In the Werewolf's Den

by Rob Preece

  "Right. Especially if he knows your tricks, you little spy. I can't believe you were pretending to be a green belt."

  Snori gave her a shy smile that looked hopelessly out of place on that massive pitted face. “I always start as a white belt in a new dojo. Shows respect."

  For the first time in days, Danielle felt the hint of a smile on her lips. “I guess so.” Changing the subject suddenly, she said, “So, what are we going to do tonight?"

  Snori stretched his hands before him, the knuckles cracking nearly as loud as gunshots. “Well, the normals are rioting again. I think it's time we taught them that not all of the magical are patsies. And there's something else."

  Danielle's blood chilled. Her job was to protect normals, even lowlife normals who decided to riot. “Yeah? What else, Snori?"

  "Maybe I'm misjudging you, Danielle, but it seems to me that you've got some sense. You're not one of those who hates people because they're different. If I'm right, I think you should see some of your brother warders at work."

  Danielle knew what warders did—she'd spent four years in the Academy including six months as an intern in the Los Angeles zone protective force. Still, she needed to stay close to Carl if she was going to do her duty. Humoring Snori seemed a lot easier than fighting him. “All right I'd be interested in that. But I'm not going to let you attack normals. You know protecting normals is the prime directive for all warders."

  Snori laughed. “That may be what they taught you in the Academy, Danielle, but it just ain't so. Come on. You've got things to learn."

  The troll moved remarkably silently for a four-hundred-pound mountain of muscle and bone. He sniffed the air occasionally, using his magically enhanced senses to track Carl and his mob.

  Danielle trotted alongside and used her control over her body functions to flush the damage from her system. Whatever happened, she'd need to be one hundred percent.

  The night air hung oppressively over the Dallas zone, moist with the humidity from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico, rank with the scent of fire, and filled with distant shouts, screams, and the crackle of gunfire.

  Twice Snori pulled her aside and hid in the shadows as warder armored personnel carriers tore past. One sent a burst of automatic weaponry into a nearby apartment, phosphate tracers igniting a blaze that continued despite the efforts of a bucket brigade that formed after the warder vehicle had moved on.

  "The warders must have had information about that apartment,” Danielle said. She wasn't sure whether she was trying to convince herself or Snori.

  The troll just laughed. “Do you know why you lost your match against Carl?"

  She shook her head, halfway angry at the change of subject and halfway intrigued. She did want to know.

  "It's because you refuse to see what's there in front of you. Just like now."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "You put a lot of energy into that ignorance. In your fight, you believed that Carl would fold, would turn wolf. You depended on it, even when you could see he wasn't going to. You dug deeper and deeper into your energy levels to push him over the edge, but here's what you were missing. Carl wasn't your enemy there. You were.

  "And now, you're still at it, using all your energies to sustain a fantasy that just can't bear the weight. Those warders didn't have information about that apartment. They had a machine gun and a trigger-happy gunman. That's all."

  As if to punctuate his words, another burst of heavy machine gun fire cut through the night.

  Danielle shook her head. Snori's five-cent philosophizing had to be wrong, but she found it disturbing nonetheless.

  "Let's keep moving,” Snori said.

  * * * *

  An army of warders and warder-led punks swarmed across the zone barrier, torches and firearms clasped in their hands.

  Carl put down his binoculars and sighed. “You say they do this fairly often?"

  Mike the Vampire shrugged. “This riot is bigger than most. But not a year goes by that we don't have a big organized affair. Takes a while for their informants to sniff out enough loot to make a good riot worthwhile."

  The warder guards did nothing to stem the flow of normals into the zone. They did slow the return flow—mostly young men carrying televisions, food, and alcohol they'd looted from the zone. The goal, it seemed, was to ensure that the warders got a cut of the loot.

  One of the men carried a wiggling sack over his shoulder.

  At a warder's request, he set it down and opened the bag.

