Underworld Fic
TITLE: Between Earth, Sea, and Sky
AUTHOR: Mari
EMAIL: Ficangel@yahoo.com
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: The apocalypse strikes Hungary.
DISCLAIMER: People that aren’t me, that’s for damned sure.
PAIRING: Michael/Selene
FANDOM: Underworld
SPOILERS: Through the movie, mostly, but I have dropped in a few details from the novel here and there.
FEEDBACK: Pet me, I’m a whore. Concrit is also welcome.
Michael felt the changes coming for weeks before catastrophe actually struck. He kept his silence, bit his lips to the point of blood that he licked away before he was quite able to stop himself, unwilling to face the imminently sensible, rational stare that Selene would fix upon him as he tried to explain. Her puppy, cast into a world that he was still trying to find his feet in, a pelt that didn’t quite fit. And Michael loved her, had killed for and knew with the same certainty with which he smelled disaster on the horizon that he would die for her, but Selene would never trust the nature of those things that were intuited rather than thought through and fought.
So Michael stayed quiet.
*
October 29, 2004-Evening
“The lycans are leaving the city,” Selene said three days later, rising from the kill of a vampire that she had called brother the year before. Her knuckles were white around the handle of Viktor’s sword and a line of black gleamed along the edge of the blade, matching the blood that spilled from a deep wound in her bicep. Marcus’s forces were getting close; it was time to find a new sanctuary.
Michael shivered as he felt the blue and shellac-hardness bleeding away from his skin, leaving it pink, soft, and human in the wake. His pupils contracted back to their normal size, flooding the world with color even as the clarity was stolen away. The blood on Selene’s arm changed from black to glistening ruby. Michael turned his head, spit copper as his teeth realigned themselves, and crossed over to the place where Selene stood so that he could get a better look at the wound. Selene submitted to the probing with a disinterested shrug, watching his face instead. Even with his color vision returned it was difficult for Michael to read her eyes.
Michael wiped a few blood droplets away from Selene’s arm and watched as her skin began to knit itself back together; within a few hours there would be no evidence that she had been wounded at all. “I know. It started a few weeks ago.” Michael shivered and told himself that it was because the season had been shockingly, inexplicably cold. “I can feel it through what’s left of…him.”
A scowl touched Selene’s face, just for a moment, as she bent to pick up Michael’s coat from where he had thrown in before beginning to change. He was hard on clothing these days and, while shirts were generally a lost cause, he tried to preserve what he could. A few lazy flakes of snow began to spiral down from the sky, lighting in Selene’s hair and turning her fit of temper into something out of Bizarro-land’s Christmas catalogue. Michael stifled a grin and caught the coat as she tossed it to him. “You could have told me.”
“I wanted to wait until I knew why,” Michael said. He shrugged into the coat and within seconds had it buttoned up to his chin. The snow was growing from a few angelic flakes into a swirling maelstrom. “Because I knew that was the first question that you would ask.”
“Oh.” Mollified, Selene considered this for a moment before she favored him with one of her rare smiles, the kind that gave Michael a glimpse past the spine-snapping warrior and into the woman of more than a century before. It was an experience that always left him disoriented and a touch mournful. “Do you know?”
“Not a clue. Neither one of us is exactly popular enough to walk up and ask.” Michael shook his head to clear his hair of snowflakes and frowned up at the sky for a moment. Memory of certain newscasts flickered through his mind, but the combinations of running and not dying had made civic responsibilities into low priorities as of late. He finished examining Selene’s arm and folded the torn leather back over the wound. “You’re going to have to start wearing real people clothes.”
But Selene was still focused on the comment that had come before, and a line had appeared between her eyes. “Do you regret it?” she asked. “What you are?” Her voice stayed smooth and cool as marble, and if she felt any uneasiness she kept it out of her face.
“Hey.” Michael bent his head so that he could press his forehead to Selene’s. Their lips brushed against one another, only for a moment. “I have superpowers and a girlfriend with a catsuit fetish. What’s not love?”
Selene snorted, telling him that he was being ridiculous, but the certainty had returned to her posture when she pulled away. She flicked a disinterested glance towards the corpse at her feet and turned away. Selene extended her hand behind her, trusting without needing to look around that Michael would follow.
They blended into the crowds on the sidewalks. Michael threw his arm around Selene’s shoulders to hide the cut in the leather and the wound that still oozed blood, and they passed largely without comment even though Selene’s outfit would have drawn whispers and stares bare weeks before. There was a pinched look to the people’s faces as they shuffled past that Michael didn’t like at all; it was an expression that he had seen in hospital waiting rooms far too often, on his own face in the months after Samantha had died. Michael shivered and felt as if he were waking up from a deep sleep. Now way October should feel like this, even in Europe.
“Selene. Wait.” He brought them to a halt outside of an electronics store. The windows were crowded with television sets, all turned towards the same news station. A dozen or so people had already gathered to watch ahead of him. None of their expressions were peaceful.
Selene was tugged back, mouth already opening to protest, and she shut it again with a snap when she saw where Michael was pointing. On six screens and in glorious Technicolor they were treated to the sight of the Danube, the monolithic river that ran down the center of Budapest and had traditionally kept it divided into two separate cities, as it overflowed its banks and then retreated again in huge, watery gulps. Sheets of ice the size of buses creaked along with the current, smashing into any boats whose captains had been foolish enough to leave them on the water. On each screen, the same man was seen jumping from the deck of his boat to take his chances in the inky water. He didn’t emerge again.
