Velli

I slash and make a nice cut across Wulf’s eyebrow. No blood. His wolves whimper but do not move. I’m not done. He leaps backward and to his left. His hip bumps against the refrigerator. Tiny room, he can’t dodge.

I’m electric, ecstatic. Never in my life would I think I could land a hit on Wulf. We enter a dance of slices and dodges—quick, small strikes, changing my wrist position after every failed attempt to gouge his eye.

An odd-fitting nostalgia washes over me with each strike. Wulf uploaded a lot of fighting tutorials. I’ve copied every move from every video throughout my adolescence. “Never meet your heroes,” they say. Yeah, right. This is the best I’ve felt in a while. I’m going toe-to-toe with Wulf. I’ve never been prouder of myself.

He blocks my latest strike. Our wrists clash. Mine stings from the impact. His bones are that dense. Our wrists push against one another. The bracelet my mom gave me breaks and spills to the floor. Wulf opens his mouth, and his eyes pity me—he offers me pity like Piedmont gave me. He’s going to tell me I can stop, that I can run away and say nothing. That’s infuriating.

I push off his wrist and go back to our dance of blades, necks, and potential death. He doesn’t get a good block in again.

I glance to my left to see Dream complete the real mission and change the time on Wulf’s watch. The look costs me. Wulf strikes. The world spins. Then it stops with a horrific impact on my back. Everything aches. My vision goes black, and my head hurts. I think I flew into a wall.

Forcing my eyes to stay open, I witness a blurry Dream sail back against the same wall. Her body crashes with a hurtful thud. Wulf steps forward. I leap up and toss both knives in his direction, perfect and straight tosses, blades meant to sink into his skull. He swats both away. All I have left is my body. So I run forward and throw that at him, leading with my shoulder.

My shoulder slams into his chest. I collapse beneath him at the impact. My shoulder, oh, it’s not supposed to look like that. It’s not supposed to hang like that. A scream resides somewhere inside me, but I can’t bring it out. Why can’t my shoulder move? My mind’s telling it to move, but it won’t. Nothing’s moving. It’s dislocated. My fingers lie between open and closed, curled like a dead bug’s legs.

Wulf walks past me, done with me, and toward Dream. He lifts her by her shirt like a naughty puppy. Undignified. Disrespectful. Irreverent. I glance at Lue. She smirks, taking a bit of pleasure at her high school punching bag’s mistreatment.

No more. I’ve still got one arm left and two good feet.

I let out that scream trapped in my lungs. This time, it’s not about pain but Wulf, Dream, and Lue herself. She needs to know someone cares about Dream. I swing my foot to deliver a perfect roundhouse to Wulf’s sweat-drenched beard. Wulf swats it down, reaches for my arm, grabs me by my hanging, dislocated shoulder, and pushes it back into place.

“Ahhh ahhh ahhh ahhhh!” I scream like a fool. Every sense I have is jammed into my shoulder, and it’s horrible.

Wulf snatches his watch from Dream. Her heartbreak is visible. Against my will, I watch as he pats her head like one of his wolves. It’s a new level of disrespect I find hard to tolerate. Fighting is part of my life. Fighting is Wulf treating us as equals. The pat on the head is for the pathetic. Wulf tosses Dream and me onto the bed with Lue like we’re pathetic children.

“Sit,” he says, and we obey him like said children.

He turns his back on us to be around his wolves. I don’t bother fighting again yet. Once he’s with his wolves, he plops down. The brown one lays its head in his lap as he nuzzles the snouts of the others one at a time.

Dream and I scramble, trying to make ourselves comfortable.

Dream nudges Lue in her attempt. “Sorry, sorry,” she says before bumping into me. “Sorry, sorry.”

“So, you were saying Lue called you?” Wulf points a lazy finger in Dream’s direction.

“A letter, yeah, a letter.” Dream turns to Lue. “And we’re taking you home.”

Lue sticks her tongue out at Dream and rolls her eyes. Dream drops back into her shell.

“No, she stays,” Wulf says. “You may leave, though.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“You’re not worried we’ll tell?” I ask.

“No one will believe you. No one will want to believe you. This is ugly.” He points one thick, manicured finger at Lue and proclaims, “People don’t like ugly.”

Lue scoots toward the bed’s back corner. Her eyes read the floor.

Ah, that’s how she can still be so mean. Hurt people hurt people. “What gives you the right?” I ask.

“I’ve earned it, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately? Are you tired of all this?”

“I have regrets. I feel older than I am. But I won’t stop. I’ve been on the other side of this. And even if I wanted to stop…” Wulf’s composure leaves him, and he grins. “I can’t lose. It’s impossible.”

“Ah, you’re one of those.”

He winces. That comment hurt him more than anything I’ve done.

“I am one of none.” He stands, giving the wolf on his lap a meaningful pat beforehand. He stretches his arms to their full extent. “Who can do what I do? Who can make what I make?”

