by C. T. Aaron
Holy crap does this asshole like to talk.
But also—
Is he right?
As much as I want to boot this bitch in the testes, he’s got a point. We’ve already decimated one planet. What would humanity do to this place?
Well, it probably doesn’t matter. We’re not going to be alive much longer to worry about it.
“Now quit stallin’ and just answer the question. You coming, or do we dig you a couple holes out here?”
Mae and I trade glances. Maybe we can’t read each other’s minds, but I believe she knows what I’m about to do.
I pop Ezzy.
The guys back up and raise their weapons. Alexander shakes his head, like he expected this.
“You really think you can make that dog get me before these guys bury you?”
“No.”
I take over Ezzy. Like black lightening, he lunges. His jaws snap shut over Oscar like a T-rex in Jurassic Park. Oscar yelps as Ezzy lifts him up, dangling the boy from his jaws. Oscar instinctively reaches up to wrap his arms around Ezzy’s head to hang on. Ezzy growls, low and baritone.
“Call your Fam and I’ll bite you in half!” I scream at Oscar.
I can see he considers ignoring me, but his two-faced Fam does not show up. I face Alexander.
“Back those guys off! Now! Do it!”
Alexander puts his hands in his pockets while the men exchange looks and wait to be told what to do. Their boss gives a little sniff.
A long moment passes.
Then at last, Alexander raises his eyebrows at me. “Oh, I’m sorry, were you expecting me to stop you? I’m still waiting for your answer. Yes or no?”
“I’ll kill him!”
When I say it, I mean it.
Because right now, that’s where we’re at. These people have guns. They have other weapons. They watch people die at these meets. Oscar knew Mae’s life would be in danger when he led his dad to her. There are no police here, no one to come helping us. We are alone, and I’ll be damned if I’m going down without a fight.
In response to my threat, Alexander . . . shrugs.
And Oscar sees him do it.
“Clock’s ticking, girlies. Take it or leave it.”
“He’s your son,” Mae gasps.
Alexander says nothing. Does that little sniff thing again is all, like he could not care less.
Is he bluffing? He must be. Right? He must be.
Oscar’s expression slowly shifts. His face gets sort of blank. It’s not me and Ezzy, I’m making sure my wolf doesn’t actually do any permanent damage yet.
It’s not us Oscar’s reacting to.
Even before it happens, I feel in my guts that things are in fact about to get very, very worse.
TWENTY
Before I can say or do anything, Oscar’s two-faced giant pops onto the scene.
Right behind Alexander.
The men shuffle back further, again raising weapons. Alexander twitches, clearly feeling the presence of the giant behind him, and begins to turn.
The giant grunts as he swings a fist in a long loop overhead. He drops the fist down on top of Alexander’s head. Soundlessly, the Big Bad drops to the ground, kicking up puffs of dust.
The men scatter. Those with guns fire aimlessly our direction. I make Ezzy drop Oscar as Maebry and I fling ourselves to the ground. The gunshots are loud, louder than almost anything I’ve ever heard.
Then they’re gone. I hear engines revving far ahead of us, and then see the guys on motorcycles, taking off.
Maebry, Oscar, and I get to our feet, slowly, forming a triangle, looking at each other. The giant is motionless, standing over Alexander’s body. Ezzy drops his belly to the ground.
We inch nearer, and he stirs. Alexander groans and rolls on to his side.
The giant picks him up by one ankle. The Fam, I think under Oscar’s control, pulls back his right hand like he’s going to punch Alexander in the body. If he does, no way will Alexander survive.
“Don’t do it.”
Oscar turns to me. I put my hands to my head and try to rub the pain away, without success.
“Are you kidding me?” Oscar says, his voice pinching. “You’ve seen what kind of man he is. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you have to be better than him.”
“Well I’m not!”
Maebry steps closer to him. “No. But you could be. Right now. You can choose. Don’t do this, Oscar. Please.”
