The giant wolf-man made a forward kick that caught Charlotte at the end of her flip. It hit her in the stomach, and the girl flew like a struck tennis ball. She smacked into the side of the building two dozen feet from me, left a succubus sized dent in the white painted bricks there, and then bounced off the wall with a wet, breaking sound.
I fell to my knees, and it seemed like I felt the girl’s pain in my own body. She was bleeding from the back of her skull, and her left wing was bent in the middle at the wrong angle. She was hurt, really hurt, and I knew that I needed to help her somehow if she was going to be able to beat Dr. King. But how? I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t hope to take out this massive alpha werewolf. The last time my friend had gotten this injured was when we fought the tiger demons in hell. Charlotte had been gutted by Divyia’s claws, but she’d recovered when I had pulled her into the Bugatti and kissed her.
Would that work this time? Would I be able to kiss the succubus and heal her? Would it even help?
I stepped toward the girl, but I felt a large hand on my shoulder. I gasped and looked up at the towering werewolf. His yellow eyes glared into mine, and my body turned to ice. He knew that I was in love with Charlotte. He knew that we were working together to kill him, and now he was going to kill me.
“Best not to get too close. The succubi are crafty bitches. Yeah. I can appreciate your enthusiasm, but I’m gonna take care of this one. I’ll tap you in if I need you.” Dr. King pulled me behind his broad back as he spoke, and I almost yelled at him to leave her alone.
But then he would have surely killed me, and I wouldn’t be able to free her from Satan’s power.
“Where did she go?” he asked, and I peered from behind his waist to see that Charlotte had disappeared. I hadn’t seen the girl move, and my head darted around to try to find her in the light of the moon.
“I still smell her. She’s around here somewhere. They feed off of the life force of men and boys. She must have thought you would be easy prey once she took care of me. Yeah. No one messes with Dr. Madness and gets away with it. Oh yeah. Look sharp, Sherman. She might try to pounce on ya. Remember the takedown I taught you today. You pin her, and I’ll do the count. Yeah.”
“I don’t know if I can--” I felt the wind whip past me, and the blur that was Charlotte connected her jump kick perfectly with Dr. King’s wolf snout. The man’s head actually snapped to the side, and he stumbled back a few massive steps.
The succubus crouched and made a slashing cross attack against his right knee with her right hand. I saw her cut connect perfectly where the man’s kneecap was, and then she twisted around to her right to follow through with her left hand at the same spot. The giant wolf was still stumbling backward, and she followed up with another half dozen slicing attacks across his thighs. Any single one of those attacks should have cut open the man’s skin, muscles, and bone as if they were made of butter, but they did nothing more than tear perfect slices in his tight wrestling pants.
Her attacks had pushed the huge wolf out of her striking range, and she landed a shin kick against the same knee she had tried to cut before. There was a snapping sound of wood breaking when she struck, and Dr. King did howl with agony. Then Charlotte spun around to deliver a roundhouse kick to his face. This also connected, and the werewolf spun around in a half circle.
Charlotte pushed her hands out, and a strange teal glow formed where her palms were. An instant later a blue ball of hot hellfire sprang from her arms and it traveled the six feet through the air to connect with the back of the werewolf. Dr. King let out a howl of despair, and his entire body erupted into flames. The fireball that Charlotte used looked almost exactly like what the rakshasis had used against us in Hell, and I wondered if the succubus had learned it somehow.
Dr. King was rolling on the grass while he howled, and Charlotte took a cautious step toward him. Her wing still looked broken, and she was kind of limping on her right leg, so I guessed that she was really hurting. I wanted to run to her side and comfort her, but I didn’t think Dr. King was quite dead yet, and my legs were frozen in their spot on the concrete.
“Oh yeah!” the werewolf screamed as he rocketed to his feet. Part of him was still on fire, and most of him was smoking, but he didn’t appear to be really hurt. “I’m just getting warmed up!” He jumped toward Charlotte, and the succubus cart wheeled to her left before his claws could rip her in half.
