Natalie skidded to a sudden stop. “Hide?” she asked, sounding suddenly uneasy.
I frowned at her. “Yes. Why?”
She studied me thoughtfully. “I didn’t even think about it, but we are very close to him,” she said, as if talking to herself. She noticed the confused look on my face and sighed. “Hyde, not hide. I think she was telling you where to go. It’s a name.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. It has to be better than here,” I said, indicating the sound of sirens.
She nodded, glancing up at a nearby sign. “We’re only a few blocks away from Tequila Mockingbird. That’s his bar. He’s a…well, I’m not really sure what he is. He’s kind of a jack of all trades. Need a job done and he can probably do it for you, no matter how difficult.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Okay. Maybe he’ll have a phone so we can check on the others at least.” Natalie nodded, using her sleeves to wipe away more blood. She’d stopped bleeding, which was a good sign. It would also be less distracting for me. “Which way?”
“Follow me. I hope you heard her right,” she said in resignation, tugging me down the sidewalk.
“Why?” I asked as Natalie turned at the next street, leading us down an even darker, emptier section of the city. It looked practically abandoned, as if the businesses had closed long ago. For sale signs lined the street, sending a foreboding chill down my neck.
“Mr. Hyde has somewhat of a temper, and doesn’t like strangers,” Natalie said.
Two old women rounded the corner up ahead, making their way towards us, using four-legged canes to shuffle down the sidewalk at a turtle’s pace. They were probably residents of the neighboring residential areas we had left behind. Natalie used her sleeve to wipe off the rest of the blood on her face, not wanting to startle the old women who were chatting back and forth as they shuffled their walking aides ahead of them with a repetitive scuffing sound followed by a thud.
It had to be harder to lug those things around than it was to just walk with a cane. Metal wasn’t light. I nudged Natalie, discreetly pointing. “What are those?”
“Walkers. Helps them move around easier,” she said.
“Made of metal? Aren’t they heavy?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Lighter than wood, probably. It’s made of aluminum.”
I frowned suspiciously. Metal that was lighter than wood? It had to be hollow. That was the only explanation. They were drawing close enough for me to overhear them bickering with each other. We came upon a dark alley, and Natalie hesitated, sniffing at the air.
The two old women continued ambling down the sidewalk, bickering back and forth.
Just as I was about to ask Natalie what she was doing, a chilling laugh suddenly bubbled out from deep within the alley. The two old women paused, glancing nervously towards the darkness as if reconsidering the direction of their walk.
“Witch,” Natalie whispered. “I can smell her skanky ass.”
I stared deep into the alley, wondering why she would give away her presence.
Then I heard matching laughs from behind us, but lower, throatier, like bubbles rising up from a swamp. I spun to see the two old women shuffling our way, cackling gleefully.
Shit. A trap.
10
The witches had to be in their eighties and wore scarves wound around their heads like hoods with thick, tattered, woolen cloaks trailing down their backs. They stared at us with merciless, violent eyes. They were both still hunched over their walkers, but their eyes glinted like polished obsidian. They looked to be twins; the only differentiation was the color of their shawls. One wore a stained red shawl and the other a swampy green.
“He looks as if he’s seen a ghost, Lucille,” the one in the red shawl said.
Lucille chuckled, tugging absently at her green shawl. “We are far worse, Camille.”
I shook my head, turning from the green shawled Lucille to the red shawled Camille with a grimace. “I’m just trying to process how terrible your father must feel for not putting your mother out of her misery during childbirth. To have one beast for a daughter is a curse, but to have twins…” I shuddered. “It would have been kinder to leave you to the wolves.” I glanced at Natalie. “A point we can rectify. Immediately.”
Natalie growled hungrily, her eyes twinkling.
The witches hissed simultaneously, their hunched backs trembling as they clutched their walkers.
Lucille tapped her ear, speaking into an earbud as she stared at the alley behind us. “Don’t dawdle, Agatha. Dinner has been served,” she clucked with a cruel laugh that sounded like gravel dribbling out of a bag.
