Heretical Edge

For as long as she could remember, Roxanne ‘Roxa’ Pittman had been accustomed to eyes following her whenever she entered a room. As a child, she had been judged by the other orphans. With her pretty blonde hair and bright blue eyes, there had been plenty of others in the foster system who saw her as a threat to their own ability to be adopted. And of course, there were the parents themselves, people who were basically auditioning kids to be part of their family. Everything she said, everything she did, everything she was had constantly been judged.

Once she’d run away from her last foster family at the age of nine (after stabbing the abusive father with a knife when he tried to touch her), people had started watching Roxa for a variety of other reasons. She was a blonde girl out on the street. Some people watched her for… less than savory reasons, while others simply wanted to help. But their way of ‘helping’ was usually to call the cops. And the police would just take her back to the system that she’d already given up on.

Then there were the people who watched her not for either of those reasons, but because they saw a thief, a ratty, dirty girl out on the streets who stole from them. They saw her as something less than human because she had no roof over her head, no family to live with, no school to go to. They saw her as something to kick out of their stores, away from their paying customers and out from under their roofs. They watched her, judged her, and wanted to make her disappear.

The point was that throughout every ‘phase’ of her life, Roxa had been watched and judged by people who didn’t actually know her. Whether they thought she was a criminal, a potential daughter, a little thug who belonged in prison, or a clueless Silverstone in the case of her recent Heretic classmates, everyone had their opinion based on little more than looking at her.

And now… well, now she was still being watched and judged for several reasons. Some of them just as familiar as they had always been, while others were… somewhat new.

The door of the bar that Roxa stepped into had barely closed behind her when a massive form stepped into her path. Her head tilted up to find a big black guy, a few inches over six feet tall and built like a truck, standing there. He eyed her before rumbling, “Little young, aren’t ya?”

“It’s my birthday,” she replied, hand smoothly tugging the driver’s license from the pocket of her jeans. She held it up for the man to see the date, which proudly proclaimed her to be twenty-one as of that morning. It was a lie, of course. Well, mostly. Her birthday was that day, but she definitely hadn’t turned twenty-one. The fake ID was a few years off. She was actually eighteen.

“Well, happy birthday to you,” the bouncer announced, handing the ID back with a shrug. “But the dog can’t come in.” He jabbed a finger past Roxa, to the animal that entered alongside her.

Roxa’s gaze followed his, and she glanced down to what looked, for the moment, like a rather large doberman. “Gidget,” she spoke easily, waiting for her hologram-covered robotic cougar to look up at her. “Wait outside, girl.” Gesturing back to the door, she repeated, “Outside.”

Gidget made a noise of disagreement, but turned and plodded back out the door before parking herself next to the entrance.

The bouncer looked like he was going to say something else about it, but in the end, he just grunted and stepped aside to let the girl walk past.

In the background, Roxa’s werewolf hearing picked up the mutter of a man describing what he’d like to do for her birthday. She ignored it, along with the chortles of his companions at the table.

Her attention, instead, was focused on the other end of the bar, where two pool tables were set up. Specifically, on the handful of men whose eyes had been on her since she entered. Like the others in the bar, they were judging her. But their judgment was very… very different.

The bar was busy, yet only those three were at the pool tables. Two-thirds of the bar was taken up by a couple dozen steadily-drinking customers, while the other third was taken up by these three men and the two pool tables. They used one, while their jackets lay over the other. None of the other patrons challenged that fact, or even approached. They knew better.

The pool-playing men’s eyes stayed on her as she approached, gazes never wavering. Three of them, all standing there with pool cues in hand as their lips tightened. Their senses were obviously yelling at them as much as Roxa’s had been shouting its warning in her ear from the moment she’d seen them.

One of the werewolves, a dark-skinned man with the tattoo of a bison on his exposed bicep half-muttered and half-snarled as she drew near enough, “You come in here to start shit, little baby Heretic, you might bite off more than you can chew. Maybe a hell of a lot more.”

