Under Wraps: An Urban Fantasy Adventure (Werewolves vs. Mummies Book 1) (7 page)

Chapter 9

“Get up!” The voice of the wind whipped around inside my head like a hurricane, and before I’d even fully opened my eyes, my body lurched to its feet and tottered forward like a half-broken zombie. The surroundings swam around me, hazy and green, as I took another step on the blood-slick floor. The stink of my blood was heavy in the air, filling my nose with the scent of a thousand rusty nails.

Somehow, my insides were tucked back inside me, held in place by a green film. I tried to reach down and feel the wound, but I couldn’t move my hands. It didn’t really feel healed… more like patched up if that made sense. It was like someone had just grabbed up all my bits and stuffed them back into my stomach and duct-taped the wound shut.

As far as I could tell, my entire body was covered in green smoke. It drifted about me in a haze, shoving me toward the doorway. Fortunately, the caustic mist was curiously absent. Well, small victories. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been unconscious, but because I wasn’t dead, I was sure it couldn’t have been long. Without my wolf healing me, I should have bled out.

Whatever. As long as I wasn’t dead, I could call upon my wolf, heal this gaping stomach wound, and find Aziza. I wasn’t sure if I was going to kill her or try to figure out why she’d gutted me like a fish. Though I was leaning toward the murderous vengeance option, I knew she couldn’t have done that without a good reason. Right? If she had wanted to kill me, she could have done so right at the start of this little adventure. That meant something had to be wrong.

“What’s going on,” I tried to say, but no words came out of my mouth. In fact, my lips didn’t even move. It was a little like screaming inside my head. It made me wonder if that was what coma patients experienced.

My feet hit the stairs a moment later. I fell forward, smashing my face on them because I couldn’t move my arms to stop myself. My head bounced painfully off the gelatinous floor as I sort of half-crawled forward on my hands and knees. Thankfully, I didn’t bust open my face because the mist seemed to protect me from actual damage, which was nice of it, I guess.

I tried to shut my eyes to concentrate, realized I couldn’t even do that, and frustration filled me. “Stop!” I screamed inside my head, and just for a second, my body came to a standstill before lurching up the stairs.

“We must protect the book,” the wind whispered in my ears with a voice like the flitting wings of a thousand swarming bats.

“Then let me control my damn body!” I snapped, and surprisingly, my lips worked. The words had barely left me when my left toes caught the top of the step. I stumbled, falling forward again. This time when I reached out, my hands flew outward, stopping me from braining myself on the stairs.

“Very well. Move forward, I will lend you my power to heal yourself. I will guide you, but we must hurry!”

“Got it,” I murmured to myself.

I pushed to my feet, surprised that I could move my body. Not wasting another second, I started sprinting up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. I know it sounds weird, but I didn’t feel any pain. I knew that my gut should have hurt, that the pain should have been stifling, but it just wasn’t. Instead, a strange numbing cold filled my body. Even when my muscles began to burn, the pain of it faded away until my body felt like one giant leaden ball.

I could still operate, still function just fine. My sense of touch hadn’t gone away, but I felt no pain, nothing at all. Even my wolf couldn’t do this. I’d gotten ripped open dozens of times while in wolf form, and it always hurt, always burned. This was so different, I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it.

We reached the top step a moment later. I looked around, trying to figure out where to go. Like last time, there were no obvious exit to the room, but Aziza wasn’t there. So where had she gone?

I was about to ask, when the world around me spun. I careened upward toward the ceiling with green mist trailing after me like an emerald comet tail. I threw my hands out in front of me to shield my face just as I slammed into the ceiling. It was like hitting really warm jelly. I plunged upward, holding my breath. When my lungs were about to explode, I sucked in a breath that tasted of spearmint and cotton candy.

Iridescent jellyfish swam past me in the murk, and I had the distinct feeling that they were wondering what the hell I was doing there. I shrugged, not knowing what I was doing there either. Whatever was going on was far beyond my control. Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that.

I was spit out on the surface a moment later. I lay there like a flummoxed seal, my face pressed against the cool stone. The wind began to whip around me, kicking up little motes of dust, and I got the distinct impression that if I didn’t start moving, I was going to go back into lumbering zombie mode.

