It was dark, properly dark, when the Tahoe flashed back into view behind them. Rosa had been dozing in the driver’s seat, and Levi had been doing his best to keep her awake. Derrick hadn’t said a single word the entire hour, but Levi knew he was awake by the flash of his eyes in the rearview mirror. Every now and then, there would be a fizzle as, one by one, Derrick went through his boosters. Levi had to wonder what would happen when the man ran out.
“Shit,” Rosa breathed.
Ahead of them the town of Santa Cruz twinkled in the moonlight. Levi could make out the boardwalk, lights burning in the tapestry of the night, by the sea. The view was uncomfortably familiar, even though he’d never been here before. A sick sense of déjà vu flooded him, but he pushed it away as he glanced out the window.
“Derrick,” Levi said, a tiny bit of desperation seeping into his voice. “Derrick, they figured out where we were headed, they’re behind us.”
“It was obvious where we’d head,” Derrick mumbled. His words were messy, slurred, like he was half awake. His breathing was wet, and every word was an effort through his bruised throat. Levi supposed he’d lost a lot of blood. “Santa Cruz is home ground for you, for Arthur. Nowhere else would make sense...”
“Derrick. Where do we go next?” Levi tried to snap his fingers, to focus the man. Derrick scowled at him, like he was being annoying. “Woods. Woodland behind the university. Big redwood trees, graffiti in the woods. Bonfire,” he muttered. He trailed off, looking out one of the windows.
“Derrick!” Levi growled.
“Just do what I said,” Derrick snapped back. He sunk lower in his seat. “You know this stuff, if you bother to listen to it.”
“He sounds bad,” Rosa mumbled. She wasn’t looking tired anymore, alert with the resurgence of adrenaline in her system.
“He looks bad,” Levi sighed.
Rosa made a right at the split in the freeway as they emerged into the town proper. A low-sitting coastal city, Santa Cruz was a slew of old constructions, poorly maintained but charming in its own way. Everything had a worn feeling to it, like the sea had been lovingly crashing against the town for ages. Rosa gingerly pressed down on the accelerator as the Tahoe followed them, trying to gain distance without being too obvious.
The smell of salt from the sea mingled with the rich scent of the redwoods in the hills behind them. They followed the freeway for some distance, that Tahoe inching closer and closer.
“Fuck it,” Rosa hissed.
She slammed on the gas, and the Mustang was happy to oblige under her. They darted forward, the headlights casting their brilliance on the road ahead of them as Rosa slid from one lane to the next and back again. She weaved through the vehicles, her concentration so thorough that she almost missed the turn. She let out a string of brilliant curses and slammed on the brakes.
“Too close!” Arthur gasped.
The Tahoe slammed into the rear of the Mustang.
Rosa grappled for control, teeth gritted as she struggled to keep them steady on the road. The Tahoe was pressed to their rear bumper, pushing them. Its massive bulk could easily overwhelm them if they couldn’t break loose from it.
With a jerk one way, and then the other, to the wheel, Rosa managed to free them from the Tahoe and shoot them off down the little road leading towards the body of the university campus. The colleges sat in the shadow of the coastal mountains, tall redwoods looming over them like silent sentinels. They followed the road up the incline alongside a fast-moving creek shaded by trees which would not lose their green even as the weather changed. Deeper into the woods they went, until the stars were obscured, and the darkness became an oppressive force around them. They passed through an area of homes, a brief clearing, then turned deeper into the woods.
Levi’s stomach twisted. Familiar. Everything was too familiar. He could smell it in the air, the scents of the woods he knew, of each inch of territory so diligently memorized and marked.
“This is home,” Arthur muttered. “This was home. For a very long time.”
College kids on bikes, hikers, locals, shouted and screamed and honked at them as they swerved past. They ended up on a dirt road, which was clearly not meant for cars going at upwards of sixty miles per hour.
“Where am I supposed to be going?” Rosa asked, sounding desperate.
“Keep going. Almost there. The top of the hill,” Derrick muttered. “Levi knows the way.”
He did. Somehow, Levi knew the way.
“Turn right here,” Levi shouted, in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.
They turned.
There was a quarry to their left. It felt like they were coming up too fast on the turn at the end of the road, but Rosa kept her foot on the gas. She hit the brakes as they started to turn, the rear end slid for just a moment and then they straightened out just in time to make the turn.
The Tahoe slammed into them from behind, and both vehicles skidded off the road and into the creek bed.
