Before the last word of Deen’s sentence entered my ear, I had already broken out of Jubjub’s shadow blanket. I charged Romulus with no hesitation. In the corner of my eye, I caught a dash of darkness keeping up parallel with me. Jubjub was joining in.
Deen was on Romulus's back, pinning him to the ground. Or trying to do so. Their size difference was too big. She was also too light and weak to keep him down. Why didn’t she bash his head in?
The stupid werewolf pushed off the ground and tried to throw off my equally stupid best friend like an enraged bull. Deen held onto his neck from behind and tightened her embrace to choke him. Romulus clawed at his back, trying to reach her. With her Guardian Angel’s guidance, Deen expertly avoided getting caught, clambering all over his body like a demented monkey.
Romulus saw me closing in. He tried that shimmering bullshit. Deen on his body seemed to prevent it. He turned around and hobbled away on his still regenerating legs, but it was too slow. He dropped on all fours to flee in an awkward gait.
“Erind! Quick!” Deen grabbed one of Romulus's hindlegs. Jubjub tied down the other with shadow tentacles.
An important question popped up—were Romulus’ hindlegs just regular legs because he had arms? Or were all of his limbs considered legs? I shook my head. Random thoughts, shoo!
I dove for Romulus's head. A wide-open mouth welcomed me, his jaws clamping my sides. Fangs pierced through my arms. Oopsies. Could anyone rewind this scene so I could avoid getting caught?
Romulus violently shook me like a dog shredding his squeaky toy. The world merged and several times I was slammed to the ground. Bones fractures and muscles tore. My blood rushed to my head as my neck threatened to break. Pushing through the pain, I gathered my will and forcefully extended my arms, breaking his fangs and punching through the roof and bottom of his snout.
I swung my arms and kicked around like a baby throwing a tantrum, taking apart anything I could hit. After a few seconds, I stopped when I realized the fight was over. It was as if someone stuck dynamite inside a watermelon and blew it up. And that watermelon was the head of Romulus.
“Erind, are you okay?” Deen jumped over the werewolf’s headless carcass to reach me. She wiped the blood off my cheeks with her hands. She must’ve predicted my thoughts through the power of friendship because she then said, “Yeah, I know it’s a stupid question. Sorry. You’re obviously not okay.”
She gingerly raised my right arm to examine it. There were three large holes where Romulus’ fangs pierced through. The holes were stretched to an oblong shape, my skin and flesh frayed—the results of the shaking around. Similar holes were on my other arm. Smaller wounds dotted my flanks, where the fangs punched through my arms and stabbed my torso. Kudos to Romulus for inflicting this much damage on me.
“This is nothing,” I said. Obviously, it wasn’t nothing. This was painful as fuck even if I had experienced worse. Still, I was resilient to pain even when I still had a normal human body. When Myra skewered my stomach at the mall parking area, I was able to limp away pretty far. “I’ll heal my injuries soon enough, Deen. Don’t worry.”
“Your clothes…”
I groaned. After the fight, my clothes were torn and bloodied. No amount of washing by the river was going to fix this. My stuff was just getting destroyed! Surely, this wasn’t my fault. Right? The world hates me—confirmed. My only option was to wear my wetsuit, but I just knew that’d get wrecked too. Whatever.
It’d be better to strip the bark off of trees and wrap those around my body. Or I could hunt a bear and use its fur as a cloak. I could probably work out how to skin it. If only I had… Hang on, I had an available source of fur.
“What is it?” Deen followed my gaze and looked down at the corpse of Romulus. “Is he still alive?”
“Nope. I’m thinking of turning him into clothes. Do I need to dry his fur after skinning him? Or is that only with leather?”
“Huh? Why do you want to—?”
“Just spewing nonsense. Erase all that. I meant to ask you if there was no more information we could’ve squeezed from this guy. You told me to kill him.”
“Probably none because that was what Gabe told me.”
There was something with the way Deen spoke that made me suspect that wasn’t exactly her Guardian Angel’s instruction. And why should I be the one to finish off Romulus? I bet Deen’s twisted sense of right and wrong was at play here. Maybe she didn’t want me torturing Romulus anymore but couldn’t bring herself to kill him, so she told me to do it.
Deen must’ve realized I sensed something odd because she hastily added, “Anyway, this Adumbrae mentioned a safe zone by the tree. There was also something about time. And, uh, Yellow Island, if I heard—wah!”
