Bloodback Read online

  Bloodback

  An EVER THE HERO Novella

  Darby Harn

  Copyright © 2020 Darby Harn. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover and interior art by Alia Hess. www.cultofsasha.com

  Fair Play Books

  www.darbyharn.com

  First Edition

  Please leave your review on Amazon and at Goodreads. Thank you for your support!

  To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul.

  – Aldo Leopold

  For Polly,

  the wolf of Williamsburg.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Original Siski Sketch

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Darby Harn

  COMING FALL 2020

  Excerpt

  One

  The sky bruises over The Derelicts. I didn’t know what to expect when I started defending the city a few months ago, but I figured full moons would mean less criminal activity.

  So far, my most effective super power is being wrong.

  The thief runs through the wreck of the alien ship. I hold my position, hovering in the air above. Used to be I put on a big light show and scared the daylights out of them soon as they snuck in through the breached hull. That got old. Now, I let the ship do the work for me. A gauntlet of maroon shards scarps the strange cave of the ship. Bird bones crunch under his boots, hard as rocks. Never a good idea to run here. A gasp caroms around the gutted candle of the interior as he trips and plunges headfirst into a narrow crevice of specious crystal.

  Lucky for him, it’s not that deep.

  The thief crawls his way out. Good on him. The object he risked so much to steal – a gleaming coil from the ship’s exposed circuitry – teeters on the edge. Blood leeches off the cut on his hand and spirals into the same magnetic confusion that doomed fifty years of birds. Crimson globules smear into ribbons around me, perched just above the crevice.

  “You’re going to scream now,” I say, and he does.

  He grabs the coil, and runs. Have it your way, then. I tug at the imperceptible folds in space and time rippling, stretching and tearing around the dormant but still powerful core of the ship, and duck behind one like it’s a curtain. I emerge below, on the crystal ridge right in front of the thief.

  “Wha – where did you come from?”

  “Let me show you,” I say, and pull him behind the curtain.

  His screams barely sound over the thunder. Mountains – maybe they’re planets, I can’t be sure of scale in the thick red haze enveloping the In Between – collide all around us. I grip the hood of the thief’s sweatshirt tight in my fist, careful not to let him go. The strange dimension the alien travelled through to arrive at Earth back in 1968 has no edge I can tell, but the tumbling chunk of glowing garnet we’re standing on does.

  “Had enough?”

  He keeps screaming.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” I say, and bring us out of the In Between back to the cold, flat, sure ground of Break Pointe.

  The thief scrambles on all fours away from me, through drifts of snow right down into one of the countless craters scarring the no man’s land between the ship and the hundred foot concrete wall closing the crash site and old downtown off from the rest of the city. Not that it’s much better off. For the most part, the Quarantine Zone stays quarantined. People always try getting through the wall to knick the powerful, valuable alien tech on the other side, but since my success – I’ll be charitable with myself – everyone and their brother thinks they can find what I did. They can become what I have become.

  The thief gags, stranded somewhere between vomiting and crying. “What… what was that?”

  “A lesson,” I say, drifting over the edge of the crater, buoyed by the dynamic tension between my magnetic field and the earth’s. “Hand it over, or we go back.”

  He throws the power coil out of the crater, and it floats into orbit around me. “I don’t have any money. I don’t have any food. What am I supposed to do? You stole alien tech.”

  I made my living once the same as the thief, scavenging alien tech to sell on the black market. I remember the hollow rattle of my belly, the only motor that ran in the winter. The endless anxiety over where my next meal was coming from. Would I make rent? Have enough for Ma’s medication? Every day was starting over from the bottom of a hill I could never summit. My fear now is the same. The hunger, though. That’s different.

  “I did steal,” I say. “And look what it cost me.”

  I zip down the front of my leather jacket enough to show him a glimpse of the alien crystal burning in my chest. All these chancers think they’re going to find another Myriad lying in the ruins of the ship. This is the only one, right here. No one else can become the alien, though I don’t know that I have.

  I’m something between.

  The Ever, the sole occupant of the ship, was a faceless, unfathomable being of pure energy. They swept through the city in 1968, lassoing thousands with coils of alien power, acquiring their energy and living information.

  I’m not exactly down with that.

  Still, my energy fused with the alien’s. My knowledge. My identity. I should have never picked up that thing, but I did and now here I am. A warning to others, if nothing else.

  “Don’t come back here,” I say to the thief. “Ever.”

  He climbs out of the crater, indignant. “Weren’t you going to fix everything?”

  He walks away. To where? Where can he go? What can he do, but this? For decades, scrapping our disaster has been the only industry in Break Pointe. The city needs a new way. A new life. I’m going to find it. I have to, for any of this to make sense.

  I return to the ship, and float to the ringed deck encircling the core. The coil eases to the growing pile of thieved items I’ve recovered the last three months. I took from the ship. I keep giving back. This isn’t what it wants. Light writhes within the dark crystal of the core. Peaks and valleys prickle the surface, fluid between light and jewel, drawn along the interplay of magnetic lines between the core and the Myriad.

