Bite: A Shifters of Theria Novel (30 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

FINAL HOURS IN LEMURIA

Before I take off into the woods for Lemuria, I make one final stop at Mert’s trailer. He takes a minute to answer the door after I knock. When he finally does, I immediately notice his red swollen eyes. He wipes them with the cuff of his shirt. He’s been crying.

“‘Livia. Y’ best be goin’, now.”

“Are you okay?” I ask. I quickly regret asking, realizing the stupidity of the question and the obviousness of his response.

“Yeah, why d’ y’ask?” That’s the one.

I wish I could tell him I’m going to make things better, but that would spoil the only half-assed plan I have. “I was about to leave when I realized I gave you the wrong card.” I hold out a similar black card that I stole from Freddie’s wallet.

“Did ya, now?” He takes the card and inspects it close to his face like my grandmother did when she forgot her reading glasses at home. He digs into his pocket and pulls out Porsha’s card. “Guess you’ll be wan’in’ this ‘n back, then?”

“Thanks, Mert.” I take the card, the tracking device, the Judas goat.

His big, sad, warm smile confirms my suicidal decision. Neither Freddie, nor Mert, nor Nicky, nor Mel, nor any gypsy in this caravan is going to die because of me. If someone’s going to die, it’s going to be me—or Carmine.

I don’t look back as I run into the forest, west, towards Lemuria. I keep running. I don’t stop. When I finally glance over my shoulder, the caravan is long gone; even the hum of the engines has faded into nothing. I’m hit by an anxious sensation. Reality. I’ve accepted the card of death, and now I’m alone. I’m headed to die alone in a strange place where no one knows my name. My death won’t matter. My life won’t have mattered, and nothing about it will have any impact on the future; a pebble that leaves no ripples as it’s thrown into the sea.

They say everyone dies twice: once when their heart stops beating, and once when their name is mentioned for the last time. Far away from the caravan now, I know I’ve already died once.

I accept death. Intentional ignorance overrides the burn in my legs. Pain suddenly seems so irrelevant; bowing to it seems almost comical.

I emerge from the forest before the city of Lemuria in under an hour, much quicker than Mert’s estimate.

Lemuria is a giant town; shocking to think that humans have no idea it even exists. Standing a mile from the perimeter, I can’t see the town’s end in either direction; it seems to go on and on, indefinitely. The roaring of chainsaws is loud at the forest’s edge. The mile hike between the tree line and the town is a minefield of thick tree stumps. Bears travel back and forth, pulling heavy stacks of timber.

The timber doesn’t even make it to the town’s towering core of smokestacks. Instead, it’s dropped off at the town’s perimeter where it’s immediately processed, cut, and distributed down the long line of cranes that form the town’s outer-shell. It’s almost like watching a time-lapse video. If you stop, you can watch the town expanding before your eyes.

When I reach Lemuria, the sun is in the center of the sky. Assuming Porsha keeps her word, and doesn’t check the location of her card until this evening, I have a few hours to carry out my plan before I’m killed.

Humans and therians aren’t so different, despite what therians seem to think. In my limited experience, I’ve noticed therians think rather poorly about humans. Call me a petty, ignorant human—anatomy aside, we’re no different. Unless you tell a therian you’re human, they’ll have no idea.

Therians see themselves as a more pure, more civilized race. Lemurians are a particularly proud people. Flags rise up from every second building. The statue of some important Lemurian is displayed prominently on every street corner. Men and women gleam with pride as they pass the statues and flags—and as they pass one another. Lemurians are constantly gleaming with pride. There is no place more perfect than Lemuria, no people better than Lemurians.

Mel was right—Lemurians are a bunch of stubborn bastards.

Perhaps Lemurians never look down their alleyways or wander towards their downtown core. If they did, they would see all of the drug dealers and prostitutes. They would see the homeless beggars fighting for scraps of food, and the wealthy businessmen hunched behind dumpsters, smoking crack with their lighters and rusted spoons. Lemuria was a dump, no different from Ilium.

The perfect place for me to thrive.