“Started this afternoon,” a middle-aged woman clutching a set of packages to her chest said to no one in particular. Michael thought that she might be using the sound of her own voice as a grounding tool, a way of convincing herself that she was still operating within the bounds of reality. It was a situation that Michael was well familiar with.
Selene’s outfit was beginning to attract stares, which would soon enough lead to whispers and, inevitably, Marcus. She squeezed quickly at Michael’s hand, bringing him back to the present. He was struck by how cold her hand felt in his own, even icier than he was accustomed to. The snowflakes in her hair were so numerous that they had entirely obscured the brunette. “Let’s go.” Her breath frosted on the air.
Michael nodded and followed her tug, making a mental note to sit down and watch a news program as soon as they were relatively safe again. He had been divorced from the human world for far too long. “I think I know why the lycans are leaving.”
“Dogs can sense changes in the weather,” Selene mused. A line had appeared between her eyes, suggesting that her practical warrior’s mind was already teasing at the problem from all angles and finding it wanting. Michael found himself in the unique position of being guide rather than follower on the final few blocks to their hotel.
“Do you think-“ Michael began as their most recent sanctuary came into sight, only to bring his teeth back together with an audible clack a full sentence could make its way out. Selene threw him a swift, alarmed glance, but Michael was only able to shake his head. Movement, way down deep, rocks straining and grinding against one another, every particle of earth in agony and eager to spew the wealth back up to the surface. Michael’s breath escaped from his throat in what Selene would tell him later had been an extremely doglike whine. He wrapped his arms around Selene’s waist and threw them both back from the sidewalk as the earth began to shake.
Michael landed on top of Selene, the weight of his body expelling all of the breath from hers in a hiss. Her eyes were enormous, but Michael didn’t wait to explain. He rolled away from her in time to see a massive streetlamp give one final wobble on its foundation and come crashing over into the place where they had been standing seconds before. The remaining electrical wires struck up from the ground like nerves, throwing out a shower of angry sparks. The ground continued to shake.
Selene rocked back to her feet but stayed in a crouch, her eyes darting all around to the swaying buildings and rippling streets. Short of an enemy that she could seize and fight, tension tightened her body until laying hand onto her shoulder would have been akin to touching a diamond.
A howling noise was ringing through Michael’s ears, and he could not tell if it arose from inside his head or out of it. He closed his eyes and gritted the teeth that he could already feel sharpening into points. They cut grooves into the soft flesh of his gums, flooding his mouth with the taste of pennies. He willed to his body to stay human, stay fragile-not here, not on the street-and was immersed so deeply into his concentration that he didn’t hear the squeal of brakes or even smell the melting rubber.
“Michael, look out!” Selene’s voice, coming to him from down a long well. Michael’s eyes flashed open, inky-black and without pupil in spite of his best efforts, and he gave the driver of the oncoming car one of the ultimate shocks in what would be a short life filled with many more. The headlamps filled up Michael’s vision, blinding him, as his ultra-sensitive eyes struggled to compensate for all of the new input, and the screech of brakes was the loudest sound in the world. The car hit a slick spot on an already treacherous road that was made infinitely worse by the fact that the ground beneath it was bucking like a mechanical bull, and through the windshield Michael could see the driver’s eyes widen as he lost control of the vehicle altogether. The car spun around broadside and picked up speed.
If Michael had had the luxury of time with which to glance down at his arms, he would have seen a metallic blue sheen rising up from beneath the tan, giving him the momentary appearance of being more corpse than man. As it was, he could feel his skin thickening into something far more like leather than flesh, and when his legs flexed beneath him it was with far more strength than would have been available to a human man. He leaped high into the air, clearing the car by several inches as it rushed beneath him, and came down on the other side. Michael struggled for a moment to find his balance again on the agitated street, but the earth was already beginning to resettle itself into a deceptive stillness. He glanced towards Selene, whose eyes had long since gone to a vivid electric blue and showed no sign of changing back anytime in the near future.
The car that Michael had leaped over continued its spin down the street, jumping the curb and coming to a halt so graceful that it nearly seemed deliberate against a light post. The driver hurled himself first out of the car and then down the sidewalk without even bothering to pull his keys from the ignition. Michael didn’t know if he was running because he had just watched a man leap like a cat over the hood of his vehicle, the earthquake, the shadowy events that he and Selene had somehow allowed to glide by them, or a witch’s brew of all three. In the end he supposed it didn’t particularly matter.
Michael went to Selene, who was slowly straightening up again once she was sure that the ground was going to continue to behave itself. The thickening snowfall blanketed her hair and shoulders and swirled around her face, making it even more difficult than usual for Michael to read her expression. The light cast down by the nearly full moon was fractured into a thousand different angles by the clouds and snow. It itched like drying blood along the surface of Michael’s skin.
“Come on,” Selene said, having to raise her voice into a shout to compensate for the fact that every car alarm in the city, including the one on the car that had so recently tried to kill him, had taken the earthquake as inspiration to go off at once. She seized Michael’s hand more enthusiastically than she was wont to do under ordinary circumstances. The idea that dread might be seizing up Selene’s insides as surely as it was Michael’s was not a comforting one.