I cast the elderly witches a wary look, wondering why I couldn’t sense any power from them.
A young, beautiful woman—Agatha, I assumed—sauntered out from the shadows about thirty yards down the alley, smirking at us and licking her lips. She had a ridged scar on her cheek, but other than that, I couldn’t find a single blemish to mar her perfection.
And she was powerful. Alarmingly powerful. Although she seemed to be the only one with magic—according to my senses, anyway, which I knew were not as reliable as I hoped—she seemed submissive to the twin matrons with the walkers.
“So, you’re the new blood-sucker in town. Pleased to eat you,” Camille said.
“Meet?” I asked, hoping to clarify.
She simply shook her head, grinning toothily. “Eat.”
“You’ve caused quite enough trouble for us, boy,” Lucille said.
“Yet you’ve given us such a lovely gift—ridding us of Dracula’s influence. Now it’s a city ripe for the boiling,” Camille added, grinning through a mouth of missing teeth.
I placed a calming hand on Natalie’s shoulder since she looked ready to rip the two old women to shreds with her bare hands. She kept darting her head back to Agatha, who was steadily making her way closer to us, not seeming to be in any hurry.
“What do you want?” Natalie growled warningly. “Even three of you don’t stand a chance against us.”
The twins chuckled ominously. “You underestimate our resolve, child,” Camille said. “All we wanted tonight was the shaman, but you stuck your nose in where it didn’t belong.”
“We will be taking you to our Black Sabbath, of course,” Lucille added, her hands fiddling with her walker. She released it and shuffled a few steps closer to us, her back bowed like she was carrying a boulder over her shoulder. “Blasted potion is a nuisance,” she cursed. “My tits are practically touching my knees, sister,” she muttered to her twin.
“It will wear off soon,” Camille said, releasing her own walker. “Once you get enough fresh blood on your hands to wash it off, of course.”
“I do love getting my hands dirty,” she cackled, bobbing her head up and down—which looked chilling combined with the bulging hump in her back. “But I hate having to give up my magic, even for pleasure.”
“Then slice swiftly, sister. Bite deeply. Bathe your arms in their blood and you’ll get your magic back. I think I would rather take my time.” She eyed us like slabs of meat at a butcher. “With one of them, anyway.”
Then they were both shuffling closer at a limping pace, not having their walkers to aid them.
I shot Natalie an incredulous look. “Is this some kind of joke? Let’s just hobble away from them. We don’t even have to jog.”
Natalie was staring at their hands with her lips pulled back in a snarl. “This is bad, Sorin. Very bad.”
And I realized the twin hags were clutching wickedly curved daggers in each hand, both stained with a dark substance.
I heard a sharp grunt from the alley, and I spun, almost having forgotten about Agatha—the witch who still had her magic. She had made a sound upon lobbing a glass vial up into the air. I yanked Natalie back in case it was more of the intense green flame.
The glass broke and a thick blanket of black fog suddenly crashed into the street. Every single lamppost for a hundred feet abruptly winked out as miniature orbs of black f
og zipped upwards to cover them, plunging the street into complete darkness.
My eyes instantly adjusted, shifting my surroundings into a tapestry of light and dark grays—as if the colors of the rainbow had been replaced with all the possible shades of lethal blades.
The twin hags stared at us, and their suddenly pointed teeth glinted like polished, sharpened steel despite there being no light to cause a reflection. Their eyes had also changed, now glowing like green flames in the darkness—the only spots of color in my vision.
Agatha, likewise, featured the same metal teeth and fiery green eyes.
Whether the two old hags had magic or not, they were obviously more dangerous than they appeared, having ingested some potion to trade away their physical forms and their magic for these hunch-backed beasts.
But Agatha still had her magic—whatever that meant. Were their powers limited to these potions they kept flinging about in those glass vials, or could they actually do something directly?
