Shade Chaser (City of Crows 2)

by Clara Coulson

  The yellow-eyed owl—no, the yellow-eyed man in owl form—peers down at me as I pass underneath his branch. He lifts a wing and points, deliberately, in a direction I think is south. And before I can get a word out, a question, a thank you, something, the owl man takes off and swoops up into the trees, disappearing into the darkness. A moment later, a faint hoot sounds off in the night sky.

  I turn, sharp, to the south, bouncing off a tree hard enough to bruise so I won’t lose speed. The Wolves, unprepared, try to bank the same direction, but their own momentum trips them up. I chance a peek over my shoulder in time to watch the three beasts crash into each other and careen off a shallow hill into a snow bank. A writhing mass of limbs and panicked yips, they vanish into the white together. And for the first time in twenty minutes, the woods behind me fall silent.

  This is my chance. My only chance.

  I peel my eyes in the direction the owl man pointed—I’ll wonder about his identity later, when I’m not potential Wolf food—searching for anything that might help me escape from this situation. Darkness to my left. Darkness to my right. White snow at my feet. And…a light straight ahead.

  The light flashes in and out of my sight as I dash forward, tree trunks in its path. But I keep track of its location—it’s static. The light from a building. A building where there might be people. A building where there might a vehicle. Or a phone. Or a computer. Or, hell, even an emergency flare. I’ll take anything I can get at this point.

  Wracked with tremors head to toe, I force myself to run faster than ever before. Even as my breaths hitch, I don’t slow. Even as my heart palpitates, I don’t slow. Even as something sharp in my chest jimmies out of place and bites into my lung, I don’t slow. Even as my abdomen seizes up entirely, refusing to budge, I don’t slow. Even as my vision dims until there’s nothing but a sliver of forest in my sight, I don’t slow. I am not giving up, you stupid, failing body! Stop trying to bring me down!

  I hit the edge of the woods. And pass into a muddy lot for a building under construction.

  It’s abandoned this time of night—the workers must have gone home, hell, ten minutes before I made my escape—but all hope isn’t lost. There’s a gray doublewide trailer on the western edge of the site, where the foreman must manage operations during the day. It’s likely got a full office setup, complete with computers and a phone line. There’s bound to be something in there I can use to communicate with the outside world.

  I fly underneath the light pole that guided me to the site and head for the trailer. The hulking steel skeleton of the building in progress looms over me on one side, a row of trucks and bulky construction equipment on the other. The ground has been cleared of most of the day’s snow, and what melted into the soil left it soggy enough to give way under the weight of the construction vehicles. Wide, crisscrossing tire tracks dot the bare earth, some of them over a foot deep. I have to carefully traverse them on my way to the trailer, so I don’t fall in and break my neck.

  I make it. In one piece. Miraculously. The front steps of the trailer are ten feet in front of me. All I have to do is get inside, barricade the door, find a phone or computer, and call Riker—

  A Wolf soars out from behind a bulldozer and skids across the ice in front of the trailer.

  Fuck.

  I stagger to a stop. My eyes dart left and right, searching for somewhere to run and hide. The Wolf sinks into an aggressive stance, about to lunge at me, teeth bared like he’s planning to rip out my throat. I make a judgment call: the unfinished building is farther away than the vehicles on my right, and one of the trucks might have keys stuffed under a sun visor or—

  A shadow falls over me.

  Oh. I remember this.

  I duck. My knees hit the half-frozen soil a split second before three hundred pounds of werewolf fly over me, so close his claws tickle my neck. But he overcompensates on the landing—wasn’t expecting to miss—and trips over one of the deep tire tracks. His massive body flips tail over head, and he collides with his buddy guarding the trailer. Together, they crash back into the makeshift wooden steps in front of the trailer, boards splintering under their weight.

  To the vehicles! I take off.

  The first and second work trucks I come to are locked, but somebody left the third one open. My attention flicking back to the disoriented Wolves every few seconds, I climb inside the truck and search for the keys. My bloody, bruised fingers skim everything in the cabin—the visors, the storage bin between the seats, the glove box—but I find nothing except papers, stale snacks in plastic wrap, and a small pack of matches.

