her father came for her. The door opened suddenly, and the young police woman came back into the room. She could tell that the officer was upset and trying to hide it, but wasn’t succeeding.
She watched as the police woman tried to say something, but when she opened her mouth, nothing would come out. Her pale, drawn face showed her emotions clearly.
“What is it?” Svetlana was getting nervous.
Oksana couldn’t say anything. Words wouldn’t come out. Some of it was fear of what the young girl in front of her was capable of, but the rest of it was that she just couldn’t process how the slim, slender young girl in front of her had done what she had just seen on the monitor in the security room when the captain had rolled back the recording for her.
The door was still open behind her, and she glanced nervously behind her where, just out of view from the room’s occupants, the tactical team was forming up. She had argued against it, but procedure was clear when a possible threat existed inside the police station. Then she turned back around to Svetlana. She didn’t think she was in any danger from the sweet young girl, but the scene on the monitor, in crystal clear full color, wouldn’t get out of her mind’s eye.
Svetlana looked around the room, to see if she could figure out why the woman was suddenly so nervous, and her breath caught in her throat when she saw it in the upper corner of the room. A video camera, with a red light on it. And it was pointing at her.
A bad word came out of her mouth as she came to her feet.
“Wait!” Oksana took a half step forward, with her hand out, palm forward, in the universal sign for stop.
“Why? So you can lock me up? You can’t. No one can keep me here. I will survive just fine on the streets.” The words came out tinged with frustration and more than a little despair.
“It doesn’t have to be that way. Your father is coming. He will be here soon. We think he is no more than a ten minutes or so away. Just talk to me.”
Uncertainty was plainly on Svetlana’s face as she stood wondering what to do. But the situation changed suddenly when the police lieutenant that had accosted her in the room earlier burst back in, his service pistol in his hands. He shoved Oksana aside, and screamed “Don’t move!” as he pointed the weapon at the girl.
The captain watching from the security room cursed suddenly as the annoying asshole disobeyed a direct order once again by thinking he was being a hero. He had been called to the room some time earlier when the tech watching the screen carefully had called him in a panic.
What had happened in the brothel last month became clear as he watched the small teenage girl transform into the huge green and black winged creature. The lieutenant had fled the room almost immediately after she had changed back, which said some interesting things about her. She could have easily ripped the man apart the same way she obviously had done to the men who had been involved in her ordeal, but she showed considerable restraint this time. That made her thoughts, and her motivations, much clearer to him.
The ability also explained how she was so calm in the face of getting detained by police during a sweep of homeless kids, a stressful ordeal for anyone. Now, he couldn’t tear himself away to run to the room two floors up, convinced that he was going to see the idiot killed the same way. But something else happened instead.
Oksana stood up, and slowly moved to insert herself between the lieutenant and the girl, whatever form she was in, never taking her eyes off the wild-eyed man with the gun. She had never liked him, and was convinced that he used his family connections to get promoted and transferred to this station, for some reason. She had always wondered why he’d chosen the inner city to work. Now her mind raced as she considered the possibility of a connection to the slavers that kidnapped Svetlana, but she didn’t have enough information to connect them.
Her eyes never left his as she stood, trying to keep herself between the gun and the girl, her hands up and out at shoulder level.
“Lieutenant, put the gun down. You know the regulations. You also have seen what she is capable of. Do you want to be the next one she deals with? She was calm and content for several hours, and never changed once until you bullied her. If you back her into a corner even with a gun, do you think you will do better than the four men did against her?” The words came out calmly, but a little louder to make sure that she was heard over the gasping almost-hyperventilating sound of his breath as he struggled to control himself.
Svetlana waited in her human form, head cocked as she watched to see what the two people in the room would do, but her heart was sinking as she realized that she had to leave as quickly as possible. There was no way she would be safe now that they knew what she was capable of. They obviously, from Oksana’s statement just now, knew that she had killed those men. She had to separate herself and make sure that she was safe, and then try again some other way to get home to her family, if they would even take her back. She brie
fly wondered deep inside from time to time during the last weeks if her father and mother would still love her after what she had done, and what she had become.
