~ Freak City ~

by

Saje Williams

Jaz watched the whole thing unfold from her hidey-hole, jaw slackening with each development. Who is this guy? she thought. When the gun came up the last time she thought it was over, that this guy, whoever he was, was history.

That’s when his clothing seemed to explode away from him as his muscles swelled and fur sprang from his flesh. He leaped the distance between them--an easy fifteen feet--like an angry gorilla. He landed in a squat, arm sweeping out as the gun roared twice at point-blank range.

The guy with the gun went over hard, slamming into the sidewalk with a sickening crunch she could hear from where she hid. The stranger leaped his body and turned. Jaz gasped. He looked like a werewolf out of a movie, but his movements were those of an ape, blending the musculature of a primate with the savagery of a wolf. He slammed the side of his fist into the gunman’s midsection, then scooped him off the ground and hurled him back into the gully from which they’d emerged. He snatched up the leader next and sent him tumbling after him.

The one uninjured ganger gave a frightened shriek and ran. The werewolf froze, staring after him, and seemed to shake off the urge to give chase. “Better run, asshole,” he barked. Then he threw back his head and howled.

~ * ~

Jaz flinched, then nearly bolted as the werewolf twisted around and stared directly at her. She stiffened, a tiny cry escaping her lips of its own volition. He turned slowly, as if checking the surroundings, snatched up his backpack in his mouth, and loped up the street toward Pacific Avenue. Again, she noticed that his gait was more like an ape’s than either a wolf or a werewolf from the movies.

She crept out of her hidey-hole and slipped up to the edge of the gully, staring down at the battered remains of the gang unwise enough to attempt to mug a werewolf. Her gaze lingered for several moments as she considered slipping down the bank and sliding the edge of her knife across a few throats. The image danced in her mind for a while. She backed away finally. They haven’t done anything to deserve that. Not yet.

Give them time.

~ * ~

Ben ducked beneath the freeway overpass and resumed human shape. The process was no less painful, though the time involved made it seem that way. Even halfway to full wolf shape--were shape--took a while to come back from.

As the fur sloughed off he could see the two slugs emerging from his chest, where’d they’d lodged in the thick slabs of his pectoral muscles. He caught them in his hand and stuffed them in his backpack. He’d been taught to pick up shell casings and slugs, when possible.

He dug out new set of sweats and hurriedly dressed. Being a werewolf involved a lot of semi-public nudity, he’d discovered. Sometimes it amused him. At other times, he found it frustrating as hell. It could be particularly rough on footwear when he was forced to change without notice. Should bill the muggers, he thought with a mental snort. Forty-five dollars--one pair of shoes.

He almost turned around and went back to raid their pockets but stopped himself. Typical gamer reflex--if you win the battle, you get their stuff. The real world’s not quite like D&D, now is it? Self-defense is one thing. Theft is another thing entirely.

He finished tying the shoes and trotted up to the corner. He glanced up at the street-sign. Pacific Avenue. A payphone sat on the building beside him, between a coffee house and a Tattoo shop. He walked over, digging his debit card out of his pocket. He slid it through the reader, lifted the handset, and dialed the number he’d burned into his memory four years earlier.

“Keening.”

“Amanda. It’s Ben. I’m in town.”

“Where?”

“Uh... the corner of Puyallup and Pacific.”

“Okay. Hold on. We’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

“We?” he asked, feeling an surge of jealousy as unwelcome as it was unexpected.

She laughed in his ear and hung up.

~ * ~

Amanda Keening hadn’t seen Ben in four years. As the car pulled around the corner and across the LINK tracks she spotted a black-clad figure standing at a few feet from the curb. Her first impression was that he was much larger than she remembered--but that shouldn’t have surprised her. It had been several years, hadn’t it?

She motioned for Chaz to pull over and climbed out of the passenger seat, pulling it forward so he could slip into the back. He tossed his gray backpack in behind the driver and crawled in. Amanda swiveled in her seat as he pushed the hood back and flashed her an easy grin.

His sky blue gaze traced itself across her face and caught her own emerald stare in its depths. Her eyes skimmed over his sharply chiseled features, his wide, strong jaw, his thin, supple lips mellowing their grin to a soft smile, and felt a gnawing in her gut she hadn’t expected. Looking at him was more than pleasant. It could turn out to be addictive.

~ * ~

She just couldn’t be looking at him like that. Ben tried to ignore it and leaned between the seats, holding his hand out to the driver. “Ben Dalmas.”

