Survivor
ARCHER
I awaken from my trip to La-La land hard—not dramatically, with a white light or a tunnel—just the hot sting of grit in my gums and a hunk of rock stapling me to the smoking lip of the blast crater.
My right shoulder’s definitely fucked and the left side of my ribcage is numb enough to tell me I’ve got serious problems internally.
Fuck, I’m never getting near Javi at zero dark thirty again.
I try to pull in air, but I get half a lungful of dust and something that tastes like copper, battery-acid, and someone else’s skin.
I cough, and a loogie slimes down my chin that I know has to be tinted with blood.
My ears are ringing so hard it makes me think of the time that bruiser from Echo Lake Prep knocked me into the barrier so hard I didn’t wake up for a week.
Hockey is brutal, especially in the supe leagues, and I’ve been banged up good plenty of times in my long career.
This might take the cake, though, because I’m so fucking weak that I don’t think I can help myself out of this jam.
My body tries to shift—automatically, the way you flinch when a door slams—so I can start healing.
Instead, everything seizes up, refusing the command.
It’s like something is saying, ‘Human form only, motherfucker’ before laughing maniacally.
That’s not normal, and it’s bad fucking juju.
Since I can’t move or transform, I try yelling. My mate’s name only comes out a splintered croak, which won’t do shit for me if she isn’t nearby. I know she can’t be close, though, because we were close to the blast center when—
Javier blew up…fuck.
The memory of his golden wings in the blue sky, then him screeching in fury, and then the blast. No way anything survives that direct hit, not even a cockroach, when a phoenix does its thing.
We should be safe here from whatever baddie we were fighting, but I’m less concerned about that than what happened after I blacked out.
I flex my fingers. The tremor in my hands says I’m running on fumes power-wise, but not zero.
I can’t hear anything over the buzzing in my ears, so I take inventory of myself.
My clothes are shredded from the shift,so I’m naked as a jaybird.
I think my left knee is pointing the wrong direction, but let’s table that for now.
The debris pinning me is a chunk of enormous tree, or maybe the spine of a hellbeast, but either way it’s big enough that I can’t lift it without shifting.
There’s no way I don’t have broken ribs and internal bleeding, plus my throat is too raw to make noise.
I am stuck here until someone comes for me—no question.
There’s no sign of Rogue, Angelo, Damon, or even Rebel and his snarky bullshit yet.
Usually I’d smell them before I saw them, but the only scent here is overcooked meat and the weird blue-sugar stink of whatever that pedestal was leaking.
I need to figure out what the fuck that smell is later; maybe D can help?
I guess that only applies if everyone has survived this bullshit, and I can’t confirm that right now because I’m fucking trapped like a bug on display.
My lungs panic as I realize how compressed I am.
The logical part of me says, ‘Archie, you’re not buried, you’re just pressed flat.
’ However, the other part of me that got stuck in a fridge at the dump as a kid is screaming, ‘If you don’t shift, you die here.
’ Childhood trauma is funny like that, showing up to taunt me when I have far worse problems than a truly shitty choice of hide-n-go-seek spots with the guys.
I got through those five hours, but damned if I ever purposefully put myself in tiny, tight spaces again if I had the choice.
Rogue’s face pops into my mind, flickering like a movie of her emotions: smug, snide, pouting, caught off-guard, unsure.
.. If she died, I’d know it, right? That’s how my parents' stories about bonded mates go—once you’re mated, you always know.
That piece of your soul that you exchange is magical and if the link is broken, it lances you with pain for the rest of your days because it cannot find its match.
I don’t feel that pain, so it can’t be broken. Right?
But I’m not Fae, and she’s not a shifter, so I don’t know if those tales apply cross-species as well as they do between different animals of our kind.
My dads and mom are all varied cat shifters, and they definitely have it, but that doesn’t mean my bond is the same.
Plus, I did things to link to Damon and he’s a demon and that’s…
a whole different ball game. I think I’d know if he was gone, too, and I don’t feel like that.
I try to call out again, my voice scraping the bottom of my throat. “Rogue. Damon. Fucking—somebody, answer before I lose it.”
It’s embarrassing, but panic makes everyone feel weak as a baby.
No answer except the steady, wet drip from my side, which is probably important.
However, since I can’t get my hand in there to check it, I have to focus on other shit.
I can move my neck enough to see that the crater is maybe a couple miles across, glowing blue at the center, and rimmed in upended debris and crispy grass.
If I really strain, I think I see where all the chunks of that stupid pedestal are, but that doesn’t help me.
