Bad Wolf (4 page)

“Yes, I’m more familiar with you than I realized,” she said, her voice
losing its buoyant quality. It was trance-like, falling through the air and
striking an unfamiliar pattern of notes. It was not the sweet, cheerful voice
from before.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she stood up and turned away from me, sauntering
slowly towards the stage. Rick stood before it, bobbing his head and swinging
his long blonde hair. Marie tapped him and he leaned down so that she could
whisper something in his ear.

‘Great, they hate us. Whatever, they’ll be done in a few songs.’ I was
about to pull up my phone and search for hotels when something strange
happened. Martin suddenly stopped playing. He just straight up stopped. His
limbs fell to his side and he dropped his pick to the floor, a dead look in his
usually lively eyes.

Brandon shifted his gaze towards Martin, and he looked as perplexed as I
did. It wasn’t like Martin was angry, or bored, or goofing off. It was like he
had become nothing. Then I followed Brandon’s gaze down to Rick and Marie.
Marie had her arms raised over her head, as if she were in the thriller music
video.

Or controlling Martin.

But there was no way.

Before I could ponder on it any further, however, Martin lunged for Trent,
his guitar still strapped around his neck, making a terrible clashing sound as
the strings moved against Trent’s back. Trent threw his arms out in surprise,
and Martin’s fingers clasped around his friend’s throat, tightening until his
knuckles went white.

“Trent!” I screamed, feeling the wind leaving my body. I was hysterical,
running up to the stage and trying to hoist myself onto it, until I felt a hand
on my ankle tug me back towards the lawn.

“You don’t want to do that, little missy,” Rick said, making a
disapproving clicking noise with his tongue.

“What the hell is going on?” I snapped. He just shrugged.

“It’s not our problem if they hate each other.” I looked up at the stage
and saw that Brandon had clung to Martin’s back, and was pulling him backwards
into the drum set. It crashed to the ground with a horrible, thunderous noise.
Suddenly, punks were flooding in the backyard to see what was going on. Some of
them cheered and others joined in the chaos, forming little circles and moshing
into one another.

And what did I do? I screamed of course. I screamed bloody murder.

Nick stood up and raised his arms, and a strange, hissing melody came
from his lips. It was surreal. I couldn’t make out what he was saying from
where I was, but I could see his moving lips. Could tell it wasn’t English. The
look in his dark eyes was otherworldly, as though a hint of red was gleaming in
them.

And then it stopped.

Well, the fighting on stage stopped. The chaos around me only escalated
as every punk and their mother thought it would be a good idea to start
breaking bottles. I managed to clamber up onto the stage, this time kicking
Rick in the face when he tried to pull me off. My foot made contact with his
nose, and made a delicious cracking noise as he fell back onto the lawn.
Adrenaline rushed through my veins as I threw myself onto Trent, inspecting his
neck for damage.

“Are you alright?” I yelled over the chaos. His eyes were wide and he
looked bewildered, but gave me a nod. A bottle went sailing past his head and shattered
on the wall behind him. “Then let’s get the hell out of here!” I yelled,
turning off the mic and pulling it off the stand. Everyone around me started
gathering the equipment, haphazardly throwing wires into guitar cases and
shoving picks and sticks into pockets. The drum set looked a mess, but I didn’t
have a spare moment to wonder about the damage. There was a door behind us that
led into the house, and as I suspected, it was unlocked.

“Let’s go through here!” I yelled out, and everyone but Martin responded
with a bolt to the door. Martin looked dazed as he slowly put his guitar in the
case, closing each latch with determined care. Rick started to stir down below,
and Marie had taken to tending to his bleeding nose. She looked up at me with a
piercing gaze that looked inhuman.

“Martin…we need to go
now
,” I said, running over to grip him by
his arm and grab his guitar case for him. There was an amp still on stage, but
I considered it a sacrifice to the mob; we didn’t have time to be concerning
ourselves with it if we wanted to get out of there alive.