Inside the hotel, the desk clerk was saying, “Hello? Hello?” repeatedly into the telephone before she finally gave up and settled it back into its cradle. Her face was the color of bleached linen and she didn’t seem to register Selene and Michael’s presence as they strode quickly by her. The electricity flickered once, twice, and died, plunging the lobby into a darkness that felt almost as natural to Michael as the light. A shower of sparks from the street as a transformer popped threw the room into relief for a span of seconds before the shadows came back. Michael could see the impossibly blue gleam that rose from Selene’s eyes in the dark, the wide terror that marked the clerk’s. “It’ll be all right,” he called back to her, and saw her head twitch towards the sound. Selene said nothing, but barely a minute went by before she stepped closer to him, so that from hip to shoulder they were one person. Their hands clutched at one another with grips tight enough to bruise.
The electronic lock on the door-bright and gleaming technology, Michael thought, how swiftly they took it for granted until it ceased to work-was dormant and lightless, and Michael only tried twice before he tore the knob off in his hand, taking most of the lock with it. The brass made a muted thunking sound as it struck the thick carpet. Michael’s step was wary as he entered the darkened room even though he would have smelled anyone lingering inside while he was still halfway down the hall. Always be on guard: one of the first habits of survival that Selene had taught him when her war had become his own, the one that he would remember the longest.
Selene and Michael separated reluctantly in order to throw their things quickly into duffel bags. Their hands continued to seek each other out, though, whenever the other one was close enough, pressing warm skin to cool and holding it there until both felt the same. They traveled light; it didn’t take long. Within ten minutes they were stepping out into the chaos again.
The snow had thickened to the point that holding hands became a matter of safety every bit as much as it was comfort. Michael could hear the whoop-whoop-whoop of emergency sirens over the howling wind, and he had to shout so loudly that it drove barbs into his throat in order to be heard above them. “We need to go somewhere that still has electricity! Somewhere where we can find out what’s going on!” He registered that Selene had turned towards him as the dark blur of her hair and a momentary flash of her eyes; all other details had been stolen away and swirled into the snow. Michael thought that he saw her nod all the same, but he wasn’t sure until he felt her fingers tighten around his in quick affirmation.
Finding electricity proved to be an easier proposition in speech than in practice. Dawn was extending its fingers over the horizon, causing a rosy glow between the buildings and a line between Selene’s brows before they managed it, in the form of a hotel obviously only a few months away from condemnation. The staff was nowhere in sight; Michael laid a fistful of bills on the counter while Selene vaulted across the top and selected from among the keys.
The room’s television set was small, black and white, with a band of static that frequently rolled across the screen. The sound worked well enough, though, and the images were still clear enough for Michael and Selene to see the way the anchorwoman’s hands shook and her throat convulsed as she read her report. They huddled together like children on the edge of the bed and didn’t speak to one another as they learned of the world’s end.
*
October 30, 2004-Early Morning
He tasted blood, thick and coppery at the back of his throat, simultaneously gagging and irresistible. Michael tried to rid himself of it all the same, turning his head and spitting with a ferocity that still managed to surprise him. The full moon tingled along his skin, not quite strong enough to force him into the change now that he was the ultimate Other, but in its wake it left a feeling like being bitten by thousands of ants all at once. Michael snarled, twisted, and struck out blindly at the enemy that he could not shake. His fist struck solid flesh rather than ephemeral moonbeam, and triumph surged down Michael’s veins before he heard the voice shout his name and felt both of his wrists being seized in unyielding grips.
“Michael!” Again. Michael gasped, and wakefulness returned to him as quickly as if he had been thrown into a swimming pool. Selene was perched upon his pelvis, pinning his wrists to either side of his body and regarding him with an intent expression. Between the trickle of crimson that ran from the edge of her mouth and the steady progress that Michael’s heart was making in crawling out of his mouth via his throat, it was the least erotic straddling that he had ever received.
“Sorry,” he gasped as Selene released his arms. Michael dragged his hand over his face and was unsurprised when it came away slicked with sweat.
Selene jerked her head towards the window, where the first rays of the dawn were pouring through and casting a rectangle on the floor. “Full moon dreams. Not your fault.” She didn’t move from her perch across his hips. It was times like this that Michael wondered how much of a sense of humor Selene had, and what kind of pains she went through in order to keep it hidden. Selene dragged her knuckles over the blood at her mouth and licked it away absently, glancing towards the window again. Frost and a thick swirling of snow were stealing away the dawning sun’s power, one beam at a time, and Michael couldn’t halt the shiver that ran up his spine. As if she was sharing his thought, Selene twitched, hitched her leg over Michael’s body so that she was lying beside rather than on him. On the other side of the room, the television offered them pictures of sterile, muted carnage. Neither of them had been willing to turn it off, just as neither one of them was actually willing to speak of the things that they saw on it. Selene lay her head on Michael’s shoulder and watched without comment as one of the miniature icebergs floating down the Danube slowly rolled over the bank and crushed a Volkswagen into parts that wouldn’t have been fit to make soda cans out of. Michael couldn’t tell if there had been any people inside.
Unlike the first quake, when the second one hit Michael received no doggy warnings, no pricklings of the senses to let him know what was going to happen. He would reflect much later that part of the reason that pets were able to sense earthquakes and volcanic activity was because these things were supposed to build for weeks in advance, and if the earth could have tantrums without any warning at all now then the state of it was a pretty shitty one, actually. Of course, by that point he hadn’t needed an earthquake to give him that particular bit of information.
