by D. N. Hoxa
“We’re steering away from the important thing again!” Luca said, raising his voice. “How does the ECU know about us? And how can they find us?”
“I’ve lived in the middle of Manhattan for two years now. I’ve never heard a single word, and the ECU has never been after me,” was my way of telling her that I didn’t quite believe her.
Lowering her head with a sigh, Elisa took a second to think about her answer. “You must be doing something right, then,” she finally said, meeting my eyes. “Look, whatever is going on, I’m only here because of the demons. I saved you because you needed saving, but I’m not obligated to answer any of your questions. I need you to tell me where to take you, right now, or I’m dropping you off right here.”
“No, no, no, hold on. I’ve lived in Manhattan for two years and I would have—”
“Yes, I heard you the first time, and I’m telling you that I don’t know why they didn’t find you. They found lots of others, so the reason why beats me. If you don’t tell me where to take you right now, I’m throwing you out.”
“Englewood,” Luca said in a rush. “There’s an abandoned gas station that used to be called Ink. That’s where we’re going, and while you drive, you can tell us everything you know. And please, for God’s sake, speak slowly and start from the very beginning.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
“I’m sorry, guys. You seem like decent people, but I just can’t take the risk,” she said, then turned around and started to drive again. “If the ECU finds me, I’m as good as dead.” Then, she started to chant.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, grabbing her by the shoulder. “Stop it!”
And she did. “You’ll just sleep, I promise. And when you wake up, you’ll be in Englewood.”
Something hard fell on the top of my head, making me dizzy. “What are you…why…no, no, wait a sec…” I fell on Ax’s chest, quickly losing control of my body.
He raised his arm, trying to reach Elisa, but he couldn’t. “You…you b…”
“I’ll give you some answers when I drop you off, if that’ll make you feel any better,” she said, and her voice seemed to be coming from another city.
“No,” I said in a whisper, my eyes already closed. “ECU!” If they found us and we were unconscious, how were we going to fight? “Demons,” I said as the mindless thingies rushed to my mind. If they found us…
“Don’t worry about them, Scarlet.” But I did. I worried a lot, even while I was struggling to keep conscious.
“How?” I asked, meaning, how do you kill them. She’d said she could, and I wanted to know how she did it. “They’re n…not from…” around here, I wanted to say, but my damn tongue was too thick now, and my vocal cords were no longer working. A melody, something like a lullaby lured me to sleep, sucking my thoughts in much like the mindless thingies sucked my magic.
“Oh, I know where they’re from,” Elisa said. “I know exactly where they’re from.”
My mind screamed at me to wake up, to open my eyes, to ask her where, but it was useless. There was no other option but to give in to whatever spell she’d put on us.
Nine
Panic jolted me awake, my heartbeat tripling in less than a split second. Somebody was screaming, and it sounded bad.
I’d already reached for my magic without realizing when I made it to my feet, my arms in front of me to attack whoever was there. We were outside somewhere and the sky was deep orange, the sun crawling its way up to the sky still.
The screaming was coming from Sienna. She was lying on the ground, kicking her feet like a baby, while Elisa and Luca crouched to her side, telling her to calm down. Ax and Grover were sitting there, too, looking around like they had no idea what the hell was happening. Elisa’s Range Rover was parked in the middle of the street in front of an old gas station. The broken and dirty sign said it was called Ink. She’d brought us right where Luca had asked.
There wasn’t much to see, except green fields and a few houses too far to even see the color of. There were no cars passing by on either side, and the silence in that place was suffocating, whenever Sienna stopped to take a breath. I expected to hit the ground again any second now, remembering how exhausted I’d been before passing out to Elisa’s spell, but I was still standing. My muscles didn’t protest. My legs didn’t shake. The wounds on my shoulder and thigh were completely healed.
What the heck?
