K Stewart - A Shot in the Dark

“Any luck?” A bandaged Cole found me pacing through the ER. It looked like he’d gotten away without any stitches. “I see that Nurse Ratched got her hands on you too.” He nodded toward my own lovely collection of gauze and tape.

“Mmph.” Cole’s wife wasn’t answering either. Oddly, that made me feel better. Steph and Mira were probably out together, doing some girl-bonding thing now that the kids were all in school during the day. They were… getting their hair done. Or… maybe catching a movie. What do women do when we’re gone? Hell, they could be having an orgy with oiled-up cabana boys, and I don’t think I’d care so long as they were safe.

All I was doing was running Cole’s battery down too, and I finally forced myself to give up, flopping in the nearest chair. I yanked the hair tie out of my ponytail in sheer frustration, and grimaced when I realized how much foulness I had in my formerly blond hair. This vacation had most definitely not gone as planned.

“So. Wanna bet this is the last official Colorado paintball trip?” My little brother flopped beside me, the pair of us looking like matching bookends.

I snorted. “Ya think? I’ll be lucky if anyone on this trip speaks to me at all after we get home.”

“It’s not that bad, big brother.” I gave him a look, and he shrugged. “Nobody died.”

“Day’s not over yet.” Even if we could get Mira on the phone, I had to wonder if Cam would survive casting the spell to save Zane. This still had the potential to turn out all kinds of bad.

“Listen.” Cole leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “None of this is your fault.”

“Um… every single bit of this is my fault. If it weren’t for me, none of this would have happened.” I gestured to the entire ER, more than half the beds currently occupied by people who arrived with me. “Zane wouldn’t have been targeted. Cam wouldn’t be hurt. Marty.. . Christ, he didn’t sign up for any of this. Will either.”

My brother blew a long breath out his nose and shook his head. “Jess… Why did you tell Will and Marty about all this in the first place? Way back when, what made you confide in them, when you’ve hidden it from almost everyone else?”

What the hell kind of question was that? I blinked at him, perplexed.

“Humor me. Why’d you bring them into this?”

“Um… I guess, because I needed their help. I couldn’t do it alone.”

“Yeah, but you could have found someone else. You could have found armor and weapons somewhere, especially after Ivan surfaced. You could have found another doctor type. So why them?”

I had to really think about it. I didn’t recall consciously making the decision to tell my two best friends about my new calling in life. It just… happened. It never occurred to me not to. “I guess because they’re my friends. My best friends. Why wouldn’t I tell them?”

Cole nodded with a satisfied smirk. “Exactly. They’re your best friends. They’re not gonna ditch you over this.”

I just shrugged. Only time would tell, and honestly, I wouldn’t think ill of Marty and Will if they ran the other way screaming. If they were smart, they would.

“So what do we do now?” My brother leaned back in his chair again, stretching out his long legs.

“I don’t know. We need Mira to help Zane. Until then, there isn’t a lot we can do.” And I needed to get to the numbers in my phone. Viljo had to get the word out, warn people if it wasn’t already too late.

Viljo…

“Oh holy fuck.” I scrambled up out of the hard plastic chair, sending it across the sterile tile floor with an obnoxious screech. “Marty, I need your keys! Cole, can I steal your phone? I need the

Marty handed over his keys, but not without looking to my brother for confirmation first. That hurt a bit. Hurt even more when Cole held his phone just out of my reach. “Where are you going?”

“Can’t tell you, but I’ll be back in like five hours.” Hopefully. “If you guys manage to get Mira on the phone, have her call me on yours.”

“Why the hell can’t you tell me?” Unspoken in Cole’s question was the fact that, after all of this, I was keeping even more secrets? Really?

But what I’d managed to remember, slow study that I was, was that Viljo, dear, geeky Viljo, lived near Pikes Peak. Pikes Peak, which was barely two hours from where I stood at that very moment. And at all costs, no one else could know where the uber-dork was, ’cause if they found him, they’d find Grapevine. And then they’d find all of Ivan’s champions, if they didn’t already know.

“Because anything I tell you, someone can take from you, probably involving horrific torture and a lovely vacation somewhere very hot. Glare at me all you want, little brother, but I’m not budging on this one.” The whole champion game had changed in the last year. I felt this to the core of my being. We-all of us champions-had tried to pretend like it hadn’t, tried to go on with business as usual. But it was the thing we never talked about, the demonic elephant in the room. Somehow, we puny humans had stumbled into something much bigger, and even if I didn’t know what it was yet, I could feel it looming near, like a rabbit in a hawk’s shadow. We had to take precautions, things we’d never dreamed of before. We had to cover our asses, which meant first and foremost protecting Grapevine.

Finally, Cole handed over his phone, but he wasn’t happy about it. I figured I was in for a lecture later.

I delayed my trip long enough that my buddies could grab their packs for anything essential. Pulling Cole aside one last time, I told him, “If anything goes wrong, do not let that big furry son of a bitch touch Zane. If he touches the kid, he’ll turn him into one of those things. At all costs, he can’t take the kid.” Cole nodded like he understood, and I took off, paintball marker in the seat beside me, aired up and loaded with holy ammo.

Driving Marty’s Suburban was like maneuvering a garbage barge after driving my little Mazda pickup, but I’d manage. I knew Viljo’s address, since we’d mailed him Mira’s dead computer earlier this summer, and I plugged that into Cole’s phone and pointed myself south.

The problem with long drives is that it gives the mind too much time to wander. Mine, of course, kept going back to the Yeti, and I scratched at the black marks on my skin a few times. It didn’t itch, really. It burned like hell, sinking in, but that passed quickly. Mostly, it was just the knowledge that it was there, y’know?

I made myself look straight ahead, trying to be a conscientious driver and all, but there was that insidious voice in the back of my head, the one that was whispering all the horrible crap that was going to happen to me. Pretty sure that going into a battle fully expecting to lose was a bad thing.

But I knew damn well that the last time I’d faced him, I’d been only lucky.

That wasn’t entirely true. I mean, I had skill, even back then. No brains, that’s for damn sure, but I could swing a blade. If I hadn’t been good, he’d have ripped me in half before I’d taken two steps.

The kicker was, that thing that cornered us up at the cabin, that wasn’t what I’d fought, last time. He was… bigger. Stronger. Just

… more. He couldn’t have handled his little zombie army, back then. Couldn’t have stood up to Axel, even if I had no idea who and what Axel really was. The Yeti was a thug, then, not a master.

Still, I’d been lucky.

It was my second challenge, ever. A local television reporter that Cole had known. Sold his soul for his fifteen minutes in the TV spotlight, I guess. He was dying, when Cole brought him to me. He actually passed away a few months after the fight.