The bed bucked once, hard enough to throw them both to the floor. Selene performed a physics-defying twist in midair that landed her into a ready crouch, hands braced against the floor for balance and eyes already shading from hazel to blue. Michael caught himself only partially, cracking his hip against the nightstand hard enough to send iron spikes screaming along his veins and pull a curse from between his teeth. “What the fu-“ A chunk of the ceiling fell down before he could finish, obliging him to jump back or be struck. Twice his weight in plaster and wood landed on the carpet where Michael had been standing a bare second before. A thick cloud of dust rolled out, stinging his eyes and coating his throat, and from the floor above a woman screamed. “We have to get out of here.” Most people killed in earthquakes died as a result of structures collapsing in on them, Michael’s brain supplied for him in an unnervingly cheerful tone. Good to know that the lessons learned from growing up in California weren’t going to complete waste.
“I can’t!” Selene jerked her chin towards the window, where the sun was battling it out with the snow and, for the moment at least, winning. The rectangle of light thrown down on the floor would have been welcoming under separate circumstances.
Michael swore again, at great length and with far more creativity. “Come on.” He grabbed Selene’s hand and pulled her towards the door, both of them struggling to keep their balance as the ground beneath them pitched and rolled. The glass in the window shattered with a sound that was nearly musical, and Michael could hear similar sounds coming from the rooms all around them. Blisteringly cold winds rolled into the room.
Michael and Selene weren’t the only ones who had decided that escape was the better of valor. The hallway was becoming choked with a mass of people motivated by the desire to go up, down, anywhere where the ground wasn’t dancing and temperatures weren’t dropping by the hour. Even without advanced senses Michael would have been able to smell the panic that rode the air. Selene flinched once, visibly unsettled by the prospect of so much warm meat shoving against her from all sides, before setting her jaw and shouldering through. Michael trailed in her wake, limited his strength as he moved people to the side but unwilling to relinquish it entirely.
Clocks and pictures had fallen from the walls and the carpet glittered with glass. Michael could see several people with blood running down their palms after having fallen. ‘Get Selene to the basement,’ he thought, even as he realized that this was perhaps the second stupidest thing that he could do. Unfortunately, the first stupidest option was the one that would have been the smartest if he had been alone: getting out of the structure and into the open air before the hotel’s condemnation notice could come early. They would just have to hunker down and hope that the advanced abilities that came with being creatures straight out of horror films would be enough to heal whatever damage was done.
Michael slowed. “Selene!” He yelled her name loudly enough to drive fish hooks into the flesh of his throat, and it was barely enough to make him heard over the sounds of the world coming apart. Selene turned, fighting to keep her position in the face of the human tide. Michael could see her fangs protruding slightly from her mouth and indenting the soft flesh of her lower lip. “This way!” Michael screamed. His voice broke on the second word. He paused and coughed before he could continue, as a particularly strong lurch threw him and everyone else in the hallway down to their knees. “We can wait it out if we get you into the basement!”
The dubious expression that moved across Selene’s face showed that she thought about as highly of the plan as Michael did, but a glance towards the window at the end of the hall made her shiver. She nodded and began fighting her way back towards Michael. He was within inches of being able to grab her hand when a corner of the building fell away.
The wood groaned before it splintered, a long, low moaning that made Michael think of old men finally giving up. The largest shake of all to rock the building had nothing at all to do with the earth, and Michael had just enough time for the words, ‘Oh, shit, the whole thing’s going to come down,’ to run across his mind before he was obliged to throw himself to the floor, ignoring the feet that pelted over his back as people were too far gone to halt. The hotel tilted, made that awful moaning sound again, and then the exterior wall and a large segment of the floor went crumbling away into the street. Michael could hear people screaming as the ground beneath them turned to air, could hear the far worse sounds of the screams halting as bodies struck concrete three stories below. This would all be ample fodder for nightmares later, but in the moment when terror receded and the world stood still, Selene was all that Michael saw.
She, like Michael, had thrown herself to the floor from the moment that she had realized the building had had enough. Lying flat on her face as she was, her hair and the thick leathers that she wore were enough to afford her with a few seconds of protection from the cold, vengeful sunlight that streamed through the gaping hole left behind as the hotel began to collapse. Selene’s hair shifted with the tremors and fell away from her cheek, exposing a long expanse of white flesh that began to redden and blister almost immediately. Selene screamed, a sound that Michael would replay within his mind until the end of the world.
He found his legs again, lurched to his feet long enough to lunge forward and grab Selene by the arm. She staggered against him, pressing her palm to her cheek, and they sprinted for the stairwell. Michael slid his arm around her shoulders as he would a girl that he was on a date with and murmured the words of a prayer as they half ran and half fell down to the lobby. Ceiling tiles pelted the floor at their feet like missiles as they fled.
“This way,” Michael gasped as they reached the ground floor, tugging Selene towards the door that he assumed led to the basement.
“No.” She dug in her heels, shook her head, and refused to go a step further. Above the blisters that marked up the side of her face, her eyes were chill and alert.
“Selene-“ Michael began, only to be cut off by the crashing sound of an enormous ceiling timber falling and striking the floor at the exact place where they would have been standing had Selene not halted them with her protest. Michael stared at her. “Later, you’re going to tell me how you did that.”
A second beam fell down against the first, marking out a rough triangle of stability against the chaos. Michael dragged Selene beneath it and they huddled there, pressing their faces close together like terrified puppies and waiting for it to be over.
*
It was after midnight before they were able to emerge, just in time to watch the biggest show of all.
