APEX

Ch. 8: A Bloody Revelation

Calla

It happened in seconds but in my mind, the world slowed to sloth mode. We moved through space like those slow creatures, the vertebrae in my neck yanked one by one, forward, then back. My wolf yelped from deep within me, a fearful cry, and I felt like I was about to transform. Noises roared painfully around me. The crowd wailed, and then the explosion hit. Whiplash, bones grinding against bones. That feeling of transformation without the thrilling release that came from letting my wolf out. All my senses thrust into hyperdrive, and then...a void.

When I came to, a piercing ring blocked out all other sounds. My head throbbed. I rubbed it, and my palm came away red.

A head injury. Great.

I blinked away blood and blurriness. By now I was coherent enough to assess the situation. During the moment of impact, I'd assumed the car had been hit. My last thought was that I was about to explode into tiny bits, and of all people, I was to share this fate with Rhys Rawlings, our material bodies forever intermixed within the ash heap of my mother's Lexus. In the aftermath, I realized someone had tossed some sort of homemade bomb, it had struck the ground next to us, and as it seemed, we had kept all our bits still attached to our bodies.

Rhys moaned. He'd been tossed against the door and appeared banged up, but he was alive, which was good enough for me to ignore him for now.

"Neil?" I asked.

No response.

The heaviest damage seemed to be from the front driver's side, and the only way for me to assess Neil's injuries was to get out of the car. The crowd had fallen back after the bomb struck, but I couldn't expect that to hold.

They might attack me. I was strong and fought well in human form, even while sporting these Louis Vuitton pumps, but the numbers were on their side. Still, Neil, from what I could see through the broken glass separating front and back seat, wasn't faring well. I tried to remove the glass, shred by shred, but the car's metal roof had been bent downward. There was no point in attempting to assess him that way.

Time was ticking.

I tried my door. Jammed shut. "Shit." I wiggled the latch harder.

"What are you doing?" Rhys said, his words slurring like he'd been at the pub all night. That, plus the ringing in my ears made it hard to understand him. "Don't go out there, it's madness. Wait for the Liaison cops."

"I can't wait. Neil needs help." I gave him a wide-eyed look to convince him of how dire our situation was.

"Holy hell. You're bleeding," he said before passing out again.

"Fuuuck," Just what I needed.

My phone vibrated against my bare shin where I had dropped it during the attack. Wincing, I bent over to retrieve it. "Hello," I yelled.

Dev said something and it sounded urgent, but I couldn't make out the words.

"Speak loudly," I said, over-enunciating each syllable. "My ears aren't working well."

"We're trying to get through the mom."

"Whose mom?"

"I said, mob." He yelled. "There's a mob."

That made more sense. "No shit."

"Just hang on. Don't leave the vehicle. We'll be there soon." He ended the call.

What to do, what to do... Neil and his team might be here in thirty seconds or thirty minutes depending on how the mob behaved. Meanwhile, an Alpha werewolf had passed out next to me and a human was bleeding out behind the wheel.