Chapter 2
Trouble and Tentacles
Dodger
Detective Ethan Harper may be easy on the eyes but he’s hell on my peace of mind. He gets on my last nerve and totally ruins my appetite, too. I abandon my spoon in the cereal bowl and shove back from the table.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the self-appointed werewolf bodyguard grumbles right on cue.
“Going to my room. Why? Do you think I’m gonna run away?”
“You go by Dodger,” he muses. “Something tells me this wouldn’t be the first time you’ve left a guy with a check and headed out the back.”
Is that actual amusement flickering across his face? Impossible. Detective Stick-Up-His-Ass wouldn’t recognize fun if it bit him on his perfectly sculpted jaw.
“The breakfast was free,” I say. And tasted like it too.
“Don’t follow me, or I’ll open a passageway to hell and strand your furry ass there for eternity.
” A total bluff. I’d be lucky to open up a passageway three feet to the right.
My powers don’t exactly listen to me. But Harper actually flinches and lets me go.
Of course. He’s the one with claws and yet little ol’ me and my spooky evil magic scares him.
The elevator doors slide shut behind me, and I jab the button for my floor harder than necessary.
I think about how necromancy is the gift that keeps on giving.
Around age ten, I started seeing monsters.
It did not make me fun at birthday parties.
Then came the strange glowing holes in the world with swirling mist and darkness inside, and eerie shapes there in the void.
Giant winged beasts, goblins, and creatures with too many eyes or teeth, even the occasional ghost.
My aunt raised me and thought I was cursed. I learned to keep my head down and keep all the crazy things I saw to myself. Then I started running from the strange occurrences. Doing what I could to make some money, never staying in one place too long.
That’s how I got the nickname Dodger. Always running, staying one step ahead of the monsters.
Recently, I learned about the supernatural world. Like that it existed. And that I was a necromancer capable of summoning creatures, usually from the underworld and spiritual planes of existence.
Once I’m in my room and pull off my hoodie, I decide to practice my skills. “Gotta learn sometime.” I’m going to learn to control my gifts and stop running from them.
First, I put on music. Music is my happy place and my safe place. I never go anywhere without the used iPod I won in a poker game or my brother’s old headphones.
Alright. Here goes nothing. The headphones around my neck pump out an old Foo Fighters track, the familiar rhythm anchoring me to this reality even as I try to tear open another one.
I try to find the space between planes of existence.
Because that’s what I’d been seeing since I was young, an endless neutral nothingness where it was possible to slip from one plane to another or call on beings from other places.
“Come on,” I mutter, extending my hands. “Open up.”
At first, nothing happens. Just me, standing like an idiot in my hotel room with my arms out. Finally, I feel a flicker. A small purple spark glows in the air in front of me. The space around it begins to shimmer and distort as the light expands.
“That’s it,” I whisper. “Keep going, keep growing.”
The spark grows, purple light widening into a large sphere of energy, an opening.
“Holy shit, I’m doing it!”
I focus on stabilizing the passage. It’s working. I step back, admiring my handiwork, and pump my fist in the air. “Yes! Nailed it!”
The passage is actually kind of pretty when you’re not running from it in terror. It reveals fleeting glimpses of another place, a mystical region of shadow and mist, an in-between that few people from this world get to see.
Open a passage on purpose and stabilize it: check. Now I just need to close this inter-dimensional door. I stretch out my hand, focusing all my will on making it disappear. Nothing happens.
“Abracadabra.” Waving my hands at the purple light, I try to shoo it away. “Bye-bye, passageway!”
Nothing.
Damn it, what the hell? I circle around it and try to find out what’s going wrong. Wait a second, what the hell is that?
A dark smudge clings to the shimmering purple boundary.
“What the actual...” I mutter, inching closer.
The dark spot pulses slightly, and my stomach drops as I realize what I’m looking at. It’s something gripping the passage from the other side. A tentacle? A slick, obsidian-black appendage no thicker than my pinky finger has wrapped itself around the edge of my passage.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” I whisper. I reach out one trembling finger and gently prod the tentacle.
Big mistake.
The appendage instantly reacts, constricting tighter around the portal’s edge.
Another one emerges beside it, slightly thicker than the first. Then another.
And another. Four inky-black tentacles now grip the edge.
In the darkness beyond the purple light, something massive shifts, something connected to these probing tentacles.
“Ah!” I jump back reflexively when faced with some nightmare tentacle monster from another dimension. I hit the nightstand and sent the lamp and phone there crashing down.
There’s a swift knock on the door.
“Dodger, are you okay?” Harper asks from the other side. “Thought I heard something.”
“Fine, I’m fine,” I shout back, my voice higher pitched than usual. “Don’t come in.”
“Are you sure? You sound—”
“I’m fine!” I holler, then lower my voice to whisper frantically at the tentacle slithering onto the hotel floor. “Shoo! Shoo! Get away from me!”
“You know I can hear you, right?” Harper calls through the door.
