“Something from the old country,” the old man said.
I took a swallow and tried to place the flavors which made me think of clover and sunshine and honey. The stuff was strong and I felt it start to warm me right away. I closed my eyes and let the warmth spread out from my center.
It didn’t just drive out the cold but filled me with a sense of peace. As I sat there, eyes closed, I felt everything slip away from me. There were no wolves, no torn bodies in the snow, no stolen children, no mysterious wolfers. There was nothing in the world but the blessed warmth.
The feel of melting snowflakes on my face woke me. Someone had wrapped me in a blanket but the fire had long since gone out. I staggered to my feet and looked around. The wolfers were gone, taking my horse with them.
I growled an oath too deeply felt to need any words and looked around. I’d slept until evening as best I could tell. Low dark clouds filled the sky, making it difficult to judge the time. The fat flakes of snow fell with elegant slowness, and had already erased the tracks of Orrin and his sons.
I stood and looked around. They had left me my rifle, and Turkey’s shotgun. That was a comfort but only a small one. Without a horse I would die in these mountains.
Then I heard the howl. I turned in the direction of the sound, grabbing the shotgun as I did. At the edge of the woods I saw a lean, dark shape staring at me. The wolf lifted its muzzle and howled again. A moment later a dozen cries answered it. Other forms gathered around the first wolf. They were like him, though some stood on two legs instead of four.
In the middle of the pack stood a dark-haired boy of about fourteen. He wore no clothing but didn’t seem any more bothered by the cold than his companions. Looking at him and the wildness on his face shook me more than even the wolves did.
“I just want the boy,” I cried, raising the shotgun. “Let me take him home and there’s no need to fight.”
I felt stupid for saying it as soon as the words were out. You can’t bargain with hungry wolves, not even when they seem so human in many ways.
They charged me and I let them come closer before I fired both barrels into the lead wolf. He fell, twisting and snapping, and I said a quick thanks to Turkey as I dropped the weapon and seized my rifle.
My first shot caught one of the two-legged wolves in the belly. He doubled in pain, then began to crawl toward me. A second shot between the eyes stopped him for good. I drew a bead on another, but the rifle jammed. Maybe the firing mechanism had frozen or maybe they’d worked some kind of witchery on it.
I didn’t have time to wonder as the lead wolf sprang. I swung the gun like a club and caught him on the side of the head. He pressed on as if the blow hadn’t meant anything. He came at my throat but I managed to jam the rifle barrel between his jaws. I tried to push him off, but he was too strong, stronger than any man or wolf should be.
As he struggled to get past the rifle, I seized my pistol, put the muzzle against his body and put three rounds into his side. He yelped in pain and went limp.
The other wolves had circled me but made no move to attack. Maybe no one had hurt them like this before. Maybe the sight of three of their own dead on the snow made them hesitate. As I staggered to my feet I could see that whatever held them back wouldn’t last for long. They were bound to realize that I only had two shots left. Maybe I could kill one more but I’d be helpless after that.
One of the two-legged wolves moved forward, growling. He was a full six feet tall with a man’s shoulders and upper body. I pulled the hammer on my Colt and sighted between his yellow eyes.
The attack came from the rear. Several of the wolves sprang on me while I focused on the obvious threat. My shot went wild, then the man-wolf slapped the pistol from my grip and I went down under an avalanche of shaggy bodies. I flailed and kicked for all I was worth but my blows didn’t seem to have any effect.
I thought I was dead, then I heard a rifle shot and there was one less set of jaws snapping at my face. Another shot and a wolf’s head exploded, splattering me with blood and gore. A third shot sounded and I was free as the animals withdrew in sudden panic.
The wolfers burst from the woods, discarding their single-shot rifles as they came. Tyree carried a big Bowie knife and screamed a war cry. Orrin laughed as he brandished an Indian war-lance. X came silently with no weapons in his hands.
The wolves pulled back, snarling, as if uncertain what to think of this new threat, or that half their pack was gone. Orrin cast his spear, piercing through a two-legged wolf and pinning him to the earth. Then his sons lunged into the remains of the pack and carnage began.
