Nicholas Smith - Wolves

Then he grabbed a fistful of the boy’s shirt and pushed him up the stairs. They climbed for several minutes, the kid squawking and biting at him.

Voices rang out below.

X was starting to lose his patience when he saw they were almost at the top. He didn’t like using a hostage, especially a kid, but it was the best he could come up with on the fly.

They stopped at the next landing, and X grabbed the doorknob. He put a finger to his lips, and the gun barrel to the boy’s head.

That finally did the trick.

“Don’t make me hurt you, you little demon,” X said.

The kid’s lip curled, showing pointy yellow teeth. Voices and footfalls continued below them, and X twisted the knob. It clicked—locked—and the kid lunged, biting X on the arm.

“Son of a…!” X shouted, nostrils flaring in rage. The boy took a piece of his forearm with the bite. Unable to afford any more tolerance, X punched him in the side of the head.

The boy crumpled to the landing, out cold.

X looked down at his bleeding arm. The teeth had sunk deep. He should get the wound wrapped before he continued, but the voices and footsteps were getting closer.

Ripping a strip from his shirt, he tied it over the wound. The unconscious boy was heavier than he looked, but X still managed to give the door a kick that sent a brilliant jolt of pain through his wounded foot.

But he had been hurt far worse before. These were just inconvenient flesh wounds, and he needed something to help.

X propped the boy against the wall and pulled out one of his favorite remedies: an adrenaline shot he had recovered from the Sea Wolf before swimming out to the WaveRunner. He jammed it into his left leg and exhaled.

Then he raised the submachine gun and gave the door a solid piston kick. The rusted metal broke open. Sunlight exploded into the stairwell, momentarily dazzling his eyes.

When his vision cleared, he was gazing at the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. Trees rose toward the sky, their branches weighed down by ripening fruit. A pool of water sparkled between gardens of flowers and colorful foliage. Scents of fruit and nectar filled his nostrils.

But this wasn’t Eden, and it wasn’t God sitting on a throne amid the gardens—it was the devil in the flesh. Above him, a metal octopus the size of a boat hung from the bulkhead, its eight long arms reaching out in all directions.

A half-dozen warriors in armor contoured to resemble musculature came streaming out of the trees with spears and firearms leveled at X. He had time to grab the boy and pull him outside, using his flesh as a shield.

“Get back or I kill him!” X shouted.

The soldiers closed in, forming a phalanx around him. His finger moved to the trigger as the human noose tightened.

“X!” shouted a voice, followed by a familiar bark.

His eyes darted to a cage a few yards left of the throne.

“Get back!” X shouted again, firing a bullet into the sky. Then he pointed the gun at the king of the Cazadores .

“El Pulpo, I came for your other eye—and your head! But I’ll make you a deal. Free my friend and my dog, and I won’t kill anyone else. Refuse, and you’re all going to die.”

A robed man translated the message aloud. El Pulpo finally got off his bone seat, laughing so loudly the noise echoed off the metal walls.

The only other sound was the eerie clacking of jaws all around X. He swept the gun back and forth over the warriors.

Another voice shouted from across the platform. This one came from a cage to the right of the throne.

“Do what they say, Mr. Xavier!”

X squinted at a half-naked man standing inside the cage. The bearded figure yelled again.

“Don’t fight King Pulpo. You can’t beat him!”

The crackling voice sounded a lot like…

“ Rodger ?”

The boy in his arms had come to and was squirming in his grip. A Cazador soldier jabbed the air with his spear, advancing closer and closer.

Their king walked down the steps from his throne and used a key to open the cage where Miles and Magnolia were being held.

“Let me go!” she shouted, punching and kicking with little effect. Miles bit at his armored leg, but el Pulpo shook the dog off with ease.

“Don’t touch them!” X yelled, leveling the gun at the king. El Pulpo’s fighters shouted and stabbed the air with their spears, the tips coming within inches of X.

This was a battle he couldn’t win. He knew it, but he was willing to die if it meant giving Magnolia and Miles a chance. A chance he didn’t see…

The man in the brown robe walked through the gardens and stopped near the edge of the sparkling pool.

“My name is Imulah,” he said in perfect English, “and I am a servant to el Pulpo. My king remembers you and deeply respects your fighting skills. Normally, he wouldn’t offer such a thing, but he has a proposal for you.”

“Fuck him and his proposal,” X spat. “I have a policy of not making deals with cannibals.”

“I urge you to hear him out. Look around you. You don’t have any options.”

There’s always an option , X thought.

The Cazador king pulled Magnolia out of the cage and held a blade to her throat. Miles had a chain around his neck now, and el Pulpo snubbed a loop of it around one of the cage bars and planted his boot on the slack so the dog couldn’t move.

Okay, so maybe there weren’t any good options.

A dozen Cazador soldiers had him surrounded, and a glance over his shoulder revealed four more at the doorway behind him.

Some of the men were half naked, their bodies tattooed and pierced. Pointed yellow teeth gnashed and clicked together, and hungry eyes stared at his flesh as they waved axes and knives. Others wore the ceremonial armor and held long spears.

Memories surfaced of other battles that had seemed impossible: in Hades when he faced dozens of Sirens, or in the Florida swamps when a snake pulled him down into black water.

But back then, he had only his own life and Miles’ to worry about. Now he had Magnolia, Miles, and, apparently, Rodger, if his eyes and ears hadn’t deceived him.

For the first time in his life, X saw no possible way out of this—not one that ended in saving his friends, even if he should sacrifice himself.

“What’s the one-eyed freak proposing?” X asked Imulah.

“You will join the Cazadores . He needs men like you for expeditions to the dark world—men who can bring back treasures and able-bodied survivors and who know how to fight the deformed ones.”

Deformed ones? That must mean Sirens. So far, the idea of being a slave and fighting mutant beasts—and perhaps being obliged to eat them—sounded grim.

“And if I say yes?”

“Your friends can live and join the Cazadores , too.”

The boy squirmed, and X gripped him tighter until he whined and quit struggling.

“I joined them,” Imulah said. “They spared me, and in return I serve them. It’s not a bad offer.”

Serve…

X had been serving as a Hell Diver almost his entire life. But that service had always been his decision. It was not slavery.

El Pulpo smiled. X pictured blowing the top of his skull off with a squeeze of the trigger, but the fleeting satisfaction of taking his revenge wasn’t worth his friends’ lives.

“Lower your gun,” Imulah said. “Join us. You don’t have to die. I’ve met others like you, on expeditions where we plucked survivors out of hell holes. El Pulpo wasn’t always the commander and king of these people. They rescued him many years ago, from Ascension, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, when he was just a child. His ancestors were English.”