Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3

by McGregor, Tim

  The silver should have destroyed it, should have put it down but the thing kept coming. The head or the heart, Amy thought. She needed to target either one but now she was down to the last round of silver-tipped ammo. She drew a bead on its massive head as it came up fast and fired. The trigger piece didn't respond.

  Misfire.

  Amy backed away, colliding into the young man behind her and they both keeled to the ground. The monster dove.

  A howl cut the air and a figure flew at the wolf and it tumbled over. It took a heartbeat before Amy realized it was Lara who had tackled the monster to the ground. There was a blade in Lara's hand and its silver flashed in the torchlight as she plunged it again and again into the monster's neck. Its blood gushed hot, painting her with it and as Lara and the wolf tumbled and rolled, Amy caught a flash of the woman's eyes. They glowed, her own lupus breaking free. The lobo swung its head crazily, trying to get at the woman savaging its neck. Its teeth clamped down over Lara's arm and the wolf lunged away blind, crashing through the front window of the nearest house taking Lara with it.

  The knife with the silver blade lay in the wet grass, fallen from Lara's grasp.

  Amy jacked the slide on the handgun, trying to unseat the jammed piece but it wouldn't budge. The clapboard house thundered and rattled, the sounds of wood shattering and glass breaking.

  The slide finally snapped back, ejecting the jammed cartridge from the gun. The last silver round spun through the air and disappeared in the weeds. Amy dove for it, patting down the long grass but it was not there and it was still not there when something exploded through another window. A body pinwheeled through the air, crashing through the porch rails and tumbling to the ground. Lara walloped on her back and didn't move.

  The wolf padded out of the darkened house, snapping the doorframe with its girth. Slathered in blood, it limped to the ground. One of its ears was missing and its snout was cut open to the bone with slabs of tissue flapping wet below its jaw. Its iridescent eyes scanned the gathered crowd, as if deciding which one to shred next.

  Amy clawed at the earth and weeds in a panic to locate the missing cartridge. It finally scrounged into her fingers from the grass, covered in dirt and slime but when she looked up, the lobo was sklathing for the prone figure of Lara on the lawn.

  “Get back.”

  A hand gripped her arm and she turned to see the young man who had slashed the wolf with a sickle. Pulling her away, he said “The Watchmen will handle the wolf.”

  Five men came running into the square and fanned out into positions around the beast. All were curiously armed. Four of them held medieval pikes with lethal barbs on the end. The fifth one, a lean giant of a man, wielded a broad double-headed axe in his big hands. The piccadores held their ground even as the wolf coiled to spring, as if awaiting orders. The man with the axe barked a command and the pikers rushed in. Lancing the monster in unison, they pinned it down. The lobo bucked and reared, impaled on the four spears. The fifth man strode forward in a quick step, hauling back on the axe and swinging it powerfully over his head in both hands. The blow cleaved the monster's skull with a bone-shattering crack and blood spit from its ears. It spasmed and twitched like a thing possessed and the man swung again and again until geysers of blood splattered the pikemen and the wolf's head was bashed and cleaved to pulp and the grim axeman was slathered with gore to the elbows.

  He stepped back, barking at his men again and these Watchmen plucked their lances free. The carcass of the monster twitched and flopped and smoke tendrilled up in wisps from it and when a breeze wafted the smoke away, all that remained were the twisted limbs.

  The tall man handed his broad axe to one of the troop and this man went in swinging, hacking the thing to pieces.

  Amy turned away from the butchery. The slaughter of the wolf lay all around her as the mauled and torn victims lay moaning or dying in the dewy grass. Their brethren ran to their aid and the men who had tried to douse the fire gave in to the inevitable and watched the tinderbox house go up in flames.

  Amy heard the tall man in black issue more orders in a tongue she didn't understand. Then strong hands snatched her from behind and she was thrown to the ground.

  22

  SILAS HOSTETLER WAS BORN and raised in the small hamlet of Dutch Narrows and only left its perimeter three times a year. Harvest, Yule and Pentecost, Silas traveled with his father to the outside world to trade or barter with the English beyond the village walls. He endured the derision and taunts of the English and gaped at their wanton, mindless ways and never understood their smug sense of superiority. The English, in their ignorance, referred to plain folk as Dutch and slandered their village with the name of Dutch Narrows. With a conflicted heart, Silas hated the outsiders as much he was curious about them.

  He had heard stories about wolves his whole life, told to him by his father and grandfather. Countless tales told in church by the Bishop. Twice he had seen the carcass of the monster, strung up on a pole or thrown onto a fire after another attack on the village walls. That second time, he was thirteen and his father waved him forward as the watchmen dismembered the monster with their blades. Father thrust a small axe into his hands and told him to help carve the beast, he was old enough now for man's work. It had been gruesome work and the smell of the creature curdled his belly.

  Both of those times, the wolf had been stopped outside the boundaries of the village. The monster was dead, the threat defeated. This was the first time he had seen a living wolf. The first time he had witnessed the violence of its attack. The first time in his life that a wolf had ever breached the fence and violated the sanctity of their town. Dead and dismembered, the beasts still held power to terrify and awe but this one, this ravaging obscenity from Hell had frozen his limbs to useless clubs and blanked his mind with horror.

