by C J Preece
“Surely Toma can kill it?”
Red nodded. “He probably can, and with Rapunzel as well I don’t doubt it. But at what cost to them? We need to be sure, and the more people we have to take on that one dragon the less drained everyone will be.”
She turned to leave, but Goldilocks was right in her path. “I know you have to go,” she said. “But just once I want you to promise me you’ll come back.”
“Goldie…”
“No. I made my promise. Now it’s time for you to make yours. I can’t lose you.”
Lost for any words that could possibly express how she felt Red took Goldie’s hands in hers and pulled her close, then kissed her, as deeply and as long as she could bear. She knew that everyone else was watching them, she knew that she didn’t have time for this. She knew that she couldn’t keep the promise she was making. But she knew she would try. She stepped back and fought to hold Goldilocks’ eyes. “I’ll come back. I promise.”
She walked away, snatching her shotgun from the corner where she had left it and leaving the room without meeting anyone else’s face. All any of them could do now was to hope to see their friends on the other side.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Confrontation
Her bike carried her just to the front door of her grandmother’s old cottage. She abandoned the bike and raced for the front door, sprinting into the bedroom and pulling the switch that opened the way into the bunker beneath. Getting out of Ateer had taken every bit of driving skill she had, and no sooner had she broken free of the city limits had she seen the pack, waiting for her. Her bike was faster, but they would still be close behind her. She did what she could to prepare, then ran for the security room, right at the heart of the complex. As she dropped into the chair and activated the video monitors she heard him.
“I know you’re in here girl.” The Wolf’s voice washed over her like oil. She closed her eye and let it. She was more than she had been the last time they faced each other. Everything she had faced. Everything she had come through. Everything she had lost and gained. It was enough for her to rise over the Wolf for the first time in her life. For so long he had been the only thing she could think about. Haunting her dreams at night, a shadow over her shoulder every waking minute. Her every step since that day had been because of him. She could have been a real human being if not for him. Not something hard, smithed by pain and fury into a weapon.
But then, without the Wolf she would never have met Goldilocks. Would never have known Belle or Adam. Would have been just as helpless as the other citizens of Ateer when the Corruption came. She had no connection to the Witch, unlike so many of the others. Her story was her own. Much like Goldilocks.
Her meditation ended as she heard the first warning sound. It was a patch of floor made of a different material than the rest. It wouldn’t seem like much, even to the Wolf’s hearing, but to her it was a signal flare. He was entering the exercise room, and he wasn’t alone. She listened as at least three other wolves crossed through the door. She smiled and pressed open the bunker’s intercom system. “I see you brought your friends.”
The footsteps halted, and she could just imagine the Wolf looking around now, trying to find the cameras that had given him away. But she had leaned her lessons from him. Relying on your eyes could be an end to you. A true hunter had to trust all of their senses. Right now even he was falling into the trap of vision. Her plan could work.
“They are not here to interfere,” the Wolf finally growled. “Only to make sure you do not leave and lock us within.”
“That would suppose that I don’t want to be locked in here with you,” she said. Time for the next stage. Like any hunter, she knew that psychology was a powerful part of the hunt. Every trick she had would need to be used on the Wolf. Now she activated the security system. From above, the cottage seemed unchanged, but below Granny’s bed a steel door had just slammed shut. All other entrance and exit tunnels had been cut off as well.
“You fight like a human,” the Wolf growled. “You think that we will not kill you, because then we will be unable to escape.”
“Actually no.” She stood now and crossed to the weapons locker, taking our her arsenal. “There’s a security room at the centre of the bunker. I have the key to open it on me. If you can kill me you can gain entrance and open the doors. But if kill you, I will be the one leaving.” She leaned in close to the mic. “Only one of us will leave this bunker alive.”
She cut the connection, already hurrying for the door. She had just given her position away, if he was clever enough to spot the hint. Even if he wasn’t, the security room had only one entrance and exit, a suitable bottleneck for his companions, but not for the Wolf himself. She headed for the weights room, close enough to the exercise room to set up an ambush but not so close they would smell her out immediately. Her scent would be concealed by the bunker itself, but the wolves would know the difference between newer and older scents. Even the false trails she had spread would quickly deteriorate and lead them right to her.
In the weights room she set the shotgun trap and jumped to the overhead beams that reinforced the stone ceiling. She was barely in place when a wolf came through the door. Her heart raced as it emerged, hulking and curled over, sniffing at the floor. It had grey fur and a bloody stain on its muzzle. Not Big Bad, but definitely an old and experienced wolf. Not likely to be fooled by a shotgun trap.
Good.
She watched as he identified the trap, avoiding the tripwire and the backup pressure plate. It went in low, below the blast of the shotgun, so she wouldn’t even be able to remote fire it. If she had the ability. When it was directly below the gun it reached up and bent the barrel neatly around before standing up and wrenching the entire assortment off the wall. The trap dealt with, it straightened and brought the gun to its nose to sniff her out.