CHAPTER FORTY

A LATE NIGHT ARRIVAL

My busy day ends at a busy bar, at the center of the city’s industrial core. Crowds of men cycle through the place, in time with the nearby mill’s steam whistle. It seems like every working man in Lemuria ends his day with a few drinks. An eerie dread rolls over me as I take my seat. This could be the place that I die. I try not to react to every creaking of the bar door’s hinges, and every set of footsteps that passes behind me. Any second, I will feel cold steel press against the back of my head.

The strange sport playing on the television could be the final sight I ever see: a bunch of people sneaking through a forest with bows. From what I’ve gathered, they’re trying to shoot a bunch of flying turkeys. The roaring of the bar-goers, every time a player shoots a turkey, could be the last sound I ever hear.

The roaring is audible across the entire town when the game ends, a mixture of angry boos and fanatic cheers. In the street outside the bar, a crowd chants, “Treeskins! Treeskins! Treeskins!” The man sitting next to me slouches down and buries his face in his hands. “Fucking refs!” he mutters to himself, over and over. At one point, I hear him sobbing. I want to tell him to cheer up. If your favourite sports’ team losing is the worst of your problems, you’re doing alright. Maybe he’ll be around when Carmine blows my brains across the bar; maybe then he won’t feel so bad about the loss.

Following the game, the crowd thins out. Only a few drinkers remain in the bar, some drinking away their post-game sorrows, some drinking to keep their post-game excitement alive.

The bartender walks up. “Another gingerale?” he asks.

“Just a water.” I try to force a smile, but seeing as I’m not a Treeskins fan, there’s nothing to force a smile about.

“Don’t like the bottled water?” he asks, tilting his head at the bottle I ordered when I first sat down, the seal still unbroken.

“That’s for a f—for someone else,” I say. A shudder runs through my body. Carmine does not deserve to be called a friend. I would sooner die than call him my friend.

“You meeting someone here?” the bartender asks, pouring me a water.

I simply nod. It hurts to speak. It hurts to push words past the stagnant lump clogged in my throat.

“Pretty late to be meeting someone.” He places the water down and begins to load the dishwasher. Believe it or not, I’m not in the mood for a conversation. Unfortunately, the seat directly in front of the bar’s camera is also in front of the dishwasher. Carmine isn’t stupid enough to murder me in front of a camera. His henchmen may be, but Carmine won’t let his henchmen kill me. No way.

I nod again. The bartender takes the hint and walks away to carry out different clean-up duties.

The ground gently vibrates. I wouldn’t notice if not for the water in my glass rippling. The vibration grows. Now I can feel it. I can hear it, like a mighty wave crashing far in the distance. It’s a solid noise, unbroken, loudening as it approaches. This is it.

I take a breath, dig into my pocket, and pull out the lipstick I bought at the Lemuria Drug Mart. It’s dark red, the exact shade I’ve always wanted. It matches the beautiful heels I bought with Porsha’s credit card, shoes I found at the same store where I bought myself a new dress, and a gorgeous perfume. I’m not going to die looking like a hobo.

The vibration becomes a tremor; even the bartender and the drunks notice it now, looking over their shoulders towards the bar door. Whatever it is, it’s heading for the bar door. I know what it is.

Footsteps. Like an army, but they aren’t marching or running. They aren’t even walking. It almost sounds more like shuffling—like a dozen men shuffling towards the bar.

I try to sip my water, but my hands are shaking. I try to inhale, but my lungs are shaking. My whole body shivers involuntarily. This is it, the final moments of my life. I’d thought I would cry when they came, but I’m not crying. I’m scared shitless, but I’m also overwhelmed by a strange satisfaction. They came for me. The gypsies got away, and Pesconi came for me. I don’t have to die with hundreds of innocent lives on my conscious.

My heart is beating in my head, pounding against my skull, drumming up a deafening ring. I hardly hear the bar door as it’s kicked in, and the flurry of footsteps as men pour into the bar.

The bartender perks up straight and raises his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot!” he says. I can see them through the warped reflection of the bottles that line the bar shelves—no less than a dozen men in long black coats and black hats, armed with what appear to be crossbows. Crossbows? I suppose they’re silent, discreet. A bullet’s loud, but it’s in and out, and quick. The thought of a bolt driving into my skull is unnerving, though it makes no difference at the end of the day.

“Where are they?” a man says.