End
AUTHOR: Mari
EMAIL: Ficangel@yahoo.com
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: The apocalypse strikes Hungary.
DISCLAIMER: People that aren’t me, that’s for damned sure.
PAIRING: Michael/Selene
FANDOM: Underworld
SPOILERS: Through the movie, mostly, but I have dropped in a few details from the novel here and there.
FEEDBACK: Pet me, I’m a whore. Concrit is also welcome.
Michael felt the changes coming for weeks before catastrophe actually struck. He kept his silence, bit his lips to the point of blood that he licked away before he was quite able to stop himself, unwilling to face the imminently sensible, rational stare that Selene would fix upon him as he tried to explain. Her puppy, cast into a world that he was still trying to find his feet in, a pelt that didn’t quite fit. And Michael loved her, had killed for and knew with the same certainty with which he smelled disaster on the horizon that he would die for her, but Selene would never trust the nature of those things that were intuited rather than thought through and fought.
So Michael stayed quiet.
*
October 29, 2004-Evening
“The lycans are leaving the city,” Selene said three days later, rising from the kill of a vampire that she had called brother the year before. Her knuckles were white around the handle of Viktor’s sword and a line of black gleamed along the edge of the blade, matching the blood that spilled from a deep wound in her bicep. Marcus’s forces were getting close; it was time to find a new sanctuary.
Michael shivered as he felt the blue and shellac-hardness bleeding away from his skin, leaving it pink, soft, and human in the wake. His pupils contracted back to their normal size, flooding the world with color even as the clarity was stolen away. The blood on Selene’s arm changed from black to glistening ruby. Michael turned his head, spit copper as his teeth realigned themselves, and crossed over to the place where Selene stood so that he could get a better look at the wound. Selene submitted to the probing with a disinterested shrug, watching his face instead. Even with his color vision returned it was difficult for Michael to read her eyes.
Michael wiped a few blood droplets away from Selene’s arm and watched as her skin began to knit itself back together; within a few hours there would be no evidence that she had been wounded at all. “I know. It started a few weeks ago.” Michael shivered and told himself that it was because the season had been shockingly, inexplicably cold. “I can feel it through what’s left of…him.”
A scowl touched Selene’s face, just for a moment, as she bent to pick up Michael’s coat from where he had thrown in before beginning to change. He was hard on clothing these days and, while shirts were generally a lost cause, he tried to preserve what he could. A few lazy flakes of snow began to spiral down from the sky, lighting in Selene’s hair and turning her fit of temper into something out of Bizarro-land’s Christmas catalogue. Michael stifled a grin and caught the coat as she tossed it to him. “You could have told me.”
“I wanted to wait until I knew why,” Michael said. He shrugged into the coat and within seconds had it buttoned up to his chin. The snow was growing from a few angelic flakes into a swirling maelstrom. “Because I knew that was the first question that you would ask.”
“Oh.” Mollified, Selene considered this for a moment before she favored him with one of her rare smiles, the kind that gave Michael a glimpse past the spine-snapping warrior and into the woman of more than a century before. It was an experience that always left him disoriented and a touch mournful. “Do you know?”
“Not a clue. Neither one of us is exactly popular enough to walk up and ask.” Michael shook his head to clear his hair of snowflakes and frowned up at the sky for a moment. Memory of certain newscasts flickered through his mind, but the combinations of running and not dying had made civic responsibilities into low priorities as of late. He finished examining Selene’s arm and folded the torn leather back over the wound. “You’re going to have to start wearing real people clothes.”
But Selene was still focused on the comment that had come before, and a line had appeared between her eyes. “Do you regret it?” she asked. “What you are?” Her voice stayed smooth and cool as marble, and if she felt any uneasiness she kept it out of her face.
“Hey.” Michael bent his head so that he could press his forehead to Selene’s. Their lips brushed against one another, only for a moment. “I have superpowers and a girlfriend with a catsuit fetish. What’s not love?”
Selene snorted, telling him that he was being ridiculous, but the certainty had returned to her posture when she pulled away. She flicked a disinterested glance towards the corpse at her feet and turned away. Selene extended her hand behind her, trusting without needing to look around that Michael would follow.
They blended into the crowds on the sidewalks. Michael threw his arm around Selene’s shoulders to hide the cut in the leather and the wound that still oozed blood, and they passed largely without comment even though Selene’s outfit would have drawn whispers and stares bare weeks before. There was a pinched look to the people’s faces as they shuffled past that Michael didn’t like at all; it was an expression that he had seen in hospital waiting rooms far too often, on his own face in the months after Samantha had died. Michael shivered and felt as if he were waking up from a deep sleep. Now way October should feel like this, even in Europe.
“Selene. Wait.” He brought them to a halt outside of an electronics store. The windows were crowded with television sets, all turned towards the same news station. A dozen or so people had already gathered to watch ahead of him. None of their expressions were peaceful.
Selene was tugged back, mouth already opening to protest, and she shut it again with a snap when she saw where Michael was pointing. On six screens and in glorious Technicolor they were treated to the sight of the Danube, the monolithic river that ran down the center of Budapest and had traditionally kept it divided into two separate cities, as it overflowed its banks and then retreated again in huge, watery gulps. Sheets of ice the size of buses creaked along with the current, smashing into any boats whose captains had been foolish enough to leave them on the water. On each screen, the same man was seen jumping from the deck of his boat to take his chances in the inky water. He didn’t emerge again.
