There were wolves in the woods.
The trees were tall, impossibly tall, towering up and up and up until their tops were no longer visible through the fog and the clouds. It was as if the night sky was held aloft by those great wooden beams, held above him as the ceiling to a great cathedral made of light and color and sound. The stars buzzed above, dancing through the trees, spritely little fireflies that dashed this way and that in the breeze. The wind rolled through, cool and soothing, making the trees shudder with its passing. It was as if the forest itself was breathing a great sigh.
The night sky was a great swirl of purple and blue and white, a river stretching across the infinite expanse of the void.
And then, there was the moon. The moon, the beautiful moon, watched him, full and pale and brilliant. It was too large, far too large, as if it were trying to swallow the sky itself.
There were wolves in the woods.
Their eyes burned like the fireflies, like the stars, in golds and blues, reds and whites, shimmering shifting things, darting one way and then the other. They yipped and howled and barked, running, playing, in the great shadows cast by the tree trunks.
Not quite coyotes.
The woods smelled of pine and rain, wind and wet. Levi could smell creek water on the breeze, buried in the bones of the place. He took a stumbling step, nose in the air, chasing the scent.
Rosewater and wildflower lingered in his senses, intoxicating and pure. Sweet and bitter at once.
Something was missing.
Levi padded forward. The earth was soft and spongy under his paws. He put all four limbs on the ground, wet nose sniffing the air. His fur bristled along his spine.
Something was missing.
He moved on, hesitantly, into the trees.
“This way,” his mother’s voice said, solemn and soft. It echoed through the trees, far away and yet right against the soft skin of his ear.
His ears swiveled, trying to track down the sound.
“This way,” she said again. Levi whimpered and sniffed his way across the soft ground.
“I’m scared,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t quite his own.
The rosewater smelled wrong, now. Off. Poisoned.
It smelled of copper.
“I know,” his mother whispered. “I know you’re scared. But it’s okay. I’ve got you.”
Crickets chirped in the trees, incessant but not overwhelming. The forest seemed to pulse with darkness, a heartbeat pulsing from its center.
“I’ve got her,” his mother said, and she sounded so, so sad. It broke his heart.
“Who?” Levi whined. He whined, because he was lost, and scared, and something was missing. The taste of the copper coated his tongue. It was so sweet. So wonderful. He wanted more of it.
“Keep going, Levi,” she said. “Follow me. Follow the moon. I’ll guide you home.”
Little wisps flickered in the dark, dancing blues that swirled in the black empty spaces between the trees. Levi stumbled after them, desperate for-
The sea rushed forward, frothing and red. Bloody.
He forced himself onwards, the rail ties catching his feet. The sea was overflowing the levy with each swell, rank coppery ichor crashing to the track ballast each time. He felt cold, body nude, rain slamming into him so hard it was practically horizontal. It stung on his skin.
A great storm.
A beast with two legs.
Red eyes, flashing in the dark.
Lightning, sparking great flames in the sky.
Howling on the wind, the wind, the wind...
A train, rumbling down the tracks.
A lighthouse stood somewhere in the far distance, its singular white eye peering through the fog. It was so, so far away. Levi could feel the train on the tracks, rushing, rushing, rushing towards him.
He walked, still. He dragged a putrid black trash bag, step after aching step. Its weight was a constant, and it took all of his strength to pull it along.
Something was laughing at him, bitter and cruel.
“This is what you wanted,” said the Beast, said his father, said the cruel amalgam of his fears and doubts and insecurities. His rage. “A sea of blood, and all for you. Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it invigorating?”
It was. In its own terrible, wonderful way, it was.
The sea churned, blood rushing past his feet as the waves threatened to bowl him over, to drown him in an ocean of blood and destroy everything that he was.
“I don’t want you!” Levi screamed at the sky, so hard that his throat ached. “You aren’t me. You’re just a monster! I’m not a monster!”
“Oh,” purred the voice from everywhere at once, “but you are. And so much more. A disappointment. A failure. Tell me, didn’t we give you every opportunity to succeed?”
“All you gave me was fear and expectations,” Levi snarled, heaving the bag forward. “All you gave me was pressure! You could never be proud of me, never smile at me. Would it have killed you to, just for once, tell me I was doing a good job?”
“You could have made something of yourself. But you were weak. You wanted control over your destiny, you lashed out for command over your fate, but all you did was throw away your potential. And now look at you.”
A wave slammed into him, and he stumbled to his knees, hands scrabbling for purchase among the rail ties.
“Weak and lost and alone. A killer. An animal.”
