by Harry Nix
“You’re just a driver, are you? Are you here to kill werewolves?” Alex growled. The kid started crying, a deep hitching sound, and for a moment Alex considered letting him live. Tie him up. Take him back to the main camp. Send him naked, staggering down to it, to tell the story of the terrifying werewolves surrounding it. But then he remembered the drones, the ones dumping silver on his land, the dead walking out of the forest, killing one of his pack. He remembered Ignis burning all that was his to the ground. Rather than let the kid cry any longer, he slashed at his throat with lightning speed, a great jet of blood shooting into the air. The kid was dead before he hit the ground.
“Take the dead bodies, turn the truck off, and let’s get the next one, too,” Alex said. His pack moved quickly, following his commands, taking the intact dead bodies with them out into the darkness, the last of them slipping away just as another truck came over the hill. This one clearly had a more alert driver who, as soon as he spotted the truck and the barricade, hit the brakes and began to reverse. But there wasn’t much space on the top of the hill, and before he was halfway around, Alex landed on the hood of the truck, his flame shield bursting into life around him as he smashed a clawed hand through the windshield, grabbing the driver and pulling him out. Beside him, Jacob roared with joy as he smashed the passenger window and slashed his claws inside, a great spray of blood filling the cabin as he took the mage by the jugular.
“Nice move,” Alex growled.
“Watch and learn, Grandpa,” Jacob said. They dived to the rear of the truck where a small battle had broken out. Alex saw a mage lifting a wand and then gasping in pain as Yvonne came shooting out of the dark and tore his arm off, leaving him standing there blinking, as though he couldn’t believe it was gone. He didn’t get much time to contemplate that he was missing an arm because Jacob came next, tearing his head from his body.
“Intact if we can,” Alex called out, as he waded into the battle. These mages did a little better than the first group, but not much. With the cramped conditions, they were soon overcome and that added another eight intact dead bodies to their count. The werewolves took the truck and one of them drove it down the hill, leaping out and letting it crash and topple over in front of the barricade, smashing into the other truck.
Alex left behind some werewolves in case another truck came along, and gave them strict instructions not to engage if there was more than one. Then the werewolves gathered the dead bodies, shifted to wolf form, and lashed the corpses upon their backs with ropes. They ran back through the darkness, returning to the mages’ camp.
As they ran, Alex had his spell screen up, reading through the reanimate spell that Henry had given him. Blocking off access to the mages’ camp was just the first step. What was to come next was a campaign of terror and the walking dead were just one part of that.
The first tinges of light were beginning to show in the sky by the time they returned to the main camp. Alex hadn’t yet had a chance to use reanimate humanoid+, but he figured now was as good a time as any. Shifting back to hybrid form, he looked over the bodies, finding the one that was the least damaged. It was a young woman in her mid-twenties who had died from a single claw through the heart. Alex sat cross-legged beside her, hoping once more that Henry hadn’t put some kind of spell bomb within the spell to kill him, and cast the spell.
Like with the chicken, Alex immediately felt a connection, but this of course was far different. The chicken was just some dumb animal, a construct of meat and bone with no intelligence and no will past wanting to peck and eat. As Alex connected with the woman, a flood of information came into his mind. Her name was Arya. She had a boyfriend, Carl, and they were both Tradinium mages. Although they had lived at the main compound most of the time, they had also discussed moving out together with a kind of breathless anticipation. Tradinium mages were permitted to live away from the main enclave buildings, provided, of course, they took proper precautions. Tradinium itself owned many rental homes throughout the town and would give them discounted rent. Why just last weekend, she and Carl had gone to a market and bought a yellow teapot, their very first joint purchase for what they hoped would be their new home. They hadn’t quite talked about children, but they had talked about—
Alex pulled himself away from the information. The stream of it was gushing out of her, her hopes, her dreams, her thoughts. She hadn’t been dead long and Alex knew he could reel her back. April moved beside him, her hand an inch away from his fur. He’d promised her he would cancel the spell if anything bad happened, and she was there ready to cleanse any dead passengers who came back. He glanced at her and nodded.
