The Other Side Of Gravity (Oxygen, #1) (35 page)

But I couldn’t close my ears, couldn’t block out the spine-tingling gnarl. My eyes popped open with terror, expecting to see a wild beast, but the feral sound came from the man. His eyes rolled back in his head, showing only whites. His hands clenched into fists. His muscles strained, the veins protruding like ropes along the bulges, and his body shook violently until the edges of his shape became a blur.

“I can’t hold it,” he growled.

“Then don’t,” the woman said. “Don’t fight it. It’s time!”

A ripping sound tore through the night as the man lurched forward, his skin shredding. A gelatinous liquid spurt out of him like an exploding jar of jelly. His pants tore into ribbons as his body lengthened and grew. The shape of his limbs transformed. His face elongated, his nose and mouth becoming a . . . 
Holy crap! A snout!
I gasped, a scream stuck in my throat. By the time his front . . .
legs
. . . hit the ground, fur covered his body. He was no longer man. He was—
A freakin’ wolf?

The beast moved closer, a low growl in its throat. Its stench of decaying corpses and rotting leaves overwhelmed my hypersensitive sense of smell, the sharp but sweet odor gagging me and forcing me to breathe through my mouth.

Pop!
Another woman appeared, again out of nowhere, with pale skin and white hair that shimmered in the moonlight.

“I smell blood,” she said, her voice a flutter of wind chimes, as she made a wide circle around me. “Mmm . . . delicious blood.”

The scrapes on my hands had already healed, but not the cut on my head. It must have been deep enough for a normal person to need stitches. For me, it could take ten minutes to heal. So my blood was still fresh.

I
could only smell the wolf’s rancid odor as it hovered over me.

“Back off,
mutt
,” the white-blonde snarled as she stepped closer. “This is too important for the likes of you.”

“How dare you!” Stick-woman accused. “We had her first.”

“Alexis is mine. Always
mine
!”

What the hell?
W
hat do they want with
me
?
Cold fear slid down my spine, and my fight-or-flight instinct kicked into high gear, though I could do neither. I couldn’t so much as twitch a muscle.

Pop!
My heart jumped into my throat as another man materialized in the darkness and strode toward me.
Seriously? How many more could there be?
The wolf growled at the newcomer, and both women hissed. Goose bumps crawled along my skin.

The man stepped in front of me, placing himself between me and the others.

Good! Very good! Safe!
My sense slightly calmed me.

“You’re alone?” the blonde asked. “Ha! You haven’t a chance.”

The man twisted his hand behind his back, and a breeze swirled around me. My ears popped, and the air itself tasted cleaner, refreshing after the stench of the wolf. At the same time, the beast lunged at my protector, who raised his hands and thrust them outward. The creature flew back as if blasted by some kind of invisible force. The wolf hit the pavement somewhere outside my line of sight, but I heard the thud and a whimper, both sounds muffled as though passing through a thick barrier. I blinked several times, disbelieving what I’d just witnessed.

The women hissed again. The first one raised her stick, pointing it at my protector, while the blonde took a step toward me.

With a faint
pop
, another person appeared between the two women and my human shield. Where the hell were these people coming from?
How?
The women responded to the new arrival in complete contrast to the first guy—their teeth gleamed in the moonlight as their lips spread into grins and their eyes glinted with appreciation.

And it was easy to see why. My protector couldn’t possibly stand up against this second man. The new one was taller, broader in the shoulders, thicker in the torso and arms than my protector, who was now out-numbered and out-muscled. The second man took a single step toward us. I didn’t dare look up at him, afraid of what I might see, but I felt his eyes rake over me in such a palpable way, I could practically feel welts rising on my flesh. My trembling turned to quakes.

My sixth sense continued shouting conflicting alarms, everyone’s intentions strong.
Good
and
Evil
both screamed in my head, and I couldn’t tell which this new person was.

But then he turned to face the women, and their expressions darkened. And I knew. He was on our side. I swatted down a leap of hope, though. The attackers still out-numbered my protectors.

The wolf, now back on all fours, stalked toward us. The fur on the back of its neck rose, and hunger shone in its reddish-orange eyes as its lips curled back in a snarl, baring fangs longer than my little finger. Its pace quickened, my heart galloping with it. It lunged once more. I tried to scream. My constricted throat only allowed a whimper.

Then the wolf flew backwards again and fell to the ground a second time. The bigger man’s hand hung in the air, palm straight out facing the wolf, as if he’d hit it, but I never saw the contact.

Both women eyed me with obvious greed. Then their eyes shifted back to my brawny protector, and confusion and even fear flickered across their faces. He turned his hand toward them. Their eyes widened, looking as terrified as I felt.

And then they disappeared.

“I’ve got Alexis. Take care of that one.” The lankier man turned toward me, his face hidden in shadow while his hand waved in front of my eyes, his fingers curling inward. “
The disco
.”

The phrase came as a whisper, immediately lost to a wolfish howl behind us that diminished into a human cry of pain.

And then everything went black.

1.               ~ * ~
   

“Alexis.” Mom’s voice, soft and distant, pulled me out of unconsciousness. “Alexis, honey, get your behind up.”

“Huh?” I mumbled, disoriented.

“We need to go.”

I forced my eyes open after blinking several times against the brightness of daylight. Dressed in jeans and a silk tank, Mom knelt on the floor next to me, where I was wrapped in a blanket, a pillow under my head.
How did I get here?
The last thing I remembered was the word “disco” whispered in my ear . . . but it had nothing to do with funky music, mirrored balls, or dancing.

