The Havoc Chronicles (Book II): Unbound Read online

  Amy hesitated, but I grabbed her arm and began to steer her around the man. The sound of a click from behind brought us up short.

  “The man asked you a question,” said a raspy voice from behind. Amy let out a soft gasp as a second man stuck the barrel of a gun in my back. She looked up at me, her eyes bulging and terrified. As girls living outside of the city, this was the kind of situation we had been warned about our entire lives but never actually expected to encounter.

  I tried to turn around, but the man grabbed me by the back of the neck and steered me towards the alley. After the first moment of initial shock I became more annoyed than anything. I was a trained Berserker. I had fought Osadyn and hundreds of Bringers and come out with hardly a scratch – I didn’t count the fact that I had practically passed out from exhaustion afterwards. I could take out both of these creeps with nothing more than my thumb.

  The only thing that prevented me from ‘zerking right then and there was Amy. As a Berserker I was bullet proof – at least in theory, I hadn’t ever tested it out – but Amy wasn’t quite as durable. If I ‘zerked, the guy with the knife might hurt Amy out of panic. Also, I might have a hard time explaining to her the whole glowing freak thing.

  Behind me I heard Amy’s muffled squeal as the man with the knife dragged her along into the alley with us. The man with the gun shoved me up against a wall, and the man with the knife did the same to Amy.

  The man with a gun held me and Amy at gunpoint, while the man with the knife retrieved a paper bag and pulled out a roll of duct tape. He placed it over our mouths and bound our hands behind our backs.

  While this was happening, I took a closer look at the man with the gun. He seemed to be in his thirties with long brown hair and a scar on his neck almost like a gruesome necklace. He wore jeans with a dark sweater.

  But the thing that struck me the most was his eyes. Cold and hard, they showed neither mercy nor pity. His mouth was turned up into a smile – the sick creep was enjoying this.

  He noticed me watching and leered at me, licking his lips in hopes of frightening me. And if I were a normal girl it almost certainly would have worked. But I was anything but normal. I gave him my best flat stare to show him that I would not be intimidated.

  “Oh, you are a feisty one,” he said walking closer to me. “This is going to be fun.”

  While he was distracted with me, Amy had been scooting closer to the mouth of the alley. Her mouth was taped and her hands were bound, but her legs were still free. When the man with the gun moved towards me, she took the opportunity to run.

  The man with the knife swore and ran after her, catching her before she could get to the end of the alley. He hit her on the back of the head with the handle of his knife and she dropped to the ground in a heap.

  Only the tape prevented me from screaming. Seeing Amy collapse to the ground I felt hot anger rush through me. My kind, innocent Amy had been assaulted and who knew what kind of damage it had caused?

  The ‘zerk came easily, and I embraced the power. The alley lit up with my glow, and I ripped through the duct tape like tissue paper.

  Both men goggled at me, taking several steps back. The one with the gun raised it and shot me.

  The bullet hit me in the shoulder, but I hardly felt the impact. It punched a hole in my blouse, but then crumpled against my skin and fell to ground with a ping.

  Both men turned around and ran for the alley exit, but they might as well have been moving in slow motion. With ease I raced ahead of them and cut them off from leaving the alley. They scrambled to stop before reaching me, then turned around and ran back the other way, hoping to escape out the back. I picked up a massive dumpster and tossed it past them so that it landed with a metallic crash in their path, spewing garbage everywhere. Frantically, they began climbing the dumpster and were almost over the top by the time I got there.

  I grabbed them by the backs of their clothing and lifted them up in the air, one in each hand. For a moment I was so angry that I was tempted to smash them into the walls. Wasn’t death an appropriate punishment for scum like this? Who knew how many other girls they had attacked?

  I turned them towards me and looked up into their faces. The malice and confidence were gone, replaced by simple abject terror. Terror of me – of what I might do to them.

  “Please don’t kill me,” said the man who had had the knife. He didn’t have it any longer. Tears ran down his face, and he was practically blubbering. The other man was looking to the sky and muttering what sounded like a prayer under his breath.

  From behind me I heard a moan, and looked back to see Amy beginning to move. Knowing that she was alive and about to regain consciousness, I moved quickly. I slammed the two men together – not nearly as hard as I wanted to – and then dropped them to the ground. I didn’t know if they were unconscious or simply playing dead, and to be honest I didn’t really care.

  I reached up and pulled down the fire escape. Not the ladder - the entire fire escape. It ripped from the building in mostly one piece, breaking where it had been bolted in. Working as fast as only a Berserker could, I twisted the metal pieces together to create a cage and placed it on top of the two men. I placed the dumpster on top of the cage to be sure they couldn’t lift it up. I took one of the leftover metal bars and scratched the word “rapists” into the cement in front of my makeshift cage. Let’s see what the police made of that when they were found.

  I ripped off the tape, and scooped Amy’s limp body in my arms, ready to run from there as quickly as I could. I needed to get Amy to a hospital and have her checked out. But before I had taken more than a few steps, I felt a nearby Berserker moving towards me.

