Death Becomes Her

by Michael Anderle

  He was able to see into the clearing. Ecaterina was half across a log near the fire. They must have had her sitting down and she had bitten a hand holding her there. Slapping her must have knocked her out, but he couldn’t see her face on the other side of the log.

  They wanted him to come back into the center, back where their sniper obviously had another shot.

  That wasn’t going to work. Not unless he darted across there as a wolf.

  That’s when the roaring started.

  —

  Alexi was pissed. He had made a leisurely stroll from his den over to the area that Ecaterina would bed down and then he went fishing in the lake. He enjoyed the fish on the south-side the most and he figured there was no reason to talk to them this evening. He would get there tomorrow morning and have his discussion with the FNG.

  As he was coming up from the lake, he heard the gunshot and started getting his ponderous body moving up towards Ecaterina’s area, getting both a full run going and a righteous and bloody anger, driven partly in fear of what he might find.

  He knew that Ecaterina wouldn’t take any shots unless something was stalking her. He doubted she would allow her customer to even bring a rifle. This meant that someone was hunting in his area and they were very near Ecaterina.

  He could smell the wolves, these were from the Bravos pack. They had dared to come onto his mountain and hunt? This was too much. He roared in anger, he roared his announcement that there would be no capitulation, he thundered into the clearing seeing Ecaterina’s body laying over a log near the fire, one of the pack members working his hand as he stared at Alex’s huge bear-form coming for him through the trees.

  The pack member, tall, with a huge chest and a red shirt turned to face Alexi as the first bullet ripped into Alex’s shoulder, causing him to stagger to the right. He only grew angrier, the pain from the wound a small consolation prize to getting his teeth into the animal in front of him.

  The second bullet tore into his left back leg, causing him to stumble again and rolled before he shook his head and roared his response to the cheap tricks this pack, not even honorable enough to face him in combat, shot him from afar.

  The pack member roared in laughter, looking at Alexi, knowing the next shot was probably the killing shot as Alexi wasn’t able to move as quickly now.

  They heard a report from a gunshot, but nothing raced down to end Alex’s life. The pack member looked over his left shoulder up into the area across a small valley when a huge black blur raced from his opposite side, bowling him over and they both left the clearing, crashing through the bushes and into the trees.

  Alexi stood up and took painful steps over to Ecaterina’s body. She was breathing but had a horrible, bloody gash above her right eye. Alexi stood up and roared his anger that anything should hurt is niece. He landed back on his feet, blood coming out of his shoulder and his leg. Without their sniper, there was no way that anything else would happen to his niece, or he would be dead.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Carpathian Mountains, Romania

  The bear took the focus of the Were by Ecaterina. Nathan stripped out of his clothes. Taking the bowie and a stick from the ground, he bit on the stick and used the bowie to dig the silver bits out of his shoulder. The pain of the silver in the bowie was horrendous. The desire to protect steadied his hand as he worked to get the bullet’s pieces out. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

  He heard a gunshot.

  He pulled the knife out and used his right hand to reach into his shoulder and grab the last piece he was unable to capture with the knife and threw it down in disgust. The silver was out, his natural healing was already helping his shoulder and now he could focus enough to change.

  One second there was a naked man, blood all over his shoulder dripping down his torso, the next a black wolf with green human like eyes. Wasting no time, the wolf took off at speed as he heard a second shot and laughing coming from the clearing.

  Focused on both speed and not bringing attention to himself, Nathan was taking too long to get back to the clearing. He heard a third shot.

  Coming through the trees from behind his own tent, he saw a man looking over his shoulder back the other way. The bear was in obvious pain, but was starting to get back up and had eyes only for the guy by the fire.

  Tough shit, this asshole was his and he hit him going as fast as he could run, taking a piece of his shoulder in his teeth as they both started tumbling into the bushes.

  A little shaken up, it took Nathan a few seconds to get his bearings and looked to see where his adversary ended up. About twenty feet away, the guy had ripped off his clothes and just finished his own change.

  Nathan was huge for a wolf, even for a Were he was a spectacular size. This guy had him beat by twenty pounds at least. Dusk colored, his black eyes bore almost no intelligence beyond animal cunning. Growling, the two wolves circled each other, looking for an opening.

  His opponent barked, there was a returning bark from the campsite and Nathan could hear another wolf coming towards them.

  Great, it was going to be two on one. Fine. That left one for the bear and he couldn’t complain later that Nathan had taken the easy way out.

  The other wolf came into the clearing and now Nathan had to work to keep them both mostly in front of him. If either one of them could come in and grab a back leg in their teeth, his day was going to go into the shitter, for sure.

  —

  The gunshot was ahead and to her left.

