Chapter 39
Arax
My palms were bleeding from the broken glass, and my ankle throbbed. The beast reared, stumbling to and fro, and my memories of the cliff, of the wolves, eclipsed all else.
I saw nothing—felt nothing but terror and helplessness.
I tried to drag my body away, but glass dug into my skin, further splitting open my existing wounds and carving new ones into my flesh.
The scream, which had gotten lost at the first sight of this thing, saw the path to freedom and emancipated itself from my throat.
Dorian rushed to my side to check for injuries, oblivious to the beast thrashing behind him.
“What are you doing?” I exclaimed with a rasp, my breathing shallow. I grasped his arm to redirect his attention. “Why aren’t you protecting them!”
I could only think of Eleni and her thin, lifeless body from my dreams. I shuddered at the memory, and my eyes sought proof of life, yet Eleni was nowhere to be found.
The guard smiled sadly at me, then glanced toward the animal. I tilted my head to follow his gaze, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.
It had fallen flat, gasping and wheezing for breath, and Penelope was kneeling in front of it, clutching her hands, nuzzling her face into its fur. Chains as thick as my forearms, silver in color, were wrapped around its neck, squeezing the life out of the creature.
Penelope lifted her head, sobbing. She knew this beast, this wolf.
Wasn’t afraid of it. Neither was Dorian.
His eyes transitioned back and forth from their dark brown to an opaque, cloudy shade of lightest blue.
I had seen this once before—eons ago, it seemed.
Except I had convinced myself then that it was not real, a hallucination brought on by injuries and opiates, the latter of which were in scarce supply.
The guard would go still and wait, and each return to brown would have him shaking his head in agitation, but why I didn’t know.
The wolf made another effort to breathe, but the chains constricted further, cutting off its airway.
Spit had foamed in the corners of its mouth, which bobbed open and closed.
Its head, heavy from the lack of oxygen, thumped onto the floor, and its eyes of golden brown, bloodshot and dimming, rolled back.
Penelope curved herself around its head, stroking the fur in a manner not unlike a lover’s caress. “Cy, baby, no,” she whispered, her fresh tears falling fast, absorbed by the beast’s dense coat. “Baby, no.”
Another voice squeaked from the other side of the wall. “Daddy?”
“Mom, don’t let her see!” Penelope shrieked.
I shifted my gaze to Dorian, who was no longer smiling. “What—what is happening?” I stammered, my brain overloaded with details bordering on the absurd.
He said nothing and lifted my ankle to examine it. Though he was gentle, I writhed in agony at the slight bit of pressure he’d applied, the pain overtaking my attention.
“You’re lucky it’s only a sprain, Arax,” he muttered and took off his tunic, then shredded it into strips to serve as a wrap. Carefully, he picked out what he could of the glass and used what was left of the cloth to bandage my bleeding hands.
He stood and addressed Penelope, who was frantically pacing. “We can’t stay here.”
Her steps did not stop. “Dorian, we can’t just leave him to die!”
She gripped her hair, and I noticed her palms were streaked with red, the skin on them practically burned.
I put a bloodied hand over my eyes and tried to breathe.
I shut everything out and forced my mind into review.
The wolves on the cliff… the one laid before me, larger than life.
Alpha, Luna… Drake’s unnatural physical ability, Konstantine’s as well.
Their changing eyes, light to dark, limpid to cloudy.
The isolation. The secrets. There was only one logical conclusion, and paradoxically, it contained no logic at all.
“What are you people?” I heard myself ask, and every part of me steeled itself, ready to refute the answer, to ridicule the response and demand another.
The quiet concerned me, and as I lifted my hand, Penelope and Dorian exchanged glances. Without a single word spoken, the worlds of myth and reality became one.
I stared at each of them in turn, then thought of Callista, and even Eleni, wondering how it could be—how each of them harbored a creature inside a mold made to look and act human, fooling those of us who never imagined such things could exist.
My focus went to the unconscious wolf splayed in the middle of the room, surrounded by piles of broken glass and splintered wood. “Is that really him?”
Penelope nodded, seeing no need to hide the truth. “His wolf is called Rostam.”
