Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

Someone…something…grabs me from the rear.

I feel a swift, cool, dry tremor down my legs…suddenly I have silver spurs to kick out and back with. Screams from my attackers are followed by a warm thick bloodbath on my ankles. I'm so grossed out at the idea of wading through blood that I literally climb over the oncoming half-were and werewolf forms, momentarily standing on free ground again.

I turn. Three of the half-weres are down and howling, but most of the werewolves throng me again. The shackles are gone but I feel something cold flooding over my chest-not a touchie-feelie diamond necklace in the night, but enough snaky metal tendrils to form a Victorian rainfall necklace over my entire chest. Very vintage.

Snow and his heavy metal games! This is no time to go vintage and cop a feel! Oh. Wait. This damn metal necklace is prickling, not tickling. It's icy cold, like someone's reputed prick.

I glance down. Silver martial arts hurling stars dangle from every multitudinous chain of my sudden new necklace.

So. Live, learn, and kick butt. I pluck those saw-edged stars off that new hanging arsenal one by one, and send them slicing into oncoming furred throats, chests, and femoral arteries.

That's enough to halt the werewolves. I run into the darkness, my thin-soled ballet slippers finding every sharp rock. Heavy panting, wet slobbery breaths, and frenzied whining barrel right behind me.

Where do I think I'm going, and why? Muscle stitches scream in my side and scratches burn everywhere. I'm finding that the terrain is rarely flat and always ends in rocky walls not even rosined soles can climb.

And then the bullets start flying.

Oh, my lucky throwing stars!

I spot a human on two legs, standing on a rocky rise holding a big black semiautomatic-something with a lot of rounds, treating the packing werewolves like ducks in a carnival shooting gallery.

It’s Ric!

His white shirtfront is like a feral grin in the moonlight. How on earth did he get here? Never mind. I can use the distraction, and hopefully his shooting-gallery aim. Hey, my ballet slippers have sprouted silver pitons. Wings would be better.

With the harsh stutter of the semiautomatic gun, and silver bullets striking werewolves and even the ground near me, the scene is all gunfire, screams, and confusion. I hurl silver stars at the fallen wolves as Ric pauses to pump in more ammo. The werewolf pack retreats behind rocks. Ric empties his weapon again, then throws it into a knot of standing werewolves.

Ric races down the incline to me as the survivors reassemble and we escape onto the dark, cool night.

Together again.

But the full moon pins us in a relentless spotlight and night creatures see well in the dark. Howls and whines echo from the rocks all around, concealing their direction.

The howlers are closing in, packs of maddened, frustrated, rabid wolves and half-weres. They're beyond the control of the mob bosses who run the lodge, who've sent delinquent gamblers, failed hit men, and their rival mobs' soldiers here to die for decades.

This is a killing ground where the unhumans take out the humans. Every time.

Ric pulls a nine-millimeter pistol from his belt.

"Too bad you had to ditch the big gun," I say.

"Silver bullets aren't exactly sold at Wal-Mart, and I didn't have much notice, but I've got a bunch of rounds left for the hand-gun. So you run. I shoot."

"No!" I don't want to leave him.

But the wolves keep coming, centering on me. I'm suddenly standing on silver platform boots, ready to race into the raw desert for my life.

"Ric?"

He's not looking at me. The semiautomatic pistol clasped in both his fists looks pathetically small. He's a dead shot. When he shoots, a werewolf drops, but two will spring up in its place.

How many shots does a dead-shot have before he's dead?

"Run, Delilah!"

I do, sobbing with frustration, grinding harsh sand beneath my impervious silver soles, my all too-pervious soul yearning to be behind myself, with Ric. Shots echo. And stop. I pause. Why go on? I'm penned in another natural arena of rock. No place to climb, to turn and retreat.

I turn anyway.

There's a star high in the sky. I recognize the brightest star in the heavens, Sirius in the constellation of Canis Major. Sirius, that forms the Big Dog's eye, known as the Dog Star, just off an invisible line drawn to the belt of Orion, the heavenly hunter. Sirius is seriously out of season, being a fall-winter constellation. Seeing it now seems a sign of hope. I think of Achilles, my first guard dog, small but fierce.

Some women have always loved cowboys, but I've always loved canines. Dogs. Not wolves. Dogs.

Time seems collapsed. I trip. I stumble. Sage stalks break to scent the night. I stop, exhausted.

And then I see the wolves. Real wolves as they once were. Not were. Strong, wild. Their eyes blaze with the crimson light of the Dog Star. Their fur rises on their hackles in a corona of lightning. They've come to stand against the degraded of their own kind.

And the werewolves rush us, dead and alive, old and new.

Maybe true wolves can't out-dog their own supernatural kind, but I believe in them, whether I survive or not.

We all brace to fight the dark and hope for the coming of the day. I look for Quicksilver, but these are full-blooded wolves, not tame at all.

They stand with me only because I'm bait. I'm the target of all the oncoming werewolves.

The moon is as pale as a fingernail tip in the black, starry sky.

The battle has come down to two forces: the double whammy of ruthless human mobsters unleashing their lethal animal natures, and me surrounded by wolves who should be extinct, and maybe are spirit wolves. I don't know. Those moonlit fangs look pretty solid.

So far I'm safe within a circle of the spirit wolves with their eerie lightning halos snapping and crackling. Thoughts of Ric dart through my every move as the wolves and I leap to repel any were that reaches us.

Still, several werewolves dance two-legged toward this intruding wolf pack, but retreat from that cold blue burning aura and the snarling jaws on four paws with hunched backs. Their fur is matted and gray, and now red-streaked, but the werewolves seem beyond pain, determined to reach me no matter how wounded.

The battle is an endless draw. What we need is the cavalry, not that ghostly desert wolves are anything to sneer at.

Instead, by the light of my guardian wolves, I see one man marching up an incline into view.

For a moment I think I see Ric, but it's not him. It's a man, weaponless, walking tall on two legs, coming on strong, not hesitating, making not for us, but for the werewolves!

In the moonlight, as I watch, another dark head breasts the rise forty feet behind the first man. Our reinforcements number two! Or are these unchanged mob bosses come to insure my end? Something relentless and swaggering drives their gait, a sense of arrogant, accustomed power.

Yet another dark head crests the hill and stalks onto the killing ground.

And another!

It's an army of heads, their eyes gleaming white and fixed on their objective.

Me!

Where's my silver familiar? I try to sense its place on my body, and fail. Has it deserted me? As good as! No, it's still here, all right, coiled into a girly, spindly "Hello Kitty" bracelet around my left wrist. Not only girly, but also juvenile. Child's play.

Rather like Snow and his games.

I try to rip it off out of sheer betrayed fury, but the thin chain cuts my fingertips, so I channel my rage forward and wade through the wolves. Impressive ghosts can't help me either.

I walk through them as into a mirror, I wade through a warm mist past their snapping jaws that give me mild electrical shocks. My electric personality doesn’t deter the latest wave of werewolves, which leap for me with huge bounds now that I've left my charmed circle of conjured wolves.