Act Two Chapter Fourteen - Alive

Darkness. Was this what death felt like? No, that she was conscious of the darkness told her that could not be. She was alive. She shuffled her feet and felt the sensation of her muscles respond to the commands of her mind, felt the touch of concrete beneath her thighs. This was real. She was alive.

But her legs were the only part she could move. She tried her arms and found resistance. But that too taught her something. She felt steel against her wrists. Shackles of some sort. She was bound, secured in place, in a darkened room.

She continued to investigate. What else could she learn? What else could she discover? Her head could move or at least twist from side to side. There was a shackle about her neck as well, so moving her head back and forth was impossible. All these shackles were bound to a wall. Concrete, rough, maybe cinderblock at her back.

It was warm. Almost miserably so. Had she still been mortal, she had no doubt her skin and clothes would be drenched in sweat. And speaking of clothing, she did not feel the brush of cloth against her skin anywhere. No discomfort of a bra’s wire. She was nude for whatever reason.

Sound. There was a dull hum in the distance, like the droning of far away machines. It was not loud, but like white noise it seemed to drown out all else. It was all she could hear.

She pressed again against the shackles and found them unyielding. For all her glorious powers and new found strength, this was an obstacle beyond her. She knew that it was intentionally so. Someone wanted to keep her here. But who?

Memories. What did she remember? An ambush, a sharp pain in her breast, then hazy images of a trial. Of a hideous creature calling down death upon her. A great black beast who dragged her off into the night. Off into darkness. Off to here, wherever it was.

Again, she pressed against her bonds to no avail. The more she became aware, the more fear crept into her. That was a lesson too. The dead do not fear. She was alive.

But there was nothing to be done. Nothing but wait.

After what seemed an eternity, the droning was interrupted by a loud metallic creaking and the momentary amplification of the machinery. Someone had opened a door and entered her chamber from outside. The loudness subsided after a short moment; the door had been closed once more, but she was no longer alone.

“Who is there?” she called out, surprised to hear her own voice in the din. No answer came. Instead, she heard a deeper-than-deep voice, a man intoning a prayer.

“Allah, your way is submission and obedience to your will. Your angels of death are not to be thrall to any but you. By your will, set this servant of yours free.”

She felt a cup brought to her lips and liquid poured into her mouth. She gagged; its taste was vile. Blood, but not such as she desired. This was tainted, polluted, with strange and bitter herbs and other flavors. But down it went, against her will. And as it entered her system, her system reacted. Her stomach heaved, vomiting forth far in excess of what she had just consumed. Blood sprayed forth again and again from her mouth, a vast deluge.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Her mind screamed as horrors came unbidden into her recollection. A lost lover, twisted and conniving, holding her prisoner, making her his against her will. Another, the face of an innocent, now lying dead in the mud. She remembered, but unlike before, she felt what had happened to her.

Pain. Anguish. Guilt. Horror. All these flooded forth into her mind. Revulsion at the memory of a lover’s touch, no, not lover, rapist, violator, slave-master. The emotions were overwhelming and she let out a piteous wail. No words could describe what she felt in that moment.

When the wail came to its end, the only sound she heard was the dull drone of those far away machines. The one who had come was gone.

---

Another eternity and once again, she heard the sound of the door open. This time, the sound was followed by the snap flash of a match being struck. Light entered her chamber for the first time. A candle flame sprang to life and then another. Soon the room was dimly lit, enough for her to see her visitor.

The “black beast” she had called him before, and it was well chosen. But it was not black in the sense that the word was usually used when referring to a person. This was not African. No, this one was black as coal, a wholly unnatural tone for human skin. He was naked from the waist up, and she could see he was a fine specimen. Well toned and sculpted muscles. Tall he was, with a bald head and bright piercing eyes that stood out against the pitch of his skin. He moved like a predatory animal, like a great panther in the night. She had feared him as a memory and feared him in the darkness of his previous visit, but now she feared him all the more as she saw him with her eyes.