The sound I made resembled laughter in its most humorless form. Rostam was legendary in the stories I had grown up with, the Persian mythological equivalent of Herakles, and this wolf had taken on its name.
“The chains.” I gestured toward them and then at Penelope’s hands. “You can’t touch them.”
She nodded again. “Silver.”
“None of us can,” Dorian said, as Penelope’s tears had begun to fall anew.
I laid my head against the wall and sighed.
The severity of our predicament, hunted by a being or beings yet unseen, precluded me from having an existential meltdown.
My injuries helped me stay rooted in the moment, and the quest for survival staved my emotions from leading me elsewhere, preventing the fabric of everything I knew to be torn asunder.
I had always suspected this community of harboring secrets, not even the simplest of simpletons was so naive to think otherwise.
However, the extent of these secrets? No one could have prepared me for that.
“None of you can,” I said to Dorian as I eyed the chains, making my intentions clear by trying to draw myself up. I winced, pushing off of my sore hands, and Dorian rushed forward to give me his arm.
Callista and Eleni emerged from behind the wall, and seeing the look on the little girl’s face when she saw her father, motionless among the wreckage, nearly brought me to tears.
“Mom!” Penelope cried out in anger.
“She already knew, Penelope. Children know more than we think,” Callista said softly. “She wanted to see if Arax was all right.”
“I’m okay, cutie.” I managed a smile. “We’re going make sure your dad is too.”
Penelope gave me a once-over, like she had so many times before, but there was no judgment in her eyes, only fear and worry.
“But, Rox, your hands. Your ankle,” she murmured, noticing the bandages.
I ignored her concerns and turned toward Dorian. “What do I need to do?” I asked nervously, motioning toward the chains. “Just loosen and remove them?”
“Pretty much,” Dorian answered, letting me go to take a closer look at Cyrus’s bindings. “They appear to be pure silver alloy. Without proper gear, that much silver will burn right through us.”
“I barely touched them,” Penelope said, her palms glowing a painful-looking red.
“Then how is he not…” I didn’t even want to utter the word.
Dead.
“He has better immunity to them in his wolf form,” the guard replied, reading my mind, “but even still, it was enough to knock the beta out. It will take some time for him to regain consciousness.”
I stumbled to Rostam, shocked to see he was still breathing.
His inhales were weak, spaced at long intervals, meaning I didn’t have time to spare.
I took the loose end of one of the chains in my hand.
It was heavy, abrasive, and rough. Four times they circled his neck, each layer twining around the other, jumbled together in a tight, twisted coil of textured metal.
Penelope stayed close, keeping an eye out, and I went to work.
My hands, which incredibly had felt as though they’d already started to heal, bled profusely again, the weight of the metal grating into my palms, reopening the wounds.
Dorian did his best to help, lifting the wolf’s enormous head as I dragged the links and threw them out from under him and over my shoulder.
The guard shot consistent glances behind him, always watching, mindful of his main priority.
The progress was slow, and my ankle hindered my speed, at times the pain making me see double.
I tried to sneak in some conversation, for the sake of preserving my sanity.
“Have you always wanted to be a guard, Dorian?” I asked, grunting.
He grinned amicably. “No, Arax, it was a favor to the alpha to stay on with the warriors. My father and his father were close.”
“So what are your personal aspirations?”
“My father saw to my warrior training since before I could walk, but I just finished medical school and will begin work with Dr. Distefano in a few months to be a field medic,” he said proudly.
“Well, you come highly recommended,” I quipped, and he laughed.
After a few minutes of not speaking, I turned toward him curiously. “What’s he like as an alpha?” The word when referring to Konstantine was still foreign to me.
Dorian stopped what he was doing and held Cyrus’s mucus-laden snout in his hands. The sight was comical, no matter how serious the times.
“I can’t think of a better man—person—for the job,” he answered in admiration.
Man and person. The terms somehow didn’t fit anymore, in light of what I’d learned.
“Wolf is more accurate,” I said without thinking.
“Interchangeable, Arax darling, in this world,” Callista remarked from her seat in the corner, where she and Eleni had retreated.
The conversation stalled, and I was plunged into a dark place, a place I’d planned on avoiding, at least for the time being.
It was filled with emptiness, purged of hope.