  He had wanted to run, wanted to flee for the safety of the house and the soothing reassurances of his father that God would protect them and that there was nothing to fear. The urge to run like a child had issued forth shame and the shame begat rage and with the rage, action. God had swelled his heart with courage and, surprising himself, he had attacked the beast.

  It had been foolhardy and rash and Father would not have approved if he had witnessed it but in that moment, Silas was prepared to die. He was outmatched and, while the reaper's sickle in his hand was lethal, it was little threat to a great wolf. It would have been a martyr's death, a death his family would have been proud of but the Almighty had other plans. What troubled him was the way in which God had spared his life.

  A girl had saved his life. And not just any girl but an outsider, one of the blasphemous English.

  Of all things, a girl.

  He had seen English girls before, heard them titter and giggle at his family when they went into town to trade, but those girls had seemed vacuous and cruel. Nigh obscene in their dress and posture.

  He had never seen a girl wield a gun before, or a weapon of any kind for that matter. She looked no older than he and yet this outsider had pulled him from harm's way and put herself between him and the monster. Who was this girl? Where had she gone?

  He scanned the chaos around him. People ran to and fro while others lay on the ground, screaming in pain and praying to God for mercy. How many of his people had the wolf killed, how many injured? The women ran from their homes to minister to the fallen, daughters rushing back to get water and linen. The Becker brothers had already fetched their stretcher and were ferrying the injured to their homes. The Burkholder house was completely devoured in flames and the blaze of the fire lit the square. There would be no saving the home now and Herr Burkholder and his daughters stood in the grass watching it burn.

  The remains of the beast lay in a wreckage of gore and twisted flesh and a devilish smoke rose from the butchered pieces as if the devil himself was coming to claim its remains. If that was the case, Silas wondered, the Bishop seemed determined to thwart him. He stood over the broken remains with his black clad guardsmen and
prayed in a loud voice for God to find it in his heart to forgive this wayward beast. Their Bishop struck an intimidating figure at the best of times, taller than most with long arms and a fierce look in his dark eyes. With his black tailcoat and stoop to his shoulders, he gave the air of giant crow, ready to pluck away the unwary. The axe he had used to slaughter the wolf remained gripped in his fist, the hands so wet with blood that they looked painted.

  When the Bishop concluded his prayer his head swiveled round until his eyes found Silas out, as if he knew he was being watched. The fire from the battle was gone from the Bishop's eyes and in its place, a mournfulness set in so weighty it seemed to stoop the man's shoulders even more. Those eyes turned away and the Bishop ordered his watchmen to build a fire in the central pit. They would burn the abhorrent remains immediately.

  Amid the wails of mourning and cries for help, Silas spotted the outsiders. One of them had been felled by the monster and lay sprawled in the spring grass. His companions, another man and a young woman clad in so much black she almost merged with the night, kneeled over their prone friend. The woman's hands were pressed over the wounds to staunch the blood. Her face alternated between confusion and terror. Silas couldn't remember the last time the English had set foot in Dutch Narrows. They were usually stopped at the gate. Even the constables of the Englisher's police force would not enter without permission. These barbarians had stormed the gates and one of them had paid a hefty price for it.

  But where was the girl who had saved his life? Scanning the grounds, he picked her out among the others and, without thinking, strode towards her. She was on her knees in the grass, trying to rouse her companion. The dark woman who had attacked the monster with a knife lay bloodied and still on the ground. He could not tell from this distance if the woman was dead or unconscious. Her name was Lara. The girl repeated the name over and over in an effort to wake her injured friend as she looked over the woman's wounds. The mark of the thing's teeth were left deep and ghastly in the woman's flesh and if she was still breathing now, Silas doubted she would survive such a mauling.

  A twig snapped under his boot heel and the girl spun around to face him. There were tears in her eyes, a smear of blood on her cheek.

  “Help me,” she said. “Please, I need to stop the bleeding.”

  Silas turned to stone, as if caught doing something he should not have. He understood English, was competently fluent in the outsider's tongue but he felt a strange reluctance to reveal that fact to the girl.

  Still. The girl, this outsider, had saved his life.

  “Please.” Her hand shot out and snatched his. “I have to stop the bleeding.”

  The shock of her hand on his rippled through his bones and broke his reticence. He dropped to his knees beside her, plucked his good handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressed it over the worst of the woman's wounds. His grandmother had sewed it for him and now it was soaking up the blood of an outsider. He would have to lie and tell his Oma he had lost it.

  The girl spoke to the unconscious woman, pleading with her to hang on, to fight back. To not die on her. Silas remembered the rag in his back pocket, soiled from cleaning his father's carriage but it was all he had. He handed it to the girl and she slapped it over another wound. She glanced up at him quickly and sought his eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked in English.

  “No.”

  He nodded at the injured woman on the ground. “Is she your kin?”

  “What?”

  “Your family.”

  “No.” The girl shook her head and then stopped, as if confused by the question. “Almost.”

  From behind them, Silas heard the Bishop bark orders to his men and he knew in that instant that he had made a terrible mistake. He should not have helped the outsider. He should have stayed away.

