* * *
“I told you we’d have a good fight,” the Alpha said. The witch glowered at him, then went back to watching the battle. She didn’t like being proven wrong.
He was pleased to see that he’d made the right choice. Harbinger and Petrov were both unbelievably fearsome while still in human form. He could only imagine what they would do in their purified state. Certainly, he could defeat either of them in a challenge, but he was beyond such things. No slave to the old ways, he would set his own path, forge a new way for all of their kind. Harbinger’s foolish rules dictated that they were only men, nothing better, just different, and that they needed to live in humanity’s bloated shadow. On the other hand, at least Petrov understood that they were superior beings, super predators, but even then, he was content to remain a mere tool for human ideologies and lacked the imagination to do what needed to be done. Petrov had a slave’s mentality. Neither of them had the vision necessary to lead their kind into the future.
His superior senses told him that many humans were coming out of their homes. They’d heard Petrov’s explosion. Some of them had realized that they were under attack and were spreading the word. The streets were coming alive. His children were confused. The magical storm had reached an unbelievable intensity. But none of that mattered. The important thing was which of the mighty werewolves below would be the one whose soul would power his ascension.
It was a perfect struggle. Nature had selected these two as the ultimate predators in their sphere. One would die. One would live to feed his hunger. Which would fuel his metamorphosis? The excitement was unbearable.
The witch pointed at the street below with her flesh hand. “We have visitors.”
A black SUV was sliding into the parking lot of the Value Sense. The driver was clueless in the snow, and they gently collided with a light pole. The doors opened and five heavily armed humans got out. “MCB?” he asked. There should have been no way that they could have arrived through the storm. In fact, they wouldn’t even know about the slaughter of Copper Lake until morning.
“Worse,” the witch muttered. “Hunters.” She held a very special hatred for monster hunters.
“Harbinger’s men?” That seemed odd. His intelligence had said that Harbinger surely would have come alone. He would never involve his human pack in werewolf business.
“No…not even close. I’d know if they were. MHI has a certain…swagger. Nothing would make me happier than the arrival of MHI,” the witch grumbled as she extricated herself from the thick snow of the roof. “Enjoy your show. I’ll handle these intruders.” She made a clicking noise, and one of her diggers stepped forward, ready to serve. Eight feet of armored monstrosity bowed before its witch. This time she pointed with her artificial hand. The steel gauntlet seemed disproportionately large sticking out from the sleeve of her fur coat. “Destroy those humans.”
The massive digger leapt from the roof and fell silently to the ground two stories below. The Alpha nodded approvingly. The unnatural things were nothing if not efficient. It would eradicate those vermin. His attention returned to the grocery just as an ear-splitting howl rose into the night. The main event had just begun. “Beautiful.”
* * *
“Look what you did to my Caddy!” Horst shuffled through the three feet of freshly accumulated snow to where the Escalade’s front bumper was crunched into the light pole. It actually didn’t look too bad, but Lins had screwed up. Sure, it was hard to drive through slush, but that was no excuse for scratching his ride. “Is that a dent? That’s a dent. That’s coming out of your pay, moron.”
Lins was livid as he got out. “Screw you, Ryan. What do you expect in a blizzard?”
“Shoulda let me drive,” Jo Ann said. “I’m at least—”
The sound that cut her off pierced all of the Briarwood team to their cores. It started as the cry of a man, filled with anger and pain, only impossibly loud, but as it went on the cry changed, becoming deeper, fiercer, seeming to linger far after any mortal lungs would have run out of breath, until it slowly mutated into a full-on animal howl. A primal, terrible cry, instinctively more terrifying than anything that could ever emanate from a natural creature. The storm had frozen Horst’s skin, but that howl froze his blood.
The staff of Briarwood Eradication Services was actually quiet for once. Horst looked to his employees. Every one of them except for Loco was staring back at him with wide eyes. Their big man just grunted and went back to pulling his machine-gun out of the Caddy, probably too dumb to be scared.
“I think I just pissed myself,” Kelley said.
Jo Ann turned toward the grocery store. “What the hell was that?”
That was an actual monster. The other things they’d run into were nothing compared to that. The fear ran deep. It wasn’t any sort of conscious, logical thought. It was deeper, coming from the lowest part of his brain, warning him that they needed to get away before that awful thing consumed them all. Horst forced himself to speak, and tried to sound as confident as possible. “That’s the sound of money, baby.”
Then there was a second howl, even louder than the first, and somehow Horst instinctively knew that this was a different werewolf. Lins jumped. “There’s two of them? You didn’t say nothing about two of them!”
They were chickening out. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Everybody shut your stupid mouths.”
“This isn’t nothing like those zombies we killed,” Kelley exclaimed. “I’m outta here.”