I got to my feet and glanced around. Off to my left, Setne was standing there, staring past me with wide eyes. Blood spattered the ground next to him, but for some reason, it didn’t seem like any of it was his. I turned my head, craning my neck so I could follow his gaze, and my breath ripped out of me.

Aziza was waist deep in the water, blood leaking from a wound on her shoulder as she wrestled with a massive crocodile. It snapped and thrashed at her, but she had one arm around its neck and was forcibly yanking back on its head like she was trying to tear it off its body. The water around her was littered with the bobbing corpses of crocodiles and glittering golden sarcophagi.

I staggered toward her, trying to count how many mummies she’d defeated in the time it had taken to get up here. Ten, twenty? Where had they all come from?

“Aziza,” I said, and my voice came out like the palest whisper. I wasn’t sure how she heard me, but she must have. Her head snapped up, eyes narrowing as she took me in. Her face went rigid as she took two steps forward and flung the massive croc at me.

I threw my arms up to block, but just before the giant reptile slammed into me, a wall of emerald mist reduced the beast to a cloud of crimson foam. It splattered across me and the ground, leaving a Thes-shaped outline on the stone behind me.

“Miss me?” I asked, taking a step forward. My hands clenched into fists, and I made an effort to relax them. Really, I wasn’t sure what to do because, as she stared at me with flat predator eyes, I knew something was wrong with her. I just didn’t know what.

“I’m surprised you’re not dead, wolf,” she snarled. The words were so acidic they could have melted through the stone floor.

“I don’t actually like being called wolf,” I replied, cracking a smile. “How would you like it if I called you mummy?”

“It wouldn’t matter to me.” She shrugged her shoulders the barest fraction of an inch. She moved, one tentative step closer to me, the muscles in her legs tensing like she was about to spring. The gilded cover of the Book of Thoth poked up from a satchel slung over her shoulder. I wasn’t sure where she’d gotten it exactly, but there were a lot of things going on right now I didn’t quite understand.

“Aziza, don’t do it.” The words barely left my lips as she sprang, one hand swinging her sword in a wide arc at my head. Purple energy trailed off of her as she moved, making me think of a ghost leaving its essence behind.

I twisted. The blade swept by me, so close that the wind of it buffeted my clothing. Without thinking, I drove my right hand outward, catching her in the throat with the heel of my palm. The blow knocked her backward on her butt, the sword slipping from her hand and skittering across the stone.

“Setne, what is going on?” I asked, and my voice was only partially mine. It had the spirit of the wind in it, thrumming under my words like the first stirrings of a winter storm.

“I’m not sure.” Setne swallowed. He shook himself from his trance and took a couple quick steps forward. Aziza regained her feet. Her eyes threw daggers at me as I lifted my left foot and planted it square in the middle of her chest so that the ball of my foot rested on her scarab pendant. The light of it throbbed, sending amethyst shadows scampering across the dark stone.

“Move again, and I’ll end you, jailer,” the wind said with my mouth. One of my hands reached down and plucked the book from her satchel. It felt good in my hand, like a drink of iced tea after a day in the hot sun. Relaxation rippled through my body, and I heaved a sigh of relief.

The cover began to swirl into a litany of colors. The wolf buried deep within me raised its ears and inclined its head toward the book of Thoth. It glanced around, one slow, sweeping gesture that scanned the room for predators.

“You’re too late, Neferkaptah,” Aziza said, her mouth puckered up like she’d bitten into a particularly sour lemon. Little silver sparks leapt from the book’s surface and zipped through the air before dying away like firecrackers in the night.

The volume fell open in my hand as green mist swarmed over it. Deep down inside me, the wolf began to pace restlessly, ears perked. The wound in my abdomen twisted and writhed like some giant beast was pawing through my insides. It wasn’t painful per se, but it sure felt invasive.

Hieroglyphs brighter than the sun filled my vision, making black spots dance across my eyes. I tried to look away, but the wind held me transfixed upon the pages as they flickered in my hands. My flesh squirmed, bones shifting beneath my skin. I tilted my head up toward where the moon would be if it were in the room. My wolf cried out. A low rumble elicited from my lips as they curled back to reveal its fangs.

