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14
Night fell and a cool breeze swept howling through the woods. From inside the tower, Jamie and I couldn’t see anything, but closing my eyes I could hear the things moving through the trees.
“You ready for this?” Jamie asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
I looked at him and nodded. “Five bags of explosives, set to go off with the push of a button. A radio to make some noise. It’s a solid plan.”
“Tell that to your face,” he said, smiling in the dark.
“Do you want to change, or do you want to stay human for this? One of us needs to hit the button,” I said.
His smile grew. “You just want to see me naked.”
“Always,” I snorted.
Jamie stood up, narrowing his eyes at me and pulled his shirt off over his head, dropping it on the ground. His hands started on his belt, and he smiled. “If it isn’t true then why are you staring?”
My cheeks burned and I turned my eyes away from him. He was right, I was staring. Why wouldn’t I? Over the ten years I’d been gone, he’d filled out. He wasn’t scrawny and pale anymore. Now he was hot, and he had those delicious lines on his hips that I admittedly wanted to trace with my tongue.
The light flashed as he changed, and suddenly a large black wolf stood in front of me. He inched closer. His paws straddling one of my legs and he stretched his nose down to my neck. He sniffed once and then he brushed his fur along my cheek.
I shivered, recognizing the affection in the gesture, and he pulled away, padding to the tower door. I pushed up on the wall to get to my feet, and inching up behind him, I squinted out into the darkness. I could hear something close by, but it was still too far away to see.
“You ready for this?” I whispered, slipping my fingers into the fur on his back, unsure if the question was directed at Jamie or myself.
Either way Jamie answered by swatting me on the backside with his tail. He looked up at me, and then darted off into the darkness to get in position as quiet as the shadows themselves.
I crouched down low, counting to thirty in the back of my mind, and trained my eyes on the clearing where we’d set our trap. The bushes moved at the far side, where Jamie planned to wait.
I took a deep breath, and then hit the button on my phone to turn on the Bluetooth radio we’d set up on the tree stump at the center of the clearing.
The sound of my top forty playlist echoed out into the air, and I exhaled. I hated the quiet. The sounds made me feel a little more comfortable. For a few seconds anyway. All of that got ruined when the first of the shadows came bleeding in from around the trees. My heart leapt into my throat. The skeleton that emerged first was dangerously close to where Jamie waited out of sight. If he moved or made a noise at the wrong time things would go very wrong.
Another skeleton came from the left, and then another from the right. They wandered clueless, and seemingly mindless into the clearing. Probing for the source of the noise, but as I’d suspected they didn’t seem able to determine that the music wasn’t coming from a human.
When eight of them had gathered into the clearing, hovering around each other, their powers mixing and polluting the air to the point I could barely make out the bushes in the distance, I lifted my hand readying to hit the button, and then froze as a strange blue light danced into my line of sight.
It was small, no bigger than a baseball, and glowing like a ball of fire. Glittering trails of sparks floated behind it as it bounced into the clearing, and the skeletons turned to look at it in unison.
The ball bobbed above the speaker for a moment and then similar to the flash of light that came over wolves in the midst of their change, the blue light flashed bright, and I had to shield my eyes.
When I turned back a figure stood in place of the light. A female from of the lithe shape of her, but I couldn’t make out the girl’s face beneath her massive hood. She walked up to the Bluetooth speaker and gestured with what I guessed was an exaggerated sigh.
A series of swear words floated to my lips as she crouched down and hit the button to turn it off. We needed the music to keep attracting the creatures, but was this the witch that had created them? The monsters weren’t attacking her. She had to be. Why else would she be there? Shifting my weight, I lifted the remote to trigger the bombs.
I didn’t realize I made a noise until the witch’s head lifted and she looked in my direction. She stood up, tilting her head to the side, and just as my fingers began to close on the button, my body stopped. Every muscle from my head to my toes froze. Not by choice, not out of fear, or getting startled, but because a foreign energy pressed in on me from every angle.
Magic. It forced me upright, straightening my legs against my will. It pulled me up off the ground until nothing, but my toes didn’t touch the ground. I tried to break free. I tried to move, but my muscles throbbed unable to shift, or bend to my will. I’d been trapped like a dragonfly in amber.
The witch began to pull me forward out of the tower. My shoes skimmed across the ground, and tears gathered at the corners of my eyes.
“Who do we have here?” I soft voice asked, barely above a whisper.
My body shifted past the skeletons standing in an obedient circle around the girl, and—
A loud howl erupted in the distance. A wolf signaling their position. A wolf that wasn’t supposed to be in the woods. Panic speared me in the chest. I tried to fight, I pulled harder against the power holding me, but I just couldn’t move.
The witch exhaled an exasperated sigh. “Go, you idiots. Kill the wolf.”