From his satchel, he took forth a washcloth and a bottle of water. He moistened the cloth and in a gesture wholly unexpected, began to gently wash the blood she had vomited from her body. “How are we feeling?” he asked in his great deep bass voice.

She could not find the words at first, but he seemed unsurprised by this. “I hope you will forgive me in time, Rebecca.” He said her name for the first time and there was a small comfort in the hearing of it. “The purging rite is harsh and brutal to both body and soul. But it was necessary. I strongly suspected he had bound you and I could not risk that.”

“B...b…bound?” she stammered, finding words at last.

“Yes. A peculiar and somewhat vicious tool in our arsenal. Drink thrice from one of our kind and the blood enraptures you. Makes you a slave to their will, creates desire within you for them. This bond is not easily broken, but there are ways such as what I have done for you.”

“Michael.” She spoke his name aloud. Her master, her friend, her betrayer. “He did that to me.”

“And much more.” He finished the bathing and returned to his satchel. He pulled out of blood bag like those used by the Red Cross in their blood banks. “Here.” He offered. “It is not fresh, but should help with your thirst.”

And thirsty she was. She bit down on the bag, tasted the plastic but for a moment, and then the sweetness of its contents entered her mouth. She drank and drank but it did not take long for that small offering to disappear.

Once she was done, he tossed aside the empty bag and reached over. With a metallic pop, he released the shackle holding her in place to the wall. “There. Much better.” He commented.

“Who are you?”

“I am Youssef Zahid Anwar, but I have not gone by that name in many years. I am The Djinn, Saracen, warrior, the last of the assassins who served under the Old Man of the Mountain. General of the armies of Baghdad when the great horde of Genghis Khan rode upon our gates. As I lay dying on the plain of that battle, I was reborn to darkness. A long time ago.”

It was at that moment that she remembered her nudity and her previous sense of modesty returned. She made to cover herself. The Djinn responded to her action, returning again to her satchel. “I am no great judge of women’s fashion, but I hope you will find these at least adequate.” He offered her some clothing.

“They’ll do.” She stood up, somewhat unsteady on her feet. The clothing was an ill-fit, but it would serve. She dressed quickly.

“I’m very confused.” She admitted. “You were told to kill me.”

“I was. I still could.”

She did not doubt that. “Then why am I here?”

“Do you believe in destiny?”

Rebecca shrugged.

“I do.” He continued. “I believe we are Allah’s instruments, and called to a specific purpose in his great plan. The vampire, as well as the human. We are angels of death, young one. Walking talking manifestations of his wrath against the sins of the world. For seven hundred years, I have labored under the guidance of one I thought closer to Allah’s will than any of us.”

“Once thought, but no longer.” Rebecca concluded.

“He is not what he once was. My lord Mathias. Said to be one of the disciples of the prophet Jesus. But either he lies or he no longer remembers. Now he takes a bride of flesh, the latest in a long line. He plays games of politics. He’s lost sight of the higher goals. He is no better than his rivals.”

“So he should die.”

“Yes. He no longer serves Allah’s purposes. And now is the time to strike. It is, I believe, God’s will.”

“So what does this have to do with me?”

“I cannot do this alone. For all his weaknesses, he is still the stronger. But he grows paranoid. For all the trust he openly conveys to me, it is clear to me that he suspects my disloyalty. Thus, he grants the boon of childer to other vampires, but not to his loyal bodyguard. I need an apprentice. Someone I can train. Someone I can mold. And if I cannot embrace a childe of my own, then I will simply make use of someone else’s.”

---

Chief Alex Martin watched from his perch down onto the valley below. Untrained or ungifted eyes would have seen nothing but the trees, brown, yellow, and beige in their late autumn colors, but his were the eyes of the Uratha, the werewolf. Below him, he could see his newest charge make his way slowly, but deliberately across the forest floor.

