Hurricane #33: The Drowning (Patreon)

Watching Sarah fall gave Serrano enough of a burst of energy to stagger to her forepaws, even if she swayed unsteadily. She took two steps—

The electric zap came again, just for a moment, and her knees buckled.

“Stay down,” Sarge growled. He’d picked up one of the black boxes.

“She’s…she’s going to…” Serrano couldn’t get out the words going to die. She couldn’t, should she? Shouldn’t a faerie that powerful, one who’d obliquely joked about stepping on buildings like Legos, be virtually immortal? Shouldn’t they be able to go step on buildings together sometime?

“She was gonna kill us!” Sarge waved at the shrunken humans scurrying away from his boots. “I don’t know how to turn them back.” He glared at Serrano as if everything in the world was her fault. “It didn’t have to be this way. I’m a record producer, not a gangster. I was just taking money on the side to help keep you where you were, keep you under control long enough for them to drain you. You understand that?”

“Yeah, I understand.” Serrano wiped spittle off her muzzle, breathing heavily. “I understand they paid you a lot of money to let them fuck with me, and you didn’t really give a damn what happened to me in the process.”

He looked away.

“And I also understand that Sark isn’t draining me, he’s draining what I’m connected to, which is the entire weather system. However many bags of gold he’s paying you, it isn’t enough.”

“Yeah, call me Julah. Whatever.” He shrugged. “I’m—”

“What you are is not fucking getting it,” Irsaw said.

Serrano and Sarge both looked at the hyena, Sarge skeptically, the coyote more wide-eyed. Had she ever heard the professor curse before?

“Perhaps you are a modern-day Julah, following in his footsteps of betraying the avatar of a god. But if the hydrologic system gets irreversibly disrupted, you’re literally dooming civilization.”

She could see Webb still stretched out on her back, groaning, like she’d taken more damage from the current than the others. Dammit, they could absolutely use a five and a half foot tall mouse with the strength of a ninety foot tall mouse right now. Ward was sitting up, too, studying the scene with a quiet, calculating look. She still didn’t fully trust the vixen, but the possibility of this being a long game on her part seemed a hell of a lot less likely now than it had yesterday. If she was up to something good, Serrano didn’t want to call attention to it.

Then her gaze flicked back to Sarah again. The wolf was still alive, but had her hands to the iron bolt in her chest, just above it, like she couldn’t bear to touch it. Blood flowed freely out of the wound. Both wounds. Serrano whined, struggling to get back to her feet. “I need to get Sarah help.”

One of the three surviving humans cut in, pointing at his earpiece. “Sark’s made the connection.” He wasn’t looking at Sarge; he was looking at another one of the human agents.

That agent lifted his brows. “So we’re done here.”

“We are.” The first looked excited.

Sarge looked between them. “Wait, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that they’re trying to find a way to drain the weather system without going through me.” Out of the corner of her eye, Serrano could see Ward drawing her gun. The coyote raised her voice, trying to keep their attention on her. “Because what I’ve been telling you is the fucking truth. I’m not a big bad Sark’s trying to take out—I’m a means to an end. And so are you.”

He grimaced. “Ronni…”

“Tell him!” She glared at one of the humans, pointing at Sarge.

The agent might have a weird human face, but exasperation was plain on it. “Yeah. And you’re a means we don’t need anymore, thank God.”

Sarge’s eyes widened, and she pointed her black box at them. “And what the hell does—”

Shots rang out, three in quick succession, metallic clangs and hissing following. The agents, Sarge, and Serrano all jumped. The humans instantly drew their guns, training them on Ward. “Drop it now!”

She dropped her gun, raising her hands.

Serrano looked between the vixen and her target. “You killed the…air conditioner?”

One of the agents looked over at the unit as it hissed with leaking…freon? No, something blue. What the hell? The blood drained from his face. “It’s not an air conditioner.”

“No.” Ward flashed an uncharacteristically manic, triumphant grin, and raised her voice to be heard over a sudden howl of wind. “It isn’t.”

Serrano stared as the humans—and Sarge—staggered against the force of the sudden gale. She could feel it, too, but they were being literally blown back. She wasn’t doing it, but…

“Ulohne,” she whispered. She pushed herself to her paws. Yes, she could feel it. Feel her. The wind, the storm, everything. The connection was back. Ward had destroyed the firewall.

The coyote-taur raised her hands. “I’ve got it from here.” Thunder cracked, reverberating around the building, setting off more alarms, and she trotted slowly toward the humans and wolf. Each step grew heavier as her size increased. Seven feet high. Eight feet. Nine feet. She caught sight of the shrunken humans soaring through the air like leaves to smash into the far wall.

Irsaw and Webb got to their paws. “The router,” the hyena said, pointing in the direction their gadget had indicated earlier. “You take that, I’ll attend to Miss Wylde.” Webb nodded, and sprinted off.

