CITY OF WOLVES - The Awakening

Chapter 5 - The Alley

The Alley

He caught the door swinging shut on the club's back exit and shoved through it into a narrow alley slicked with rain, chasing a woman he'd known for ninety seconds because some instinct told him she was the only person in this whole tangled mess who might actually tell him the truth.

"Wait," he called into the dark. "Please, I just need five minutes—"

The alley was empty of silver dresses.

It was not empty of people.

Three men detached themselves from the shadows along the brick wall, unhurried, the kind of unhurried that comes from absolute confidence rather than calm. They spread out in a loose triangle, closing the alley's only exit behind Elias without seeming to move quickly at all.

The third stayed silent the whole time, arms loose at his sides, watching Elias with the patient stillness of someone who already knew exactly how this would end and felt no need to hurry toward it.

"Wrong door, reporter," the nearest one said. He was young, maybe younger than Elias, with a face that would have been unremarkable on a subway car and was deeply unsettling here, six feet away, blocking his only way out.

"I'm not looking for trouble," Elias said, backing a step and hitting brick. "I'm looking for two missing people. That's all. I'll walk away right now."

"You should have walked away three days ago." The second man's voice carried something underneath it, a low vibration Elias felt more than heard, like a truck engine idling a block away.

He glanced past them toward the alley mouth, gauging distance, gauging odds, the old journalist reflex of calculating an exit even as every other instinct told him there wasn't one.

Rain fell harder, drumming on the dumpster lids, and in the flare of a passing car's headlights through the alley mouth, Elias saw all three men's eyes catch the light the wrong way.

Not reflecting it like human eyes reflect light.

Igniting with it, gold and sudden, flashing bright as struck flint before fading back to ordinary brown, gone so fast he'd have doubted it entirely if his whole body hadn't already gone cold with the certainty that whatever these three men were, they were not, strictly speaking, men.

"I don't know what you are," Elias said, and hated how his voice shook on it, "but I'm going to walk out of this alley, and you're going to let me, because I haven't done anything to any of you."

The nearest man smiled, slow and without warmth, showing teeth that seemed, in the space of that smile, half a shade too sharp for an ordinary mouth. "You did something the moment you found that photograph," he said. "The moment doesn't undo itself just because you'd like it to."

The first punch came from a direction Elias never saw, and it dropped him to one knee with his ears ringing and copper flooding his mouth.

He'd covered war zones. He'd been in rooms with armed men before. Nothing in eleven years of reporting had prepared his body for the speed of the second man closing the distance, faster than anything should move on wet pavement in dress shoes, faster than Elias's mind could issue the command to run.

He swung blind and connected with something solid, bought himself half a second, used it to scramble backward toward the dumpster and whatever narrow gap might exist behind it.

Claws raked across his chest.

He knew, even as it happened, that the word claws was wrong, that human fingernails couldn't tear through a leather jacket and the shirt beneath it and the skin beneath that in one motion, but there was no other word his mind would offer him for the four parallel lines of fire that opened across his ribs.

He screamed and shoved himself through the gap behind the dumpster on pure animal reflex, squeezing through a space that scraped skin from both elbows, and burst out onto a cross street loud with traffic and ordinary human witnesses, people who would see three men beating a stranger and call the police, people whose presence he was gambling his life on.

It worked. The three didn't follow him into the light.

He ran six blocks without stopping, lungs burning, chest burning worse, until he finally collapsed against a bus shelter and ripped his ruined shirt open to look at the damage, bracing himself for something that would need a hospital, stitches, hours of paperwork he didn't have time for.

The wound was already closing.

A bus rattled past the shelter, its headlights sweeping briefly across his bare chest, and for a moment he thought he saw movement beneath the skin itself, some ripple that had no business existing in a human body, gone before he could be sure he hadn't imagined it.

He watched it happen, torn skin knitting itself shut in real time like film run backward, the pain fading to a dull ache even as the last visible gash sealed itself into a thin pink line that looked days old rather than minutes, and Elias sat in the bus shelter's fluorescent light shaking, staring at his own healed chest, understanding for the first time that whatever had happened to him in that alley had not ended when the men stopped chasing him.

A woman waiting for the bus glanced at his torn, bloodstained shirt and quickly looked away, tightening her coat around herself and stepping a few feet further down the platform. He didn't blame her. He wasn't sure, looking down at his own unmarked chest through the shredded fabric, that he entirely recognized himself either.