[Writer’s note: The opening scene is adapted from Discord writing. Claire’s dialogue is written by Claire’s writer.]
12:25 AM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 2019
GRAND PRAIRIE, TEXAS
A group of werewolves from the Northern Lights pack gathered in front of the Stoddard-Barclay house, rallying behind their alpha Claire, waiting for their orders, waiting to figure out how they were going to rescue Claire’s wife Andy who had been missing since earlier in the afternoon, presumed to be taken by the Red Wolves, a rival pack to the Northern Lights. In addition to Claire, there was Fillip and Fallon, the oldest werewolves in the pack, ancestors to Claire in some way. Four of the newcomers were there too, Dusty, Peter, Carrie, and the quiet wolf with the sword Feeney. Claire’s plan was to kidnap one of the daughters of the Red Wolf Alpha and work out a hostage trade, but that sparked a discussion. Claire and Fillip bickered loudly on the other side of the driveway while the rest pretended not to watch.
"I'm sorry. I'm.. a bit out of sorts,” Claire said when the spat was over and she returned to the group, hands on her head out of frustration. “I was wrong to suggest kidnapping a child. So we will try another way to find her. Hopefully Sergei didn't think to hide her with magic. If he didn't, Avery may be able to use a locator spell.”
“We don’t need Avery,” Feeney was the first to speak up. All eyes went to her since she didn’t often have a ton to say at moments like this. “And we don’t need to kidnap anyone for a hostage trade. We need a distraction.”
“I don’t understand.” Carrie scratched the back of her blonde head. “A distraction?”
Feeney looked to Claire. “Your wife is tough as nails and badass, right?”
“You’re saying we let Andy rescue herself?” Peter asked, stepping up beside Carrie.
“I say we give Andy what she needs to help rescue herself,” Feeney said.
“And how do we go about that?” Claire asked, her full focus on Feeney now.
"Well, we don't grab his daughter but maybe we make it look like we're going to grab his daughter. If he cares about his daughter he'd move more of his wolves to protect her and away from Andy. Then all we have to do is get Andy her weapon."
"What's her weapon?" Carrie asked.
Feeney blurred to the garage and blurred back with a chainsaw.
"How do you know so much about Andy?" Peter asked curiously, but his question would probably get washed away in everything else.
"How do we get a weapon to her?" Carrie asked.
"Magic. Avery doesn't need to track her," Feeney said. "That sort of magic is easy to ward against, but she can use a spell that'll transport this chainsaw to wherever Andy is in the Multiverse and then she frees herself."
A quiet moment lingered between the pack members gathered there. Feeney’s plan was bold, dangerous, and required a lot of trust on Claire’s part, not trust in Feeney but trust in Andy. Feeney made a gamble suggesting it, but she was certain it was the right move. She wasn’t surprised when Claire stepped forward and smiled. “Okay,” Claire said. “Let’s do it.”
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
SEPTEMBER 25, 2019
NECROPOLIS
Time didn’t exist in the basement. Andy had a rough estimate of how long she had been a prisoner of the Red Wolves pack but there was no true way to tell. The room they kept her in had no windows. There were no obvious breaks in the pointless torture they were putting her through to give her any idea of what was day and what was night. There was only the harness that kept her elevated off the ground—legs and arms numb and joints sore from where the straps cut into her—and there was the room. She dozed off occasionally between bouts of torture, but never for very long, and waking up from a spontaneous micro nap only made it harder to track how much time was passing.
There was no routine or schedule, but the human mind could find patterns in anything and Andy managed to find some semblance of a rhythm to how things operated down there even if it wasn’t an exact or regimented order of events. The masked man came in and out, never speaking, not even a word. He wasn’t a wolf, he was a witch, or a warlock or whatever classification of magic-user he deemed himself. Andy didn’t give a sh*t what he called himself, she only cared about what he would do. It was savage and cruel for the sake of cruelty. No questions were asked, no point was given; the man in the leather mask simply would come in, crush Andy’s hands and feet with his tools, leave her to suffer, come in and heal her with his magic, and start the process all over again. Sergei made it sound like she was just a bargaining tool, but that didn’t account for the torture. Her imagination ran wild with explanations. The masked man was a psychopath who Sergei owed a favor too, and Andy was a payment. He was a show of force and the pain inflicted on Andy was only meant to last psychologically and not physically. A dozen scenarios played through her head, but when the hammers swung the reason why it was swinging didn’t matter. Only the pain mattered.