“Started this afternoon,” a middle-aged woman clutching a set of packages to her chest said to no one in particular. Michael thought that she might be using the sound of her own voice as a grounding tool, a way of convincing herself that she was still operating within the bounds of reality. It was a situation that Michael was well familiar with.
Selene’s outfit was beginning to attract stares, which would soon enough lead to whispers and, inevitably, Marcus. She squeezed quickly at Michael’s hand, bringing him back to the present. He was struck by how cold her hand felt in his own, even icier than he was accustomed to. The snowflakes in her hair were so numerous that they had entirely obscured the brunette. “Let’s go.” Her breath frosted on the air.
Michael nodded and followed her tug, making a mental note to sit down and watch a news program as soon as they were relatively safe again. He had been divorced from the human world for far too long. “I think I know why the lycans are leaving.”
“Dogs can sense changes in the weather,” Selene mused. A line had appeared between her eyes, suggesting that her practical warrior’s mind was already teasing at the problem from all angles and finding it wanting. Michael found himself in the unique position of being guide rather than follower on the final few blocks to their hotel.
“Do you think-“ Michael began as their most recent sanctuary came into sight, only to bring his teeth back together with an audible clack a full sentence could make its way out. Selene threw him a swift, alarmed glance, but Michael was only able to shake his head. Movement, way down deep, rocks straining and grinding against one another, every particle of earth in agony and eager to spew the wealth back up to the surface. Michael’s breath escaped from his throat in what Selene would tell him later had been an extremely doglike whine. He wrapped his arms around Selene’s waist and threw them both back from the sidewalk as the earth began to shake.
Michael landed on top of Selene, the weight of his body expelling all of the breath from hers in a hiss. Her eyes were enormous, but Michael didn’t wait to explain. He rolled away from her in time to see a massive streetlamp give one final wobble on its foundation and come crashing over into the place where they had been standing seconds before. The remaining electrical wires struck up from the ground like nerves, throwing out a shower of angry sparks. The ground continued to shake.
Selene rocked back to her feet but stayed in a crouch, her eyes darting all around to the swaying buildings and rippling streets. Short of an enemy that she could seize and fight, tension tightened her body until laying hand onto her shoulder would have been akin to touching a diamond.
A howling noise was ringing through Michael’s ears, and he could not tell if it arose from inside his head or out of it. He closed his eyes and gritted the teeth that he could already feel sharpening into points. They cut grooves into the soft flesh of his gums, flooding his mouth with the taste of pennies. He willed to his body to stay human, stay fragile-not here, not on the street-and was immersed so deeply into his concentration that he didn’t hear the squeal of brakes or even smell the melting rubber.
“Michael, look out!” Selene’s voice, coming to him from down a long well. Michael’s eyes flashed open, inky-black and without pupil in spite of his best efforts, and he gave the driver of the oncoming car one of the ultimate shocks in what would be a short life filled with many more. The headlamps filled up Michael’s vision, blinding him, as his ultra-sensitive eyes struggled to compensate for all of the new input, and the screech of brakes was the loudest sound in the world. The car hit a slick spot on an already treacherous road that was made infinitely worse by the fact that the ground beneath it was bucking like a mechanical bull, and through the windshield Michael could see the driver’s eyes widen as he lost control of the vehicle altogether. The car spun around broadside and picked up speed.
If Michael had had the luxury of time with which to glance down at his arms, he would have seen a metallic blue sheen rising up from beneath the tan, giving him the momentary appearance of being more corpse than man. As it was, he could feel his skin thickening into something far more like leather than flesh, and when his legs flexed beneath him it was with far more strength than would have been available to a human man. He leaped high into the air, clearing the car by several inches as it rushed beneath him, and came down on the other side. Michael struggled for a moment to find his balance again on the agitated street, but the earth was already beginning to resettle itself into a deceptive stillness. He glanced towards Selene, whose eyes had long since gone to a vivid electric blue and showed no sign of changing back anytime in the near future.
The car that Michael had leaped over continued its spin down the street, jumping the curb and coming to a halt so graceful that it nearly seemed deliberate against a light post. The driver hurled himself first out of the car and then down the sidewalk without even bothering to pull his keys from the ignition. Michael didn’t know if he was running because he had just watched a man leap like a cat over the hood of his vehicle, the earthquake, the shadowy events that he and Selene had somehow allowed to glide by them, or a witch’s brew of all three. In the end he supposed it didn’t particularly matter.
Michael went to Selene, who was slowly straightening up again once she was sure that the ground was going to continue to behave itself. The thickening snowfall blanketed her hair and shoulders and swirled around her face, making it even more difficult than usual for Michael to read her expression. The light cast down by the nearly full moon was fractured into a thousand different angles by the clouds and snow. It itched like drying blood along the surface of Michael’s skin.
“Come on,” Selene said, having to raise her voice into a shout to compensate for the fact that every car alarm in the city, including the one on the car that had so recently tried to kill him, had taken the earthquake as inspiration to go off at once. She seized Michael’s hand more enthusiastically than she was wont to do under ordinary circumstances. The idea that dread might be seizing up Selene’s insides as surely as it was Michael’s was not a comforting one.