  Up ahead I saw a bright glow hurtling through the fog. I recognized the figure at once – who else could it have been? Rhys stopped in front of me, his varé drawn and at the ready, his eyes trying to look everywhere at once. With the glow surrounding him, he was breathtaking. A vision of male perfection – deadly, beautiful, and – what was he doing here?

  “Were you following me?” I demanded. It was the only way he could have arrived so quickly. Berserkers were fast, but he wouldn’t be here yet unless he had been lurking nearby.

  In an instant, Rhys switched from alpha predator searching for quarry, to hunted prey on the defensive. His eyes met mine, and an expression of embarrassed discomfort crossed his face. He looked like the proverbial little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  “Not exactly,” he said, but the tone of his voice made it clear that I had it exactly right.

  “Did my dad put you up to this?”

  Rhys took a step back and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. A gesture that looked especially strange when done by a glowing Berserker carrying a weapon. “No,” he said. “It was nothing like that. I came down here on my own.”

  “So, you didn’t think I could take care of myself?” Given what had just happened, this was kind of an unfair accusation, but the truth was that I was not too happy at the moment.

  Amy stirred in my arms, turning my attention back to the situation at hand.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” I said, and then filled him in on what had happened.

  As I spoke, Rhys’ eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. He understood what those two had been planning as well as I did.

  “How badly is Amy hurt?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was going to take her to a hospital and get some help.”

  Rhys took in a deep breath. I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was – that taking Amy into the hospital would bring up a whole lot of awkward questions. “Amy’s health is the number one priority right now,” he said. “Get her to a hospital as quickly as you can.” He looked past me into the alley where the two men were caged. “I need a moment to visit these two gentlemen.”

  I didn’t know what Rhys intended to do, but from the look of calculated determination on his face, it wouldn’t be pleasant.

  I had no problem with that.

  As I ran I tried to avoid populated areas, but I only had a vague idea of the general direction I needed to go, and so I accidentally passed a few startled pedestrians. I simply kept going since there was nothing I could do about it right now.

  But before I could find a hospital, Amy’s movements became stronger and she started to wake up. I changed from a full ‘zerk to the less powerful, but more importantly, less glowy pre-zerk.

  Amy immediately started thrashing. “Let me go!” she yelled. “Get off me!”

  I slowed to a stop. “Hey, Amy, it’s me,” I said. “You’re safe.” I gently set her down on her feet, making sure she was completely steady before I let go. She frantically looked around in every direction before finally taking a deep shuddering breath and bursting into tears.

  “Shhhh,” I said, pulling her into a hug in an attempt to comfort her and calm her down. “We’re fine. They aren’t coming after us.”

  For several minutes Amy continued to sob into my shoulder until she had finally cried herself out and pulled back wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “Why are we not dead?” she asked. “How did we get away?” She reached up and winced as she rubbed the back of her head where the man had hit her.

  I really wanted to tell her the truth, but I knew that wouldn’t go over very well with Dad and the Berserkers. I would have to go with a combination of vagueness and complete lies.

  “You started to sneak away and the guy with the knife hit you on the head,” I said.

  “Yeah, I remember that far,” said Amy. “Next thing I knew you were carrying me. It’s the in between that’s blank.”

  It was time for some quick thinking. I took a deep breath. “I screamed after you were hit, and then I heard someone yelling asking what was wrong. I heard footsteps running towards us and the two men got scared and ran out of the alley. I wasn’t going to wait for them to come back, so I picked you up and ran in the opposite direction. That’s when you woke up.” During my explanation, Amy had stared at the ground in an unfocused way that made me nervous. She had been hit in the head and who knew what kind of damage that had done. I lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. “I think we need to get you to a hospital and get your head checked out.”

  Amy shook her head. “No, I’m fine. Look, I don’t have any slurred speech, headache, vomiting, or spontaneous combustion.” She smiled at me. “I don’t have a concussion, but if it will make you feel better, I promise I’ll let my mom look at me when we get home.”

  I hesitated. Amy’s Mom was a nurse and Amy often spouted off obscure medical facts she had learned. Now that she had snapped out of the initial shock she seemed to be fine, but what did I know? It’s not like I was a medical professional.

  “You promise you’ll let her look you over?” I asked.

  “Promise,” she said, her face a mask of seriousness. She held up her hand in the Boy Scout sign. “Scout’s honor.”

  Amy could only keep a straight face for so long, and she burst out laughing. It wasn’t her usual laugh and there was a bit of a hysterical edge to it that worried me, but after a moment I couldn’t help it and joined in. Together we laughed long and hard, tears streaming down our faces. The joke wasn’t very funny, but the laughter felt wonderful – some of the tension of the night easing out of us.

  Eventually our laughter subsided, occasionally erupting in a short burst of giggles. I could tell now that Amy would be okay, and I was grateful for that – it had been a close call. But as we walked back to the car, I had the strong feeling – or maybe it was more of an impression – that the consequences of what had happened tonight were not over. I shuddered as the feeling came over me, desperately hoping it was just my over-active imagination.

