by Kit Fortier
“Go on,” Fox gently shooed the boys away. “Go help him get ready. The pack has plenty of salt and silver,” he said, indicating the hiking pack on the office chair. “Just light up the fire with alchemy when you’ve left Eric alone, got it?”
Ben nodded. He took Eric’s hand in one hand and picked up the pack in the other. The two left down the stairs in a thunderous stampede. They holed up in their bedroom, judging from where the sound of the closing door came from.
“I’ll head upstairs and keep first watch,” Jake said.
“How about I go up with you and watch your back, baby?” Fox offered.
“I hate it when you make sense, handsome.”
“I know you’re trying to keep me out of danger, Jake. But you’re here for your son, I’m here for you, remember?”
Jake breathed in those words as he touched the inside of his palm softly against Fox’s jaw. He pulled in for a gentle, warm kiss.
“We’re here for each other,” Jake said, remembering their conversation that morning.
12. Hikari no Kitsune
*** Eric
Nothing about any of this was supposed to happen. Not the bloodbath around him, not the injured men behind him. Certainly not Ben fighting for his life while Eric stood by helpless to stop it.
As the sun went down earlier that evening, Ben reluctantly lit the fire before he gave Eric a final kiss before leaving. Eric watched Ben go and wished he could just leave all this behind and go with him. But the witch was coming. It was an inevitability.
Eric attempted to glean warmth from the fire his man left behind. He held his hands against the flames, warming his palms through his fingertips. The sound of the ocean tides crashing against the shore were soothing, but not nearly enough to calm the rising anxiety building around Eric’s stomach and pressing into his heart. An unsettling feeling swept over him as he saw the dome that surrounded him ripple from one side to the other. They were here.
“Aw, look, baby! The puppy’s come out to play!” The woman who spoke those words stepped out into the faded light of day, still casting a fiery glow on the western horizon in the absence of the sun. “What do you think, baby? Do you think puppy brought friends?”
“I know he did,” the man with her said. They were both dressed in black tees and black sweatpants, likely certain their deeds would best be done in the dark. “The air around him is shimmering, like a shield. That’s alchemy right there.”
“You’re right,” the woman giggled. “He thinks he’s so prepared. But we are, too!” With a summoning wave of her fingers, a man in shorts and a sweaty tee shirt walked out from where the witch did moments ago. His eyes were vacant, his gait noticeably mechanical. He came to a stop between the witch and her acolyte.
“You can come with us, or the man dies. If you stay there, the man dies. Shit, I think it’ll be fun just to kill him anyway!” The witch laughed. A shout from behind Eric caught the pair’s attention. Then a lightning bolt split the rock they stepped away from. Fox stepped out with his left hand outstretched. The air around him crackled.
“Let the man go,” Fox said. “He’s got no part in all of this.”
The witch looked like she was considering when the man in black at her side moved like a flash. Suddenly the runner had blood gushing from his neck, and his intestines began slipping out from a footlong gash in his abdomen. The witch’s male counterpart hurled the body Eric’s way. The young man watched in horror as the runner’s lifeless body slid across the sand, leaving a thick trail of blood and viscera in its wake.
The shield around Eric fizzled and collapsed where the runner’s blood broke the line of salt and silver. Eric reached into his pack and grabbed a handful of the stuff when behind him, a cry caused him to spin around.
Fox staggered back, falling into Jake’s arms as the bigger man arrived. The man who gutted the runner had thrown another knife that missed Fox’s heart, but lodged in his chest beneath his left arm. Jake pulled him aside and crouched protectively over him. A thick shell of glass rose up between the men on the ground and the scene unfolding before them. Jake whispered desperate, soothing words to his husband to keep him from panicking and going into shock.
Ben sprang onto the scene and engaged the acolyte. The man seemed more capable this time around. Ben gave up the element of surprise in the casino those precious few days ago, and the pair of murdering mages were prepared. The acolyte, down one knife, took one from his witch. He held two then, and he used each one expertly, though Ben was definitely holding his own, even unarmed.
That left Eric and the witch.