  The work must continue.

  I thought I’d come to some kind of accord with the alien, but the further I get from my old life, the further I get from me, the less sure I am. Nothing tangible exists in the ruins; only the ghosts of futures and pasts, starved for life.

  I just want to go home. Do nothing. Be normal, if I can. Eat some cookies. A smile cracks my lips. Another dimension. I start a text to Abi. Before I can send it, a vibration jolts through my hand. I hope it’s her, but it’s another alert. Another fire I have to put out in the frozen city. I swipe at my PEAL, and Vidette Rizzo appears on the screen, in a snowy field.

  “Vi? What’s wrong?”

  “There’s a body,” she says.

  Harvested corn stalks stab through the foot or so of snow in the field between two gutted townhouses on the south end of Shelley. Much of the neighborhood has gone back to fields and forest in the last half century. All my life, Break Pointe has felt stretched between the poles of nature and the cosmos, the past and the future, the island in limbo between. Our instincts confuse our common sense. Our purpose splinters, t
orn between the simple need to survive and the yearning to become more.

  “You found a body out here?” I say.

  Vidette walks with her arms locked, her body a shield against the bitter cold I don’t feel at all. “Kid came into the clinic tonight. Frostbite. He saw it out here.”

  Drizzled trails of glassy blood speckle the snow, shadowing a meandering trail of massive paw prints. “What was this?”

  “Over here.”

  Blackbirds peck at snow gone to rust. Hawks circle low and sure. The tracks lead to a giant rock just shy of the tree line, but then I realize it’s no rock. It’s the emaciated body of a coywolf. His yellow eyes open in shock. Bleeding Jesus. I think it’s a coywolf. I’ve never seen one so big.

  Vidette turns the wolf over, twice her size, like he’s a page out of a book. I grew up idolizing this woman, and yet sometimes I forget her extraordinary strength. For the most part, it’s hidden behind her kind nature and small stature.

  “We need to find out what happened to him and fast,” she says, “or we’re going to have a war on our hands.”

  I shake my head. “War?”

  Vidette’s hand trails from his snout, over his head and down the broad streak of red on his back. “All these years, I’ve only ever heard stories about them. You know what he is?”

  “A coywolf.”

  The animals never bothered me. I got used to them, prowling the ruins as I did, after living in The Derelicts for so long.

  Awe laces Vidette’s voice. “He’s not just a wolf. This fella here, he’s one of the Bloodbacks.”

  “Bloodbacks?”

  She smiles. “You didn’t think it was just people with powers, did you?”

  Two

  Living in The Derelicts, you don’t have much, but you’ve got legends in spades. Ghosts of the acquired. Giant Empowered rats living in the sewers, ruling over some subterranean kingdom. Something massive and strange, lurking out in the lake. Empowered wolves.

  “I thought they were stories,” I say.

  Vidette smiles. “Nothing is just a story here.”

  Out in the ruins, scavenging for alien tech I could sell, my biggest worry wasn’t someone else snatching a find out from under me. It was one of those big wolves people always whisper about snatching me up.

  “What did you call them? Bloodbacks?”

  “That’s what Professor Blackwood called them.”

  Across the river, the Blackwood Building glows like a trickle of melted moonlight frozen on the window of the sky. They have power over there. Food. Heat. Vidette likes to say she went into medicine because she got tired of breaking bones and wanted to set them. The truth is, she got tired of working for a company that put money ahead of human beings. Great Power owes everything to the ship, and the city, and the suffering so many of us still endure. Without it, they wouldn’t have their powers, their business, or their wealth. Rather than give a little back, they think we’re taking from them to ask them to be human.

  “What are their powers?”

  “I’m guessing you’ve got way more info in here…” Vidette taps her chest. “…than I can give you.”

  I access the trove of information I acquired from the GP mainframe. Tucked away deep in nested files are imaged documents going back to the 70s. Sightings of giant dogs in the city. Government studies on the environmental impacts of the crash. Vidette looks off toward the trees as I read. People do this as I absorb information. Something in my expression makes them uncomfortable, but I don’t know what; they never say. I never ask. I keep reading.

  Coywolves became common in Break Pointe after the ship crashed. Blackwood first identified the pack in 1980, when he discovered the bones of dead wolves in Brewster Park. He wasn’t sure how they had become Empowered; he was only sure by their enlarged skulls and evident intelligence that they were. Then, the bones disappeared. All traces of the wolves vanished from the city.

  I brush the claret streak down the wolves’ back. Long, coarse hairs shine electric red in the glower of this lantern in my chest. I trace the bones showing through his slack skin. “He was hungry. Desperate. Must have drove him out in the open.”

  Desperation doesn’t discriminate in The Derelicts.

