Chapter 12 – This Has to Be a Joke

The boy with the long sword lowered the tip until it almost touched the snow, but he didn't let go of the hilt.

The girl with the bow didn't lower her arrow either. On the contrary, she pulled it back a little tighter, and her eyes started moving from one corpse to another, without fixing on any of them.

"What the hell happened here?" she repeated, quieter this time.

The boy took one step forward. Just one step. The snow crunched under the thick boot of his hunter gear.

"Wait," he said, without raising his voice. "Don't move yet."

"Why?"

"Because we don't know what killed these things."

The girl glanced at him from the corner of her eye from under her hood.

"And what does that have to do with me moving?"

"It has to do with the fact that if whatever killed these wolves is still around here, I'd rather we stay together than be ten steps apart."

The girl pressed her lips together and looked at the scene again. She didn't answer. But she didn't move forward either. High above, silently beating its wings, a small black bat was watching them.

Lyon was floating at a height that was hard to calculate because of the blizzard. The low mist of this frozen world reached almost as high as the streetlights a cop back in his city would have, and he was just above that layer.

High enough to see them down below, but high enough that they, if they looked, wouldn't see him except as one more little speck among the snowflakes.

Even so, it wasn't enough.

Because from that high up, with the body of a bat, with eyes the size of an apple seed, Lyon couldn't quite make out the details of what the hunters were doing.

He just saw silhouettes. General movements. Hands going up and down.

And he needed more than that.

'I'm going to boost my vision,' he thought.

"Uh-huh," the voice inside his head answered, a little tired but attentive. "Whatever you say. Bite your finger. Well, bite your wing. You know how this goes."

Lyon opened the little bat mouth and brought the tip of his left wing to his fangs.

Crack.

It was a tiny bite. A drop of black blood appeared on the edge of the wing, and that drop, instead of falling, separated from the wing and floated for a second in front of the bat's eyes, trembling in the icy air.

Then it dissolved as if the air had swallowed it.

And all of a sudden, everything down below got clearer.

Lyon saw the texture of the leather on the boy's sword. He saw the metal edge of the tip of the girl's arrow. He saw the gold badge both of them had stitched onto the chest of their gear, with the Association's logo engraved on it and a serial number underneath.

He saw the vapor coming out of the boy's mouth when he spoke. And he saw, above all, what the boy had pulled out in his left hand.

A phone.

A black phone. With a side stripe just a shade lighter gray than the rest of the body.

'Hold on...'

Lyon wasn't an expert on phones, but that phone, the one the boy had pressed against his ear while pointing his chin at the wolf corpses, that one was almost identical to the one that was, at this very moment, sitting on top of the bed in his room.

The continental network phone. The one Cya had bought him.

"Is it the same one?" the voice asked, in a tone that was no longer teasing but curious.

'It's the same one. Or if it isn't the same, it's a first cousin. Look. Gray stripe. Size. Thickness. It's the same brand at least.'

"Interesting."

'He's reporting in.'

"Yeah, you can tell."

The boy was moving his lips nonstop. He'd look at a wolf, he'd talk. He'd crouch down, touch a wound, talk. He'd lift his head, look at the tracks in the snow, talk. On the other end of that call, someone was writing down every word.

The girl with the bow, meanwhile, had started moving.

She had separated a bit from the boy. She was moving away from the portal, following a wide arc, with the bow still drawn and the arrow always pointed forward. She was combing the edge of the clearing. Looking for tracks, or bodies, or whoever was responsible.

"Oh, Lyon."

'What?'

"That girl has a serious face on her, huh? And that bow isn't half-drawn. It's fully drawn. Doesn't she scare you a little bit?"

'No.'

"Not at all?"

'Not at all.'

"Mmm."

'What?'

"It's just that you're flapping your wings a little faster than a minute ago."

'I'm compensating for the wind.'

"Uh-huh. The wind."

'Yes. The wind.'

The voice laughed inside, short, restrained.

"I'm just saying that if you were scared, it would be normal. She's got a bow. You've got mouse wings. The math isn't in your favor."

'I'm not scared. It's a matter of waiting. They're going to move deeper in at any moment. They're going to walk away from the portal. When they do, I'll come down, go in, cross over, and leave. Done.'

"Are you sure about that?"

'Yes.'

"I'm just saying that to me it didn't look like she was getting ready to walk deeper in. To me it looked like she was getting ready to make sure nothing walked back out."

Lyon didn't answer that. In part because he didn't want to give her the point. In part because, down there, something started to move.