  I could not have been more wrong.

  Chapter 2

  Haze

  I awoke the next day with a sick knot of apprehension in my stomach. When I had arrived home last night I told Dad what had happened and he had reacted with typical parental horror, telling me that I was never allowed to go downtown by myself again. That lasted until I ‘zerked and lifted his chair, with him still in it, above my head.

  He got the point.

  Still, the fact was that I – in all my glowing splendor – had been seen by several unknown pedestrians and had ripped down an entire fire escape last night. Something was likely to end up on the news. Not an ideal situation.

  Sure enough, when I went down for breakfast my dad had the TV on to the local news and the DVR paused on the story of two men found in a cage.

  The reporter explained that a passerby found them around 5:00 am and alerted the police. The men were actually still in the cage. The rescue team was awaiting a portable crane to lift the dumpster off because they feared cutting the bars might cause the structure to collapse, crushing the men beneath.

  “But the really strange part about all this,” said the reporter. “Is that these men claim to have been trapped here by a glowing girl with some sort of super powers.”

  The camera switched to the cage, which was surrounded by policemen, paramedics, and firefighters. All I could really see was the dumpster on top of the cage.

  “The officer who first arrived on the scene also saw this.” They flashed a picture of the word “Rapists” I had scratched into the cement. “While neither man would provide ID to the police, we are now hearing reports that both of them are confessing to several assaults and are actually asking to be locked up.”

  Dad turned off the TV and turned to face me. “You do realize what a mess this is, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, but when he hit Amy, I snapped.” Well, I was kind of sorry. I was sorry it was getting so much publicity, but I was not sorry for what I put those scum through. Looking back I actually wished I had done more, or at least been a bit more creative about terrorizing them.

  I wondered what Rhys had done to them to make them so eager to confess.

  When Rhys stopped by for lessons later that day, the concern in his eyes was easy to read, but I wasn’t letting him off that easily.

  “So?” I said, once we were alone in the practice room. I folded my arms and waited for a reply.

  Rhys met my gaze head-on without flinching. Finally after a moment, he looked away. “Okay,” he said. “I was following you.”

  “Why?”

  Rhys threw up his arms in exasperation. “Why? After what happened last night you are really asking me why?”

  “I see, so you knew in advance that Amy and I were going to be assaulted? Do Berserkers have some sort of precognitive powers that I’m not aware of?”

  “Look, it’s not like that,” said Rhys.

  “Then tell me what it is like.”

  “Obviously I didn’t think you and Amy would be attacked. But I was still worried for your safety.”

  “But why?” I asked. “What were you worried about?”

  “Osadyn,” said Rhys. “I know he’s gone for now, but Shing, Aata, and Eric have had no success in tracking him down. That means he’s on the move. Which means he could easily show up, capture you, and be gone before we even knew he was there.” He looked at the ground. “It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened like that.”

  “That still doesn’t give you the right to follow me,” I said. I knew he had only been trying to protect me, but I was furious he’d done it behind my back.

  With a sigh, Rhys opened the little refrigerator we kept in the practice room and pulled out a bottle of water. “I kept as far away from you as I could,” he said. “All I wanted to do was be close enough to feel you ‘zerk if you were in danger. That’s a pretty big range. I figured if I hung around in the same general area, it would be enough.” He took a drink and set it down on a table. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have followed you without your permission.”

  And with that, my annoyance drained away. Yeah, I didn’t like what he had done, but I really liked the fact that he could admit when he was wrong. That was a trait that seemed to be in short supply in the male gender – or maybe it was something that just took a hundred years to develop.

  I smiled. “Thanks. That means a lot to me.”

  Rhys nodded and looked relieved. “How are you?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Fine, I suppose. Dad’s not too pleased about the news reports, but there’s not much I can do about it right now.”

  “I’m not worried about your Dad’s reaction,” said Rhys. “How are you? I know you’ve got power and can’t really be hurt by humans, but these kinds of experiences do more than just physical damage.” He took my hands and looked deeply into my eyes. I knew he was waiting for an answer, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the feel of his hands on mine and the overwhelming wish that he would pull me in closer.

  But our moment was just that – a moment. He gave my hands a last squeeze and let go, breaking our connection. I fixed the moment in my mind, memorizing all the details before they faded so that I could recall it later. Who knew when something like this might happen again?

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Madison?” he asked.

  The truth was that I was more worried about Amy than myself. I was fine. I didn’t have nightmares or difficulty sleeping. Amy, however, wasn’t returning my calls. “Honestly, I’m fine,” I said. “I’m more worried about Amy’s reaction than mine. It was strange, the only fear I felt was that Amy might get hurt. I guess after fighting Osadyn and a rushing ocean of Bringers, fighting a couple of thugs seems a bit anti-climactic.”

  Rhys looked at me skeptically, clearly not believing that I could be that nonchalant about the situation. Given how protective he and my dad were, likely the only thing that would convince them that I was fine was time.

  “One last question,” I said. “What did you do to the guys after I left with Amy?”