Marcus Pelegrimas - Blood Blade

From behind Cole, a coarse howl rolled through the subterranean confines. It was definitely coming from outside, but that didn’t make Cole feel any better. The howl didn’t sound like it came from an animal nor did it sound like it came from a man. It was more like the sound a demon would make while getting its bony wings torn off. After the first hellish roar, it tapered off into something more familiar.

Familiar, but still unnerving.

“Uhhh, Paige?” Cole whispered.

She waved quickly at him and nodded. “Can you hear that howling? Are those more like you, Henry?”

Curled up in his corner, Henry looked as if half of his body mass had simply folded in on itself. His arms were wrapped around his knees and his chest heaved with strained breaths. When he rocked forward to get a closer look at Paige, it was easier to see the deep groove that had been worn into the corner behind Henry as well as beneath him. “They weren’t like me. Not at first. God told me to hurt them, so I did. He said they’d help us, and they will. They did. They like to run with me. They…like me.”

“How many did you hurt?”

“Don’t know. God didn’t teach me to count. God told me about you,” Henry said as he bared his teeth. “He said you wanted to kill me.” Furrowing his brow, he clenched his eyes shut and let out a groan that boiled up from the back of his throat. “You tried to kill me! I remember!”

Paige held her weapon behind her back. “I want to hear about God,” she urged as she took a few steps toward Henry’s corner. “What did God say? Where is he?” When she saw the happy gleam in Henry’s eyes, she added, “Can you take me to him?”

Henry kept trying to see what was happening in the shadows behind her, but Paige pulled his attention back to where she wanted it to be.

“I…didn’t mean to make her,” Henry said.

Paige narrowed her eyes and asked, “What?”

“I was looking for someone. She reminded me of the pretty lady from the saloon.”

“Saloon?”

Henry nodded, but could only manage a slight bob before letting his head swing along its normal course. “The golden-haired one. She…so pretty. Her friend was so pretty. I thought she missed me. They all screamed at me. Just like they did the first time I…” Henry’s eyes shifted and his brow twitched. On anyone else the expression would have seemed vaguely contemplative. On Henry it looked as though a caterpillar was slowly crawling beneath the skin of his forehead. “I don’t…I don’t…I hear His voice now. I hear him!” Suddenly, Henry twitched and he flopped into his corner as if he meant to curl into a ball of filthy, knotted muscle. “God don’t like it when I think too hard. AgoodmanobeyshisLordandhonorsHimwithswiftstepswhenHecalls.” In a voice that had suddenly cleared, Henry said, “I’m hungry. God will provide! Godwillprovide! I’m so hungry.”

When he pulled himself to his feet, Paige shouted, “Henry, no! Stay here! Tell me about God!”

But her words were lost amid whatever else was swirling through Henry’s mind. He shoved past Cole and ran across the hall. Cole looked into the den and was just in time to see Henry squat beneath the hole leading outside and then jump straight up through it.

“Cole?” Paige called out from behind him. “Did he get away?”

“I sure as hell couldn’t do much to stop him!”

“Grab one of those Half Breeds,” she said as she anxiously patted Cole’s chest, “and I’ll help carry it to the car.”

“You want to bring one of those dead things with us?”

“That’s right. You made it this far, so don’t punk out on me now. We need to get moving. Half Breeds only howl for a few minutes before they start hunting, and we need to make sure we don’t lose sight of them.” She made a straight line for the Half Breed directly beneath the entrance in the ceiling. “This one’s perfect,” she said while pointing to the werewolf carcass as if it was the prettiest Christmas tree in the lot. “Hand him up to me and we can get the car started before the rest of those things start running.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Just do it!” she growled with more ferocity than the monsters outside.

The phone in Cole’s pocket chirped in its familiar way. Despite the squealing of the tires against the pavement and the dangerous pull of the steering wheel in his hands, he reflexively dug the phone from his pocket and flipped it open. Angrier at himself for answering the damn thing than he was at the actual ringing, he snarled, “Yeah. What is it?”

“You guys doubted me, but I found the place,” Walter said from the other end of the line.

“What?”

“I’m in Janesville. I’ve been scouting all the parks all day long and I finally found one that fits my vision!”

Turning his head away from the phone, Cole announced, “Walter found his park.”

Paige was in the backseat with the dead Half Breed across her lap. Although the werewolf had shrunken a bit since it was killed, it didn’t shift all the way back to the putrid, gnarled thing it had been while it was asleep, and it was still a long ways from anything human.

“Great,” Paige said as she pulled up a handful of the werewolf’s fur and started cutting it away with her hunting knife. “That just gives us a fat load of nothing, since we’ve already found our own way to get to Misonyk.”

Cole looked out the window at the stretch of I–39 he was currently using as his own personal autobahn. With the sun long gone and the full moon hanging overhead, the road was only illuminated by an occasional streetlight and the rare billboard. The pale light coming from the moon was enough to put a nice glow on Henry’s back as he launched himself into the air to cover the ground at anywhere from ten to twenty yards per jump.

“Yeah,” Cole said. “Paige says great job.”

Walter dropped his voice until he was almost drowned out by the roar of the Cavalier’s motor. “A bunch of Nymar are gathering, and it looks like one’s in charge. He could be Misonyk. From what I can see, it looks like a lot of these guys are freshly turned.”

Suddenly, another shape bolted from the side of the road and flashed into Cole’s side mirror. The Half Breed was one of two others that had showed up to howl at the moon near the ruins of Lancroft’s East Wing and had yet to stray too far from Henry. When the werewolves originally bolted from the mansion, they headed south. Although Henry stuck fairly close to I–39, the Half Breeds came and went like flickers of shadow across the surface of a choppy lake.

“We should be there pretty soon,” Cole said. “Which park is it?”

“Palmer Park near I–39. You can’t miss it. Just turn off at—”

Suddenly, one of the Half Breeds dashed across the interstate in front of the car. Cole had to pull the wheel hard to the right to avoid hitting the werewolf, which caused him to swerve almost directly into a roadblock of twisted muscle. Henry sat in the middle of Cole’s lane. At the last second, Henry hopped back and swatted at the Cavalier as if the car was a pesky insect.

“What the hell are you doing?” Paige shouted. “I’m working with sharp objects back here!”

Cole gritted his teeth and swerved back onto the road. Henry leapt over the Cavalier to land a few yards ahead of it. The moment his feet hit the ground, he was running again. “Gotta call you back,” Cole said into the phone before he flipped it shut and tossed it onto the passenger seat. Squinting into the rearview mirror, he made sure Paige hadn’t cut anything that wasn’t supposed to remain attached.

The backseat was all but filled with dead werewolf. The Half Breed’s front two legs were wedged between Cole’s seat and his door, the curved claws scraping against his left leg. Its hind legs were wedged in a similar fashion between the passenger seat and that door. Paige sat with her legs tucked beneath the carcass so her hands were free to work. The details of that work became a little clearer when Cole heard something that sounded like thick, wet canvas being ripped apart.