“You idiots. You thought you could fool me with this?” The witch waved at the broken circle, the glistening field of salt slashed with a dark red line, the cover of night. “I was wrong. You weren’t smart at all. You were just lucky.”
“How did you find me?” Eric called out.
“Blood, blondie. Blood. My trainee here slipped into the station and set up a real scene. When we were done with the cops, I got my knife back, and I used the blood from the tip to find you. I almost had you before, but when you became fully human, you burned out all the wolf blood in you. That’s what I was tracking before.
“Didn’t realize you shacked up with Alchemists—but I guess they’re jokes,” the witch chuffed at Jake and Fox. Jake glared at her. Fox’s eyes were closed, his hand over the knife.
“What do you want?” Eric cried, keeping his distance, despite her moving closer.
“I want you to tell me how you forced out the Lycan in you,” the witch demanded. “I don’t really care if you know or don’t. I figure you were bitten by a stray, which was fine. I don’t need pure Lycan organs. Yours would have been fine.”
The horror of what the witch was after settled in.
“But I’ve got a fix for that,” The witch pulled out a gun with a longer-than-normal barrel and casually fired off one round. A whistling sound cut through the air briefly before Eric realized what happened.
A feeling of piercing fire hit Eric in the arm. It was a dart. He involuntarily jerked back hard as if the strike from the dart had been a blow from a baseball bat.
“We’ve moved past potions and chalices and all that medieval crap when it came to creating a Lycan sero-agent,” the witch said, her voice closer. Eric stumbled backward as though his feet were mired in deep mud. “When you presented clear of any of the blood bonds, you became a clean slate. I was mad at first, but then I wanted to see how fast my new agent worked on someone with no connections to Aether at all.”
The fiery pain from his arm had spread like army ants chewing their way through his blood vessels and his tissue, outward.
“I’d try it on your friends, but alchemists tend to be pretty resistant to the drugs we use to make our slaves. No—the only thing they’re good for is blood. That’s what my mentor told me before she went off the deep end and killed herself.” The witch seemed nonplussed by the loss of her mentor—as if she couldn’t care less one way or another. Eric groaned and curled in on himself as the serum burned its way through capillaries radiating away from the dart’s injection site, flowing freely and deeper through his body. Eric shuddered as a fever overwhelmed him, scalding his gums, burning beneath his fingertips, the arches and balls of his feet. His spine trembled as each vertebrae shifted one way, then the next—while his skull began to crack and his jaw unhinged itself. His skeleton was readying itself for the shift, preparing for the change that Eric loathed with every fiber of his being. He howled in pain.
“I know I could have used just anyone, but it had to be you. I don’t like losing. If you just came with me the first time, I wouldn’t have to kill all these people. But you just had to run.
“So to show you who your alpha is, I’m going to love breaking your boyfriend in while you watch, and when I’m done, I’ll make him be the one to harvest your organs for us.”
“Eric!” Ben yelled, still engaged with the acolyte who showed no signs of flagging. Eric’s skin felt
dry, tearing like paper as his bones cracked and shifted. His muscles popped and filled rapidly. Eric fought the change hard, but it would take more than will to stop this. There was brief comfort as the ocean breeze caressed his skin, made bare where his clothes shredded off him after the change began.
The witch sighed casually, looking up at the night sky.
“You couldn’t know. But the new moon made this the best time to hit you with my drug,” the witch said. She knelt down when Eric hit the sand, his face on its side in the dirt. “Full moons tend to make the victim crazy. I don’t need that. I’d rather they were docile, sweet. Looks like it’s working pretty damn fast!” She preened, patting Eric on the face as if he was a subservient pet. “You’re gonna be so useful when you’re a puppy again. We’ll harvest organs from your freshly converted body and make the serum even better. And we’ll have that tall drink of water, too… So young, and so limber…”
Eric’s heart squeezed. This was a violation of his body all over again. The anger and sadness overwhelmed him as his eyes closed tightly and he wailed against the pain. They wanted to gut him? Use his body parts for some sick experiment? And Ben… Ben! Her mindless slave? The casual way she referred to their lives as playthings to her will made him fight harder—fight the change for all he was worth.