Jo Ann and Lins were babbling, too, as the three of them started getting back in the Caddy. His dreams were falling apart right in front of his eyes. His people were scared senseless. None of them were cowards, but they hadn’t been expecting this. That howl was just wrong, and the answering one was even worse. He understood now that Stark had been telling the truth. This wasn’t a normal werewolf; that thing in there was ancient, and therefore worth a huge PUFF bounty. They couldn’t back out now. There was a reason the government had to pay such stupidly large bounties for this level of creature, because no sane person would willingly go looking for one.
Somehow, Horst found his courage. He was the leader of an elite company of monster hunters. If he walked away, it would be like all those stuck-up MHI chumps would be laughing at him. Ryan Horst had vowed that he was never going to be a nobody again.
He needed to do something quick. He thought back to his brief time with MHI. What would they have done? Those bozos were always motivated. What would Earl Harbinger have done? He would have gotten his crew fired up. I can do that. Horst reached into his coat, unsnapped his shoulder holster, and drew his FN 5.7 pistol. He hoisted it into the air and yanked the trigger.
The sudden bang got their attention. Horst realized how stupid that had been as soon as he’d done it, because the insides of his right ear suddenly felt like someone had hit it with a hammer. “Listen up!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, waving his gun toward the giant hole in the grocery store. “This is what you signed up for. Pull yourselves together, damn it. Each one of those hairy bastards in there is worth at least fifty large. Fifty large! We came all this way to kill these things. We got guns. We got silver bullets. What do they got? Teeth? Shit. They got nothing! I am not going home until I got one of these bastards as a rug. You hear me? We’re Briarwood, and we’ve come up here to show these animals who’s boss.”
The three mutinous members of his crew turned their heads sheepishly, afraid to look him in the eye. Damn right. Lowering his piece, Horst glared at them. After chewing them out, Earl Harbinger had always softened his voice when he was trying to make a point to the MHI Newbies, like they weren’t worth raising his voice over, but it forced you to listen extra hard. So Horst tried it, speaking quietly, but firmly. “So get your shit together and let’s go. We can do this.”
They actually surprised him then. His people responded and went to work. There were a series of metallic clacks as weapons were readied. A smirk crossed Horst’s face. Damn. I’m good.
* * *
Nikolai was on him in a flash, claws erupting from the ends of his fingers. Earl moved aside easily, the change pumping massive amounts of adrenaline through his system. His body was flushed with heat. Despite the freezing wind blasting through the gaping wound in the store, sweat rolled from every pore. Time slowed as Nikolai tore at him, Earl swung with all his might, hand open, fingers wide, and was rewarded with a spray of blood as his nails ripped through the Russian’s flesh.
His enemy stalked away, circling. Four lacerations crossed his heaving chest, having cleanly sliced through his ammo pouches. Nikolai ripped the canvas off and tossed it aside. “MURDERER,” Nikolai roared, his jaw already distorting. “I’ll rip you apart for what you did to her.” Nikolai leapt at him.
Earl caught his opponent in midair, using the momentum as a weapon, and hurled Nikolai down the aisle. Earl got one ear sliced nearly in half for the trouble.
Nikolai hit the floor, rolled, and slid on his knees to a gradual stop. The change was fully upon him now. “You die now,” Nikolai gurgled. He said more, but it was unrecognizable as he tore off his shredded clothing. “Die for thing you done.”
Earl had a hard time forming a response. His mind changed along with his body. Words became hard to understand, even harder to use. “Try me,” he answered, his voice a distorted growl.
After the heat came the pain. It started in the bones and radiated out from there. It was part fire, part grinding, all horrible. The pain in his jaw grew as bones twisted, cracked, stretched, and reformed. Blood leaked between his teeth as they changed, new sharp edges slicing through gum tissue. Heart rate elevated, breath coming fast, Earl cringed as his old skin ripped.
Nikolai was a mirror image as he went through the same process, matching cracking bone for cracking bone. Dark gray hair grew rapidly across the Russian’s body.
Clothing. Constricting. Earl pulled off the rest of his armor and kicked off his boots. The change wrenched through him, ten times faster than when he’d first been cursed, but the pain was all still there, just accelerated. Burning. Twisting.
Earl took a step forward. The soles of his feet were hard as leather, but he screamed as they hit the floor, bones cracking, heel separating. His toe claws dug through the garbage. Earl took another step, the pain traveling up his leg, joints tearing, burning, reforming. Muscles hardened, becoming tighter, and it was only because of long exposure that he was able to keep moving. He fell onto all fours, but as the geometries changed, that didn’t matter.
Earl scratched his claws into the floor and howled. The challenge had begun.
Earl was angry. Hungry.
Nikolai raised his face, showing his teeth in a vicious snarl. Earl wanted to eat that face.
As his mind descended into chaos and visions of cascading red, Earl’s last rational thought was a desperate plea. God. Help me now. Keep me sane. Kill enemy. Hurt no people. Amen.