  A teenaged elf girl shook herself out of the hampering material and made a dash for freedom—and was caught by the warder's bullet between her shoulder blades.

  "They don't mind a little rape within the zone, but frown on bringing it outside,” Mike observed.

  At his side, Arenesol hissed. Well, Carl couldn't blame him. He'd lost two daughters tonight. Seeing that child murdered would only freshen those memories.

  Carl swallowed, tried to keep control, but failed. He spewed the contents of his stomach over the ground. However long he lived, that elf girl's expression, and the explosion of flesh and blood when it emerged from her tiny chest would be seared indelibly into his memory.

  He didn't know which was worse. The warder's casual contempt in shooting down the child, or the redneck's decision to bring a girl home as a sex souvenir from the riot. Neither was acceptable.

  He forced himself to stand. He couldn't run away from this, couldn't tell himself that this was someone else's problem. His games might have set this riot into motion, but he couldn't blame himself. He hadn't made the warders and their allies riot. They had decided to do it themselves. He had simply provided a pretext. Still, just because it wasn't his fault didn't mean that he wouldn't try to fix it.

  In college, he had read about the Russian pogroms against the Jewish ghettos. At the time, he'd assured himself that those were ancient history, that contemporary America was far removed from that blot on humanity. He'd been wrong.

  "That warder was just doing his job.” Arenesol fed Carl's own words back to him.

  "And I'm going to do mine,” Carl replied.

  He welcomed his body's shift back from human to wolf form. Joyed in the play of muscle and sinew, the heightened senses of smell and hearing.

  "They'll shoot you down before you get within a hundred feet,” Mike warned him.

  In his Were form, his mind was a little less logical, a bit more driven by emotion and primal needs. That didn't mean he was an idiot. Getting shot in the streets wouldn't do anything to avenge that poor elf-girl or end the warder injustices.

  "Diversion.” His wolf vocal cords mangled the word, but Mike and Arenesol nodded their understanding.

  "Give us five minutes,” Arenesol told him.

  The elf's calm demeanor would have fooled him if Carl had still been in human form. His wolf self was more attuned to subtle signs of emotion, even emotions hidden by the famously stoical elves. To him, Arenesol glowed with suppressed fury.

  "Be careful,” he growled. The last thing he needed was for the elf to take unnecessary chances.

  "Just be in position in five minutes and let me worry about myself."

  Carl nodded, then loped into the darkness.

  He circled around, cutting through deserted alleys. When he had to pass in front of one of the many burning buildings, he hunkered low to minimize his profile.

  No sober warder would mistake him for a stray dog, but some of their freelance assistants might. He intended to give them every chance to make a mistake.

  The warders had cleared away all structures within a hundred feet of their guardpost, creating a fire zone that would normally be lit by searchlights.

  Now, though, the searchlights were stationary, focused on the crowd of returning rioters and their collections of loot.

  It made sense, Carl realized. Like himself in human form, many magical could pass for normal. If they could just mix with the returning rioters, they could escape the zone. At lea
st, that seemed to be the warder's fear.

  He waited, counting down the seconds in Arenesol's five minutes.

  The diversion came exactly on schedule. A shot kicked up dust near one of the warders, the sharp snap of rifle fire sounding a fraction of an instant later. Rioters seethed like disturbed ants, some firing blindly into the night, and some gathering their collected loot more closely.

  From the warder tower, the searchlights moved, zooming into the darkness. Tracer bullets from a machine gun cut a deep hole into the area from which that single shot had emerged. Overhead, a helicopter gunship swung by, its lights adding to the glow, its phosphorous-packing Gatling gun adding firepower to the river of destruction.

  One of the rioters panicked, made a sudden dash through the gateway that separated the zone from normal territory.

  The warder reached out and touched the man as he ran past. An electric snap sounded nearly as loud as the gun's retort and the panicking man collapsed.

  Unlike the elf girl, the normal wasn't damaged. He moaned, then struggled back to his feet.