  Damn.

  Does anybody know how to hotwire a truck?

  Because I don’t.

  I pocket the matches and look at the Wolves again. There are three of them now. The third Wolf, who’s the largest (it must be McKinney), stands before the two who broke the steps. Even though he’s not making any sounds, he seems to be berating them for their screw-up. One of the subordinates has his furry head hung low, while the other is pacing back and forth, limping a bit, a back leg broken or sprained. After glaring at his goons, McKinney’s head slowly turns my way. He spies me in the truck and peels back his Wolf lips in a freakishly human manner.

  I’m not sure what spurs me to do it. Maybe it’s instinct. Maybe it’s déjà vu. But something inside me knows I can’t stay in the truck. So my broken body fumbles its way out of the cabin and races across the muddy lot like it’s hopped up on serious steroids. My breath is coming in shallow pants now, which sound too wet to be healthy. My muscles have all but liquefied—and I honestly don’t know how my legs are still working. But I make it across the gap between the vehicles and the building and enter the partially built first floor just as McKinney finishes chewing out his cronies.

  When I glance over my shoulder to see what the Wolves are doing, I spy McKinney jerk his head my direction. An order for his men to pursue me again. A second chance to prove they’re not complete morons.

  The other two Wolves track me down with their narrow, angry eyes, glowing beacons in the night. Even from forty feet away, I witness their huge muscles coil up tight, like springs. And then they bound toward me, kicking up frozen mud in their wakes.

  I flee farther into the building. There’s construction equipment everywhere, an obstacle course. Nails sticking out of boards that skim my feet. Missing panels in the floor that threaten to drop me into the basement. Low-hanging wiring that may or may not be live.

  Up the stairs I go, as fast as my spent legs can take me, until I reach the second floor—everything above it is barebones. Below me, the Wolves tear into the ground floor, slinging loose boards and power tools and stacks of cinderblocks all over the place, destroying weeks’ worth of work.

  Searching the available rooms on the hallway—only two have finished walls—I pick the first one on the right and head inside, quietly locking the door behind me. In the dim light, I seek out something to barricade the door with, but beyond a basic toolbox in the corner, some tiny barrels covered with a tarp, and a couple of fold-out chairs, there’s nothing I can use to keep the Wolves out. Not that blocking the door would save me for long. The walls, for an office, clearly, aren’t much more than drywall and insulation. If the Wolves try hard enough, they can break through.

  I’m dead. There’s nowhere else to go. Except back out into the hall, where the Wolves are currently prowling around, having made it up the stairs. Or…there’s a window on the far wall.

  I shuffle over to the window to peer out and—summarily trip over the tarp. I fall flat on my face and bust my chin open on the scratchy unfinished floor. Cursing, I roll over and grab the tarp to toss it away, only to notice something I completely missed before. The tarp isn’t covering small barrels, like I assumed when I first came in. It’s covering tanks.

  Propane tanks.

  My hand drops the tarp and sinks to my back pocket. The matches.

  The Wolves reach the locked door and nudge it.

  I rus
h across the room, to the toolbox, and grab a hammer. Next, I return to the window, snagging a propane tank on the way.

  Hammer held high over my head, I hesitate. What if it sparks when I hit it and I blow myself up? Would death by Wolf be better or worse than death by fire?

  I bite my tongue and hiss out, “Worse.”

  Then I bring the hammer down as hard as I can with so little strength left, and the nozzle of the tank pops off with a clang, skittering across the floor. Propane spills out, spreading across the plywood in a shallow pool.

  I brace the bottom of the hammer against the floor and balance the metal head against the underside of the tank, pointing the nozzle at a downward angle so the propane will continue to pour out until the tank is empty.

  Someone rams the door. It cracks down the middle.

  I back up to the window, jimmy the lock, and slide the left pane open to the right. The resulting gap is just wide enough for me to fit through.

  Another impact with the door. Splinters fly out and bounce across the propane-covered floor. But the door holds.

  As the pool of propane circles back toward me, I climb up into the window, knees bent. A story below me, a large snowdrift promises to cushion my landing. I can’t be sure it’s deep enough. Or not hiding anything sharp and pointy. But again, I’d rather break my neck or skull than go out as Wolf food.