As they fought, the setting sun broke through the clouds, painting the clearing a brilliant orange and transforming the snowflakes into drifting shards of fire. I found my pistol and rose. Tyree had split one wolf’s skull already and faced two others. Adam Brand crouched nearby, his teeth bared.
X had killed one of his wolves. I hadn’t seen how he did it, but it lay there, its head crushed as he held the other by the throat. He tossed the animal down and stomped on its head with one of his heavy boots. The snarls changed to whimpers of pain as he ground his foot down on the wolf’s skull. I wondered what kind of strength it would take to do that to one of these creatures.
I heard Tyree cry out and turned to see that one of the wolves had sunk its fangs into his wrist, causing him to drop his knife. The other, the last of the two-leggeds, took advantage of the chance to lunge at him. I fired my last shot and the wolf-man spun, clutching his chest, and fell.
I moved toward them as the big man began to club the animal with powerful blows of his stump. I found the knife and raised it. The blade was made of dark metal and inscribed with some sort of lettering I couldn’t read. The letters flashed with the color of the sunset as I held it.
I turned to Tyree, but he didn’t need me. He had freed his good hand and was using it to hold the wolf at arm’s length as he strangled it. The animal’s legs kicked and clawed uselessly at the air.
The boy leaped on Tyree’s back then, clawing and biting. The big man ignored him as he tightened his hand. There was a crunch of bone and cartilage from the wolf’s neck and it went limp. The last of the pack was dead.
Tyree plucked Adam Brand from his back and caught his neck in the same deadly grip.
“Stop!” I shouted, raising the knife. I didn’t know if it could kill one of these men as easily as it had the wolves. I didn’t want to put it to the test, but I wasn’t going to stand by and watch them kill a child.
Tyree stopped and stared at me as if I was crazy.
“He’s one of them,” he said.
“No,” I answered. “He’s just a boy, and I’m taking him home.”
“He was born a wolf,” Tyree said. “That’s why they took him. They come for their own. There’s only one thing to do with a wolf and that’s to put it down. Show it mercy and it’ll tear your throat out.”
He said this easily, without a trace of pity in his voice.
“You’re as much a monster as they are,” I said.
Tyree shook his head and X stared at me, an unreadable expression on his face. Then Orrin began to laugh.
“Let him try to keep his promise,” he said. “He’ll learn soon enough.”
Tyree turned the boy loose and stepped away from him.
“Keep the knife,” Tyree said with an ugly smile. “You’ll need it.”
The boy grew docile once we’d left the wolfers behind. He didn’t seem bothered by the cold, but I made him a poncho with one of my blankets anyway and belted it with a piece of rope. My horse shied a little when I mounted Adam in front of me, but adjusted quickly.
The boy started sniffing the air when we’d gone about half an hour away. I smelled it too after a moment: smoke from wood and meat. The wolfers had made another pyre for their prey.
I tried talking to Adam as we rode, but he never responded. After an hour it was full-dark but the snow had stopped and the sky was starting to clear. I decided to
press on, wanting to put as much distance between us and the wolfers as possible.
About an hour after that the moon rose and I felt Adam begin to tremble.
“What is it, boy?” I asked.
He spun and grabbed at me with fingers suddenly tipped with blunt claws and snapped with a muzzle full of teeth. We toppled from the saddle and I landed hard underneath him. I struggled but he had become strong; much stronger than me. As he tried to get at my neck, I drew Tyree’s knife from my belt and plunged it into his side.
I shoved him away and rolled to my feet. When I looked at him again I didn’t see a monster, just the skinny, awkward body of a fourteen year old boy with a knife sticking in him.
I made a pyre for him, then took the knife and beat it with my hatchet until the blade snapped. I lay the fragments on his chest and lighted the wood.
I sat up the rest of the night, watching the fire burn down and thinking about monsters. When the dawn came I climbed onto my horse and began the long, weary journey home.
