For the last two blocks or so, the buildings had grown into various states of disrepair, unused save for a few homeless squatters or possibly drug dealers. No businesses called this block home anymore. Instead, only trashcans lit on fire to provide warmth lit up small coverings thrown over various scrap parts left abandoned. These hovels were their homes. I wanted to help them, to hand them money or food, or simply a hug to help them feel wanted in this world. I wanted to give them whatever they needed. I had so much now, that once I got my Lex back, learned about my magic, I wanted to do more with my life than just push pencils around an office. I wanted to make a real difference.
My mind boggled with how life worked, what it took away and then what it offered. To come through all of this and get some sort of reality check, a small calling to help those less fortunate... that was a gift in my eyes. My heartbeat grew more erratic, my energy within more fierce, as I began to feel Lex more and more. I gripped the dashboard in front of me, as if holding on, holding myself here, not to rush to him. I’d promised myself, though, to take orders, to follow protocol, to heed their experience in order to best save him.
The place was scary enough to warrant that anyway. As we’d driven, I’d actually seen a shady type of deal going down, just three figures in the shadows, between two cars, something exchanging hands. I assumed we could possibly run into more trouble than just true werewolves in these parts. Luckily, I didn’t need to fear that sort of trouble with a band of vampires leading me to Royal werewolves.
I was trying to not crawl out of my skin, feeling him so strongly now, and his agony, his suffering, even his own worry, with this proximity. I scoped out the area, as I noticed the rest of them doing while we awaited the arrival of the Royals, our line of cars tucked into the night on the far side of what had once been a large parking lot.
This was just the sort of wretched place I assumed the true werewolves would think to hide out. I only hoped they didn’t bother the poor homeless trying to make it a home. From the writing on the building, this one had been an old paper mill. Made mostly of white bricks, many of the five stories were missing large sections of the walls. Brick piles lay on the ground beneath them, making it look dangerous to go near the place at all.
Still, those holes let the homeless in, but apparently only into the lower floor. I could see those fires burning through the cloudy walls of windows, throwing shadows of human forms and maybe old machinery that had been left behind. The remaining floors were pitch black. Looking at the looming structure, wondering just where they were in it, and who was guarding them, I saw a flicker of light on the top floor.
“Look! Up there,” I exclaimed in the quietest voice I could manage. “I see a light on the fifth floor, all the way to the back. I just see it from time to time. Yes, right then. Did you see it? I bet they are up there. Of course, they would have drug them all the way up there.”
“It gives them leverage to be on the offensive rather than the defensive,” the raven-haired vamp behind me in the back seat said. “I’m sure, here, they are armed with guns. We’ve seen it before, paranormals hiring human bodyguards who are nothing more than dispensable bodies with guns, an ambush for the enemy. It helps alert them, giving the enemy, us, a wall of bullets to work our way through before we get to the real battle.’
“How do you fight that?” I asked, imagining running head first up the stairs, only to end up falling down the stairs in a rain of bullets.
“With the Royals, they use their magic as a force field. Bullets sting, but don’t hurt us. They only slow us down. They know all of this. That is why I said it is more an alert to them than anything, that the enemy is coming. While we fight our way through the humans, they line up to attack us.”
“Great. Is someone going to teach me how to do this force field of protection thing? Because I’m sure bullets are going to do a lot more than sting me,” I said, insisting to myself that I would not, could not, lose my nerve here.
“If they don’t have time,” Nira said, “one of them will make sure you are behind theirs. No one is going to let anything happen to you.”
I just nodded, until I was startled by a sound beside the van I was in. It sounded like we were already under attack from the increase in footsteps scraping along the gravel. Beyond the rustle of feet, and the kicking of a few small stones skittering to find another place to rest, came muffled voices.