We wait, tense, as Alexander slowly regains consciousness and starts to realize his ass is hanging upside down from his son’s Familiar.
He groans. “What the . . .”
“Okay,” Oscar says, staring at his father’s reddening face. “Okay.”
Instead of punching him, the giant grabs Alexander’s leg, so that he has both fists wrapped around it. The giant gives his fists a little twist. It’s slight, but the sound that comes from Alexander’s bones is not.
A single sharp crack, as loud as the gunshots, echoes through the mirror world. Alexander screams, high pitched, as the giant drops him to the ground. Alexander sits up, grabbing at his ankle. The foot inside his fancy leather shoe is facing a very, very wrong way.
“Let’s go,” Mae says quietly.
I nod, and turn to check on Ezzy as Oscar marches toward the doorway without a look back at his dad.
Instead of sitting up like he’d been a minute ago, now my wolf is lying on his side.
Bleeding.
“Ezzy!”
I stumble toward him with the last of my strength. Ezzy is panting. Bloody holes dot his shoulder.
“Oh no, Ezzy!” I wrap my arms around his neck.
“Send him back,” Oscar says, lifelessly.
“What?”
“He’ll recover faster if he’s home.”
“And just where the hell is that?!”
“I don’t know. All I know is it works. Send him.”
Ezzy licks his lips, then his big tongue stretches out to lick my hand.
I don’t have much choice.
“Thank you,” I whisper into his ear, and hug him closely but gently before popping him away.
Maebry kneels beside me, just as I see the giant disappear and Oscar reaching the doorway.
“Can you walk?” she asks.
I struggle to my feet. “Not for long.”
Over Alexander’s angry, painful cries, we shuffle to the doorway. Oscar, for some reason, waits for us, then goes through just as we get there.
Darkness—
TWENTY-ONE
Then light.
It’s morning, early morning, bright and shiny here on Earth, but I have no time to enjoy it. My legs start to give out, and Maebry catches me.
“I got you, B. Hang on.”
“You?” I croak. I grab the hem of her shirt and tug, trying to make her turn around. “Did they hit you?” I scan her body, head to toe and back again, then make her turn and show me her back side, too, as if judging the fit of a wedding dress.
“No, no, no,” Maebry chants. “I’m fine. Are you—”
“Let’s get out of the open, huh?” Oscar interrupts. “Someone’s gonna see us here.”
Traffic is light; only two cars amble past the preschool building as we stumble to the sidewalk. Maebry guides us across the street to our school and we enter campus. It’s completely deserted; is this Saturday? Sunday?
Doesn’t matter. We walk to the middle of campus before stopping, surrounded by two-story classroom buildings and the cafeteria. We’re sort of out in the open, but not visible from the street. It’ll have to do. I sink to the concrete sidewalk, heart and head pounding in unison.
“Your Fam okay?” Oscar asks, not looking at us.
“He was shot,” Maebry says. “He could have been killed.”
“He’ll be okay if you let him stay there awhile.”
My eyes close for a long time, heavy and thick-lidded, before I can open them again. Maebry is staring at me. “You coul
d have been killed.”
I swallow sticky dryness and look for the water bottle, only to find we’ve both dropped them in the mirror world. My face gets warm and my eyes involuntarily squeeze shut as the facts of the matter bury into my soul.
“I hope you’re not waiting for me to say thank you,” I say to Oscar. “Because if I ever see you again—”
“You won’t. I swear.”
“Won’t he come after us?” Mae says. “Your father?”
“After you two? No. I know how he thinks, believe me. He only wants one thing right now, and that’s me.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know. But I got a big-ass Familiar and he doesn’t, so. I’ll be all right.”
I’m fading fast. “You should go. Right now.”
“Right,” Oscar stands there, fidgety for a second. “Listen. I’m sorry. Okay?”
I force my eyes to open wider. “I don’t care. Go.”
He nods, gives Mae a look I can’t quite interpret, then walks down the breezeway and turns the corner.
Once I can’t see him, my body sags against the concrete.