Arthur ran through the water, laughing. Laughing, and smiling, and enjoying the way the silt felt between his splayed toes. Martin and Carlo were running with him, and Carlo had a squirt gun that he’d bought at the CVS by their elementary school. The water was cool, but not cold, and it was a welcome respite in the heat of the summer.
Above him, Tony, the pack’s unofficial leader, was talking to Richard. Tony was in his sixties, but built sturdily. His hair was grey, and his eyes were kind and soft. Still, Arthur knew from a great many years of playing the trickster, that the old man was still plenty clever.
Richard was his dad’s best friend.
Well, Richard had been his dad’s best friend, before Arthur had killed him.
He stopped running to look at his feet through the muddy water. Martin and Carlo stopped with him. “Hey,” Carlo asked, “what’s wrong?”
“Uh, nothing,” Arthur said, trying to make himself perk back up. He didn’t have a dad, anymore. Good. He was glad he didn’t have a dad. He hated his dad.
Alpha Richard Reinhart would take care of him. He came from up north, a big mean looking man with muscles and tattoos, a man who smoked cigarettes and drove a big pickup truck.
He wasn’t really mean. He was soft inside, squishy. Like a big blue-eyed watermelon. Once you got through the outside he was all... water?
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That was a bad metaphor. Or maybe he was putting it together wrong? Or, wait, was that a simile? They’d been learning about symbolic language in English class, and he still couldn’t really tell the difference...
He ran on with his friends in the cool creek water, and forgot, for a little while, about his dead father, and the man who was to raise him instead.
Levi was curled up in the corner. The plaster of the wall was cold against his back, and it felt nice against the bruises and lumps that were forming there. The room was dark, a set of Christmas lights twinkling above the curtains to his one window the only source of illumination. They were the plain yellow kind, and they helped make him feel less alone, less afraid.
He could hear his dad and his abuela screaming again. They were arguing in Spanish, which always meant it was bad. Levi didn’t speak Spanish very well, his dad had never made an attempt to teach it to him and his abuela only really used it to curse.
Except when they were fighting. When they were really upset, they didn’t bother translating.
Levi understood enough. It helped that it was the same argument they were always having. An argument about him. An argument about what kind of life he should live. Should he go to a public school, or a private Catholic school? Should he go to university? Abuela wanted him to be an engineer, his dad wanted him to be a physicist, like him.
Why couldn’t he sit still?
Why didn’t he behave?
Why couldn’t he pay attention?
Why didn’t he listen?
Such a disappointment. Such a disappointment. Such a disappointment.
Always the same argument.
His back ached so much where Abuela had hit him. He’d wear his long-sleeved shirt to PE this week. Again.
They were stumbling through the water, Arthur and Levi, together. The creek wasn’t deep, it came up to their knees. Their back ached-
His back ached. Levi’s back ached.
He clawed at the banks of the creek as he dragged himself free, coughing up the acrid smoke from the vehicle. The Mustang and the Tahoe both sat in smoking heaps in the water, the creek bubbling peacefully against the metal hulks.
Levi dragged himself into the grass and flopped onto his back, looking up at the stars.
They seemed to be blinking out, one by one.
The heat-death of the universe.
He sat up with a start and stumbled his way back to the wreckage. He climbed over the Mustang’s crumpled body and, with a heave, tore the driver’s door from its hinges. Rosa was unconscious inside, blood drooling down her face from a nasty mark on her temple. He drew her, carefully, from the wreck, clutching her to his chest.
She was so, so precious.
Her arm had begun to bruise purple and green already, and it looked to be at the wrong angle. Broken, almost certainly.
As carefully as he could manage, he carried her to the edge of the water and laid her down in the grass. Then he went back for Derrick.
It was hard to tell if Derrick was alive for a few, agonizing moments. His body was very still, and he’d been severely injured before the accident. Now though, soaked with blood, he looked pale as a corpse.
He gave a wheezing, wet inhale, and Levi sighed with relief. He pulled Derrick from the vehicle, moving him over to the grass.
Derrick was fiddling with his vest again.
“You look hilarious,” Arthur teased as they walked along. They were headed to a little motel at the back end of town. Everything they’d seen so far pointed to this William kid being there. He was a Black Hound, an omen, and Derrick had been on his trail for a while. Omens could be dangerous, to themselves and to others, with their magic. An Omen interfering in the wrong place at the wrong time could not only get an innocent bystander hurt but could get themselves injured, or worse, if they tried to save a life that it wasn’t possible to save.