"He's doing well for such a late bloomer." commented Alex's companion. "He takes to our ways quickly." Linda Doran was the tribe's shaman and had joined the new chief in his observations.

"We've been lucky." said Alex. "All along, we've been lucky."

"Is it luck?" said Linda. "Or has it all been predictable?"

"Spoken like a prophet." teased Alex.

"Tyler was doomed, one way or the other." said Linda. "The wizard was right. His hatred had made him blind and foolish. In the end, he would either have met the fate that he did or you would have deposed him. No surprises there. No luck. Just predictable outcomes.

"And likewise the vampires. Roanoke is too small to support them in large numbers. They are vile parasites who bear no honor or loyalty to anyone but themselves. When word had come that they had expanded their number, I knew it could only mean one thing. Their lord was fishing for rebellion and, sure enough, rebellion came. Again, predictable, predictable enough that we were ready and able to move to fetch our lost cub in the midst of the chaos of their infighting."

"But Boar's skill? How do you account for that?"

"On that, it is luck. I will grant you that one." Linda paused. "I fear though you push your luck too far. Ami is not ready to mentor him. A true cub, a child, that I could see. But Boar is a man grown, with a man's desires."

"She was the one who blooded him. The one who found him. She’s earned the right. Besides, Ami has lived with this tribe since she was in diapers, as have I. We have grown up together. She knows our ways. Knows our taboos. I cannot imagine her violating them with him. If I am ready to be chief, then she is ready to train. That is my final word on the matter."

"I pray you are right, Alex. For if the rule is broken, we will have far worse to reckon with than the vampires."

----

Far below his observers, Boar quickened to his bestial senses. In true wolf form, what the werewolves called urhan in their unique tongue, the world came alive to him. But he must focus. So many scents, so many sounds, so many distractions. It was so easy to lose one’s self to the wolf, especially when you barely learned to master it.

Boar focused sharply, trying to discern one single pattern within the noise. One sound, one scent. Her sound, her scent. Ami Janes, who in human form was a petite sassy bespeckled high schooler, the same werewolf who had claimed him that night in Blacksburg. She was his prey. Even Boar found it hard to imagine this wisp of a girl could be a savage werewolf, let alone one seasoned and experienced enough to train him. Yet it was so.

Boar stood still as a statue as he took in his surroundings. He knew she was close. Learning to track a fellow werewolf was just preliminary training. The werewolves saw their purpose in life to hunt things far more vile. Vampires and mages at times, but far more often were renegade spirits of nature, “things” that had escaped from a spirit realm that just a month ago Boar did not even know existed. So much of what he had once thought superstition and myth was proving true.

He should have known. Vampires were real after all. That was his first lesson. Why not these other things? How they all fit together did not yet make sense to him, but now he’d learned this alien world was his world, that he was a part of it, that he was uratha, werewolf, himself.

A scent, a familiar one. A pungent one. Boar understood now why the common dog could sense a human’s mood or physical condition by scent. He could tell so much from just one whiff of Ami nearby. Not the least of which was where she was.

He pounced through the brush to his left and there she was. Her urhan form was not much bigger than a collie dog, but she was quick. Boar overshot and landed in a pile of leaves. She was on him like lightning, biting at the scruff of his neck. To an outside observer it would have looked playful and in many ways it was. The intent here was not to draw blood or to injure, but to practice.

Still, for all her experience, Ami was half Boar’s side and he flung her off with ease. She twisted over and over in mid-air and landed on her feet with all the grace of a cat, shifting to human form on landing.

“Still not fast enough.” She commented. “Why do I bother?” she sighed in feigned disappointment.

Boar let out a pitiful whine and then shifted himself. “I did find you.” He said. “And I would have overcome you.”

“That’s beside the point.” She corrected. “It’s not me you’ll be hunting in the future.”

