She was faster than me. By a mile.
I needed to get close enough to use my bite strength.
She did not let me.
So I changed the game; I played hers.
As she lunged for a long slash, I shifted from wolf to wolfman. I pivoted and whipped out my hand and caught her wrist. Then I clamped my teeth around it as I shifted back to werewolf.
Bite strength, baby. Nothing beats it.
Bones collapsed, meat burst, and then I had her hand. She screamed so loud I thought it would blow out my eardrums. I reeled, but it was all noise. She clutched her maimed arm to her body, trying to staunch the flow of blood that jetted from the stump. She backed away, the fight taken out of her.
I had other plans.
As she turned to flee, I hurled myself onto her back and slammed her down onto the floor. As we landed I buried my fangs in the back of her neck. I could feel the vertebrae break apart. I could taste the cerebral spinal fluid as it filled my mouth. I could feel the life as it fled from her like steam from a ruptured pipe.
I almost howled. Like a wolf does after a kill. Almost.
But there was too much going on.
Ledger was being pushed back now. Bloody cuts crisscrossed his body. But amazingly, one of the wolfmen lay dead at his feet, the rapid-release knife buried to the hilt in the top of the creature’s skull. Ledger had no weapon. All he had was speed and training and whatever angels protected him.
He was going to die, though. I could see that without question.
He was also fifty feet away and I was never going to be able to get to him in time.
Crow was down on one knee, his whole side glistening red. The shotgun lay in pieces around him, but there were three dead werewolves, too. As I watched, Crow fumbled his pistol out of his holster and raised it. His hands trembled with pain and fatigue. And fear. I could see in his eyes that he thought he was going to die, too.
Maybe we all were.
I’d taken a hell of a lot of damage.
I started in his direction, but then my entire back exploded with searing, unbearable, blinding pain. I could feel nails rake across my spine and ribs. The force of the impact knocked me down and sent me sliding across the floor, riding a red carpet of my own blood. As my body spun, I saw a figure that I hadn’t seen before.
A fourteenth werewolf.
Tall. Powerful.
He shifted back to his human aspect, standing there naked and indomitable.
With a face like an American Indian. High cheekbones, black eyes, straight black hair.
This was the werewolf who’d killed Antonio.
I was certain of it.
And, just as certainly, this was the alpha of this pack.
He exuded power.
Across the room, Mike Sweeney vanished beneath a pile of wolfmen. Blood geysered up around them and screams filled the air.
My pistol was on the floor near his feet. He bent and picked it up, dropped the magazine to inspect it, slapped it back in, racked it. The round that had already been in the chamber went arcing over his shoulder. The man looked around the room. His mouth turned down in a frown. Not of unhappiness at how many of his people were dead. It was a sneer of contempt. Everything he saw—us, his own pack, all of it—was nothing to him. He was a monster among monsters. I could feel that. I knew it to be true. We werewolves have certain instincts. I knew that this man was as close to death personified as ever walked the earth. Maybe he was the pinnacle of the twisted research being done in this place. Maybe he was the superior soldier they were looking for. An unstoppable force.
The pain in my back was excruciating, but I had to move. I had to try to fight. This wasn’t just a bad guy, not some child abuser I was hunting or a bail skip I was paid to nab. This wasn’t the kind of scum I chased for small bucks as a P.I. This was the kind of evil I became a cop to oppose. Actual evil.
Was this what the people at Limbus wanted stopped? They’d put me in the path of a monster before, and I’d nearly died fighting it. This time I was pretty sure that I was going to die. Limbus seemed so prescient, but as I struggled to get to my feet, I knew that their faith in me was badly misplaced.
The big man raised the pistol and pointed it. Not at me. He pointed it at Ledger. His mouth curled into a very small, very cruel little smile.
“No!” I snarled in a mouth that was not constructed for human speech. I flung myself at him. I tried to gut him with my claws. Tried to bite him with my teeth. But all I managed to do was bump against him and spoil his first shot. The round vanished into the smoke above Ledger’s head.
The alpha grunted and clubbed me with the butt of the pistol. Once. Twice.
Again and again.
Beating me down. Breaking me.
Killing me.
And he wasn’t even in wolfshape.
I collapsed onto the ground.
The man gave a single little nod and raised the pistol again.
This time there was nothing I could do to prevent that shot.
Nothing.
Chap. 51
I didn’t have to.
There was a flash of movement. A blur, as fast as when Ledger and Mike had moved. Faster.
The hand holding the gun leaped into the air, trailed by rubies. The gun fired, but the barrel was pointing nowhere. The bullet struck the body of the dead werewolf woman, adding neither insult nor injury. Her flesh quivered but a little.
The alpha howled in agony. He spun around, and in doing so, changed from bleeding man to maimed wolfman. The thing that had attacked him, the creature that had taken his hand, landed ten feet beyond me. It whirled and bared its bloody teeth at the towering killer.
It was another werewolf.
Smaller than me. Darker fur. Eyes as hot as hell’s furnaces.