Whenever the masked man exited Andy was left in the room alone with a single wolf guard who sat in a chair in the corner behind her. They were meant to watch her but they mostly just read from a magazine while Andy hung in the center of the room, suffering, groaning, or sleeping. Sergei hadn’t been back since he left after the first torture session. The guard was different every time, but that didn’t help Andy track time either. They never stayed very long and they switched out often. Now, in a lull between torture sessions, the guard was a woman with light blonde hair who read from a magazine that had a pair of shoes on the cover and was decorated in cyrillic script. In the beginning, Andy talked to the guards—even if they never talked back—but she didn’t have the strength any more. They beat that out of her. She looked back and stared at the woman and her magazine upside down from time to time, but she couldn’t do that long either without the blood rushing to her head.
The lulls between torture were almost worse than the actual torture. That was a strange thing to think, Andy figured, but it was true. At least she had the ability to wince or brace for impact before the masked man swung his hammer down on her hands or feet, but hanging there, exhausted and hungry and thirsty and covered in her own piss and bruises, it was enough to drive anyone mad. There was no getting comfortable only transitioning from different sorts of discomfort. Sometimes the shoulders hurt more than the legs, sometimes it was a headache that set in that made Andy’s skull feel like it was on fire. These shifting pains came in the lulls, and Andy’s only escape was the brief moments of sleep her body forced upon her every now and then. One was coming on now, she could feel it in her bones. Andy was drifting off when all of a sudden there was some snoring. Snoring? Andy wasn’t asleep yet, she wasn’t snoring. Craning her neck back and looking upside down she smirked. The woman guarding her had drifted asleep, her magazine slumped forward in her lap.
An idea came to her like a bolt of lightning.
“Ade beaucoup Damballa,” Andy whispered, closing her eyes and concentrating on the voodoo prayer she had memorized. “Donne-moi tout le pouvoir, je t’en supplie. Ade beaucoup Damballa. Give me the power, I beg of you. Awake!”
The guard woke up in a snort and a start, the magazine dropping from her lap. She looked around confused, touching her face and arms and legs and then she smiled at Andy and Andy smiled back. “It worked,” the guard said, not speaking in a Russian accent.
“Please cut us down,” Andy said.
Andy copied her soul and took possession of the guard. The spirit of the Russian wolf was still inside that body too, and Andy wasn’t cruel enough to make a soul share their host with an outside force for long, plus Andy wasn’t fond of the idea of having too many soul copies out in the world anyway, but these wolves did kidnap her. They were the bad guys, so she didn’t feel too bad. The copy of Andy got up, pulled a knife from her belt and used it to cut the harness down. She tried to ease Andy down to the ground but she ended up falling with a huff. Andy didn’t mind. She never had been so happy to fall on the ground in her life. Once down she was able to free herself, rubbing her wrists and ankles and slowly getting up on her feet.
“We need to get out of here,” the copy said.
“I need to get out of here,” Andy corrected herself. “I’m not taking this person with me. They may be working for bad guys but there’s gotta be a difference between us and them. There’s gotta be a reason I can call myself the good guy.”
“You’re hurt,” the copy said. “Let me at least help you fight your way out of here. You can’t do it alone.”
There was a zap of energy somewhere behind them and when both Andys turned they found Andy’s chainsaw sitting on the floor by the door. Andy smirked, not knowing exactly how it got there or where it came from, but knowing that her wife was somehow involved. “I’m not alone,” Andy said, standing up and picking up the chainsaw with her stronger of the two hands.