  The watchmen advanced on them quickly. They seized the girl by the arms and pulled her away. The gun was snatched from her belt and confiscated. The girl demanded to be let go, trying to shrug off the grip of the black guard but they clamped down harder and ferried her along. Her eyes locked on his and the fear and confusion in them made him wince. “What are they doing?” she screamed at him. “Tell them to stop!”

  Silas pushed up and got to his feet. “You're being arrested. I'm sorry.”

  They took her away. The panic in her eyes made him feel ashamed and he didn't understand why. He didn't know this girl, this outsider. She had trespassed and her companions had caused mayhem in his town. Why should he feel ashamed that he could not stop her from being placed under arrest?

  Two of the guardsmen hauled the unconscious woman away by the arms, her feet dragging through the grass. Silas watched as the others were taken away. The Bishop hovered over the remains of the beast and Silas felt the man's eyes bore into him like a drill. Condemnation was not something Silas was familiar with but he felt it then in the gaze of the church elder.

  He heard his name called above the din around him and when he turned, he saw his father running towards him. His face was pale and he was out of breath. “Father, what's wrong?”

  His father gripped his arm and panted. “Where is Jacob? Is he with you?”

  Jacob was eleven. Silas’s younger and, now only, remaining brother. “Isn't he at the house?”

  Silas felt his father's hand tremble on his arm. He had never seen fear in his father's eyes before. Not like this. “No,” his father said. “Help me find him.”

  He was off like a bolt, running through the crowd of plain folk in the square, checking every injured person on the ground. His brother was not among them and he thanked God and ran on. Jacob was a good son, an obedient and devout one unlike Silas but also something of a daydreamer and would often wander off in his own woolgathering. This time would be no different. He had simply chased a firefly into the meadow and missed the horror that had invaded the village. There was nothing to worry about it.

  The windows of the blacksmith's shop were dark as he ran past, the smith himself no doubt in the square helping with the injured. Silas ran past its dark windows towards the open meadow where Jacob would often go but he stopped short when he spotted a dark shape in the scrabbled yard of the shop. It's nothing, he chided himself. A pile of rags and a trick of the light.

  The mass let out a sigh as Silas turned it over and his brother's face rolled to the night sky. Droplets of blood were spackled across his downy cheeks like rainfall.

  23

  THE WATCHMEN SAID NOTHING as they manhandled the outsiders away from the square and across a meadow. Rising from a tangle of rosebushes stood a circular structure of stone, like an oversized silo. Amy dug in her heels but she was no match for the iron grip of the watchman dragging her along. When she asked where they were being taken, the pikeman surprised her by replying in English. “The keep,” he snarled. Three of his front teeth were missing.

  The keep was a massive silo of mortared fieldstone and raw pine beams. The floor was rancid with the remains of previous harvest and rats scuttled among the scattered millet. Amy, Tasha and Griffin were hazed to one wall while the injured were carried in. Lara and Jay jostled limply on their pallets as they were lowered to the floor.

  Griffin pushed back. “You can't keep us in here.”

  A watchman slammed him against the cold wall. The knuckles of his fist were bloodied and raw and he snarled at the outsider to shut his mouth. Then he turned smartly on his heel and followed his troop out. The heavy oaken door boomed shut followed by the cold rasp of metal as it was locked.

  Amy knelt over Lara's prone figure. There was a deep bite wound on her left shoulder and upper arm where the wolf's teeth had chomped down. At least the bleeding had stopped, the angry puncture marks scabbing over in a deep shade of crimson. She tore away the tattered shirt and picked out the shreds of fabric from the wounds. She needed to clean it but there was no water to be found in the silo prison, not even a stray drip from the ceiling. She patted her pockets only to remember they h
ad been emptied by the sullen watchmen with the long spears. They had taken away her gun and phone and even the loose change in her pocket.

  She smoothed the hair from Lara's face and thumbed open one of the eyelids. A deathly blank stare looked back at her, unconscious to the world.

  Griffin stood at the door, pounding against the wood and barking at his captors to be let out. His voice was becoming shrill as it rang off the stone walls and circled back in an echoing vortex.

  “Hey!” Amy snapped. “Knock it off.”

  The man fumed as he glared at Amy, hands balled into fists but he ceased his racket. Amy rose and joined Tasha where she hovered over Jay. “How is he?”

  “Not good.” Tasha's voice was low and fragile. “I think the bleeding's stopped but he's seriously hurt. What happens when someone goes into shock?”

  Amy looked over the cameraman. His right arm looked mangled beyond repair. “The body shuts down. Beyond that, I don't know.”

  “He needs a doctor for Christs’s sakes,” Griffin said, pacing the floor. “How can they just lock us up like this? When are the cops gonna get here?”

  Amy leaned back against the cool wall. “I don't think they're coming.”

  “What are you talking about? After all that carnage? Of course they're coming.”

  “Did you see this town? These people don't deal with the outside world. They keep themselves closed off. There's no cavalry coming to the rescue.”

  Griffin sputtered at the notion. Tasha's face fell, suspecting that Amy was right. “What do we do?”