  My fingers slip into my pocket and tug out the matches. I tear the cover off the pack and press the striking strip horizontally against the match heads. Then, after a nervous breath, I drag the strip across all the matches at the same time. They don’t all light at once from the friction, but enough do to set the whole pack ablaze.

  I stare at the wavering flame clutched in my hand, whispering prayers to a god I don’t worship.

  The Wolf rams into the door one last time, and it shatters.

  I toss the match pack on the floor and tip backward out the window.

  Halfway to the ground, my world is consumed by the blinding glow of fire. Flames burst out the window, breaking the glass. The unfinished ceiling of the second floor explodes from the force of ignition, and smoke roils up through the skeleton of the building-to-be, curling around the metal bones. The floor of the room buckles beneath the blast and falls through to the unfinished lobby beneath. And somewhere, in the office that never was, inhuman shrieks of agony are nearly drowned out by the inferno’s roar.

  My body hits the snow.

  I lie there for minutes that feel like hours, watching the fire consume months’ worth of hard work, hundreds of thousands of dollars. At one point, I spot something tumbling down the stairs, hard to see through the tongues of fire curling over every piece of wood, through the dense smoke snaking around the corners. But that something is big enough and familiar enough for me to identify: one of the Wolves. Injured. Badly.

  The Wolf drags himself through the fire—he can’t avoid it, it’s everywhere—and outside via an unfinished wall on the bottom floor. Half his fur is gone. The visible skin beneath is blackened and burned away, down to the bone in some places. One of his ears is missing, either eaten completely by the flames or sheared off by a piece of debris. And lastly, he’s dragging both his hind legs. Something collapsed on his back and paralyzed him from the waist down.

  Werewolves are hard to kill.

  But I wonder, watching this wounded Wolf who nearly murdered me, as he limps away from the battlefield, defeated…I wonder just how much a man disguised as a beast can truly survive. In spirit, if nothing else.

  The Wolf disappears into the woods and doesn’t return. The second Wolf who was in the building never emerges (the one who broke the door, I guess). The initial blast must have killed him on the spot. And—

  A dangerous growl to my right.

  I sit up. Brace my hands against the compacted snow beneath me to stay upright. Suck in a breath with tired, tortured lungs, surrounded by cracked ribs. Let it out as a cloud of steam in the cold winter night. And then, resignation sour on my tongue, I turn my head to face McKinney.

  He’s standing at the corner of the building. His Wolf eyes reflect the churning inferno before us. And those eyes of fire are focused on me. Nothing but me. Not the flames eating through the walls. Not the tracks of his surviving minion leading to the woods. Not the distant flicker of blue and red that might, might be a police vehicle heading this way. Cal Kinsey is the singular thought in this werewolf bastard’s mind. Because Cal Kinsey, wretched human, has killed one of his subordinates.

  Vic Martinez’s unsolved murder started this whole fiasco.

  Now either Zhang or Donahue is dead. At my hands. So if McKinney didn’t want to butcher me before…

  The Wolf charges.

  There’s nowhere for me to go. A fire in front of me, too hot to survive. Bare ground behind me, too far to run. To my left, a stack of thin metal pipes, secured with taut cords. And McKinney on the right, teeth bared, snarling, as he closes the distance between us to eat me alive.

  There’s nowhere for me to go, but I run anyway—because I refuse to head to my unknown afterlife with the weight of surrender on my shoulders. I scuttle backward to the stack of pipes and climb as fast as I can. The stack is maybe ten, twelve feet tall, and the snow-slicked metal is slippery against my calloused hands. My feet slip off twice on my way up, and I glance over my shoulder each time, catching glimpses of McKinney’s massive Wolf form growing larger and larger in my field of vision. The fire in his eyes seems to burn through my skull.

  I’m almost to the top when he reaches the base of the pipe stack. He rams it, trying to throw me off, but the pipes are small enough to wrap my hands around, so I hang on, brace myself, as the stretchy cords strain to hold the stack together. The whole thing wavers, back and forth, as if trying to decide whether or not to topple. It stays upright. Barely.

