Hope Comes to Brockton Bay
Part 26
[Author's Note: the second part of this post may seem extremely familiar. This is because entire paragraphs have been lifted from Worm Interlude 11e. The ending, however, is ... different.]
"Hope!"
Hope buried her face in the pillow. "Wstgfl."
A hand on her shoulder, shaking. "Hope! Wake up!"
She turned her head, blinking. The light in her room was on. Weld was shaking her. She focused on the cheap electric alarm clock on her bedside table.
"Weld? Why are you waking me at ..." She rechecked. "four fifteen in the morning?"
"Because you have to get up now," Weld said urgently.
Hope was already sitting up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. "Why? What's the matter?"
"It's Armsmaster," said Weld, his face taut with anxiety. "You'd better hurry. It's bad."
Hope wondered absently, in this world of cape battling cape, what counted as 'bad'. But she hurried anyway.
Weld was right. It was bad.
Armsmaster lay on a surgical table – Hope was forcibly reminded of her late-night foray, just one interrupted sleep ago – with tubes and wires connecting him to various machines. Two surgeons worked on him, their movements sure, their voices low but just as urgent as Weld's had been.
He was a big man, vital. This was possibly all that was keeping him alive. A stab wound to the eye, several to the abdomen. They looked deep, and serious. The surgeons had him open, trying to fix the worst of the damage. One arm was gone, but that looked to be a pre-existing condition.
Hope slipped into a gap, laid a cool hand on Armsmaster's exposed skin. She gasped as the sensations flooded in. She took a deep breath. This was going to take all she had.
"Gentlemen," she said clearly, "please remove everything from the wounds. I need to work."
The surgeons turned and stared at her. "These are all that are keeping him alive –" one began to expostulate, but the other laid a hand on his arm.
"It's good, I think," he said. "She's a healer."
The other gave him a dubious look, but they did what she said. She took another deep breath, held it, laid her other hand on his skin, and concentrated.
Silvery blue light build up around her hands, and poured into the patient. Her wings vibrated a high, sharp chime, that built and built.
First, the blood vessels.
She felt them close, felt them stop pouring Armsmaster's life into his body cavity.
Then, the lungs.
The tissues knitted, the alveoli repaired themselves, and the lungs reinflated.
The silvery-blue light intensified. The chime sang higher and sharper.
Major organs.
Hope felt the creeping fatigue, would not let herself stop. He can still die. Iwill notallow that.
One by one, each of Armsmaster's vital organs healed itself, reasserted its normal functions. The chime now sounding through the surgery held a triumphant note.
Close the wounds.
The gaping wounds in his torso pulled themselves closed, sealing without a scar. The blood vessels reconnected without demur.
She felt darkness fluttering at the edges of her vision, but she pressed doggedly on.
Scavenge the blood. Restart the heart.
Within the body cavity, the tissues absorbed the blood. Dead matter went into the digestive system, live cells back into the bloodstream. With a jolt, the heart kicked over. Blood flowed. The lungs took a shuddering breath.
With the last of her concentration, she confirmed that Armsmaster was out of danger. There was more healing to do, but that was minor, a matter of bed rest.
The song of her wings died away. The silvery-blue glow faded.
"He'll live," she said faintly, and then crumpled to the floor.
She never felt the hands lift her, carry her, place her gently upon a bed.
The Lair of Fenrir's Chosen, later the same day.
Cricket reached to her side and picked up a small silver tube. She pressed it to the base of her throat, and her voice came out sounding distorted and digital. "Something's wrong."
"With the fight?" Hookwolf asked, raising one eyebrow.
Cricket opened her mouth and pressed the tube to her throat to reply, but didn't get a chance. There was an explosive CRACK, and the rectangular stack in the corner of the room ... shifted.
Every pane of glass that had been in the windows was now in that stack. Hookwolf knew, because he had overseen the removal of the glass, the wrapping in heavy tarpaulins, the stacking of their heaviest weights atop them. He had no doubt that once they unwrapped the tarpaulins, there would be nothing but fragmented glass there. All other glass items were in the lockers at one side of the room.
Glass that would otherwise have torn through the room like so much shrapnel.
Hookwolf tapped into his core, the 'heart' from which his metal sprouted inside his body. He could feel it start to churn with activity, and the metal he already had encasing each of his muscles began to stir. Soon it was lancing in and out of his pores, criss-crossing, some blades or needlepoints sliding against others with the sounds of whetted knives. In a few seconds, he had covered his body, to protect himself from further attacks.
"Shatterbird!" he roared, once he knew he was secure. There was no reply. Of course. She was attacking from a safe position.
An attack from her meant an attack from the rest of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Daunting, but not impossible. He was virtually invincible in this form. That left few that could actively hurt him. Burnscar. The Siberian. Crawler. There was Hatchet Face, the bogeyman of capes. With the exception of Hatchet Face, the group wouldn't be able to do much harm to him unless he was forced to stay still.
More troubling were the Nine he couldn't put down. The Siberian was untouchable, an immovable object, invincible in a way that even Alexandria wasn't. Even if he were capable of hurting Crawler, he wouldn't want to. Mannequin, he wasn't sure about. He knew the crazed tinker had encased himself in a nearly indestructible shell. As strong as Hookwolf was, he faced that distant possibility that any of these people could pin him down or set him up to be taken out by others.
Who else? He wracked his brain. Jack Slash was the brains and leader of the operation. Not a threat unto himself. Shatterbird couldn't harm him, he was almost certain.