“Give it another sniff, Vince,” one of the other men cut in. “She ain’t just a Heretic. Not unless they’ve been getting damn sight more accommodating than they used to be.” He gave her a long look then, eyebrows raised. “Close my eyes and use my nose, I smell a wolf. Open my eyes and ignore my nose, I see a Heretic. So which are ya really, kid? Heretic or wolf?”

For a moment, Roxa just looked at the man. He had red hair that had been fashioned into a simple crew cut, and was very slightly balding in the front. If he was human, she would have put his age at around forty-five. But for a werewolf, she had no idea. They aged slower than humans, that much she knew. But she wasn’t good enough to even make a wild guess.

Finally, as the man’s two companions (the black guy named Vince and another man with long dirty blond hair) pushed away from the pool table with hard looks, she responded. “Last time I checked, ignoring either your nose or your eyes was a bad idea. Why not listen to both of them?”

“A werewolf-Heretic,” the red-haired man muttered, head shaking slowly. “Now I’ve seen everything. Most times one of your kind get turned, his ‘friends’ make it a special a point to get rid of him. Or her. So why’re you special? And the point was, you here as what I can see, or here as what I can smell? Werewolf or Heretic, which one just walked into my favorite bar?”

“I’m not here to start a fight,” Roxa replied simply. “Does it really matter what I am beyond that? I’m just here to ask for information. Information that I can pay for.” From her pocket, she produced a roll of fifty-dollar bills, counting off four of them before putting them on the pool table. “For taking the time to talk to me. The rest of it if you answer my questions.”

The blond man, the only one who hadn’t spoken yet, snatched the money off the table and passed three of the four bills over to his obvious leader. “What do ya wanna know? Maybe then we decide if we wanna talk, or just take the population of Heretic-Wolves back down to zero.”

“A man named Lemuel.” Roxa watched each of their reactions closely. “I’m looking for him.”

The red-haired leader gave an obvious snarl. “You looking to join up with that bastard, pup, and we’ll have more problems than that wad o’bills you’ve got there can get your ass out of. His kind’s less welcome here than yours is. So if he’s the one you’re looking for, go on and piss off.”

Raising a single shoulder in a shrug, Roxa continued to meet the man’s gaze while casually replying, “I’m not looking to join him. I’m looking to kill him.”

That drew a laugh from the blond man, who ran a hand back through his long hair and gave her a mocking smirk. “Got news for you, pup, Lemuel’s pack’ll tear you down to the bones before you get within twenty feet of the old prick. You might think you’re hot shit cuz you’ve got werewolf mixed in with Heretic, but you ain’t nothing but a bug on a windshield to someone like Lemuel.”

“That’s enough, Silas,” the red-haired leader informed his subordinate before looking back to Roxa. “But he ain’t wrong. You go after Lemuel, his pack’ll take you apart. And if you’re looking for him, you came to the wrong bar. Wrong neighborhood. Wrong zip code. His kind ain’t welcome here. This is my territory, and I don’t like people like that fucking up the peace and quiet. Wolves like Lemuel and his kind, they draw attention. Attention we’d rather avoid.”

Roxa’s head turned slightly, and she sniffed twice. Two more–no, three more werewolves had entered the room. She could smell one standing by the entrance that she had come in, while two others stood by the hall that led to the restroom and the emergency exit. Clearly, all three had been summoned as backup in case she started something. Six werewolves, all watching her every move, several of them itching for any excuse to put her down.

“I dunno, Tomas,” the black guy, Vince, remarked. “She might make a good recruit, if you talk her out of this suicide plan. Heretic-wolf on our side? Could add a lot of muscle to the pack.”

Before the leader, Tomas, could respond to that, Roxa shook her head. “Not interested. Like I said, I’m here for information. I just have one question. And that question is…” Holding up the wad of bills so that every wolf in the crowded room could see it, she finished, “Which one of you is working with Lemuel to kill Tomas and take over so that he can absorb your pack into his?”