Levi forced himself to his feet. He made his body move, one step after the next, squinting against the bitter cold of the rain.
“I am not weak!” Levi howled. “I am strong! Arthur taught me that! Rosa taught me that! I will get up, as many times as it takes, no matter how hard it is. I won’t give up on having my own life!”
“And what a life it is,” the voice purred. “One filled with mediocrity and violence. Tell me, do you remember the first person you hurt? The first one you beat so bloody they couldn’t open their eyes?”
The wind screamed in Levi’s ears. His eyes were full of tears.
The moss felt good between his pawpads. The wolves yipped at him from the woods, and the desire to join in filled him. He wanted to run and play, to breathe the sweet clean air of this place forever.
But then there was rosewater turned to poison, and something was missing.
Something was missing.
He put his nose back to the earth and forced himself forward.
“About... two years after your father and I got married,” his mother said, her voice melodic in the fog, “he finally got accepted to the staff in Oregon. Not tenured, but he’d get to teach. He always loved to teach. To talk about the stars.”
Levi remembered the stars. He remembered lying in the back of his father’s truck and looking at them, naming them. He remembered the way the crickets chirped, just like they did here. He remembered the moisture in the air, heavy in their hair and in the grass.
“I swear, he must have explained what the Cosmic Microwave Background is hundreds of times. But it never got old. I could have listened to him ramble about infinity until the last star died. I loved him. I loved him so, so deeply. He was always an odd man, but in the most wonderful way. People are made of all of these little idiosyncrasies. Millions of contradictions make life worth living. They make a person, a person. More than just a little name and a face.”
Levi thought back to the people rushing in and out of Bullseye. To the mundane nothingness of existence.
Was that really all he wanted?
Was that really all he cared to have?
Was he just a puzzle piece?
“He always had the weirdest sense of humor,” his mother said. “There was never a day, though, when he didn’t make me laugh at least once. It was reliable. I think he would have called it a constant. And whenever I would laugh, he would get this big grin on his face, and his eyes would crinkle up in the corners like they were made for nothing but joy.”
She sounded sad. Heartbroken.
“He doesn’t smile much, anymore.”
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The man spoke, and his syllables were too long, dragged out across his tongue.
“You can’t help me,” the man slurred. His eyes had no pupils, blank, empty spaces. “Your government can’t help me. I am all that is left of two thousand years of death and desperate survival.”
“That legacy,” Derrick said, voice controlled, “is precisely why you need to come with us. If you’re the last of your people, shouldn’t that be recorded?” Levi winced, because it wasn’t the right thing to say.
The man was getting riled up. “Recorded,” he spat. “Our legacy is recorded. It is recorded in the bones and blood of the world! You stand on a foundation built by the magi of our people, and yet you are ignorant of it! Everything you know is a monument to our glory.”
“Be that as it may,” Derrick reasoned, “it would be good to have a written history. And we don’t know that you’re the last. The Bureau has resources, resources it can use to find your wayward kin, if they’re out there. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to know if you’re really the last?”
The man was quiet for a moment. He looked down at his feet. Then his hands.
The movement was so fast, Levi almost didn’t have time to react.
He lunged for Derrick, hands crackling with abominable energies. Derrick reacted, but he wasn’t fast enough to contend with this thing.
Levi’s body moved without thinking, hands darting out to grab the creature and slam it into the wall. He let out a savage snarl, bringing an elbow into the thing’s face. Blood, green and tingling with magic, splattered across the brick wall behind the man. The empty-eyed man reached for him, but Levi grabbed his wrists and spun, lifting the man over him and slamming him into the floor. He smashed his foot down on the thing’s chest, and the creature wheezed.
He did it again, and again, and again.
“Levi!” came a voice over the rushing blood in his ears.
Derrick looked at him with wide eyes and a silver-headed baton in his hand.
Levi looked at the baton, then down at the wheezing form underneath him. He took a stumbling step back, sickened. Blood coated his high-tops. Derrick slid to his knees in front of the creature, pulling out his phone to call someone.
The man with the empty eyes ceased to breathe.
Ceased to be.
Levi wretched against the wall.
Levi stood before a great polished stone.
His paws were wet. It had begun to rain, and the mud got under his claws and between the pads of his toes. It was unpleasant, but it didn’t mitigate the strange desire to roll in the muddy puddles.
The stone was shining in the light cast by a great many stars. Mirror-smooth, reflective. He looked down into it, and saw his own eyes peering back at him, a brilliant, blinding crimson. He huffed out of his nose, tail giving a single swish.