I know what he references. The fashion, the money, the monuments, but in this tiny room, all I see are portraits from a scared girl who wants to see the sun again. I step off the bed and pull one of the saddest portraits off the wall—painstakingly realistic but with the passion of a child in kindergarten art class. It’s Lue holding hands with an older couple, I assume her mother and father. I toss the picture at him, and it lands at his feet.

“Yeah, you’re one of a kind.”

He doesn’t glance at the picture, but my reflection sits in his gray eyes. “Get out,” he commands.

“Make me,” I counter.

Both Dream’s and Lue’s heads perk up.

Wulf opens his mouth.

“No, shut up,” I tell him.

He shuts up. I want to back down, if I’m honest. His aura pulses from him, as invisible as the wind and as truthful as the law of gravity and as real as cancer, and it tells me we will lose again. However, people are counting on me, so it doesn’t matter. Tragedy or majesty.

“Your whole shtick is you can’t lose,” I accuse. “Fine. Give us a rematch. Ten minutes to midnight, right? Dream and me versus you for five minutes. Just give us five minutes to plan. May the loser die or serve the other for all his days.”

“What’s your name?” His cold tone implies he doesn’t want to know my name but is issuing a challenge like Weaver did outside of the hospital.

“I don’t have a name,” I say, accepting his challenge.

Wulf snickers, shrugs, then nods. “As you wish.” He spreads his arms. “I’ll wait five minutes.”

He sits on the floor and plays with his wolves.

I gather up my knives. Dream reloads her guns, and we pretend to whisper to each other about a plan. I exaggerate my hand signals, and Dream feigns fear for a whole five minutes.

An alarm clock on the table goes off with a shrieking bing.

Drown it. We forgot the alarm clock.

“Oh, are we fighting early?” I feign confusion.

“No…” He ponders. “That ring means it’s midnight, but my watch is supposed to tell me that.”

Six hours. I may be clever, but no one has more heart than Dream. For an hour and a half, we searched for pictures of every watch model Wulf has worn in the past year and purchased them—we’ll be returning them tomorrow because that’s expensive, obviously—then Dream spent six hours without a break practicing changing the time on each watch. So when she got the chance to change the time on Wulf’s watch, she could do it in under ten seconds. Her thumbs are still red and bear the indentations from practice. Regardless, she did it. Meaning it’s already midnight. He has to beat Lue in the next sixty seconds, or everything he built will be destroyed.

I pull out my knives and ask, “Round two?”

He ignores me and looks to the ceiling, where his victim’s artistic pleas for freedom hang. He’s able to look past that, and all he sees is heaven. “Lord, may the blood on my hands honor you.”

The wolves disappear into the shadows.

He shrugs. His silk top falls on the floor to reveal boulder-sized shoulders, biceps, and triceps. I fear I’m making the wrong decision again and that with a little effort from those arms, he could pull my face from my skull. Doesn’t matter. I’ve made my choice. I have to fight.

Dream’s the first to pull out her gun. She blasts twice, and the sweet wisp of the silencer juts out. A refrigerator slides across the floor and blocks the shots.

That’s convenient.

Dream shoots twice more. The table full of Lue’s drawings flips in the air and shields Wulf as he roams toward us.

No way.

I pull out my knives, waiting for an opening.

The floor tilts backward like gravity doesn’t want to work anymore. I stumble with it, swinging my arms to get balance. With nothing to grab, I fall, and everything falls around me. Portraits fly in my face. I dodge the table’s descent and leap over a microwave. I reach for the wall. Nothing’s there. It’s gone.

The roof and walls are gone. The night air shocks me. Paper flies by us like bats in a cave. The table meteors to the ground, and the microwave explodes when it lands.

Wulf tilts the floor further, and I’m sliding backward on my back. I have nothing to grab. Everything rolls past me. I’m in the air, free falling. I grab onto the floor serving as a ledge.

Dream’s done the same. Her tiny feet dangle in the air. Lue hangs beside Dream on the ledge.

“Any chance you still have your knives?” Dream asks.

Moron.

I didn’t even realize I lost them in the chaos. Below me, either I imagine it or I could see the blades cracked into tiny pieces on the street below.

“Yeah, same for mine,” she says. “Backup weapons?”

“It’s all gone. I’ve got nothing to fight with.” I yell at Lue, “You could have told us he can control the building!”

“You weren’t supposed to come here!” she yells back.

I panic. I really may have overestimated myself here.

Another dead friend soon, and it’s all your fault.

It’s not my fault. I didn’t expect the whole floor to tilt and the walls to walk away.

Tell it at her funeral.

The room tilts forward. We obey the tilt, slaves to gravity. The wall behind Wulf fragments into flakes and disappears. The few amenities and art in the room crash to the ground or disappear by his will.

You’ve really improved this woman’s standard of living! I know a homeless guy who has a cardboard box for a house. I would love to see what you do for him.