Well, if she wanted to get their attention, Roxa sure succeeded then. Silas took a quick step forward. His hand caught her arm, while his other hand took her opposite shoulder. In an instant, Roxa was shoved hard up against the nearby wall with enough force to rattle it. “The fuck did you just say?” he snarled, showing teeth that went from human to sharp canine for a moment.

In the background, she saw a few of the patrons looking over at the disturbance. One stood up and made as though to approach, but the bouncer stopped him. Leaning closer to her would-be rescuer, he whispered something that was too quiet even for her hearing to pick up from across the bar.

The man who had stood up gave Roxa one more look, then made for the door. Around him, most of the other customers did the same. None looked at her, or so much as glanced in that direction. They all left, followed eventually by the bouncer himself. In the end, even the bartender made himself scarce through a door labeled as being for the staff.

Another wolf had entered in the interim. Seven of them. Seven wolves all standing at various parts of the room, and each of them staring at Roxa. One of whom still held her pressed against the wall, the sharp claws of his fingers digging painfully into her skin.

“I think,” Tomas started while moving behind Silas to lay a hand on the man’s shoulder, “that you should leave. Questioning my pack’s loyalty, not your best move, pup. But you walk out now without looking back, and I’ll let you go.” He paused, amending, “We will all let you go.”

Instead, Roxa watched the eyes of the man holding her. The words she spoke, however, were for Tomas. “I wasn’t questioning the loyalty of your pack. Only one of them. The one that’s been talking to Lemuel for the past week, making plans to kill you. Like I said, he kills you, takes over the pack, and Lemuel absorbs them into his own. He gets your territory, your people, and all it costs him are whatever it took to buy off whichever one of these guys is your personal Judas.”

Over the sound of the chorus of growls that came from every werewolf in the room, Tomas carefully, yet dangerously spoke. “Is that what I get for giving you a chance to leave? You’re still trying to make my people doubt each other? You the one working with Lemuel? That the plan? You come in, try to make us all start snapping at each other and then he picks up the pieces?”

Shifting as she was held against that wall, Roxa quietly asked, “Can I say one more thing?”

“Kid,” Tomas replied, “deep as the hole that you keep digging yourself into is, my suggestion is that you stop talking. But if you insist on going on with that shovel, I ain’t gonna stop you. Yet.”

Her head bowed in a nod. “Like I said. I just need to say one more thing. Namy, you done?”

While the wolves were trying to work out what that meant, the pixie in question flew straight down from the overhead light where she had been perched. “Yup! Nice distraction, Roxa.” She hovered down beside the blonde girl’s head, announcing, “We’re a badass, bitchin’ team.”

The other nearest wolf, Vince, grabbed for the pixie. But Roxa quickly slipped free of Silas’s grip. Twisting and ducking under his arm, she put herself between the black wolf and her diminutive partner, raising a hand to stop him. “Wait,” she snapped.

Her attention turned to Tomas. “My friend here did one thing while I was making sure that you called all these guys in to deal with me. She hacked their phones with this.” Holding her hand out, she waited for Namythiet to produce what looked like a simple red orb about the size of a tennis ball. The pixie simply pulled it out of the vastly smaller pouch at her waist, a simple feat for the race that had invented the extradimensional storage spaces that so many Heretics used to store things like their weapons.

Under the watchful, distrustful stares of seven werewolves, Roxa turned the orb over. There was a single button on the side. “See, Namythiet’s a Hephaestetical pixie. In other words, she really likes technology. And she’s really, really good with it. So like I said, she hacked their phones. And this thing,” she continued while tossing the orb up and then catching it. “Is gonna play back a very… special conversation that one of your people had on their phone a few minutes before I walked in here. You hear that conversation, then we’ll see whether I’m still your biggest problem.”