“Ben!” Eric cried with everything he had. He desperately wanted to help, to save his friend, the man he loved.
But he couldn’t even save himself.
“Shhhh, puppy,” the witch cooed. To her, Eric had no longer registered as human. “It goes better if you just lay still, okay? Just let it happen. It’s going to whether you want it or not.”
Eric’s emotions threatened to stop his heart, his breathing. He’d heard words like those before, and it destroyed him then. But he couldn’t be destroyed. Ben needed him. Ben wanted him.
Ben.
Eric opened his eyes and saw Ben stab the acolyte in the neck with his own knife. He saw his man fall to his knees, reaching out to Eric. Why? Was he hurt? He was so far away…
*** Ben
The man Ben squared off with was surprisingly well trained. There were no words shared between the two. Likely because words are what distracted the mage the last time when he encountered Ben in the Bellagio. As a skilled opponent, he was not likely to make that same mistake again.
Blocked punches, reversals, kicks caught with kicks, broken grips from both sides—the fight could have gone on longer. But fights shouldn’t last this long; or so Ben was taught to believe.
Both Ben’s sensei and sifu told him that in a street fight, there are no rules. Everything is a weapon, even words, and every moment is a fight to the death. That much was obvious by the way the mage trainee fought him, knife and glamour combined.
That nearly cost Ben dearly.
What Ben remembered: The mage was fatigued. Both were breathing heavily, trying to mete out their respective resources to outlast the other in what seemed like a skirmish of attrition. The mage punched with the butt end of one of the knives he held. Ben dodged, slapping the attack away while simultaneously closing in with the butt of his palm against the man’s jaw. But in his peripheral vision, the glint of light from the fire he made warned Ben his attacker was sacrificing distance and taking the hit so that he could take a lethal swipe at him.
Ben leapt back, narrowly avoiding the mage’s deadly weapon. But another glint told Ben the man dropped his other knife, and a quick glance at the mage’s empty hand frantically motioning—like a Deaf person signing with one hand.
And then there was no one on the beach. No one but Ben, and the man he loved. Eric was there before him, only a few strides away, arms open, a small, welcoming smile on his face.
“Ben,” he cried.
The voice did not match the face.
The voice was screaming. Eric was smiling softly. Ben stepped back, allowing himself a moment to breathe, to gauge… to see.
Sparksight, he thought. It came to him almost instantly. Ben gave greater focus to his eyes. The darkness of the waters suddenly contrasted the veil of the night sky when the ocean lit up like it had before, when Fox told him about his ability. In the distance, he saw a body of light, flickering, laid out on the sand. Eric. There were two other forms that bore no light, rather, a multitude of thin strands like spider silk ebbed off them both, tied to a deep, rich void that moved when they moved. One close to Eric—the witch—and the other, the mage, in front of him.
Aether, Ben realized. The strands must have been Aether. The mages must have given up all of their spark, hence the voids he saw where light would have been.
The form nearest to him moved slowly closer. He saw the firelight glinting off of an invisible thing beneath the encroaching shadow’s hand—the knife! Another glint came from behind the form. That had to be the knife the mage dropped before he threw his glamour…
Ben had to act before his window closed. With a little concentration, he focused on the ground at his feet. A burst exploded upwards, spraying sand directly at the mage from head to toe. Just as fast as it appeared, the glamour collapsed, and the mage was sputtering, frantically wiping sand from his eyes. From his standing position, Ben dove into a forward roll, snatching up knife on the sand on his way, minimizing himself as a target while moving quickly. And from his place close to the ground, the young man sprung upwards, knife pointed at the soft part of the mage’s chin just as the enemy had turned to face him.
The knife the mage held dropped into the sand. When Ben put his arm down, the enemy collapsed like a marionette with cut strings. The edge of the knife protruded through the top of his skull.
Ben’s next thought was to the flickering light on the shore. Eric! There wasn’t much of a glow left—soon the Aether would overtake him! Ben did the only thing that came to mind; what Fox did in the desert. What he and Fox did on Graduation Day. He fell to his knees and reached out to the man whose light would be all that he’d ever need.
