"I might need to get its attention." I said, hefting the twelve-gauge.
"Whatever. Stay close and pay attention. We don't know how many of them are up there, and it's getting close to dark."
"Can Weres shift in the daytime?" I asked.
"Jesus H. Christ in a sidecar, boy! Have you ever listened to anything anybody's ever told you about monsters? Yes, they can shift any damn time they feel like it, but on a night of the full moon they have to shift. And they're gonna be at their strongest tonight, at the height of the full moon. If we coulda picked a worse time to go into a den, I don't know how." He spat on the ground and turned, walking into the trees following a trail only he could see.
I stuck close, trying to see what he saw in the woods that he was following. Every once in a while I saw a broken limb off a sapling, or a patch of disturbed fallen leaves, but mostly I was counting on this half-blind old man to lead me into the den of some flavor of were-creatures at sunset on the full moon.
Sometimes my life doesn't make a damn bit of sense when you really look at it.
Chapter 5
We spotted the cave after about twenty minutes of walking, and Grandpappy dropped to one knee. I did the same, but where he move silently through the wilderness, I put my knee right down on a dead branch and snapped it with a crack like a rifle shot. Pappy shot me a dirty look, but nothing came out of the cave after us. It was your average, run of the mill cave in the woods. Looked like it was about eight feet high, about fifteen feet wide, and God only knew how deep. There was a big rock shelf overhanging the front of it, and moss and vines and crap had grown down to partially mask the opening.
"We going in hard and fast, or slow and quiet?" I whispered to Grandpappy.
"Well, since you move like a horny bull elephant in an all-girl circus. I figure we might as well run in there guns blazing."
"Cool. I like that idea." And I ran into the mouth of the cave with my shotgun aimed out in front of me. I had strapped a flashlight to the barrel with duct tape, so I flicked that on as I ran. The Mag-lite cast a narrow yellow beam into the blackness of the cave, and the darkness swallowed that little beam of light like it was something alive and hungry. I drew up to a quick stop inside the cave, pretty much as soon as I realized that I couldn't see crap, flashlight or no. I wished I had my lantern, but I crept down the tunnel as fast as the dark and the terrain would allow, and followed that about two hundred yards until it opened out into another underground cavern.
This one was more lair than the last one, mostly broken bones, animal skins for pallets and a couple of fires burned low. No bookshelves, and no wi-fi. But it did have werewolves, or at least one werewolf which was what I was looking for in the first place. The Were charged me as soon as I came into the big room, and she almost got me, too. She was in her half-turned form, and she was fast. Mean, too, but that usually goes without saying where monsters are concerned. She came charging at me like an LSU running back, and I dodged to the left and reached out with my right hand to yank her back by her hair. I pulled hard and her head snapped back with a yelp. She sprawled on the cave floor, and a cloud of dust came up around her, blinding me. I danced back out of range of her claws and brought the shotgun around on her.
The sound of a twelve-gauge shotgun outdoors is loud. The sound of a twelve-gauge shotgun in a cave is absolutely friggin' deafening. The gunshot made my ears ring so bad I couldn't even hold onto my boomstick when the wolf-chick jumped up and ripped it from my grasp. Grandpappy was right, anyhow. Even with half silver pellets, a shotgun just ain't worth a shit against a werewolf. So I let her have the gun, and she flung it aside and turned back to me with a nasty grin on her muzzle.
"You came to die, yes?" She growled. Her voice sounded like she didn't really have the right equipment to make words anymore, but still used them because it proved that she could. "Came to die like my mate. Like the whelp that killed my mate!" She lunged at me again, but this time I wanted to ask her some questions, not just kill her. So I punched her in the face, a big looping roundhouse right that spun her around and dropped her to her furry little kneecaps. She was right back up again in a matter of seconds, diving for my throat. I put both hands on her neck, rolled backwards and planted my feet in her midsection, straightening my legs to send her flying behind me. She bounced off the cave wall and got up to face me again, shaking her head and looking at me like a predator instead of an appetizer this time. I rolled to my feet to meet her charge.
She dove at me, shifting all the way into a full wolf when she did. She was a big damn wolf, almost waist-high on me, and probably a hundred and fifty pounds, and she was all kinds of pissed off. I got a knee up in time to block her, but she hit me like a ton of bricks and I went down under her weight. She dug her back claws into my belly, but my overalls blunted the worst of her attack. I got my left forearm jammed between her jaws, hoping that all those legends about the littlest scratch or nibble from a werewolf being enough to turn a human were just that - legends. She clamped down on my arm and worried it back and forth, shredding the skin and tearing into the flesh with her razor-sharp teeth. I pulled back and punched her in the side of the head with my right fist, but she didn't let go. I hit her again, then a third time, and finally felt her grip slack up on my arm. A fourth short jab and she let go and jumped off me.
I rolled over and got to one knee, holding my injured arm tight to my body. She stood about eight feet away, shaking her head as if to clear the cobwebs or make the birds stop tweeting. She was too far away for me to grab, but too close not to worry about. She looked up at me and peeled her lips back from her teeth, showing my blood in her snarl. I reached over my shoulder and drew Grandpappy's sword. The wolf skittered back a step and let out a little yelp. Something about that sword scared the crap out of her.
