Gavin approached him with a hand held out. “Cool, man. Wanna shake on it?”
He was about to do something stupid. I knew he was about to do something stupid and get himself hurt, maybe even killed. I knew I needed to make him back off and let this happen, but my brain locked up for a second, and by the time I started moving, it was already too late.
The moment he was close enough to actually shake hands, Gavin jumped at the werewolf guy. Before I could even think, the guy grabbed him and shoved him back so hard he flew through the air and hit the opposite wall. There was a thud that sounded almost too quiet, and Gavin bounced off and landed face-down on the ground. Krystal let out this loud, deep yelp and ran over to check on him.
“Crap! Sorry, really sorry about that. Swear to god I didn’t think I was hitting him that hard. Is he okay?”
Gavin groaned and rolled over, so at least he was moving? And I couldn’t see any blood or bones sticking out, and there wasn’t a big dent in the wall, which I knew there would have been if Alex or Grace had thrown someone at full strength.
“What the fuck are you on?”, Krystal hissed at him.
“Steroids, man. Gives me hella self-control problems.”
She gave him a look, but then seemed to accept it and went back to trying to check on Gavin. Which was crazy! You only had to glance at the guy to know he wasn’t taking steroids. He was only a little taller than me, and on the skinny side of average in an unhealthy way, like he missed meals instead of exercising. How many times in my life had I seen something supernatural, and ended up believing some weird excuse like that? I’d figured it was just the two that I knew about, but now I wasn’t so sure.
But that wasn’t happening now. I knew what was really going on, and that meant I had to be the one who helped out and stopped the situation from getting any worse. If I’d just done that a minute ago then Gavin wouldn’t have got hurt in the first place.
I put on my best calm and authoritative voice. “We need to call an ambulance right now.”
“Yeah. Fuck, you’re right. Unless you can wave your hands and fix him up?”
“What?”
“You know, magic him better. You or one of your friends.”
Krystal snapped. “Stop joking around, fucker! You think this is all funny?”
How did he know that I knew? I hadn’t given him any clues, had I? Whatever, didn’t matter.
“No, I can’t and neither can they.” I was almost certain that was true, I didn’t totally get how Grace’s powers worked but from what she’d said, she had to put healing on people before they got hurt, not after. “We can leave together, okay? Just you and me. Krystal can call him an ambulance and make sure he’s okay, and you’ll have me still as your - your mandatory guest. Everyone gets what they want.”
“You’re kidding!”, Krystal said.
“It’s fine. He won’t hurt me, right?” I looked him straight in the eyes. He looked… I dunno. Almost like he was impressed about something?
“Pinkie promise,” he replied.
“Okay.”
He opened the door for me and let me walk out first. I could tell Krystal wasn’t happy, but she was worried enough about Gavin that she didn’t fight too much, and was on the phone as we left. I couldn’t hear her talking, though. All I could hear was my heart beating in my ears, so hard I could have sworn it was making my whole body jump with each beat.
“Where.” My throat was too dry to talk. I swallowed a couple times, then tried again. “Where do you want to go?”
“I dunno. This hasn’t exactly gone to plan. You know any nice, private meeting spots around here?”
Luke’s room again, maybe? No, that wasn’t private enough. It worked for group discussions, but we didn’t want to be in a dorm building if there might be a werewolf fight breaking out later. My house was big enough, and it was private until Dad got home, but no, really bad idea. Grace’s house?
“I think so. You um, want to follow me there? It’s about forty minutes’ walk away though, and I’m not a great walker.”
“I have a car.”
“Oh.”
Getting into a murderer’s car and asking him nicely to take you to your friend’s house instead of to a quarry somewhere was another really, really bad idea to add to the great big pile of really, really bad ideas I was already having, but what else was I meant to do? He seemed genuine, and he’d let Gavin and Krystal go, and they’d seen him so people would know what happened if nobody ever saw me again. Which was really not that reassuring, but it was better than nothing. A little bit better.
His car turned out to be nicer than I thought. I didn’t know much about cars, but it looked sleek and new, though on the inside it was full of junk like leftover fast food bags. Which was weirdly normal, actually, because everything else about it was the strangest car trip of my life. I got in, heart still thumping, told him the address, and then we just sat there listening to his GPS giving him directions and acting like I wasn’t basically being kidnapped.
He even seemed just as weirded out by it as me, since after a while he broke the silence by saying, “I’m Callum, by the way.”