I almost killed my Familiar, my beautiful Ezzy. I forced him to do things today, and then even when I didn’t force him, he let himself get hurt to protect me. And yes, if he’d died in doing any of it, that would have been the end for me, too.
What Maebry had tried to show me that first time at the meet . . . I don’t think it stuck. I was horrified by the meet, yes, but the point she was trying to make didn’t quite get through. But now I get it. Or think I get it. There should have been some other way out of this mess than risking our lives, than so many people and creatures being hurt. But at the same time, they didn’t leave us much choice. Mae would be dead right now if Ezzy hadn’t used force. That has to be okay. Right? When Mae forced Aison to bite the hummer, she didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t deliver a speech or make a post online or share a meme and expect the monster to leave us alone. It just doesn’t work that way.
Maybe sometimes it does. And I definitely want nothing to do with hurting anyone ever again . . . but I can’t let anyone hurt me, either.
My headache takes on a whole new dimension—no pun intended—as I try to wrestle with all this. Maybe now’s not the best time. Maybe recovering from this little death-defying adventure should take precedence, and the rest I’ll figure out as we go, with Maebry by my side.
Maebry gets up and helps me to my feet. “You have to go to the hospital.”
“Good idea.”
“Oscar might be right about Alexander, but we don’t know about those other guys . . . Dante and whoever else. They’re probably from around here. They wouldn’t travel all through the mirror world just to get to the meets. That means they might come after us here, if they can.”
I grab my head with one hand, trying to slow another bout of dizziness. “That’s not making me feel better.”
“Sorry. Let me call 911.”
“I really like the sound of that.” I cast a nervous glance around the school, expecting Alexander or his thugs to somehow pop nearby, like Familiars. But there’s nothing. Just our empty school, a light breeze tossing a plastic grocery sack in oddly normal circular patterns.
The sun. A breeze.
As we reach the street and stumble toward a bus stop bench, I start crying.
TWENTY-TWO
Turns out I have what’s called a mild closed-head injury, sort of like a concussion. Nothing too traumatic, fortunately, but I have to stay in the hospital overnight. The doctors readily buy my story about tripping on a sidewalk, which was nice. Consistent with my injuries and all that, although they were a little curious about why I was so dehydrated . . .
Mom wasn’t so sure. About any of it. The school had gotten through that evening when I left the house, telling her all about my encounter with Ballcap, and now Mom thinks that’s why I “took off with Mae.”
The story Mae and I concocted while waiting for the ambulance that morning admittedly didn’t paint the best picture of us: that we’d had these “issues” with some boy at school and decided to ditch for awhile, ended up taking a car out to a little artsy town called Sedona, and then realized it was late and decided to stay there overnight . . .
Yeah, it was a pretty bad story. So Mom laid into me for a while, and I’m basically grounded for a month or so, except she gave up on that about two days later, mostly I think because, one, she’s totally on my side after hearing our side of the story about Ballcap; and two, she’s just glad we’re alive and safe now.
I’m not sure I ever want to be a mom.
Honestly, we didn’t know yet what was going to happen to us at school. But Maebry and I had already decided we mostly didn’t care. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to get out of a place where a guy like Ballcap could do what he did without anyone batting an eye. Mom had assured me, though, that actually getting expelled was fairly unlikely. It was our word against his, and we didn’t exactly have a record of disciplinary problems.
Like before—before she knew about me and Maebry—I can tell Mom knows we were lying about our little trip, but doesn’t know how to ask about it, or else doesn’t want to. Maybe equal parts of both. For the first time, it’s occurred to me that Mom has a Familiar too. Some strange or wonderful creature in the mirror world she knows nothing about. Off and on, I debate showing her Ezzy, telling her the entire truth of what happened. But I don’t think I’m ready for that. And I don’t think she is, either.
The important thing is that a week later, after dark, when I tell her I’m going to go meet Mae at the park, she doesn’t stop me.