The house was like a maze of horrors, filled with rotten food, terrible
smells, and strange, horrific posters on the wall of men screaming with white
face paint. Luckily there didn’t seem to be anyone left in the house except for
a single guy passed out on the couch. The front lawn however, was a different
story. There were people rioting out there, one girl on top of a guy beating
his face to a bloody pulp. It was horrific and surreal; I looked back at Martin
to see if he was okay, but he looked more bewildered than I was.

“Come on,” I said, gripping his hand in mine and running towards the van
where the guys were tossing their stuff into the van. Some guy approached Nick
with a switchblade, a maniacal look on his bloodied up face. All the air in my
body escaped in a split second. I was too horrified to scream. It was like
everything was swimming in water as the punk extended his right arm, the dull
gray blade shooting out in front of him towards Nick’s abdominals.

I was sure he was a dead man standing. I was about to watch a man die,
and nothing was going through my mind except a panicked, ‘No!’

But in the nanosecond before the blade jabbed through Nick’s stomach, he
held up a hand and the guy froze momentarily, before flying back in the air,
ten feet or so before falling with a thud onto the street at the feet of a
middle-aged woman with curlers in her hair, screaming into her cell phone.

I was paralyzed with fear and confusion, and probably would have continued
to stand there and gawk if it weren’t for Martin, who was tugging at my hand
and pulling me away from a six-foot-tall girl with a Mohawk, coming at me with
an insane grin.

“Come on!” he said, pulling me towards the van. He ripped the guitar
case from my grasp and threw it on the floor of the van before pushing me in.
The doors slammed around me in a series of loud bangs, but I could hardly
notice a thing except for my insane shivering as Nick backed up the car and
drove away, a wailing siren and bright red lights passing by us as the van
dipped down the hill back onto a main road.

“What the hell was that?” Martin barked, snapping me out my daze.

No one said anything for a moment. I turned around to look at Brandon,
whose lips were closed into a single line. Clearly, he knew something I didn’t.
And I suspected that Nick and Trent did too.

You know, because Trent can turn into a wolf and Nick just propelled
someone back into the air several yards with a mere wave of his hand.

When still no one said anything, I decided it was my turn to badger
something out of them.

“I saw what you did Nick. We both did. Are you a—”

“No,” Nick said quickly and firmly, looking at me through the rearview
mirror.

“Are you a what?” Martin asked, a desperate anger in his voice. He
sounded hysterical. “What the fuck is going on guys? I just blacked out and
came too with my hands around Trent’s neck, there was a crazy punk rock riot
going on that would have put Sid Vicious to shame, and I swear to God I saw
someone fly through the air! You’re not going to tell me that wasn’t nuts?”

“It was nuts,” Brandon sighed behind us. “We can’t keep this many
secrets anymore, Nick,” he said, something soft in his voice that I wasn’t
expecting. “At this point, it’s dangerous.”

Nick didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he exhaled a long and steady
breath. “Fine. But I need to park somewhere.”

“There’s an empty parking lot right there,” Martin said, pointing to his
left. His jaw was tense, and I could see how aggravated he was. It took a lot
to aggravate him, he was normally so good natured.

Nick pulled the car into a sketchy, half-empty parking lot for a bowling
alley and a Dollar General.

“Don’t I have any say in this?” Trent grumbled.

“You know this isn’t up to you,” Brandon snapped.

“Guys,” Nick said. He sounded tired. They both became quiet. “Bailey,
Martin…there’s a lot you don’t understand about us.” He paused. I looked to
Martin, who seemed perplexed and nervous. “We have secrets that you might not
be willing to believe…that might compromise our friendships. But we have to be
honest, because at this point you’re going to have to make some decisions for
yourselves. And it may be wise for you guys to distance yourselves from us.”

“What the fuck is all this cryptic nonsense?” Martin growled, his fists
balled up at his side.

