And he was a wolf. For some reason, this last observation was what really got to Markus. A massive, greasy man with a machete was fine, but for him to be a shifter on top of all that? It was like someone had ripped apart the fabric of reality and then stitched the threads back together in new and terrifying ways.
“This is a message from the Shade Claws. Ralph is ours. And soon you will be, too.”
Markus tensed up tighter and tighter with every single word that fell from those fat, liverish lips. He started to shake his head, and his head was still shaking when he lunged at the stranger.
Faster than fast, moving like lightning, the enormous man let go of the machete he held. Jacob stayed put like his body hadn’t gotten the memo it was freed, and then he started to lean off to one side, on the verge of falling. It seemed as if the man might run, and Markus hoped for that, hoped for it with every fiber of his being because if that happened, he could attack from behind.
The man didn’t run. He reached out, as casual as could be.
Markus twisted, trying to double-back on himself to avoid that hand coming towards him with all the surety of a comet.
He didn’t move in time. Five fingers, each one the approximate width of a summer sausage, clamped down around his throat.
Choking, struggling, fear jangling like alarm bells in his mind, Markus lifted up his hands and clawed at those fingers. His body was trying to shift but it couldn’t do anything with that obstruction there, but it was still trying. He was choking himself, his body expanding, contorting, and crushing itself against that vice wrapped around his neck.
His nails tore swathes of flesh from the man’s hand, sending strips of flesh drifting away in the wind like curls of confetti tossed in the general direction of a party-goer. Blood soaked his summoned fur, streamed from the man’s torn digits. He felt the surface of his nails striking bone, and still he wasn’t free.
“You fucker!”
Lost deep inside his rage and fear, his senses already fading from the lack of air as his windpipe was crushed, Markus hardly recognized the howl that split the air. Thin and reedy and warbling, it didn’t sound like it could belong to a wolf at all. A startled bird, maybe.
Out of the corner of his fading vision, he caught a glimpse of bleach-blonde hair rapidly erupting out across the shape of a man. Reuben, attacking, shifting.
Suddenly, Markus felt himself propelled through the air. He didn’t know how to deal with what he was feeling. It was unlike anything else in the world. His thoughts couldn’t catch up with the situation, couldn’t comprehend any of this. The closest thing he could compare this to was the weightless tingling of driving down a very large hill at a speed that was just a little bit too fast.
For a fraction of a moment, he was flying.
And then he was crashing, colliding with Reuben.
Reuben yelped.
Everything stopped, blanked out.
When Markus opened his eyes again, he was looking at concrete at inch away from his face. The texture was absurdly fascinating. Bumps and crags, miniature ridges and valleys and whorls, a fingerprint of the city. There were all sorts of different shades of gray down here, which wasn’t something that he had realized before about concrete.
He knew he was in shock. Or something. He couldn’t even figure out what this state was because there was too much sensory input. None of it made sense, a white noise of emotion and sensation. The only thing that felt real at all was the rough concrete under his cheek, the sight of it before his very eyes. These were all he could understand.
Oh, and pain. Bad pain, far away. Maybe not even his. He didn’t know.
“Shit!” That reedy, terrified howling again. “Shit! Shit! Jacob! Fuck! Markus! Get up!”
Someone grabbed him by the shoulders, whirled him around so he lay on his back. Though the sun wasn’t particularly bright here in this part of the alleyway, right now it was enough to hurt his eyes. He lifted his hand to shield them. The person who had rolled him over misunderstood, grabbed his hand, and yanked him up even further.
Now Markus was staring right into Reuben’s wild, terrified gaze. “Fuck. You’re hurt, too. Goddammit!”
Reuben disappeared from his field of vision, still speaking. Markus stopped focusing on it because now that he was sitting up, he was very, very aware of the pain and where it was located.
Lifting one hand, he brought his fingers to the back of his head. At some point, maybe when he had fallen with Reuben, he had hit his head hard. There was so much blood flooding from him, sheeting down the back of his head, he couldn’t even tell where the wound was. The pain seemed to be everywhere.
Clamping his hand over as much of the back of his skull as he could, sensing that was probably the best thing he could do in this situation, he looked around. The world swam around before his very eyes, wobbling at the edges and threaded through with rainbow streaks and black speckles, before clearing again.
The alley was entirely devoid of attackers of any kind. As suddenly as he had come, sneaking up on them when they were at their most vulnerable, the shifter with the machete was gone.
Though the man who had used it was gone, the machete had stayed. It was currently still embedded in Jacob, who lay on his back where he had fallen. He stared up at the sky, features blank, fingers twitching on the ground.
His third leg had been severed. Where it was right now, Markus didn’t know. He couldn’t see it. He didn’t know how it had happened. All he knew was that blood was pumping from the massive hole in Jacob’s side where his extra limb used to be.
Reuben crouched over Jacob, the only one of them who seemed to be unharmed. His hands were slick and bloody as he alternated between pressing on the first knife wound and the site of the amputated limb. His lips moved. He was screaming into a phone, which he held trapped between his ear and his shoulder.
