Pointed Hand by J. Manoa

Author:J. Manoa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABDO
Published: 2017-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Shayera groaned as she slowed to a stop.

“You were hit,” Samantha said, pointing her snout to a patch of red at Shayera’s collar.

“Nothing,” Shayera replied. She braced herself against a tree trunk for a moment before leaning her back against it and sliding to the ground.

“Need time.”

“Let me see,” Riley said, stepping up. She brushed some hair back from near Shayera’s neck. Another few inches and the shot might’ve been fatal. The blood caked the dense black hairs. It was wet on her fingers while the hole was nearly gone. She checked the back of the shoulder. “Looks clean. Through and through,” she said, recalling the phrase from a movie she’d seen, though she couldn’t remember which one. Probably been a long time since she’d seen it. Been a long time since she’d seen any movies at all.

Shayera didn’t seem wounded when Riley spotted her sprinting through the houses around the school and directly toward the edge of the forest. Samantha growled through her transformation while Riley kept watch. They ran too, around the houses and through the empty lots. They dodged roots and trees, puddles of melted snow, and exposed rocks for what felt like several minutes before finally stopping here, in a small clearing between the pine trees with glistening snow hanging from the needles.

“I’m fine,” Shayera said, as though disappointed that she’d been wounded at all.

Samantha slumped into a patch of snow in the middle of the clearing.

Riley brushed the hair back to look at the wound again. A rim remained, but the skin was almost completely closed. “How does it work anyway?” she asked. “The healing, I mean.”

Shayera shook her head. “Same as it does for you.”

“If the shell got stuck in the wound then would your body push it out or heal around it?”

“Don’t know. Never been shot before.” Shayera sighed loudly. “They say it’s a gift,” she said, taking her time to enunciate the words as best as she could. “A gift from our creator.”

“Creator?”

“Rerrucia, the feral god.”

“God’s gift,” she said, remembering the words written on the wall of the murdered family, the boyfriend of the girl they’d found at the tracks. There were claws marks found on the bodies. Dense white hairs were also said to have been left at the scene. Virgil said it was a sign of the wolves’—the Canaanites as he called them—breaking their centuries-old agreement. He’d also called them “corrupted,” “cursed by God,” “descendants of Cain,” “who’d been driven onto mountaintops and mingled with the beasts left on an already forsaken world.” It had never occurred to her that the wolves—the Fenrei as Samantha called them—would have their own god. Made sense, every culture has its own creation myth, but she hadn’t given it much thought.

“Who was that?”

“What?” Riley asked, coming out of her thoughts.

Shayera tilted her head in the direction they came. “The soldier.”

Samantha glanced up as well, awaiting Riley’s answer.

“A sleeper,” Riley said, “like I was.”

Samantha stared at the ground in front of where they sat.

“We were given locations and told to blend in until the call came.

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