“Chaz,” the driver replied, twisting his body around to meet his hand squarely. He shook once, with a firmer grip than Ben had expected by the look of him. He looked a bit geeky, slender to the point of skinniness, with a mildly pocked face and a fringe of pale curly hair around the edge of his skull that made him look a little like Friar Tuck on a starvation diet. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, despite his half-naked skull. His round-framed glasses gave him an owlish appearance.

He glanced at Amanda. “So where to now?”

“Hungry?” she asked Ben.

“Well, now that you mention it...”

She thought about it. “Let’s go to Shari’s. The one on Union’s closest.”

Chaz gave a swift nod and pulled a U-turn. He whipped a quick left and jumped on I-5, then caught a connecting freeway barely a mile down the road.

~ * ~

Less than ten minutes later they were sitting in a booth at a Shari’s restaurant, watching as a matronly waitress with graying hair and glasses poured their coffee.

Chaz regarded Ben with an unreadable expression, his gaze measuring. Amanda caught a glance from the corner of her eye and smiled to herself. She knew Chaz, but not quite well enough to know what he was thinking. No one ever knew what Chaz was thinking--except maybe Renee or one of the other psychics, she amended. His brain didn’t work like the brain of anyone else she’d ever met. He saw everything as patterns, as wheels within a big machine where everything meshed into one coherent system.

It made him a remarkable mage, as well as one of the world’s leading engineers in several different fields. It occasionally made him a royal pain in the ass as well, but that was just another detail to deal with.

Athena Cross--her ultimate boss--leaned heavily on his expertise when it came to technological matters. A lot of the gadgets used by both MAD--the acronym for the Magical Affairs Division--and PARD, which stood for Paranormal Action Response Division, had been designed and built by Chaz and his team at Shea Industries R&D.

She focused her eyes on Ben and found him staring down the aisle at a group of teenagers who’d just come in. Nothing unusual about that. Most graveyard shifts at twenty-four hour restaurants saw a lot of teens with nothing better to do than sit around, drink coffee, and shoot the breeze. Some things rarely changed quickly--even here in Freak City.

Then she looked again. Two of the teens weren’t quite what they looked to be. They were all Goths, with the heavy white makeup, dark mascara and eye shadow, and black on black ensemble that told the world how truly scary they were. Except the two Ben had his eyes on. They had the look, but it was all too fake. Or is that too real?

Their faces were too luminous, far more than simple makeup could explain. Their hair caught the light and seemed to prism, casting back a million different colors. Her eyes flicked to their hands. As one talked he waved his hands. She caught sight of his fingernails--they gleamed like mother-of-pearl, like an abalone shell caught in the light.

She knew the look as well as Ben did. His best friend and her brother and mother had it. The Living Dead. Vampires.

Not as though that came as any particular surprise. She knew there were some around. Like the rest of the Freaks, vampires found Tacoma nearly irresistible. It hadn’t gained its nickname of Freak City by chance, after all.

The hostess led them past their table. The two vampires passed their respective gazes across their table with nearly identical mocking smiles. They knew they’d been spotted and didn’t care.

Amanda avoided their gaze. Even if they were babies they could catch a mortal’s mind in their mental grasp without even trying. At least most of them could. She wasn’t going to take the chance of losing herself in their eyes.

She felt a vibration through the table and realized that Ben had leaned against it and a low rumble was rising from his throat. Shit! Not here! “Ben!”

His eyes snapped to her. “What?”

“This is neither the time or the place,” she told him.

Chaz raised his eyes from the table, where he was sketching some sort of a diagram on a napkin. He hadn’t noticed a thing until the vibrato tone from the werewolf had shook the table beneath his pen. That’s Chaz for you.

The vampires disappeared into a booth somewhere behind them and Ben shook himself irritably. “Should’ve warned me,” he muttered.

“That there were vamps around? You’re kidding, right?” He’d spent the last few years on the fringe of modern vampire politics. That he wouldn’t know that they’d spread all the way across the west coast simply astounded her. Guess that means he wasn’t paying attention.

She’d gotten regular reports from her mother--her brother wasn’t talking to her, but that wasn’t much of a surprise. He knew she opposed his particular brand of vampire politics. She supported her mother’s Conclave solution, not his ‘clan’ bullshit. He wanted to promote his own sense of power. Making get and building his clan was his way of doing that. Gina’s democratic concept, built on the model of the labor union or civil rights organization, suited him not at all. For now the mortals were unaware of them, but that wouldn’t last long. They were just another brand of Freak, when it came down to it. But, unlike the mages, who could easily show their value to the population at large, the vampires would have a much harder row to hoe. Vampires fed on people. They didn’t have the power to heal, or work other wonders that would benefit mankind. They were, more or less, parasites.