The Message of the Wolf
Gary Buettner
Dirig made no sound as he moved through the winter woods. The long, black duster he wore did not rustle as he slipped between frozen trees, nor did his big, old pistols rattle in their holsters. Only his thick boots left any evidence of his passing, heavy prints in the ice-glazed snow.
“We still get paid if we kill the wolf in human form?” Maclvoy had stopped to relieve himself and had begun to wonder. He was a professional soldier, a mercenary, fresh from security work in the Middle East and he saw everything, including werewolves, in dollars and cents. He saw hunting lycanthropes as a means to a wealthy end. Generally speaking, violence, no matter who it was administered on, paid well. Killing werewolves was legal, lucrative and generally encouraged by the general populace, not that public opinion usually bothered Maclvoy much, but, and he would not admit it to anyone, he did like playing the hero. He was like Beowulf with a machine gun.
Banks, busy catching snowflakes in the palm of his black leather gloves, stopped suddenly. “That is the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
Maclvoy zipped up. “Why?”
“We just going to show up with some John Q. Public’s head in a bag like he Lon Cheney Jr. or some shit? How they know we didn’t just cap some pedestrian over his half-caf vanilla latte?”
Banks was all about accuracy. As a street sweeper, a hired gun for urban gangs, a man’s worth was calculated not by how many men he’d killed, but by the colors of the men that had gone down. Bloods and Crips, it was all the same, but a man could not forget who was paying the bills, calling the shots this week. Banks had gotten tired of shooting brothers and statistics said that werewolves were more than ninety-percent Caucasian. Very few werewolves in Compton.
Maclvoy shrugged. “Mark of the beast?”
“Mark of the beast?”
“Yeah.”
“That is the second stupidest thing I ever heard.”
Maclvoy slung is rifle over his shoulder to free up his hands. When he was trying to explain something, he always talked with his hands. “Way I got it figured, your average werewolf is human most of the time, right?”
“Guess so.”
“So odds are we’re going to find Fido on two legs, not four.”
Banks stood, holding his shotgun in both arms like he was cradling a child. “I concede your point.”
“Really?”
“Naw,” Banks said,” but nothin’s scarier than a cracker with a machine gun and an idea.”
They both laughed and turned to follow Dirig.
He had materialized in front of them, looking like he had begun to reconsider taking on two new assistants. He thoughtfully rubbed his gray goatee with one gloved hand. “We’re already dead,” he said. “We just haven’t been made aware of the fact. The wolf, you see, is the messenger that makes us aware.”
Banks and Maclvoy glanced at each other and then back to Dirig. After a moment of silence, it was Banks who spoke first. “I don’t, uh, follow what you mean?”
Dirig sighed. “Stow the chatter, men, and march double time.” He turned and stomped away, leaving his humongous footprints behind him.
Maclvoy rolled his eyes. “He was in the war,” he finally said when he had estimated that Dirig was out of ear shot.
“Big whoop.” Banks made a jerk-off gesture with his hand. “Which war?”
Maclvoy shrugged. “I dunno, Civil War?”
Chuckling, they hurried to catch up with Dirig.
There used to be no legends of the hunt. So few even tried more than once to take down a werewolf. Of course, there were men who’d lost family to the beasts, who with a little luck and a lot of money had managed to not get killed and maybe put a few silver bullets into something out into the woods. No one had brought back carcasses. For all the werewolf remains that had been returned, there wasn’t enough to reconstruct one full werewolf. Some brought out Gray Wolves or wild dogs and hunted the others to near extinction.
That was before Dirig.
Bleeding near to death, Dirig dragged the remains of a werewolf he’d killed out of the Rocky Mountains. He had killed the thing with a silver knife that had more in common with a medieval sword than your average piece of cutlery.
Dirig had killed so many werewolves in his career that it caused one man to remark that Dirig didn’t so much go out and kill the wolves, but he was their Grim Reaper and they went to him to die.
Very little was known of Dirig and the general consensus was that was a good thing. What he had seen, what he had done would, hopefully, die with him after the last werewolf.