Inside the hotel, the desk clerk was saying, “Hello? Hello?” repeatedly into the telephone before she finally gave up and settled it back into its cradle. Her face was the color of bleached linen and she didn’t seem to register Selene and Michael’s presence as they strode quickly by her. The electricity flickered once, twice, and died, plunging the lobby into a darkness that felt almost as natural to Michael as the light. A shower of sparks from the street as a transformer popped threw the room into relief for a span of seconds before the shadows came back. Michael could see the impossibly blue gleam that rose from Selene’s eyes in the dark, the wide terror that marked the clerk’s. “It’ll be all right,” he called back to her, and saw her head twitch towards the sound. Selene said nothing, but barely a minute went by before she stepped closer to him, so that from hip to shoulder they were one person. Their hands clutched at one another with grips tight enough to bruise.
The electronic lock on the door-bright and gleaming technology, Michael thought, how swiftly they took it for granted until it ceased to work-was dormant and lightless, and Michael only tried twice before he tore the knob off in his hand, taking most of the lock with it. The brass made a muted thunking sound as it struck the thick carpet. Michael’s step was wary as he entered the darkened room even though he would have smelled anyone lingering inside while he was still halfway down the hall. Always be on guard: one of the first habits of survival that Selene had taught him when her war had become his own, the one that he would remember the longest.
Selene and Michael separated reluctantly in order to throw their things quickly into duffel bags. Their hands continued to seek each other out, though, whenever the other one was close enough, pressing warm skin to cool and holding it there until both felt the same. They traveled light; it didn’t take long. Within ten minutes they were stepping out into the chaos again.
The snow had thickened to the point that holding hands became a matter of safety every bit as much as it was comfort. Michael could hear the whoop-whoop-whoop of emergency sirens over the howling wind, and he had to shout so loudly that it drove barbs into his throat in order to be heard above them. “We need to go somewhere that still has electricity! Somewhere where we can find out what’s going on!” He registered that Selene had turned towards him as the dark blur of her hair and a momentary flash of her eyes; all other details had been stolen away and swirled into the snow. Michael thought that he saw her nod all the same, but he wasn’t sure until he felt her fingers tighten around his in quick affirmation.
Finding electricity proved to be an easier proposition in speech than in practice. Dawn was extending its fingers over the horizon, causing a rosy glow between the buildings and a line between Selene’s brows before they managed it, in the form of a hotel obviously only a few months away from condemnation. The staff was nowhere in sight; Michael laid a fistful of bills on the counter while Selene vaulted across the top and selected from among the keys.
The room’s television set was small, black and white, with a band of static that frequently rolled across the screen. The sound worked well enough, though, and the images were still clear enough for Michael and Selene to see the way the anchorwoman’s hands shook and her throat convulsed as she read her report. They huddled together like children on the edge of the bed and didn’t speak to one another as they learned of the world’s end.
*
October 30, 2004-Early Morning
He tasted blood, thick and coppery at the back of his throat, simultaneously gagging and irresistible. Michael tried to rid himself of it all the same, turning his head and spitting with a ferocity that still managed to surprise him. The full moon tingled along his skin, not quite strong enough to force him into the change now that he was the ultimate Other, but in its wake it left a feeling like being bitten by thousands of ants all at once. Michael snarled, twisted, and struck out blindly at the enemy that he could not shake. His fist struck solid flesh rather than ephemeral moonbeam, and triumph surged down Michael’s veins before he heard the voice shout his name and felt both of his wrists being seized in unyielding grips.
“Michael!” Again. Michael gasped, and wakefulness returned to him as quickly as if he had been thrown into a swimming pool. Selene was perched upon his pelvis, pinning his wrists to either side of his body and regarding him with an intent expression. Between the trickle of crimson that ran from the edge of her mouth and the steady progress that Michael’s heart was making in crawling out of his mouth via his throat, it was the least erotic straddling that he had ever received.
“Sorry,” he gasped as Selene released his arms. Michael dragged his hand over his face and was unsurprised when it came away slicked with sweat.
Selene jerked her head towards the window, where the first rays of the dawn were pouring through and casting a rectangle on the floor. “Full moon dreams. Not your fault.” She didn’t move from her perch across his hips. It was times like this that Michael wondered how much of a sense of humor Selene had, and what kind of pains she went through in order to keep it hidden. Selene dragged her knuckles over the blood at her mouth and licked it away absently, glancing towards the window again. Frost and a thick swirling of snow were stealing away the dawning sun’s power, one beam at a time, and Michael couldn’t halt the shiver that ran up his spine. As if she was sharing his thought, Selene twitched, hitched her leg over Michael’s body so that she was lying beside rather than on him. On the other side of the room, the television offered them pictures of sterile, muted carnage. Neither of them had been willing to turn it off, just as neither one of them was actually willing to speak of the things that they saw on it. Selene lay her head on Michael’s shoulder and watched without comment as one of the miniature icebergs floating down the Danube slowly rolled over the bank and crushed a Volkswagen into parts that wouldn’t have been fit to make soda cans out of. Michael couldn’t tell if there had been any people inside.
Unlike the first quake, when the second one hit Michael received no doggy warnings, no pricklings of the senses to let him know what was going to happen. He would reflect much later that part of the reason that pets were able to sense earthquakes and volcanic activity was because these things were supposed to build for weeks in advance, and if the earth could have tantrums without any warning at all now then the state of it was a pretty shitty one, actually. Of course, by that point he hadn’t needed an earthquake to give him that particular bit of information.
