by Alice Bello
“You should feel honored,” Sophie said, leaning down and snatching hold of Lucy’s chin, pulling her face painfully up to meet her crazed glare. “At least you’ll be buried in the family necropolis, if nothing else.”
Lucy tried to pull away, but the werewolf had a death grip on her chin.
“Now, now... none of that. No whining or trying to ruin our fun. You did bring this all on yourself, after all.”
“What the—” Lucy tried to say, but Sophie back-handed her with her free hand. It was like her cheek exploded, pretty, pretty stars tried to pierce their way through the pain. Lucy blinked them from her vision, and started to crawl away. She didn’t know which way she was going, and she didn’t know where the hell she was, but she needed to get away from the lunatic Double Mint Twins.
A spike high heel dug into Lucy’s back, pressing her down to the ground, pinning her like a butterfly to a cardboard backing.
“You had plenty of chances to bow out from this... this abomination of a marriage.” Olivia ground her heel in, just enough to make Lucy cry out in pain, but not enough to actually puncture the skin. “I mean, how dense are you when you don’t get the hint that you shouldn’t be marrying Gabriel? Are you freaking retarded?”
Lucy ground her teeth. I’m going to kill you first!
Something close to her rose up and took notice. Lucy felt it for only a moment, and then it disappeared again. But it had stirred at Lucy’s anger.
The heel ground in a little more, and then its weight disappeared. Lucy gasped for breath, trying to push herself to her hands and knees. A kick from Sophie’s bare foot lifted her off the ground for a beat, and when she landed her lungs filled with liquid fire. She screamed because it hurt so badly.
Her screams were met with another kick, and a mirthless snicker. “I mean, why didn’t you just walk away? It’s not like he could ever really be yours.”
Olivia drove her spiked heel through Lucy’s hand, skewering it into the cold, dew coated grass.
“Even if you did let him turn you!” Olivia sounded like she’d eaten glass. “There’s no way a half-breed could ever really be one with a pureblooded noble.”
Sophie kicked Lucy again, and the searing in her chest redoubled. She couldn’t draw breath enough to scream. She was sure her ribs were broken.
“Imagine our surprise,” Olivia said as she pulled her heel out of Lucy’s hand. “When he decided to mate outside of the species. It’s disgusting!”
“It’s fine to play with your food before you eat it.” Sophie grabbed Lucy by her hair and pulled her over the rough ground. Ancient roots jutted out of the ground, ripping at Lucy’s back. “But to take it home and shove it down your family’s throat!” Her voice was hard as steel as she threw Lucy like a ragdoll against the nearest headstone. It didn’t matter if it was large or small, stone was stone, and Lucy blacked out on impact. But not before she heard her bones snap.
~*~
The loss of consciousness was refreshing. No malevolent blue power watching her. This time the darkness around her stayed put. That was until the bickering voices of her attackers wrestled her from her impromptu siesta.
“You always overreact! It’s just typical!” Olivia brayed, stalking back and forth a few yards away.
“Don’t you blame this on me! You inflicted enough damage your-own-goddamn self.”
“What? Do you think we can bring her back to life to torture? Huh? Once the little bitch dies, our fun is over.”
Fun... they thought what they were doing was fun?
Lucy opened her eyes and beheld the enormous headstone she’d been battered into. Three feet tall, nearly five feet across. Gray marble, time worn and rough looking, topped off by a Celtic cross. But a name remained.
Tobias Luther Enoch.
A tarnished sword stuck out from the side of the headstone. So dull and tarnished it didn’t even gleam anymore.
Hey there Luther... or is it Tobias? Toby? Mind if I borrow your sword there?
“I just can’t fucking believe we had to degrade ourselves this way... to have to kill her ourselves. We’re freaking royalty! Just look at us, trolling around in a stinking graveyard. And for what? To kill off some human flesh-bag our cousin should have skinned and chewed up the first night he met her.”
There was silence for a few beats, and then Olivia howled out in irritation. “He didn’t even consider mating with me! How the hell did he think I could just take an insult like that lying down?”