From the portal, from the very same portal that Lyon had crossed through less than an hour ago, people started coming out.

But they weren't hunters.

The hunters had specific gear. A reinforced uniform, with reflective details and the gold badge. Clothing made for fighting.

The ones coming out now were wearing something else. Dark green uniforms, with lighter patches up top, made for camouflaging in the snow. Thick boots. Helmets with visors. And on their backs, each one was carrying a big, rolled-up bundle.

"Military," said the voice.

'I saw.'

They came out one after another. One. Two. Four. Eight. Ten. And they weren't carrying firearms in sight, nor did they seem in a hurry to fight anything. They were carrying something else. They were carrying poles. They were carrying tarps. They were carrying hammers with the head wrapped in cloth to keep from making noise.

And when they got to the clearing, they started setting up a tent.

Not a small one. A big tent. A tent the size of two living rooms put together, with reinforced walls on the inside and a double tarp on the outside for insulation against the cold.

They raised it around the portal.

Lyon watched, from up above, as two soldiers marked the perimeter with stakes. Two others started stretching out the tarp. Others hammering the poles in. Within minutes, the purple bubble of the portal was surrounded by a structure, with only one opening for people to pass through.

And behind them, more people kept coming out.

Another five hunters, this time, with different gear from the boy and the girl. One of them, the tallest one, crouched down next to the corpse of the nearest wolf and pulled a small case out of his backpack. Out of the case, he took gloves, took tweezers, took jars.

They started examining the bodies.

And up above, in the icy air, Lyon opened the little bat's eyes wide.

'...No.'

"Yes."

'No, no, no.'

"Yes, yes, yes."

'This can't be happening.'

"Lyon."

'Not this. Not this. This cannot be happening.'

"Lyon, calm down."

'They're setting up a camp! They're setting up a whole CAMP in front of the portal! That was my way out! That was my only way out!'

"I already told you they weren't going to move away."

'Fine, you were right, I get it, don't rub it in right now!'

"I'm not rubbing it in."

'You're rubbing it in!'

"I'm just saying I told you so."

'THAT IS RUBBING IT IN!'

The voice laughed inside. And Lyon, up there, couldn't even properly get angry, because his tiny body started failing him.

At first it was a small sensation. Kind of a tremor in his wings. Like when a person's hand shakes after carrying weight for a long time.

Then it got worse.

His wings started to feel stiff. The membrane got rigid. Every wingbeat cost him more than the last one, and with each beat the little body went down a little more than it went up.

"Hey."

'Don't talk to me.'

"Lyon."

'No.'

"Lyon, seriously."

'What?'

"You're freezing."

'I know.'

"You're losing altitude."

'I know.'

"You're losing altitude fast."

'I KNOW.'

"At this rate you're going to fall on top of the camp like a dead little birdie and those people are going to pick you up with tweezers."

And there Lyon reacted. He beat his wings hard, gained a bit of forward speed, and turned. He turned with his beak aimed away from the portal, away from the camp, away from the green silhouettes still hammering stakes.

Lyon turned toward the only area of the horizon where there was no movement to be seen, a gap in the mist, past a group of gray silhouettes that he was pretty much sure were dead trees.

And he flew, with what little strength he had left, toward there.

He didn't make it far. Thirty or forty meters in, the wings simply stopped responding. They folded inward, the little body went nose-down, and Lyon fell.

Fwump.

He fell on a mound of snow so soft it didn't even hurt. Snow just got into his snout, into his ears, into the membranes of his wings.

He stayed there a second, buried up to his middle, without moving.

"...Are you okay?"

'I'm okay.'

"You've got snow on your face."

'I'm okay.'

"You've got snow in your mouth. I'm feeling it. It's cold."

'I know it's cold, I'm feeling it too!'

"Okay, okay."

With enormous effort, Lyon got out of the pile. He shook himself off, took two clumsy little hops to a clear space, and there, without thinking much, he let the red light wrap around him again.

Fwoop.

And now, lying in the snow, there was a girl with white hair who was shivering, and who had the sleeves of the raincoat hanging empty because the jacket was already practically destroyed from the earlier combat.

A girl with the t-shirt in tatters, with only one shoulder covered and the other one exposed.

A girl with the shorts singed at the edges and without a face mask and without sunglasses.

Lyon was practically naked.

"O-Ow..." Lyon whispered, the high voice trembling in the icy air. "Ow, ow, ow..."

"Okay, this is serious," said the voice, and for the first time all day it didn't sound amused, not even a little. "You need heat. Now. Fast. Right now."

"I-I know..."