“Here you are,” his mother said softly. “Right where you belong. Home.”
The sides of the stone platform were painted with reds and purples and oranges, little wolves running around the base. The polished surface shone like crystal-clear water, a lake undisturbed by wind or rain.
The wolves in the woods around him grew louder.
“Levi,” said one.
“Arthur,” went another.
“Home.”
“Pack.”
“Brother.
“Blood of blood.”
They repeated themselves, over and over again, and Levi felt warmth blossoming inside of his stomach.
Levi stepped his paws onto the platform. Despite the mud on his feet, he left no prints on the glass-like surface of the stone. It was cool against his pawpads.
And then he slipped inside, swallowed whole by the still-water. The surface did not even ripple.
The moon stood, reflected in its stark brilliance, in the stone.
The storm raged, and raged, and raged.
Levi growled, digging his hands into the pebbles, grabbing at the rail ties, pulling himself along one hand after the next. The wind threatened to throw him over the side, the sea rose, blood seeping between the steel of the rails.
He barred his teeth and pulled himself on.
“You could have been a physicist. You could have been the greatest physicist in the country! So brilliant!” the voice, who was both his father and not, raved. “You had the mind. All the potential. The training, the guidance, the financial backing. How many scholarships did you turn down? How many opportunities did you waste, opportunities others would have killed for!”
Levi dragged himself on, towards the lighthouse standing in the distance. The tracks rumbled under him, vibrating with the train rushing down it.
“You are a miserable, wretched, worthless waste. But you’re still good for one thing.”
The voice seemed so close to him now that it was as if it whispered into his ear. He clenched his eyes shut and he dragged the bag along. His body ached. He was so miserably cold. The wind tore at his skin, flaying him as he crawled. “You’re good for the blood,” the voice hissed.
“I chose my own path!” Levi snarled, though every word was a struggle to produce. “I’m not a monster. I’m good for more than violence, more than living out the dreams you never could.”
The voice laughed, and it was not a sound filled with humor. It was a sound filled with cold mockery and distaste. A sound filled with hate.
“You’re a killer. You threw away your life, all the good things I gave you. For what? To fester in your mediocrity? To live out the rest of your days in an obscure grey mush? Look how that turned out for you. Maybe, if you’d done as you were told, Arthur would still be alive? Maybe Rosa’s smile would still be lighting up the world. Derrick wouldn’t have gotten hurt. Reinhart would still have his son.”
“Shut up!” Levi screamed over the biting wind. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
“But don’t worry,” the voice purred, sounding pleased. “You don’t need to worry. I’ll take care of everything. Reinhart is handled. I tore him to pieces for you. You needed the help, after all. I’ll take very good care of you. And all I want now, all I want in exchange, is blood.”
Levi collapsed between the rail lines as the bloody sea overwhelmed him. It swallowed him and, though Levi fought until his lungs burned, the bag weighed him down, dragging him towards the bottom of the sea.
“You have to let it go,” came another voice, a new voice, quiet and at peace. A woman’s voice, sweet like rosewater.
Levi squeezed his eyes shut. He was clutching onto that bag with all of his might. His past, his sins, the cumulation of mistake after mistake heavy in his hand. Finally, he let out a breath, opened his hand, and let his guilt sink into an ocean made of blood.
After slipping beneath the glassy surface of the stone platform, Levi found himself sitting in a silent, featureless expanse. There were no walls, no floor, nothing that Levi could reasonably determine as up or as down. His feet would not find purchase in the Aether that he swam in, nor could his hands. He breathed, and the air was cool as ice, painful to breathe, but good. Clean.
He searched the endless, silvery void. It was impossible to say how much time passed. He felt sheltered, like he was inside of a bunker as the world fell apart outside.
“Hello Levi,” said a voice that sounded almost shy.
Levi’s heart gave a lopsided thump in his chest. His eyes snapped to focus.
Rosa sat, cross-legged, in the empty space. By his frame of reference, she looked to be upside-down, but in a place with no proper up or down it didn’t seem to matter. Her hair laid across her shoulders and breasts, the beautiful reddish-brown that always drew his eyes.
“Rosa,” he croaked, eyes suddenly wet and burning. “Rosa,” he said again, the name sweet on his tongue. His throat strained with the word, with her name,
“Hello, love.”
“What is... what are you doing here?”
“You needed my help. I came running, just like I always do.” Her smile was playful and a little sad. “Always did, anyways.”
“Are you-”
Rosa interrupted him, holding up a single hand. “I have some things to say, and I don’t have much time to say them. I need you to listen to me, Levi, because this is the only chance I have.”