“Tracker says they’re here. They should be here. Look around.”

“These aren’t fucking gypsies. These are a bunch of fucking drunks!”

“Shit.”

The men scour the bar. I keep my head forward, with help from the rigid muscles in my neck. My gut turns and clenches. I want to throw up on the bar, but I also don’t want to die in a pool of my own vomit. My vision is cloudy. Keep it together, Olivia. Now’s not the time to be some useless zombie.

“Hey, boss! There’s no gypsies here!” one of the men calls out in the street.

“Please don’t shoot—” the bartender says again.

“—Shut up,” says one of the cronies. That same crony now walks towards me. “Turn around and put your hands up, darling. This ain’t some candy gram.”

My muscles are slow to thaw. I turn slowly to the scene. The bar’s patrons are stiff, with their hands far above their head, each with a crossbow aimed at their chest. The man with his weapon aimed at me is familiar.

His eyes widen as he sees my face. I’m familiar to him, too. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Don’t move,” he says, stepping back towards the door. “Boss! Better come in here!”

The heads of the henchmen and the patrons turn to me, some with long, confused expressions, some with wide-eyed and dazed expressions, others with all-too-familiar sinking, pitiful expressions.

Carmine enters the bar. Death enters the bar. My legs go weak but I stay upright. He doesn’t even scan the room before his eyes fall on me and his skin turns red. “You,” he says simply, in a low, growling tone.

“What should we do with her, boss?” asks one of Pesconi’s men.

Carmine is too busy glaring into my soul to respond. His eyes narrow and his lips press thin.

“Boss?”

Unlike his clueless henchmen, Carmine scans the bar for cameras, spotting the one right behind my head. “Everyone get out.” His men are slow to respond, but no one questions the command.

Carmine scans the faces of the patrons and the bartender. “You too. Get out. Go home. You saw nothing, here.” The place clears out within seconds, save for Carmine, and two armed men who linger by the door.

“Well? Get up,” Carmine says to me.

I remain seated. The pain in the center of my chest is crippling. These are the final seconds of my life. Carmine reaches under his coat. I can see his fingers wrap around a handgun, but he doesn’t pull the weapon out. Unlike his men, he’s smarter than that. “Get up.” His low voice rumbles through his clenched teeth.

“No.” If he wants to kill me, he can kill me on camera.

He turns to his henchmen. “Get out of here, and close the door.” The men don’t hesitate. I don’t blame them. Carmine turns back to me. He wants me alone, for himself. “Explain to me why you have my wife’s territ card.” He steps towards me.

I stare into his narrow, brooding eyes. I want to look away so badly; my eyes shake in their sockets. I keep my gaze locked on his. “Because I stole it.” I can’t help but grin. Freddie would be proud.

“You stole it? That’s funny, because my wife told me a gypsy stole it.” He stops close enough to me that I can smell the lingering scotch on his breath.

“She’s probably right, seeing as I stole it from a gypsy.” The pressure in my chest is unbearable—what I imagine it feels like to have a heart attack. Maybe I am having a heart attack.

His face his red as his hand clenches into a tight fist. His muscles tense as he stands in silence, as if he’s fighting the urge to smash my head into the bar. “Where are the gypsies?” he asks slowly.

I hold my eye-contact, fighting through the strong instinct to cower away. “I could tell you, but I don’t want to.”

The back of his hand connects with the side of my face, knocking me off my seat, onto the cold, sticky bar floor. It takes a moment for my blurry vision to refocus. The whole side of my face stings, burns like I’d been splashed with boiling water. Stay strong, Olivia. You have him where you want him. Now you just need to stay strong. Carmine glances over at the camera, shrugs his shoulders, and takes a deep breath. “Get up,” he says, recomposed.

I do.

“Let’s go,” he says, turning to the door, reaching for my arm.

I push his hand away. “No. If you’re going to kill me, kill me here.”

Carmine’s eyes drift to the camera and then back to me. “I’m not going to kill you here.” A clever choice of wording for the camera. He’s smart enough to resist dragging me out by my hair. He regrets the slap. I can tell by his sudden sheepish and hesitant demeanour Still, it’s not good enough—not enough to win any court case. I need to make him angry, I need to irritate him—I need to become Freddie.