The Havoc Chronicles (Book II): Unbound (2 page)

Amy looked up, a wicked gleam in her eye. I had her attention now. She paused and appeared to give the matter some thought. “I’m pretty sure,” she said. “Does it really matter?  I mean the boy has love-sick puppy written all over him.” She gave me her most devious smile. “Unless you don’t want him, of course?”

“No! I, uh...” I was too flustered to find words. Of course I wanted him. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want someone like Rhys? But I still had those nagging feelings of self-doubt. I knew how I felt, but we had never actually talked about a relationship before. For all I knew any relationship we had could all be in my imagination. I didn’t want to presume.

“Yes,” said Amy, this time with a genuine smile.

“Yes, what?”

“He said the word ‘boyfriend.’”

A warm giddy feeling washed over me. Our special moments weren’t all in my imagination! He did care about me. That wonderful, almost magical, connection wasn’t just some pent up schoolgirl fantasy playing out in my head – at least not entirely.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Amy, closing her locker. “But keep in mind since you and Rhys are an item, that means Eric is now up for grabs, and I’m ready for a serious rebound.”

We took a few steps down the hall before I answered her. “That might be difficult to do, unless you’re looking for a long distance relationship.”

Amy stopped and crossed her arms. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Spill.”

When it had been decided that Eric would join the hunt for Osadyn, we knew we would have to come up with a good story to explain his disappearance. Eric wanted us to tell people he had been sacrificed by a ritualistic cult, but as usual we all ignored his suggestion.

“Eric is going to a military academy in Virginia for this semester,” I said.

Amy gaped at me. “Military academy? Like the kind of places where they shave your head and make you run ten miles with a heavy pack in the middle of the night?”

I shrugged. “Something like that,” I said. “I don’t know all the details - it was rather sudden. Rhys told me he kept breaking house rules and something bad happened on Christmas Eve so they sent him there to learn some discipline.”

Once the initial excitement of new gossip was over, Amy seemed to deflate. “Well, so much for rebound option number one,” she said. Suddenly she brightened. “Hey, why don’t we forget about boys for a while and do something together, just the two of us?” she suggested. “Like old times.”

“You really want to go back to old times?” I asked. “You and me as spokespeople for the hopelessly undateable? I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Not that,” she said. “You and me go and have a girls’ night out. No boys allowed.”

“Sure, why not?” I said, with what I hoped was an enthusiastic voice. Actually I could think of several really good reasons why not, the foremost of those being my desire to spend time with Rhys, but Amy was my best friend. She was trying to be tough, but I could tell she still needed me.

“This will be fun!” Amy put an arm around my shoulder. “Look out world, Madison and Amy are going out on the town.”

Over the next few days we solidified our plans. I was hoping for a laid back evening spent watching romantic movies and crying our eyes out, but Amy wanted to “get out and do something.” We settled on dinner and shopping in Portland Friday night.

Getting permission to do that was not so easy. Dad and Rhys were both against it, but that made me all the more determined to make it happen. I had spent the last several months under constant surveillance. Osadyn was gone – it was time for my parole to begin.

“Can Rhys at least come with you?” Dad asked. As much as I liked the idea, I knew Amy wouldn’t want it, so I shot that idea down in a hurry.

“This is a girls’ night, Dad,” I said. “Not only would Rhys hate it, but the entire point of this trip is to do something fun without any boys around.”

I was glad I had started early, because it took most of the week to wear them both down. But my logic was sound: Osadyn was clearly gone – significantly colder temperatures as proof – and I was a Berserker, which meant it was safer for me to wander around downtown Portland than it was for Dad.

By Friday night they had given in – if not willingly – to my demands, and Amy and I drove my mom’s car down to the Pearl District – a sort of urban-chic hipster neighborhood with plenty of art galleries, shopping, and restaurants.

Amy wanted Thai food so we went to a little place off of Hoyt street that had recently opened up. Amy was more adventurous and tried one of the spicy dishes, but I stuck with my usual Pad Thai. I hadn’t eaten Thai since I had become a Berserker and I hoped it wouldn’t be too strong for my enhanced sense of taste.

Despite the fact that Amy had wanted this to be a girls’ night out with no boys, she sure had a hard time not talking about them. She told me all about Cory and how he had gradually gotten meaner during the semester until that last night when he had shoved her down.

“And now he has the nerve to call up begging for forgiveness,” she said, and thrust her fork into a piece of chicken as if it had personally offended her. 

I tried to persuade her to give him a second chance, especially since I knew it was partially my fault he’d been acting that way. But without revealing the key fact that her boyfriend had been influenced by the prolonged presence of a monstrous demon, I didn’t really have much of a case.

After dinner we walked through the streets looking in shop windows and occasionally going inside for a closer look. In the end we didn’t buy anything because the prices for everything were unbelievable. We were used to shopping at the mall and everything here was quite a bit more expensive.

I remembered Eric’s revelation that as a Berserker I’d inherited some sort of trust fund, but I hadn’t heard any mention of it since, and Dad certainly hadn’t brought it up. So, in the meantime I was going to have to continue in my teenage poverty.

After a while Amy got discouraged by the prices. She had never had much money and was hoping to find a good bargain for the last of the income from her summer job. To take her mind off of clothing, I suggested we stop at Powell’s Bookstore. To my surprise, Amy agreed.