Levi sniffled. He wanted to fight it. He had so many things he needed to say. He needed to tell her how much she meant to him. He needed to tell her that he loved her, that he was sorry for dragging her into all of this, that all of it was his fault and he’d never forget her.
He nodded anyways, because this was Rosa, and he was helpless to resist.
“When I was a little girl,” she said, voice soft and warm in that cool, cool place. Her words seemed to wrap him in their embrace, and it was all tenderness, a submersion in a warm, rosewater scented bath. “When I was a little girl, I told my dad there was no such thing as a monster. I told him that there was nothing hiding under my bed, nothing hiding in the closet, nothing lurking in the long shadows of the hallway outside of my bedroom. I think I was right, and wrong, at the same time. Monsters exist, but not in the way you’re thinking. People aren’t monsters. They’re just people. People are driven to do horrible things by circumstance, or desire, or some other motive, and we call them monsters, because it makes us feel better about ourselves. It lets us pretend we aren’t capable of the same, lets us act like we couldn’t be the guard at Auschwitz, or the bomber of the children’s hospital. But, the twisted thing is, I think we’re all capable of those things. Put us in the right place, at the right time, and I think each and every one of us would be so shaken by what we’re capable of that we’d call ourselves monsters.”
Levi could see now the face of the man in that warehouse, screaming up at him as he was beaten, fighting for his own life. What a sad life it was, a little run-down van with cardboard over the windows. But it had been his. Wasn’t Levi’s life the same? Something he built, no matter how small and fragile?
Levi could see the wolf in the cabin, screaming as Levi’s thumbs dug into its eyes. Hadn’t that been a man with hopes, with dreams, with desires all his own? With a mother and a father who loved him, despite his flaws and despite their own?
Levi could see Reinhart, snarling at him. Snarling at the man who had taken his son.
How culpable was Levi for what he had done? Could he lay it all at the feet of the Call and go through life, pretending he wasn’t soaked through with the blood of others?
“But those people, the ones who do horrible things to stay alive, or to accomplish something that they think is so important it’s worth giving up anything for,” Rosa said, drifting in that mirrored expanse. “Those people aren’t monsters. The monsters, the real ones, are the thoughts that titter in their ear at night, the things that lurk in the oily black of the pavement as they drive alone down the road. These demons, these motives, these ancient gods that have had a grip on mankind for as long as we’ve been a species. They are monsters, Levi.”
And then she was there, her arms wrapping around Levi, his head against her collar bone. He could smell her. He could hear her heartbeat. It was so terribly real.
“Do you remember what I said to you?”
“When?” Because she had said so many things, and Levi remembered each and every one.
“That day, by the water, when the sunset was red and orange and purple, like rainbow sorbet swirling in the clouds.”
“About what you wanted,” Levi whispered.
Rosa kissed the top of his head, that messy, curly mop of hair that Elizabeth couldn’t tame. “I said I wanted to fall in love. To fall in love, and to go on an adventure.”
Levi tried to speak, but his voice came out as a croak, the tears running down his cheeks shimmering in the reflective void like drops of mercury down his face. He wasn’t prepared for this. He didn’t know how to have this conversation, how to say goodbye.
“I got what I wanted, Levi. I promise you. And, if I had to do it all again, I would. For you. Because you’re worth it, Levi. You’ve done horrible things to survive, to stay sane, and I know those things might never really leave you. But I hope these words don’t leave you either, because I mean them from the bottom of my heart; loving you was worth it. Every part of it. You deserve to be loved, completely, totally, and unapologetically. Never forget that.”
The void quaked, and Levi sobbed against the bare, warm flesh of her as everything seemed to run together.
“Goodbye, love,” she whispered.
He sank into the void.
He climbed from a sea of blood.
He was embraced by warmth and forgiveness.
He dragged himself up a rocky coastline to the lighthouse looming overhead, dragged himself with both bloody, scarred hands.
And then all of it was gone.
When Levi’s eyes opened, two men looked down at him. One was old, with grey hair and sharp, sharp eyes. The other was young and tall, with brown skin, brown eyes, and brown hair. He looked familiar in a way Levi couldn’t place, like he’d come from another life.
He was in some kind of clearing, and firelight crackled nearby. He smelled strange, familiar smells, like family he’d never met, or maybe had forgotten. The world smelled green with the scent of the trees.
“Hello, Levi,” said the old man, a grin spreading across his face. Him and the young man next to him looked down at Levi like he was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. “My name is Tony, and you can consider this your formal welcome to Santa Cruz. Welcome home.”