“To kill those who do not know how deep the world is? Those who experience the pleasures of the world without earning it? No one has earned it more than I have. They led happy lives and I ended their lives in their oblivious charade while under the primal spell. I am sorry for her death, but she would never care for my pain. No one would. To them, I am a joke, yet, I am so much more than them! To control such a beast within me is not easy – to fail in harnessing its power cannot be blamed on me!”
“You have more than they do. You have life!”
“What I could have been will never be. What I could have had is lost forever. This is what I am. You can’t tame a werewolf. I am a killer to the core.”
“And who was the one you pinned it on?”
“One of my enemies – he had betrayed me in the past and that was his reparation.”
Red began to sob.
“I do have one creation I can be proud of – you!” he said.
The room began to fall apart.
“Run,” he said softly.
She hesitated after a step back.
“RUN!” he roared louder than she had ever heard from him before. She turned and began to run out of the room.
She looked back at him once more, his sorrowful, red eyes piercing into her, before the ground gave way about to swallow him whole. He teetered on the edge, still bound to the chair.
In a flash, Red felt his pain through her connection to his mind and saw his guilt and true desire for change. She thought of Fen’s tale and how he was trying to express his lack of control over his primal side so that she would understand. He had allowed her to go free, sealing his own destruction – and that showed there was still hope.
Red ran back to Fen and grabbed his fur as he was about to fall, pulling him towards her. Fen yelled for her to leave, but she refused. As more of the ground collapsed, the chair slid into rock and shattered, allowing enough slack for Fen to squirm free from the bind. He jumped forward as the room fell apart, grabbing Red and leaping over holes leading to certain doom. Fen shielded Red from falling bricks as he maneuvered around the destruction, moving at an incredible speed, and finally escaped through a hole in the wall.
He put her down and they watched the castle fall on top of itself. He yelled in agony as he transformed back to human form.
“You saved me…why?” he asked.
“Because I believe that you can change. I saw it when you let me go.”
“My pack…”
“Has paid for what they have done to this village. They weren’t very keen on you, as you recall.”
“That is true. Still, I sense that many of them survived,” he said, solemnly.
“Do you really believe that there must be order within your kind? Do you believe that those that have committed atrocities against human kind need to be punished?”
“I do. Every word I told you was the truth. To enforce such order is what drives me forward. But how can you trust me? How do you know I won’t regress?”
“Because you’re with me. I’ll make sure it won’t happen.”
Red wasn’t sure that what she was doing was the correct path. She knew that he was dangerous, yet she felt that he had something within him that was more than just a beast. She had the ability to set him on the right path – all he needed was a guide.
Fen rubbed Red’s head and smelled her hair, before rubbing his mouth over her neck. She placed her hand on his head and watched the smoke clear. Through the haze, a silhouette emerged – a man, most of his clothes incinerated, with a look of fury directed towards Red and Fen.
“You! You are both responsible for this!”
It was the beta that Red had seen earlier. He crept closer, his finger pointed in their direction.
“The pack will rise up again, under my control now – and we will destroy this village, as we should have done long ago!”
He jumped forward towards Red, and Fen threw himself in the way, slamming the beta down into the ground. Red’s eyes opened in shock as she witnessed Fen ending the existence of the attacker.
“Nothing will harm you now that you are by my side,” he breathed out.
Red wrapped her arms around him and brought her face to his.
“Help me end my pain,” he whispered.
Red looked into his eyes and imagined a future between them, wondering if it could work.
“We have done horrible things to each other,” she said. “We have both tried to kill each other. Can it work?”
“That is typical within my world.”
“Then how do you make it work?”
“I’ll show you the first step,” he said, and kissed her deeply. Red kissed him back, holding him close, as the fires from the destruction burned in the distance.
Epilogue
Two great wolves leered from the shadows of the forest. It was snowing and their white fur hid them in the storm. In the distance, they saw a red object approaching slowly. Black hair waving in the wind caused them to lick their lips.
“We are fortunate tonight.”
“I would not be so sure. The last one of us to try and use this road as a hunting ground did not escape alive. They say it was ‘The Hood’.”
“I do not believe in fairy tales,” he growled.
“You best start believing in fairy tales. You’re in one!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. You’ve never seen Pirates of the Caribbean?”
“No.”
“Jack Sparrow? Johnny Depp?”
“No.”
“You’re hopeless. Anyways, this wolf approached a house in disguise, and demanded entry. But it was a trap. He was drowned and boiled alive in a stone trough, baited by the smell of meat.”
“I do not believe one could be so cunning. And we know nothing of ‘The Hood.’ It could be a tale told by the humans to scare our kind. And yet I am hungry. Let’s strike – see how the red cloak stopped moving.”
They slowly proceeded, their heads down and eyes focused like lasers. The snow crunched beneath the ground.
The first wolf got closer before pouncing quickly, ferociously swinging its mouth around, and tearing apart red fabric.
“There’s nothing here!” the wolf screamed.
“If there was anything here, we would have smelled it!”
“Wrong,” said a voice behind them.
They turned to see a girl covered in a white fur coat and hat, holding a weapon the likes they had never seen before – a Gatling gun crossbow with tubes, gears, cranks, and a scope crammed together in a jumbled, awkward mess, like some sort of ill-conceived art project.
“What is this, a girl?” he growled.
“No girl can resist us, let alone stop us,” the other snarled.
“You wanna bet?” she said.
“Here’s a good line I used on my last victim: That’s a nice, uh, hood you got there…too bad we destroyed it, we’ll get you another…what shade of red was it?”
“Blood red,” she said.
The wolves looked at each other and laughed.
“If you’re this “Hood’ character, I wish you’d caught us a long time ago. We lucked out on this beauty,” the wolf said. “She looks tasty.”
“That’s a big gun,” said the other, laughing at her, “for such a small girl.”
Red flipped a switch on the device and it began to hum.
“The better to slaughter you with,” she said, as the gun began to furiously spin before a barrage of silver bolts exploded from the barrel, impaling one of the wolves before jamming. As Red threw down the gun, she pulled out a giant hammer and swung down upon the other wolf.
The wolf stuck with silver bolts leaped towards Red.
“Red!” yelled Fen as he collided with the wolf, who was much smaller in stature. Fen bit down upon his neck, shaking his body, before throwing him into the snow. Red smiled as she lifted her hammer and Fen flared as teeth as the final wolf, bruised and bloody, stepped back, cowering down
in fear.
“But…you’re one of us!” the wolf cried.
“Not anymore. I’ve found a new direction in which to focus my aggression: on those that murder innocents, like you!” Fen said as he rushed forward.
Red smiled as she swung down her hammer, her heart beating wildly for Fen, who had unleashed and allowed the primal nature within her – as she worked to subdue his own inner demons. Together they made each other stronger.
The blood on the snow and the haze in her mind blended into one and she lost herself in a sea of red.
Also by Lillian Jacobs: Fifty Shades of Oz
Big Bad Page 8