“Okay.”
I knew it was a little rude for me to not give him my name, but he was a murderer who’d just hurt my friend, so I wasn’t going to do it unless he actually asked. Besides, I was pretty sure he’d given me a fake name, so he didn’t deserve my real one anyway.
He got the hint, and neither of us said anything for the rest of the trip.
Grace’s house was pretty average, just a regular brick house in a regular suburb. The one thing that stood out was the garden, which was like something out of a magazine. Every different colour of flower, all tall and healthy and perfectly arranged in tidy rows. It was almost too nice, like it didn’t belong in front of a house that was so plain.
I didn’t realise until after we got there that I didn’t have a key to get into their house, but it turned out there was an open window that wasn’t hard to climb in. ‘Callum’ made me go first, not that I would have tried running anyway, and I landed on the living room floor, maybe. It was a weird room without much in it, hard to tell what it was for. I’d never actually visited Grace’s house before, I’d just looked up her address.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
He came through a moment after me, sniffing again. There was probably a lot of interesting werewolf-scent for him in here, I hoped I wasn’t giving away any of Grace’s and Alex’s secrets somehow. Then he led me into a dining room with a big table and not much else (the whole house seemed pretty bare on the inside) and sat me down across from him.
“Can I tell my friends where we are now?”
He nodded, and I sent the text. “Really, really sorry about how this all went down, by the way.”
He really seemed like he meant it, but I still wasn’t going to feel any sympathy for him. He’d hurt Gavin, and I could be next if he changed his mind for whatever reason, so I was way too busy feeling sympathy for myself.
“Just wanted to say, you seem like good people, and I’m sorry Gen attacked your friends. She gets a little impulsive sometimes, is all.”
I didn’t want to say anything to provoke him, but I couldn’t help myself. “You murdered someone, in a really nasty way.”
“He was a bad person! The world’s better off without him.”
“So you kill anyone you think is a bad person?”
His eyes narrowed. I might have taken it too far. “No, but sometimes killing one bad person is the only way to save the lives of a lot of good people. You heard of the trolley problem?”
I nodded. Luke talked about that stuff pretty often.
“What if you could kill the guy who keeps making all those trolleys and sending them on collision courses for innocent people? People like White never put themselves close enough to their victims to look them in the eye, or even know who they are, but they’re responsible for more evil than a hundred actual ‘criminals’. I came here to say I’ve got no beef with you or any of your buddies. You aren’t like him.”
“You painted the walls with his blood,” I said softly.
“Yeah, that was nasty. But you can’t fix the world just by killing someone. I had to send a message.”
I couldn’t argue with him after that. Not that I agreed with him, I just couldn’t even imagine what to say, so I stopped talking, and he did too. I couldn’t tell how long we both sat there, awkwardly silent again, before finally I saw something through the window that wasn’t another car. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, I just noticed movement. Then I heard a scream from outside, and the wall exploded.
It definitely wasn’t any of my friends. Something like a bull was standing on the other side of a huge hole in the wall. The monster - it had to be a monster - was big. I’d never seen a bull in person, but there was no way they were meant to be this big. And it had antlers instead of horns, which twisted and split outwards, almost as wide as it was long. Those antlers had to be the only reason it hadn’t made it inside the house yet, the hole was big enough for a person to walk through but not big enough for its head.
I leaped out of my chair and stumbled away from it, but ‘Callum’ didn’t hesitate. He ran straight at the monster and punched it square on the nose, which made a sound almost as loud as when it smashed through the wall. It staggered back but didn’t seem to be that hurt, while Callum actually recoiled in pain and grabbed at his hand.
“Shit, it’s hot!”, he said. Now that he mentioned it, I could see the flowers burning up around the monster’s hooves. I’d backed myself up against the wall by that point. There was an open door right next to me, this was my chance to run. But I couldn’t.
“Can you fight it?”, I asked, while the monster got its footing again. It was backing up a bit, but in a way that looked like it was getting ready to charge, not leaving.
“Really don’t wanna!” He reached a hand down to the ground and tapped some of the debris that was scattered all over the floor. There were some big pieces there, I was lucky that I hadn’t been hit. But the moment he touched one of the chunks of wall, they all broke apart, practically dissolving. I almost thought they’d turned into dust, but there was still colour and shape to it all as it swirled up into the air and started floating around him. He was surrounded by a million teeny tiny shards of brick, wood and plaster, a brown-and-white mosaic mist so thick it was hard to make out his face through it.