When Sienna stopped screaming, I looked up to see Elisa chanting, the words of her foreign spell now soft as they rolled off her tongue. No longer kicking her feet out, Sienna fell on the dusty ground full of small white rocks with a sigh. Elisa had put a healing spell on her, and I was willing to bet she’d done the same with me. There was no way I’d have felt so rested and wide awake if she hadn’t.
“Where are we?” I asked no one in particular, spinning around to look in the distance, trying to make sense of the view. I’d definitely never been there before.
“Englewood,” Ax said. “This is where we live.” And he nodded back at the gas station.
A convenience store? They lived in an empty convenience store?
“She’s okay,” Fallon said, taking Sienna’s head on her lap while caressing her hair. “She’ll be fine.”
“She better be,” Elisa mumbled and stood up, dusting off her black yoga pants. “I need to get going.”
The words were a physical assault on my face. “No, no, no, you’re not going anywhere. You spelled us in the car, right before you said you’d answer some questions when we got here.” I waved my arms around. “Well, we’re here.” And I was dying for some answers.
Walking backwards to her car, Elisa smiled sneakily. “You’ve got about half a minute to ask.”
“But you—”
“Do you know any spells that work with our magic?” Luca cut me off. “Anything at all would help.”
“No idea,” Elisa said, dragging her feet around the car. “I’m not like you.”
“Do you know what our magic is?” he asked next, but I didn’t wait for her to tell him she had no idea. How could she, when she just told us that she wasn’t like us?
“How do you know about the people who prey on us?” I asked instead, walking over to the driver’s side of the car. She was already in front of the door.
“I know because I saw them,” Elisa said.
“How do we stop them?” Ax asked before she could continue.
“You can’t. They don’t die, technically. Or, if they do, they return fairly quickly.”
“From where?” I asked, my fingers slightly shaking with anticipation. Elisa opened the door of the car.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” she said. “What you need to do is figure out how to teach them whatever you do to get off their radar, and stay as far away from them as possible. And the ECU.”
“Why is the ECU after us?” Luca asked.
“For the same reason they bother to go after anyone else: to kill you,” she said with a shrug. “The demons want to save you, but you already know what being saved by them looks like. I suggest you keep that in mind.” Elisa hopped in her car and tried to shut the door, but I stopped her.
“How do you know all this stuff, Elisa?” I asked, trying my hardest to keep the anger from showing. The last thing I wanted to do was piss her off. “We’re desperate here, not to mention clueless. If there’s a way to make sure we stay off the ECU radar, you have to tell us.”
“Just do what I do: keep a low profile, never talk to anyone, and hide your magic.”
“You’re hiding from the ECU as well?” She was a Hedge witch, sure, but that wasn’t a crime, was it?
Elisa smiled bitterly. “Oh, no. I’m hiding from something much worse,” she whispered, and her blue eyes seemed to get darker. I’d have loved to hear that story, but I already knew she’d never tell me.
“You said there were others,” Ax said from the other side of the car. “That the ECU has others like us. Where are
they?”
“Last I heard, they were being held in Inwood, but that was some time ago,” Elisa said. “So stay away from that part. In fact, stay away from New York, period. Trust me, you’re better off out here, in the middle of nowhere.”
“The demons,” I said to Elisa, inviting her eyes to me again. “Tell me about them. Where do they come from? Why do they suck our power? Why isn’t the ECU after them?”
“Who says they aren’t?” Elisa said with a wink. “And you’d do we…” Her voice trailed off and her pupils dilated until the blue of her eyes almost completely disappeared. “Oh, shit.”
That didn’t sound good at all.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, but she didn’t need to answer. In the next second, I heard it, too: the sound of a car speeding toward us.
Instinctively, I grabbed a gun, only to remember I had no bullets, so I took my swords in my hands. Elisa pushed me back with all her strength. “Hide!” she said, shutting the door, but the window was still open. “They’re after me, so run and don’t look back!”