Sophie snorted derisively. Lucy saw her shoot her sister a heated glance. The look plainly said, As if...
“I just can’t believe all those mercenaries failed. I mean, really, she’s just a human. We could’ve peeled her skin off and broiled her like a pig on a stick by now. How is that professionalism?”
Sophie smiled. “They just don’t make hired guns like they used to.” She brought her hand up to her mouth and licked off a long smear of Lucy’s blood. Lucy cringed. “So now it’s up to us.”
Olivia sighed, her voice a low rumble. “Never send strangers to deal with family business.”
A dirty bare foot planted itself against the side of Lucy’s face, pressing down hard. “Look who’s finally waking up. Maybe this won’t all go to waste after all.”
She pushed down hard, making Lucy’s ears pop, and her vision fade, fuzz up, and then vibrate as it came back.
“You remember to bring the saw?”
Lucy puked up the contents of her stomach. It was streaked with blood. She was surprised she’d lasted this long.
Thoughts burned in her head. Not words, she hurt too much to form coherent thoughts. No, this was just a prickly, primal imperative flashing like demented neon in her head.
She needed to find a way to kill them. She wanted to kill them. But how?
What had sparked to life out in that graveyard earlier shook its head and howled. Lucy could practically hear it bay up to the waxing moon above. Then more voices joined in, and she felt—literally felt—claws dig up through the dirt beneath her, and into the flesh of her body.
Wolf.
That was what she felt, what was calling to her. But not the way Gabriel and his kin felt to her. No, this was death magic, something akin to her own power. She was feeling the restless, ravening souls of the long dead and buried werewolves that were laid to rest in the necropolis.
And they were hungry.
Unlike the dead from the cemetery behind her grandmother’s home, these weren’t calling to her, or begging.
They were demanding her attention.
Their wraiths prowled the necropolis, slipping from shadow to shadow, wild and dangerous... and powerful.
They liked the violence. They were indeed all werewolves, and most of them were warriors. Bloodthirsty, ruthless killers. Hunters. And they wanted more blood.
But they had no connection to the two now shifting werewolves that had had been beating the very life out of Lucy moments ago. Besides them being werewolves, and of their bloodline, that is.
But their connection with Lucy was strong, near intimate. They swirled about her, caressing her, tasting her blood with their essences.
Lucy had ignored the Double Mint Twins long enough that when she noticed they were shifting, she had lost track of who was who. One sister was already in full werewolf form. The other was a hideous mixture of human and werewolf. Her jaw was far too large, and her upper fangs too small. One arm was even longer than the other. When her claws burst through her fingers, Lucy could practically feel the pain it caused.
But I’ll cause you even more pain...
Lucy reached out and opened herself to the dead werewolves of the necropolis. She had no idea if they would choose to help her... she had no idea if they could help her at all.
The night trembled at her fingertips, and then the magic of the dead snapped and pushed into her in a flood. They filled her, fast and hard, violently, making her gasp and scream. But she felt what they were doing. They were healing her, inside and
out.
She took a great, delicious breath. Death was in the air, the dead were everywhere, and they wanted, they hungered, for her to kill.
Kill them both.
They waited, spectators all, silently willing Lucy to action.
Lucy pushed up from the ground and hauled herself to her feet. She’d lost one of her sneakers in all the kidnapping and torture, so she kicked off the remaining one, and then spit the blood from her mouth. It wasn’t her own blood she was hungry for.
That small sound drew the shifting werewolf sister’s attentions back to her, and growls rumbled from their hideous maws.
“Aren’t you two pretty,” Lucy said as she moved closer to the gravestone with the sword sticking out of it. She didn’t know why, but that sword was really, truly calling to her. And since there wasn’t another weapon anywhere in sight, she went with it. “You’re right... how did Gabriel escape your charms?”
In perfect unison the werewolves’ ears flattened against their misshapen skulls, and their growls vibrated from their chests.