“So you say” thought Boar incredulously. “You just don’t want to admit I could pin you down and have you at my mercy so easily.” He said to her. A lustful smile crossed his lips.

“You know that’s forbidden.” She said, standing on her feet and brushing the leaves from her. She was dressed in the uniform of Roanoke Catholic High School. One of the first tricks a werewolf was taught was how subsume their human clothing into their shapeshifting, a bit of magic that prevented every uratha from having an excessive clothing bill each month. Boar had learned this from Ami, but he also knew that many of the werewolves of the tribe didn’t bother. He regretted that Ami was not among them.

“Forbidden or not…” Boar let the sentence drop. He knew. She could not hide her interest from him. He could smell it when Ami was in wolf form.

“Again, beside the point.” She said. “What I want and what is permitted are not the same. Do you have any idea what the rest of the tribe would do if they found us together? Or worse if I…” she didn’t finish the sentence.

“There are ways to prevent that…” Boar countered, but he too paused mid-thought. Something was amiss.

Ami shifted to wolf-man form, dalu in the werewolf tongue. When she did that, Boar did likewise, only he went to full wolf out of habit. When he did, the assault on his senses was overwhelming. A rogue spirit was nearby.

What came through the brush at them was somewhat underwhelming. At first glance, he seemed nothing more than a typical local, a hunter dressed in flannel with a blaze vest and a shotgun. But Boar and Ami could both tell there was more to him than met the eyes. He was hithimu, a man literally possessed by the spirit.

The man raised his shotgun lightning quick and let off both barrels into Ami. She collapsed into a heap behind them as Boar leapt. His bulk knocked the man from his feet and onto his back. The shotgun clattered away.

The man grasped at Boar’s forelegs and with inhuman strength began to push him off. His mouth widened into a hideous maw and his teeth sharpened into fangs, gifts of the possessing spirit no doubt. Boar had one shot, so he took it. His head snapped forward, clamping around the man’s neck. With a mighty rip, he tore his throat out and the hithimu’s body went limp.

Boar came back to human form just as Alex and Linda came through the brush to join them. “Are you…?” Alex asked.

Boar gave no answer, but went immediately to where Ami had fallen. Linda moved there as well.

“Not silver.” She said with confidence. “She’ll be fine.”

“So we’ve found our poacher, or rather he found us.” Said Alex. “A gluttony spirit.”

“He fled the man as Boar struck.” Commented Linda.

“Then we’d best be after it. Boar, take Ami home. Your lesson is done today. We will deal with this spirit ourselves.”

---

By the time Boar drove Ami back to her apartment, her wound had healed clean.

“I’d be dead if you hadn’t been there.” She rubbed her chest where the blast had hit. “That hit so hard I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Stunned like that, he’d have been all over me. I owe you my life, Mike.” It was not often that Boar heard his real name, even among his new family.

“I’m just glad you’re okay.”

She shivered and made to get out of the car. “That’s the closest I care to come to dying.”

“We’re uratha. It’s part of the territory.”

“And you think I don’t know that.” She scolded. “I was born to a human father and a werewolf mother. I was raised by the tribe. I’ve known this all my life.” She paused. “It’s one thing though to be told that you’re life will be brutal, violent, and probably short. It’s another to watch it happen, to realize it’s real, that they didn’t lie to you, that they didn’t exaggerate.”

Boar put his hand on her knee. It was meant as a comforting gesture, but touching her soft skin was almost electric to both of them. He ignored it for the moment, however. “When you really think about it, even life as a human is uncertain. Any moment you could die in a car crash, have a heart attack from some unknown defect, get a disease, or be caught in the crossfire of a gang battle. Let alone be sucked dry by a vampire, eaten by a werewolf, or possessed by one of those things we fought in the woods.”

“We don’t eat people.” She corrected him.

“Regardless, we still killed a human today. That he was not himself probably does not matter in the end to his parents or his friends or his children.”

“Next time, it could be us instead though.”