All of it was just too much. Dragging himself over to the nearby wall, a two-foot journey that seemed to last for a year, Markus leaned against it. He closed his eyes and waited.
For the next month after the events of this fateful day, anyone who noticed him sleeping, dozing off, or taking too long to blink would roughly nudge him to make sure he wasn’t falling prey to the concussion he incurred. It was a pretty bad concussion. The doctor who treated him for it cheerfully imparted the knowledge he hadn’t seen a noggin knocked so bad since the days he was an on-call football game medic.
At the time, Markus hadn’t really cared. He’d been adrift on a sea of pain and shock, incapable of doing much but answer the questions asked of him. There would be no lasting brain damage, he was informed, though a concussion of this magnitude would take a long time to sort itself out. If he injured himself again while it was still healing, he ran the risk of permanent damage in the form of hemorrhaging or brain swelling.
Which was fantastic news for a biker, who were prone to their fair share of falls and didn’t wear helmets as often as they should.
But that was after the fact, after all the chaos stopped. For a very long time, Markus drifted. He would learn timelines later, that it took the ambulance 10 minutes to arrive, the ride to the hospital was about half that, and that he ended up sitting in the same hospital room for over nine consecutive hours while doctors observed him to make sure he wouldn’t suddenly go downhill.
Reuben didn’t ride in the ambulance. He sustained only a few scratches here and there as a result of his fall, which was mostly due to the fact that Markus had been thrown against him so hard that his body actually wrapped around behind him and cushioned his fall. That was the theory posited by the police, agreed upon by the doctors. In fact, Markus’ concussion might not have been so bad if Reuben’s full weight hadn’t crashed down on top of him.
Reuben rode to the hospital behind the ambulance, though he didn’t stay there long because he was shuttled away to talk to the police about what happened. There was simply no keeping the cops from being involved this time. A single incident of violence against a member o
f a motorcycle club was something that could potentially be put to the side, but two counts of violence? With an escalating number of casualties? It was their duty to work with the cops in order to figure out why something like this was happening. Ordinary people could be in danger.
While Reuben was being interviewed by the police and Markus was being treated for his head injuries in an emergency room, Jacob was undergoing intense surgery to save his life. The machete had clipped his lung with the first stab, then punctured straight through for the second. A major vein along his side had been severed, meaning he was in danger of bleeding out; most people didn’t have an important vein there, but in Jacob’s case, it was part of his third leg. All legs have major arteries in them and this vestigial one was no exception, which was the reason it hadn’t ever been removed in the first place.
It would have killed him.
It was killing him now.
While all that was going on, Brock was being alerted that his brother had been attacked. The news was delivered to him by a nurse who had managed to wiggle the name of a relative out of Markus when he first arrived at the hospital. She was left hanging, speaking to the empty air at the other end of the line, as Brock dropped his phone on the floor and threw himself outside to his motorcycle.
It was a mess, a terrible mess. Jacob stayed in the hospital, fighting for life, in need of more surgeries. Markus was released, and he was driven home by a frantic Brock who tucked him into bed like he was a child again.
He was so, so tired. None of this felt real. He knew it had all happened, had vague memories of it all that would be strengthened in the coming days by testimonies from his friends and police officers, but right now it was like he had just been watching a movie. It had happened. Just not to him.
All the same, lying in his darkened bedroom, he cried while falling asleep. There was no shame in it, his grief and fear needing to be expressed, and later on he wouldn’t remember he’d done it. He would mistake Brock’s presence, a brotherly hand on his shoulder, as being a fragment of a dream.
He slept for 12 hours, during which Brock woke him up every hour as he had been instructed to.
The last time he woke up was on his own, though he wasn’t alone. Brock sat on the edge of the bed, just as he had on all the other times when he came in to check on Markus.
Markus looked up at him wearily. “Hey, bro. What’s up?”
“Do you feel up to a trip? Or do you want me to just tell you what happens when I come back? I’d feel better if you came with me, but it’s your choice.”
Rubbing his eyes, Markus slowly sat up. The back of his head didn’t hurt nearly as much as it had before. Sharp, gnawing agony had mellowed into a dull sort of throb that bounced around in his skull every time his heart beat. An abominable ache had settled behind his eyes and he was still so tired that he hardly knew what to do with himself.
At least his bedroom didn’t go spiraling around his head when he moved.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. His lips parted with an audible ripping sound as he broke through a gummy layer of dried saliva. His breath tasted foul. “Where are you going?”
“The memorial park. I’ve already arranged a meeting there while you were sleeping. Pretty much everyone is coming. You in or out?”
“A meeting about?”
“About what just happened and what your next step from here is going to be.”
“You mean, the next step for the club.” Markus cleared his throat, trying to sound more authoritative than he felt. “What’s our next step?”
“After the meeting, I’m going to take you to the police station. Reuben said that he gave them the exact version of things that happened. He just left out the fact that we’re shifters, that the attacker was a shifter. It’s all the truth. They just want to talk to you. Get your testimony, a second way to see things. It’s going to be important, especially if their investigation turns up proof that it was those Shadow Claws fucks that did it.” Brock lifted one hand. “I know your opinion on that. I’m just saying. It’s going to be important, okay?”
