by Ben Tripp
The hunding looked around at the maison and its green-glowing eyes fixed upon Sax, visible in the kitchen window by the floodlight that reflected from the wet, icy ground. When the monster locked eyes with him, Sax shrank. He was so very frightened. Little pig, little pig, he thought. Mine is a house of straw.
Paolo took Emily by the shoulders and got her well back from the window, but she had seen enough. She was as terrified as Sax. Then the hunding’s eyes turned back to Gheorghe, Sax dismissed for now, and the thing drifted closer to the SUV, water streaming from its sparse fur and glistening in beads on the coarse bristles of its shoulders.
Sax was watching Gheorghe as intently as the monster. The man was up to something. Sax tried to will Gheorghe to stay calm, to stay where he was. Sax could not hear the sounds of the tableau but saw it all in pantomime. Gheorghe used his elbow to pop the latch handle of his door and put one foot down onto the wet ground, keeping the mass of the vehicle between himself and the lycanthropic thing that had hunched, arms back, head low, ready to spring, at the sound of the opening latch. Rock appeared at the cottage door, shotgun in hand.
Rock was shouting to Gheorghe, who shook his head. The hunding gathered itself low for the spring—and Gheorghe fired both guns. The monster leapt not at Gheorghe but sideways, out of the line of fire, and Rock shot at it as well. The thing was hit, but it did not flee now. It sank low on its front legs and tried to push itself up but lacked the strength. It was snarling, teeth bared.
These things didn’t fear injury, because they could survive almost anything—but their boldness got them badly hurt. At least it might be out of commission. Then they could finish it off. Rock fired another round from the doorway and Sax saw a halo of dark blood jump up from the hunding into the spotlights. Again Rock was shouting to Gheorghe. Gheorghe tossed the wet hair out of his eyes. There was a filament of rainwater streaming from the end of his nose.
Rock fired the shotgun again, and in that moment, Gheorghe made his move, running with his shoulders turned at right angles to his path, firing the guns in his hands. A wild bullet shattered one of the windowpanes to Sax’s left; he and Paolo and Emily hit the floor, scrabbling in a cascade of broken glass.
“We need to get to safety,” Paolo said.
“Brilliant,” Sax said, and lifted his head up to see out the window set in the kitchen door.
Only a second or two had passed. Gheorghe was still moving. He was almost to the cottage doorway when the second hunding appeared.
It lunged out from behind the corner of the building, just beyond the front door, and Gheorghe all but ran into its arms. The beast caught him around the neck with one of its thick limbs, and with the other it reached up and stripped open the man’s belly. Gheorghe’s guns flew from his hands. His mouth was stretched open in a tortured scream that Sax could hear through the window. A tangle of entrails spilled out of his body, then the blood poured forth, and the monster thrust its huge paw inside Gheorghe’s abdomen and ripped out his lungs.
Sax must have made quite a sound himself, because Paolo came forward and clapped his hand over Sax’s mouth and dragged him away from the door, their shoes slithering in the broken glass. They reached the foot of the stairs, Emily following, bent double to keep out of sight. Fra Dinckel was at the top of the stairs, holding the hammer in his hands.
“It has no handle,” he whispered.
“Break a bit off that bloody chair,” Sax said. In his fear and anger he wanted to lash out, and he had always disliked the chair at the top of the stairs. He’d been meaning to get rid of it for years. Let it suffer—it wasn’t a hunding, but it was something. When Fra Dinckel just stood there and did nothing, Paolo rushed up the steps, then smashed the chair over the stair railing, which was not at all what Sax had in mind. No sense breaking everything. But then one of the long uprights of the chair back came free and Paolo shoved it through the eye of the silver hammer Simon with its sharp tip shining even in the semidarkness.
A length of broken chair leg clattered down the stairs, split along its length: it could pass for a wooden stake, Sax realized, and snatched it up. It would not make much of a weapon. Maybe he could stab himself with it before they got to him. He saw in his mind a flash of Gheorghe’s screaming face as the entrails tore free from his body. It was almost beyond Sax’s ability to imagine surviving now. The flowers were blooming behind his eyes again. He felt faint. If he hadn’t been sitting on the floor he would have fallen. Fra Giu was beside Paolo at the top of the stairs now. He placed a hand on Dinckel’s shoulder and the younger man jumped with fright.
