Series of Death Draft 01 CH 54 (Patreon)

Trembor grabbed onto the wall, claws digging into the plaster, to keep from losing his balance and pulled his legs out of the hole by the section of the floor that fell away. He stared at it, catching his breath. What was this? Some horror house from a vid show? A bad one at that. Was he dealing with a criminal organization or some cub? He’d expected thugs trying to subdue him, instead he got knives on springs and dropping sections of floors.

He considered going back, had his hand on the door, but Marlot was there. Him and his ‘I don’t care what you want’ attitude. He would have moved on, right? He wasn’t down the steps, waiting for Trembor to come back, tail between his leg. Waiting to smirk and point out that again he was right. Marlot wasn’t like that.

Trembor’s hand shook on the doorknob. Fuck, he was the cub. Scared of some memory. Someone who had been out of his life for close to half of it now. Considering how Gorrek treated males, he was probably dead by now. Someone had had the strength to end him and the misery he brought on everyone around him.

He wished he’d been the one to do it, instead of locking the memory in the back of his mind and hoping to never have to think of the lion again. Hoping to never have to face anyone who resembled that.

He rested his head against the door. Why did it have to be Marlot?

“Damn it, Wolf,” he whispered, “why did you have to dig in your claws so deep?”

He let go of the knob. Even if Marlot wasn’t by the stairs, he was somewhere on the ground floor, and he was almost at the office. He’d get to pound someone’s head in there. If no other part of the floor was rigged to fall out.

He stretched on the floor and looked under. Where the metal crossbar had been cut was still shiny, confirming it had been recent. He couldn’t see cuts on the other bars. As infantile as this felt, someone had put work on it, having to climb the shelves to cut this section.

He backed up, ran, and jumped it. The other side held, fortunately.

He approached the office carefully, catching sight of the hare in the window, still pacing, more a barely distinct form in the low light than someone. Oblivious to the noise Trembor made, or trying to lull him into overconfidence?

Next to the window it peeked in, the looked and started.

The pacing form was just a form. A manikin set on tracks running along the outside window, to ensure anyone in the warehouse would see it. Trembor growled. This was like one of the games on the Survivor Experiment show, with clues and misdirection. This definitely felt more like someone playing a game than trying to impress on Trembor the magnitude of the error of his ways.

He tested the door, and it opened. Looking in, he saw no strings along the floor in the light from the bank of monitors against the wall where the door was. He flicked the office light, and it came on. If that had been the simple way to illuminate the manikin, then the monitor being on mean whoever set this up wanted to draw attention to them.

Marlot said something about a hunter.

This felt more like the work of someone like this than a criminal organization. Hunters were unhinged, to begin with, so imagining one of them would create a game out of stalking his prey felt more plausible. But that he’d involved his brother when he was after Marlot, as the wolf claimed? That was pushing credulity.

In the office, he could see the eight monitors showed various sections of the building, the image flicking every few seconds to show another part; the warehouse, the front, where he and Marlot argued. If the hare had been in here, he would have seen them. The controls had a volume dial. He might even have heard them.

Which one of them had sounded the more like a cub?

He cursed, one of the screens had shown someone in a chair, he thought it was a lion, but the image had changed before he could focus on it. He looked through the screen, searching for it.

His pad buzzed, and he took it out. Marlot.

Did he want to answer him? Would he just order him again? He cursed. They were beyond that. He’d give the wolf a piece of his mind once this was done with,

“Marl, where are you?”

“RI Goldenmane,” a young-sounding voice said, “It’s such a pleasure to talk with you again. I was really sorry the last meeting didn’t go as well as it could have.”

“Who is this?” the voice sounded familiar.

“No? I guess we didn’t interact long enough. How about this?” this time when he spoke he sounded older. “Officer Goldenmane, I, I saw something, a body, no, I don’t want anything to do with it.” This time it was the words with the voice.

“You called in a body. Bypassed the call-in line, called me directly.”

“Time was of the essence,” the voice was younger, but not as young as the first one. There was a neutrality to it, a lack of inflection, Trembor didn’t like “and I really didn’t want the enforcers to consider sparing a few people from the riot that coincidentally took place to secure the house. After all, it was an intimate meeting, not an all invite party.”

“What have you done with Marlot?”

“Now that’s the tone of voice I wanted to here, controlled anger. Second from the top, second from the right. It might take a bit for the camera to cycle back, but tell me when you see me.”

A dark room, then a different angle of the cubicles, a row of shelving, then a hare in a room with Bo in the back, in a chair, head slumped forward. Before he could ask about his brother, he saw the wolf at the hare’s feet.

“What did you do to him?” he demanded, his words distorted by his anger. The hare waved before the image flicked to Trembor’s back, looking at the screens.

“The more important question is what am I going to do with him. Oh, don’t worry about your brother. He was just a way to get you here. I did consider threatening him, but as far as you’ll go for your family, I think you’ll go much further for a different kind of love.”

The image was back to the hare as he prodded Marlot with a foot.

“I will kill you,” Trembor snarled.

“Will you? I mean, you are a killer, but this isn’t about feeding yourself. I thought your wolf had it in him, I mean he killed twice for you already, right? Have there been other times that I didn’t uncover? You, on the other hand. What did you do for him?”

“Where are you?”

The hare sighed. “There’s a shed at the back of the loading docks. We’re in there, and I’d hurry if I were you, because I’m really tired of giving the two of you a chance. Someone dies today, Trembor. You get to decide who.”

The call ended and Trembor ran out of the office and was down the stairs leading to the loading dock before he even considered there might be more traps on them, but he didn’t care. Marlot was in danger and he wasn’t losing him.

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