Chapter 42 #3
I was shoved hard, away from the men and toward the running wolves.
My ears popped as a staccato of bullets drowned my grief with fear and I crouched low.
The leader condemned my brother’s name with an angry shout that turned to desperate screams when his startled men started returning Andy’s wild and flurried fire.
I couldn’t not look back. I had to see if by some miracle my brother had evaded their aim.
Exhaustion and delirium were making it impossible to see.
The heat from sun above pressed down on me, its heaviness unbearable.
Sweat and salt burned my eyes. Each time I blinked, the scene in front of me did not change and my brother was nowhere in sight.
Resigned, I turned in desperation to Konstantine and his men.
I could make out his outline, naked, sweaty and running like a god gliding on winds with an army of angels surrounding him.
However, he wasn’t my savior, and it wasn’t salvation which found me; it was a stray bullet instead.
I knew I was hit not from the pain but from the blood that slicked my thigh and immediately darkened the fabric of Konstantine’s sweatpants.
Then came the pain, from the metal that burrowed quick as lighting and split into my vein, tearing it clean.
I stumbled. My eyes grew heavy, blood rushing away from my brain, and I slid slowly down, feeling nothing but the vacuum of apathy the bullet had created in my soul.
“Araxia! Kuyrik?!” Andy’s voice was in my ear. He’d once again appeared from thin air and held me to him, rocking me back and forth, whispering a lament. He tried to put pressure on the wound, all the while murmuring apologies and regrets.
“He’s almost here, kuyrik.”
A commotion bigger and grander than before took over the world and within seconds Andy was gone again.
I was alone, resting on the hot flat flagstones that scalded my skin.
Let it all burn, I said to myself. Let this cruel world burn.
Scorch it down to nothing. Raze this evil place that had given me my brother just so it could rake in the pleasure of seeing me watch as it took him back.
Would he ever know how much I had missed him?
Would I ever get to ask if he’d found love?
Or let him know that up until a few hours ago, I’d been happy—truly, undeniably happy for the first time since our father had passed?
That by the most serendipitous set of circumstances I’d found the place I didn’t know I’d been searching for, and the cracks in my heart had begun to fill?
Tell him how for one sweet moment, looking into his eyes and knowing he was alive, I had been made whole?
And would I be given the chance to swear to him that I’d have sacrificed this newfound happiness to stretch that moment into infinity?
No, I didn’t think I would.
So let it burn.
A figure blocked the sun, hovering over me.
Was it the angel of death, or Charon, or some other messenger come to lead me out of this forsaken realm?
The figure, a man, took stock of my injuries as the ground shook with a thunderous clap.
Peering behind him, his form snapped straight, and he produced a roar heard only in the bowels of hell.
His hands were soaked in blood, my blood.
I closed my eyes at the first sounds of mayhem.
Bodies clashed, and the air grew thick with the smell of death.
Shadows whizzed past me, dancing in my eyelids, and it was a moment amid the chaos before my body registered the ever-growing searing pain spreading through my thigh.
I opened my eyes and realized I was lying in an expanding pool of red.
A wave of nausea hit me, seeing so much of myself on the outside and my body stiffened. Shock.
I blindly reached for my brother, but there were just the smooth edges of the flagstones, dampened and painted by my blood. It ran into the dips in rivulets, forging a path of vermillion diluted by my tears.
Echoes of yells and shouts surrounded me, but I was alone. Fingers suddenly took my wrist, feeling for a pulse, and I rolled my head, but the sparks traveling up my arm boiled dry the well of hope that had sprung eternal.
Konstantine’s green eyes had taken the place of my brother’s hazel ones.
They brought no comfort, their presence unwelcome.
My clothing was torn to reveal the injuries beneath.
His breathing turned pneumatic at what he saw.
His nostrils flared wide as he sucked in air, and his exhales sibilated, hissing out of a mouth that had bared its teeth.
His eyes clouded, and soon another figure was at my side. Slowly I was lifted to a warm bare chest, tanned and inked. He started to walk, and my head hung dejectedly from his arms, my body too defeated to let me speak… to call to Konstantine and plead for him to find my brother and spare his life.
He’d remained where he was, his body stooped and bowed.
Fur sprouted up the length of his back, hackles along his shoulders.
Amid his metamorphosis, he turned his head to stare, and the man I’d come to care for became a monster I didn’t know.
His face was as hard and cold as stone, but his eyes blazed in pale-grey fury, burning white hot out of cavernous sockets that sank into his head, belying a bottomless rage that even I felt in my barely conscious state.
He lifted his head, howling not at the moon but at the sun, calling to his brethren, who joined the bloodbath.
This great wolf, his coat of jet so black, it reflected not one beam of light, snatched the first body that came at him and mauled it where he stood.
It was an act of revenge, of justice. His jaws slashed into the man’s back, shredding skin and crunching bone.
Burrowing into the screaming carcass, his snout disappeared.
The man’s mask had been thrown off, and he lifted his head, his mouth hanging open.
Eyes bulging, he turned to look. I had never seen someone be the captive audience of their own death, but he watched himself being dismembered until the wolf ripped out his spine.
And my mind broke.
It disintegrated under the weight of loss, of grief, of anger… crumbling into little pieces, ferried into the void by the wind.
The stench of rot crowded my nose, and I wheezed in the wetness of vomit covering Drake’s torso. He closed my fingers around his wrist.
“Hold on to me,” he urged. “Just a little longer, pet.”
Neither the words nor the accented voice were Drake’s.
My head drifted toward his face, searching it for signs that he was still there.
The soft lines of his smile… his eyes of summer blue.
Yet the man looking down at me had the visage of someone else.
The angles were too sharp and severe, cut from solid ice.
His eyes were drawn and harsh, arctic pools of murky teal that held no warmth.
My grip on his wrist weakened. My fingers went slack, slipping off one by one. When the last no longer felt the touch of skin under its pad I, too, slipped away—over the event horizon, distended by a black hole into a vortex of eternal night.