  McKinney backs away a few feet and roars, furious I didn’t fall to my doom. I ascend the last few feet up the pipe stack and straddle the top, all four of my limbs quaking so hard I can hardly balance. The Wolf paces at the bottom, throwing fiery glares at me in between his steps as he tries to figure out his next move. He can’t climb up after me with Wolf paws, one tiny disadvantage to his animal form. But at the same time, he’s so large that he might be able to jump high enough to grab me with his teeth and yank me off the pipes.

  I scrutinize every twitch in his bulky muscles. Waiting, tense, for the moment he decides to leap at me. If I roll over the back side of the pipe stack, he might miss and…

  McKinney doesn’t go straight for me at all. Instead of jumping up to get me, he prowls over to one of the cords holding the stack together. With an outstretched paw, claws extended, he flicks the cord to test its strength. The outer fabric layer of the cord unravels at his touch. He can cut through the cord, both cords, and then ram the stack again, collapsing it and throwing me to the icy ground below. Where my battered flesh will be easy pickings for his teeth.

  Shit, what can I do now? There must be something.

  A tall stack of heavy pipes held in place by two cords. How can I upend McKinney’s plan to knock it over?

  Think. Think! You made the DSI elite for a reason, Kinsey!

  McKinney lines up his claws with the first cord to slash through it in one swift blow.

  Stack of pipes. Two cords.

  Stack of pipes that can fall in multiple directions.

  Two cords that McKinney can’t break at the same time.

  So what if I…?

  McKinney swipes his sharp claws at the first cord, and it snaps in half like a rubber-band, the sheared end flying up into the air. As soon as I feel the stack of pipes unsettle near my feet, no longer restrained, I lurch toward the remaining cord in front of me. Six inches from the top of the stack are the natural ends of the cord, held together by two black hooks.

  I swing my torso off the peak of the stack, grab both ends of the cord, and slide one hook out of the other’s grasp. I let the cord go, and both ends zip off in opposite directions.
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  Finally, I push off toward the back side of the stack, rolling away from McKinney in somersault formation. Halfway down the destabilized mountain of pipes, I curl my legs in and kick with all my might. My feet slam against the center of the stack, knocking numerous pipes out of alignment. There’s a second, as my body sails away from the pipe stack, through the freezing air, closing in on a snowdrift, that I’m a hundred percent sure my plan will fail, the pipes won’t fall, McKinney will come reeling around the stack and rip my head off.

  And then…the pipe mountain collapses. On top of McKinney.

  A cacophony of clanging metal rings out into the night as I crash into the snow, glimpsing the Wolf through the narrow gaps between the pipes. McKinney is pelted by them, over and over, dozens of pipes beating his limbs, his back, his head, his face. The end of one pipe whips sideways when it collides with another, and the rough edge gouges out a chunk of McKinney’s abdomen. The Wolf howls in pain, but the sound is drowned out by the metallic downpour. Then another pipe comes wheeling by and smacks McKinney in the face, knocking his jaw out of its socket.

  McKinney falls. The pipes keep coming.

  When all is said and done, McKinney is half-buried under the toppled mountain of metal. He struggles to cast the pipes off, every part of his body battered and broken. I watch him writhe from my place on the snow bank, where I lie limp, my limbs so weak from exertion and injury I can barely move. Payback isn’t sweet, I think, but it isn’t bitter either. Even so…

  McKinney’s a werewolf, and they heal fast, so I can’t just lie back and enjoy the creeping hypothermia. This Wolf man won’t stop chasing me until one of us is dead, and if someone else interferes…A faint police siren is growing ever louder.

  You know what you need to do, Kinsey. So do it.

  I get up. My walk is more a shamble, but I manage to make my way around the bulk of the pipe mess, to where McKinney labors to extract himself. A single pipe sits a few feet off from the rest, like it’s waiting for someone to pick it up. Like someone laid it out for me. I hobble over to it, bend down with knees that don’t want to support me, and lift the pipe with a swinging motion that lets me rest the bulk of the weight on my shoulder. Then I continue on to McKinney.