The werewolf left a trail of ash behind him when he dashed forward, and the air was starting to smell like burnt fur. All of Charlotte’s earlier attacks hadn’t seemed to injure the massive wolf, but the fireball had, and the burn marks on his furry body weren’t healing. This wasn’t a video game, so I obviously didn’t see a health bar over the man’s head that measured his damage, but I guessed that Charlotte’s blast had taken about 10% of his life off.
But the beautiful succubus girl was hurt a lot more.
The werewolf did a spinning leg sweep that Charlotte leapt over with her knees pressed to her breasts. Her wings flapped a single time, and they yanked her away a foot from Dr. King so that she avoided his rising uppercut. The man still had a much longer reach than she did, and she had to frantically block his next series of clawed punches with her forearms. The succubus normally wore a stoic expression on her face when she fought, but her beautiful face was now contorted in a grimace, and I guessed that her injured wing was hurting her.
The werewolf dashed forward with a roll, and Charlotte tumbled to the side half a second before his tumble ended in a low kick. Dr. King seemed to have expected her to dodge that way though, and he threw a spinning back fist at my friend’s pretty face. She ducked under it just in the nick of time, and then she made a half a dozen slashing attacks with her clawed fingers at the man’s exposed chest.
None of them seemed to even faze the alpha werewolf.
“Your attacks don’t work on me. Yeah! You gotta have the cream,” he said as he darted forward to clinch with the smaller girl’s shoulders.
“You gotta have the power to be sour.” He brought up his knee to Charlotte’s stomach, and the girl bent over with a gasp. “You gotta be funky like a monkey!” He slammed one of his massive fists into her back between her wings, and the girl collapsed into the grass next to the building with the sound of ten celery stalks being ripped apart. “And you gotta let the beat. Go. On.” Each of his last words were punctuated with a stomp of the man’s wrestling boot into my dream girl’s broken back.
I didn’t know when I had started screaming, but I realized that I was screaming, and I wanted to run to Charlotte’s side. The girl was getting brutalized, and if she wasn’t already dead, she was really close.
I didn’t want Charlotte to die.
“Then you gotta do the finishing move!” the werewolf shouted over the sound of my screech as he kicked the winged girl in the side of her stomach. It was a brutal movement, and it caused her to spin around on the ground so that she was facing up. The beautiful girl’s eyes were closed, and she didn’t see Dr. King jump impossibly high into the air, fold his knees underneath him, and then fall onto her stomach.
“Oh yeah! Snap into a succubus!” he shouted as Charlotte’s body bent around his knee.
“No!” I screamed again, and the giant werewolf looked up to me with surprise.
“Yeah, Sherman. I know you are worried about showboating and grandstanding. I’m gonna call this fight over. Let me just take out the trash. Yeah.” Dr. King reached down to Charlotte’s legs, grabbed her by the ankles, and then he started to spin around like a top. The beautiful girl still looked as if she was unconscious in his grip, and she didn’t open her eyes when he tossed her. Charlotte flew through the air as if she was a thrown discus, and she traveled into the night sky a good two hundred yards before I lost sight of her.
“That was a good rumble. Yeah. Wish she would have let me know that she wanted to step into the squared circle before she attacked, but I give her credit for being a contender. Yeah. You okay there, Sherman
?”
“Ahhh. No,” I gasped.
“Did she hurt you at all? They go after young men a lot. You might have been able to wrestle her, but it was easier for me because my heart belongs to Lady Bella. Oh yeah. She’s the love of my life, and no succubus can fool me with hell powers. Where are you hurt?” he asked as his burnt hands grabbed onto my shoulder. His grip was much softer than I would have thought, but I still gasped with terror.
“Uhhh. I’m not hurt,” I squeaked. “Cha— the succubus, is she dead?”
“Naw. I went easy on her. Don’t like hurting girls much. Yeah. Not a fair fight. Those ones are mean, though. Real mean. She’ll not want to mess with you anymore. Oh yeah. I brought her to school, and then sent her to do her homework.”