Silver light burst from the book, filling the room like a metallic sunrise as the pages revealed a wolf-headed warrior ascending a pyramid, one clawed hand gouged into the surface of the stone.

I turned the book in my hand and shoved the pages into Aziza’s face. “Do you see this?” the wolf roared and the wind howled. “This is what you have done.”

Aziza’s face went perfectly blank as she stared up at me. “No…” she whispered, voice so faint that I could barely detect the hint of it. The wolf’s ears perked, catching the faintest twinge of a sound so distant that it had to have been miles away. It tasted of fear, of panic, of the rabbit dashing away into the bushes. It smelled of prey.

I licked my lips.

Black smoke burst from Aziza’s lips, eyes, and well, pretty much every hole in her head. It exploded upward, reminding me of the time the great tree had burned and filled the sky with thick, dark smoke for miles. Bits of paper white ash flitted through the air on unseen currents as darkness pooled against the silver backdrop of the room.

Aziza shuddered, her body writhing beneath my foot as we stood, the wolf, the wind, and I.

“You may have spoken the words,” the wind raged. “But you will not succeed in entering the temple. Not without this.” I held the book out once more, and as I did so, it burst into a million golden beetles. They scurried across my flesh, back bright and glittering, before disappearing within me.

Chapter 10

“We’re not going to talk about anything that happened, are we? Even though you stabbed me in the stomach and left me to die.” The words tumbled out of my mouth though I wasn’t quite sure I’d said them aloud until Aziza turned and looked at me, eyes half-staring into the distance as thoughts writhed beneath their surface.

We were walking along the bank of the Nile. Toward where? I wasn’t sure. Thick mud squelched as I moved, covering my feet in the stuff. Unfortunately, that sound was the only response that greeted me. I sighed, a small explosion of air that made Aziza’s eyebrow quirk upward just a hair.

Thanks to Setne, I’d managed to carry her to the surface and make camp. After what felt like hours, she had woken up, and without even saying a word to me, proceeded to walk down the riverbank. Tromping off like it wasn’t filled with crocodiles, evil mummies, and mud. That had been about an hour ago. Since then, she’d offered little in the way of explanation, and every time I tried to talk to her, she either blew me off or stayed silent. Whatever was going on in her mind was clearly for her brain only. Did she even have a brain? Didn’t they remove those from mummies?

“What’s there to say? That I got taken over by some spirit? That it trapped me inside my own head so all I could do was scream and shout, and do little else of consequence while it gutted you and stole the book?” she snapped, swallowing back an additional retort, her throat convulsing with the effort. The sound of her voice was like a box of knives strewn across the floor. Pointed, sharp, and dangerous.

I looked away from her, glancing off into the distance so I couldn’t see the rage starting to fracture her face. “I’m not trying to upset you or anything, Aziza. I know it must have been horrible.” I swallowed, unsure of what else to say. I wasn’t exactly the most comforting person. My parents had subscribed to that whole tough love thing, and as an Alpha in my pack, I wasn’t exactly encouraged to talk about my feelings. Feelings were weakness, and weakness was for omegas.

Aziza didn’t reply, but her hands balled into fists. I could tell she wanted to yell at me from the way her top lip quivered. Her scent changed, taking on sort of a muskiness that reminded me of brambles and fire. She opened her mouth, but sound didn’t come out. Her mouth closed, compressing into a thin line.

Without thinking, I reached out toward her, presumably to put my hand on her shoulder? I wasn’t really sure, but before I could do so, she slapped my hand away and turned toward the river in a huff. A small sob wracked her body as she stood, back to me, and shoulders shaking.

“I don’t need your pity, Thes.” Her words were tight and strained, like a ball of razor wire, and I knew that untangling them would leave me cut and bloodied. I wasn’t sure I was up to it. Still, staring at her was tearing me up inside, leaving something raw and unfinished inside. I sucked in a barbed wire breath and shut my eyes for a second.

“I don’t pity you, Zeez.” I swallowed, dropping my hand to my side. “I feel bad that something horrible happened to you, but it isn’t pity.”

She said nothing, and the silence between us stretched out into infinity.