 We hopped on the MAX, Portland’s light rail, and rode over to Powell’s, one of my favorite places in the world. To call it simply a bookstore didn’t do it justice. They called it the City of Books, and that wasn’t much of an exaggeration. It took up an entire city block and extended several stories upwards. It was my own personal haven. I could spend hours there and never get bored.

Together we wandered through the rooms browsing through thousands of titles packed onto row after row of shelves.

By the time we’d finished, it was getting late and we decided to head home. A thick fog had rolled in while we were inside, turning the night eerie and damp. The night air surrounded us and coated us with moisture as we walked back to the MAX stop.

With the fog as thick as it was, we accidentally missed our stop and had to get off one stop farther than we’d intended. It was only a few blocks so we decided to walk rather than wait for a train back.

“Thanks for tonight,” said Amy as we walked. “I know you have better things to do than hang with me, but it felt good to be back together again. No boys getting in the way of our sisterhood.”

 Before I could reply, a large man stepped out of a nearby alley holding a knife in his hand. He wore jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt pulled over his head, obscuring his face.

“What are two attractive young ladies doing out here all alone at night?” he asked, casually holding his knife as if he were simply going to use it to clean his nails. His voice sounded merely curious, but it was glaringly obvious he was trying to intimidate us with his presence and physical size.

Amy hesitated, but I grabbed her arm and began to steer her around the man. The sound of a click from behind brought us up short.

“The man asked you a question,” said a raspy voice from behind. Amy let out a soft gasp as a second man stuck the barrel of a gun in my back. She looked up at me, her eyes bulging and terrified. As girls living outside of the city, this was the kind of situation we had been warned about our entire lives but never actually expected to encounter.

 I tried to turn around, but the man grabbed me by the back of the neck and steered me towards the alley. After the first moment of initial shock I became more annoyed than anything. I was a trained Berserker. I had fought Osadyn and hundreds of Bringers and come out with hardly a scratch – I didn’t count the fact that I had practically passed out from exhaustion afterwards. I could take out both of these creeps with nothing more than my thumb.

The only thing that prevented me from ‘zerking right then and there was Amy. As a Berserker I was bullet proof – at least in theory, I hadn’t ever tested it out – but Amy wasn’t quite as durable. If I ‘zerked, the guy with the knife might hurt Amy out of panic. Also, I might have a hard time explaining to her the whole glowing freak thing.

Behind me I heard Amy’s muffled squeal as the man with the knife dragged her along into the alley with us. The man with the gun shoved me up against a wall, and the man with the knife did the same to Amy.

The man with a gun held me and Amy at gunpoint, while the man with the knife retrieved a paper bag and pulled out a roll of duct tape. He placed it over our mouths and bound our hands behind our backs.

While this was happening, I took a closer look at the man with the gun. He seemed to be in his thirties with long brown hair and a scar on his neck almost like a gruesome necklace. He wore jeans with a dark sweater.

But the thing that struck me the most was his eyes. Cold and hard, they showed neither mercy nor pity. His mouth was turned up into a smile – the sick creep was enjoying this.

He noticed me watching and leered at me, licking his lips in hopes of frightening me. And if I were a normal girl it almost certainly would have worked. But I was anything but normal. I gave him my best flat stare to show him that I would not be intimidated.

“Oh, you are a feisty one,” he said walking closer to me. “This is going to be fun.”

While he was distracted with me, Amy had been scooting closer to the mouth of the alley. Her mouth was taped and her hands were bound, but her legs were still free. When the man with the gun moved towards me, she took the opportunity to run.

The man with the knife swore and ran after her, catching her before she could get to the end of the alley. He hit her on the back of the head with the handle of his knife and she dropped to the ground in a heap.

Only the tape prevented me from screaming. Seeing Amy collapse to the ground I felt hot anger rush through me. My kind, innocent Amy had been assaulted and who knew what kind of damage it had caused?

The ‘zerk came easily, and I embraced the power. The alley lit up with my glow, and I ripped through the duct tape like tissue paper.

Both men goggled at me, taking several steps back. The one with the gun raised it and shot me.

The bullet hit me in the shoulder, but I hardly felt the impact. It punched a hole in my blouse, but then crumpled against my skin and fell to ground with a ping.

Both men turned around and ran for the alley exit, but they might as well have been moving in slow motion. With ease I raced ahead of them and cut them off from leaving the alley. They scrambled to stop before reaching me, then turned around and ran back the other way, hoping to escape out the back. I picked up a massive dumpster and tossed it past them so that it landed with a metallic crash in their path, spewing garbage everywhere. Frantically, they began climbing the dumpster and were almost over the top by the time I got there.

I grabbed them by the backs of their clothing and lifted them up in the air, one in each hand. For a moment I was so angry that I was tempted to smash them into the walls. Wasn’t death an appropriate punishment for scum like this? Who knew how many other girls they had attacked?

I turned them towards me and looked up into their faces. The malice and confidence were gone, replaced by simple abject terror. Terror of me – of what I might do to them.

“Please don’t kill me,” said the man who had had the knife. He didn’t have it any longer. Tears ran down his face, and he was practically blubbering. The other man was looking to the sky and muttering what sounded like a prayer under his breath. 

From behind me I heard a moan, and looked back to see Amy beginning to move. Knowing that she was alive and about to regain consciousness, I moved quickly. I slammed the two men together – not nearly as hard as I wanted to – and then dropped them to the ground. I didn’t know if they were unconscious or simply playing dead, and to be honest I didn’t really care.