The tires screeched when she hit the gas and the car shot forward, blowing my hair back. Adrenaline pumped my blood and confusion paralyzed me in place—a bad combination. Somebody called my name but I was focused on the car, a white Audi, approaching me fast, until it stopped abruptly in place, as if it had hit an invisible wall. Smoke came from the tires and I was surprised nobody broke the windshield with their heads. My swords were drawn, my instincts telling me that there was danger ahead, my magic slithering under my skin, ready to be unleashed. The driver and passenger door of the Audi opened, and out came two people—a man and a woman. They were both smiling, the orange light of the sun making them look even stranger.
Behind me, something exploded. I jumped around, terrified all of the sudden, when I saw Elisa’s car had stopped in the middle of the road, the hood steaming, and on top of it, a…a monster.
I’d never seen one before, but they said werewolves were a sight to behold, and not in a good way. Now, as I watched the creature standing on all fours, with dark brown fur covering every inch of its body, and its head that of a wolf, I barely believed my eyes. It was too far to see details, and I was glad for it, until Elisa came out of the car and fell on all fours on the asphalt.
Footsteps running toward me made me spin around again so fast, I got a bit dizzy. The man and woman who’d been in the Audi were now running to Elisa with guns in their hands. I don’t know why I thought it was a smart idea to raise my swords at them. I just knew that Elisa was the reason I was there, free and fully healed, and I couldn’t stand back and watch those people hurt her.
The pair stopped five feet away from me, curiously looking at my swords. They obviously weren’t impressed, or threatened at the very least by the sight of me.
“We have no business with you, Red,” the man said, his long neck giving you the impression that he was skinny at first sight, but he wasn’t. He was full of muscles and his tight shirt showed it all.
“Stand back,” I said after a deep breath. I was too scared to think of something more creative to say, something that would help me establish the image I wanted to: that I was not someone to be messed with.
But the truth was, they didn’t give a shit. They looked at each other and laughed out loud as if they thought I was no bigger than a bug under their shoes. My weapons were there with me from the first day that Leo—my personal trainer—began to train me. I moved them around like I did my limbs, so they had no way of moving fast enough to stop me when I put both swords into my waistband, and drew out of my back pocket four throwing knives, and I threw them in one movement. Three of them hit their marks: two in the man’s torso, and one in the woman’s stomach.
Surprised wouldn’t even begin to describe the looks on their faces, but they weren’t for long. By the time I had my swords in my hands again, their guns were drawn. Calling to my magic to spin the air around me before they pulled the trigger was easy, too, at first. The bullets ricocheted when in contact with my mini tornado, as if they’d hit a wall instead of air. Thanks to Elisa, when I ran forward, my leg didn’t hurt, and I spun on air with the tips of my swords aiming for their torsos.
They dodged so fast, I nearly missed them going down, and when I heard one of them chant, I fell back, but it was too late. Their magic, whatever it was, chased away the tornado shielding me from their bullets like it had never been there in the first place, and the spell caught me on my right before spreading to the rest of my body. It felt like a web, quickly knitting all around my cells, disabling them from any movement. It wasn’t as much painful as it was uncomfortable, except when I fell back and hit the ground. The back of my skull felt broken, and as the two of them, now angry as hell, raised their guns at me again—bullets were a much quicker and cleaner way of killing than spells—I thought I was done for.
But the man was pulled back by an unseen force, and by the time the woman looked behind, she was hit the face by a large fist, and she stumbled to the ground, barely keeping her balance. The spell holding me immobile was already starting to fade as I watched Grover, Ax and Luca fighting with their fists and with their magic. Trying to move would only get me more tired, but I couldn’t just lay there and watch. The faster I seemed to move, the weaker the spell holding me got, and when I was finally able to sit up, Luca was on the ground a few feet away from me. Behind us, Elisa was fighting the werewolf, who still looked just as nasty as the first time, but she was still standing. The best we could do was hold these two off for her while she got away—if she could.
