Hounded By The Gods

by ST Branton

  That was a question I did not want to answer honestly, so I chose to sidestep it. “Look at these doors, man. If they do come back, they’ll break in here in a second. Go home, lock everything, turn the lights out, and stay quiet. That’s your best chance.” Out of sight, out of mind, right? At least, that was what I hoped. “I’ll cover you, but you have to go right now. We don’t know how long this lull will last.”

  He stared at me, plainly conflicted, but in the end, my logic won out. I held the door as they filtered out and scattered toward their homes. Not even five seconds had passed before I heard someone shriek, “There’s another one!”

  “Damn it to hell!” I rushed out after the last person, preparing for a chase. “Go, now!”

  But the werewolf standing at the edge of the road didn’t do anything. It was a little bit smaller than the others, which wasn’t saying much, and the fur on its body was a richer brown than the ones I’d seen so far, almost red. I fell into my default stance and raised the sword.

  It looked at me for a long minute, neither of us moving an inch. I held my breath. Any moment now, this thing would throw itself at me. I had to be ready.

  But I didn’t get the chance. Off to my right, another Were unleashed a hellish growl and crept toward me, its steps measured. It was a large gray beast, and mangy as hell. I glanced over at the smaller creature. Its eyes were also fixed on the beast who advanced on two legs, mouth pulled back in a malicious sneer.

  This one had my attention now, and I raised the Gladius, prepared to do what I had to.

  “Come to momma, you damn mutt,” I whispered, as I started to pace in a circle around the Were. It matched me step for step, and, for a moment, I thought we were in a dance that might last for eternity. Just as I began to fall into the rhythm of our steps, the damn thing sprung, like a jack-in-the-box wound for a week.

  I raised my sword in a mixed posture of offence and defense, but I never got a chance to use it. The smaller, reddish Were tackled the brute in mid-air, breaking its course. The two tumbled into the dust, snarls and teeth raging as they rolled in a ball of fur and rage. Finally, the two separate. The smaller of them bore its teeth and dared the brute to engage.

  The gray Were glanced at me and back at its attacker. It let out a howl, turned, and ran for the cover of the forest.

  I let out a long breath that I had been holding forever, but I still held Kronin’s sword before me. “Thanks,” I said, staring into the copper eyes of my savior-Were.

  It bobbed its head, and in a moment, it had left as quickly as it had come.

  There was no time to linger at the scene, but my thoughts stuck on the encounter. “What in the hell was that all about?” I asked out loud, only half expecting an answer from Marcus. For once, we were in almost the same boat in terms of what we knew and didn’t know.

  I confess, I am not sure, he said. This inconsistent behavior is extremely puzzling. But for once fortune smiled on you, Victoria.

  “Yeah.” I shook my head to clear it. “Guess that’s a good thing, but still, I’ve got a real shitty feeling, Marcus.” A feeling like things were about to get worse before they got better.

  Marcus did not disagree.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  As morning broke over the torn-up town, I was running my ass around, securing perimeters and making sure there were no stragglers from the night before. If I stopped for too long, I became painfully aware that I’d had no sleep at all, so I kept myself moving.

  The pleasant drunk buzz I’d gotten before the werewolves showed up in the center of town had long since worn off, but adrenaline fended off whatever inklings of a hangover might have tried to push themselves on me.

  There was too much to do to worry if my head hurt or my body needed rest. The more ground I covered, the clearer it became that I’d only seen a small part of the wreckage. Everywhere I went, I saw bodies. There must have been nearly a dozen of them. Some were covered haphazardly. Others weren’t. They all bore similar awful, tearing wounds. I saw bite marks on the few I dared to inspect close-up before moving on.

  Some of the bodies looked like they had started to change, but even those were still dead. I waited for a few minutes at the first one I found just to make sure. Yet another mystery added to the pile. Had the changes begun before, during, or after the attack? What was the cause?

  I didn’t know. Marcus didn’t know.

