Chapter 49: Helena

She hated how calm she felt suddenly, how much slower the world moved as the tips of Daniel’s fingers pressed into the tendons of her neck. Everything had been turned on its head since the start of this nightmare and the idea of it all ending right here and now released her in a terrible, exquisite fashion. Let the voices in her head go quiet, let the screaming trauma she already sensed building trenches in her mind disintegrate into dust. Being alive was going to be too hard if she managed to survive. How much peace could she know after living through this?

But when she saw Ryan’s face, beads of sweat puddling across it and ridges forming in his tightly concerned brow, she wanted to make it to the other side. She wanted to leave this nightmare behind and keep her eyes on the future she had always assumed was out there for her. Daniel’s grip only reminded her of how much more she had wanted at one point, how much more there would be if she took Ryan’s hand and they bolted into the sunset like old timey cowboys.

Daniel fumbled in his odd backwards waddle towards the door, past Ryan, over the threshold till they were outside in the pastels of the headlands at twilight. There was no charge in Daniel’s hands like when Troy was tracing his fingers across her body. Whether or not Daniel wanted to sink his body into hers, at that moment he only needed her as a tool to make his escape, as a buffer to force Ryan to hold his distance.

“You trashed the van,” he muttered once they were outside. “Too bad for you. That just means we’ll have to walk.”

The in-between light played tricks with form and shadows. Helena saw creatures on all fours bent over dark shapes on the lawn. As they stepped off the stoop, she spotted a mangled version of what might have been Troy; the twilight version of himself, a trick of shadows transiting from one form to another. The creatures by the bluff’s edge raised their heads to alertness when they spotted Daniel and Helena making tracks away from the house.

“Don’t you two come anywhere near me,” Daniel warned. “I’ll kill this bitch without thinking. You know I will.”

The two shifters held their positions. One of them lowered his head and growled. Daniel was unperturbed. His fingers pressing in, he continued to pull Helena towards the woods.

A distant sound of paws hitting the hard ground turned everyone’s attention to a third shifter bounding towards them at a breakneck speed. The wolf lunged at the first two, its mouth wide open and catching one of them by the throat. Helena felt Daniel’s hand go slack as he observed the scene so she took her chance to elbow him in the stomach as hard as she could. Daniel sputtered from the hit and released her but only momentarily. He was grasping at her again before she could get away, snagging her by her clothing and yanking her backwards.

The shifter not under attack bolted forward and landed hard against Daniel’s body. He flipped onto his back, yanking Helena down with him but unable to keep his grip on her. Helena watched as the shifter ripped into him, Daniel screaming as chunks of his flesh came off with each bite.

Helena scrambled to her feet and scanned the vista for a place to run, to hide, to wait this all out if that was the only option. The shifter who had been attacking the others noticed Daniel under duress and bounced from one wolf to the other. They tumbled together in a blur of brown and gray fur.

Daniel panted into the cooling night air. His face was streaked in blood and he held one arm against his body as if cradling a baby. The moans emanating from him were other worldly; he was in a state of pain he as a human could never comprehend.

Ryan burst out onto the stoop and started towards Helena but the attacking shifter turned at the sight of him. Its head lowered and it became a bullet of animal flesh, moving through the encroaching night fluidly, silently.

“Isla!” Mia’s voice punctured the chaos. It rang out between the trees, unshaken in its power. “Isla, your fight is with me.”

She stood barefoot on the grass, human in one moment then twisting into her second form in front of everyone’s eyes. Isla in her wolf shape seemed to be grinning as if this was bigger than the rest of them realized; this was what she always knew it would come down to.

Mia’s clothes tore off her body. Fully feral, she started towards Isla at top speed. Isla growled, howled, made all sorts of shifter war cries then bounded away from her current fight, leaping at Mia and colliding with her in midair. The two transformed into a sirocco of teeth and snarls, of white froth capped mouths. Helena couldn’t tell them apart and as one of them closed her jaws tight to the other’s throat, she prayed that Mia was the victor.

