That was the story of my life. Life kept handing me lemons…and I was pretty shit at making lemonade. Sparkling water with a hint of citrus was the best I could do.

  I let my mana thread do its thing on Kian. Once I had willed it, it followed my command without further input. I grunted through gritted teeth, my arm still burning from the earlier bite as I turned my gun to the wolf leaping at me. It was a struggle keeping the gun up and firing as I ran outwards towards the patio, steering clear of Kian’s path as he ran in reverse. The wolf landed where I had been and then began bounding towards me at the same time that Kian completed his backwards journey. He crashed into the wolf as he returned to his starting point.

  Actions first, consequences later. This is where it mattered.

  Three targets I could tag. The wolf on the roof had landed where Kian had been. The wolf inside had been thrown against the upturned coffee table and was shaking its head as it got up. And Kian was standing there, aiming at the wolf outside, but with a confused look on his face, wondering what the hell had touched him from behind. It hadn’t been there before. He was turning around to check.

  “Move, Kian,” I screamed, gun up, ready to press the trigger. I tagged the wolf behind me, quickly glancing how far away it was. Maybe two metres at most. Too close, but I wouldn’t let it get closer. I channelled continuously, and every time the wolf tried to leap at me, almost instantly it was dragged back. The clear thread barely had time to form before I pushed mana into it the other way.

  Kian ducked to his right – my left – but it gave me the opening I needed. I did short bursts this time. Kian did the same, arse sat on the shattered glass on the conservatory floor, gun up between his legs. The wolf yelped pathetically as it realised it had nowhere to run, its body being peppered with our bullets. We took it down and turned our attention to the wolf that looked like it was glitching out. It kept moving forwards and backwards, in the space of a split second. We emptied our mags into its head, and I stopped channelling when it was down.

  Kian stood up and joined me on the patio, in the light of the motion-detectors.

  “Question,” I said, as I grabbed an ammo mag from his bag and awkwardly reloaded, gun between my arm and midriff. “Do you remember running into the patio and being pulled back?”

  Kian looked at me with a frown on his face, clearly not sure what I was talking about. He reloaded his own gun. “No, I don’t. I remember your instructions though, so I guess I did run out?”

  I nodded at him. “What do you remember?”

  “I remember you telling me you’ll yoink me back, then next thing I know, I’m feeling some pressure on my back like I’d hit something. It was a weird feeling.”

  I nodded. It was good info. Stuff I needed to know for future reference. If I used this power on any of them, they wouldn’t remember it. Had he not hit the wolf behind him, Kian might’ve run out again, or more likely, seeing the wolf outside, he would have shot. That’s what I expected.

  New information. New actions. Even without the memory of being pulled back. That’s why he had tried to turn to see what he had touched.

  “Which way?” Kian asked. “Should we get up on the roof here?”

  We walked backwards a little, to look over the lip of the roof. There was enough light in the air to see that there was no way to the third floor that the girls were on.

  “Nah,” I replied. “No point here – we’d just get behind the ones on the same floor we were on. Need to find where the wolves got through to the third floor.”

  “Maybe the garage roof?” Kian said, looking over to the corner he had been standing at earlier in the night. I nodded and followed him as he quietly made his way to that corner, where both of us stood flush against the wall. The night was still, not a sound in the air. He cautiously poked his head out, then pulled it in and shook it at me. Slowly, we turned the corner, stayed close to the wall as we passed the windows of the house on this side. The garage was at the other end, at the front of the house.

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  My arm was feeling seriously fatigued. Not just pain from the bite. It wanted to just hang by my side, like it didn’t want to work anymore. I shifted the gun to my left arm – the weaker one – and let my right hang like it wanted to. I wasn’t even able to use it to steady the rifle. As we made our way to the front, there weren’t any wolves about that we could see. By my count, there were still two or three left.

  We got to the garage corner, and again, Kian peeked out before indicating the coast was clear. There was a long driveway out the front, gently sloping to a road that led to the rest of the village a hundred or so metres away. We walked out onto the driveway, keeping our eyes on the garage roof. The garage was a rectangular shape, most of it protruding from the front of the house. Over to our left, halfway to the other side of the house, we could see the hind legs of the two wolves we had killed in the hallway blocking the front door.