“Yeah.” He said. “It could.”

She took his hand from her knee and brought it up to her face, giving his fingers a playful kiss. “If my life is to be short and uncertain, then I’m going to grasp for what I want now, rules or no rules.”

---

“Reality is what you make it.” Instructed Darren. “Remember that all we see around us, all we call the universe and existence is not end result of physics or science, but the result of will.”

“Whose will? God’s?” said Mitch. The two were sitting on a bench outside War Memorial Chapel on Virginia Tech’s campus. It was around lunchtime and the campus was alive with students making their way to and from class.

“Perhaps. But I’m not trying to make a theological point here. As one of the Awakened, you have the power to alter reality by the sheer force of your will. In a sense, what the divine may have done at creation, you can do now on somewhat smaller scale.”

“So is magic divine power?”

“For someone who is not religious, you make a lot of comparisons there.”

“I went to Sunday School and church as a kid.” Confessed Mitch. “It seems the closest parallel.”

“It serves, I suppose.” Replied Darren. “But magic is willpower made incarnate. What you wish becomes reality.”

“I can’t make the sky turn red, can I?”

“No, your will is not strong enough for something that radical. No mage’s is. Plus, always remember that there are forces of will working against you. The unawakened cannot consciously or individually alter reality like we can, but collected together they exert an immense power upon the universe. We call it unbelief and when you attempt to do something that is beyond what people see as possible, you will run into it.”

“You teleported right in front of me when you found me.”

“You can poke holes in unbelief at times. The easiest way to do the impossible is to do it when no sleepers are looking.”

“But I was not Awakened when you appeared in front of me.”

“You were a vampiric thrall, as was your pursuer. You had already been made a part of the Awakened world by that slavery. In a sense, you did not count.”

“Can you teach me to teleport?”

“I can try. But note that some aspects of reality you will find easier to manipulate. Others will be harder. Despite your fondness for theological parallels, we are not gods. We are not angels. We are human and as such we have limitations. I am Mastigos, a warlock. Spatial reality and the realm of the mind are my strengths. However, altering physical matter is difficult for me.”

“And I am?”

“Do you not know?”

“Acanthus is the word that comes to my mind.”

“An enchanter. Yes, that would fit.”

“How do I know these words?”

“You had vision of a watchtower, did you not? When you fully awoke?”

“That?” Mitch seemed confused.

“Magical legend says the watchtowers are ruled over by ancient mages who seek out like souls in the world and then call them to awaken. Like most legends, there’s probably as much metaphor in that as there is fact, but the nature of your watchtower defines the sort of mage you will be and by some mystery, we just know what we are when we awaken. We even know the Atlantian term for it.”

“Atlantian? As in…”

“Yeah, another legend. But regardless, it’s what we call our secret language.”

“So as an enchanter, what can I do?”

“As I can master space, you can master time.”

“So I can time travel?”

“Only in very small increments. A few seconds at most. Unbelief won’t allow anything greater. But you, once trained, will be able to speed up, slow down time. You will gain a window into past and future events. I envy you. It’s a neat power.”

“Time isn’t all I can do though. My luck is a part of this too.”

“Yes, enchanters can alter and influence the seeming randomness of the universe. Probability, chance, luck are also under your power. The power of fate.”

“Cool.”

“Your power is very weak at this point however. You must be trained and your best training will come from a fellow Acanthus. That, we do not have here, which is somewhat surprising given how they are drawn to the hedonism of your typical college campus. But there is one in Charlottesville at UVA. He will be your teacher.”

“So when do I leave?”

“As soon as you can get your affairs in order. Seeing as your previous allegiances seem to have self-destructed, I can imagine that won’t take long.”

Mitch frowned. He did not like to be reminded of the events of that night. Michael, Deborah, Boar all gone. “No, I don’t imagine it will.”

“Don’t look so glum, James. You’ve been given the cheat codes of the universe. Enjoy it.”

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