That was until Lucy reached out and gripped the sword sticking out of Tobias Enoch’s tombstone. That’s when their growls turned into choking laughter, a sound that was never meant to come out of a wolf’s muzzle. Maybe a hyena, but never a wolf.
“That sword will do you no good, you idiot human.” Though she couldn’t pin down why, she was sure that the one speaking was Olivia. Her voice was coarse as sandpaper, and was more snarl than articulation, but it sounded like Olivia. “Even if you could pull it from that stone... ” and she barked another laugh. “It’s only iron. You’d never be able to—”
That’s when Lucy pulled the sword out of the stone. No, not like King Arthur, easily yanking it out of the fabled stone with no trouble at all. Lucy pulled with all her might, and that turned out to be far more might than she had planned on, or needed. Her effort littered the ground of the graveyard with chunks of stone and rubble. The sound of cracking marble was like a bomb exploding, like a wrecking ball pulverizing the side of a building.
Both werewolves took an involuntary step back. One was completely changed; the other was nearly changed, but still kind of humanoid looking.
The sword was just iron, nothing special, and certainly not silver. But it felt good in Lucy’s hand. Not like the sword she’d practiced with when she sparred with Micah. No, nothing like that. This felt good. This felt so familiar, so right... and she suddenly very much knew what to do with it.
Lucy flicked it through the air a few times, instinctively warming up her wrist and arm. The movements seemed familiar, so ingrained as to be habit. The werewolf sisters backed up again, their fang adorned mouths open and seething, their claws at the ready to attack... but their feet were taking them further and further from her instead of closer.
Something inside her told her that this wasn’t just a simple retreat. This was the actions of predators, hunters... spoiled debutante sisters or not, these were still skilled killers, with preternatural speed and strength... and big-bad-wolf claws and teeth.
Her brain told her she should wait and let them make the first move. To react to their attack, and kill them through skill and patience...
But she wasn’t at all sure the skill she was feeling was true. But what did feel emphatically clear was that the spirits that had filled her and healed her were now howling for her to attack, no to wait, but to slaughter the mangy bitches where they stood!
Lucy liked that plan better.
She moved forward swiftly, not running, but striding confidently toward her enemies. The sword in her grasp seemed not to weigh much of anything, even though she held it up at eye level, one handed, her arm bent at an angle that felt perfectly natural.
The werewolves recognized the thrust of Lucy’s movements as an attack, stopped backpedaling, and stood their ground. Though the fully turned Sophie was stealing nervous glances at her half turned sister, surprisingly, it was Sophie that moved to counter Lucy first. Be it her wolf’s instinct to strike, or just her nerves getting the best of her, the fully shifted sister surged toward Lucy like a freight train.
The wolf moved with amazing speed, but Lucy sidestepped and leaned out of the beast’s lunge even faster, and with a surprising amount of grace. The werewolf stopped in her tracks and swung back around, throwing out one obscenely long, furry, muscular arm, tipped with razor sharp claws. Lucy somehow dodged that too, and with surety, swung the sword in a blindingly quick, perfectly level strike to the werewolf’s middle. She had leaned into the blow, and though she was aiming to run the blade straight through her to the other side, she was shocked to see the blade do exactly that.
There was a spray of blood, and a rather human gasp, and then the werewolf fell to the ground—her top half falling to the right, the bottom to the left. The top half whined, then growled, trying to swing for Lucy’s ankles, but she bled out almost instantly, and her body twitched twice more before she died.
There was a great hiss, and Lucy turned to find the fully shifted Olivia snarling, her gruesome dentition dripping with strings of drool.
Killing the first werewolf hadn’t sated the spirits around her one bit. If anything it raised their calls for blood and death to a more fevered pitch.
The werewolf was vibrating with anger; Lucy could practically feel it. But Olivia was obviously more in control of her beast. She wasn’t about to charge half cocked and meet the same demise as her sister, angry or not. Lucy and the wolf circled each other, the wolf poised for attack, her claws raised, her jaws open wide, her posture ready to pounce. Lucy stayed relatively relaxed, her eyes never diverting from the growling beast before her.
