From this angle as we moved around the side of the building, working toward a back entrance, I could no longer see the flicker on the top floor. Still, I kept it in my mind. I knew it was there. In a surge of feelings, I felt Lex. Though, what I got was a sense of his pain. It bit into me, making me have to fight not to curl over it. Tears stung my wide eyes while I attempted to swallow hard, despite a dry, closing-up throat. I chewed on my lip until I tasted the tang of my own blood.
Hold on, I said in my head to Lex, trying to send the message out to him over our connection. I’m here. We are here. And, we’ve come to save you. Soon you will be healing in my arms. Even the voice in my head wavered, ringing out more toneless than normal.
Remaining standing now itself a task to complete, I had to also hold myself back from foolishly running into the building and to him. It wouldn’t help anyone to do so, though. I knew that. Not a one of us truly knew what lay between us and him. We’d figure it out soon enough. I braced myself to enter, waiting for a signal to move forward. As I did so, I gave myself a much needed pep talk about the power of being positive and all, as I attempted to come up with and then embrace those positive thoughts that felt so flimsy they might at any time disappear into a mist into my head, never to be heard from again.
Chapter Three
Finally, we stepped into the abandoned building. The darkness grew deeper once we entered, so my only guidance was the two bodies on either side of me until my eyes adjusted. I could look up and see the moonlight still, cut and divided like a kaleidoscope by the broken windows. At least both Nira and Alex could see well at night. Though, that meant that so could the other wolves. So, nowhere was truly safe. I braced myself, ready for something to jump out of nowhere at me. If the definition of true horror came with the fear of the unknown, what one couldn’t control, then this was it. I was experiencing it.
Mixed in with that moon in places, as we moved, I could see the glare of the trashcan fires outside on the windows, adding yellows and reds to silvery blue light. The windows being covered in a thin layer of filth, the flames reflected like specters, alive and taunting me. The idea of ghosts at this point should have been nothing, given I was with a vampire and a werewolf, having my own powers inside of me, but somehow I still grew spooked. The hair on the back of my neck prickled, as a cold sliver of fear raced down my spine. I shivered, gaining me a look from Alex. His large wolf eyes shone in the night.
It wasn’t exactly the ghost thing that got to me, but the whole of this moment, the anticipation, the waiting to be attacked, for a body of fur to come flying out of the darkness. I cut myself some slack. When fiction turns to real life, or one finds themselves walking through a horror movie, one should be allowed to pant, cry a little, vomit, and think all sorts of wild thoughts. I’d earned it.
As my failure of a pep talk continued, shadows gave way to dark outlines, and my eyes adjusted. Large machines seemed to rise out of nowhere to loom over my head. We creeped around these massive beasts of metal. The closer we got, the more gears I could see, and the more formidable they looked. In this light, I guessed anything could look angry and predatory if you factored in my stressed-to-the-max imagination.
Each of our footsteps along the paper debris that littered the floor grated on my nerves, and made me edgier, if that was even possible at this point. I needed silence to hear if anything came our way, but the old paper, and who knew what else in that pool of darkness surrounding my feet, crunched with each step. The four large paws beside me making it even worse. Silly, but for a moment, I concerned myself that something could get stuck in his paw.
I stumbled in an ungraceful sidestep when the wall of fur between me and the machine bumped me. Biting my lip to not cry out, I caught out of the corner of my eye something looming over my head. Ducking, as if it would fly at me, I realized it looked like a steering wheel attached to the side of the machine.
Alex had saved me from banging my head against the metal. I snuck a shaking hand, light radiating from my palm, between where it had been in my pocket and the underside of the animal beside me, giving him a rub of thanks. A deep sound came from his chest that I felt rumble where we touched even more than I heard it.
I wanted to use these hands of mine as flashlights, to have a way to make out some of the haunting shadows that moved with us, and on their own. I’d only serve as a beacon, though, lighting the enemy’s way to us. The word, enemy, sounded odd in my mind. I didn’t think I’d ever truly had one. And as an orphan with a full figure, no one bothered to be jealous of me either. Too bad, once this was over, I couldn’t do a look-at-me-now magic show with my sexy man at my side at the next high school reunion .