A sudden chorus of angry meowing sounds rose up, making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end as the black fog eddied around my feet. I noticed at least a dozen pairs of glowing, feline eyes now surrounding us, trapping us inside a circle with the witches. Making things even worse, they didn’t remain still long enough for me to accurately assess the size or scope of our new boundaries. Instead, they prowled left and right, back and forth, in a jarring, unsynchronized tempo, disorienting me so that I had to force myself to look away from those yellow eyes or risk tripping over my own feet.
“Fucking cats!” Natalie snarled, her forearms suddenly covered in golden fur and ending in long, black claws where her fingers had been. “Something is preventing me from fully shifting! I can only call upon my claws!”
I wondered if that was the purpose of the circling felines. Canines and felines were often depicted as mortal enemies in my day. Was their presence keeping Natalie’s full werewolf form restrained?
As if my thought had been a summons, an offended yowl was all the warning I received before one of the vermin abruptly struck me from behind, latching onto my head with a maddened, coughing hiss. I cursed, snatching at it with my claws and violently flinging it away. The creature’s claws scraped my cheek in the process and I instantly knew we were not dealing with typical cats. I grunted, feeling suddenly dizzy as my cheek burned like fire. “Silver. The cats have silver claws,” I snarled, forcing myself to fight through the pain.
Natalie swore, comprehending just how dangerous that was to us. “Kill everything.”
One of the hags laughed delightedly but I couldn’t tell which one since both of their shawls looked the same in the darkness. “Oh, not my pretties. They came here for a meal and they are so hungry, the poor dearies.”
I saw another pair of eyes gleaming at me from an alley, attempting to slink closer while I was distracted. I tapped into my blood reserves and tried to call forth my shadow and blood cloak to shield us from the felines, but I gasped in pain as a sharp warning pain bloomed in my chest. I gritted my teeth and snarled. I didn’t have enough blood inside me to call it up—not with me using so much of my reserves back at the restaurant and my body fighting to heal the silver-claw wound on my cheek.
Instead, I went back to the basics. I formed a crystallized dagger of blood and shadow to hang suspended in the air before me. Even that small of a task was alarmingly difficult, and I knew I would have to end this fight fast or hope Natalie could save the day. I flung out a hand, hurling the blood crystal to impale the creature—the witch’s familiar—to the wall.
It yowled and screeched loud enough to make me flinch, and I watched in horror as a darker, inky black fog drifted out of the dead familiar and then zipped towards three nearby allies.
All three of them abruptly grew larger, absorbing the soul of the familiar I had killed.
“We have a problem,” I snarled at Natalie, trying to count how many familiars we had to deal with, and trying not to think about just how large the last cat standing might end up being.
“You have many problems,” one of the hags cooed.
“We can take you dead or alive, but either way, you will lead us to the shaman and his tomahawks. Our mistress would prefer you alive so she can make your death slow,” Agatha said in a sweet, strangely cheerful tone, licking the tips of her pointed teeth.
“And meat is so much better after it’s been tenderized,” one of the hags said.
“And easier on the teeth. The few I have left, anyway,” she said, grinding her mismatched teeth together hard enough to emit sparks. Which made her old snaggle-toothed Camille.
“What have I done to offend your mistress, and why does she want the shaman?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t be able to get an explanation after I killed them all.
“That is not our concern. We obey!” they hissed in unison.
Then the two hags were scuttling forward like crabs, darting from side-to-side with stunning speed. I let out my claws, ready to spill some blood. Natalie risked a quick glance my way, her lip curling up at the corner in a macabre smile. “I’m more than enough bitch for three witches,” she said in a surprisingly calm tone, revealing the reasoning for Stevie choosing her as a werewolf lieutenant. “You take the…Pussy Witch Muffs, or whatever we’re calling the cats,” she smirked in amusement at her nickname for them.
“What does that even mean?” I asked, dodging a flurry of attacks from Lucille before she slipped out of my reach.
