Wolf fight

(NOTE: The Wolf appears differently to everyone)

Avery leaped down from the bridge, cape trailing behind her, into the fray. John tensed.

She landed in a localized tornado of wind that made the hair and clothing of Others billow and flap.

Nobody had buzzed in, so the woman with the walkie-talkies started the count down.

"Go!"

Avery remained, talking to an Other.

Why had he tensed?

*

"Go!"

Avery didn't move. John watched her body language, studying.

He had a bad feeling as the report came in from her. "I have just been informed by a friend of a friend that you-know-what from the Forest Ribbon Trail will be making an appearance by train."

*

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.

"Mr. Stiles," the Wolf said, looking at John with eyes that had a lot of white to them. Grinning.

He said it like he knew John.

And to John, in the world he lived in, in the languages his enemies spoke, that kind of knowing meant absolute and crushing defeat.

"Go!"

The Wolf resumed running.

John had planned to fight and now he moved the other way. After Avery.

*

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.

*

John challenged the smiling Lost that were in their way, on his way back. It was a sequence of darting movements, he'd chosen a course that went wide, and so he 'jousted' with three Others in quick succession. A woman with an oversized teapot she swung with casual ease. He kicked her off balance. Another with eyeholes carved into a bucket on his head came at John with a sword. John had his knife. The sword bit deep into John's side. The knife sank into the bucket knight's neck. The third was a kid with a dog mask with a mechanical mouth, that whirred like the walking chattering wind-up teeth. It got a grip on John's arm, and he lifted the boy, because he needed to keep moving to arrive at his spot on time. He threw the boy aside, losing a chunk of his arm in the process. Leaving one more.

A woman slapped ineffectually at John's face and chest while growling, flinching overdramatically as John lifted a hand. John shoved her aside.

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 others were all talking, arguing, raising their voices behind John, as he lay there, sitting, his back to the barrier that kept him from retreating.

"Leave them alone!" Jude shouted.

"I won't kill you, Mr. Stiles," the Wolf growled the words. He stroked his beard with one hand. "I'll break you, and I'll own you."

*

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.

*

Avery was moving toward the left path of the Promenade. As the Wolf followed, the cables that were tearing out were pulling at the fronts and sides of the buildings and shacks. Others spilled out, making the necessary movements to get away, but it was causing steady collapse, and it was making the bridge lean more.

*

There were Others too strong for John to fight. Sometimes drawing on the tags like he'd just done would work.

*

John rushed to the square he needed. He held his knife, facing the Wolf.

"Don't you get tired of this, Mr. Stiles?" the Wolf asked, still walking, walking past him. "Either killing the weak and unaware or losing to those stronger? Endlessly fighting, patrolling, and watching what you have slip through your fingers. Friends, teammates, child, home?"

"Go!"

"Help me again," John whispered, touching the spot on his chest where tags were strung. He went for the Wolf.

The Wolf turned his head, making eye contact with John.

John, for one of the few times in his existence, hesitated in a moment of crisis.

*

The Wolf grabbed John's knife by the blade. Blood welled at the Other's palm. With a wrench to one side, he seemed intent on disarming John. John found it in himself to hold on. Instead of having the knife handle pulled from his grip, the blade snapped off.

He dragged the fragment that still stuck out of the handle across the Wolf's face.

"Infants quartered with the hands of war," the Wolf told John, catching his wrist. A hand with wiry hair on the back of it reached forward and gripped John by the chains that looped his neck. He pulled them taut, and metal squeaked. "What else does this get you? Anything else is an illusion, a shadow enslaved in a chewed up woman. A faint promise from those who have no expectation they'll have to live up to it."

A ball bonked off of the side of the Wolf's head.

John took that opportunity to lunge in. Teeth to throat, biting. He found purchase.

*

The hand gripped tags and bent metal, and the Wolf bent down to bite John back, harder, fiercer.

With one tear, all the strength went out of John's arm. The wolf released the now-limp arm, grabbed John, and lifted him up.

It cast him down onto the tile, hard, and then brought a foot down, shattering knee, shin, and foot, in that order.

The Wolf pulled, and the chain broke. John lunged for individual tags before they could scatter, despite the pain of his leg, and caught them.

But he was on his belly now before the Wolf. The Wolf stomped onto his back, breaking that too.

*

The Wolf broke into a run. John couldn't do anything about it.

He was immobilized, and as part of that, he was failing to move as he was supposed to.

*

He stared at the back of the Wolf with loathing and hatred. It was the same thing he'd felt toward Matthew and Charles, once. The Wolf was that. Repulsive, loathsome, everything he'd been fighting against. Everything he'd failed to fight against.

Lucy was shouting something.

By fighting it, he played into its hands.

*

"Are you okay!?" Lucy's voice reached him. Not through a walkie-talkie, but through some kind of sound projection. "John!"

He twisted, flopping back onto his back, and looked at her, upside-down in his view. He was healing, but the smiling Lost crowded around him. They would get to him before bones and spine knit together.

With the world turned around-

"Change perspectives!" John hollered. "The gate thing! It's too hard to fight our wolves!"

"Avery already did!"

"Go!"

Another move he'd failed to make. More Others. John caught a fork as it came plunging down toward his midsection. The Other wasn't stronger than him, but it was supposed to hit him, because he'd failed to play by the rules of this asinine system.

So the fork gradually came down and bit flesh.

Maybe the change in perspective didn't help that much. Maybe it made that small amount of difference, because Avery was moving, doing what she needed to. Saving Jude by catching him as he jumped. Actually fighting the wolf instead of hesitating or flashing back to bad moments.

There was a chant coming through on the walkie-talkies now.

"Over the edge, John!"

John wrestled with the Others that were close. The fork rose, then fell again.

