The Assassin's Shadow

Chapter 3

Voices swirled around my body and the words seemed to touch the air like butterflies. I didn’t understand or recognize the voices but they seemed to be pulling me closer to the surface of the whirlpool I was in, and that was just fine by me. The whirlpool was making me dizzy and my ears were ringing like bells.

“How long’s it been?”

“Not too long. Only about five minutes.”

“You shouldn’t have been so quick, Cody.”

“This was the only way to find out. If Andy’s right and she’s one of us then she’ll be fine, but if she’s not then she’s more useful dead.”

The more feminine sounding voice didn’t respond back.

“Wait, look!” a new voice interjected into the silence.

A new silence filled the air, a silence so tangible I could taste it. The whirlpool that surrounded me seemed to be letting up and suddenly the feeling in my head crashed down on me. It wasn’t a painful feeling but neither was it pleasant, and it was a feeling that I would have known anywhere just because it was a feeling no one could forget. The skin on my head filled with a warmth and then a creeping feeling made it seem as if new skin was growing over the old, new skin mending the damaged.

Then the feeling disappeared and the whirlpool dissolved. My mind was clear and my memory returned. I remembered the sharp crack that had broken my body, neither knowing nor caring if it would heal.

“She is one of us.” the girl’s voice said. She didn’t sound particularly pleased about this.

“Nice call, Andy. She’s much better at healing than our last one.”

“You’re so sick, Cody.” the girl said bitterly.

“Relax, Ash.” the second voice said. “Do you think she’s awake, Cody?”

There was a pause and then I heard footsteps coming toward me. Rather than sit here and wait for someone to come over and see my flickering eyelids, I opened my eyes and scrambled to my feet, backing away. I slipped a little bit and my eyes shifted down to the pool of red. I could feel the blood dripping from the ends of my hair.

The one who’s footsteps I had heard was the one who had shot me. The two other people were the girl who had been in the black car and the boy I had seen the first day in the parking lot, the one with blonde hair.

“She’s awake.” Cody said.

“Good, now we can go home. I hate being on the Resistance’s turf.”

“We have to leave Cody, we’ve overextended our stay anyway. If they find us, they’ll kill us.” the girl Andy had called Ash said.

Cody glanced at the two. “Are you afraid of a couple of humans?”

“There aren’t just humans, you know full well a few of our people have gone over to their side.” Ash said.

Andy gave the alley a sweeping look as if afraid someone was going to jump out of the shadows.

“We’re more than a match for anyone on their side.” Cody said confidently. He turned back to me, his attention refocused.

He took a step in my direction and I, unable to ignore the screams of my feet any longer, turned around and ran as fast as I could the other way. Suddenly, though, he was in front of me. I slid to a stop and looked at him in horror. He grinned down at me and I knew suddenly that not only did he look like a panther, he also had the personality of one.

I hated to play his game of cat and mouse but I hated even more to stand there and wait for him to knock me out or in some other way incapacitate me. I backed up from him, and then suddenly he wasn’t in front of me anymore. I felt arms wrap around me and then a prickling pain in my arm. I looked down and saw a needle in my arm. I tried to reach up to tug it out, but Cody’s arms pinned mine to my side like a straitjacket and soon I was drifting back into the whirlpool I had just escaped from.