“The Three Billy Goats Gruff fairy tale,” Natalie said as if it explained everything, keeping her eyes on the other two witches as they circled us. “Beat down one and their bigger brother comes after you. A cat is sometimes called a pussy—”
Ruining both her explanation and her suggested enemy allocation, three cats suddenly lunged at her back. She managed to sidestep at the last second, slicing the three of them in half in one brutal swipe. Camille barely missed Natalie’s spine with her dark dagger as she scuttled past the werewolf, trying to get in a cheap shot.
The same inky orbs zipped through the air from the three dead familiars, making the surviving familiars bigger—the size of large dogs now.
She pointed a bloody claw at them. “Pussy Witch Muffs,” she hooted with a satisfied grin.
“I’m not calling them that,” I muttered.
11
I pivoted to dodge another dagger swipe from Lucille’s poisoned blade as she caught me staring at her familiars and their constantly shifting boundary. I struck her hunched back and it popped like a balloon, startling me as it began spraying a thick, pungent smoke. I coughed and wheezed, my vision suddenly going dark—no longer able to see in the blackness.
Lucille laughed delightedly—the sound whipping from behind me to in front of me and then gone again, but I couldn’t see anything. Cats yowled and screeched in the darkness, but I couldn’t see them either. I couldn’t see anything, and my counterattack hadn’t even seemed to harm the witch. In fact, she was toying with my blindness. If she’d wanted me dead in those few moments of confusion, she easily could have done so. My body was already beginning to ache from lack of blood, and some of Natalie’s wounds must have opened as she fought, because it suddenly took every fiber of my being to restrain myself as the sweet scent of her blood struck my nostrils. Panic coupled with hunger was a great way to turn me into a mindless beast.
I took a calming breath to clear my head, and I heard their taunting laughs, and breaths, and footsteps dancing around me like a whirlwind of dead leaves—always just out of reach.
That’s when it hit me. I didn’t need my eyes. The gifts I had received from Artemis had made me a vampire, but they’d been given to me to become the world’s best hunter. They had not been limited to my sight.
I also had enhanced hearing.
I immediately focused on heartbeats, distinguishing Natalie’s from my foes so as not to accidentally kill her the moment I chose to go on the offensive. I heard a faint rustle before Natalie roared, slashing harmlessly at
one of the cackling witches. “I can’t see!” she snarled.
“Use your nose!” I snapped. I heard a faint pattering of feet rapidly approaching and I locked onto the thudding heartbeat just as one of the familiars struck my leg. Thanks to my hearing, I managed to stab it with my claws the moment it touched me, impaling it before the silver claws reached my flesh. I swiped wildly, hoping to destroy the inky orb that I knew was escaping the dead familiar—even though I couldn’t see it. I felt no resistance, so I had either missed entirely or my claws were ineffective against it.
“I can’t smell anything but that fucking smoke!” Natalie shouted, sneezing.
I gritted my teeth, successfully leaning away from a slashing dagger just in time to avoid contact. “Pick another sense! Hear their pulses! You’re a goddamned hunter, Natalie. HUNT!”
“Gladly,” she snarled. I heard Agatha suddenly let out a gasping scream, followed by a hollow, wet splat that reminded me of a bursting melon.
I heard the twins shriek as if they shared in Agatha’s pain, but a gurgling cough cut one of those screams short. I didn’t waste a moment, lunging towards the last witch. My claw tore through flesh at what I hoped was throat level for the hunch-backed hag, resulting in a moist, bubbling gasp and a spray of hot blood over my face. Luckily, I’d kept my mouth closed, expecting as much if my aim struck true.
The blinding smoke slowly began to dissipate. I took that as a good sign, relieved to find my vision incrementally returning.
Before I could verify my kill, I sensed a deep thumping heartbeat leaping through the air behind the hag, intending to hit me head-on from over her shoulder. I flung one hand up just in time to see my claws tear through the chest of a large feline the size of a panther. It snapped its silver fangs at me, showering me in sparks. I reared back and stabbed through its throat with my other hand, not daring to bite the familiar for fear that the blood was somehow tainted. Hot blood poured down my arm, but it smelled foul, confirming my assumption that the blood was poisoned.
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