It stood on four legs, claws flexing with such fury they scored the concrete floor. Hair rose along its spine, its ears were back. It was the picture of savage rage, of a total commitment to hate.
The killer looked into those eyes.
So did I.
I think we both recognized them.
I spoke the name.
“Antonio.”
I didn’t ask how. The blood. The old ritual I’d performed had done its work. Its magic. It had brought this young man back from the dark place. It had restored him, healed the terrible wounds that had been torn into his flesh. It had brought him to the peak of his feral power. Maybe to a greater peak than ever before.
Even maimed and bleeding, the alpha was still twice his size. He’d beaten this young man before. Easily.
He bared his teeth, and in that leer there was a promise of even greater harm and humiliation. The alpha suddenly rushed at him and though Antonio tried to dodge away, the killer was insanely fast. He struck Antonio with his stump, and it was like being smashed with a club. The younger werewolf yelped in pain and slammed into me so hard we rolled over and over. Blood welled from his mouth and nose and splashed my face.
Then he scrambled to get off of me, slashing me by accident as he sought to evade the next blow. The alpha caught him on the hip and sent him slewing sideways.
I snapped at the alpha and caught his ankle. With all of my rage, I tried to bite hard enough to cripple him, but he squatted, twisted and struck me on the side of the head hard enough to knock the world off its hinges.
Everything went dark.
I felt like I was falling from a great height. Falling through smoke for an endless time. I spun sideways and lay on the floor. Through shadows and blood, I saw the fight between Antonio and the alpha.
It was heroic, what that kid tried to do.
He gave as good as got for as long as he could. Tearing and slashing. Leaping and biting. Fighting with fury. Fighting like a Benandanti. Had my blood given him that edge?
If so, it was not enough.
Not enough.
Which is a damn shame because that was one hell of a comeback. One hell of an entrance. Heroism of that kind should be rewarded
. Not pissed on.
I wished I could help.
I wished I had something left.
All I could do was lay there and feel myself die. I could feel Antonio’s blood seep into my mouth. I could feel my own blood leak out. I could feel the coldness creep in.
Except…
Except that wasn’t what was happening.
The taste of blood in my mouth was strange. It was his blood, but it tasted familiar. Like my own. It burned. It burned its way through the flesh of my mouth and into my blood. It burned through my blood.
It burned so goddamn bad.
And it burned so goddamn good.
The fire tore through me. It felt like there was acid in my veins. Lava. I screamed so loud blood flew from my lips.
I was wolf.
I was a human.
I was both.
I screamed as I changed and changed and changed.
The alpha swatted Antonio aside and turned to see what was happening. He frowned again. This time in doubt. I changed and changed and changed and changed.
And all the time I burned.
I had no idea what was happening to me. It was ripping me apart. Burning me at the cellular level. Destroying me.
Except…
The burning stopped.
Like that.
Like a switch being thrown.
I collapsed onto the bloody floor, gasping, human, naked, covered in blood and sweat.
The alpha watched me with narrowed eyes.
Antonio, gasping on the floor, watched me.
In the reflecting surface of the pool of blood beneath me, I watched myself. I saw my human face. I looked for the cuts. The slashes. The exposed bone.
And I saw none of it.
What I saw was whole skin. Painted with blood, but no longer gaping, no longer bleeding.
On the floor, Antonio shifted back to human form. His eyes were bugged in amazement. But he was also smiling.
The alpha was not.
This was not the science he knew. This was not the work of some super-soldier formula. This must have looked like sorcery to him.
Magic.
Pretty much was like that for me.
Except that I understood it. As I lay there, whole once again, I understood it. Antonio’s blood in my mouth. Somehow in performing the ritual on him, I’d changed his nature. From Canis lupis to Canis dirus. He was a Dire Wolf now. Not sure if that made him a Benandanti, but definitely a cousin. Enough so that his blood did for me what mine had done for him.
I rolled onto my hands and knees, and in doing so raised my head to look up at the alpha.
“Surprise, surprise,” I said. My voice was filled with ugly promise. Fine.
“You were dead,” he said.
“Yeah, well, fuck it,” I said.
And I launched myself at him.
It was the man who started that lunge, it was the wolf who buried his teeth in the alpha’s throat.
He tried to change.
He tried to make a fight of it.
As the saying goes, that ship had sailed.
Beside me I saw Antonio struggle to his feet. He shifted back into wolfshape and raced across the room to help Joe Ledger.
I killed the alpha.
God, did I kill that son of a bitch.
I tore him to pieces.
Pieces.
Never in my life had I ever felt that powerful.
Across the room I heard a howl of agony. I looked up from the steaming corpse and saw a badly wounded Mike Sweeney struggling with two of the wolfmen. I saw Crow crawling toward a pistol that lay out of reach. Still alive, both of them.
There were more of the wolfmen in the room. The odds were still not in our favor.
And right then, at that moment, it didn’t matter.
The wolf in me had never been this strong before. Maybe it never would be again. I threw back my head and howled. The howl of an alpha triumphant. It shook the walls. It knocked plaster from the ceiling. It shocked everyone and everything in that room into silence and stillness.