When Olivia spoke, her voice was feral and terrible, but the words were nearly perfectly enunciated. “Your death will be slow and painful, little girl.”
Lucy smiled, just a little. “Yours won’t.”
The werewolf stalked around Lucy, claws digging into the dirt of the graveyard. “I’m going to fucking kill you, bitch!”
“Yeah, yeah... you’ve been saying that all night,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes. “If you want my life so badly, then come and take it.”
The iron of the sword was covered in werewolf blood, yet it sang, vibrated in her hand as if it yearned to sink into yet another. She was all too ready to indulge it.
The werewolf jerked, its canine face distorting with anger. And then the great beast shot up straight into the air. The jump was spectacular, and though Lucy couldn’t see the beast with her eyes—Olivia had gone too far up too quickly and was veiled by fog—Lucy could sense her perfectly.
She held perfectly still, sword in hand, waiting as the beast’s mass came crashing back to earth. She knew the instant Olivia reached out her huge, claw tipped hand toward her, and with a sudden turn and a swing, Lucy severed that hand from the werewolf’s arm. Lucy could practically hear a sizzle as the old sword chopped through bone and sinew.
Olivia crashed to the ground, yelped and howled as she feebly held her other arm where her hand had been. Lucy kept her feet firmly planted beneath her, holding her ground, ready for the wolf’s next move.
She didn’t have to wait long. Olivia shot back to her back feet—or were they technically paws now?—and flung herself at Lucy, running full steam toward her, and then feinting to the left at the last second.
Lucy didn’t try going for a fatal blow. She could tell far in advance that the growling wolf would be out of range for that, but she did lop off Olivia’s left ear. It sailed through the air like a falling fall leaf, and made a small, wet sound as it hit the ground.
Olivia stopped and her remaining hand shot up and felt the bloody nub where her ear had been. She looked at her hand, seeing her own blood dripping from it.
This made the wolf finally lose all its control. Olivia’s eyes burned a hateful yellow tinged with red, and she roared as she charged toward Lucy once more.
Lucy stepped back as the raging werewolf charged. The ancient spirits of the warriors around her
howled in appreciation. They clamored for more blood. They urged Lucy to strike hard and fast, to kill her opponent in the most vicious, painful way.
The wolf shot around her in a preternaturally swift movement, and came up on her from behind. A very good move, but Lucy felt her change direction, felt her every step falter and then turn confident again, as if her own nervous system where hardwired to the soil of the graveyard.
With a smooth turn and a seemingly random swipe of the sword in her hand, she removed the wolf’s remaining hand, at the elbow. Olivia hissed and her face hurtled toward Lucy, her jaws open for the strike.
But Lucy had already moved away, and with another flick of the sword she sliced Olivia’s nose clean off, leaving a red, bloody stump on the end of the wolf’s snout.
Olivia roared in agony and rage, and whirled around on Lucy.
Lucy had jumped upon what was left of Tobias Enoch’s gravestone, holding the sword out in aggression. “Now, that is really more of a winter look. You know: the whole Rudolph thing.”
The wolf looked to her amputated arm, and her lopped off hand, and started to hyperventilate. But her eyes were flaming almost as red as her detached nose. She was going berserker. The rage and pain poured off the wolf like ripples in a pond.
Olivia leaped for Lucy’s legs and Lucy leapt for the wolf. She flew over the wolf like in one of those silly kung fu movies her brother Seth so liked to watch, and she reached down and ran the sword’s blade gently down the wolf’s back, slicing a shallow though painful gash down the wolf’s spine.
Olivia landed against the broken tombstone and turned on a dime, surging back at Lucy. She was given another cut, this time to her leg, and arterial blood sprayed from the wound. Lucy had hit the femoral artery.
Olivia staggered, and then when she realized what had happened, she tried to scuttle away. Loss of limbs was one thing—a were could re-grow something like that with a little time. But with your life’s blood pumping out of your body with every beat of your heart, you suddenly started counting the beats and doing the math.