Tomas gave her a long, silent look for a moment before flatly insisting, “I trust my people.”

In response, Roxa’s thumb pressed the button on the orb. As she did, there was an audible click. Silas’s hand lashed out to smack the ball out of her hand, sending it across the room while the blond man himself backhanded her across the face with his other hand.

Yet even as Roxa hit the wall once more, with the other wolves lunging to get their piece of her, a voice filled the room from the orb, which had rolled under the nearby pool table.

“Tonight,” Lemuel’s voice insisted with obvious annoyance. “We’re not waiting around anymore. Get it done, or the deal’s off. You really think you can hold that pack together without my help? No more excuses. No more delays. Kill Tomas tonight, or he won’t be the one you have to worry about. Got it?”

“Yeah, yeah,” a now-familiar voice replied. “I got it. He’ll be dead by morning, you have my word. Just stick to your side of the deal. I don’t wanna be fucked over when this is done.”

The recording stopped, and every eye in the room turned toward the source of that familiar voice.

“Vince,” Tomas spoke in a voice that was far more dangerous than any tone he had used with Roxa. “You wanna explain that one?”

The black werewolf’s head shook rapidly. “It’s a trick. It’s a trap. It’s a–” Abruptly, he spun. His hand lashed out, and Roxa barely had time to see a knife with a silver blade pop into his hand before it tore into Silas’s throat. He gave the suddenly-bleeding man a hard kick straight into Tomas before spinning back to sprint straight for the door that the bartender had gone through.

The rest of the wolves were caught flat-footed, shocked by their packmate’s sudden betrayal. They were so surprised, that Vince was able to make it through the staff door before anyone else moved.

Anyone, that was, except for Roxa. She was already on the fleeing werewolf’s tail, calling back, “Help him, Namy!”

Lunging up and over the bar, she went through the still-swinging door in time to see Vince crashing through another one at the far end that led out into the alley behind the bar.

In the alley, Vince was already yanking a motorcycle around that had been resting against the wall there. He glanced over his shoulder, gave her a dark glare, and then took off with a squeal of tires and the loud roar of the bike’s engine.

For most werewolves, that would have been the end of it. They were fast in human form, but not as fast as a motorcycle. And changing into wolf-form would’ve taken far too long, even for those who were very good at it.

But Roxa wasn’t most werewolves. She was a werewolf-Heretic. And the very first power, aside from the peridle’s healing ability, that she had absorbed during her time at Crossroads had been enhanced speed. It didn’t let her break the sound barrier, or even move as fast as a good car could get up to. But she could reach speeds approaching seventy miles per hour. And she put that speed to work catching up with the man on the motorcycle.

Whistling sharply, she sprinted after the fleeing figure. Vince hit the end of the street and took a sharp left, tires screaming in protest.

Roxa, meanwhile, pivoted and ran straight for the nearest building. Summoning all the strength that she could, the girl leapt high enough to barely catch hold of the bottom of the fire escape. With a grunt, she hauled herself up and onto the metal railing there. Instead of continuing to climb that way, however, the blonde girl threw herself off the fire escape. Her feet landed on the edge of a windowsill further up, and she jumped from there back to the metal railing on the next landing up.

She continued that way, jumping from window to fire escape to climb much faster than simply using the stairs. With the shortcut combined with her own enhanced speed, the girl was on the roof of the building within a handful of seconds.

Hitting the roof, she took off to the other side, arriving just in time to see Vince far below as the man completed his turn around the corner and began racing away, perpendicular to the way he had been going before.

Roxa didn’t hesitate. Still sprinting, feet kicking up small pebbles from the roof, she leapt out into the open air. Her feet windmilled a few times as she soared across the width of the entire street, before landing on the roof of the building on the opposite side. She stumbled slightly, but caught herself, glanced down at the motorcycle on the street below, and kept running.