The shifter clamped in place by the teeth wriggled like a fish, extending all four legs in a desperate and futile attempt to scratch her way out. Blood ran dark down her fur. The winning shifter shook her harder, listening to the doglike whine when she did. A mournful mini howl was spit upward into the night, and she was dropped to the grass, injured and whimpering.

Helena hadn’t moved from her spot, afraid that if she was noticed by anyone that would be the end of her. The shifter began to limp her way but then she beelined towards the unconscious body of Troy right by the concrete steps. Ryan was frozen in place as well, and Helena wondered if he knew how to tell any of Troy’s pack members apart once they were in their animal form. Was this creature dragging her leg and breathing hard ready to fight more of them or was she done with it all, tired of how she had been living and what she had been reduced to?

The shifter sniffed at Troy’s neck then raised her eyes to look at Helena. There was something in them that was past the point of familiarity. Even from the distance apart, Helena saw her own reflection in those infinitely dark pupils. The shifter growled from down inside her bowels then sank her teeth into Troy’s throat, tearing the flesh of it into crimson shreds.

Helena wanted to look away but couldn’t. She wanted to run but couldn’t. There was no rising nausea in her guts, billing burning at the back of her throat and threatening to burst into the open air. The numbness returned, the one she had fallen into after Troy and the others killed her father; the numbness that dulled even the most basic of her instincts like wanting to stay alive.

Ryan took the chance and slipped past the shifter as she tore Troy apart. He crouched down in front of Helena, putting his hands on either side of her face. Helena saw his lips moving, saw the frantic concern and timid relief in his eyes but everything sounded like static to her. Like white noise from a channel on the TV where no signal came through.

“Are you ok? Are you ok?”

Muted, each word soaked up by the turbulence around her, lost somewhere in her ear canal, never coming through at full volume. Ryan was repeating himself, she saw his mouth making shapes over and over again.

“Are you ok? Are you ok?”

She blinked at him, staring at him as if he was a stranger, someone unfamiliar to her whose face she could almost place.

“Helena!”

Hearing her name cut through the shock. She inhaled in intervals, her lungs unable to take it all in at once.

“Ryan,” she managed to say, feeling a tremor convulse through her, shudder every part of her without her consent. “This was a terrible plan.”

“I wish we had a better one.”

Helena turned her focus to over his shoulder. Daniel was half alive on the lawn, his eyelids fluttering spastically. Next to him, the naked shape of Isla was curled up like a question mark. Slashes decorated her back and shoulders, weeping blood along her spine and onto the grass. The sun was almost fully set; in the near dark, the blood was vicious ebony. A hateful, vindictive color.

By the bluff’s edge, another body was sprawled on its back, naked and marked up. Helena’s eyes couldn’t latch onto much of anything at the moment but she lifted her arm and pointed at it until Ryan turned to see what it was.

“Stay here,” he told her. He started to cross the lawn but halted when he saw the winning shifter hunching into position, slipping back into humanhood.

Mia appeared out of the fur and fierceness, her hard expression gone liquid. Troy’s body drained its fluid at her feet. Around her the rest of the pack hung in limbo or were rapidly dropping off into the beyond. All she did when Ryan crossed her path was watch him, inert and blank.

“He shouldn’t have ever gotten involved with your father,” Mia told Helena. She wasn’t looking at anything in particular. The treeline, the lawn, the corpses of people she must have once thought of as family. “We told him it was a bad idea to get too deep in with humans.”

“I wish he had stayed the fuck away from me in general,” Helena answered.

The moment it left her lips, she wished she had said something to Mia about how sorry she was for all that happened but she wasn’t and there was no way Mia would believe her. Nothing that had taken place actually had to do with her. She had spent the past week reacting to other people’s mistakes and being used for other people’s purposes. Her father had seen her as collateral and Troy had seen her as a way to settle a debt. To hell with any of them, even pathetic and weak-willed Isla currently bleeding out on the lawn. The only one Helena had any sympathy for was standing naked in front of her, nothing readable across the features of her face.

Ryan was crouched down the body, his shoulders shaking. A sensation like her stomach was falling through space overtook Helena. Finally, the churning rose properly inside of her, and she got herself to her knees just in time to vomit what little contents her stomach had all over the grass in front of her.