Red struck, dropping down from the beams. Her legs were still hooked over so she ended up upside down and facing the wolf, close enough to smell its foul breath and see the moment of shock register in its eyes before she brought two knives down hard into the sockets. The wolf reeled back, mouth open to howl, but before it made a sound she shoved a third knife up and under, into its throat. Her cut was precise, severing the vocal chords in the first cut, then retracting and slicing through the major artery in the neck. The Wolf staggered for one more second, then collapsed to the floor, not even able to whimper as it tried to crawl away.
It wasn’t the time for mercy, it would be dead in under a minute anyway. But there was always the faint chance it could manage to alert the others before it died. Old Breed were tough. She somersaulted to the floor, landing heavily and crouching over the beast. She made three more blows, one to the back of the neck where the spine and head connected, another to the vein on the other side of the neck, and a final one inside the open mouth, through the roof and into the brain. It was probably dead by then, but she lost nothing through caution.
One down, three to go. If she was right about the way the Wolf organised his packs this would have been the next oldest. There would be one fresh new blood, out for his first human kill, and another experienced warrior, but young enough to still have the strength and speed of the young. Ideally she would take the youngest one next. She retrieved her knives, cleaned them quickly and picked up the broken shotgun from the floor. It could still pack a punch if she used it right. She left the weight room and headed downstairs to the shooting gallery and armoury. It was empty of weapons, but not ammunition. There was plenty she could use to set a trap.
On the stairs she heard scratching, coming up towards her. Unexpected, she hadn’t thought they would find the lower level so easily. She raced silently to the top of the stairs, then broke right and cut across the bedroom towards the kitchen. The bedroom would do well to mask her scent, and the kitchen had enough strong odours to buy her more time. Whichever wolf it was, it couldn’t fail to notice the new scent she had made at the top of the stairs. She could only pray it
wasn’t Big Bad, he would be able to sniff her out immediately.
In the kitchen she set her traps, finishing just as she heard the wolf coming through the bedroom. He was moving quickly, too eager. It had to be the youngest. Her teeth bared in a grin. They were making this too easy. She slipped into her hiding place and waited. From somewhere deeper in she heard a muffled explosion. Another one of her traps had been set off. Part of her hoped Big Bad was dead, but another, more instinctive part wanted Him to be alive and wounded, ripe for the kill. She pushed that surge of emotion down. Time enough for that later.
The young one entered the kitchen, sniffing delicately and recoiling at the cocktail of scents which greeted him. Red allowed herself one more smile. All those times she let the washing go undone or left the food to rot had finally paid off. He was looking left, then right, then to the cupboards that lined the room. Without a thought he started to throw them open, growling each time and baring his teeth. Red counted off the cupboards. One. Two. Under the sink. Four. There.
A shotgun blast split the room and the wolf was flung back into the other side of cupboards. As she had hoped his bulk broke through the wood and another blast rippled through the room as the second trap activated and the broken shotgun exploded. The bent barrel meant the gases had nowhere to go, turning it into a bomb. The wolf crashed to the floor, his back split open to the spine and ugly shards of black metal sticking from the muscle. His chest was a pulped mess, the undamaged shotgun trap having made light work of it.
She finally revealed herself, bursting out of the trapdoor he had walked right over when he first entered. She crouched low over him, her cloak spread out over his body as she administered the killing blows. Artery, vein, top of the spine, under the mouth.
There was no time to waste. The other wolves might think it was the youngster deliberately setting off booby-traps, but she couldn’t take that chance. If even one of them came to investigate and found her nearby she would have a real fight on her hands. It was time to disappear.
Above the cool-box she had a hidden passage that gave her access to a network of tunnels running the entire length of the compound. Normally they supplied her with fresh air, but she had made sure they were big enough to admit her and a variety of weapons. Now she levered herself into them and began to crawl, heading once more for the armoury and firing range.
In less than a minute she dropped lightly to the floor, pausing and listening intently for any sign of the wolves. From the other end of the tunnel she could hear one of them bursting into the kitchen, stopping when he saw the body of his pack-mate.
“She’s killed Raze,” the wolf growled. It wasn’t Big Bad.
“Find her.” The response came from close by. She ducked into the shadow of a gun cabinet, trying to pinpoint his location. Not in the armoury, that was for sure, but possibly on the firing range, or the bounty room next door.
There was a crashing of wood and she relaxed. There was no wood on this level. But above there was her bedroom, with an air vent that would carry the sound. She had time.
As silently as possible she crossed to the door and eased it open, slipping through into the trophy room. It looked like someone had already been here, and she plucked some dark grey hairs from one of the cases. Big Bad himself then. She wondered what he had been looking for. Surely he wasn’t the sentimental sort? Maybe he thought there was a spare key. She went to the very back of the room and slid open a panel. She took another key from her neck and used it to open the safe within. Contained inside was an old revolver and a couple of emergency healing crystals. Nothing she needed, but with the right priming it could be another trap.
She took out a grenade and set it inside the safe, tying a thin cord to the pin and attaching the other end to the door. Finally she broke one of the crystals and pushed the grenade into the mulch it made. The crystal would set fast, holding the grenade in place. Now time to lay the bait. She drew a knife and slashed open her own armour on the left arm, tracing three cuts, deep enough to draw blood but shallow enough that they only stung. She rubbed some of her blood on the cases and the edge of the safe, working backwards to the vent opening, which she added a smudge to. She had no doubt the wolf in the kitchen would have found the vent on his end, and now the scent of blood would make him stupid. If he thought she had been injured he would assume she was vulnerable, and there was enough carnage in the kitchen that he would believe the ruse, at least long.