Still, despite her enhanced speed and elevated position, Vince was already pulling away. The motorcycle wasn’t stopped by traffic, able to weave in and out as needed, and could even leap onto the sidewalk where it needed to. Other cars, or even pedestrians, weren’t an issue. He was slowly, but steadily, pulling away.

But Roxa wouldn’t let that happen. Taking three more steps to the edge of the last building, she leapt off while giving another sharp whistle. Rather than jumping toward the next roof, she leapt down toward the fleeing motorcycle.

As she plummeted, Roxa saw a small metal figure racing along the road far below. An instant later, Gidget threw herself up, transforming in mid-air. The robot cougar shifted into her hoverboard form, flying straight up at an angle that let her intercept the blonde girl in mid-fall.

Catching herself on the board, Roxa angled to continue the chase. The board streaked down, pulling up a bare foot from the pavement before leveling out.

Now the motorcycle wasn’t nearly as much of an advantage. And despite the time that it had taken for her to join up with Gidget, Roxa had managed to stop Vince from gaining an insurmountable lead. He was only at the other end of the block when she got her board under control. And that distance was about to shrink rapidly.

A car was coming straight for her, horn blaring. Roxa simply angled her board up, flying slightly higher to go up and over. On the far side of the car, which was already screeching to a stop, she kept going without even glancing back.

Another car, weave to the right. Doing so put her right up against a moving truck, so she angled the board to ride along the side of it, even as Gidget put out straps to hold Roxa’s feet to the board so that she could fly along basically sideways without falling off.

More cars, coming and going. None presented much of an obstacle for the combination of Gidget’s maneuverability and Roxa’s own reflexes. She flew around, over, and in the case of one particular semi-truck, under the vehicles without taking her eyes off of her quarry.

Through it all, she had no idea what the normal humans were seeing while this was going on. A particularly skilled skateboarder? What the hell was the Bystander Effect showing them?

She had no idea, and no time to worry about it. Angling around another truck and onto a side street, Roxa barely managed to see the massive, gray-furred figure before it lunged at her. The thing was bigger than a normal human, it looked like what a normal human would call a sasquatch, an enormous furry form with long arms, thick fur, and a combination of nasty claws and teeth. It was clearly a werewolf in his half-wolf, half-man form.

Just as clearly, he had been waiting for Roxa. It wasn’t Vince. Even the fastest-changing werewolf wouldn’t have been able to switch that quickly from the time that she had lost sight of him. This was a different wolf.

Kicking off the board as the furry, overly-muscled figure lunged at her, Roxa threw herself into the air. She sailed over her attacker’s head, while Gidget flew under his outstretched arms.

Both landed on the other side of him. Roxa caught herself on her feet, while Gidget shifted into her cougar form.

The motorcycle had stopped, idling just down the street while Vince himself stepped off and shoved it aside. The man turned, glaring back at Roxa.

Meanwhile, the wolf-man was already facing her. Towering over the blonde, he showed his teeth and gave a chuckle. “Good dodge, girl,” he informed her, his voice thick with mockery.

“Not that it matters,” another voice cut in as a third werewolf stepped into view from the opposite side of the small, narrow side street, cutting off that avenue of escape as well.

“Yeah, what do you think of that, huh, cunt!?” That was Vince. The man stalked back over, his glare hateful and vindictive. “You really think Lemuel would just leave me by myself back there without having a couple watchers? Now you just–”

One of the other two werewolves, the one in human form, just looked at him. Vince immediately fell silent. Then the newcomer spoke. “You can fight if you want. But we outnumber you three to one. In the end, you’ll tell us everything we want to know about what the hell you’re doing here and what you want with Lemuel.” He smiled faintly. “I hope you try fighting. It’s more fun that way.”

“Your math’s a little wrong,” Roxa informed him, standing there with her guard up. “It’s not three on one.”

The man’s eyes flicked down toward Gidget, and he shrugged a bit dismissively. “If you want to count your little metal friend, be my guest. Three on one or three on two, it won’t help.”