The bed bucked once, hard enough to throw them both to the floor. Selene performed a physics-defying twist in midair that landed her into a ready crouch, hands braced against the floor for balance and eyes already shading from hazel to blue. Michael caught himself only partially, cracking his hip against the nightstand hard enough to send iron spikes screaming along his veins and pull a curse from between his teeth. “What the fu-“ A chunk of the ceiling fell down before he could finish, obliging him to jump back or be struck. Twice his weight in plaster and wood landed on the carpet where Michael had been standing a bare second before. A thick cloud of dust rolled out, stinging his eyes and coating his throat, and from the floor above a woman screamed. “We have to get out of here.” Most people killed in earthquakes died as a result of structures collapsing in on them, Michael’s brain supplied for him in an unnervingly cheerful tone. Good to know that the lessons learned from growing up in California weren’t going to complete waste.
“I can’t!” Selene jerked her chin towards the window, where the sun was battling it out with the snow and, for the moment at least, winning. The rectangle of light thrown down on the floor would have been welcoming under separate circumstances.
Michael swore again, at great length and with far more creativity. “Come on.” He grabbed Selene’s hand and pulled her towards the door, both of them struggling to keep their balance as the ground beneath them pitched and rolled. The glass in the window shattered with a sound that was nearly musical, and Michael could hear similar sounds coming from the rooms all around them. Blisteringly cold winds rolled into the room.
Michael and Selene weren’t the only ones who had decided that escape was the better of valor. The hallway was becoming choked with a mass of people motivated by the desire to go up, down, anywhere where the ground wasn’t dancing and temperatures weren’t dropping by the hour. Even without advanced senses Michael would have been able to smell the panic that rode the air. Selene flinched once, visibly unsettled by the prospect of so much warm meat shoving against her from all sides, before setting her jaw and shouldering through. Michael trailed in her wake, limited his strength as he moved people to the side but unwilling to relinquish it entirely.
Clocks and pictures had fallen from the walls and the carpet glittered with glass. Michael could see several people with blood running down their palms after having fallen. ‘Get Selene to the basement,’ he thought, even as he realized that this was perhaps the second stupidest thing that he could do. Unfortunately, the first stupidest option was the one that would have been the smartest if he had been alone: getting out of the structure and into the open air before the hotel’s condemnation notice could come early. They would just have to hunker down and hope that the advanced abilities that came with being creatures straight out of horror films would be enough to heal whatever damage was done.
Michael slowed. “Selene!” He yelled her name loudly enough to drive fish hooks into the flesh of his throat, and it was barely enough to make him heard over the sounds of the world coming apart. Selene turned, fighting to keep her position in the face of the human tide. Michael could see her fangs protruding slightly from her mouth and indenting the soft flesh of her lower lip. “This way!” Michael screamed. His voice broke on the second word. He paused and coughed before he could continue, as a particularly strong lurch threw him and everyone else in the hallway down to their knees. “We can wait it out if we get you into the basement!”
The dubious expression that moved across Selene’s face showed that she thought about as highly of the plan as Michael did, but a glance towards the window at the end of the hall made her shiver. She nodded and began fighting her way back towards Michael. He was within inches of being able to grab her hand when a corner of the building fell away.
The wood groaned before it splintered, a long, low moaning that made Michael think of old men finally giving up. The largest shake of all to rock the building had nothing at all to do with the earth, and Michael had just enough time for the words, ‘Oh, shit, the whole thing’s going to come down,’ to run across his mind before he was obliged to throw himself to the floor, ignoring the feet that pelted over his back as people were too far gone to halt. The hotel tilted, made that awful moaning sound again, and then the exterior wall and a large segment of the floor went crumbling away into the street. Michael could hear people screaming as the ground beneath them turned to air, could hear the far worse sounds of the screams halting as bodies struck concrete three stories below. This would all be ample fodder for nightmares later, but in the moment when terror receded and the world stood still, Selene was all that Michael saw.
She, like Michael, had thrown herself to the floor from the moment that she had realized the building had had enough. Lying flat on her face as she was, her hair and the thick leathers that she wore were enough to afford her with a few seconds of protection from the cold, vengeful sunlight that streamed through the gaping hole left behind as the hotel began to collapse. Selene’s hair shifted with the tremors and fell away from her cheek, exposing a long expanse of white flesh that began to redden and blister almost immediately. Selene screamed, a sound that Michael would replay within his mind until the end of the world.
He found his legs again, lurched to his feet long enough to lunge forward and grab Selene by the arm. She staggered against him, pressing her palm to her cheek, and they sprinted for the stairwell. Michael slid his arm around her shoulders as he would a girl that he was on a date with and murmured the words of a prayer as they half ran and half fell down to the lobby. Ceiling tiles pelted the floor at their feet like missiles as they fled.
“This way,” Michael gasped as they reached the ground floor, tugging Selene towards the door that he assumed led to the basement.
“No.” She dug in her heels, shook her head, and refused to go a step further. Above the blisters that marked up the side of her face, her eyes were chill and alert.
“Selene-“ Michael began, only to be cut off by the crashing sound of an enormous ceiling timber falling and striking the floor at the exact place where they would have been standing had Selene not halted them with her protest. Michael stared at her. “Later, you’re going to tell me how you did that.”
A second beam fell down against the first, marking out a rough triangle of stability against the chaos. Michael dragged Selene beneath it and they huddled there, pressing their faces close together like terrified puppies and waiting for it to be over.
*
It was after midnight before they were able to emerge, just in time to watch the biggest show of all.
End