The edge?

"Go!"

John moved, lurching, rolling with arm strength alone, even though his leg was so destroyed it didn't rotate with him, his lower body numb.

*

The chant ended. Avery was one of the participants. Her, Verona, and Lucy, together.

And, as though they were on a train that had passed into a tunnel, an arch swept over and past them, bright white. The sky was painted in television static, and every star in it was falling, a streak of color in the noise.

No more chimneys and pipes, but decaying buildings instead. Buildings that looked familiar.

Whose eyes were they looking through?

He spotted the Wolf, and he knew.

She was no older than twelve, wearing a red dress. Her hair was black, her feet bare, and her skin pale.

Yalda in different colors, holding an electrical wire.

Brie's Wolf. Had they chosen one that would be smaller, thinking she wouldn't be as strong?

Because if so, that wasn't right. She grabbed the half-fallen bridge by a railing and pulled it down onto the path, halving the available ground there. Avery was clinging to the sideways-bridge with Snowdrop in her arms, and she was forced to jump. Jude had to move to get out of the way, and that brought more smiling Others onto the path.

"Give me strength," he murmured, chin at his collarbone. He didn't have a spare hand to reach for the tags. "Each and every one of you. Give me vigor, and anger, and whatever else you have, buried in there. Let me heal. I need to fight."

He paused, feeling it work.

"Don't hold anything back," he whispered. "It's not as if I'll need to draw on you again past this summer."

They stopped holding back.

Sensation returned in a painful way. He felt his leg mend.

*

The Wolf stomped, and tiles broke, floor broke away, and an entire section of the left concourse tilted left. Bits of debris slid and fell over the edge, into a sky of television static and streaked colors.

*

John adjusted his grip, sliding down the pole a bit, to see below the Promenade.

He couldn't quite see all of it, but Jude was clinging to Avery, still, having switched to a grappling hook. They dangled, swinging, having hooked onto the underside of the Promenade.

The Wolf started moving with purpose, toward the ledge, where there was an alley between shops and gaps where shops had been damaged and uprooted and there was only sky below. In the process, she tore past and through Others as they milled, many heading further down the Promenade, to where Jude's family seemed to be.

John hauled on the post he was hanging off of, and as part of that same motion, he stumbled forward. The Wolf was preparing to go after them, the Lost who could climb were doing so, hanging off the sides and underside. There was no way John could reach them and he wasn't sure they were in a position to do more than dangle.

More important, with so many failed moves, the concourse was flooded with smiling others. John fought his way forward, toward the Wolf, who was pulling part of a shop down. Through these countless Others, who clawed, hacked, and bit at him. They poured boiling water on him. He answered every blow with another, in a blind fury that had nothing to do with anger. He had been nothing more than this, a combatant, for the first year or two of his existence.

The Wolf turned to face him, holding the cables in a small hand. She hauled on them, and whipped the length of them in his direction, and for the Others closest to it, it was like being hit by a car. They hit John in turn, slowing him.

She was ready to face him, she was stronger, and she would destroy him.

But the cable- he fought forward. It was in reach. And he grabbed that. He used the fact it was angled slightly, starting high and sloping down to a small hand close to the ground, and he slid along it. His hand gripped the tags that were still intact, silently asking for strength. To break her grip, to separate her from what prevented the others from escaping.

It didn't work.

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.

They fell into endless sky. Into nothingness. The cable jerked free of her hand. Her other hand was buried in his guts, small fingernails like knife blades.

"They'll call you back with a tag."

They spiraled, tumbling over and past one another.

He didn't answer, his jaw set.

"But that will take time. And you're at my mercy in the meantime."

She was free to tear him apart as they fell. A mad, vicious, false Yalda destroying him. Everything he'd tried to stop.

She laid her head on his chest. Her hand made a sucking sound as it pulled out of his stomach, and she laid it on his chest beside her face.

"What you are… you're expendable, you know. It's the fate of a soldier to be seen as a throwaway life by those at the top."

They fell. There was no ground below to fall to.

"This is what you are. Either you'll be a sacrifice, or you'll perpetuate the cycle of violence and loss. Whichever you do, whatever you do to those girls, they'll cry and they'll lose more innocence, more childhood. The closer you are to them, the more it will take from them to lose you."

He closed his eyes.

"And all for causes you care nothing about."

She laid her head on his chest.

"Wonderful," she whispered.

The whisper became a laugh, and the sound of that laugh carried them all the way down into oblivion.

*

Tags struck ground.

John's boots hit ground with matching force. The only sound was the scuff of boot on dirt road.

"Kind of crazy, that whichever direction I step, so long as we're in Kennet, I'm walking toward conflict," Verona said.

John opened his eyes. He looked at them.

"I'm so glad we were able to call you," Lucy said.

"I'm bound to this place by history, by other things. And there's power in those tags."

"I'm just glad," Lucy said.

"Are you okay?" Avery asked. She was sitting, leaning a bit to one side, making a face. "Tashlit can maybe heal you. She had to heal me and Jude."

"I'm intact enough," John said. "I mend on my own."

"Thank you for coming," Avery said. "Distracting, fighting her. I felt bad, leaving you behind after she hurt you."

"No. It wouldn't have helped anything for you to walk into her clutches."

Snowdrop stepped forward, and she wrapped arms around John's midsection. It hurt where he hadn't healed from having a hand inside his guts, but he didn't comment, instead laying a hand on her head.

*

The four girls headed over to where the various practitioners and small handful of Others were gathered.

John turned and he headed down the dirt road to Kennet, feeling his insides shift and reposition as they healed.

It was only noon. It felt far later. It was hot, and the mountain was blocking the wind instead of encouraging it.

Not that the heat bothered him.