Reaching into the dark, he grabbed the rope and pulled it, but it wasn’t like bringing Jacob back to life, or the kid and his mother, there was a domination to this, inherent in the spell. His grasp on the rope was like a collar. He saw Arya’s face coming out of the black, shocked and scared, but saw her go flat as the collar of his will surrounded her neck. Her spirit settled back into its body under his command, and then her eyes lit up with an eerie green that he had seen before. Casting the spell had taken a good dose of magic but not as much as he’d assumed. He wasn’t quite sure how many reanimated corpses he could control, but at a quick guess, figured at least six without totally draining himself.
There was still a continuous pull on him from holding Arya in place and keeping their connection but he was able to maintain it easily, his body naturally generating more mana than it was using.
For a brief moment, Alex considered reanimating one of the other dead, but then decided to stick to the plan. He got the feeling April would punch him in the face if he tried to get two going at once.
He stood up and commanded Arya to do the same with a silent exertion of his will. She stood up and then waited, not even blinking. She wasn’t breathing either, and her heart lay dead in her chest.
Alex pushed away the information that had flooded into him from her, the yellow teapot sticking in his mind. Sure, she was a person, but she’d been on the way to the camp, which was there for only one purpose.
He tried to probe at her mind, silently asking her what their plans were, but no information came from the dead spirit. It was locked down and inaccessible to him. He had dominion over her, but she would not give him anything other than what had been revealed in that initial flood.
“Those glowing green eyes are a dead giveaway. Get it, dead giveaway,” Juno said, appearing out of nowhere. She’d been sleeping most of the night, taking the day shift with some of the other werewolves.
“Maybe I can stop it,” Alex said and willed the green away, but it stayed stubbornly in place. He was about to open the spell itself and dig through it, wondering if it was an artifact of it, like the way healing flame appeared as a flame because of the leftover parts of the spell that was within it. Then Juno pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her pocket and set them on Arya’s face. They were big and blocky and concealed the glow.
“She’s ready to go,” Juno said. Jeremiah came forward, and the rest of the pack backed up. He was holding a grenade, which he gave to Alex who held it out and willed Arya to take it.
Her movements were jerky, as though Alex’s will wasn’t translating perfectly. He could feel why, though, and already knew that the more he practiced, the smoother it would be. There was no solution for it now. If she went jerking down the hill and was revealed because of it, there was nothing they could do. He willed Arya to keep her hand by her side, concealing the grenade in the folds of her clothes, and then gave her the instruction to march down the hill, find any weapons cache, and drop the grenade in it after pulling the pin.
Arya began a jerky stagger away from them and the werewolves gathered in the trees, watching her moving down the hill. The further she went, the more Alex could feel his grasp on her weakening. Soon she was far enough away that he couldn’t give her any further instructions, except to return. They were still connected, of course, but Alex wondered if she was even going to make it
to the camp before the connection broke, and if it did, whether she’d simply drop dead and the mages would find a corpse with an unexploded grenade in its hand.
It was still early morning, but the guards were reasonably alert, spotting her as she came down the hill. One of them spoke to the other and then called out a challenge. She didn’t stop, however, and on the last part of the hill began picking up speed, a sort of toppling forward that became a run.
One of the mages brought up a gun and fired it at her, hitting her in the shoulder, but she shook it off like it was nothing. Alex watched, grinning, as she shoved past the mage, knocking his gun aside and running into the camp, which suddenly erupted like an anthill. There was more gunfire and then flames, and then Alex felt an echo of regret down the tenuous line connecting him to Arya. She had failed at his instructions. He shouted at her to pull the pin on the grenade and throw it, not sure whether the instruction would actually get through and realizing he needed to give better backup instructions in the future.
There was shouting down in the camp, followed by a sudden explosion, and one of the recently constructed buildings shook and then collapsed on one side. The shouting from down below died down, then smoke began to billow.