“Be careful,” she says, and gives me a look. It’s a new look, one that says something like, I’m not effing kidding. Don’t do anything stupid. Again.
I give her a big hug. “I will. I promise.”
I pack my usual bag and head out on foot for the grade-school field. I’ve seen Mae every day since our adventure, but not Ezzy. I have no idea how he is doing. I only know that, since I appear to be alive and well, he must at least be living. Mae and I decided earlier that tonight we’d pop our guys and check up on them.
Maebry is already in the middle of the field when I get there. She jumps up and runs to me for a hug. “How you feeling?”
“That is officially the last time you get to ask me that,” I say, pulling her to the ground so we’re sitting cross-legged. “I am fine, I have been fine, I will be fine. And I can’t think of any other ways to conjugate that or whatever, so let it go, babe.”
Maebry laughs. I’d missed that sound.
“I brought brownies,” she says, pulling a foil-wrapped package from her backpack.
“Perfect. Here, water.”
“Thanks. I will never travel without water bottles again.”
“Right?”
We chit-chat for a few minutes, then kiss for a few minutes, then look in each other’s eyes.
“Okay,” Mae says. “Ready?”
“Yeah. I’m a little scared.”
“Me, too. But we have to know.”
I nod. “Together?”
Maebry nods back. “One. Two. Three.”
Ezzy and Aison pop beside us. The very first thing I hear in my mind is Ezzy’s deep voice growling something that sounds a little bit like, Briar! and I can hear the smile in it.
Aison stands still and stoic as ever, as if Mae popped him from the top of a gothic cathedral. But even in the dark, I feel like he is smiling too, somehow.
Mae rubs his wing where it was punctured. There’s still a hole, but it’s smaller now.
I turn to Ezzy and throw myself on his broad, furry flank. “How are you? Are you okay?”
He nudges me with a wet, black nose almost the size of my face. I run my hands over his shoulder where the bullets had hit him. He has some bald patches that even in the dark I can see are red and inflamed, but the holes have sealed up, and there is no blood on him.
“Oh, t
hank God,” I say, and scratch behind both his ears. Ezzy groans happily and shuts one eye. “And you’re sure you’re all right?”
He whines happily.
“You saved our lives, Big Dog. Thank you..”
Ezzy gives me a little kiss on the face with the very tip of his tongue. That makes me want to be all crying-face, so instead I give him a hug. “I love you, Ezzy,” I say into his fur.
While I can’t hear him, somehow I’m pretty positive he says, I love you, Briar.
I step back, give him one last scratch, and pop him away. Maebry is whispering something to Aison, who has hunkered down so she can reach his ear. After a moment, he sits back up and gives one long, slow nod. Maebry smiles and steps back, like he needs room to blast off. Just before popping away, Aison gives me an uncharacteristic wink, sending a wisp of smoke rising into the night. Then he’s gone.
“All right, I feel better,” Mae says with a sigh. “You?”
“Yep.”
Mae holds my hand and pulls me toward her. “So with that out of the way,” she says, encircling my waist with her hands like we’re going to slow dance, “I think we can relax and enjoy the rest of the night.”
I smile back at her. “Sounds good to me, Maisy-Mae.”
We stretch out on the grass, side by side. I rest my head on her bent arm and take a deep breath, looking at the stars and feeling a sudden and pleasant exhaustion overcoming me.
“You came looking for me,” Mae says after a long time.
“Of course I did.”
“You could have been killed, B.”
“Yeah, and you almost were,” I point out.
“I don’t know if I’m ever going to find someone else like you.” Mae’s voice is so soft I can barely hear it.
“Far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to,” I say, also quietly.
Maebry sighs. “I love you, Briar.”
“I love you, too.”
I sigh right back at her. It’s the first time we’ve said those words.
Then I add, “But let’s not get chased by monsters again any time soon.”
“Deal,” Mae says, and laughs. She sits up a bit, resting her head on her palm. “So. What schools do you want to talk about going to?”