“To the tree we go!” I grabbed Deen and pulled her to Romulus’ post by the riverbank. “Jubjub, are you here with us? This is the tree where that werewolf hid in, right?”
“Yeesss…” Jubjub materialized from a puddle of black sludge hiding in the darkest shadow beneath the tree. “He was up there.”
I scanned the ground. “This is supposed to be some kind of safe zone that the werewolf guy wanted to reach before a specific time. I guess we’ll stay here and find out what’ll happen. Jubjub, did he manage to contact other people?”
“He did, unfortunately,” Jubjub replied, looking away with a frown. “He asked if the passengers were all accounted for, and someone answered that they had to check. I succeeded in disabling his communications device after that. I apologize for not doing it fast enough, but they likely don’t know that intruders have infiltrated Red Island.”
“Probably, yeah,” I replied. “The werewolf guy was just bluffing that backup was coming because he was surprised that Deen, pretending to be his ally, showed up. Oh, everyone, don’t forget that they have someone who can shapeshift. Also, it’s better to just assume that the jig is up. Someone will eventually check in on the werewolf and realize that he’s not answering, so better if we’re vigilant all the way. Jubjub, still no luck contacting Dario?”
“I can’t get a signal.” Jubjub showed us her hi-tech-looking phone and pointed to a blinking indicator of whatever. “Same as inside the whale monster, an interference is jamming communications.”
Figures. It wasn’t a big deal even if she could communicate with Dario. In fact, I wanted her to do so. That’d be one of our possible tickets back home. It was a more precarious scenario if Jubjub was telling the truth.
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“Deen, can you please hand me my wetsuit?” Might as well get changed during our downtime. I bunched up my torn clothes and stuffed them into the exposed roots of the tree. “I kind of want to wash the blood off my hair in the river, but I don’t want to risk whatever’s going to happen if I leave this tree. What did that werewolf say again?”
“That he’ll lose us in Yellow Island. Probably another island next to this one?” Deen slung the bag higher on her shoulder while making eye contact. She wanted to check the papers that Big Marcy gave me. “Did he mean that he planned to use this tree to reach Yellow Island and escape from you?”
“I’m betting it’s the opposite,” I said. “This tree will keep him getting transported to Yellow Island if it’s really a place. This is a safe zone, he said. Outside here… we don’t know what’ll happen. Any more words from your Guardian Angel?”
“Gabe is silent. I think we’re on the right path.”
“Which means the ‘thing’—” I made air quotes “—is probably going to happen in around ten minutes from the time your Guardian Angel told you to pretend to be that werewolf’s friend. We should experiment with this.”
I stabbed my fingers into the tree next to us and tore off a wide chunk of bark. It was a normal tree, it seemed. Not sure yet what made this place special. I tossed the bark like a Frisbee some distance out of the tree’s shade.
Deen examined the exposed part of the tree trunk where I removed the bark. “Are you testing the effects of the safe zone? What’re you going to compare it with?”
“Myself.” I coiled the end of my hair. With my other hand, I made another coil about the first one and pulled. My hair broke between the coils.
“Why did you do that?” Deen exclaimed.
“My hair will just grow back. See? It’s almost its original length again. Regeneration for the win. I guess this isn’t regeneration though because hair is dead cells.” I tightened the knot of my hair and threw it, adding some force because it was incredibly light. It landed somewhere near the tree bark. “Speaking of dead cells, maybe this won’t work.” I stared at my hand.
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of—Erind!”
I grabbed my finger. Deen caught my wrist. “It’ll grow back,” I said. “I had holes in my arm earlier. This is nothing.”
“I don’t want you harming yourself,” Deen said. “Just because you can regenerate doesn’t mean it’s fine to be hurt.”
“It’s for science. Pseudoscience. But this is real. Magical science? Paranormal science, if that’s not an oxymoron.”
Deen smiled. “It’s cute when you go into random tangents. But this isn’t cute. I’m not going to—Hey!”
I wrestled my hands from Deen’s grasp and twisted off a finger, snapping the joint and ripping my skin and flesh. I held my bleeding hand away from me. The wound was sewing itself shut, and a tiny nub poked out as it regrew.
“I could’ve used my finger,” Deen said.