“Uhh. You are smoking. Are you hurt?” I asked as my heart hammered in my chest. I was relieved to hear the man say that he didn’t think Charlotte was dead, but she looked really hurt, and I didn’t know how we were going to be able to accomplish Satan’s mission now.
“I’m at exactly one million percent. That’s even better than one hundred percent. Oh yeah. Let’s continue on to your car. I’m thinking that the bad guys might not like you joining our team, and that is why they are sending the good looking ladies to distract you. It happens a lot with us tough sports guys. Yeah. You need to find a woman that is going to support you for who you are, and doesn’t try to suck the life out of you through sexual activity. Yeah. That’s so bad that it isn’t good. Yeah.”
The werewolf gestured for me to follow him, and I glanced back in the direction that he had thrown Charlotte. I still didn’t see the woman, and I hoped that she was okay. I wanted nothing more than to run through the quad and find where Dr. King had thrown her, but I guessed that the alpha werewolf would just figure out that the succubus and I were working together, and he’d probably kill me. Then not only would we fail Satan’s mission, but I’d be dead.
“Which car is yours?” he asked when made it to the school parking lot.
I saw the Volkswagen Jetta that Charlotte had driven here, but I didn’t see the girl anywhere. This was going to be a problem because I didn’t know how to get rid of the man now. If he waited around, he might decide to go looking for Charlotte. Or, he might figure out that the two of us were together. I didn’t have the keys to the car, or really know how to drive.
“My uhhh, ride isn’t here yet. I can just wait alone. It is no big deal,” I said to the werewolf.
“When a chicken hawk is looking for ducks he has to fly with the other eagles so he doesn’t get confused. Yeah.” The man patted me on the head with a massive paw. “Did you send them a message with your mo-bile phone?”
“Yeah, but they might be unpacking, since we just moved. I can just walk home,” I said with a forced grin. I needed to get rid of this guy so that I could find Charlotte.
My phone started vibrating in my pocket, and I did my best to step away from Dr. King so I could look at it without the man seeing the screen.
The caller ID said: Satan. Lord of Evil and Master of Hell.
I fought against my terror, and smashed my fingers against the screen in an effort to kill the light from it so that the giant werewolf didn’t see. The device stopped buzzing, and turned to look up at Dr. King. He had his hands over his goggle sunglasses and was sniffing the air.
“Was that your ride?” he asked.
“No. Just a friend from back, uh, home,” I said.
“Yeah. Friends are good. They can help you with your cream. When you need to rise to the top, they can be the ones to support you. Sherman, I’d like to take you home. The school doesn’t feel safe for scrappy fighters like you. Giant Gene is a showboater, and a hot dogger. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sent that girl to getcha. Yeah. Let me give you a ride home in my Madness Machine.” The wolf man gestured to the neon camo painted jeep that was on the far side of the parking lot. It was one of those off-roading models, with tires that went up to my chest, a raised suspension, and an open top. The yellow paint job made the vehicle glow in the moonlight, and it shone almost brighter than the lamps shining down on the almost empty parking lot.
“That is a good idea. Yeah,” I said, and realized that I was starting to talk a bit like the man. This would give Charlotte a chance to recover, and I could call her as soon as I got home. If she didn’t answer, I would run back to school and look for her. Our apartment was only a few miles away.
“Get in the Madness Machine, and hold onto your shorts! Oh yeah!” The werewolf let out a long howl as soon as he jumped into the driver's seat of the Jeep, and I had to kind of rock-climb my way up the tire, body, and door before I could get inside.
The engine roared to life when he turned the key, and he slammed on the gas to peel out of the parking lot. The Jeep fishtailed a bit when we hit the road, and I grabbed onto the oh shit handle attached to the glove box so that the seatbelt didn’t cut into my shoulder.
“Where are your digs?” He barked over the sound of the air rushing past the top of the open car.
“Make a right at the second intersection. Then the first left. My building is on the left there.” All the video games I played made me great at directions, and we pulled up to the apartment complex a few minutes later.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning for practice. Oh yeah. You did real good today Sherman. You’ve got the potential for cream. I’ve just got to rub it out of you! Then you’ll be too much for that Albert kid to handle. Yeah!”
