Demon Hero: Dark Fae Hollow 1 (The Dark Fae Hollows), page 16
“You’re right… I’m…” My voice gave out. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the sentence. I felt so listless and vacant.
Where was that fervor that had kept me going despite difficulty? The room was dark, and I had no idea how long I had been out. I doubted Sol understood how much time had passed anyway.
“I had three dreams… that’s how long I’ve been out.”
The information was presented without any expectation of a response. If Sol wasn’t available to connect with me on the astral realm, and he wasn’t able to speak to me in this one — then I could hardly believe he had the capacity to care about what I had to say.
I closed my eyes and wished for death.
The only thing that bothered me more than everything else was that Talon had taken that final expression of autonomy away from me as well. My brain must have been tired from the sedatives, because I didn’t think until that moment about how I might use magic to escape.
There was a way to excite the molecules of a given substance so that they spontaneously melted or burst into flame. I hadn’t ever done that before. The only way I had ever manipulated fire was by having the actual element present, and for the moment, I didn’t see anything in this place except a dark, cold room.
I considered the possibilities of going through the astral realm once more, but I shook involuntarily when I remembered the feeling of Sol’s wolf biting into my wrist and shaking his head from side to side.
My reflections were interrupted by a sharp cry of pain.
“Ahh!”
“Sol… talk to me.”
“Mmffff!”
“Sol… I need you to talk to me. What’s going on?”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew they were foolish. I didn’t need anyone else to spell it out for me. My dreams had already done that.
“It’s a full moon tonight, isn’t it?”
Usually, I was more in tune with the cycles of the moon, but some mixture of sedatives, fatigue, and being locked in a room all day had taken away that connection to nature.
“Sol, just try to relax okay? Everything’s going to—”
He let out a piercing scream, twisting and pulling on the cords that held us. They dug into the flesh of my wrists, cutting off my circulation, and crushing my bones against the metal pole that held the two of us together.
“Sol,” I cried, tears streaming down my face. “You’re hurting me.”
There was no getting through to him. He was lost within a world of his own pain. The transformation was happening inches away from my body, yet I could only catch a glimpse from the corner of my eye. The shift pushed my hands into the pole, pinching my wrist and pushing the pain into the forefront of my mind.
When the pressure was so intense that I could not imagine any end to the experience besides losing my hand, the ropes snapped.
My wrists went numb first, and then they slowly transitioned into an incredible amount of pain. Not surprisingly, the pain was the last thing on my mind.
Sol had broken us free, true—but at what cost?
Behind me, he thrashed about on the ground, knocking over his chair and my own. I toppled over to the ground, noticing Sol had completed his transition.
I was now sharing the room with the wolf.
Chapter 26
Sol paced about the room, now standing on his back paws.
I didn’t dare speak to him. I didn’t even want to move. Sure, he had been helpful to the two of us once before, but I wasn’t certain if that was an actual reliable circumstance, or if it was nothing more than a temporary alliance between myself and a chaotic entity.
The room was dark, and I couldn’t make out the details of his being. Adrenaline pumped through my heart, bringing sweat to the pores of my skin. My pupils dilated, and I instinctively made myself very small.
I had a bit of magic in me, and I immediately weighed the consequences of whether to attack him or conceal myself.
I looked to the door. It was locked, to be certain. He continued to move around the small room, the light of his eyes glancing out at me. His form was towering — even larger than Sol normally was. The wolf lowered to the ground on all fours, and his eyes disappeared once more. It sent out a warning growl before an attack.
He leaped against the wall and began to paw and tear at the siding. Huge claws pushed into the material and powerful muscles tore away wood and drywall with each stroke. I was frightened and fascinated by the power from Sol’s wolf form.
He was so incredibly powerful that I couldn’t help but imagine one of those single strokes tearing a line through my own body. Or the body of a police officer. Or of another human.
Thinking about the potential for innocent lives to be endangered by his actions; the realization he might not be in complete control of his behavior; that he might not even recognize the intricacies of right and wrong in his current state — all of this terrified me.
“Sol… be careful.”
As soon as I spoke, he turned to me and barked in my direction. His eyes narrowed at me with hatred.
There was no threat; it was a promise. The promise that the next time I bothered him, it might be my body and not the walls of a building that took the next hit.
I shut up and made myself small once more.
The wolf continued with its work, tearing huge pieces of drywall, insulation, and finally plaster away from the wall. A hole into the outer world began to appear. Once it appeared, it was easier for the wolf to make it larger still.
It was just before dawn outside. Dark, though the street lamps from down the alleyway brought an eerie glow to the room. At least some light was getting through. When the hole in the wall was large enough to fit him, he turned and growled at me.
“Go if you want, I’m not going to stop you.”
Barking and cajoling like an irritated father at its cub, the wolf stalked over and nudged me in the shoulder with its nose. The push directed me toward the hole in the wall. The muzzle of this wolf was larger than my forearm and hand combined.
“You want me to go?”
