13. Chapter 13
Chapter 13
JASON
A s soon as we neared the house, I knew it was as bad as we’d feared.
More protesters. A lot of them. Some I recognized from the facility, some from the news report at the school. It was all converging on my neighborhood. Security guards were keeping some people out, but others were breaking through the line and scattering into the woods, right past the DO NOT ENTER signs.
Whitmore’s car was in our driveway, and Mom’s was in the garage, but we didn’t see either of them when we hurried inside. Then I spotted Mom out on the deck.
“The police are everywhere!” she was yelling at the people daring to cut through our yard as we flung open the sliding glass doors to join her. “What do you people hope to accomplish?”
“Monster are mayhem!” I heard from below, so talking sense was clearly off the table.
“Mom!” I called, rushing up behind her. “Where’s Whitmore? Are you okay?”
She immediately flung herself at me for a hug, and then hugged Ricky just as tightly. “I am just so glad you weren’t at the school. They were practically out for blood. They still are. Everything was okay at the facility?”
“Okay enough,” I said.
“Agent Whitmore already went in to touch base with the guards at the portal. No one is listening to reason. It just keeps escalating. We need to get inside,” she tried to tug both of us back toward the doors. “Lock the house—”
“Mom, we can’t.”
“You are not going out there!” Her voice cracked as she screamed that.
Mickey was at our feet, having snuck out with us, and rubbed against my legs. He chirped, so I picked him up to pass him to Mom. Hopefully, if anyone tried to be stupid enough to break in, that little fighter of a cat would give them the same treatment he’d given me when we met. “I have to, Mom.”
“ We have to,” Ricky said. “And don’t even try to tell me to not go with you. There’s a storm coming. I can feel it.”
I glanced up at the sky. “I assume you don’t mean in the metaphysical shitstorm kind of way.”
“That too, but also a real one.”
“Great. Sucks. Why does it matter?” I’d always hated storms but there were worse things.
I hadn’t noticed before, but Ricky had taken one of the scanners from the lab and pulled it out of his jacket pocket. Besides an initial screen of readings I didn’t understand, he was able to scroll back through previous data both from the man-made and natural portals and compare them to each other. “Remember when Beck said there were fluctuations the other night, when we, um… when it started raining before we went to bed?”
Right. That night. “Yeah. So?”
“Think about it. What does each occurrence of portal activity have in common? The day your dad disappeared. The day you were attacked. The day we arrived and first found the portal when someone screamed and disappeared. The other night too.”
“It was raining,” I realized with a slowly sinking dread, given the dark clouds rolling toward us now. “Storming in most cases.”
“Exactly. At varying levels, but I think the worse the storm, the worse the activity spike.”
While I didn’t understand the meaning behind the numbers he showed me, I could tell he was right that the readings were more extreme during those dates and times.
“That’s why it was minimal the other night,” Ricky continued. “It only rained a little, no thunder or lightning. Less electromagnetic activity. But if there’s more…” He glanced at the sky like I had, and I could see the hairs on the back of his neck prickling already.
“This is going to be a bad one, isn’t it?”
“We have time, but when the storm hits, yeah, it’s going to be bad.” Ricky looked pleadingly at Mom. “If we don’t stop that mob from reaching the research site, Sandy, any number of them might get sucked in.”
“You can’t…” Her voiced cracked again, more like a whimper now, and she held Mickey even tighter to her chest. “Your father… he…”
“I know. I remember being with him, Mom. I remember that day now.”
“What?”
“It finally came back to me. I wandered into the woods. It felt like something was calling to me, and Dad saved me from it, a monster, the portal, whatever it was, and he got taken instead. It was my fault we lost him.”
“Honey…” She shifted Mickey in her arms so she could lift a hand to my cheek. “You could barely walk. You can’t blame a toddler. You can’t blame yourself. But please, if that is really what happened, don’t go in there.”
“If that is really what happened, I can’t let it happen to someone else. Even if right now, none of them would care about me, I have to be better than them, Mom. I have to go in there. Please.”