  The most I could do was finish patrolling the outside border of the town, then return to the center square and report my grisly findings to the old, benevolent sheriff. He looked as though he had aged a decade in the past few hours, and he accepted the information with a tired nod.

  “Thanks,” he said. “We need all the help we can get, especially as the body count keeps growing.”

  “Of course. I’m here to help. What else can I do?”

  The sheriff rubbed his eyes. “Well, you’ll need to keep checking to make sure things stay secure. And maybe while you’re out there, you could keep an eye out for survivors. We got a lot of dead, sure, but there’s more missing.” He indicated to his notepad, which was covered in a nearly illegible scrawl of names. “As far as I can tell, no one’s even seen them since the sun came up.”

  “Shit,” I muttered. Not a good sign.

  “Yeah.” He sighed deeply. “Yeah. I’m going to try to assemble a town meeting if it looks like it’s safe enough. And if I can convince people to leave their homes again.” A frown crossed his face. “Though maybe it’d be better if they didn’t. Maybe we ought to establish a curfew.” He ran his fingers through his thinning hair and closed his eyes for a moment. “Hell, I don’t know. But we’re not giving up. We’re going to dig in and salvage this town. Silver Banks won’t be another Mormouth.”

  I left the sheriff to his burdens and wandered my way down the main road, looking for anything that might give me more clues as to what exactly was happening in this little corner of the Pacific Northwest. More of the bodies were slowly being covered up, mostly in an effort to stem the atmosphere of slowly growing hysteria.

  But it was impossible to keep everyone from seeing what had gone on in the middle of town overnight. The bravest were starting to emerge from safety to come check things out, resulting in a whole lot of panic. And there was no reassuring information to mitigate that panic because nobody really knew what was going on—me included. I told myself to focus on cleanup and finding survivors. When some semblance of order was restored, then I could think about piecing together the puzzle.

  I took it upon myself to take better inventory of the missing. Sheriff Rosewood’s list was already long, but I suspected it wasn’t comprehensive, and it sure wasn’t very readable. Going from door to door like some kind of macabre salesperson, I asked the hard questions: if everyone was home, and if not, who wasn’t?

  The task was heartbreaking in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Sheriff Rosewood was right: there were a lot of people missing, and I learned that all of them had families who were sick with worry. I wished there were answers, but I had none yet. Each house visit strengthened my resolve until I happened to find Wade Stevens’s place.

  It was empty. I saw his name stenciled on the mail slot in the door and steeled myself for a confrontation, but a press of the doorbell and a loud knock yielded no answer. Standing on his porch, I tried to remember if I’d seen him at all during my canvass of the town.

  “Marcus, have you spotted Wade around?” I glanced at the door one more time. It stood unmoving, the house silent. I retraced my steps back to the curb.

  I do not believe I have, Marcus said. For the moment, he seems to be among the missing.

  “That’s… I don’t like that.” I looked over my shoulder on my way to the next driveway.

  I thought you were on less than friendly terms with him. His disappearance could grant you some comfort.

  “No, I mean it gives me a bad feeling.” I couldn’t explain it any further than that, but a seed of nonspecific dread planted itself in
my stomach. Given Wade’s big mouth, I would have assumed he’d be more visible than anyone, yelling all over the place about how he was going to teach these creeps a lesson. He was even more conspicuous in his absence.

  I saved Smitty’s house for last, mostly because I knew Amber was pulling her weight as part of the relief effort downtown. No doubt she’d tell me if something was up with her grandfather. Still, I got goosebumps on my way up the path toward the smithy and the house in the glade. The furnace stood silent and cold beside the bellows. The windows in the house were empty.

  “He must be helping out in town,” I said out loud. “I just missed him, right?”

  Marcus stayed quiet. Before I even reached the front door, I turned around and booked it back to the main drag to make sure Smitty’s face was among those watching, helping, or milling around.

  He wasn’t there.

  I went up and down the street, checking every open building. Caution tape had been strung up around the broken doors to the local tavern, and a couple nervous policemen stood guard. They stepped up to intercept me.

