by L.J. Hayward
Chapter 32
Argh! What the hell was I doing letting her come along? I was mad. This was the morphine talking. Or it was Major Matt of the Pants Brigade taking control at the worst, worst possible moment. There was no excuse for it. None what’s so ever.
“Here,” I snapped, harsher than I meant it to be. I thrust my phone at her. “There’s a GPS program. Get it up and track the dot on the screen.”
She took it and with deft skill had the program up and running. “That way.” Erin pointed to the left. “What is this?”
I swung the car onto the dark side street. “It’s tracking Mercy. And she’s tracking the werewolf. It’ll lead us right to them.”
“Right.” There was a quiver to her voice. “God, this is like some movie, or a really bad dream.”
“You had the chance to wait back there,” I said heartlessly.
“I don’t back down from a fight.”
I smiled before I realised it. “So I’ve noticed.”
“Can you go right? It looks like she’s veering that way.”
Trees crowded the road on both sides. “Um, not really. We might have to back track. Watch her, see if she keeps going in that direction.”
“You do this a lot?”
“More often than your average PI, I would wager. Hey, I’m sorry I missed the meeting today. I really did mean to get there.”
Erin snorted. “But vampire and werewolf business got in the way?”
“Heh. Yeah, sort of.”
“She’s coming back this way. So the other day in the pub, you were really researching werewolves?”
“Still thinking about writing that book though. Should a be quick, easy wad of cash.”
I slowed the car, sensing Mercy draw close. Sure enough, she flowed out of the trees and stopped in the middle of the road. She looked into the car, saw Erin and her lips peeled away from her fangs. Her anger washed down the link and bit into my head. I snarled and sent it right back at her, with a twist of my own in the mix. She took it with a hiss but lifted her head and sniffed.
“That way,” she announced over the private line, her touch sharp edged. She pointed back toward the more built up areas of the suburb. “It’s hungry.”
Her own hunger was spiking as well. There’d been no time for her to eat before leaving, and she’d claimed she wasn’t hungry. Stupid me for not packing a picnic I guess.
“Then move your scrawny arse,” I replied.
Mercy glared at me, but shimmered into action once more. I came fully back to myself to find Erin staring at me.
“Hi.” I turned the car around and headed back the way we’d come.
“What was that?”
“Werewolves, vampires and now psychics. Been something of a busy night for you,” I said, concentrating on the road.
She was quiet for a while, computing the new information.
“Psychic,” she said, softly. “It shouldn’t surprise me.”
“Don’t feel bad if it does. Hell, I still have issues with it all sometimes. On the back seat there’s a box of ammunition. What calibre does your Glock take?”
“Nine mil. Why?”
“Good. The rounds in the box are nines. Swap out your ammo for them. They’re silver tipped. Your best bet against were-creatures.”
Erin slanted me a sceptical frown, but did as I said. She even held a silent hand out for my spent mags and filled them with quick, economical motions. When she was done, she took up the phone again.
“Left,” she commanded, then sighed. “When this is done, we are really going to have that talk. No bones about it.”
“When this is done, you might not want to have that talk.”
The next several minutes were filled with nothing but directional instructions. We ended up back in the true suburbs, houses on both sides of the streets, a few cars on the road. My fingers curled around the steering wheel so tight they turned white. If this had stayed in the Reserve, it would have gone down easier. But we were amongst the smorgasbord now. An all you can eat buffet for something as large as this creature, which could probably tear down the front wall of your average house and pick out the residents like sardines. Not the best place for a big ol’ showdown.
Erin echoed my thoughts. “This is not good.”
“It could be better. What’s she doing?”
She studied the phone screen. “Circling. At least I think so. Over there.” She pointed and I turned down the closest street.
It took us to a little cul-de-sac at the end of a street of older houses. The very end of the street was a park with a playground surrounded by tall trees and trimmed hedges. Erin looked out over the park, then back at the phone, nodding.
“This is it. She’s just circling fairly wide. What would that mean?”
I sucked air in between my teeth. “Don’t know. She’s never done that before. Stay here. I’m going to check this out.”
Should have known better than to waste the breath. Erin just got out and joined me at the front of the car. Still, I wasn’t going to leave it at that.