A place that soughed the callous and tempestuous winds of Konstantine’s deceit and lies by omission.
I was getting antsy, and Penelope’s continued pacing was driving me a little crazy. I wiped the sweat from my brow and entreated her to stop.
“I’m sorry,” she said, not heeding my request. “I can’t get a hold of anyone.”
“The guards assigned to the castle were pulled into the field, at the bet—Cyrus’s bidding,” Dorian told her, and he paused to shoot me a furtive glance. “The alpha needed backup.” He sighed. “Darius said there is a skeleton crew left with those in the bunker. We’re on our own for now.”
He didn’t elaborate as to why Konstantine was in need of additional guards, or how he—Dorian—had been privy to this knowledge. A prickling sensation crawled along my spine, and I chewed my lip, feeling nausea building.
“Should we link him?” Dorian asked.
“No!” Penelope spun around abruptly, anxiety rolling off her in waves.
“We can’t have him or anyone distracted.
My brother… He’ll come up with something.
He always does.” She walked to the space close to where the window used to stand.
“Fuck!” she yelled into the ether, startling me.
“That piece of shit bastard better be all right.”
Dorian and I resumed what we were doing, leaving her be.
My hands trembled, but I weathered the slideshow of horrors on replay inside my head.
As the last loop of the chains came undone, the wolf heaved a sigh so great and loud that I almost didn’t hear Dorian say quietly in my ear, “Arax, get down.”
Several things happened at once. I dove… or was shoved. I couldn’t say which.
I crawled on my elbows to Rostam’s opposite side and glanced over his right flank, and my heart almost stopped. We’d been found.
Dorian and Penelope were engaged with three masked men, armed with automatic rifles strapped to their bodies. Dorian had one in a headlock, the other he kicked in the stomach, and the man crashed to the wall close to Callista and Eleni. The former scrambled to her feet.
“Quickly!” She jumped toward me and grabbed my arm. Forgetting about my ankle, I tried to get up and run but tumbled back down.
“Go!” I shrilled at her.
She hesitated, and at seeing her daughter fighting the largest of the three, she placed Eleni in my arms.
“Get to the wall,” she ordered and went to Penelope’s aid.
I mentally calculated the distance and looked around me.
The man Dorian had kicked lay at an odd angle on the ground.
The other two were still fighting, their backs toward me, and I saw my opportunity.
Shielding Eleni with my body, I didn’t look back, dashing as fast as my injury would allow and slid behind the wall.
A flood of tears and snot was smeared on the little girl’s face.
I tried to soothe her, wiping her clean with my sleeve, and she quieted, shaking in my arms. Pressing her to my chest so she couldn’t see, I laid my cheek on top of her knotted hair.
She smelled of baby shampoo and innocence, the scents out of place in such an ugly setting, undeserving of their virtue.
Dorian had lost his hold on the second man.
His undershirt was torn and a large gash lay across his bare chest, blood spilling down his torso.
Callista tackled the man, and together she and Dorian forced him down.
Bile rose in my throat, and seeing him subdued, I closed my eyes as a snap was heard.
I peeked again and saw his body had sagged, and the man fought no more.
Dorian and Callista turned their attention to Penelope, whose hands no longer resembled those of a human.
Long black claws curled in place of her fingers.
The deadly spikes sliced into the man’s chest through to his stomach.
He fell to his knees, and in a stroke faster than my eyes could capture, she slit the man’s throat, the blow deep, he was nearly decapitated.
His head hinged away from his body, attached only by a thin strip of sinew.
The rest of him collapsed, a mangled heap of flesh and entrails, and bled out on the hardwood floor.
The bile in my throat seeped into my mouth, and I gasped at the burn.
I had never witnessed deaths so violent and grotesque.
Tears of shock and disgust splashed on my cheeks, stinging my cuts.
If it hadn’t been for the man slumped against the wall changing positions, adjusting himself to raise his rifle and aim for Penelope, I would have shut my eyes again and looked away.
I screamed Dorian’s name, but it was Callista who reacted first. Leaping at Penelope, she grabbed her daughter around the waist seconds before the gun was discharged.
She turned them both around, her back toward the man, and I watched the luna put herself in the line of fire and take the bullet instead.