time, Carlos,” I muttered to myself.
I considered my various cellar options. Of my choices, two or three could only be accessed while a fox, and only if I controlled my size enough to fit into the entry hole, assuming it hadn’t been blocked by one of the latest storms. Some gambles were worth making, but I eliminated it as an option.
If something blocked the entrance while I was inside, the cellar would become my tomb.
I didn’t want to die. In a way, I appreciated how the bounty clarified things for me. When dead, I could do nothing. If captured, freedom remained a goal, something I could continue to fight for.
I kept one eye on my back while heading for the outskirts, forcing myself to take slow and even breaths in case I needed to make another mad dash out of a bounty hunter’s clutches. My head hurt from the close encounter with Carlos’s stick, and I wondered if he’d managed to draw blood. Until I reached somewhere safe, I didn’t dare to check.
Moving made me a harder target to catch.
By the time I reached my regular haunts, several pyres burned, and I wondered just how many lives the storms—and their creators—had taken. Ten, twenty? Thirty? Per pyre? I couldn’t tell; if built right, the largest one could reduce a hundred bodies to ash given a few hours and extra fuel.
It hurt watching them, so I moved on.
I stuck to the alleys to make it harder to track me, popping out to the rubble zones to check my progress and determine if any of my cellars could be accessible. The house on my deeded property, which I checked on at a distance, still stood. I viewed its persistence as a miracle.
After checking five cellars to discover the same general situation, I accepted the inevitable: I needed to head towards an Asylum entrance or the sewers and gain access to my good property that way. I could only hope I’d given myself enough time since last transforming, else I’d be flirting with more trouble. I tired of trouble.
It haunted me, just like the invisible weight of the murdered littering the Alley would haunt me.
The streets remained eerily empty, and the exposure bothered me enough I kept to the narrower corridors cutting through the dying city, checking my back for anyone following me.
Gunfire rang out, echoing in the alley’s tight confines. The first bullet struck the broken asphalt at my feet and dug deep. I jerked my head up in time to catch a glimpse of a dark figure wearing a trench coat. I couldn’t tell if I spotted the muzzle flash, heard the second shot, or comprehended the bullet slamming deep into my arm first.
I staggered, tripped over the debris strewn over the ground, and landed on my hands and knees.
If there was a third shot fired, it was lost in the darkness.
Friday, May 1, 2043.
Asylum, Oklahoma.
The Alley.
* * *
I recognized the building as one of the smaller warehouses tucked along the carved wall of Asylum, guarded like every other warehouse, as the sanctuary’s owner understood supplies meant the difference between life and death when trapped underground. With someone always patrolling the buildings, I’d stayed far from them, but my magic took me places I’d never been, as usual.
In one of the dark recesses, where the narrow passage between the buildings ended at an unadorned rock wall, a guard and a dark figure in a trench coat met. The guard, a middle-aged, tired man, accepted an envelope, checked its contents, and nodded. I struggled to remember his face, but he came in as disturbingly average, with no features setting him apart from any other older, brown-haired, brown-eyed man from the Alley.
Average faces created excellent crooks, circumventing my ability to tell anyone quite who he was, beyond he wasn’t ugly, he wasn’t precisely handsome, his eyes, nose, and mouth were all in the right place, and he fell right in the middle of the pack when it came to age.
Damn it.
He did me no good.
Unfortunately, neither did my glimpse at the figure wearing that damned trench coat, as he took care to hide his face. I assumed he was a man due to his height and build. Anna had a man’s build, except for her breasts, which did a good job of exposing her.
Nothing about the man implied he might be a woman, and while he wore a trench coat, it fit him well.
I checked his feet, which seemed far too large to