Another nudge.
Just then, another sound echoed from within the warehouse. A door being splintered open by impact, followed by the sound of boots hitting the pavement. Everything flashed in my head at once. The police were attempting to intercept Talon before the protest in a preemptive raid.
I brought this on myself, I thought, and the realization of my own responsibility and the absence of fear of Sol’s wolf form pushed me to action.
Okay, let’s do it.
I sprinted from the room as quickly as possible, heading for the jagged hole in the wall that Sol had created. My right hand was basically useless. When I tried to put weight on the injured wrist, I fell to the ground and ended up summersaulting over broken pieces of the building.
The alleyway was empty. I had enough time to look around and get my bearings. I was in the same alleyway that led into the emergency exit of the warehouse. The difference was I was about thirty yards toward the dead end. After a moment, the wolf burst through the hole. Chunks of wood splintered all around the two of us, and he grabbed my shirt between his teeth.
He pulled me to my feet, and I struggled to fight the fear of being devoured whole by this monster. The precision of the bite was impeccable. Before I knew what was happening, his snout was between my legs. He pushed me over his head with a single powerful movement of his neck. I clung to the back of his neck while he moved forward at a sprint, speeding away from the warehouse.
Shouts came from behind us, followed quickly by gunfire. Bullets peppered the brick wall on the far side of the alleyway, leaving a trail just behind Sol’s tail.
It took me a minute to adjust, but I could hold on tight to Sol’s body with my legs and upper arm strength, if not my hands. The moon was low in the sky. Though the dawn approached, the lighting of the city was already eerily full from the moon and the colored lamps of the Red-Light District.
The people on the street dove out of the way. A commotion stirred wherever the wolf bounded forward. The drunken crowd that was making that lonely walk home was privileged to the most unusual sight the Red-Light District had seen in some time.
A Faerie riding a werewolf just before dawn.
I couldn’t help but smile.
All the kinkiest sex shows in the darkest corners of this neighborhood couldn’t compete with this experience. The thought lasted only a moment as the two of us were fired on again from a nearby cop car.
Two motorcycle cops and the police car followed in pursuit. Sol dodged them, pushing pavement down another series of crooked alleyways. At first, it seemed like there was no specific direction, but things began to grow more familiar.
He sprinted until we ended up in the center of town.
I know where we are…
Of course, I had been there before, but what was more interesting was the fact I had been there just last night, in the astral realm. It wasn’t long before the people started to show up. The streets began to grow more crowded, and then, ahead of us, we saw a police line.
The police had full riot gear, standing in a barricade on one end of the main street. All around them, people were videotaping the situation, holding their phones up in the air and huddling around one another.
The angrier people were yelling, and the more vulnerable were hiding or running away. Sirens came from behind us, and Sol charged toward the police line from behind. We got about twenty yards away before the police turned and started firing at us. Sol managed to dodge a few different shots and take a few indirect blows to the shoulder, but I got through unscathed. The wolf plowed into the police officers who had attacked him, throwing me from his back into the crowd of protesters beyond.
I watched helplessly as he grabbed one of the officers by the bulletproof vest and shook him until he was lifeless. Shots were fired into Sol from all sides, and at that exact moment, a riot call was launched from the far end of the crowd.
“The police, they’re attacking us!”
More shots sounded off, and more cries were heard. That was all that was needed to push the mob into action. The crowd overwhelmed the cops who were nearest to them. Tear gas went off everywhere, and as the sun rose, the crowd lost its moral compass.
I wanted to stand up and yell. To direct the attention away from the fight, and recenter the focus of the people on something constructive. In such a large crowd, there was no time for me to want. All I could do, it seemed, was react. A dodge here, a huddle there — anything to stay out of the way of immediate pain.
Everyone was afraid, and people managed that fear in different ways. Those who had something to protect, or nothing to lose, were aggressive. Talon, no doubt about it, had pushed the crowd from behind with his faux police gear. Sol had taken out the main line on the western side of the crowd, and now the crowd looked like a miniature warzone.
Gas grenades and all-stops-barred crowd control weapons were launched. The Fae were coming out of hiding and using their magic to whisk away the tear gas on currents of air that seemed to come out of nowhere and blow the gas back in the direction of the riot police. Indiscriminate shots of those dangerous sedatives were fired into the crowd. People were slumping over one another. As a result, a reactionary fire burned ever hotter within the populace.
Sol was losing the strength of the full moon, but was still in wolf form — still going strong.
He had broken through the line, and was knocking over crowd-control turrets and way stations that had been set up to prevent this sort of event from taking place. The people were excited to have a beast like that on their side, but they were also terrified of him. A wide circle was given around Sol, and nobody, not police, Fae, or human wanted to breach that circle until he fell.
When Sol shook his coat, darts flew out from their position inside his skin. He seemed like a porcupine, ejecting quills in all directions. Some of the darts found their way into police. Some into humans, and still others bounced harmlessly against the walls of buildings.