That made sense. Markus nodded. He was very, very glad that things were starting to make sense. If he had to flounder around in the dark much longer, he thought he might have started to lose his grip on reality.
“Sure, okay.”
“I can come back and get you, or you can come with me. What do you feel like?”
The one thing he wanted more in the entire world right now was to forget any of this had happened. He wanted to go back to bed, to pull the covers up over his head and hide from everything.
Instead, he said, “I’ll go with you. Just give me a few minutes to get ready.”
“Sure.” Brock placed his hand on his shoulder, gave him a gentle squeeze. “You take all the time you need. The meeting isn’t going to go anywhere.”
Markus nodded. He hesitated for a second, then gave in to his own desires. If there was ever a time when he was expected to depend on other people, it was right now. “Would you maybe make some coffee while I get ready? Toast? Something?”
Brock also nodded and repeated, “Sure, buddy. Anything you need, I’ll get it for you.”
I don’t think that’s entirely true. Not anything.
Brock patted him on the shoulder, then suddenly leaned in and wrapped both of his arms around Markus. He pressed his cheek gently against Markus’s. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” he whispered. “It could have been so much worse. You could have ended up…”
Like Pockets, an empty husk of his former self.
Like Jacob, in critical condition.
Markus reached around with one arm and hugged onto his brother, gripping him as tightly as he could. “I know. I’m okay. It’s okay.”
“God, I sure hope so.”
Brock left and within a few seconds, the distinctive scent of coffee filtered down the hallway and into the bedroom. Taking this as a sign that he should probably get moving, Markus pushed down on the mattress and twisted around so he could dangle his legs off the edge. He slid down and then stood up, reaching out to hold onto the wall for balance.
He took an experimental step, and then another. His legs held, and he didn’t feel like he was about to fall over, so he let go off the wall and headed over to his dresser. He pulled out a handful of fresh clothes, grimacing a little as the soft fabric reminded him what he was wearing was crusted with sweat and blood.
After hopping in the shower—or gingerly stepping in—he came out and dressed again. There wasn’t much he could do for his hair right now since there was no way in hell that he was going to get water on the tender stitches.
Coffee and toast slathered with a liberal amount of peanut butter awaited him when he finally came out to the kitchen. Brock sat at the table, a slice of his own sitting on a plate in front of him. A single bite had been taken from the toast and that was all.
Having something in his stomach helped Markus start to feel like an actual person again. The beginning surge of sourness and nausea rapidly faded, letting strength flood through his limbs.
When he had finished, Brock looked up as if he’d been just waiting for this moment. “We ready to go?”
“Yeah. My shoes are by the front door.”
Brock ended up needing to tie Markus’ laces for him, since bending over to do it himself made him feel dizzy. Once more, Markus was struck by the sensation he had been reduced to the level of a child.
It wasn’t a particularly bad feeling, either. It was nice to have someone who cared so much about him.
Destiny cared about me.
He shoved that thought away. That was way too heavy of a subject to add on top of everything else right now.
They took the car that Brock owned, rather than either motorcycle. The doctors had said it would be for the best if he didn’t get jostled around a lot for a while.
Brock drove slowly, cruising easily down the streets.
William Bartram Memorial Park was a peaceful, quiet place c
omposed mainly of stretches of green grass and wandering trails. Stands of beautiful, thriving trees wrapped around most of the area, giving the illusion that the park wasn’t in the middle of a city.
The meeting place was near a modern art sculpture deep inside the park, a green twist of coils that looked like a cross between a person, a flamingo, and a DNA helix.
By the time Markus came within sight of the sculpture, he was already exhausted. Walking from one end of his bedroom to the next had been a manageable task. This felt like a journey across the barren plans of Antarctica. He would die out here and grass would grow up around his deceased form and people would walk by him without ever knowing that he was there.
Ridiculous, exhausted thoughts.
Standing around the sculpture was an enormous cluster of burly men. They were mostly alpha wolves, and the sight of them would have sent paroxysms of fear straight through the heart of any parent who saw them. In fact, the presence of so many motorcycles in the parking lots at the various park entrances would cause many people to turn around and reconsider their plans for the day. Bikers were almost like cops, in that regard. They seemed to exist on a completely different plain of humanity, one which the average person didn’t want to cross unless they absolutely had to.
However, there were also a small amount of betas and an omega here and there. Women were also in attendance, though they were far outnumbered by the men.
Markus hadn’t really ever paid much attention to these proportions before. Seeing them now, laid out in front of him in a smaller scale, it made him wonder if women might not be the smarter of the sexes.
There were already about 25 bikers standing around the sculpture, with more arriving all the time. A few of them started to notice that Brock had arrived and was heading in their direction. Word spread. Heads started turning in a spreading ripple of motion, and then everyone was staring expectantly at their leader and his wobbly brother.
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