Bonesaw. She was the wild card, the most unpredictable element in terms of what she could bring to the table. So often the case with tinkers.
He strode across the room to the windows and gazed out at the city block surrounding the home base of the Chosen. They had worked all night, but the vast majority of the glass in the windows of the surrounding buildings had been taken down, sealed behind doors. There had been much grumbling, but never where he could officially hear it. He himself had had doubts, but then he had reminded himself of Hope's warning.Only an idiot leaves a weapon lying around that an enemy can use.
"Cricket," he called out. "You said something was wrong. What did you notice?"
"Sound. The glass was singing. Still is." She pointed at one wall. Hookwolf followed the line to a building across the street and a little ways to one side.
His ears were ringing from the explosive detonation, but he doubted that was it. It would be something subsonic that Cricket noticed with her power, then.
"You come with me, then. Menja, Stormtiger, arrange our defenses."
"On it," Menja said, echoed closely by Stormtiger. They began to organise the rest of the Chosen.
Orders given, Hookwolf drew the majority of his flesh into a condensed point in his 'core', felt himself come alive as more metal spilled forth. Only his eyes remained where they were, set in recessed sockets, behind a screen of shifting blades. He was half-blind until the movement of the blades hit a rhythm, moving fast enough that they zipped over the surface of his eye at speeds faster than an eyeblink.
He let himself fall from the third floor window and hit the ground in a state that was more liquid than solid. Blades, spears, hooks and other twisted metal shapes all pooled on the pavement, absorbing the impact.
He pulled himself together, in his favored quadruped form. Looking up to the window, he created a tall spear from between his 'shoulders'. Cricket leaped out and caught the pole, slid down until she could hop off and land beside him.
Cricket pointed, and he led the way with her following directly behind him. As he walked, he wasn't moving his limbs quite so much as it might appear at first glance. Instead, he extended one growth of metal as he retracted another, only generating the illusion. A hundred new parts growing each second to suggest shifting musculature, a cohesive form, when he was anything but. Only the core skeleton, the shafts of metal that formed the limbs from the shoulders or hips to his knees, actually moved without retracting or extending.
As he moved, he looked around for his enemies. He could see none of them, which puzzled him. Crawler would have been attacking already. Siberian, Mannequin, these were front-line fighters, hard (or impossible) to hurt, formidable in their own right. So where are they?
Glass flew in from the surrounding area, from windows that had not been removed because they were too far away, to fit together into a window that floated in the air and he smashed through it with one of his forelimbs. Another barrier appeared, thicker, and he smashed that as well. The glass began to form into dozens, even hundreds of barriers. He quickly found one strike wasn't enough to clear the way.
Through the mess of dozens of dirty and wet panes of glass, he saw her. Shatterbird. A sand nigger, going by memory and the color of her exposed skin. The upper half of her head was covered in a helmet of colored glass, and her body was covered with a flowing garment made of tiny glass shards, like scales.
Is it only her? Why? He dismissed the question, even as he posed it. She came alone. Her mistake.
He rose onto two feet, standing straight, and reconfigured his arms. With spears as big around as telephone poles, he punched through thirty or forty panes of glass all at once, then did the same with his opposite hand. It was slow progress, as the glass constantly reformed and pieced itself back together a few feet ahead of him, but he was closing in.
She abruptly dropped the barriers and changed tactics. The majority of the glass in the area formed into one shape, a cone of solid glass, pointing towards the center of the purple-red sky, two and a half stories tall.
Raising one hand, she shot it straight up into the sky above, until it was just a speck.
Hookwolf lunged for her, only to find that she had moved more glass on to the ground underfoot, and it was denying him traction. His metal claws failed to find grip, failed to crack the glass, even with the heavy impacts and his impressive weight. Closing the distance proved slower than he'd hoped.
The massive spike of glass plummeted from the sky. He knew it was coming, had kept an eye out for it, and timed a leap to coincide with its descent.
And then a gale blew up out of nowhere. She was driven down into the street, hard. The glass spike wavered, tumbled, and then smashed into the ground nearby. Hookwolf and Cricket ducked flying shards.
Hookwolf would have laughed if he could. He looked at his headquarters and saw Stormtiger standing in the open window, where Hookwolf had jumped from. Stormtiger wouldn't interfere where it counted, but he would give Hookwolf the opportunity to confront his opponent. He turned, leaped, and landed near Shatterbird. She held one leg while laying on her back. She'd fallen badly.
She raised one hand, then frowned, her lips pursing together. "Hm."
Cricket, nearby, laughed quietly, rasping in her throat.
"Pride goeth before the fall," Hookwolf said, striding towards his enemy. "Seems as though Cricket can use her subsonics to cancel you out."
"Seems so," Shatterbird answered, watching him approach. "But I'm not here to kill you. I'm here to recruit you." She had a British accent. He could hear her trying to keep the fear out of her voice. She's miscalculated, badly.
He placed one large metallic clawed foot on her chest, the sharp edges drawing blood from her chest.
"That's where we differ." His right hand and arm began to form into a spear-pointed blade, razor-sharp.
"Go ahead," she said, straining at the weight on her body. "Kill me. But –"
He drove the blade through her throat.
"Not interested."
Moments later, he held up the severed head of Shatterbird, held it high by the long dark hair.
"CHOSEN!" he roared to the sky, his metallic shell amplifying his voice and giving it an unearthly timbre."CHOSEN!"
And the roar came back from his people, lined up along the window, and in the street below.
"HOOKWOLF! HOOKWOLF!"
At that moment, he would have challenged Scion himself. He was invincible.
To be continued ...