I howled again, louder still.
The alpha.
The master of this pack.
I screamed at them.
And one by one, the remaining wolfmen stopped their attacks.
One by one, they lay down on the bloody ground.
And goddamn it if they didn’t roll to me.
In a pack, when the other wolves do that, the alpha bites them gently on the throat or belly, establishing dominance. Adopting them into the pack.
I came to them and bit them. One by one.
You couldn’t, by any definition, call those bites gentle.
No, you couldn’t.
When it was over, there were only five members of the pack.
Two of them were human.
Mike Sweeney and Antonio Jones looked at me. I lifted my head and howled.
And they howled with me.
Chap. 52
Joe Ledger and Malcolm Crow were in bad shape.
We left Mike at the scene, but Antonio and I had to get them to the hospital, so we broke a lot of traffic laws doing it. We almost didn’t make it in time.
While they were still in the E.R., a black helicopter landed in the parking lot and three men came into the hospital. Two were clearly military, in unmarked black BDUs and wires behind their ears. One was a tall, blond-haired guy with lots of muscles. One was a black man in his early forties who looked like he ate crocodiles, uncooked. The third guy, though, was in his sixties, wearing a very expensive suit. Tall, blocky, with dark hair shot through with gray. Even at night he wore tinted glasses. He exuded a kind of personal power I have never before encountered. I would not have wanted to match my alpha status against his. No, sir, I would not.
He introduced himself as Mr. Church. No badge, no I.D.
He told me to wait for him, and he left the other two guys with me in the waiting room. Mike Sweeney was still at the crime scene. Antonio was in the waiting room with me.
The two military guys didn’t say a fucking word. They stood waiting. They exchanged a few looks. They studied me. One chewed gum, the other didn’t.
After twenty minutes, their boss came out of the E.R. and motioned for his men and Antonio to leave. When the door was closed, Mr. Church sat down opposite me.
“Captain Ledger will survive,” he said.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “How is he?”
“He’s had worse,” said Church. No trace of sympathy in his voice. No trace of anything.
“He’s a good guy,” I said. “But this wasn’t his kind of fight.”
Church eyed me. “And was it your kind of fight?”
I said nothing.
Church nodded.
“What about Chief Crow?”
“He’ll have some challenging rehab, but they expect him to make a full recovery.”
“Guess we got lucky.”
“Apparently so.”
I chewed my lip for a moment. “Did you talk to Ledger?”
“Briefly. He’s been sedated.”
“Did he tell you what we found?”
“He did.”
“Tell me something, Mr. Church,” I said. “I know this isn’t my business and you can pull rank and tell me to go piss up a rope. I’m Joe Nobody to you.”
“Ask your question.”
“That science…the, um, super soldier stuff?”
“What about it?”
“What happens to it? I mean, from what Ledger said, this is some kind of foreign terrorist thing.”
“Multinational,” agreed Church. “Funded covertly by North Korea.”
“Okay. But it was terrorist science. What happens to it? I mean, does our government take it and start making its own monsters? Is that how it works?”
He leaned back in his chair, fished a small packet of vanilla wafers from his coat pocket, tore it open, and offered me one. I passed. Never been a vanilla wafer fan. He took one and bit off a
piece, chewed, and studied the remaining cookie for a long few seconds.
“What do you think we should do with it, Mr. Hunter? This is science that could put superior soldiers into battle against an enemy that is both relentless and determined to see America burn. That science could give us an edge. What do you think we should do with it?”
“Are you really asking or jerking me off here?”
“Asking.”
I crossed my legs and stretched my arms across the backs of the seats to either side of me. “I think you should burn it. I think you should destroy whatever’s in there. Burn it down and scatter the ashes. There are enough monsters in the world already.”
“Not all monsters are the enemy, Mr. Hunter.”
“Maybe not, but should we be in the business of making more?”
Church finished his cookie. He brushed a stray crumb from his tie, rewrapped the package and put it into his coat pocket. Then he stood up.
“Wait,” I said, “is that it? You never answered my question.”
Church reached for the door handle, then paused. “Fifteen minutes ago, a Black Hawk helicopter fired four hellfire missiles at a blockhouse in the state forest. The news reports will all say that this was done to destroy a rogue laboratory making weaponized anthrax.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s a useful story. And it will explain why that building and all of its contents have been reduced to hot ash.” He opened the door, but paused one more time. “The world has enough monsters already, Mr. Hunter.”
“Wait,” I said, rising to my feet. “What about this Limbus thing. They must have known about that lab and what was in it. You need to find them and find out how they know what they know. You need to find out who they are.”
His eyes glittered behind the tinted lenses.
He smiled faintly. “Thank you for your assistance in this matter.”
And he went out.
An hour later Joe Ledger was medevac’d out of there. I knew that if I tried to find him or Mr. Church, I’d find nothing but shadows.
Antonio was in the hall, and we walked together to the doors to the E.R., then followed the gurney with Crow to his new room. We sat there all night. Crow’s wife came in, glared at us, and went in to be with her husband. Hours passed.
Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 34
