The End Series

Chapter 1

Snow coated the foot thick ice on the pond. Ivy smoothly swirled and twirled around the ice, skating serenely. She was imagining. The day on the Plaza with Jake. He had saved up all his savings so that he could take her on her dream date. She had always dreamed of going to the Plaza and going on a carriage ride then ice skating. He had just been a tailor park high school drop out with a criminal past. A pyro at heart and knew how to get in trouble did not suit the wiry boy with black hair and glasses. He was never mistaken for a geek or a nerd though. He had had his first tattoo from the time he was sixteen and had just added more and more. He had one full sleeve by the time he was seventeen. When he met Ivy he was 19 and about to get out of juvey. The only place he had left to go was the streets and he didn't want to go back to that so he planted a bomb on the roof of the juvey center. It wasn't a big bomb. Just big enough to land him in jail for about three years. She had crawled out of a ceiling vent and proposed that they get out of here before they got in trouble. He fell in love at first sight and agreed almost immediately. When he had asked her what she had been in for, it surprised him when she said that she had been caught with about 7 pounds of bud in the court house delivering an order to the judge. The judge had been barred, but she had only gotten juvey because they didn't want the media to run with it.



He had grown up to make bombs for the U.S. government. They had a marriage planned for the day after his 21 birthday. He always celebrated his birthday on April 20, even though his birthday was actually the day before. They planned on having the most reefer that San Fran had seen yet, but something had gone horribly wrong about two weeks before the magical day. The wulfenite bomb he was making went off. Killing him and two of the guards on duty at the door. The bodies were never found but pronounced dead. No human being could have survived the whole building coming down on them.



Ivy had always been close to her mother and father and sisters. But not even they could console her when she heard that her one and only love was gone forever. It was a crushing blow. She was a national best seller at the time. Writers poured their heart and soul into their books, where was her heart going to come from? It was at the bottom of some building crushed to death.



Everything from the way the wind blew to the way the sun shone reminded her of Jake. She couldn't go anywhere without completely falling apart. The meds that they had her on for the pain weren't doing their job because the attacks were happening almost every day twice a day. She would completely break down crying, fall on the floor and no one could do anything. She started to stay at home more and more. Afraid to leave but afraid to stay for fear of not being able to control the urge to end it all and be with her true love.



A friend of the family recently died and left a piece of land in Colorado to the family. Her mother called her and she immediately jumped on the chance to move to a brand new place. Maybe if she was away from all the memories she could function and write the story that everyone had been asking for forever. It was the third in a series and even though everyone understood that she was going through tough times, they were stilling pushing for more. So she packed all of HER things and moved to the quaint little cabin in the middle of Colorado.



As it happens she had been right and within a year and a half she had written the third book and had gotten excellent reviews. Now all she wanted to do was relax for a year or two. She went skating almost everyday. Enjoying nature she had started to take more and more horse back rides on her horse Jaeger. She knew most of the woods by heart now and had no fear of them. She had almost no human contact unless she flew into town. And when I say fly I mean fly. She had her pilots license and her own two passenger plane.



Her quaint little cabin was warm and was sounding really good to Ivy. So she took her skates off and started walking toward the cabin. A crunch behind her made her turn. A blue streak and quickened foot steps were all that she saw and heard. After more investigating she saw that there were wolf tracks all over the trees behind the lake. This worried her. She had a horse and wolves definitely weren't picky on their choice of meals up here. This explained the unexplained cattle slaughters that she had heard about when she had gone to town the day before. She made a mental note to fly into town in a few days to tell the town folks what she had discovered. She couldn't get over how blue the wolf had been. The color had been really familiar and she couldn't get the thought that the blue some how was connected to her and how it couldn't be from when she lived up here. She shrugged and brushed it off as tiredness and started back to her tiny little cabin.



When she reached the cabin she realized that maybe tiny wasn't right. It did have two bed rooms and a full basement. But compared to what she was going to buy with Jake it was tiny. But what it lacked in size she had made up for in technology. On more than one occasion in San Fran she had been robbed even though she lived in the country, so she had equipped the entire property with surveillance and that included the pond, Jaegers pasture, and every square inch of the barn, and cattle pasture. She stepped into her mud porch and kicked off her snowy wet boots and stripped down to her undies, throwing her pants on top of the pile of laundry on the floor. She then trudged into the kitchen and started making a cup of her favorite dark hot chocolate. While the milk was heating up in the microwave she walked through the living room with its two couches and a nice size TV with Tivo. She almost never used it unless her mother was staying with her and she never let her mother into the basement. Her mother didn't even know she had a basement. She skipped into her bed room and pulled a pair of jeans from her chest of drawers. *ding* she could hear the microwave all the way in here. And she shimmied her jeans on and went to stir in the chocolate before the milk turned into nasty gunk.



After she had her hot chocolate and was trying to cool it down she decided that the basement sounded like a wonderful place to go. So she carefully set her hot chocolate down on the dumb waiter and closed the door. It was precision balanced and she was not. Especially walking down really steep dark stairs. So she went to her closet and slid her clothes aside and opened the almost invisible door and stepped into the darkness below.



The lights turned on almost before her foot hit the step. She had motion sensor lights everywhere, which helped her because she always left the lights on which ran down the battery in the generator. She trotted down the stairs and opened the dumb waiter door. Her hot chocolate had not spilt and now it was much cooler.