She dimmed the lights in the armoury and trophy room, then punched the side of the vent hard. It reverberated through the entire bunker, a clear signal. She heard a growl at the other end almost immediately. “Found you.”
“Oh god,” she said, putting as much fear into it as she could.
“I got her!” The wolf howled. “She’s wounded, down on the lowest level.”
“Find her.” Big Bad had moved, his voice was coming from much further away now. He was almost at the entrance. “Bring her to me.”
“Yes sir.”
There wasn’t time to muse on Big Bad’s movements. She hurried to the trophy room, listening as the wolf crashed down the stairs to the lowest level and hammered at the door. She went to the safe and put a hand to it, careful not to pull the door too far open. He was through the door in seconds and followed her scent easily to the trophy room. “Found you.”
She spun round, gasping and backing away from the safe, miming a limp and holding her arm slack at her side. “Please,” she said, trying to sound as pathetic as possible.
He growled happily, buying it without a second thought. In a single bound he had crossed the room and had her by the throat, lifting her up. “The key. Now.”
It wasn’t difficult to mime being choked, under the circumstances. “In… safe…”
He dropped her, turning to the safe. She crawled to safety behind one of the reinforced plinths that held her trophies. He didn’t even pause, grabbing the door of the safe and yanking it open. She heard the pin drop and put her hands over her ears, curling up as much as she could. There was one last second for a snarl of realisation before the grenade went off.
The blast was tremendous in the confined space, nearly deafening her and shaking her bones inside her body. The wolf was shoved backwards by the shock wave, crashing heavily onto the floor. Thankfully the safe had directed most of the force directly into his face, but she still felt it hammering her body. Glass rained down on her from the cabinet above and when it was over she got unsteadily to her feet, looking around at the carnage the grenade had created.
Glass littered the floor. Nearly every one of the trophy cases had shattered completely, though the blocks they rested on remained intact. Most of the trophies were intact as well, since most of them came from hardy monsters and weren’t likely to be destroyed by a simple grenade blast. The wolf hadn’t been nearly so lucky. Most of its muzzle had been removed completely, leaving a ragged, smoking hole. Both its eyes were gone as well, and most of the skin and muscle of its throat. It was still alive, amazingly, but it wouldn’t be for long.
She knelt down and drew her knife, slicing as deeply as she could through the wolf’s artery. A quick death was just about all she could offer now. She waited next to it while it died, steeling herself for what was next. Only when its last breath had ended did she stand, collecting her thoughts and checking her weapons. Big Bad would have heard the blast. And He would know she was alive. The only question was whether He would hunt her out or wait for her. With three wolves dead by her hands He had to know she had the advantage in sneaking and ambush. If she was in His position, she’d head to the biggest open space and wait for her.
Sawn-off shotgun, two revolvers in the hip holsters, knife on the front of the belt and the back. Knife in the boot, knife up the sleeve, and a pistol in each shoulder holster. Red looked around, trying to find anything else that could help her. The armoury was cleared out, and she didn’t have time to find one of the undisturbed grenade traps and disarm it. There were on
ly another two, and she was fairly certain one had been set off. The second was by the entrance. One way or the other the Wolf would be in her way.
“Red, my dear.” The voice echoed down the vent. She focused on it, trying to find him. “Are you ready to stop hiding in your holes like a frightened rabbit?”
“Are you ready to face me yourself and stop sending others to die for you?”
He had the gall to laugh. “Merely testing you dear. Though I suppose your injury was only a sham?”
“Had to find some way to trick your pet idiot.”
“I do apologise my dear.” She still shuddered, just a little, every time he said that. “I have not shown you due honour. You have proved that you are a wolf. Now let us see if you are worthy. I am waiting for you in the garage. It should suit for our purposes.”
“To the death?”
“That is the only challenge worthy. It may be time for a new pack leader. Or not. Come Red Rider, let us finish this.”
New strength flooded her. She took a healing crystal from her pack and ran it along her arm, healing the scratches. She would never have believed it, but He had actually helped her. Her mind was focused, more than it had been in her life. No more nagging doubts nipped at her, no more worries. Only the hunt. She went to leave, but as she went to move her eye caught on something.
The case which had once held her red riding cloak was empty. A quick glance at the ground showed it was nowhere to be found. She remembered that the room had been broken into before she arrived. Why would the Wolf have taken her cloak?
A question for later. Her blood was rising, her eye sharpening to the hunt. Time to move.
The cold grey walls of the bunker flew by, her cloak streaming behind her as she flowed up the stairs and through the narrow passageways. She came to the garage and saw him immediately, standing in the very centre of the room. She could have shot him from the doorway, but she knew that wasn’t how this had to work. Instead she drew her shotgun in one hand and a knife in the other. The wolf nodded approvingly and she walked forwards to meet him. They faced each other, a few feet apart, eyes meeting in mutual respect.