“Like I said, you probably won’t believe me. But there’s a whole other
world that you’re not aware of. We try to keep it secret from people like
you—”

“People like me?” Martin spat.

“Shhh,” I said, taking his tense hand and giving him a reassuring look,
even though I could feel the fear thundering through me. It all sounded crazy
and ridiculous, but I knew Martin was in the same position I was; even though
we couldn’t outright accept these strange things, we couldn’t dismiss them
either. We had seen and felt too much of something otherworldly.

“People who are truly human. Who aren’t corrupted,” Nick paused, and
Trent cleared his throat in the way he did when he was nervous. If this was
some kind of a joke, they were all incredible actors, that was for sure.

“Martin, Trent was that wolf you saw the other night.”

The information hung in the air, and Martin said nothing, his lips tense
and his eyes shrewd. I watched his face, somehow nervous for Trent.

“Brandon and Trent are shifters. They’re what you’d think of as
werewolves, except that emotion rules their transformation almost as much as,
if not more than, the full moon.”

“And you? What the fuck are you supposed to be? A goddamn fairy?” Martin
spat.

“No. I’m…a demon.”

A shiver ran down my spine at the ludicrous assertion. ‘
A demon?
’
I thought. ‘
That sounds so heavy
.’

Martin snorted. Still, something in my eyes told me he didn’t entirely
dismiss it. “So what, you’re from hell? You used the power of the
devil
to throw someone in the air?”

“Martin…” I said, but he ripped his hand away from mine. I could see
that he was trembling as well.

“No Bailey, it’s okay. I am from hell. It’s the unfortunate truth,”
there was something tender in his tone. I hadn’t heard Nick speak so much in my
life, but he was breaking my heart now with the sad tune that sang through his
words.

“But my powers don’t come from hell. The come from another place. Akia,
or, The Other Realm. I know it’s a lot to take in, but I’m here as Brandon and
Trent’s guardian. I’m here to protect you and everyone they interact with from
corrupted magic. And clearly, someone is after them. It may be best if we
called this whole tour off.”

“So you expect me to believe that you have some satanic powers and that
you’re from hell, but you want what’s best for us? Did
you
make me
attack Trent?” Martin spat viciously.

“Hey!” Trent growled, whipping around to look at Martin. His gaze was
fierce, and I saw that horrific wolfish look on his face as he snarled. “Nick
saved your life. I don’t care if you don’t believe a word he says but it’s the
truth.”

Martin didn’t say anything. The information was spinning in my brain,
and I was having a hard time keeping any of it straight.

“So…Marie. Was she controlling Martin? Is she…is she a demon
too?”
“She was controlling Martin, but it’s unlikely that she’s a demon.
If she is, it isn’t the way in which I’m one—meaning, she isn’t a
guardian. But she was most likely a witch or a nymph.”

“So…what other ways can you be a demon?” I said, still not entirely
believing, but curious as to how elaborate this potential fiction was.

“Well,” Nick turned to face us for the first time. I studied his face to
see if he believed what he was saying. He looked dead serious. “I’m here as a
guardian to redeem my soul. I’m looking for second chance in the afterlife.
That’s why I’m here, to protect people like Trent and Brandon—they were
born human but have been corrupted in ways that can lead them to harm others
and themselves. But of course, there are demons who don’t want to be redeemed.
They act on behalf of hell, Hades, whatever you want to call it. Some are even
rogue, acting on their own free will.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt invigorated, like I had a
little too much coffee and I was sitting on the edge, just a little too close
to discomfort.

“It’s a lot to take in, and I don’t expect you guys to completely
believe us either. But it is my responsibility to do what’s best for you. And
you both need to decide for yourselves if you want to call this tour off,
because I can’t explain all that’s been happening lately. I really don’t know
if your lives are in danger.”

Everyone in the car went silent. A woman walked by, scolding her child
as he wailed. I watched them, a little envious of their dilemma. Part of me
didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to deal with trying to make sense of all of
this.