The implications and first roll of thunder in the distance had her eyes looking like saucers, yet she mustered a strength I’d always admired and nodded. “Go. But promise me you are coming back.”
I hugged her again, squishing Mickey between us, who let out a grumble of discontent, making both of us laugh. “I promise.”
After Mom went inside and locked the sliding glass doors, Ricky and I raced down the deck steps into the backyard. People were still trespassing to use our deer trail. What did they even think they were going to do in there?
“Hey!” I raced after those I could catch. “This is private property! Scram!” I let the tiniest bit of growl into my voice but kept my features human, so the protesters had to second guess whether they wanted to fight.
Those who hadn’t already disappeared into the trees chose the smart option and dispersed back where they had come from.
But how many had entered?
Ricky grabbed onto my hand as we continued forward. There was so much noise, I couldn’t pinpoint where the most people might be.
“Should we just push through to the site?” I looked at him. “Warn them about—?”
A scream tore through the woods like our first night here, but definitely not from the direction of the portal. We hurried that way instead. Maybe it was a good thing. Maybe they weren’t heading for the portal. But as soon as I thought there might be something worth celebrating, I felt it.
I felt the same presence I’d been feeling since the first day we entered the woods. The same presence I’d felt when I was attacked last year.
“It’s here,” I told Ricky, certain of which direction to go now as we hurried forward. “I can feel it!” I was ready to unleash my own beast at a moment’s notice.
“The monster? Are you sure—”
People burst out of the trees running, forcing us to huddle close to avoid anyone knocking into us. Then Ricky was suddenly the one in front, pushing through the trees ahead of me that these people had come from. He was being too reckless. Couldn’t he feel it too? The monster was right here .
As I rushed after him, in the darkening thicket of more and more trees, I saw it.
Glowing eyes in the dark.
In the trees.
Teeth .
I leapt in front of Ricky before it could cause any of the pain to him that it had to me, transforming as I did so, and ruining yet another set of clothes as I grew and roared to warn the beast back. The beast… that was a normal, gray, timber wolf, hunkering low to the ground and whining in response to me, before he rolled onto his back in complete submission.
This was the presence. This…
This was what attacked me.
Then I discovered why. Behind him, out of that dark deeper density of trees, emerged another wolf, very pregnant, with two younger looking wolves that might have been no more than a year.
“It was you,” I said aloud, still shifted and in mangled clothing. I couldn’t say if it was subconscious or not, but my form slowly shifted to being only the werewolf version that I’d first become when I thought a werewolf bit me.
“Jason…” Ricky grabbed my arm.
“It’s okay. He chased those people off, I bet, but I think he’s more afraid of me than I ever had reason to be afraid of him. You don’t know what I am either, do you?” I bent down, crouching, and he rolled upright from showing his belly and came forward to lick my face. Classic submission to an alpha.
He looked at Ricky but didn’t even dare to growl at him. He knew Ricky was mine.
“Your mate’s about to burst with more puppies, huh? It’s the right season. So, she probably had her first litter last summer, and they were only a few months old when you found me lurking around your territory.”
“That’s why I couldn’t sense what you did,” Ricky said. “It was never a monster. A normal wolf bit you.”
“And I changed, just like when Mickey bit me, and the snake.”
“What does that mean?”
I stood. The mate and what I assumed were the females from the previous year’s litter were clearly wary of us, staying behind their alpha, who’d so easily bowed to me as his. “I don’t know. Maybe the monster that took Dad still did something to me when I was a kid, but it didn’t trigger until I got bit, and the rain that day was just a coincidence. Hey.” I made sure the alpha looked at me, even though his instincts told him to avoid eye contact. “I don’t know if you can understand me, like, through some animal kinship or something, but you need to lie low with your pack. No one in the woods is after you, okay? They are after something else. So stay hidden. Do not attack anyone. If they don’t know you’re here, they won’t come for you. Okay?”