"Very seriously, Lyon. The vampire body heals itself but it doesn't warm itself up."

"I-I know."

Lyon tried to stand up and his legs didn't respond at first. He propped himself up on his hands, his hands were blue. He looked at his fingers and for a second he didn't recognize them.

'Okay. Okay. Fire.'

"Yes. Fire."

He dragged himself through the snow to the first dead tree he saw. It was a skinny trunk, almost black, with twisted, brittle branches, covered by a thin layer of frost on the outside but dry on the inside. Dry for years.

Lyon stood in front of the tree, took a deep breath, and brought his left hand to his mouth.

Crunch.

He bit his palm. The blood came out slow, much slower than the last time the voice had drawn it. Almost black. Almost warm.

He stretched his hand toward the tree.

'Come on... fire...'

"Concentrate."

'I'm concentrating.'

"Concentrate more."

'I'm concentrating!'

"You're shaking too much. Close your eyes. Don't feel the cold. Just feel what you have in your hand and what you want to be on the tree."

Lyon closed his eyes. Clenched his teeth. Tried to remember the sensation from the fight, when he'd first managed to light his fist up in front of a wolf.

The mana from the air. The blood from his hand. The two ingredients coming together in a single point over the tree.

One ingredient. The other. A point.

His fist lit up.

A small fire, weak, trembling in his palm, the size of an apple. Lyon let out his breath with a small sob of relief and stretched his hand toward the trunk.

And the trunk caught fire.

Within seconds, the fire climbed up the dead trunk as if the tree were made of paper. The bark split open. The thinner branches turned red. And from the top of the tree, smoke started to rise.

White smoke. Thick. Dense.

Lyon dropped to his knees in front of the fire and stretched both hands toward the flames. The heat hit his face almost violently, as if warm water were being splashed on him after he'd been standing under an icy rain. His fingers started to loosen up.

"...ah..."

"Good," said the voice, in a relieved tone.

"Ah... ah..."

"Breathe. Let your chest warm up first. Everything else comes after."

Lyon obeyed. He stayed there, kneeling in the snow, hands extended toward the burning tree, with his chest rising and falling underneath the tatters of the t-shirt.

His shoulders kept trembling but each tremor was a little smaller than the last.

And up above, from the tree, the smoke kept rising.

And kept rising.

And kept rising.

And it wasn't discreet smoke.

"Lyon."

"Mmm."

"That smoke."

"Mmm."

"The smoke, Lyon."

"I saw it."

"It can be seen from the camp."

"I saw it."

"It can be seen from three kilometers away. It's a column. It's a fat, white column, in a gray sky. It's the most visible thing in this frozen world at this moment."

"I saw it."

"So why are you still in front of the fire?"

"Because I need another minute."

"You don't have another minute."

"I need thirty seconds."

"Lyon."

"Twenty."

"Lyon..."

"Ten."

"Lyon!"

"LEAVE ME ALONE!"

Lyon squeezed his eyes shut. He got closer to the fire. He felt the heat sticking to his face almost like a burn, but he didn't care.

He needed his body to stop shaking.

He needed his wings, when they came back out, not to fold up again after thirty meters.

He needed twenty more seconds and that was it, and that was it, and that was it.

And then, between the crackling of the fire, a shout was heard.

"Who's there?!"

It was a woman's voice. Firm. Young. The voice of someone who knew how to shout to be heard in the middle of a storm.

Lyon froze.

'...No.'

"Yes."

'No, no, no, no, no.'

"I told you, Lyon."

'DON'T RUB IT IN RIGHT NOW!'

"I'm not rubbing it in."

'YES YOU ARE!'

"It's an observation."

'I already told you that's rubbing it in!'

Lyon slowly turned his head. In the distance, through the mist, a silhouette could be seen. A hooded silhouette, advancing between the dead trees with careful steps. She had something in her hands. Something long. A bow.

The girl with the bow.

And she also, apparently, couldn't see him well. She was moving with her head tilted forward, squinting her eyes, trying to make out exactly where that smoke was coming from.

"Who's there?!" she repeated, a little closer. "Identify yourself or I shoot!"

Lyon looked at the fire. Looked at the silhouette. Looked at the fire.

'I need ten more seconds.'

"Lyon, you have to leave."

'Five.'

"Lyon."

'Five. Five. Five. Just five.'

Lyon pressed himself even closer to the burning tree, all that his human body could take without burning, and counted mentally.

One. Two. Three. Four.

He felt the heat sneak in under his ribs. He felt his legs respond a little better. He felt his hands go back to a color more like normal.