Slowly, Roxa shook her head. “I wasn’t talking about her. And it’s not three on two.”

From both sides of the street, more figures appeared. Wolves. Five of them.

“Actually,” the blonde girl continued almost conversationally as the rest of her pack stalked into view, surrounding the men who had thought that they were surrounding her.

“It’s more like six on three.”

******

“Sorry for giving your little pup there a hard time.”

About an hour after that little fight, Roxa and the rest of her pack were back in the bar. This time, the others were all in human form. The man speaking was Tomas. Beside him sat Silas. The blond man was still injured, since the silver from Vince’s blade wouldn’t regenerate the way most injuries did. But it had been bandaged up, and Namythiet had helped to make sure that the man didn’t bleed out before the man’s packmates could get to him.

“It’s all right,” Mateo replied, speaking up for his own pack. “The whole reason she came in here by herself was to draw attention. We had to give Namythiet over there a chance to get into their phones, and do it publicly so you knew what was going on. After that, we figured your traitor would run right to wherever his handlers from Lemuel’s pack were. Just had to make them believe that she was on her own so they’d show themselves.”

“You get what you needed from them?” Tomas asked before slowly turning to look at the far corner, where the unconscious, heavily injured form of Vince himself was trussed up. “Because I don’t mind asking my old friend a few more questions.”

“We got enough before his men died,” Mateo assured him. “We know where Lemuel’s pack is heading next. Which means we can get ahead of them.”

Tomas shook his head. “Still think you’re crazy, going after that psycho. I’ve got a hard enough time just keeping his bastards out of my territory.” His eyes glanced toward Vince again. “… though maybe I ain’t doing as good of a job on that as I thought.”

“Lemuel and his super-pack are a problem that’s not gonna go away,” Mateo intoned flatly. “They keep getting bigger. He’s snatching Alter and human kids, turning them, building his forces. He’s gonna keep expanding until someone stops him, until that pack gets broken up.”

For a moment, Tomas didn’t say anything. He simply stood there, hand on Silas’s shoulder. Finally, he asked, “You asking for help, Mateo? Cuz I don’t have the freedom you’ve got. I can’t go traipsing all over the country hunting these guys down. My pack leaves here, and another one is gonna move into our territory. We live here. This is our home.”

Mateo shook his head. “Not asking you to wander around with us. Just asking you to be ready. If we can get Lemuel’s pack in open ground, find them in a good spot, we’re gonna need help. We’ve got Wonderland backing us up, but having another pack like yours, that’d be good too.”

Tomas was silent again. He seemed to be considering things for several long seconds before eventually letting out a long sigh. “Yeah,” he muttered. “If something ain’t done, that son-of-a-bitch is gonna ruin everything. And he already came after us once. Turned one of my own people, one of my friends.” Grimacing then, he nodded. “You find a good way of hitting them, get to a point where all you need is numbers, you let us know.”

The two pack leaders shook on it, before Tomas glanced to Roxa. “You ever get tired of running around with this guy, you let me know, pup. You’ve earned a place here. Heard you even killed one of those fucks yourself.”

It was true. Roxa had killed the one who had threatened her. And after doing so, she had absorbed some of his power. She was still a Heretic. A Heretic and a werewolf. What did that mean? Absorbing some of a werewolf’s power while she herself already was a werewolf? What would it do?

Swallowing, she slowly shook her head. “Thanks, but I think I’m okay.”

Her eyes turned, taking in the sight of Fezzik gleefully poring over the jukebox with Namythiet’s help, a still-bloody Lesedi steadily drinking two of Tomas’s pack under the table, Hasty teaching three other wolves to dance while loudly bitching at Fezzik to pick a song and stick to it, and Corson playing cards with another wolf while trying to pretend that he didn’t know what he was doing.

“It’s like Mateo always says,” Roxa murmured mostly under her breath. “Pack isn’t just friends.

“It’s family.”