  “Ma’am, no one’s allowed—”

  “I know. Have you seen Smitty?” I asked, keeping my voice level. “I’m looking for him.”

  The older officer shook his head. “Not hide nor hair of him. I figure he’s waiting for this to blow over before he shows his face. He’s not much for this kind of general chaos.”

  “You might ask his granddaughter, Amber,” the other cop said. “She always knows where he’s at. They’re like two peas in a pod.”

  “Right.” A sour taste pricked the back of my tongue. “Thanks.”

  As I went back the way I came, it struck me that I hadn’t run into Maya, either. That was odd because she’d told me herself that she was the closest thing Silver Banks had to a full-time doctor.

  Everyone I knew in town was gone, except for the sheriff and Amber. “Dammit,” I whispered. “What the hell is happening here?”

  Frustrated and full of anxious energy, I turned my attention to helping with the movement of some of the bodies that still lay in the street. There was one little funeral home tucked down a quiet lane on the outside of the town center, but its built-in mortuary was quickly filling up. I was pushing a gurney back to the road when a commotion reached my ears.

  “Vic!”

  I left the gurney where it stood and bolted toward the voice calling my name. It was Maya. She came from the direction of the woods, half carrying, half dragging a bare body I also recognized. The old man’s skin was alabaster white, except for streaks and patches of scarlet.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked, aware that a crowd was beginning to form around us. “Where have you been?” Maybe it was an unfair barrage of questions, given the current circumstances, but I was pretty fed up with not knowing shit. A faint pulse emerged from Smitty’s carotid artery, much to my relief.

  “There’s no time for that,” Maya said. She hefted the blacksmith higher in her grip. “He needs help right now, and I don’t want Amber to see her granddad like this.”

  I wanted to argue, but I knew I couldn’t, so I just caught up Smitty’s legs and helped her lug him into the clinic. We shut the doors on the ranks of curious onlookers, and after we got him situated on a table in the back, Maya made sure all the blinds were drawn. She was snapping a pair of latex gloves over her hands as she reentered the examination room.

  Smitty looked worse than many of the dead bodies I had encountered that morning. For all their rage, the Weres were efficient killers—dealing massive damage then moving on for the next kill. But Smitty looked like he had been worked over for a good long time—and yet somehow, he was still alive.

  His clothes were gone, his pale skin was covered in dark, half-dried blood, and after a moment of careful searching, I found the source. Both of his wrists appeared to have been hacked with an instrument not quite sharp enough to do the job.

  I winced automatically, inspecting his arms. “This is seriously screwed up. Did he do this himself?”

  Maya glanced at me sharply. “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know a lot of murderers who go for the wrists,” I said. “Suicide victims, on the other hand…”

  She shook her head hard enough that her hair bounced around her face. “I wasn’t born and raised here, but I’ve lived here long enough to know my way around, and I can tell you Smitty would never do anything like that. Amber is his whole heart. He couldn’t leave her even if he wanted to.”

  I sat back, running my eye over the blacksmith’s prone form. Then I turned my attention to Maya. “Can I ask you something?”

  She dabbed gently at Smitty’s injuries. “Depends what it is.” Her tone was curt and guarded.

  “How the hell did you get him here yourself?” Last I checked, Maya was a tiny little thing, especially compared to Smitty’s build. I had a good nine inches and at least twenty pounds on her. But as I watched her work around the unconscious blacksmith on her table, I wondered if I could have been wrong.

  Suddenly, she didn’t seem so small. The muscles in her arms filled out the sleeves of her work shirt. Could I have misjudged her height, too? It didn’t feel possible, but neither had a lot of the events of the past month. I was half-willing to chalk it up to the possibility that I might’ve been drunker than I thought when she’d shown up to the bar the night before.

  Then she said, “Don’t worry about it.” Without making eye contact.

  Acting just like me when I had something to hide.

  I didn’t force her to answer my question, but I made a note to discuss it with Marcus later. This town was too small to have this many strange things afoot. Too many people were acting cagey or downright missing.