Five.

"I'M WARNING YOU!"

Lyon jumped up, stepped two steps back from the fire, and let the red light wrap around him for the third time that night.

Fwoop.

And in the air there was, again, a small black bat.

The bat beat its wings twice. This time they responded. This time they had strength. Lyon lifted himself above the branches of the burning tree, went up three meters, went up five, and turned toward the mist just as the girl with the bow raised hers.

Fwip!

The arrow whistled past less than a meter from Lyon's left wing. Lyon felt it more than he saw it. A cold different from the cold of the snow. A pointed cold. A cold that goes straight.

"There!" she yelled. "THERE!"

Fwip! Fwip! Fwip!

Three more arrows, almost at the same time. Lyon dodged them with sharp turns, the first to the right, the second up, the third closing his wings against his body and dropping a meter before opening them again.

He felt the air cut open above him with one of the arrows passing. He felt another graze the tip of a wing.

"Ah!"

"Up! Higher! Up, Lyon!" the voice shouted in an amused tone.

Lyon beat his wings with all the strength he had left and went up. A meter and a half. Three meters. Five. Ten.

The girl, down below, kept shooting, but now the arrows were starting to arrive tired, with less precision, barely grazing the altitude where he was flying.

And at fifteen meters, he entered the denser layer of mist, and disappeared.

Fwip!

One last arrow. This one passed underneath.

And then, silence.

Lyon beat his wings more slowly, gaining altitude without rushing, with his chest rising and falling so fast that he could feel the bat's little heart.

Below, he could still make out the voice of the boy with the sword arriving at a run.

"What happened?! Are you okay?!"

"Something was here!"

"What do you mean something?"

"A silhouette! It flew away!"

"Flew?"

"Flew!"

There was a short silence below. Lyon, up above, took advantage of it to settle into a current and stabilize.

"...A bird?" the boy asked, without much conviction.

"It wasn't a bird. Birds don't start fires."

"So..."

"So someone else is here."

Another silence. And then, the boy spoke, and his voice was no longer the relaxed investigator voice from before. It was something else.

"...More reason to stay alert. I'm going to call it in. And I'm going to ask them to bring more gear before things get ugly."

"Yes. Do it."

The footsteps of the two of them moved off below, in the direction of the camp.

And Lyon, up above, breathed out in relief.

"That was close."

'That was really close.'

"Really really close."

'Don't rub it in.'

"I'm not rubbing it in."

'You're rubbing it in.'

"I'm commenting on my reaction."

'It's the same thing.'

"It's not the same. Commenting is softer."

'...Whatever. Let's go see what's happening at the camp.'

Lyon beat his wings and turned, with the mist still covering him above and below, toward the dim glow that told him where the portal was.

And when he got there, his stomach sank all over again. Because the camp was no longer just the tent from before.

In the few minutes Lyon had spent warming up and dodging arrows, more people had come out of the portal. Many more. Ten, fifteen, twenty. All with different gear. All with different tasks.

One group was setting up a second tent, smaller, off to the side of the first one.

Another group was driving tall, thin antennas into the snow, with red blinking lights at the top.

A third one, a group of five hunters with silver badges on their chest that Lyon didn't know what the silver badges meant, but he had a feeling it was something different from the boy and the girl's gold ones.

The hunters were walking in a circle around the portal, with their hands extended, as if measuring something you couldn't see.

And from the portal, people kept coming out.

'...I am not going to hang around in circles until sunrise in this damn frozen world.'

"Agreed."

'I'm going to cross over.'

"Now?"

'Now.'

"There are a whole lot of people down there."

'I know.'

"They're going to see you the second you come down out of the mist."

'I know.'

"They're going to try to stop you."

'I know.'

"You're going to have to dodge everything they throw at you."

'I know.'

"Okay. Just checking that you understood the situation."

'I understand it perfectly.'

"Fine. Good luck."

Lyon folded his wings against his body, let himself plummet toward the portal, and dropped out of the mist.

And everyone below saw him.

"THERE!" someone shouted, one of the soldiers from the military, pointing up with his finger. "SOMETHING'S COMING DOWN!"

"What is it?!"

"A bat!"

"A BAT?!"

There was a full second of confused silence. Which Lyon took advantage of to close the distance another ten meters. And then, someone else shouted.

"WAIT! THAT'S THE BAT FROM THE REPORT!"

"WHAT?!"

"THE BAT FROM THE REPORT! THE ONE THEY SAID WENT THROUGH THE PORTAL EARLIER! THE ONE FROM THE CITY! IT'S THE SAME ONE! STOP IT!"