“Really, Erin, this is going to get pretty hairy. You should stay in the car.”
“Really, Hawkins, you should stop being a chauvinistic pig. I might just clock you if you don’t.”
I swallowed a laugh. “Touché.” Cougar in both hands, I eased along the path to the playground at the middle of the park. And then, just because I’m that sort of thick-headed guy, I added, “Stay behind me.”
She stepped up to my side, mirrored my slow stalk. “Sure. Whatever you say.”
The trees closed in on us as we advanced. The moonlight filtered through, limning shapes in pale grey, sliding across the wind-touched foliage like quicksilver.
Cold electricity rippled over me, stopped me dead in my tracks. It hit Erin at the same time, her breath lodging in her throat. I could safely say that, because that’s where mine was as well. There was no accompanying flood of flavour in my mouth, so I could assume it wasn’t Big Red, even though the weight of the presence was equivalent to his.
The were-creature was here.
Erin quivered close beside me, jumped a little when nails tapped on cement behind us. A snarl born of pure hunger and malevolence washed over our backs, prickling the hairs on my neck.
A rush of hot, fetid air hit my neck. The night resonated with the snap of teeth so close to my head it rang in my ears. Beside me, Erin whimpered, eliciting another snarl from the beast. It shifted, nails clicking. This time, Erin lost it. She made a little noise as if trying to breathe both in and out at the same time. Then she ran.
Running equals prey. I’m sure Erin knew this, in the part of her brain currently taking refuge behind the big, screaming primitive part. I had a split second to decide my own action. No choice really.
I matched Erin pace for pace. So did the werewolf. What was a flat out run for us was a casual lope for the beast. It didn’t let us run far. Just as we emerged from the trees, I felt it tense, a tightening of the air around us. I grabbed Erin’s arm and dropped a split second before the beast pounced. We hit the ground, which was a sandy base for the playground. I got a mouthful of sand and a woman on my back. The sand exploded out of my mouth on a tidal wave of all the air in my body.
Erin rolled off me with a strangled grunt. Side by side, we clambered to our feet, guns at the ready. I looked around. Found the beast on the far side of the playground, a seesaw away from ripping our throats out.
At the house, I’d been too concerned with forcing the creature off Erin to take in too much of its particulars. I couldn’t help but take it all in now.
Tony Rollins had said the dog was a ridgeback, wolfhound cross. Both breeds were visibly apparent in this beast. It was tall and lean, shaggy with a great ridge of stiff hair standing up along its shoulders and down its spine. But it was also part wolf. The long, pointed muzzle of the wolfhound was shortened and broadened, stained with the blood of its one time master. The shoulders were wide with bulky muscle, the hin
d quarters narrow. Oh, and the eyes shone a baleful shade of blood red. Before the full change, the dog must have been scary enough, but it was pure monster now.
The werewolf lowered its head and growled at us, top lip peeling back from its teeth. My heart positively clawed at my throat, trying to get out of my chest, at the sight of those red streaked, yellowed daggers it had instead of fangs.
Where the hell was Mercy?
A gust of wind rocked the swings to our right. The wolf glanced at them. I took the chance to raise my gun. Erin did the same. But before we could do any more than that, the creature’s attention was back on us. It took a slow, menacing step forward, sweeping us with its blood red gaze. Another step and Erin and I opened fire.
We both had silver tipped slugs this time. Each and every shot that hit it did real damage. Flames erupted about its head and shoulders, smoking in the clear night. It yelped and jumped, but kept coming forward. It sailed over the seesaw as if it didn’t believe in gravity. Great plumes of sand arced up in its wake as its giant paws dug through the soft ground to hurl its big body forward. It was, in a word, sublime.
It was like watching those nature documentaries where a lion springs out of the long grass and just simply flows over the terrain after its prey. If it touched the ground, you barely registered it with your feeble human eyeballs and brain. Muscles bunched and released with exquisite precision, creating a motion that was both fluid and solid, a real weight bearing down on some helpless animal.
Except that this time, we were the helpless animals.