Whipping my head around, I glare at the closed door. “Using werewolf hearing is cheating!”
“Not if you’re a werewolf.”
“Look, just”—I cut off as more tentacles start to emerge from the portal—”Oh god.”
In desperation, I chuck the first thing my hand lands on. A tissue box.
I chuck the box at the slithering limbs and watch as it bounces off them uselessly. The tentacles shift, pulsing and changing from slick black to a furious red.
Oh shit. I made it mad. It occurs to me too late that the enchanted whip I was given for situations like this is on the other side of the room. It’s supposed to help channel my powers when interacting with creatures I summon. Can this get any worse?
Right on cue, the door suddenly splinters open as Harper kicks it down and barrels into the room.
“Hey! I told you to stay out!”
“You also told me a madman was after you.” He strides over, eyeing me to ensure I’m in one piece.
“Privacy, man! What if I was naked?”
“I thought making sure the madman hadn’t found you was more important than privacy,” he retorts, his golden eyes scanning the room. His face darkens as he takes in the portal and the emerging tentacles. He curses, “What the—”
“Okay, this looks bad, but I swear, I’ve got everything under control.”
“Then control it!” he barks back, gesturing wildly at the monstrosity.
I grimace. “Damn, did you really have to call my bluff that quickly?”
Harper pulls out his gun.
“You seriously think that’s going to do anything?” I can’t help but question.
“Maybe?”
Despite our dire situation, I find time for an eye roll. “A tentacle monster from another dimension isn’t going to politely pack up and leave just because you introduce it to some lead. You’re just gonna piss it off.”
“It gets mad?” he asks incredulously.
“The tentacles didn’t appreciate when I pelted them with a tissue box,” I admit reluctantly.
Incredibly, amidst our crisis, he halts and stares at me. “You’re giving me grief for drawing my weapon when your first line of defense was a tissue box?”
...Okay, that definitely wasn’t my proudest moment. “Can we please get back on track?”
“Alright then.”
Harper’s golden eyes flash as he stands before the passage, his body rigid with tension. I realize what’s about to happen.
“Oh my god, are you really going to fight a tentacle monster?” I blurt out. “A werewolf fighting a tentacle monster. Where’s my phone? I need to record this.”
“Just get out of the way,” he growls.
Dark blond fur erupts from his skin, spreading like wildfire across his transforming body.
His face elongates, jaw pushing forward, teeth lengthening into gleaming fangs.
Where Detective Ethan Harper stood moments ago, a massive wolf now crouches, its fur the same dark blond as his hair had been, its eyes the same intense gold.
All business even in this form, the wolf lunges for the closest tentacle. Pouncing with his claws extended, he cuts clean through the slick flesh. That’s easy enough. The wolf’s got this.
My relief lasts approximately three seconds.
Then my stomach drops to somewhere around my ankles. At least twenty tentacles rise up. That’s just excessive. They burst through the portal, filling the air with their undulating forms.
Harper leaps to meet them, a whirlwind of teeth and claws. He catches one, shredding it with savage efficiency before twisting to snap at another. But there are too many, coming too fast.
His odds would be so much better with some help.
The whip. It’s still in my backpack by the window, on the other side of the tentacle-filled danger zone.
I launch myself across the room, dodging a tentacle that whips toward my face.
Another slithers across the floor in my path, and I vault over it, landing awkwardly and nearly falling.
I fumble for the whip and grab onto the leather.
Calling on my power happens naturally this time. I let it flow into the whip, watching as the leather begins to glow with a deep violet light.
“Stay away from him.”
I crack the whip, directing it toward the mass of tentacles attacking Harper. The whip doesn’t connect, but the tentacles respond to the power I send through it, backing away from Harper.
I snap the whip again and again, each crack accompanied by a surge of power from deep within me.
“Back!” I shout, putting all my will behind the command. “Back to your own realm!”
The tentacles retreat, sliding back through the portal inch by reluctant inch.
Clutching the whip tightly and uttering a series of pleas and curses in my head, I somehow manage to close the passage. The purple light dims. With a soft pop like a bubble bursting, the passage closes completely, leaving nothing but empty air where it had been.
Well… that didn’t go exactly as planned.
Exhaustion slams into me, pulling me down onto the bed in a heap. After a moment, I sense Harper’s presence hovering over me. Cracking open my eyes, I find him standing rigidly, back in human form, his gaze locked on me.
“What?” I croak out, “Got a tentacle stuck on my face or something?”
His mouth opens and closes a few times, but no words come out. He sounds like he’s choking on his own tongue. “You, I… watching you…”
“Did I scare you that badly?”
“I saw you,” he finally manages to say.
“Yeah, you had a front-row seat to my devious dark magic show.”
“No, I mean... I Recognized you.”
“As you should. We met a few days ago.” Is it possible that our little monster encounter fried his brain?
“Not like that,” Harper says. “I Recognized you... You’re my mate.”