  Carl gritted his teeth and dashed across the hundred feet of open space.

  Normal human eyes can see movement hundreds of times more easily than they can see the stationary. Carl had to hope that the warders in the watchtower would be blinded by their own searchlights and by the glow of their tracer bullets. Now was his only chance if he was to accomplish anything.

  By what he had done to the normal, the warder had shown that he could have stopped the elf girl without shooting her. He simply hadn't bothered.

  Anger about Danielle's betrayal, about the Tiger ambush, and about the elf-girl burned into a single sharp focus in Carl's mind. This warder had to pay for all warder sins.

  That Carl was unlikely to survive his attack didn't weigh heavily on him. He'd felt an emptiness inside ever since he'd realized that his own trust in Danielle had been responsible for betraying the Tigers. He would die here, but he could take out the warder who had shot that poor girl.

  Maybe this insane attack was just a way of running away from his problems. Maybe he should stay and fight injustice and stupidity another way. But a wolf wasn't that great with abstract logic. As wolf, he looked at evil and knew that he had to destroy it.

  Carl closed the last few yards of open space, wiggled his way into the shaded area beneath the machine-gun tower and caught his breath.

  No further gunshots came. The normals gradually regained their calm and the warder started processing the loot again.

  Carl crouched and waited for his opportunity. He was on his own now. Mike and Arenesol had delivered their diversion. If they had survived the brutal fire from guard tower and helicopter, they would be scurrying for safety somewhere deep in the zone. He hoped that they were. Those two, perhaps more than any of the other magical beings he had met since living in the zone, had taught him about himself, about the realities of the zone, and about the way that humanity doesn't have to express itself in a normal human form for it to be real and true.

  * * * *

  Mike's pale face writhed with pain.

  He stumbled into Snori, then began a slow collapse.

  The troll picked him up as lightly as if he had been a baby and moved into the shadow of a long burnt-out Lock-and-Store storage center.

  "Almost got away,” the vampire breathed.

  "Come on, buddy,” Snori urged. “You'll be fine."

  The vampire shook his head. “Didn't expect the helicopter. It caught me in the open as I ran."

  Danielle had thought Mike's rumpled shirt was merely the result of a long evening. She looked more closely now and saw that it was torn, shredded and singed. Part of what she'd thought were ragged edges was really his vampire flesh, exposed and raw.

  Her warder instructors had never imagined that she would use her first-aid training for an impaired. Danielle herself would have bet money that she would only laugh if she ever saw a vampire in pain.

  Still, her hands moved without conscious thought, cutting away at the filthy torn fabric to fully expose terrible wounds on Mike's chest.

  Silver bullets had pierced the vampire leaving wounds large enough for her to put her hand through. The worst of the damage, though, was from fire.

  The left side of his chest, where his heart would be if he'd had one, was a blackened pit. A fiery bullet had nearly consumed him from within.

  Danielle swallowed hard, then pulled off the karate gi she still wore and ripped long strips from it.

  "Help me wrap this around him,” she told the troll. “We've got to stop the bleeding."

  The vampire might be dying, but he still laughed. “Bleeding? You can't get blood from a vampire."

  "Let me take care of this,” the troll told her.

  "But—"

  "Danielle, quiet."

  She was so used to Snori's placid behavior that she hardly recognized the harsh voice.

  The troll pried open the vampire's mouth, set his own neck beside the sharp teeth, then shoved.

  Snori gasped in pain as he forced the vampire's teeth into his own carotid artery.

  Blood, powered by a massive troll heart, shot from the deep wound.

  Only a fraction of that blood reached the vampire's mouth.

  Still, he swallowed.

  "You don't have to watch this.” The troll gasped the words.

  Beneath him, the vampire sighed, then swallowed again.

  Every instinct told Danielle to attack, to protect her friend from the vampire that was sucking out his life-blood in such huge gulps.