But that was a different problem to be solved later. First she had to survive the current situation. She guessed that bullets wouldn’t hurt her in her other form, because when she’d killed the two boys who tried to rape her, one had had a knife. He had tried to stab her after she changed shape, but the blade had skittered over her skin, and hadn’t even left a mark. So she calmly waited to see how Oksana would fair against the asshole that had tried to force her to talk earlier. So far, it wasn’t going good for the young woman.
“Get out of the way, you idiot! She is dangerous! Why are you protecting her? She killed my – ” He broke off suddenly, face flushing as he almost said something that might get him in real trouble, and Svetlana’s eyes narrowed at hearing his words. Her mind raced as she tried to figure out what he was about to say, then it occurred to her. He had been asking about what happened at the brothel, not to the two older boys she had killed trying to defend herself. She looked closer at him, trying to remember what the men looked like, but he didn’t look anything like the first man, and she hadn’t seen the faces of the other men long enough to remember them very well.
Oksana heard it, as well, and things suddenly began to make sense to her. All the little clues that had nagged at her subconscious for months came together, and unlike Svetlana, she had seen the faces of the men killed in their previous arrest photos passed around the station as the detectives tried to figure out how they died and what killed them. She knew the girl behind her had done it now, and she even knew why. But this new information helped clarify things considerably, as her orderly memory brought up the image of one of the men killed in the kitchen. He was a close match to the crazed lieutenant in front of her, and she nodded.
Organized crime existed everywhere. It was the bane of every police organization and honest citizen in every country everywhere. There had never been even a hint that the illegal brothel had existed in their city, let alone that it employed girls that were underage, all of whom had been kidnapped elsewhere and forced into the sex trade against their will. If they had a high-ranking family member on the force, and on the vice squad, like she suddenly remembered the lieutenant was, it would make their job much easier.
“Was he your cousin or your brother?” The question came out in a flat, unemotional voice, with only the tiniest inflection that gave away the smallest fraction what she was really feeling inside.
“He was my –” He broke off again. This was not going well. He knew that the video system also recorded audio, and he started to sweat as he dug himself in deeper.
Oksana nodded at the miniscule shred of confirmation. It didn’t matter. Now that the investigators knew what to look for, they would find the connection.
The captain watching in the monitoring room swore in vile temper as he, too, put together the signs. He turned, grabbed a radio from one of the two technicians, and yelled at the other to keep him informed as he ran from the room, hoping he got there soon enough to prevent a bloodbath again, this time in his own station house.
The stalemate continued upstairs, with Oksana staying in between the gun and the girl, and the lieutenant trying to get a clear shot. Svetlana, for her part, simply glared at the man in front of her, letting her rage out through her eyes, which now glowed red even in the bright lights of the room and the glass windows on the wall. Oksana continued to try to talk the man out of his weapon, and Svetlana felt grateful that a police officer was trying so hard to protect her. But if the man shot Oksana down trying to get to her, she was going to do to him what she’d done to the others in that place. This time, though, she was going to try to leave him alive, and let him suffer. She’d had enough, she decided.
The captain burst out of the stairwell after running up the two flights of stairs, somewhat out of breath, but didn’t stop, trying to get to the room before things went completely south. He almost made it.
The man suddenly changed tactics, and in a flash, the barrel of the gun flashed out, hitting Oksana’s protector on the side of the head even as the technicians watching remotely watched in horror, convinced that everything was going straight to hell right in front of their eyes.
Snarling in triumph, he brought up the gun and opened fire in one smooth motion. The result was not what he was expecting.
Svetlana flashed into her stone gargoyle form and raised her arms to protect her face and eyes as the man emptied the gun into her body. The impacts drove her back somewhat, and stung, but when his gun was empty, she looked down and saw she wasn’t bleeding. The bullets had smashed into her form, some staying there while the rest fell to the floor. Then she moved.
The captain got to the room and shouldered his way through the tactical response team that still didn’t know what to do, even at the sound of the gunshots, making it into the room in time to see the girl, or the creature, whatever she was, fling the heavy wooden table into the wall. The windows there shattered at the impact, leaving a huge gaping hole where they once set, the cold fall air suddenly chilling everyone nearby.