It wasn’t as if I heard a voice in my head, but I had this eerie sense that the wolf did understand me. He bowed his head in further submission, and then ushered his family back into the trees. This time, as the branches parted, I saw why so few people had encountered them before. Those trees were hiding a hill. And in the side of that hill, covered in vines, was the mouth of a cave.
I really hoped no one else found them.
More noise erupted from the other direction. Not screams, but a whole lot of shouting.
“I think that’s back by the portal this time,” Ricky said.
“Let’s go.”
I shook off my wolf aspects as we ran the other way. My clothes hadn’t been destroyed enough to be indecent. Plus, I figured a werewolf appearing would only draw negative attention.
The portal wasn’t far, and once we reached it, what came as no surprise was that half a dozen people were already surrounding it, surrounding the guards, and wielding various clubbing weapons. At least no one had a gun, but among those advancing on the ogre guard, who I’d met before, and a human one, who looked like he’d already been on the receiving end of one of those clubs, were asshole father and son Jensen who’d catfished Kai.
“They let you out on bail?” My pronouncement distracted the group enough that they all turned at our arrival, giving the guards the chance to move away. They must have been overwhelmed, because I didn’t see either of their tasers on them. The portal wasn’t visible yet, but I thought I saw a few sparks forming. “Good luck managing it again after this, asshole. Now stand down.”
“Tell us what they’re doing out here!” Jensen Senior demanded of us.
“We’re studying a natural phenomenon that could be dangerous,” Ricky gambled on the truth, “especially during storms, so we need you to—”
“More lies,” he snarled, and tried to take a swing at Ricky with his bat.
I caught it mid-swing, which surprised the others enough that they stumbled back.
Thunder rolled overhead, followed by the emergency storm warning siren, and I could tell from Ricky’s expression that we were out of that buffer time we’d had before.
“Weren’t you supposed to have backup?” I called to the ogre, while thrusting Jensen away from me but keeping his bat, which I chucked into the woods behind me.
“They moved to the perimeter to help there,” she answered. She rested the woozy looking human guard against the side of the porta potty, which wasn’t ideal but better than the interior workstation, which was closer to the growing collection of sparks. “Along with Agent Whitmore, the scientist team, and their children.”
At least Kai wasn’t here to see his attackers again.
A flash of lightning above preceded an almost immediate growth in the sparks, as another roll of thunder sounded, louder and closer than before. A second later, the people with clubs couldn’t ignore the tear in reality as the portal opened.
“See! You’re doing something!” Jensen Senior hollered. “Tell us!”
His son Colt looked wary, but the others took this as a sign that none of this was worth the repercussions and took off running in various directions.
“No!” Jensen Senior called after them. “Cowards! We can finally find out what they’re doing!”
“I told you—” Ricky tried, but more lightning and thunder began, in rapid succession, as it finally started to rain outside the canopy covering the site. The portal was growing, and I could feel that awful pull I remembered from when I was a kid.
Lightning hit the ground or a tree somewhere in the woods nearby. We had seconds to think. To act. Jensen Senior’s attention was on me and Ricky, while Colt rushed to his father’s side, holding a freaking hockey stick. The ogre was working her way over to us, trying to get the jump on Jensen Senior, I figured, but there wasn’t enough time—
Jensen Senior ripped the hockey stick from his son’s hands, raising it over his head like a madman, but Ricky leapt at him from around me and tumbled with him onto the ground.
“Ricky, we—”
The ogre was pulled backward a full foot along the ground. The suction was getting stronger, and as her eyes met mine with a look of panic, I rushed forward, grabbed her by the arms, and threw her out of the perimeter as hard and as far as I could.
Only for moments later to get sucked into the portal myself.
“Jason!”
As I hurtled into the light, which quickly erupted into blackness, the first thing I saw clearly again was an empty sky.
“Oof!”
And then Ricky, as he landed heavily on top of me.
“Jason, are you—”
In an instant, everything hurt .
“Ahhhh!” I howled, giving way to gasping and grunting as my body convulsed.