*** Eric
The ocean roared behind him. His eyes went to Jake and Fox. The knife in Fox was out, and Fox held a hand where he had been injured. He was still pale, but he winked. He winked. He was okay! He focused on Ben again, and saw he had still been reaching…
The pain that had ripped its way through his body faded like letters scrawled into the shore, overridden and eroded unrecognizable by the coming and going of the tides. The feeling from the morning in the desert, when they chased the wolf out, had returned. The golden fox from his dream unfurled in his mind, stepping forward from the mists. It scented the air, then let out a piercing bark.
Eric put a hand down in front of him to push himself up.
But his hand was a massive golden, luminescent paw.
He rose up onto his feet—for some reason, he felt four feet, not two. The witch had fallen on her ass, scampering backward, parallel to the water.
“Wh—what is this?” The woman cried.
A primal, feral instinct overwhelmed Eric. She hunted him. She injured him. She violated him, expecting utter submission to her will.
Now, she stank of fear. The smell made Eric's mouth water. The sensation in his mouth was electric, like biting into aluminum. He was hungry. He wanted to eat.
The witch screamed as he focused on her. He looked down his muzzle—his muzzle? —and let out a roaring fox’s scream that echoed across the beach in both directions. The witch curled in on herself as her body seized up in awe-filled terror at what sounded like a hundred women screaming, and each scream was pointed straight at her.
That didn’t matter to Eric. He dipped down and picked the witch up and tossed her in the air. The dart gun fell to the ground with a dull thud. With one vicious bite, he separated her upper torso from the rest of her body, chewing roughly and swallowing. He dipped down once more and picked up the woman’s legs, masticating heavily and swallowed again.
There was blessed nothing, no screaming, no fear. Only the scent of the ocean all around him. Eric tipped back his head and let out
a beautiful, lonesome howl.
A thought rolled into his head. Mate. He had a mate. B. Ben—Ben was his mate. He looked down and saw a man standing on the shore, looking up at him in wonder.
“Hey, E,” the man said, holding a hand up.
E. Eric. Him. His name. Eric dipped his head down, sniffing at the man. B. Ben. He smelled like the ocean—as if he was the warm, beating heart of the ocean. Eric dipped his head down and came to rest his haunches on the beach.
“Come back to me, baby,” Ben whispered. His hand touched the flesh of Eric’s muzzle.
Eric lifted his head. The words Ben spoke whizzed about his head, bouncing around and through his brain. The world seemed to rush away from Eric, along with his breath, his sense of balance. He toppled forward onto his knees and his hands, wheezing.
What just happened?
“Eric?” A voice asked. A man stood over him. A man with the familiar bass that rumbled through his heart. He sat back on his heels and looked up.
Ben stood there, his eyes watery, a smile on his face. Behind him, Jake helped Fox walk across the way to join them.
Ben reached out a hand to Eric. He took it, and soon was pulled up and into Ben’s warm, tight embrace.
“What did I do?” Eric asked. Confusion nibbled at every corner of his mind.
“Let’s go inside and talk about it, okay?” Jake said, patting Eric on the back gently. Ben and Eric took Fox by his arms, helping him walk. Jake smiled, breaking off from the group to tend to the acolyte.
*** Jake
He smiled to himself when he saw the men hadn’t left without him. His men. His family.
Jake took a moment to collect his thoughts before he cleared up the broken circle. He pulled the scattered silver together, forming an easily pocketed ingot. Jake considered burying the acolyte’s body deep where it lay, though with the dead jogger, it made sense not to. Instead, he roiled the sands to shift and move the witch's pupil closer to the jogger, and then pressed a knife into the jogger’s hand. With a thought, rough sands scraped and scratched the handle of the knife sticking through the mage’s head, erasing any evidence that Ben held it, however briefly. He then left the scene for the police, who would be called soon. Jake picked up the gun and passed it to Ben, and they all quietly trudged back to their new home.