“Stay back!” one of the humans screamed, struggling against the wind to aim his gun. “Stay back or I’ll—”

Serrano made a pitching motion with one paw, hurling ball lightning at him. His threat dissolved in screams. Thunder cracked again, and feathery clouds against the ceiling drizzled rain.

One of the two other humans turned and tried to run, but lost his footing. The coyote-taur, now well over twice his height and more than ten times his weight, smashed a forepaw down on his upper body. He spasmed violently and went still.

“Ronni, come on!” Eddie screamed, covering his face against the rain. “It’s over! They’re not gonna bother you anymore! We both got what we wanted!”

The “big” wolf barely came to Serrano’s knees now; she had to crouch to casually grab the human next to him. “What I want, Sarge,” she growled, lifting the kicking man up to her muzzle, “is to save the fucking world from these weird little prey animals you sold us out to.”

“Humans aren’t prey animals!” the man screamed desperately. "Humans aren’t mmmph—"

She cut his protest short by clomping her jaws down around his upper third and swallowing hard, feeling his head enter her throat. Then she just kept swallowing, quickly, roughly, yanking him in a foot or more at a time. Until now, she hadn’t been sure just how her taur-ish digestive system worked. Now, she could feel that she had one long, powerful throat, effortlessly pulling down the struggling human toward her cavernous stomach.

She paused to pull off his unappetizing-looking shoes, threw them to the side, and finished with one big swallow, feeling him slide down inside her. She wiped spit off her muzzle. “Prey animal.” Then she looked down at Sergeant Eddie, whose ears had folded back completely against his head. “They were about to kill you along with us. You know that, right?”

“Three Lords, Ronni! I don’t—I don’t—”

She grabbed his muzzle between thumb and forefinger, holding it shut. “Every night I dreamed of a violent storm. Of drowning. Over. And over.” She looked up at the rain clouds in the building and gathered them, directed them, drew them together, then looked back into his terrified eyes, baring her teeth. “Now it’s your turn.”

The rain and wind in the building stopped. For a moment, it was silent, apart from the alarms from upstairs. Then Sarge’s eyes widened, and he started thrashing, hands around his throat, choking and gasping. The gasps became gargles. As he fell to his knees, water started trickling out of his muzzle.

“What did you do?” Irsaw sounded aghast.

“Put the storm inside him.” Serrano could hear banging from the room Webb had run into, and footsteps and shouting from upstairs. People running. Sirens.

Sarge stared up at her, terrified, pleading, for another moment. Then his eyes rolled back, and he collapsed, thrashing twice, and went still, water gushing out of his mouth.

“I’ve…” The hyena shuddered. “I’ve done what I can for Miss Wylde, but I can only stabilize her for a few minutes more. If she’s going to have any chance at all, we need to get her to hospital immediately.”

She looked over and down at Irsaw and Sarah, ears lowering. The hyena had pulled out the iron bolt, stemmed the flow of blood, worked mad science, but the wolf still looked—looked—

“Can a mortal hospital even help her?”

“I don’t know.”

Webb had reappeared. “I took care of the router. I think. Everything in the room is smashed.”

“Do you have—magic doctors on campus?” She looked toward the door as she spoke. Someone was coming down the stairs. She tensed up.

Webb tilted her head, looking up. “In a manner of speaking. I don’t—” She stopped herself, looking at Sarah, then just nodded. “All right. Let’s figure out how to move her.”

Firemen hurried into the room through the door, two of them, a burly rabbit and a lanky rat. They both froze, gawking—first at Serrano, then at the destruction, then back at Serrano.

“You’re just in time,” Mrs. Webb said to them, pointing at the wolf. “We need to get her into an ambulance and to the campus hospital.”

“The…campus hospital, ma’am?” the rabbit said.

The rat pointed shakily at Serrano. “You know, that campus.”

“I—” The rabbit swallowed, seeming to make similar quick calculations as Webb had, then got on his radio. EMTs filed in quickly, carrying a stretcher.

Serrano closed her eyes, trying to let go of the power, to return to normal. It was harder than she expected this time; she had to let go of enough adrenaline, enough anger, for the storm inside her to calm. But she did. Normal size, bipedal. Naked, of course.

“Ah—” she heard Irsaw say, and opened her eyes.

The EMTs were gone, although the firemen were still there, surveying the damage. Jake and Carl stood at the exit, looking in, gaping.

Taking a deep breath, Serrano strode toward them, motioning Irsaw and Webb to follow. “Big electrical fire, pipes bursting, all sorts of shit,” she said by way of explanation.

The hyena nodded, pulling out their detector gun gadget again and waving it around as they made for the exit with the mouse.

Carl stared at Serrano as she approached, caught between anger and terror. “What have you done?” Jake stared, too, although if he blushed any deeper his ears might ignite.

She shouldered past him. “With any luck, saved the fucking world. We gotta go follow our friend to the hospital.”