Ricky scrambled off of me. I had been doing so good, in complete control of my changes, but now that we were definitely in the monster realm, I was being forced into my new form that I freaking hated. It was happening so fast this time with the way the vines and branches burst out of me, wrapping around me as I lengthened and shifted with all the other added features, that of course it hurt, but fuck .
“Fuck!” another voice cried.
My vision was blurry in the final moments of the change, but I saw Ricky look behind him. When I followed his line of sight, I saw the Jensens. They’d been sucked in with us, but at least I’d managed to keep the ogre guard from getting sucked into the portal too.
A portal that was quickly fizzling out of existence, until it was merely a shimmering, fluctuating line.
“Damn it, I lost my scanner,” Ricky grumbled, but we didn’t need it to know that we were not getting back through the portal the way it was.
“No!” Jensen Senior reached for the sparking fissure.
“Don’t!” Ricky warned him. “Being that unstable means it’ll only blast you backward!”
The man hesitated but looked at Ricky with a snarl. “This is your fault! If you’d told us what you were doing—”
“I tried! You didn’t believe me until it happened to you, so telling you sooner wouldn’t have made any difference, would it?”
“U-uh, Dad?” Colt wasn’t looking at the diminished portal or even at me, still shaking on the ground as I acclimated to how swiftly I’d changed. He was looking into the trees around us.
All around us.
The sky was dark. Overcast like back home? It was difficult to tell. There was this strangeness to the sky without a sun or moon, and I couldn’t be sure if what was above us was clouds. The portal was in a small clearing like back home, meaning trees and other plant life surrounded us on all sides. But the flora was too weird, too colorful, too twisted, and it was what might lay beyond that bothered me more, because Ricky dropped back down beside me and grabbed my hand as I sat up.
I knew he could feel whatever was approaching long before we both saw what Colt had.
Dozens upon dozens of glowing eyes like mine. When they reached the tree line and emerged, they all looked like me too, just in varying shades and shapes.
I pulled Ricky against me as I stood, lifting him fully off the ground for a moment in my haste. I held him tight to my side, rotating and moving him with me, unsure where he might be most safe when the monsters were everywhere.
“Stay back! Stay away from us!” I growled. “I want to know which one of you did this to me. Why did you do this to me? What did you do with my dad? And all the other people who came here? Where are they?”
“Hush, child,” a female voice said from our right, as an older looking member of the tree people stepped closer. “We mean no—”
“I said stay back!” I threw an arm out in front of me, and the vines from that arm shot forward and launched her into the trees.
Holy shit. How did I do that?
The other tree people hunkered low to the ground as if about to converge.
“I will kill all of you!” I howled, not thinking, just lashing out again and again with my new vine whips to keep them back. “I will tear the bark and branches off of every one of you if you touch him!”
“Jason.” Ricky clung to me, because with so many of them, we both knew I couldn’t possibly protect him forever. We didn’t know what they were. My efforts to keep them back were enough to convince the Jensens to gather closer to us, however, instead of near the portal.
Hypocrites.
One of the monsters bounded toward us on all fours, partially transforming into something wolf shaped or maybe like a bear.
Again, I launched vines at it, tripping its momentum, and caused it to slide the rest of the way to us. It shifted more humanoid as it caught its breath, but I wound my vine-like tendrils around its throat and lifted it from the ground.
“I mean it!”
“Jason?”
I was so ready to fight that it shocked me to my core how this new voice forced all the breath out of my lungs and all the tension loosened from my shoulders.
Another of the tree monsters was coming forward, with a male voice that had sounded so familiar. This one was shaped and colored almost exactly like me, even more so than the others. He held his hands up as he approached, gesturing for the rest of his kind to stand down too.
I stared at him with wild intensity, slowly lowering the monster I had held aloft and releasing it. As it scrambled back to the others, the one commanding my attention spoke again.
“Jason Bosco?” he asked, and in one swift unwinding of his monster form stood a handsome middle-aged man with blond hair whose voice I hadn’t heard for real in so long, but it was so much like mine, and he looked so much like me too.
“Dad…?”