  “I don’t think he died of starvation,” Vidette says.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Look at these bruises.” Vidette carefully combs through the tinsel-like fur on his side. Deep purple bruises lurk beneath. Offset lines of broken bones. “His ribs are broken. His jaw. Signs of internal bleeding. This is blunt force trauma.”

  “He was in a fight?”

  Blood trails behind him. There aren’t any other tracks. Shoeprints. This blood is his. Even weak and hungry, I can’t think of any other animal that could have done this. Certainly not a person.

  An ordinary one, anyways.

  “Someone did this,” I say. “Someone Empowered.”

  She grimaces. “This was a murder. And this is why I was talking about a war. He’s not the only wolf. The rest of them? Not going to be happy.”

  Whoever killed him had the ability to go toe to toe with a wolf the size of a small car. And they walked away. Few Empowered would have had the strength. Vidette. Lodestone. The Interdictor. If the killer is Empowered, they have to be with GP. Any representative of the company being in The Derelicts would violate the Empowered Registration Act; their sanction to use their powers ended when the city failed to pay its dues. A greater question still would be why anyone from GP would be in The Derelicts, or have any interest in the wolves.

  “We need to find out what happened,” I say.

  “I’ll do my best,” Vidette says, “But I’m not an expert in wolves. I’m certainly not a medical examiner.”

  “I’m not a detective.”

  Her nose wrinkles. “You’re kind of everything right now.”

  I could do with being everything, if I could be everywhere. At first, with Vi and Mike and The Uniform, we had a rotation. We had a team. Then The Uniform got court-martialed for defying orders during the battle, and went back to Washington. Vi spends most of her time in the mobile clinic, treating colds and frostbite and Mike can only do so much without any powers of his own. I patrol more. Robberies still go up. Muggings. Fights.

  Murders.

  “Let’s get him to the clinic,” Vidette says.

  “Wait.”

  I slip my glove off. I don’t know why. Light leeches out of my gossamer fingers into him. His hairs stand on end. His claws curl. The wolf’s entire body convulses as I touch his cold, bristly snout. No energy resides in him now. If I could give him mine. If I could make myself a battery, and warm this city. If I could just connect the dots, and make all of this work.

  I close his eyes.

  Time is a song, Verity Bridge says on the screen and Abi fakes a yawn. Here it comes. After a baroque bit of stretching, she wraps her arm around my shoulder. Months of this now. A match trying to light an ice cube. Her heart throbs through the magnetic ether, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm. Vines of energy shadow Abi’s fingers beneath the translucency of my skin, a cat chasing a point of light. Before, I wore a costume that contained this energy and insulated everyone from the hunger of the Myriad. I lost the suit in the Battle for Break Pointe. Hard thing to replace. Now it’s just me. My control. My focus.

  Abi makes it hard to focus.

  She teases the filaments across my blouse. Down to my navel. Back up to my heart. The Myriad flickers with anticipation. My body smolders.

  Here it comes.

  I pick a straggling kernel out of the bowl, and munch on it. The popcorn becomes energy, as water does, wine, the cookies Abi is always baking in the apartment. Nothing tastes the same. Nothing feels the same. Nothing feels safe. I want a glass of wine. A plate of cookies. Her skin on my lips. Between us isn’t the division of flesh, but a superficial scrim of atoms and molecules that collate their inherent energy into divergent strands. A touch, a snap, and I could unravel us both.

 
I zip up my jacket. “We can’t.”

  Abi snuggles closer to me in the loveseat, and lowers her voice. “We can. You can control this. You are right now.”

  A pointed Shh! slings past us.

  Back in the day, the first floor and basement of the Halfway Hotel had been a department store. Nothing much changes in The Derelicts, and down in the basement, the original wood paneling is still here. Display cases. The carpeting, though that could do with a change. All sorts of nooks and crannies for shelves and mannequins create space for something new, including a cozy little movie theater.

  Abi slides her hand, slick with butter, between my thighs. I pinch at the restriction of my jeans, tighter, warmer as Abi melts into me, lips against my ear, breath hot and soft. Light flutters through me. Sometimes I can’t tell if the urge to kiss Abi is the urge to acquire her. Those two desires have become entwined since my transformation.

  There’s no distinction.

  I squeeze her hand. I doubt the leather of my gloves is any kind of comfort. “Let’s watch the movie.”

  Her hand tugs on my zipper. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Just a kiss; but it’s never just a kiss with me. I fix on things. People. I disappear in them. Even before this happened to me, I had this need. This all-consuming hunger and I never knew what to do with it. I was all this want and feeling and emotion and I didn’t know how to process it. I didn’t know how to conduct any of it without overloading the system. So I buried it down deep. It was easy. I never met anyone who wanted, like I did.

  Until Abi.

  Life gushes right through her. Desire. All of it exists on the surface, and I want her. I need her to take all of this. To contain me. I want to be held within someone.