  Her mind superimposed the scenario before her with that of her childhood, of her stepfather drinking deeply from her mother's still twitching body, of countless pictures and videos she had studied in the Warder Academy.

  Her hands bunched in fists and she was halfway into a fighting crouch when Snori opened his eyes.

  "I'll be—” he gasped as the vampire took another swallow, then adjusted his teeth more deeply into the troll's neck.

  "Don't worry about me,” he concluded. “I'll take care of Mike. You go find Carl."

  Chapter 10

  Danielle didn't need magically enhanced senses to follow the path Mike had left. Bits of vampire flesh, scraps of smoldering clothing, and the scent of fire left a clear trail.

  The spot where Mike had been hit was a scene of absolute destruction. Tens of thousands of high-powered shells had left a lunar surface of craters, dust, and loose rubble. What had once been a wedding dress shop was now a flattened parking lot.

  She crouched amongst the rubble and scanned for any sign of Carl and Arenesol.

  Drunken laughter drew her attention like a magnet.

  Despite her need to find Carl, she crept toward the sound.

  In Los Angeles, Danielle had been on duty during one of the riots. Like the other warders, she'd headed toward the zone expecting to be put to work protecting normals from impaired attacks. Instead, she had been politely informed that the more senior warders had inside guard duty. She had ridden patrol outside the zone looking for any escapees.

  At the time, she'd assumed that this had been to protect an inexperienced intern. Now, she saw the truth.

  Warders were collecting a share of the loot from the rioters.

  One of the rioters displayed a long string of ears he'd evidently collected from his victims. Tiny ones from brownies and fairies, pointed ones from elves, a couple of large ones—troll. Several looked perfectly normal. Danielle barely contained her disgust as he and a warder haggled over what fraction of the ears he would leave as toll and whether a brownie ear was worth as much as a troll's.

  As she watched, Danielle picked up a hint of movement directly under the guard tower.

  Too low and slinky to be a human, she first mistook it for a stray dog.

  Her heart almost stopped when she realized it was a werewolf. Carl.

  It was her duty to shout out a warning, to protect her fellow warders from an impaired attack. She opened her mouth and
found herself unable to force out a sound.

  The amount of wealth the looters carried with them astounded Danielle. Fine carpets, antique furniture, paintings, pouches of long hoarded gold coins, and large supplies of food and alcohol were in evidence.

  A little elf girl lay dead, piled amongst the loot. They'd slaughtered her as if she was a bothersome mosquito rather than the precious child she was.

  Danielle had spent months in the zone and had never seen a hint of this kind of wealth. Which meant one of two things. Either the impaired were hiding it from her and had far more assets than they let on, or that the rioters were not merely random looters. That they'd targeted their victims. Danielle didn't think the zone was wealthy.

  The only deduction that made sense was that someone had equipped the rioters with directions to the wealth of the zone. Only her fellow warders, and the network of spies that they maintained in every zone, had the capabilities for that.

  Maybe Carl had hit her harder than she'd realized, but Danielle's world-view turned on its head. She'd been taught that normals need protection from the impaired. Even when he'd lied about the elf breakout, she'd thought Joe Smealy really wanted to protect the normals. But that too had been a lie. The warders were attacking, not defending. They were the problem, not the solution. And she was part of it.

  Despite the two hundred yards that separated them and the dark shadows of the gun tower under which he crouched, Danielle recognized the bunching of Carl's muscles. He was getting ready to attack.

  A decade of training kicked in. She opened her mouth to shout a warning, and then shut it firmly. These warders weren't her friends. And they had betrayed everything Danielle believed in.

  Carl seized one of the warders—the one still admiring the collection of ears he'd taxed from the looter—and flung him to the ground.

  The looters were tough, armed to the teeth and already filled with the flush of successful battles against the impaired. Carl should have been an easy target for them.

  But they were lulled by the nearness of the zone border, drunk on ransacked alcohol, and laden with plunder. Instead of a quick and deadly response, the result was chaos.