Then as the monster started to charge at the wall again to cave the whole thing in this time, he laid a hand on the inside of the hole, and all that mist flowed into it. It gathered in the one spot, grew even thicker as it squeezed into a small space, the gaps between each speck getting smaller and smaller, and then snapped into place as a brand new solid wall. Just in time for the monster to hit it with another huge crash, and smash it to pieces again.
This time he was ready. All the bits of wall crumbled into mist while they were still in mid-air, and he started to reform the wall before the monster even had time to poke its nose through. Some of the chunks actually hit him before they disintegrated, since he was standing right there, but they didn’t seem to hurt him.
Everything was quiet for five seconds, then there was another giant crash, another spray of rubble, and he put the wall back together again. He looked me right in the eyes.
“If you’re doing this, stop it. This is gonna end badly for both of us.”
“Me? What? How?”
There was another impact, even bigger than the first ones. The monster did get its nose through this time, and Callum had to smack it with a chair to make it back out before he could fix the hole. “You telling me it just showed up by coincidence?”
“I don’t know! Maybe you brought it here!”
It didn’t charge again, which was the exact opposite of reassuring. Callum put a finger to his lips and pressed his ear against the wall, then ran through the door to the next room over, the kitchen. He got there just in time for the monster to slam through that wall, breaking through one of the windows this time. The windows in the kitchen were big, not big enough to fit its head through but they’d sure make the monster’s job easier. But despite that, Callum managed to put the wall and windows back together before it could get inside.
“If you’ve got any secret powers you were hiding, now would be the time!”, he shouted.
“I don’t!”
“Great! Think any of your friends can handle this thing?”
“Um.” I wasn’t exactly an expert at monster-fighting strategy or anything, but at least I knew what they could do. Charity might be able to confuse it, but she couldn’t hurt it. Grace and Alex were two more werewolves, but if Callum couldn’t even touch the thing then they probably couldn’t either, and their magic wouldn’t help. But maybe Luke? Light didn’t care about heat, right?
“Maybe!”, I finally replied.
He slowly backed away from the wall and walked back over to me. Had the monster given up, or was it just working on something else? I couldn’t see it through any of the windows over here, and that was worrying too, because something that big should have been very see-able.
“Maybe isn’t good enough, give me a yes or no.”
“I don’t know, though!”
He laid a hand on my shoulder, and right then I was scared enough of the monster that I forgot to be scared of him. I could see that he was still cradling his other hand like he was in a lot of pain, the one he used to punch the thing. Weren’t werewolves meant to heal super fast?
“Look. We can hole up in here, but sooner or later it’s breaking through. If your friends are going to turn up and save our asses, then I can try stalling it ‘til that happens. If that isn’t going to happen, then we have to take our chances and run. Which is it gonna be?”
“You sure you can’t fight it?”
“Maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t. I might die if I try, and I definitely won’t die if I run away as fast as I can, so nothing personal but I’m not interested in trying.”
There was no point in arguing with him about it. I had to make a decision, and I had to make it fast. I didn’t understand what this monster was or what it could do, and I only kind of understood what my friends were capable of. There was no way I could give a proper, informed answer.
But I could do one thing: have faith in my friends. They’d all been through a lot, and they were all really smart, capable people. Even if I couldn’t think of one, if I had to bet on anything, I’d bet on them being able to figure out a way to stop this thing.
Just as I was about to give my answer, I was interrupted by more screams from outside, and this time I could see where they were coming from. The window opposite me looked out over the road. The people out there probably thought this was a regular animal escaped from someone’s farm or something, but that had still scared them enough to clear the street, so there hadn’t been any innocents getting caught in the crossfire. Except now it had apparently got bored and decided to go find some.
One of the driveways across the street had actually melted partway through, leaving a trail as the monster had walked up to that house. It kicked in their door with one of its front hooves, and I could see people running for their lives out of a side door, while the monster started plowing straight through their house. Two of the people running were little kids. They were where the screams had come from.
Unconsciously, I reached out for something, anything, that I could use to help them. And in that moment, something reached back. It was wild and dangerous, but it wasn’t fire. It was incomprehensibly deep, but it wasn’t an ocean. It was a living thing, intelligent but in a totally inhuman way. It didn’t push, it pulled, and I fell off the ledge and into its depths.