With the table out of the way, Svetlana leaped forward, and ripped the now-empty and useless gun away from him with one hand as the other reached out to close around his throat. Massive muscles tensed as she heaved him off his feet, slamming him back into the wall behind him so hard that his world spun and the plaster behind him gave way. Then she bent down and roared in his face, a deep rumbling sound of elemental rage that carried to everyone nearby.
The captain made it into the room, and she turned to him, her eyes narrowing. She lowered the stunned lieutenant and turned to evaluate the new person in the room, to see if he was a threat, a rumbling growl escaping her with every breath.
“It’s ok. I don’t even have a weapon. Svetlana, your father will be here soon, and you can go home. It is ok. You will be ok.”
The deep, guttural, gravelly voice that came out of her gargoyle form was deep and full of pain and anger as she responded.
“He will not want me anymore, after he sees what I have become, what I have done.”
“You don’t know that.” The captain spoke in soothing tones, trying to calm the girl down. He had no more idea than anyone else how the young girl was able to do what she had done, but he had children of his own. He knew that she had been brought to the now-closed brothel, and had been there when the men were killed, but had no idea that she had done it. Now that he knew, he was horrified at what she’d had to do to save herself. Becoming this thing, and doing everything she’d had to do to live and survive, to get away, must have taken its toll on her.
“Why don’t we wait together, and see? I have children, daughters of my own. I would be out of my mind with worry if my daughter was missing, and I would be so happy to have her back that I wouldn’t care about anything else. I promise you, it will work out ok.”
She shook her massive head as tears started up in her eyes. The man was so kind, but he was so wrong. He wasn’t her father.
“It’s true. But running out now will not solve anything. If your father won’t take you back, I will take you in. It will work out. I promise.”
“What about those men? What about him?” She motioned to the man on the floor, who was now just trying to clear his head and get back up to his feet.
In response, the captain reached slowly behind him, pulling out his handcuffs and showing them to her. “May I deal with him?”
She laughed through her tears, nodding at the captain. “Do you need help?” The giggle seemed totally incongruous, coming from the massive, fearsome form, and he smiled.
“Only if he moves. But, try not to damage him. We need him in one piece, so we can figure out what he knows about the criminals in this town.”
“Tell him if he does not answer your questions completely, I will come back and eat him, piece by piece.” She turned her head slightly away from the lieutenant and winked at
the captain so the younger man couldn’t see her eye. He got the message with a slight curling grin, which vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.
She watched carefully while he handcuffed the man, who was still shaking his head to try to clear the ringing noise from his ears while the world still didn’t want to stay still.
After the disgraced lieutenant had been handed off to the tactical team outside and the captain shut the door rudely in their faces, he turned to help Oksana up to her feet. It was while their eyes were elsewhere that she changed back again.
She glanced over at the young girl standing slumped with her hands down by her sides, the very picture of abject despair, and held out her own arms. “I will stay here as well. We will see what happens together. Is it ever cold in here. Can someone bring me a warm coat for her and I? Captain, would you need one?”
Svetlana swarmed into the woman’s arms, holding on tightly, and Oksana winced as the girl’s strength registered, and then looked down at her in surprise as she laughed once.
The teenager worked one arm free, and gestured behind her. A white light flashed from her hand, and the window was suddenly whole again, as was the table. At another gesture, the warmth returned to the room, as well.
The captain just stared at the young girl in utter amazement then looked at Oksana’s equally wide eyes. Before he could stop himself, he blurted out, “Wow!”
Svetlana didn’t let go of Oksana, but the policewoman thought she felt Svetlana’s form start to shake. Worried that the girl was crying, she leaned back, only to realize the girl was laughing silently, a big silly grin on her face.
A laugh escaped her own throat as she spoke up, “Well, that was amazing. How are you able to do all that?”
It was silent in the room for a moment, but a much more sober Svetlana spoke up. “I don’t really know. I do know that when things really started to get bad, I felt something I never felt before. I touched it, and now I can do lots of things. Not all of them are good. I still have nightmares about the bad ones. I feel bad about what happened to those men, but…” She trailed off, and the captain nodded.