The Copy nodded at her original, saluted her and said, “Good luck,” before she started chanting a similar voodoo spell. There was another pop of energy and the soul duplicate was gone. The werewolf that had been possessed fell to the floor, unconscious but otherwise okay.
Andy was weak and her, but that didn’t stop her. She picked up her chainsaw and kissed the rusty blade. “Groovy.”
That’s when the door opened behind her.
The man in the mask walked into the room. He entered with a leisurely pace and posture but when he looked up and locked eyes with Andy—free and standing four paces away from him, armed with a chainsaw, her guard passed out on the floor—his body went rigid with panic and confusion. His face was hidden by the mask, sure, but the panic and confusion shone so brightly it glowed out from under the seams.
Andy smiled and wiggled her eyebrows. “Hi.”
She pulled the cord on the chainsaw to bring it to life but it only puttered into nothing. She tried it again. Nothing. A bruised thumb flipped up the gas cap. The tank was empty. The weight difference didn’t even register on her exhausted arms. “F***,” she sighed. The masked man turned his head to the corner where his tool kit sat on a stool. He stared at it. Andy stared at it. He stared at her. She stared at him. They hovered in limbo, waiting for the right time to make the first move. He flinched first, darting for the stool. Andy heaved her weapon back and tossed the chainsaw through the air. There was no gas to make the blade sing but it had additional value. The chainsaw gracelessly soared through the air and the engine clunked the masked man on the head before he reached his stool, knocking him down to the ground.
Andy dashed forward, adrenaline pumping through her body and making everything function despite the pain she was in. She got to the stool as fast as she could, grabbed a hammer and knocked the rest of it down. There was no hesitation or second thoughts or caution. Andy acted and she acted quickly. She used the hammer to turn the masked man’s head into jelly. BAM! BAM! BAM! She was relentless, bringing it down on him over and over again, putting every moment of the torture he put her through into each swing. His skull crumbled and he leaked through the leather mask until he stopped moving and went stone-still.
When the hammering stopped Andy was panting, sore, and covered in sweat and blood. She took a second to catch her breath, tossed the hammer off to the side, and went back for the guard’s knife. She picked that up, doubled back for her chainsaw, and limped out of the room, unsure what she would find on the other side but ready to deal with whatever was there. The basement had a second room—this one smaller and blander than the first. There were a few supplies along a stone wall under some wooden stairs that went up. Among the supplies, Andy found a red plastic gas canister. She tucked the knife in her belt, went to the canister, and smiled when she shook it. It was full.
Andy filled up the chainsaw and tossed the canister away when she was done. When the cap went back on she lifted her weapon of choice and chortled some. It was heavy again, heavy like it was meant to be. She took a deep breath, went to the foot of the stairs, and steeled herself for the fight to come. She pulled the cord back and the chainsaw roared. Deep breaths up the stairs and she made her blade sing before heading upstairs. Some people yelled in Russian and then came some screaming in terror.
There were only two people upstairs, two werewolves in the whole house actually, other than the guard in the basement and the masked man. Andy caught them off guard and managed to fight her way out with one decapitation and one disemboweling. She left the house covered in blood and bruises, looked around and found she was in Necropolis. That explained how the Russians made it to Texas so fast, the supernatural city could be accessed from anywhere in the world and sort of acted as a short-cut between places.
She didn’t take the time to explore the house, but even just on her way out she noticed that there had been more people there. Something lured them away, something made Andy’s job easier, which was something she was incredibly grateful for because as soon as her face hit the fresh air outside all those hours of exhaustion and torture and hunger hit her like the El coming down around a bend. She fell to her knees laughing, unable to lift herself anymore. She let out a scream, crying out in victory. A few people came out of neighboring houses, all row homes connected by shared walls. It didn’t matter if there were any other wolves left in the area, there were witnesses now. Andy was safe.
A few good Samaritans came over to help Andy. One yelled to call an ambulance. Another came rushing over with water. A third cradled the exhausted Andy in his arms.
“Claire,” Andy mumbled through chapped lips. “My wife… get me to my wife.”