The whole situation seemed more like a firefight than anything else. Both sides were inflammatory, and each attack seemed only to escalate the experience until there was nowhere for anyone to go except further into aggression.
Submission, naturally, was always an option, but that option didn’t exactly look desirable when it meant subjugation by force.
I personally felt torn, mostly because the escalation was partially my responsibility. Sol had to stop, and he was one of the strongest catalyst factors in this whole fight. Sol’s continued presence as the wolf indicated a complete lack of control in his fighting. He was in a totally reactive feral mode, and was being attacked on all sides. If he would have stopped, tensions might have diffused down to a manageable level, but there was no way for him to stop at this point without being murdered by the police.
I had to do something.
Just as I was sprinting toward him, Sol got soaked by a blast from a nearby fire engine. The water, laden with Naturalization chemicals, hit Sol straight in the face. He sputtered, coughed, and then collapsed on the ground while the serum overwhelmed his system.
The officer who was subjecting him to the stream was standing there with his hose out.
I hated him.
I hated everything about all of them, and I wanted them to burn. It didn’t matter to me that they were just protecting their own. I didn’t really care that Sol had started it. I found it easy enough to justify my anger and deflect my hatred.
With strength I didn’t know I possessed, dark magic began to flow in my veins. My vision began to shift into the astral realm, and I saw the fire truck as a source of pain and suffering that needed to stop. My hatred surged toward the truck like flaming arrows of shadow. The fire truck seized, as though it had been hit by a missile barrage. The attack caused the vehicle to capsize, tearing the hose from the hand of the officer. Chemical-laden fluid flushed over the street, and the whole riot gasped in horrified fascination.
At that moment, I noticed that there was another spell caster at my side, sending a protective beam of light around the fallen form of Sol.
Instinctively, I knew it was Talon.
Chapter 27
My vision shifted once more, and I was standing over Sol while Talon hovered above me, directing all his energy into creating a pillar of protective light. The skirmish went on around the three of us, but only at a dull roar. Many of the eyes in the area were drawn to the spectacle of the wolf and the two Fae.
While Talon had taken the lead in defending the two of us, the police had taken every step toward targeting him as the new focus of attack. He descended to the ground to huddle around us.
“Talon, you have to stop!”
“Don’t worry, I’ll have backup!”
“Talon, that’s not—”
Just then, four other Fae came up behind Talon, and the five revolutionaries each made a crucial point of a pentagram power sigil. The symbol required all five members to shift their energies in toward one another. The synergistic effect of the movement of magical energy meant there was a compounding of force as the magic now had a solid geometrical basis from which to move forward.
“That’s war magic…”
Talon was too focused on his moment of victory to respond or justify. They were aiming the sigil at an approaching battlement of soldiers. The government was no longer messing around with basic riot police, but had moved into a full military-supported defense against whatever social rebellion was brewing.
The outlook for these soldiers, or the humans cowering in fear behind the group of Fae, did not look good.
The humans were equipped to fight in defense of themselves against the riot police. The idea that there was some level of police interaction that was toxic to social health was all that was initially needed. The rationale that the police were unfairly attacking them seemed to encourage the brave ones to fight back. In the face of a full military presence, the humans were more ready to go safely to their homes than they were to battle.
A few of the brave Fae stood and positioned themselves between the civilians and the approaching military. These were young, brave, and capable Fae who had been inspired by the sight of Talon and his crew. Despite their bravado, they were not trained in battle magic. They had a better chance of running away and hiding than they did engaging in a fight with the soldiers.
While I was taking an account of the situation at hand, Talon released his first energetic attack. The blast was terrifying.
My own attack on the bus had been born of passion and desperation. I had dipped down into the darkness of my own psyche and drawn up forces I wasn’t previously aware existed. There was something wild and protective in my magic, even if it was a frightening display of power. The magic Talon unleashed was designed to inflict casualties in a situation where both opponents had knowledge of the same magical arsenal.
War magic stretched back in the culture of Fae to the Dark Years. Watching the impact of the spell was like watching a small meteor storm hit the first line of the soldiers. Tanks were overturned alongside armed vehicles. Asphalt was torn up from its place in the earth and turned into explosive projectiles. The first wave of soldiers took the flack, and they raised their weapons to return fire.
“You’re putting lives at risk, Talon. You need to stop!”
“You don’t understand… force is the only language these people speak.”
Just as he prepared to unleash another attack on the soldiers, I reached out and cast a communion spell, seizing Talon’s heart.
The combination of the pentagram and the connection between Talon and me caused all the energy of the war spell to move into my own body. The only way to process that level of energy was to give it a direction, so I did the only thing I could think to do.
I tore a rift between the realms and brought the nightmare right in front of everyone’s face.
I hadn’t known it was possible, but I had been spending so much time between the astral realm and our regular realm of existence that the astral seemed the only rational place to direct that much power. The shock of moving into the nightmare I experienced earlier was unsettling for me, but on a certain level, it also felt like coming back to a familiar place.