“I’m still getting used to this thing,” Derrick grumbled.
“You’re built like a tank, that thing is clearly not meant for someone as stocky as you are.”
“They were out of extra larges!”
Arthur sniggered some more at the man, then patted his back. “Calm down man. You’re doing good. You’re just nervous.”
“This isn’t the first person I’ve tracked.”
“No,” Arthur granted, “but this is definitely the one that has the most eyes on it. If you find this kid, are you really going to bring him in?”
Derrick sighed, looking away. “I can’t just leave some kid wandering around by himself, Omen or not. This isn’t exactly a safe neighborhood.”
“I think it’s noble of you to want to keep him safe,” Arthur said softly. “Let's get him to talk, see if he’ll listen to reason. Maybe... maybe this doesn’t all have to find its way back to the top, yeah?”
Derrick looked up at him, and his eyes had a flicker of rebellion in them that made Arthur grin.
Levi pulled Derrick’s shirt off, wincing. There was so much blood, sticky and wet. Levi’s belly churned at the memory of what he’d done to that Bureau agent on the doorstep.
The Beast growled giddily.
“Fuck, Derrick, I don’t know how to fix you,” he whispered, voice cracking. A pale white spear of bone jutted through the side of his body, flexing with each rise and fall of Derrick’s chest. The man almost certainly had a punctured lung. He went and grabbed the duffle bag from the Mustang, then used one of his shirts and some packing tape to create a crude 3-sided bandage for the wound. His rib had punctured through the thin, film-like armor the man wore under his street clothes. Without some kind of plastic film, it wasn’t likely to help much, but it was all he-
A thump sounded behind him, and a shudder ran up Levi’s spine. A second thump. Then a third.
The driver’s door flew off the Tahoe and sent up a spray of dust as it rolled across the grass.
Levi turned, heart hammering, and watched as Arthur’s adoptive father climbed from the smoldering ruins of the SUV.
Rich was the best.
Arthur sat in the bed of his pickup truck, reading a book on the different kinds of birds native to the Channel Islands off of California’s coast. Rich was driving slowly to keep from bouncing him too much. It was dark out, but Arthur could see okay. Being a wolf was pretty cool sometimes, even if he hadn’t been able to properly turn yet.
Rich said it was really important to obey traffic laws. Especially at night, because driving at night was dangerous. That part was stupid. The important part was that, if he got pulled over while he was a wolf, the Bureau would get involved, and Rich said that was a nightmare.
“Hey,” Rich shouted. His voice sounded extra low and gruff, but that helped it carry over the wind of the truck’s movement. “We’re gonna pick up some steaks from the butcher I like. You’re gonna help me pick ‘em.”
“Cool,” Arthur called back, trying to sound like that wasn’t at all exciting for him. “You have work in the morning?”
“Yeah,” Rich called back. “But not for very long. I should be off in the afternoon. Did you still want to meet my pack?”
“Definitely!”
“I’ll get the boys together. I can’t promise everyone will be able to come, but I’ll do my best.”
“Thanks Dad,” Arthur shouted over the wind. Such a simple, innocent thing. So small.
And suddenly his eyes were welling with tears. His heart slammed into gear in his chest. The truck slowed and pulled to the side of the road.
“I’m sorry!” Arthur wailed. “I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, I won’t! I’m sorry!”
Rich climbed out of the truck and walked around to the bed. Arthur looked at him with wide, wet eyes. Rich sat next to Arthur in the bed of the truck, and the bed creaked as the weight shifted.
“I’m sorry. It was an accident,” he whimpered. “I won’t do it again, I promise.” Arthur had killed Rich’s best friend, had torn him to bloody shreds, and the man hadn’t brought it up once in the entire year he’d been taking care of Arthur. He had just calmly, quietly, watched over him, spent time with him, made sure he was doing well in school.
Rich put a hand on Arthur’s shoulder. The boy flinched.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled a final time, his sobbing having turned to bellyaching.
Rich pulled him into a hug, pressing the lanky boy to his chest. The man smelled weird. He smelled like cold air and ozone, the smell of the welding shop where he worked. He smelled of fresh rain and the hint of oil from an auto shop, like sweat and the aging leather of the seats of his truck.
“You can call me Dad,” Rich said quietly. “If you want to.”
Just like that, Arthur was crying again. He didn’t manage to stop until Rich had set him down in the passenger seat of his pickup truck, and they were on their way north towards Redding.