  She started running, but this time it was different. She was in her zone now, every leaf, every branch was in complete detail as she chose exactly where to place each foot, each handhold as she jumped over fallen trees, dodge between trees or use branches as shortcuts through the dense foliage.

  Dimly she heard a roar, the sound took forever to travel, to reach her as she moved. What she could, she ran over. What she couldn’t, she would run through or across. Nothing was stopping her from finding the gun.

  She spotted the weapon, then she spotted the sniper.

  She jumped from her location to the first wall and started pulling herself up. There was nothing too tiny to use as a leverage to climb. He was more than a hundred feet above her… seventy feet.. forty feet.

  She watched as he shot again, she moved across the face of the cliff trying to find a handhold, any handhold.

  In frustration, she reached back and drove her fist into the stone, pulverizing a hole, aggregate shooting everywhere.

  He was lining up for another shot. She wouldn’t be in time. Determination fueled her anxiety. Frustration pierced her anger.

  The world flashed white; suddenly she was falling down towards him from above. She punched the back of his head and his finger pulled the trigger as she came down crashing into this body. His head, however, had already hit his gunstock and shoved the barrel up into the sky. The shot couldn’t strike anyone down in the valley.

  He wouldn’t ever be shooting anything again. His head had just about exploded with her punch. His blood was all over her hand.

  We are down on our energy reserves to almost nothing.

  “What the hell just happened?” Bethany Anne, struggled off of the corpse and was busy grabbing the sniper rifle to use the scope to see what was going on down in the valley.

  You transported your body up above the victim, and, well, you know the rest.

  “Yeah, but how did I do it?” Seeing the bear with the wounds looking like he was protecting a woman from two more rather large wolves, one took off into the bushes to her left. This left one harassing the bear.

  “How much would it take to transport down there?” Bethany Anne pointed down to the clearing, at least a thousand feet away from where they were presently.

  Too much, you would need a significant Etheric balance to make that jump. We will become more efficient using your reserves with every jump, but right now you don’t have it and you won’t be pulling it together for some time. Well before that is finished.r />
  “How much blood?”

  Excuse me?

  “How much blood would I have to consume to get the energy needed. She needs me.” The anger was starting to get into Bethany Anne’s eyes. Her hatred of the strong preying on the week, the anger of what was right getting lost to what bad people forced on others. This wasn’t happening to her, to that woman down below.

  Bethany Anne decided that she was going to become that which the monsters feared. If they feared Michael because of his honor, they were going to fear Bethany Anne because hell hath no fury like a woman protecting her own. And the defenseless, were indeed, Bethany Anne’s own. There was nothing she wouldn’t do in life, or in death, that would stop her before she breathed her last.

  Well, I truly couldn’t say. We would need to try a little and then I could…

  “Tell me when I’ve got enough.” With that Bethany Anne reached down and grabbed the body with her right hand, never taking her eyes from the clearing that she could see below. She lifted the two-hundred-pound corpse as if it weighed the same as a sack of potatoes and started sucking blood from the neck with incisors that grew as her eyes became red and then she just disappeared, the corpse falling back to the ground with a sickening ‘plop’.

  —

  The other wolf took off into the bushes. Alexi could hear the growling and could easily figure out it just became a two against one battle.

  That left him the one, and this one wasn’t stupid. Every time Alexi tried to get a good position, the wolf would make a jump towards Ecaterina, causing Alexi to have to come back and protect her and swat the wolf away. He was unable to get any proactive offense going.

  Then life got suddenly very weird.

  Alexi was almost standing over Ecaterina, staring at the one wolf who was obviously trying to figure out which way to go around him to get to the girl while the snarling was getting pretty loud in the bushes, when a woman, blood all over her mouth and right hand appeared from thin air behind the wolf and picked it up with her left hand and slapped it with her right. The wolf’s head disintegrated. She dropped the dead wolf’s body and walked into the bushes towards the fight.

  Oh, this is bad, thought Alex. He could smell what this being was and while he hadn’t been around one in many, many years you never forgot the smell of a vampire, or the destruction that came with them.

  Well, if he died protecting Ecaterina, it wouldn’t be a mangy wolf he lost his life to. He moved to stand between the bushes and his precious niece, ready to take on death herself to give Ecaterina just one more chance at life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Carpathian Mountains, Romania

  Nathan was in a real quandary. The new wolf was moving into position and he was going to have to make a decision to stay here, or see if he could join up with the bear and try to make it a two against three fight. Hopefully, the big guy would recognize him and not just knock him ass over appetite the first chance he got.

  Bears were notorious for being loner. They weren’t much into big groups as animals, and the Were versions weren’t much different.

  A sudden, loud and meaty whack was heard out in the clearing by all three of the wolves in the bushes. The wolf out there was suddenly quiet. A body could be heard hitting the ground.