“Go with Nilu,” Giu said, and tossed his thumb over his shoulder at Sax’s bedroom door. Dinckel scuttled away into the darkness.
“What is happening?” Giu continued, seeing the look on the others’ faces. “Did someone—”
“Gheorghe,” Sax croaked. “He’s done.”
“There are two wolf men,” Emily whispered. “One is wounded. They killed—” She didn’t say it. Too much to encompass in words.
“There could be as many as six,” Sax said. “We saw them being loaded into the back of a truck at the foot of that bloody castle. That’s what was happening—it never occurred to me. They trucked them here, and released them as soon as we got back.”
Sax cursed himself. In hindsight, if he had only paused to consider it, shouldn’t this have been obvious? What else would the vampire have been up to? He was a fool, and now there was another dead man. But it was time to act, not utter mea culpas.
“How do we kill them?” Emily asked, like a child wanting to know how to stop the rain.
“We can’t. Not six of them. They’re just as tough as any man-shaped vampire, and stronger. The only advantage we have is they’re stupid. But they have all the instincts you can get. So we’re in real trouble—”
Emily interrupted: “If we were up in Fort Tetanus on the hill, we could lock ourselves in and wait for help.”
Sax shook his head. He was sweating. But he had an idea, a plan as bad as any he’d ever devised. “Yes, but we’re not up there, we’re down here in the airy-fairy farmhouse, all windows and doors, and they can walk right in here and play football with our livers. So instead—”
“Don’t lose your head,” Fra Giu said. He was shaking now, too, his back to the stairway wall.
“I’m not,” snapped Sax. “I’m just telling you what we’re dealing with. I suppose you know it all, with your precious team of crack vampire-slaying monks. Listen to me! You know what we have to defend ourselves? We have fire. They hate fire.”
“What fire?” Paolo asked.
“I mean let’s get a bloody fire going,” Sax said.
Fra Giu went down the stairs and peeked out the dining room window beside the French doors.
“They’re still out there. They’re trying to get into the cottage,” he said. Then: “O Gesù benedetto.” He had seen the remains of Gheorghe.
“Can you see Abingdon anywhere? Or Min?” Sax was gripping his wooden stake with such convulsive force that his hands ached.
“Only those things.”
Sax started to move. He crossed to the dining room and knelt by the liquor cabinet. A dozen bottles in there, half empty, things tenants had left behind. He pulled out the most flammable stuff. Vodka. Whiskey. Liqueurs.
“Help me,” he said to Fra Giu. “Tablecloths in there.”
Fra Giu pulled a stack of neatly folded white tablecloths from within the sideboard and threw them to Sax.
“What do we do, make torches? Surround them with fire?” he asked. Sax was pouring the liquor over the tablecloths, making acrid, dripping sponges of them.
“We surround ourselves with fire,” Sax said. “Look, I’ve a kind of a plan but it’s not very good. We might have very little time before they attack. We need to move. Spread these wet cloths out under the windows and doors, will you? Now-ish would be best.
”
Fra Giu did as he was told, taking a couple of fragrant, sopping tablecloths into the kitchen. Paolo grabbed the next couple and spread them out along the foot of the French doors, twisting the cloths along their lengths as if he planned to knot them together for an escape rope. Emily pulled down the curtains above some of the back windows and piled them on the windowsills. Sax poured liquor over them. Fra Giu returned with olive oil and splashed that around as well.
“How are we going to escape the fire?” he asked.
“No idea,” Sax said. “We’ll have to do something with the girl upstairs. Carry her.”
“You’ll have to do this,” Giu said to Paolo. “Move faster than me.”
Sax brought a bunch of wax tapers and a box of matches out of a kitchen drawer. “Light these candles, please. There’s a gas lighter in that drawer there. Quickly.”