Her basement was covered head to foot in psychedelic colors and pictures of beautifully colorful cannabis sativa plants. She had a flat screen TV that dropped down outta the ceiling and rotated so that wherever she was she could see it.



She sat down on the black velveteen couch in front of the beautifully carved glass top coffee table. The coffee table had been a present from a member of the family as a wedding present. It had a mirage of different things going on on the doors and legs. There was an elf smoking a blunt on one of the legs and a werewolf with a peace pipe on another. The doors on the bottom popped out to reveal a wooden box that held about an ounce of cannabis along with some papers and about 10 lighters of different sorts.



She didn't feel like smoking a joint she felt like smoking out of a pipe today. So she set the box down and got up and walked over to her glass front book case. She picked a yellow bubbler from the bottom shelf and walked back to the couch. Her book case had almost ever kind and color of bong, pipe, bubbler, or hookah you could think of.



She sat back and picked up her bag of weed and started breaking up and cleaning on a High Times she had lying on the top of the coffee table. The bud was sticky and by the time it was about cleaned she had resin all over her thumb and index fingers. She smiled remembering when Jake used to make fun of her for not using a grinder. But it always felt better to Ivy to break up by hand. She liked playing with the reefer before she smoked it.



She loaded the bowl and took a hit. She felt the head change almost immediately and relaxed a little from the familiar aroma of cannabis smoke. She sat back on the couch and searched the cushions for the remote. She found it and turned the TV so that she could see it. Her favorite show, Weeds, was playing on her DVD player. She smoked the rest of that bowl and had smoked two more before she remembered that her hot chocolate wouldn't be hot anymore if she didn't drink it soon. So she got up and went to get the now warm chocolate from the freezer she had sat it on when she came to the couch.



She had turned and walked to the curtain dividing a section of the basement from the rest of the room, and walked through the fabric and plastic to a room with three plants in it. The Mary Jane was run completely on an automated system so Ivy didn't have to do anything to it at all but watch it.



She went back out to the couch and sat down and loaded another bowl. This was going to be another long night. She knew it was a full moon even though the basement had no windows. On full moons she always had horrible night terrors and had to get really stoned before she went to sleep so that she at least has some silliness to her nightmares.



Like the beast that always chased her fell down a few times and when she was finally caught all it did was tickle her to death. She was odd and she knew it.















On the other side of the United States there was another sort of conflict going on in her ex best friend's life. She had monsters of her own to deal with and these weren't fairy tale beasts, they were real monsters, bent on taking her money (among other things) and maybe even murdering her. But Cassidy wasn't going to lie down and play dead like a good little girl. She didn't think that it was right for them to get away with her hard earned money.



The two men that had her cornered in the dark alley way hadn't done their research very well in the sense that they didn't know that she had been trained since she was about 5 to disarm and take down men 4 times her size.



These men wouldn't know what hit them. "What are you scared little girl." one of them said tauntingly.



"You should be." she said. With a grin she swiftly swung her left leg up and over the mans shoulder and kicked the gun out of his hand and into her own. She turned on a dime and dodged a shot when the other gunman tried to shoot her. She dove behind a dumpster and started a shoot out. She quickly killed them both and had only stepped from behind the dumpster when the cops showed up.



"Hands above your head!" they said guns drawn. She obeyed. Having dealt with the "man" before she knew that she had had every right to do what she did. Self defense. Plain and simple.



" Attention all officers. You are to report to the station immediately. Leave all crime scenes and come now. No matter what you are doing." came the radio dispatcher. She sounded very afraid and her voice cracked a few times before she finished. The officer looked very confused. He ordered her in the car and didn't even bother to cuff her. His first mistake. He put her in the front seat. Second mistake. When he powerslid into the parking lot he left her in the car when he ran in. I guess he figured what ever it was a little girl couldn't do any harm and he wouldn't be that long anyway. Third and fourth mistake. Keys in the ignition. Shot gun on the seat. He was just stupid.



At first the silence didn't register with Cassidy. She didn't hear the city go silent. There were no cars on the road and no people on the street. That's when she was it. It was about the size of a bull, only it had long fur and claws that rivaled her longest dagger. Four on both paws. It was crawling down the side of the police station, looking right at the cop car she was sitting in. From her earliest memories, her father had told her of the Lycans. She hadn't believed a word outta his drunken mouth till now. She jumped over the console and started the cop car. She threw it in reverse and took off.



As soon as she hit the street she could see why no one was out and about on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. They were everywhere. Werewolves were ripping open houses and dragging people from them screaming. Taking their enormous claws and shredding human stomaches like hot knives through butter. Blood and human insides littered the streets. Cassidy had never seen such carnage and almost threw up. She raced through town and barely made it through the bridge before a big black lycan almost landed on her car. He chased her for a good two miles. She finally lost him in the roads outside of town.



She pulled into her good friend Seth's driveway and hoped to the goddess above that the werewolves hadn't made it out here yet. Seth came out with a shot gun and enough ammunition to have ended the second world war. He stopped short when he realized it was Cassidy and then admired the fact that she had just stolen a cop car and the fact that it was a Dodge Charger. He had enough guns in his trailor to obliterate a small militia let alone a hord of werewolves, but Cassidy didn't want to stand and fight anymore she wanted to run and where she ran Seth was bound to follow. She knew he loved her and she also knew that he would defend her till the end. When she told him what had happened, he agreed that they needed to run. So they loaded up the Charger with all the things they needed for a long road trip and headed for the one place they knew they would be safe. The Armory.