The chaos quickly calmed. A group of mages moved to the perimeter, armed to the teeth with wands and weapons, keeping watch for further attack while others quickly put out the fire and began assessing the damage.
“Not bad for a single zombie and old Grandpa driver of said zombie,” Jacob said. Alex swiped at him again but missed. The young werewolf landed flat on his ass anyway, tripping over Juno’s foot.
“Watch yourself, kid,” she said with a wicked smile, waving her finger at him. They watched the mages for a while as the sun rose, the ones around the perimeter gradually melting back to go about tasks. Eventually Alex faded back from the hillside, going deep into the woods where his pack was scattered among some heavy trees. Just as he was settling in to get some sleep, shifting into wolf form, Jeremiah appeared and crouched down beside him.
“Got five trucks backed up on the road now. They’re trying to move the barricade but there’s no way, at least for a few days. So this is it,” he said.
Alex chuffed and rubbed his head against Jeremiah’s hand. Over in one direction he could see Yvonne and Jacob huddling up together behind a small group of trees, thinking it was some kind of privacy, definitely not going to sleep. Alex turned so he couldn’t see them and closed his eyes, safe and surrounded by his pack, knowing that they had only just begun.
20
Alex howled into the night, a piercing sound that echoed off the hills for miles around. All around, his pack were howling at the moon, and from the far side of the mages’ camp, he could hear Simak’s pack howling in response.
It was midnight, and there was no way these mages were getting any sleep tonight. Beside him Jacob was giving it all he could, thumping his front paws down on a half-rotted log. Yvonne was beside him, adding her voice to his. There was no official schedule but the werewolves came and went, so there was never a break in the howling. Sometimes they moved about too.
Alex would stop and another bunch on the hill would begin, then they would slink through the dark to a new location and start howling once more. Alex could not only feel his own pack, but also Simak’s and others. By his estimation there were close to four hundred werewolves spread throughout the forest surrounding the mages’ camp. The effect on them had been significant. The previous night there been plenty of guards, but now it was tripled, mages armed with wands and guns circling the camp. With their supplies being cut off, the building had finally halted, the mages getting halfway through constructing what appeared to be a new barracks before realizing they didn’t have the rest of the materials to complete it.
Far up the road, the mages had retreated but then returned at dusk, and since then, there’d been a steady boom as they’d used explosives in an attempt to clear the trees away. The werewolves up there were just sitting and watching, as the mages doing that job were even more paranoid than the ones in the camp. There were at least a hundred of them and they’d set up lights, piercing into the darkness, run from temporary portable generators.
Their plan to use explosives wasn’t the best however. The trees were incredibly heavy, and when they exploded one they often took part of the road with it. What they really needed were a few bulldozers with heavy chains but it appeared they didn’t have access to those right now. It meant they were making slow progress and that the camp would not be resupplied anytime soon.
Alex stopped howling with one final piercing cry and loped off to his remaining stock of dead bodies, which weren’t smelling too good now. Sadly, he’d only had four grenades, and one had been used for the first attack, so Alex was holding the other three back not wanting to waste them. Still, he was having a lot of fun using the dead, sending them against the mages. The second one he’d simply sent running down the hill, screaming at the top of its lungs as the mages shot at it and used their wands. It had almost reached them too, before some of the dead digging the trench had climbed out and run at it, hacking it to pieces with their blunt weapons. After that, as dark had fallen, Alex had sent another crawling on hands and knees trying to stay low to the ground to get as close as possible before attacking.
After a day since they died, a change was coming over the dead. Now when Alex cast the spell the strand connection to the original spirit felt thinner and brittle. One of the bodies he’d revived he’d only gotten a name from—Zara—and nothing else, the flood of information just a droplet. The spirit that had returned had been vague and confused, unfocused, and it’d been easy to exert his will upon it.
Thinking back on when necromancers had raised the dead in a graveyard, Alex wasn’t sure how they’d done it. If the spirits weakened or dissolved away as April said, what were they pulling back to reanimate?