As an image of a dark street and strange people filled my mind instead, the fear returned, and I sat up with a gasp. Pain shot from the base of my skull to the backs of my eyelids, nearly knocking me back down. I pressed my fingers to my temples.
Had that been real? Or a dream?
I examined my hands. No scrapes. I touched my head. No bump or cut. That meant little, though. The injuries would have been healed by now anyway.

“What happened last night?” My voice came out as a rasp.

“Hmm?”

I started to tell her, and her brows pressed together as I began with the boys and the knife.

“I can’t believe how mean kids can be,” she interrupted, but then she frowned. “And I can’t believe you taunted them. We should have moved after the burn.”

I shook my head, just once. It hurt too much to move more than that. She misinterpreted the movement, though, thinking I still protested her offer to move to avoid my humiliation. I hadn’t wanted to leave and change schools so close to graduation, but that had been months ago. It didn’t matter anymore.

“I know,” she said. “We’re moving now, and you can have a fresh start. You’re starting a new chapter, college—”

“No, that’s not it. There was this couple in the street, too. And the man . . . he changed into a . . . a
werewolf
. And the woman—I swear she was a
witch
and put a spell on me!”

Mom’s eyebrows arched. “Honey, do you realize what you’re saying?”

I did. And it sounded ludicrous. In fact, in the morning light, I knew the memory was more than ludicrous—it was absolutely impossible. But it had felt so
real
.

Confused, I squinted at her face. We had similar features—chestnut hair, almond-shaped, mahogany eyes, smooth, light-olive skin—but hers were inhumanly perfect. Not that I was ugly, but nobody in this world could compare to Mom. Her beauty was on a completely different plane than the rest of us. So while she looked like an angel, I looked like her very human daughter. Well, sister. Because she also looked, impossibly, twenty-six years old. Mom didn’t age. One of her quirks. By the time I was fifteen, we had to tell people she was Sophia my sister because she looked too young to pass as my mother. Since I rarely needed parental control anymore, we pretty much behaved like sisters, too. In a she-was-the-older-and-bossier-one kind of way.

“You have the wildest dreams,” she teased with a smile while nodding and patting my arm.

“But—” I pulled my arm from her, knowing she used one of her other quirks, what I called her power of persuasion. She had an uncanny way of convincing people to see and do things her way.

“It was a dream, Alexis. We don’t have time to discuss it.” An edge had come to her voice.

Right. A dream. It has to be
. Something deep inside, past the throbbing in my head, denied that theory, but there was no other explanation. Witches and werewolves . . . people appearing and disappearing . . .
How can that be real?
Logic told me it couldn’t but . . . my intuition knew
something
had happened. Right?

I broke my gaze from hers to hide my denial, not in the mood to challenge her now. My head raged, feeling like someone had jabbed knives around my brain while I slept. Also, I’d seen that stony expression on her face before:
Drop it
, the look said.

I glanced around the living room and noticed the emptiness for the first time—no furniture, no boxes stacked against the walls, nothing. “Where is everything?”

“Packed in the moving truck.” She sounded nonchalant, as if it made perfect sense.

“
What?
”

It didn’t make sense at all. That wasn’t the plan. Mom was supposed to break up with her boyfriend last night, and we would pack the truck today and leave for Florida tomorrow.
Why the sudden rush?
She didn’t believe my story, so that couldn’t be it. It had to be the boyfriend. It was almost always the boyfriends.

“We need to get out of here,” she said. “
Now
.”

I knew the tone and moved as quickly as my aching head allowed. Our moves always felt like forced escapes. Sometimes we moved because of an accident, but most often because of the boyfriends. Though this move had actually been planned, it now had the familiar feeling we were once again making an escape. At least this time I knew where we headed and why.

My head still felt sluggish as we traveled south on I-95, but once the drugged feeling lifted and I could think clearly, I analyzed last night. People had tried to hurt me and possibly wanted to kill me.
I think
. Maybe the werewolf and the witch and the other bizarre parts weren’t real. Maybe I hit my head harder than I realized and imagined those aspects. Or maybe the real events of . . .
something
. . . mashed up with an actual dream, and I had everything confused. But I was certain I was
attacked.
Fairly certain, anyway
. And the way the white-blonde said I was “hers” told me it wasn’t the last time I’d see her.
If she’s even real
.

I blew out a sigh as I stared at the passing landscape. My memory felt like a ripped-up photo taped back together but missing vital pieces. Some details, like the wolf’s terrifying eyes, were clear, while others, like everyone else’s faces, remained blank. This made me question the reality of it all, but I couldn’t so easily dismiss the fear that was deeply embedded into my memory. If that had been a dream, it’d been one hell of a night terror.

On the other hand, if someone had truly attacked me, Mom would know, and she wouldn’t have dismissed me so easily. She’d never been the hovering type, but because of our history, she was protective in her own way. Even now, as I moved south for college, she followed, giving up her job in corporate sales because, she’d said, she was ready for a change. She’d been in sales for as long as I could remember and was quite successful at it. With that power-of-persuasion quirk she had going on, she could sell a truckload of beef to a vegan. But she had always wanted to own a bookstore, and there happened to be one for sale just ten miles from the university I’d chosen. Most people my age would be aghast at their mother following them, but I was actually okay with it. She was my best friend, after all. My only friend for years. That had been her reasoning, too—she’d even joked about taking classes with me—but now I questioned her true motivations.