And there, chaos.

Rifles came up. Hands came up with spells glowing in the palm. One of the soldiers ran to grab a rolled-up bundle from the ground and started unrolling it at top speed, shaking it out until a giant net opened up, thick, with tight knots.

"NET! FROM THE LEFT!"

"IN THE AIR! IN THE AIR!"

Bang! Bang!

Two shots. Rubber bullets, from what Lyon could tell they didn't want to kill him, they wanted to catch him alive, but bullets all the same. Lyon veered left with an abrupt wingbeat and the bullets went past his side, so close he felt the air move.

"NET, NET, NOW!"

Whoosh.

The net shot upward from three different points, pulled by six soldiers with both hands. It opened up in the air like a mouth closing little by little, trying to wrap Lyon up in the center.

Lyon closed his wings.

Let his body drop.

He fell two meters in a straight line, passed under the bottom edge of the net, and opened his wings again just before touching the ground.

"IT ESCAPED UNDERNEATH!"

"UNDERNEATH?!"

"CATCH IT! CATCH IT!"

Hands. Lots of hands. Soldiers lunging in from the sides, hunters extending their arms, one trying to jump on top of him with his body wide open as if Lyon were a chicken that had gotten loose from the coop.

Lyon dodged.

Zip.

A tight turn to the right, passing under one man's arm.

Zip.

A short flap upward, dodging the hand of another one that almost grabbed him by the wing.

Zip.

A hard brake in the air so that a third one, who had lunged with both hands out front, went flying over the top of him and landed face-first in the snow.

"Ah, shit!"

Lyon took advantage of the gap. Between the legs of two soldiers. Under the outstretched arm of a hunter. Grazing the hip of a woman with a silver badge who reacted late and only grabbed air with her fingers.

And there, up ahead, the purple bubble.

The portal.

Lyon beat his wings with every ounce of strength he had left and threw himself forward, with his beak aimed at the exact center of the bubble.

"IT'S GOING TO GO IN! IT'S GOING TO GO BACK INTO THE PORTAL!"

"CATCH IT!"

"NO, LET IT GO! ON THE OTHER SIDE THERE ARE MORE PEOPLE! THEY'LL GRAB IT OVER THERE!"

And Lyon, without knowing it, entered the bubble with that last sentence ringing in his ears.

The white void.

One full second.

And then, the world he knew. The asphalt of the highway. The red and blue lights of the patrol cars. The smell of smog. The distant noise of a city alive.

And people.

Lots of them.

Way, way more people than a few minutes ago.

In the time Lyon had been on the other side, on the highway side not only more police had arrived, not only more soldiers, not only more hunters. TV vans had arrived. Reporters had arrived with cameras on their shoulders. Onlookers had arrived, slipping between the orange cones.

And in the middle of all of it, standing in front of a group of officers with gold badges, with two microphones hanging in front of her face and with the camera lights lighting up her uniform, was a woman with black hair. And red eyes.

It was Cya.

Cya was giving a press conference.

She was in the middle of a sentence with her mouth open about to say the next word, with her right hand raised pointing at the portal to indicate something she was explaining to the public, with the flat, professional face she had been wearing all afternoon.

And her red eyes, those red eyes, were locked exactly in the direction of the bubble.

Which is to say, in the direction of Lyon.

Which is to say, on Lyon.

For a full second, the two of them looked at each other.

A second in which Lyon knew, with absolute, brutal, terrible clarity, that she had seen him come out.

The officers next to Cya were still looking straight ahead, at the microphones, waiting for the next word of the press conference.

The reporters were still with the cameras pointed at her. The people behind the cordon were still murmuring.

Nobody else had noticed yet.

Only her.

And Cya lowered the hand from the gesture she was making, closed her mouth without finishing the sentence, took half a step forward stepping out from behind the podium, and with a movement so quick that one reporter's camera only caught the blur of a black sleeve, stretched her arms out toward the air.

Toward the bat.

Toward Lyon.

Hi, everyone! I wanted to apologize because I wasn’t able to do the 3-chapter marathon for two days in a row as I had planned.

(╥﹏╥)

I’m still trying to get my workflow back on track after the earthquake that happened near where I live. I’ve been writing much more slowly than usual, but thankfully, I’m only now starting to feel better.

Once I finish the marathon for my main novel, which should last about four more days, I’ll start the marathon for this one. In the meantime, I’ll be uploading one chapter per day.

Thank you so much for your patience and for continuing to read!

(っ˘ω˘ς )