The Wolf fight

He indicated the surrounding landscape.  The wrought-iron building around the landing, on this end of the concourse, the tiled floor, in white, yellow, black, and red, each tile about three feet across by three feet across.  Paths seven tiles wide and a few hundred tiles long extended on either side of a mishmash of shops, small buildings, and cloth-draped stands.  A staircase led to a narrower path, over the shops.  Short sets of broad stairs allowed people to come in and out on the trains, each stair made up of two three-foot by three-foot tiles.

*

The ‘arrival’ area that they’d been dropped into was dark, most of the sunlight blocked off by glass and the wrought iron construction, and a lot of the sunlight that did come through was dappled or filtered, like the circular slash of light that shone through the clock that faced the Promenade.  Light clearly demarcated the starting line, which Jude had confirmed.

*

Out there, past the threshold, where sunlight fell in a neat line at the edge of the indoor tiles and the outdoor tiles, was the Promenade.  It was an animated scene, each moment something that could be snapshotted and made into a painting, blown up to full size, and put on a kid’s bedroom wall.  Each individual out there was interesting, and the Garrick Finders with their rugged clothes and tendency toward brown, cracked leather, ropes, utility, and scrounged-up things stood out a bit.

A man stepped out. Eight feet tall and ugly, wearing a long coat with many pockets, carrying a cane he didn't use to walk. His beard was scraggly and white, and reached his navel. He wore a top hat with a card in it, and from a distance it looked like a pointed ear.

*

The cane slapped against palm, then a long arm holding the long cane by the end thrust the handle out. It struck a child in the head and punched the head through a wall.

*

The wolf kicked at a kid who was cowering in one spot, a boy with a hummingbird's face. Her foot punched his head into and through the wall of a stall, leaving a bloody smear there.

*

The Wolf was still there, foot sticking through the wall, the limp body of the hummingbird kid slumped there.

*

The Wolf was smiling. She hadn't been before.

The tall old woman with the black hair and the blood red dress pulled her foot back out of the hole she'd made, and her toes were curled. Curled around something black.

Wires.

The old woman raised her knee and leg up, reaching down, and grasped the wires in her gnarled fist.

She tugged, pulling them out of the wall, toothy grin on her face as she turned Avery's way. She advanced, dragging more of the wiring out.

*

It moved now, straightening. Pulling cabling out of the side of the shop with the head of the cane, then gripping it in one hand.

*

The Wolf was walking, cane held out. The cabling caught, knotted, and tore free behind it, leaving horizontal rents in the wall with torn and stretched-out cabling pulling out.

With every step it looked like it should slow down. That the accumulated tension and weight of the cables and debris attached to the cables should add up and that it should lack the strength to continue like it was.

It didn't. The Wolf moved easily, and the implication was that it could keep doing this forever, or keep doing it until it had pulled out enough cabling and things that this little pocket of reality would come unstitched down the center.

*

The Wolf broke into a run. Cables tore and snapped behind him, fraying, and a rotten-toothed smile in the midst of the stained white beard stretched wide.

*

"Go!"

John moved again, same pattern, for a headlong rush. He stopped, squared his feet, then aimed.

The gun was loud, as if this was a confined space, and not an open one. The jolt of each shot jarred his upper body and shook his senses, but his eyes remained focused, and he controlled for every jump of the gun as he followed one bullet with the next.

They punched into the flesh of face and upper body and they didn't destroy the flesh in the way they should. They were higher caliber, the gun heavy.

The Wolf didn't care.

"Go!"

John moved, and Avery and Snowdrop ran past him. He drew his knife.

Wild eyed and grinning, the Wolf tore into the smiling Others. He held the cane high, the still-connected cables hooked on it, stretching and straining, and grabbed one schoolboy, hurling him at Avery. A cable snapped, and slapped a girl with a green skirt across the side of her head, cutting past flesh and shattering the bone at the side of her skull.

*

She twirled on the spot, the contents of a pencil case spilling out of her skull cavity. Protactors, rulers, erasers, pens and pencils. The Wolf ceased running and instead let the scene frame him. An Other destroyed. One with a paper on its face crouched off to the side, hand shielding its face. Another thrown. Avery had avoided it, but now it was right next to her, brandishing a fistful of pencils.

John eyed the spot he had to take on his next move. He'd still be zig-zagging, but it would be mirrored from before. He had to get past the Wolf.

The Wolf stepped into the way, cane held high overhead, with a hundred cables, broken, knotted, and fraying stretched out behind it in a loose, skewed 'v' shape.

*

John reloaded and shot while running. He aimed first for the legs. Nothing. Bullets punched into skin, muscle, and shattered bone with audible cracks and the Wolf didn't even break stride. The wound healed. He placed two shots at the cane and cables instead. The bullets sparked as they glanced off.

*

He'd moved twice forward and twice back. He'd intended to step back into the shade. To maneuver, plan his re-emergence. But as he reached the others, and they parted to let him charge through, he hit a wall.

Threads, thin and narrow, formed a web that barred his path.

He turned, slumping against the barrier, hand at his wounded side, and his eyes widened.

Avery had avoided the Wolf. The Wolf, in turn, brought the cane swinging down.

Cables snapped, and they combined the force of snapped elastic with the fact that they were steel, sometimes an inch thick, and heavy.

There was no precision to how they lashed out or what they struck. They hit pipes, and they punched into and through tiles, folding metal and sending it tumbling into the open sky below the Promenade.

*

The cane swung down. Cables followed, whipping down. The first slapped tiles and broke them, tore up landscape, scratched ground.

John had to change course, moving alongside the door. Avery ducked between the incoming cables, pausing for one second to let one slap the ground in front of her before she leaped over it. The Wolf whipped the cables back and away from the path, laughing, then swiped at the bridge. Destroying most of the stairs. The entire catwalk bridge that stretched over the shops creaked and bent. Avery's friend Jude nearly fell.

*

John circled around behind the Wolf, going for the cables. He pulled out the gun and aimed at the thickest clusters, shooting.

Cables snapped, but it didn't seem to be because of the bullets. The Wolf moved the cane and the metal's tension became too much. Twined up metal split, one strand breaking, followed by the others in succession.

*

And the Wolf walked toward Avery.

John reached for the tags at his neck. Then he began reciting names. Asking for help.

The boy with the fistful of sharp pencils drew closer to John. John ignored him.

"…Horseman, Meyers, Miles, Doe, Angel…"

Guns didn't work as well as knives, most of the time.

"Go!"

Knives cleaved closer to connections, to Self, to personal power. Momentum and physics didn't always matter, and to many, a bullet was simply a smaller amount of metal than a knife or sword, with less meaning and history ascribed to it.

"…Ghost, Smith, Grandfather, Poe…"

Avery threw a ball skyward. The Wolf reached out to catch it.

John whispered. "Yalda. I'm home for a little while longer. I need your power to keep the promises I made. Sorry."

The ball dropped.

John shot. One bullet to the back of the head.

The Wolf staggered a step forward. His hand missed the ball. It bounced off of Avery's head instead. With a backhand swipe, he swiped for Avery, and she moved, running several steps.

*

[Note: The Wolf was forced into the form of Yalda, John's adoptive daughter, that he vowed to kill permanently (long story). Hence he can draw on that Oath and dog tags for that power]

She caught him, and she tore at his stomach with small hands. Like Yalda's curse had gripped him by the midsection for a little over a year.

He drew his gun as he fell into her. He held it to her head.

"I don't need to say anything to explain why this deserves to count," he told her.

She smiled.

He pulled the trigger, and it had enough of an impact that she stumbled back.

He rushed forward, pushing, and the two of them went over the edge.