Fra Giu took a bundle of white candles from Sax and lit them. Sax realized his plan was moving almost too fast. Safer to light the candles after they were in position. It didn’t matter. He stuck one of the tapers in a water glass and placed it at the foot of the kitchen door, surrounded by a rumpled-up tablecloth soaked in whiskey. The candle flame flared and crackled as if hungry to reach the spirits evaporating all around it.
Emily made a noise—a sob, a gasp of terror. Sax couldn’t tell. But he looked at her sharply, and she sucked whatever it was back inside herself, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment.
“I’m getting light-headed from all the alcohol,” Emily said. “I’m going upstairs to tell Mr. Dinckel what’s happening.”
Paolo set up a pair of candles in the dining room in the same manner, placing them in glasses so the long wax cylinders teetered at an angle over their top lips. If somebody made a mistake now, the whole place would go up in flames and drive them outside, if anyone could even make it through the flames to begin with. Sax was sweating so profusely that a fat droplet of perspiration extinguished the candle he placed under the window at the far end of the kitchen. He fumbled out his matches and relit the candle. A fragment of burning match head spiraled down onto the floor beside the vodka-fuming cloth bundled at his feet. Sax jerked back. The alcohol didn’t catch fire. He sank to his knees. Fra Giu appeared at his side.
“Okay, you make a good plan. If they come in, the candle falls, the fire comes. Good plan.”
“Yes, well it’s missing the bit after that,” Sax said curtly, and forced his rusty knees to bear him upright again.
Paolo was watching the yard from a few feet inside the kitchen door. They were all keeping well away from the candles.
“There is a third creature outside now,” he said. “It’s looking at us.”
“Get away from the light,” Sax hissed. He doubled over to get himself out of sight as much as possible and made it to the stairs. Fra Giu followed him. They went up. It was dark. Fra Dinckel came to the bedroom door, his wide eyes glittering.
“Emily?” Sax whispered through the bathroom door.
“Just a minute,” she said from inside.
She came out wiping her eyes. Sax suspected she’d just had a fit of tears, the remainder of the panic she’d first shown downstairs. Typical of her to require privacy for that.
It was wholly dark now except for the light from the yard. The rain drummed on the roof and the exterior lights made snakes of reflected water writhe over the walls. Thunder rumbled deep in the bones of the house, too far away for the crack of sound. Sax went alone into Emily’s room and looked out into the yard.
He saw the three hundings now. One was on the roof of the cottage, almost level with his eyes. It was watching the maison but it was not looking at him. Could it leap as far as the window at which he stood? He didn’t think so, not quite. The other two were circling the cottage, pacing counterclockwise, studying the windows and doors, ignoring the maison. Rock had attacked one of their own. They wanted him first.
The cottage was a strong structure with very few openings in it, being constructed according to the needs of impoverished eighteenth-century peasants. The big house was as insecure as a china cabinet, all bourgeois glass and delicate woodwork, not stout timbers and stone. Rock might survive by sitting tight; the monsters would slink away at daybreak. By that time the maison de maître would be an abattoir of blood and destruction, or a blazing funeral pyre.
Then Sax saw the situation change, and after that it all happened at a ferocious speed. The hunding on the roof abruptly raised a foreclaw and slammed it downward and Sax saw it had found one of the skylights, both of which were big enough for the creature to shove its bulk through. It tore the broken plastic shell from the frame, then wrenched the frame out of the roof and shoved itself head and shoulders into the opening. At that moment, it was framed by a flash of light as if someone had just taken a photograph, but it couldn’t have been that, because the monster’s head vanished in a fountain of brains, blood, and bone, its severed mandible whipping through the rain like an obscene fang-studded boomerang. The monster convulsed and its limbs went stiff and it rolled, blood spewing from its ragged neck, off the cottage roof and onto the hood of the SUV below. That would stop it for a few decades.
At that moment, there was a metallic clang from across the yard and the back door of the bread truck flew open. Abingdon leapt out. Sax was both exhilarated and terrified.