  No wolves on the garage roof, but we could see where they had got in. Where the garage met the front of the house, there were two sets of windows, equally spaced apart, on both the second and third floor. The third-floor windows had been shattered, wooden pieces of the frames hanging at odd angles, holding on to what tentative grip they had on the brickwork. They must have been a good ten or eleven feet above the roof.

  I wondered if the wolves went for the third floor because they knew their brethren had entered on the second on the other side. Maybe they’d planned some kind of pincer movement. The implication was troubling. Coupled with the wolf that was a lookout, it suggested an intelligence beyond that which I’d expect of animals.

  I had a quick glance towards my right, looking towards where the village would be though it was dark over there. No lights to be seen from the houses. It didn’t look like any of the wolves had decided to investigate in that direction. Why would they? Their prey was inside this house.

  “How’s your arm?” Kian asked.

  “It’s fine,” I lied. The burning sensation had started to spread past my elbow, and into my hands. I wasn’t about to tell him I was having difficulty breathing either. “I’ll spot you. Once you’re up, help me up.”

  I walked over to the garage entrance, putting my rifle to the floor and joined my hands together, holding them out like a little cup for Kian to use as a stepping stool. He put his gun next to mine, along with the ammo bag and put his right foot into the cup. I winced with the pain in my right arm, but I fought through it and pushed him up until he had a grip on the roof. He scrambled over. I handed him the guns – with my left hand, and tossed the ammo bag up as well, before he lay on the roof, offering his hands to me. I jumped up, reaching out with my left, my right arm tucked into my body. Once he’d grabbed me using both his hands, I used both of mine, my feet climbing up the corrugated metal doors of the garage as Kian dragged me up.

  As I cleared the top of the roof, we heard the gunfire. Short bursts. Three or four shots. A pause. Another three or four shots. It was muffled. Deeper inside the house. Not near us. Kian grabbed the weapons and ammo and both of us ran to the windows, against the soundtrack of gunfire. The base of the second-floor windows came up to our waists, but the third-floor windows were too high for both of us to get up there.

  “You go,” I said, cupping my hands together. He didn’t argue. He grabbed two magazines of ammo and slotted them into his hoodie pocket, before grabbing his gun then using my cupped hands to clamber up onto my shoulders. Even standing on my shoulders as he was, his head still didn’t reach what used to be the windowsill. He tossed his weapon through the broken window above, steadied himself on my shoulders then jumped up, grabbing what remained of the sill with a sharp cry of pain.

  “Fucking glass,” he muttered, as he used his feet to get some purchase on the brick and scrambled up and through the window. There was more gunfire from the same place as before. Three separate bursts this time. A few seconds later, Kian looked out and gave me a thumbs up.

  I grabbed my gun off the floor and smashed the window in front of me, using the butt of the rifle to clear any remaining glass. My arm was bad enough as it was. I didn’t need more cuts. I hopped inside, leaving the bag of ammo – we’d need to come back for that – and stalked through what looked like a good-sized home office, gun in my left hand, my right struggling to hold the underside of the barrel.

  As I made my way to the door at the other end, I heard more gunfire. A single burst of three shots this time. I hastened my steps, and then I heard a bloodcurdling scream from upstairs. At the door, I gently twisted the knobbed handle, opening the door slightly to see what was outside. It was dark, but I could see the light at the top of the stairs. The door led into the passageway where Kian and I had been earlier, but on the opposite side. The stairs up were to my right, a few metres away.

  I threw caution to the wind. I needed to get up there to help the girls and Kian. I sprang towards the stairs and took them two at a time. On the top two stairs, I encountered a lifeless wolf, its light-grey fur matted with the dark red of its own blood. I stepped around it.

  The stairs opened out into a passageway, much like on the floor below, doors at either end and some other doors on either side. There was another passageway that I turned into, leading towards the front of the house, light coming from one of the rooms along the way.

  I stopped in my tracks.

  Well, shit.

  Just when I thought I was learning to make lemonade.