“Context is for your words very important,” I pointed out as I tossed my severed finger near where my hair and the tree bark lay. “I suppose my severed finger is also made of dead cells now.”
“I’m also willing to volunteer my body parts,” Jubjub said, probably trying not to be an outcast of the group.
“My finger is already fine, okay? If we need body parts again, the two of you can use yours.”
Then something washed over us. It was forceful but wasn’t the wind or a shockwave. The sensation was hard to describe. Falling in a dream? Not really. More like going downhill and having that feeling in the pit of my stomach. The world had moved, my body was telling me.
But nothing seemed to have changed in our surroundings. I looked at my companions. They had also felt it.
“Is it… safe to leave?” I glanced at Deen, offering her the opportunity to volunteer.
“I’ll do it,” she replied. “Gabe isn’t telling me to stop.” She headed to the stuff I had thrown. Since nothing happened, I followed her. “Nothing’s here…”
I searched the grass to make sure that my hair, finger, and the piece of bark were all gone.
“Look at this!” Jubjub called from behind us.
I turned around and saw her pointing at the tree trunk where I got the piece of bark. It was as good as new. Or good as how old this tree was. My mind was starting to work in hopefully not a dumb way. I beckoned at the others as I rushed to the forest.
“The werewolf corpse is gone too,” I said. “Just like my hair and finger.”
“The marks on the ground of our struggle are wiped away,” Deen chimed in. “It’s like everything reverted to the way it was. Minus the werewolf.”
Jubjub materialized several feet away from us, next to the tree where I had pinned Romulus. “This tree has also repaired itself.”
I snapped my fingers. “Okay, time to list what we know and don’t. Red Island rewinds itself whenever that happens. Anything that’s not part of the island itself is gone. We have to assume that what the werewolf said about getting transported to Yellow Island is true. Problem is, we need to be in a safe zone to avoid it, and we don’t know any other than the tree back there.”
“There’s also a specific time when the rewind happens,” added Deen, “but we don’t know when.”
“Phew, there’s a ton we don’t know.” I paused for a bit. Funny how I became the de-facto leader of the group. Was it because I was the strongest? The one with the most experience? I was just behaving with my new face, and this was the result. I jolted, realizing something. “The passengers on the boats! Jubjub, lead the way and find them, uh, please.”
Jubjub didn’t complain that I was ordering her around, turning into sludge and zipping away to follow the river. She probably preferred following instructions to being in charge. To be candid, the Las Vegas group sucked ass in comparison to ours.
“The tracks of the passengers will be gone with the rewind,” Deen put my thoughts into words. “We can’t look for the next safe zone. We won’t even know where to find their drop-off point. Oh, maybe the ships are next to it?”
“If the ships are still around,” I said. “They must’ve been transported to Yellow Island. Their disguise as fishing boats is probably for that place. They didn’t use it getting here because we’re inside the whale monster that’s not really a whale.”
Big Marcy’s drawings were starting to make sense. The different outlines of islands layered on top of each other probably meant that they occupied the same space but different dimensions or whatever. That was a powerful as fuck power! Was it the ability of a real Adumbrae helping the Supplier? Reality bending seemed too much compared to the power levels of Adumbrae I had faced so far.
Curiously, I didn’t remember any markings for safe spots on Big Marcy’s map. Did he not know about them? I couldn’t recall any time indicated either. We knew about the tree because Romulus told us… The guard posts!
The guards had to stay in safe zones if they wanted to remain in their respective islands. As for the schedule, I guess we just had to torture the next Adumbrae guard we’d catch. Hey, I was kind of a genius for figuring this out. Big Marcy was right to trust in my deductive skills.
A few minutes of running along the riverbanks with no leads. I thought of consulting the maps that Big Marcy drew, no longer caring what Jubjub would think when we saw Jubjub in her human form up ahead waving at us.
“I’ve found something,” Jubjub said as we approached. She held up a piece of cloth. “This got snagged by a bramble. The people from the cruise ship passed by here.”
“Good work, Jubjub,” I said. “Before moving on, we have to show you something because we trust you.” I glanced at Deen. She nodded. Of course, her Guardian Angel couldn’t tell if Jubjub would betray us hours into the future. But I wasn’t asking for a prediction. I wanted her agreement so I’d share the blame if things went wrong. Deen handed me the bag.