‹ Prequel: Chasing Imagination
Sequel: Martyr's Run

Hurricane Heart

Unfamiliar Allies

Arjan

I could hear my heart in my ears, pounding in time with every frantic footstep as I disappeared down the narrow road through in between the office blocks, quickly emerging out the other end, looking round almost as though I was spellbound at the streetlamp-lit road; wide; a few cars parked; more offices lining each side.

I knew Hurricane had stayed behind to fight the man, and I would have turned back had the woman not been following me. And maybe I was a coward, but I wasn’t ready to kill just yet. I had a stun gun, but running away was always my preferred option.

Exiting out into this new road, I ducked into the entrance of a building, jumping up the two front steps and pressing myself into the shadows of the alcove, allowing myself time to double over and regain a little of my breath. A stitch burned in my side and I clutched at it, willing the pain to fade away.

She had followed me. I just had to hope that she was far enough behind that she wouldn’t know where I had gone.

Hope was dangerous.

Almost as soon as the thoughts entered my mind, she was there. She ran out from the side road and into the centre of this street at a run. We were in business district; it was sometime in the dead hours between the middle of the night and early morning. There was no one about.

Maybe I could try and find a shopping centre. Sure, there’d still be very few people around, but maybe I’d get lucky. Berlin was the capital city. There had to be some people conducting some business around here. There would be things open all night—the hospitals, the police stations...

No. I was absolutely not going anywhere near a police station right now.

The woman whipped her head from side to side, her long hair, tied in an elegant ponytail behind her head, swishing round her like a ribbon each time.

And then our eyes made contact.

I had no time to even think; only time to shoot. Because here in this little alcove, the walls were deadly smooth. There were no corners or cracks to push myself into. So I just fired my gun, and she fired hers, and we both missed this time, but she fired many more times. I ran for it, knowing it was stupid, but knowing that staying where I stood was even stupider. I dived down the two steps, sprinting as her bullets ricocheted off of the walls around me, leaping into another alcove further down, from where I fired back.

I pelted stunning bullets along the road, but they all seemed to miss her as she danced about the deadly scene, leaping over one; ducking to avoid another; prancing to the left of a third. She was practiced at this. I could tell that much.

The eyes behind her mask were red with murder, and for a moment she reminded me of Elize—whatever fate may have befallen the girl I had become so dangerously close to trusting—and they were fixed on me, never moving, never even blinking. For not the first time, the Soulless became more animals to me; nocturnal creatures, beasts of the night, skulking through darkness and shadows, making it their home. She was comfortable out here; way more comfortable than she should be.

She couldn’t come any closer for fear of my bullets hitting her, and I couldn’t move out of my little corner of safety for fear of getting shot.

And then the firing stopped. After all that constant noise; explosion after explosion deafening me like a bomb, ringing through my ears so that the shots were no longer individual sounds, but one great symphony of never-ending noise, the silence somehow felt even more deafening. The total quiet rang through my ears, great, piercing alarm bells crashing about inside my head and slicing through the coils of my brain so that I could scarcely even think.

‘Well, Arjan,’ the woman said, her accent soft, her tone measured and, despite where we were, always speaking English to me, as though she knew that it was better than my German...as though she knew everything there ever was to know about me. ‘This is not going well is it?’

She took a step closer and I raised my gun.

‘Stay back!’ I warned, clutching it in both hands. I couldn’t get it out of my head that she was just a young woman.

No. No ordinary young woman would try to shoot a man whose only crime was dreaming. She was not just a young woman. She was a monster.

As it happened, though, I did not need to shoot; not for now anyway.

Because all hell broke loose.

As if my ears hadn’t taken enough orchestral crashing tonight, the clamour rose to an even greater height. Having not yet recovered from the last round of thunder, more explosive gunshots could be heard from close by, and as I peered out, I could see two...no, three people emerge into the road from another. Two were running to begin with; silhouettes against the orange and black city backdrop. One turned to fire their gun; I couldn’t see from this distance whether it was a man or a woman, and was followed by a third who dodged the bullets and leapt in a cat-like manner round a corner.

Dreamers.

Oh God, they had to be Dreamers.

One of them jumped in behind something—a bin, perhaps? A post box? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t even know who was on my team.

But the woman did.

She began to run at them, firing her gun repeatedly as another woman screamed, diving in behind the post box thing beside what could only be her partner. The Soulless continued to run at them, and I fired at the one with the long braid, praying that my aim would be true. But she was moving. She was sprinting. She was sprinting towards these other two, who were caught in the centre of a deadly battle with nowhere to run, desperately trying to retaliate and shoot back. One of them—a girl, I could tell, from her high pitched cries to the other, was fighting the woman, and the other, who I presumed from the lower voice was a man, was taking on the other Soulless man. Glass rained down around them as at least the third window was smashed from a badly aimed shot, and the silhouette of the woman leapt down, shielding her head with her hands as she screamed more times.

And then my stun gun finally aimed true.

The Soulless woman, now so close to them, though assuming she was safe hidden in the indent of a door, collapsed, staggering forward, losing her balance as she tried to turn too quickly. The two Dreamers looked around as I charged forward, racing towards the woman, knowing that they were still running and diving, trying to defend themselves from the man who had first chased them into this road, and as I grew closer, I could see both fear and excitement in their faces.