  Only the bear could be heard moving a little towards them. And then all three wolves heard the steps, human steps.

  Slow, distinct human steps.

  There was only one human out there and Nathan knew she wasn’t stupid enough to come into the bushes where you hear three wolves fighting.

  Their own fight was kinda forgotten until this new situation could be figured out, a human female ghosted into the area with the wolves and looked at all three.

  Oh, holy shit, thought Alex. If the blood on her hands, throat and traveling down from her mouth didn’t give it away, the freaking blood red eyes were a big telling sign that Nathan found the new family member.

  Apparently, she didn’t need Michael holding her hand, and she was walking in the daytime.

  Well, fuckity-fuck. This was going from bad to worse. If she was going to ask questions of the dead then Nathan was officially a goner.

  He had hopes that she was at least neutral since he could still hear the bear out by Ecaterina.

  Then the newest wolf decided to end his participation by attacking her. Death by vampire is always quick, well at least in Nathan's experiences and this didn’t seem much different.

  The other wolf, at least eighty pounds, took off and jumped at the vampire who continued to look at both him and the other alpha as she casually plucked the jumping werewolf by the throat, stopping his jump in mid-air, ripped his head back, splitting his neck and spraying the area with his arterial blood. She calmly pulled the body up to her mouth while keeping her blood red eyes on the both of them. She sucked down the freshly killed wolves essence. Dropping the body at her feet, she stepped over the body and calmly exclaimed, “Change back to your human forms or die. I won’t give you a third option.”

  Nathan got busy, lying down to change back into a human and the other wolf seized the opportunity to bury his teeth into Nathan’s neck.

  He never made it over to him. The vampire was ten feet away one second and the next had the alpha slammed down into the dirt by Alex, who was now fully human and naked.

  She reached down, cocked her head as if thinking and then casually used her forearm to crack the other alpha over the head, not killing him it looked like, but rather knocking him from dazed into unconsciousness.

  She grabbed the alpha by the neck, like you would a puppy, and turned around, walking towards the clearing. “Get dressed, meet my by the woman.”

  There was a certain reason Gerry always had Nathan communicate and meet with Michael and his family, it was because he never, no never, became stupid around vampires.

  —

  Alexi heard the first wolf jump and the short bark of surprise and then the ripping of flesh. The blood could be heard pumping out of the wolf. Then a moment later a body dropped to the ground and the vampire stepped over the wolf and giving the other two an ultimatum.

  Alexi didn’t even have time to wonder if either would be stupid; he heard a body slam into the ground, another being hit and the vampire coming back over towards him, telling the remaining wolf to get dressed.

  She appeared in the clearing with fresh blood around her mouth and down her throat. It didn’t seem like it bothered her too much. She carried the other alpha like a pup and casually threw him down at Alexi’s feet.

  “Don’t let him go, sit on him if you have to. I want answers and he is going to give them to me. I’ll be back.”

  With that announcement, and the still unconscious wolf at Alexi’s feet, she disappeared towards the lake.

  Alexi looked down at the wolf and considered just ending its life. However, he decided that he didn’t really want to press a day-walking vampire’s patience right away.

  The silver was beginning to really substantially annoy him as the other guy, the one Ecaterina had brought up here, came out of the bushes. He walked past Alexi giving him a head nod in respect and went over to his tent. He reached into the tent and pulled out a bag. Getting out a change of clothes, he brushed off the dirt that was on his skin from laying on the ground and got dressed. He pulled out a first aid kit from his backpack and walked over to Alexi and Ecaterina, he held out the first aid kit.

  “Do you mind if I approach her and clean up the hit? I don’t think it is going away by itself and she can’t be comfortable in that position. You would keep an eye on large and stupid here better than I can. I don’t want to be in wolf form when dark, bloody and dangerous comes back.”

  Alexi moved over, resting a large dinner plate sized paw on top of sleeping ‘ugly’.

  Nathan gently pulled Ecaterina over the log and laid her out carefully on the ground. Opening the first aid kit, he pulled out the antiseptic wipes and started cleaning her wound.

  By the time he was fini
shed, the vampire was back having removed as much of as she could in some water. She walked into the clearing, obviously not caring if they wanted her there.

  Nathan was holding Ecaterina up. The vampire was stunning, if you liked your ladies with dark hair and destructive urges. She came right up to Nathan and Ecaterina after sparing a glance at the bear holding down the wolf.

  “How is she doing?”

  Her voice was soft. Completely different from the previous experience when her voice was death, just slightly warmer.

  Nathan took a moment to respond to her, carefully weighing his words. “I think she will do OK. These types of wounds, on humans, can keep them out for a little or a long time. I expect her to be awake before sunset. Look, I don’t think she understands anything about the UnkownWorld, so I hope you don’t feel a need to wipe her?”