“Uhhh, okay. Thank you for the ride,” I said, and then I remembered that the werewolf thought that he had defended me from Charlotte’s attack “And thanks for protecting me from the succubus.”
“That’s just what heroes do, Sherman. They fight to help their friends. Oh yeah. See ya tomorrow!” the man howled like a wolf again and then the Jeep peeled out, flipped around on the narrow street with a turn that seemed too tight and wobbly to be possible, and then sped down the road in the opposite direction.
As soon as I didn’t see the Jeep anymore, I grabbed my phone and called Charlotte.
Chapter 6
I found the succubus curled into a fetal position under the stairs of one of the school buildings on the other side of the quad from where she had fought Dr. King. The girl was bleeding out of her mouth, and one of her eyes was swollen shut. I hadn’t even seen her get punched on her face, but she told me she’d done a face plant there when the alpha werewolf had tossed her across the quad.
“Does he suspect you?” she gasped when I picked her up in my arms. Her right wing was torn, and I had to kind of keep her upright a bit so that the injured part wouldn’t get caught up with my arm.
“No, I don’t think so. He thought that you were attacking me,” I whispered as I took the first couple of steps away from the stairs. My body was an aching mess from the PE class and wrestling practice, but I was somehow finding the strength to carry the injured girl. It was probably because I loved her so much, and I knew I would do anything to protect her.
I should have stepped in and defended her against Dr. King.
“Good. I’m glad you didn’t do something stupid. Like try to defend me and fight the werewolf. Then I’d be picking bits and pieces of you off of the buildings.”
“Uhhh. Yeah. I uhh, thought you didn’t want me to get involved.”
“Sherman,” she coughed. “I’m hurt.”
“Just relax. I’ll take you to the car,” I said. The girl’s words made my heart ache, but I knew that my pain was nothing compared to what she felt. The first few steps with her in my arms had felt fine, but now my biceps were starting to scream and my fingers were numb.
“I don’t think I can drive home. I’m so tired,” she muttered into my chest.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked. I was darting under each of the buildings and peering into the moonlit center of the school quad. I didn’t want anyone to see me.
“Are you, uh, visible to them? Do you look human now?” Dr. King had known she was a succ
ubus, but I saw through the disguises all the time, so I didn’t know if she still looked like a demon.
“I’m in my human form. I can’t maintain if for much longer.”
“You have to maintain it?” I asked.
“Kind of, just when I’m hurt like this. I just want to pass out. You’ll have to drive home. The keys are in my jeans pocket.” We had reached the parking lot, and my arms, back, and legs were begging me to drop the girl. I didn’t listen to them, and managed somehow to fish the keys out of the front pocket of her tight jeans without getting distracted.
Then we were in the car, I had started the engine, and I was backing out of the parking spot.
“I thought you didn’t have a license,” she said with a cough that poured a half cup of blood down her chin and onto her already red stained shirt.
“I don’t. I drove the car in hell remember? I play a lot of video games. You are really hurt. Let me drive.”
“I’ll be fine. We need to talk about our…” her voice trailed off, and I risked a quick glance at her. Even though she was bruised, battered, and covered with muddy blood, I still thought she was the most beautiful woman in the entire world. My heart almost stopped beating, but then she opened her purple eyes and gave me a grimace.
“Yeah. Just not used to getting my ass kicked. Ha,” she coughed out the laugh. “Ever since I met you I feel like I’ve been--”
“My phone is ringing,” I interrupted her. I had just pulled into the parking space assigned to us at the apartment, and I reached into my pocket.
I already guessed who it was, and I showed the screen to Charlotte. She nodded, and I answered it on the speaker of my phone.
“Hi Satan,” I said.
“Sherman, Sherman, Sherman. My favorite secret agent. You didn’t answer the phone earlier. Did you listen to my voicemail?” he asked.
Werewolf!: Hell High Book 3 Page 7