Once was all I needed. The woman was weak now, and I fired two more times, and she lay, slumped with her face against the wall of a building, unconscious.

Now I was close enough to see these Dreamers and the Soulless for who they were. The woman was small and blonde—very light blonde, in fact. The man who moved swiftly from side to side was bigger and with bouncing curls.

I recognised these two. We’d come into contact, brief though it was, a little while earlier, whilst I was still with Hurricane.

And then the Soulless man spotted who had just shot his comrade.

A gun was aimed in my direction.

He fired.

I braced myself.

Nothing hit me.

But there was a scream.

As the others turned, enthralled by my completely unprecedented, mysterious appearance, the Soulless man had taken full advantage. The bullet was not intended for me, as I had assumed.

Anke staggered forwards, collapsing into Mark’s side as he caught her in his muscular arms, a wail high pitched enough to smash what little glass still remained in the windows of buildings escaping her lips. I ran towards them, looking at the Soulless that stood on the other side of them, visible over their shoulders, watching as his face contorted into a sadistic, cackling smile.

But it was nothing compared with Mark’s face. As Anke fell into him and her arms clung to his shoulders, his expression was transformed in a nanosecond from that of a warm young man to that of a snarling beast. Rage took over as the anger in his eyes boiled over, and he was torn between saving the girl he loved and the desire to charge after and rip out the throat of the man who had hurt her.

I reached them, keeping an eye on the leering Soulless behind them. He still had a gun.

And he was raising it.

‘Get down!’ I cried to Mark as he tried to help Anke into an alcove in front of a building.

‘Arjan?’ he asked, his face confused and overflowing with fear. ‘You’re Arjan, aren’t you?’

I nodded solemnly. ‘I am.’

‘You’re on our side?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you stay with her?’ Mark asked.

‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll do everything I can to help.’

Mark stood up, taking off his jacket, rolling it up and placing it under Anke’s head. She was convulsing and whimpering, blood pouring like a waterfall from the gunshot wound in the lower part of her back. She grasped at Mark’s hand, shaking violently, her already pale face turning whiter still.

‘Don’t...hurt yourself,’ she choked.

He gave the slightest nod. ‘I’ll try not. But I've got to go. I love you.’

‘I love you.’

He ran, jumping down the three steps that led up to the building and sprinting off after the Soulless man, who realised just a second too late that he was being pursued. Yet again this night, the sound of guns rung in my ears until I was surprised that I could still hear anything at all. The symphony was reaching its climax...the bullets were pounding faster than ever before.

I didn’t know what to do. I’d comforted Hurricane before...sort of, but never like this. And there had been the woman in the shopping centre—I struggled to even think about her without pain stabbing me in the chest—but I’d been shoved out of the way before I could even do anything.

‘It’ll be alright,’ I insisted as she sat there shivering vigorously. I tore off my jacket and laid it over her, feeling the cool breeze that was channelled along this high-sided road sting my bare flesh.

‘It hurts,’ she moaned.

‘It’ll stop soon,’ I told her, even though it wasn’t really the case. ‘Mark will come back, and he’ll get you out of here to someplace safe, you understand? You’ll be fine.’

She gave the slightest nod, her face relaxing for just a moment; a perfect mask of calmness, before contorting back into a silent scream. I gripped her hand gently, but her fingers clutched mine so tightly that I could feel the circulation being cut off. I just grasped her back, knowing that she needed something to hold onto; something to tell her that she wasn’t slipping away just yet.

Her blue eyes opened suddenly at that moment, fixing on my face.

‘Arjan,’ she said through her gasps of pain. ‘Where is she? Where’s—Hurricane?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted truthfully, fear creeping back into the edges of my mind as I thought about the many things that could have possibly happened to her.

‘They want her,’ Anke stammered, crying out and scrunching her face up in agony. ‘They want...to hurt her. And they want you. She said...she had to know...but why?’

She was making less and less sense; I just assumed that she was asking why the Soulless wanted me. Hurricane had explained it such a short time ago—knowing that I now knew gave me power—but I still didn’t fully understand. I hadn’t had a lot of time to think about it. Did I really dream many times more often than any non-Dreamer? And was that really the only reason they wanted me? Were my dreams alone that important?

‘Hurricane said that it was because I dreamt more than other non-Dreamers,’ I said, and Anke’s eyes widened. However much she hurt; however much of her own blood she was laying in, she realised just how important what I was saying was.

‘You dream?’ she asked. ‘Like...properly?’

‘I think so,’ I said, careful of how much I could tell her. I didn’t want to give away false information. I didn’t understand what Hurricane was saying that well, and even then, I only had her word that everything she told me was true. I hated myself for doubting her in times like this, but I had learnt that I could never be too careful.

‘And you’re...really on our side?’ Anke asked.

It felt like a note of finality as I declared my answer.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes I am.’ Now, there was no going back. Literally overnight, my very life depended on creating these new allegiances. I fell into contemplative silence, thinking about the defining choice I had just well and truly made.
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Ugh, I'm not sure about this chapter. I'm not sure if the fight scene actually makes sense. :/