Abingdon was clad in a suit of medieval armor and held a broadsword in his gauntleted hands. His body and arms were encased in the fluid coat of mail called a hauberk, and there was a shining gorget at his throat. He wore a helmet with an iron nasal that came down between his eyes, and his arms were further bound in steel vambraces with bat-wing hinges at the elbows. It made a strange contrast to the faded blue jeans and engineer’s boots below. Abingdon charged, and one of the other hundings was caught off guard. It had been crouched over the corpse of its headless companion when Abingdon emerged from the van. Now the monster turned, leading with its head, gathering its mass low to pounce—Abingdon swept the long, flashing blade of the sword in a low arc and cut off the monster’s face. Sax could see into its sinuses and the empty half-sockets of its eyes for an instant before the blood came pouring out and the thing went berserk, hurling itself around the yard. If Abingdon had ignored it to attack the remaining creature, he might have survived.
As it was, he ran after the thing to finish the job, hacking at its limbs. The yard was awash in blood. Abingdon himself was painted red from head to foot, and Sax thought he was seeing the real chivalric ideal of battle with dragons brought to life. Emily was at his shoulder now. Some instinct told him to propel her away from the window. She resisted but stepped back.
The third hunding came up behind Abingdon and he swung around and severed its foreleg at the elbow joint. At that same moment, three more of the monsters came hurtling out of the darkness beyond the farmyard wall and fell upon Abingdon at once. He did not strike another blow, but was ripped into thirty-pound chunks in a matter of seconds, the coat of mail torn to heavy rags that trailed in the blood-slimy yard. The white rain poured down and hit the dirt and sprayed back up crimson.
The monsters turned to the maison as one. It was time to finish things.
“They’re coming!” Sax shouted, his voice unexpectedly loud in the silent house. Glass broke downstairs. Sax squeezed Emily’s arm. Then he slammed the bedroom door and twisted the key in the lock. He didn’t know where anybody else was. They were going to have to live or die according to their individual wits and fortunes. It always came down to that eventually, whenever men squared off against vampires.
There was a boom below the floor and something crashed to the ground and broke, then everything was smashing below them, the floorboards jumping beneath their feet. Smoke curled up through the floor and the boards became hot.
“I wish you hadn’t come,” Sax said. Emily didn’t have any words. She threw an arm around his shoulders and took the wooden stake fr
om his nerveless fingers and held it like a dagger. Sax felt so old and helpless and, worst of all, stupid. He had caused all this. Every ounce of blood and scream of agony was his work. He still had the lees-end of a bottle of vodka in his hands. He wondered if he shouldn’t offer the poor girl a drink.
He heard gunshots. There was an explosion. Human screams.
And then the flaming hunding came crashing through the door.
The oak panels shattered like glass, long staves of broken wood flying into the room. The creature was wreathed in fire, its white flesh splitting, blackening. It howled and Sax could see the heavy sawing teeth behind its fangs, the ridges of its hard palate, the vulval anatomy of its throat, all illuminated by the flames that wreathed its head.
Sax’s time had come. He threw Emily aside, not consciously to save her—it wasn’t possible—but because, perversely, he wanted her to live a second or two longer than him, so he wouldn’t have to witness her death. She tumbled against the bed and the monster lunged at Sax. He struck at the thing from instinct, reduced as he was to a frightened ape incapable of conscious thought, and the vodka bottle shattered in its teeth. White fire filled Sax’s vision, there was an intolerable weight upon him, and Sax knew nothing, felt nothing, was nothing.
Rock had requested some special equipment from the Holy See when he accepted the vampire-hunting job but hadn’t brought the stuff to Germany for the recon mission. He had been very glad his duffel bag was in the cottage in Petit-Grünenwald, however, when the monsters came. Wouldn’t have done him any good in the back of the SUV. The shotgun proved most effective. He had come up with an innovation that would later go on to become a standard item in the antivampire toolkit. The shells of the ten-gauge shotgun he’d ordered were loaded with a mixture of silver .00 buckshot and granulated sulfur, all suspended in a matrix of gelled garlic oil. He had based this formula on anecdotal evidence of what worked best on vampires; there was no science to it. But it did work. Something about sulfur and silver at the same time had a hell of an effect on vampire tissue. Add to that the allium oil and it was like hitting the monsters with a hand grenade full of razor blades.