Erin dove to the left. I took the right. The werewolf flashed through the space we’d just occupied faster than eyes could comprehend. Thankfully, the soft, mobile ground wasn’t its friend. It hit the sand and skidded, coming right to the edge of the playground and tumbling onto the hard packed soil and grass before the trees. I used the time to scramble up onto the monkey-bars. Erin, I noticed from the corner of my eye, dived head first up the enclosed slide coming off the climbing castle. She scrambled frantically and her head emerged from the top like a meerkat checking for trouble.
Balanced on the top of the monkey-bars, I tracked the wolf. It sprang to its feet and spun to face us again. For a moment, it looked between us, then decided. It came for me.
Hooking a foot around a rung, I let loose a wild yell and emptied the rest of my magazine into the charging beast. It howled and simply rammed the end of the structure with a massive shoulder. The whole frame shook and I wobbled dangerously. The empty mag I’d just ejected flew from my hand and disappeared into the night. Grabbing another one from a pocket, I nearly lost it too as the wolf backed up and charged again. This time, there was a tortured, metallic scream and the monkey-bars tipped alarmingly to one side. My foot came free of its desperate perch and I rolled over the side.
The wolf bounded almost playfully to the spot where I would have landed, had I not caught hold of the bars and swung myself in under them.
Of course, it was a child’s playground. The monkey-bars weren’t made to suspend a fully grown man of the tall persuasion, especially when they were already broken and listing terribly. My feet hit the ground but I hauled them up ASAP and the wolf’s teeth grazed my arse.
Erin shot at it and a brief fire blazed on its back. It ducked and turned away from me, facing her. She crouched at the top of the climbing castle, resting her gun against a crenellation to keep it steady.
The monkey-bars were steel piping. The climbing castle was not. It was a stacked together structure of hard plastic pieces. Withstanding the beating an eight year old could deal out was about as tough as the climbing castle manufacturers had in mind. About eighty kilos of enraged, supernaturally strong dog pulverised the thing.
Thankfully, the logical thinking part of Erin’s brain had struggled part way back into control and she dived for the enclosed slide a moment before the whole structure came crashing down. The slide rolled away from the carnage, taking her with it. She clattered about inside it, swearing and cursing.
The wolf followed it, shoving its head in one end. Erin nearly flew out the other, but she stayed just inside, for the wolf was too big to get more than its head and neck in. Those powerful shoulders were just too wide. Its snapping and snarling echoed, as did the shots Erin fed into it down the tunnel. The wolf backed out and into a barrage from my gun.
One of my shots took out a hamstring and the leg just collapsed under it. Growling, it hauled itself up on three legs and spun, clumsily, to face me.
I’d lost track of the number of hits it had taken, here and back at the house. It had only three working legs. Large patches of its skin sizzled under the touch of silver. And still the fucker kept on coming.
I clambered back on top of the seriously tilting monkey-bars, lined up the shot and muttered, “Come on, you sonuvabitch,” in my best Sheriff Brody.
The wolf launched itself right at me. I put a bullet down its gullet and, I guess because it didn’t have a pressurised gas tank in its mouth, nothing much happened beyond it driving right into the monkey-bars and sending us both flying A over T.
It had to happen eventually. The amount of times this thing had sent me tumbling, I was bound to lose my gun. I heard a distant crack as it hit a tree or something and then I was on the ground, breathless once more and wishing I hadn’t been so careful on the morphine dose this time. White flashed before my eyes and I waited for it to turn red, but it didn’t and I knew I had to move. No berserk rage was going to get me out of this one.
I rolled and whipped around, looking for the beast. It was back on the grass beyond the edge of the playground. It stood on its three working legs, shaking its head groggily. Something long protruded from its side, one of the cross beams from the monkey-bars. Yes. It had taken a serious blow. Nice.
But even as I congratulated the laws of physics and chance, the beast reached around with its head and bit down on the metal piping. With a vicious shake, it pulled the bar free and tossed it aside.
Holy crap. They built these werewolf-dogs tough.
Then it turned toward me once more, red eyes blazing.
Desperate, I scrambled through my pockets and came up with the nightstick and SAS knife. Shit. I loved them when going hand to hand with a vampire, but I hadn’t intended on getting that close with this monster. Still, it was the best I had left.
I climbed to my feet, knife and stick at the ready.
“Bring it,” I snarled.
And the wolf brought it.