The men kept to the more traveled hiking paths, following the sun as it settled into the western sky. The color of the snow and the light had shifted from blinding white to a cold blue, by the time they found the first body.
“All I’m saying,” Banks whispered. “Is I’m a professional killer, son, pro-fessional. I don’t need any of this Sun-Tzu, hut-two-three-four bullshit…”
Dirig stopped, holding one fist above his head.
The two men stopped, shouldering their weapons and turning in slow circles, scanning the icy wall of pine trees that surrounded them. They had not noticed how tight the path had gotten, how close the trees were. Something could explode from this cover and take them both before they had the chance to properly shit themselves.
Dirig crouched down next to where the snow was a thick maroon. He dipped his fingers in the blood.
“If he licks that shit, I’m gonna puke,” Banks said.
Dirig wiped it on his boots, stood up and gestured that they should continue.
The men followed, rubber-necking at the kill like it was a particularly grisly car wreck on their morning commute. To them, it was: Pedestrian vs. werewolf.
The dead woman, blond and dressed in immaculately white ski suit, lay in such a pile that she did look like she’d been hit by a truck. Her skin had already turned blue, giving her the appearance of a broken doll. It made Banks think of his Gramma Nana’s Hummel figurines. “Monsters all kill the pretty ones,” he said as they passed. “Never the ugly bitches.”
Maclvoy shook his head, gesturing to a sign that indicated that this was a difficult hiking path.
“No shit,” Banks said.
“We make camp here,” Dirig said.
“Great,” Maclvoy said, shrugging off his pack. “I was hoping to sleep next to a beautiful woman tonight.”
When they had made camp and gotten a decent fire going, Maclvoy found himself drawn back to the kill.
“You leave that poor girl alone,” Banks said. “She’s had a rough day.”
“Dirig,” Maclvoy said, feeling odd saying the man’s name. “I think I found something… shit…I found something.” He held up a Spongebob Squarepants ski-hat.
Dirig took it. “Well, that wasn’t hers. Where did you find it?”
Maclvoy showed him. After a frenzied moment of digging with his gloved hand, he found more. “All these
clothes. Bloody. Looks like a whole family. Two or three maybe.”
“Damn,” Banks said. “Just dragged everybody off?”
“Why leave Mommy, then?”
Banks stood up straight, squinting into the darkness. “Maybe he was planning on coming back.”
Dirig said nothing.
“Keep your backs to the fire, saves your night vision,” Maclvoy said as the three men headed back to the camp.
“Aint you a good soldier,” Banks said.
Maclvoy laughed. “Fuck you, gangbanger.”
Dirig disappeared into his tent, leaving the two men on watch. They settled, back to back on either side of the fire. Banks cleared his throat. “You notice Dirig’s tracks?”
“You’d have to be blind to miss them.”
“He added blood.”
“Smell him coming a mile away.”
“Like he wants to be tracked.”
“Yeah.”
“Maclvoy?”
“Yeah?”
“You wonder what happened to his other assistants?”
“I prefer to think they are currently enjoying an early retirement someplace warm and werewolf free.”
“Yeah,” Banks said. “That ain’t what I was thinking.” He sat quietly for a minute. “When the shit goes down?”
“Yeah?”
“I got your back.”
“Good to know,” Maclvoy said, “but this ain’t some Brokeback Mountain shit, is it?”
Banks laughed. “Cracker, you ain’t even my type.”
“My booty ain’t big enough for you?”
“Much love to the sisters,” Banks said. “You ought to try you one on, whitebread, you might change your whole perspective.”
“Why, do you have a sister?”
“Hey, now.”
“I like blondes, personally,” Maclvoy said. “First girl I ever kissed was a blond.”
“That’s sweet,” Banks said. “You sniff your finger afterwards?”
“Thanks, for ruining that memory for me.”
“So Mommy over there is your type, huh?”
Both Barrels of Monster Hunter Legends (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 1) Page 6