  And too many were dead.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I lay cocooned in the warmth of my bed in Smitty’s third-floor room, by turns enjoying the comfort and torturing myself with unresolved questions. No matter how I took things apart and fit them back together, I couldn’t make the bigger picture gel in any meaningful way. Which meant I stared up at the hand-hewn ceiling in the false darkness of closed curtains at midafternoon.

  Sleep continued to evade me. So, I talked to Marcus. “You up for a little theorycrafting? It’s pretty clear I’m not going to sleep anytime soon. All this bullshit is filling my head to bursting.”

  You should try to rest while you can, he told me. Your body requires rejuvenation.

  “Technically, I am resting.” I fanned out my arms and legs under the blanket and stretched all four limbs at once. “See, that felt awesome. I just can’t achieve unconsciousness at the moment.”

  This is one of those times where it would be worse to argue with you. I can tell.

  “Bingo.” I laced my hands behind my head. “So, let me hear it. What the crap do you make of this place?”

  Lupres has beaten us to the punch. He spoke glumly. I believe he is creating his minions just as Lorcan and Lysiani created theirs.

  Recalling the copious bloodstains all over Smitty, I grimaced. “I’m guessing blood is involved somehow. Again.”

  Yes, but I am not sure how it is spreading so quickly to such a relatively large populace, if we assume all those who are missing have been infected. I see no way for Lupres to have established a base of operations as Lorcan did.

  “Well, then that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? That’s what we need to find out. How is this shit spreading, and how do we stop it?” I rolled onto my side. “Because if we don’t stop it, this whole town is gonna go six feet under. And I bet there’s another little town not that far from here that’s next on the list. And after that, another.” The pattern was painfully obvious, even after just two iterations.

  The werewolves were going to expand indefinitely unless I put a stop to them.

  What are your thoughts, Victoria?

  “I’m thinking you might have been right all along,” I admitted. “We need to go on the offensive. We need to find Lupres by
any means necessary and end him.”

  It was hard as hell to think about putting down converted townspeople, but if this were to become some kind of werewolf pandemic, we’d have a real disaster on our hands. Seattle was three hours away. How long would it take for the wolves to reach that major metropolis?

  Probably not too long at all.

  A few lives for the greater good? I’d have to learn to live with that. But when it came down to it, I needed to trust that they were somehow connected. The hope was that if I could kill the source, I could end the outbreak. It was something to hold on to.

  In the morning, Maya brought Smitty home in a wheelchair. The color had returned to his face, and the bandages on his wrists were hidden under a long-sleeved shirt and coat, a much improved visual from the morning before. I held the door as she pushed him into the front room.

  “How are you feeling, old-timer?” I asked.

  He mustered the strongest grin he could. “I’ll tell you, kiddo, this doctor’s not just for the dogs. I was a little afraid she was going to try to neuter me and put one of them cones around my neck, but in the end, she treated me just fine.”

  Maya groaned, but she laughed anyway. “Don’t worry, Smitty, I still know you’re a mutt at heart.” Her laughter ended, and she rubbed his arm gently. “You scared me half to death when you came in looking like that. Lucky I didn’t just pass out then and there.”

  She made no mention of the fact that she had actually carried him out of the forest and into the clinic herself, or that he’d been buck naked at the time. I supposed some things were better left unsaid.

  I helped him out of the chair and into his recliner, then parked myself on the sofa beside it. “Smitty, can you tell me what happened two nights ago? Maya’s right. You were in pretty rough shape.”

  He lifted his arms one by one, pushed the shirtsleeves up, and examined the dressings as if they might jog his memory. A faraway, slightly bewildered look settled into his eyes. “Well…” The word drew itself out. “I think I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to get some fresh air. That usually helps me knock right out again.” Smitty paused, awkwardly stroking his chin with two fingers immobilized by his wrappings. “I must have lost track of time because the next thing I knew, I was heading for the next town over. Not Mormouth,” he added. “Greenlake. West of here.”