It was constructed somewhere definitely not here, and neither Rogue nor I recognized the markings on it.
I dig my nails into the ground instead just to remind myself I still have hands that work.
The dirt here is melted and full of hard glassy bits, which means the explosion must have been hot as fuck.
I grab a small shard and press it into my palm and squeeze, letting the sharp, new pain ground me.
That’s something I learned in years of playing elite tier sports, by the way.
Old pain will eventually fade into a hum and you can ignore it, but that’s dangerous.
New pain will bring the focus back and you can keep yourself conscious until help arrives.
Modern day gladiators in silly costumes playing for modern-day Romans greedily consuming their feasts, I guess.
Yikes. I got a bit philosophical there, so the glass thing worked.
It’s better than letting the other pain lull me into another blackout, or thinking about Javi exploding into ashes to save our bacon.
I can’t process how that works logically, and this is the first I’ve ever seen it, so my brain doesn’t want to wrap around him turning from a fun bartender to a pile of fireplace detritus.
Javier could be a little tightly wound at times because of his folks, but once he was in our pack, he was in.
And my parents always taught me that you die for your pride—that’s why the lioness is so fierce, like my mom.
Oh, she’s gonna hide us all when she finds out about this shit. Sariah does not play when it comes to taking stupid risks.
After all, she was the one who led the search team who found me in that fridge and she scared the piss out of me, Reb, Javi, Angelo, and Damon for life.
No one wanted to cross her by doing something stupid like that again, and trust me, we did a lot of stupid shit.
We just tried to keep on the other side of the ‘Sariah will come for us’ line when we did it.
I close my eyes, resting as I cough a laugh.
The darkness behind my lids is comforting for a moment, then I see more movies of my mate and my friend playing behind my lids.
I have to pry them open again because I can’t…
I just cannot watch that when I don’t know where they are or how injured they might be or if anyone is dead.
What if the thing that hit us is still out there, just waiting for the slow ones to drag themselves upright so it can finish the job?
Given that I should be able to shift, and I should have started to heal by now, it’s very possible.
Something has to be preventing it, and I’ll be damned if I know what, but it’s making us sitting ducks.
I try to twist my arm under the slab. My muscles bunch and shake, but it’s like being zip-tied by some cartoonish assassin for a torture session.
I taste bile in my mouth as the pain lances through me and I have to swallow it back.
Shifters shouldn’t be able to bleed to death like this, but I definitely could if I don’t get out from under this thing and away from whatever is keeping my supernatural abilities from working.
This is the shittiest death ever, by the way—pinned under some broken wood like a weak human and conscious enough to know what’s going to happen if I don’t get help.
The alpha-guy vibes in me are taking a real beating with this and even if I don’t die, I might perish from embarrassment if this gets out in the news.
I don’t really care about that shit, but it’ll fuck up my sports rep for sure.
Of course, I could close my eyes and just drift off, see what’s on the other side.
It would hurt less; I think. But I hear my mother’s voice, as loud and clear as if she were squatting beside me in the dirt.
‘Glasers are not built to give in, Archer. The world might look at us as if we don’t belong and we should hide who we are—don’t let it win’.
She always said it with a snarl and flash of sharp teeth because she meant it.
My mother and fathers endured a lot of criticism when they were younger about our pride because it’s made up of so many different kinds of cats—and led by the female without compunction.
It made lots of kids and adults be shitty to me and the other kids, but Sariah told us we were put here to thrive on our terms, not to fold at the first sign of adversity
I imagine her here, licking her thumb and swiping the blood off my jaw, telling me to ‘Get up and find your pride, boy’.
I want to tell her I’m trying, but something is physically preventing me from just powering through.
But she’s not here and I can’t really say much anyway, so I mutter what I think is “I’m sorry, Mom. ”
Another spasm of pain rockets through me, and it feels like something important is getting ready to quit.
For a second, the world tilts and I see blue light dancing in the cracks of the crater.
I see Damon at the rim, or maybe it’s Angelo, sprinting toward me, yelling something I can’t hear.
Relief spikes in me so strongly that it almost knocks me out.
They’re alive. Rogue is probably with them.
If I can hold out another minute, they’ll dig me up. Maybe we’ll even make it home. I hang on to that thought because my family being okay is enough for me to push through.
I clamp my jaw, and press the glass shard deeper into my palm so the new pain brings me back. My folks’ stories weren’t wrong—I’d feel it if she died. I’d be hollow, but instead, there’s a thin thread keeping me tethered.
The mate link is real and she’s alive, so I can’t leave yet.
I whisper her name, like a prayer, and wait for the world to come back and get me.