Chapter Twenty-Five: The Tree
The wolves trailed Richard into the garden by the west gate, panting and stumbling. James’s fur had felt snug before they’d left Richard’s farm; now he felt like he was running in a quilted jacket. Wolves had more red blood cells than humans – which allowed them to get more oxygen to their organs and therefore tire less – and an enlarged heart and lungs to process the extra blood, but that knowledge had just been academic until recently, when his spleen had released the extra blood and James ran at full capacity…
It felt like opening the throttle and feeling the engine roar, except that he was the engine. The world flew past. And still James used every ounce of that extra stamina just to keep pace with the werewolf and his enormous upright strides.
Richard reached the Tree first and pressed his back against the nine-foot obelisk. The eight exhausted wolves surrounded him. They were little threat to Richard individually, but it only took one lucky wolf to break Richard’s neck. James doubted that would kill Richard, since it wasn’t his heart, but it might incapacitate him. And it would hurt like hell.
James was the first to leap. He aimed for the neck, was knocked aside as he knew he would be, but opened opportunities for three others to latch onto ankles and arms. Richard shrugged his massive shoulders and tossed wolves away, but Curt had leapt all the way onto Richard’s back and was biting his neck.
James rolled onto his feet and ran back into the fight, dodging the wolves that were being thrown and bumped away. In seconds, they too had recovered from landing and returned to the fray.
Curt was actually doing very well. While most of the others had been shaken off and replaced by a second set of wolves, Curt had managed to clench Richard’s neck tight enough to stay on and was even growling. As James latched onto Richard’s ankle, the werewolf grabbed Curt with both hands and tossed him over the Tree.
A combined effort pulled Richard’s half-human legs out from under him and he thudded onto his back, but flipped quickly onto his front, sending wolves skidding into the dirt as they lost their grip.
They rushed back and clamped onto Richard’s arms, legs, side, neck. Richard fought back, but he was bleeding from a dozen wounds and there were too many wolves to kill any of them without leaving himself wide open to other attacks. The best he could do was throw them off and try to twist out of their bites, but any second now he’d leave something vital unguarded—
Something registered on the edge of James’s vision: the top of the Tree had changed shape. It wasn’t smooth stone any more, it was knobbly and… moving.
Melanthios, the dark-haired youngest Andraste, landed beside Richard and began throwing wolves off him. Now that James knew the vampires were here, he could smell the damned things, but only just.
Two wolves jumped at Melanthios. He smacked one out of the air, but the other brought him crashing to the ground.
Strangely, the other vampires didn’t come to their relative’s aid. They watched from their perches in the trees to the north as their brother and son defended his neck with his slender arms.
“I reckon that’s enough,” said a dull voice. Thomas Brown, having gained twenty pounds and a thick burgundy tan – very different from Leander’s lobster one – emerged smiling from the tree line.
The vampires launched out of the foliage and landed with easy grace. They pulled wolves from Melanthios and Richard, then dodged the answering snap of jaws. Richard shook off the last of the wolves and followed them.
The two lines regarded each other. Eight wolves. Twelve vampires.
No, wait. Thirteen vampires, one of them wearing a collar and chain. James thought he looked like Clarkson, but… no, he’d think about that later.
Adonis, an inch in front of the others, raised his chin as if to indicate that the wolves would be no challenge so he was in no hurry to dirty himself ending their meagre lives.
James lowered his head, extended his neck, and growled. The other wolves picked up the snarl and it rose in tempo.
As one, the wolves charged.
In mayhem, the vampires scattered.
They leapt back into the trees or ran off, past others or into them. The wolves didn’t pursue; they stayed as a group close to the Tree. James hoped Mitchell would arrive soon, since his own plan had been spectacularly short-sighted: he’d turned the wolves against Richard, but he hadn’t considered that another Brown might arrive with another, larger, army.
Leander had edged close to the pack and swiped at Dom, who was the easiest target – the smallest and thinnest. As Dom nipped at the fingers, Leander flipped backward to knock Dom’s jaws together with a fine leather boot. That made James suspect that the Andrastes had never been in a real fight before. They weren’t using any of the tried-and-true schoolyard tactics James had honed growing up. The vampires were more like ballerinas than brawlers.
Following Melanthios’s display, other vampires realised that one-on-one they had an advantage over the wolves, but the pack was ready for them. When Phaedra tried to claw at one of them, she found another wolf had bitten her wrist, but before she could hit that one, he was back safe among the others.
Ten feet away, beneath the shadow of the trees, the two Brown brothers clapped one another on the back. Vampire and werewolf cooperating. That went against every bone in James’s body.
A smell tapped him on the nose: meat and decay, blood and bile, mould, cloth, and death. Lots and lots of it. Quite close.
James gave a low bark and the wolves dropped back into a tighter group, staring south where, after a few seconds, the zombies emerged from the dark. Flesh hung off them by long-dead sinews; clothes were stained yellow with blood; legs dragged along the ground; arms hung loose at sides; white eyes gazed.
The wolves huddled around the Tree. On the plus side, that put them too far from the trees for the vampires to jump out and surprise them. On the down side, there was no cover for the wolves when the zombies turned against them, which James was sure they were about to.
Because if the zombie army was here, that meant Norm had failed.
Kill! shouted a cold voice that James heard in the base of his spine. The smell of day-old alcohol led James to the skeletal figure of Harold Brown, undead head of the horde.
As the zombies obeyed their commander, the vampires fell back north. It wasn’t retreat, however – not fear of this new threat – the vampires were creating a perimeter. They weren’t going to fight; they were just going to put down any mongrel that tried to escape.
James smelled fear roll off the other wolves. Together, they could punch a hole in the vampires’ guard and escape, but that left the Tree undefended. If all the Browns reached it, they’d fulfil the prophecy…
In that moment, James chose who he wanted to be. He wanted to be here. He wanted to be the one who stopped this. And with every bone in his body – including those in his fluffy tail – he would buy Mitchell every second he could.
James raised said tail from between his legs, lifted his head, and howled at the zombies. For a moment he was alone, his howl shallow and afraid in the big dark night. Then Dom joined in. Curt. The others.
The silence had been the vampires’. They had lived in it, fought in it, wrapped it around themselves like a cloak and around their enemies like a suffocating shroud. But no more. This was a new night, a night filled to overflowing with the Howl. And it was theirs.
So they charged.
Bovicide, Zombie Diaries, and the Legend of the Brothers Brown Page 65