Alex shifted to hybrid form, trying to block out the smell of the dead. He still had three bodies left, all men. He sat cross-legged, extended his hand, and cast the spell, reaching into the darkness. Without speaking, April appeared at his side, hand an inch away from his. So far they’d been lucky. Nothing had come back hitching a ride but he wasn’t going to take any chances.
Alex reached into the dark, feeling for the strand, and hit something that was rigid. It felt almost like a boat oar. He grabbed it and hauled it towards him. He got the briefest flash of information—Riley, the man was cold, and he was a Tradinium mage—before something shot out of the dark that didn’t look human. It had the features of a human, nose and eyes and teeth, but distorted, the mouth too big, the teeth too sharp, the eyes weirdly set apart, the nose flattened. It was as though it was a human slowly melting, halfway through transitioning to some kind of monster.
Alex hauled it into the body but then felt its will pressing against his, sudden and sharp and almost overwhelming. It wasn’t Riley the mage but something from out there in the dark, some parasitic thing that have been consuming what was left of him, binding itself as it did. Alex struggled for domination. Previous times he’d reanimated he saw the mental image of a collar going around a neck, but this thing, although once human, was now grotesquely deformed, its neck twice as thick as a thigh.
The world fell away, the howling, the sound of the wind, the few brave insects that still went about their nightly business, and narrowed to just Alex and whatever this abomination was. He was wrestling with it as it snapped those teeth at him, its hot breath on his face. He couldn’t let go, couldn’t pull the collar around its distorted neck, otherwise it would bite him. It was strong beyond belief, and slowly but surely, Alex felt himself weakening. He couldn’t out-endure this creature.
As soon as Alex realized this he decided to pull the trick he’d used on Jasper. Even in his mental state he could shift. He went from hybrid to wolf, letting go of the monster and ducking beneath it to tear at its leg. Claws scored down his back, but he shifted to hybrid again, lifting it off the ground. H
e grabbed it, slamming it face down, like cops taking down a suspect. The abomination was stunned and in that moment Alex pulled the collar from nowhere, seeing it had stretched to accommodate the new size, and pulled it around the thing’s neck.
The moment it connected the abomination became docile. Alex let it go and ordered it to stand and it did, although it was looking at him with undisguised hatred. Alex felt a gentle touch on his arm and between one blink and the next he was back in his body, the sounds of the werewolves howling around him returning. There was a faint chime nearby, April casting a spell, and he felt warmth trickling from her fingers and running into his body, pushing away the deep chill that’d come over him.
“I got it! I dominated it,” Alex said. He looked down and realized there were small dots of frost collecting on his fur. April merely nodded, murmuring something under her breath as the warmth coursed through him and the ice disappeared.
Soon as she was done, she stood up, patting Alex on the shoulder.
“And that’s why you want me with you all the time when you do this,” she said. She went off into the darkness, heading for the small, temporary laboratory she’d set up on a fallen log, where she was using a small smokeless fire to brew potion after potion.
Alex watched her go, his mind suddenly distracted from what they were doing by the slinking of her hips, the edges of that old feeling coming back. Was it the thrall?
With three hot mates sex was never far from his mind, but he remembered what it’d been like when the thrall had been approaching, like being a teenager again, unable to concentrate on anything for more than ten seconds.
He shook his head and turned to face Riley, who was standing there, eyes glowing a brilliant green.
Henry hadn’t given any information about the reanimated dead, so Alex was surprised to find that he could sense that Riley was far stronger than any other dead he’d brought back. The abomination inside him that had merged with what was left of his spirit was immensely powerful and it meant the dead body was strengthened too. Even as Alex watched, his skin hardened, Riley’s dull fingernails grew into sharp points, and when he opened his mouth, Alex saw his teeth reshaping, taking on the appearance of the abomination within him. This thing was a wrecking machine and Alex didn’t want to waste it. Gathering his will he touched Riley on the shoulder.