Grabbing my swords again, I went for the woman who was fighting Grover, the words of her spell hurting my ears. I must have miscalculated the distance between us because when I swung my sword, all I cut through was her pony tail. A chunk of thick brown hair fell on the ground soundlessly, and when she spun around, she was met by my fist in her nose. That shit hurt—I’d tried it firsthand. Falling back a step, she raised her hands in front and chanted again, but I moved to the side and rolled on the ground, holding my left arm out so that I could stab her on the leg coming back up to my feet. I missed by an inch because she anticipated my move, and kicked me on the back of my head instead. Stars in front of my eyes as I tried to keep from falling, and used the momentum to turn around with all my strength. Throwing swords wasn’t something I’d ever done before—I’d only ever fought against the mindless thingies that Elisa called demons—but there was a first time for everything. My first sword buried in the woman’s stomach, right next to where my throwing knife had hit her first, but she saw the second coming, and she dodged both it and Grover’s fist in one movement. Grover aimed again, but then something fell on him and took him down. The man had thrown Ax like a sack of fucking potatoes, and now that both of the guys were on the ground, he spelled them, and took his damn time. I couldn’t even warn them because the woman was on me, moving like she had no bones in her body, hitting and kicking me every split second. I reached for the hearts in the makeshift holster around my belt, and I threw them but she kept kicking my forearms so fast, it was impossible to aim properly.
When I fell on the ground, her face loomed over mine, and her fist came down at me three times before I even thought to blink. She threw curse words at me, her saliva all over my face. Just when I thought it was over, she put a spell stone right on my chest and charged it while I watched. My body was not my own. I’d been sucked by the mindless thingies before, but as soon as they began, I lost consciousness every time.
The spell she cast on me caused pain like I’d never felt before. It spread ice all over my skin at first, and then I couldn’t decide whether I was freezing or burning. It was torture, but every time I tried to move, it got even worse. Elisa was on my mind, and when I turned my head to the side, I felt like my neck broke. My eyes were full of tears because blinking hurt, too, but I could see her. I could see the werewolf holding Elisa’s small body over its shoulder, walking like it was not an animal, showing his huge, ugly and sharp tee
th like he was in a fucking beauty contest. The closer he got to us, the better I could see the yellow of his eyes and his matted fur. I’d never forget the sight of him for as long as I lived.
He met with the two witches who’d kicked our asses like it was their life’s mission, and they walked back to where the white Audi was, until I could no longer see them. The cold and the fire was beginning to fade by then, but every hope I had of making it on time to not let them take Elisa was gone when I heard the roar of the engine, and the car turning back where it had come from.
I hadn’t felt this big a failure since my father refused to say goodbye to me on the last night I saw him.
Ten
Fallon and Sienna had gone inside the convenience store. Sienna looked like a ghost, while Fallon looked like a pissed off ghost, staring at Luca, who looked like a guilty ghost.
“That was the last time you make me stay back,” she spit, not even caring that we all could hear her.
“She needed someone to protect her,” Luca said reluctantly, holding his head with his hands. He must have been hit the same as I was by those witches. My face was a mess of bruises and cuts. That woman sure knew how to throw a punch. Bitch.
We sat in the back of the gas station, trying to catch our breaths and figure out what to do next, but none of us dared to talk about what had happened.
“Then next time, you stay behind and let me fight,” Fallon said, then turned to Sienna, and her eyes softened instantly. Luca didn’t dare argue.
“Who were those people?” Grover asked after a while. We were trying to assess the damage done to us but so far, we all seemed to just be bruised and cut—nothing broken.
“The ECU?” Luca asked.
“No, they weren’t the ECU. They were assassins.” I hadn’t seen one before, but I knew what people said. The car they drove, and the clothes they wore were nothing like what the ECU soldiers had. The man had worn jeans and a shirt, while the woman had leather pants on, skin tight, and a button down dark green shirt that didn’t fit the ECU uniform. And the werewolf…it left no room for doubt. The ECU’s policy was for its werewolves to never shift in front of others.