"I don't want to use this on you, but I will if you don't chill out right damn now. Are we clear?"
The wolf nodded, weaving from side to side like she'd love to run past me out of the cave but didn't want to get that close to the sword. Her yellow eyes never left the blade. "You wanna change back to girl form so we can talk? Or do you wanna fight some more?"
She shifted completely back to human form and sat cross-legged on the floor. "We talk now. No kill. No bite." She ducked her head like a dog expecting to be punished.
"You're the Alpha in the room now, son. Don't screw it up." Grandpappy whispered from behind me.
"Where were you when she was chewing my arm off?"
"I was guarding the entrance in case she killed your ass. I've got a .44 ready with six silver rounds. Three for each of you if I need them." I looked over my shoulder to see if he was joking. The look in his eyes was colder than the glare the wolf-bitch was giving me, and I had no doubts that Grandpappy would have killed me in a heartbeat if I'd turned.
"Where are my father and brother?" I asked the wolf-woman. She was buck naked, and a pretty distracting naked, too. She had wild brown hair, tan skin, and the kind of long, trim muscles that came from living lean and running hard. She moved clumsily, like she didn't spend much time in this shape, and her eyes had changed from a glaring yellow to ice blue. Those piercing eyes coming out from under a curtain of dark brown hair made for a downright hypnotic package, and Grandpappy had to poke me to get me back on track. "Where are my father and brother?" I repeated, louder this time.
"I can hear you, furless," she sneered. "You smell like the whelp that killed my mate. He was stupid, but had guns. Old one was not stupid, but whelp charged in. My mate fought with honor, tooth and claw only. Whelp used weapons, guns and silver. Whelp had no honor. My mate injured whelp, but could not kill him. Old one slew my mate before whelp could be slain. Tricksy old one." Even in human form, her speech had the cadence of someone who was more comfortable with barks and whines and non-verbal signals than spoken language. I would have probably thought it was kinda hot except she was talking about her mate trying to kill my brother and father.
"Heh. Yeah, you gotta watch them ol
d ones. We're tricksy." Grandpappy said from behind me. The girl looked up at him, eyes glowing.
"Where did the whelp and the old one go?" I asked, pulling her attention back to me.
"Don't know. Don't care. Mate is dead. Nothing else matters. No pups for me now." I remembered seeing something on Animal Planet about wolves mating for life. Guess it works for half-wolves, too.
"Sorry about that, but we're looking for my brother and my father. And you're going to help us find them." She glared at me, but said nothing. "Get up." I said. The girl stood.
"Now how about you shift into that half-wolf form and we start tracking my brother's trail? I bet that doggie sniffer of yours is better than a GPS." I said. She didn't make move, so I waved the sword in her general direction. She shifted into her half-human form, and I took an involuntary step backward. She lunged at me, and I put a boot in her snout. That settled the Alpha question right quick, and she whimpered and scratched around in the dirt some more.
"Let's go," I said, and pointed out the mouth of the cave. She shot up the tunnel and Grandpappy and I hustled after her. We almost lost her once or twice, but she circled back to us, tongue lolling like she was laughing at us. Hell, she probably was. I stumbled through that forest like a drunken water buffalo, tripping over roots, breaking branches, and generally announcing to anything within a mile that a fat redneck was coming to visit. We followed her through the woods for an hour or more, until she came to a stop at the edge of a clearing. We were at least five miles from our truck, which put us ten miles from the middle of damn nowhere, and here stood a run-down cabin in the woods. I'd seen enough horror movies to know that not a damn thing good was gonna come from looking in that cabin, but there was a little bit of blood in the grass by the treeline, and I could see a few drops here and there spattered across the porch.
Now when I say this was a cabin in the woods, I'm being generous. This was a run-down shithole of a shack that made Grandpappy's old shotgun shack look like the Taj Ma-friggin-hal. The porch had done caved in on one side, and the one post holding the roof up on the other side looked like it could go any second. The steps were nothing but old slats half rotted through, and if there'd ever been any glass in the windows, it was long gone. There was a small woodpile out to one side of the porch, where the roof could still protect it from the weather a little, and I saw a rusted old axe stuck in a chunk of white oak.
I knelt down beside the wolf-girl and whispered "Why are we stopping?"
"I go no further. Evil tricksy ones in there." She pointed to the cabin and started to turn like she was going to leave us there.
"Oh hell no!" I grabbed her arm and yanked her back. "If Pop and Jason are in there, they're hurt. And we're going in after them."
She yanked her arm back and before I knew what was going on I was laying on my back looking up and the muzzle of a very unhappy she-wolf. "It is moon-time. I change. I hunt. I eat. I kill. But no mate. Thanks to tricksy one, no mate. I leave. Or I kill you."
I heard a soft click, and the wolf and I both turned to stare down the barrel of Grandpappy's .44. "If them's the options, I think you better get on out of here, bitch." He waved the pistol back the way we came, and the Were hopped off my chest. She shifted fully into wolf form, and bounded off down a trail only she could see. I looked at Grandpappy, who didn't seem at all disturbed by losing our guide, and then turned back to the cabin, trying to see what had scared her so bad.
I shoulda trusted the wolf.
Chapter 6
When she was gone, I turned back to Grandpappy. "Now what?"
"Now we split up, ease through these woods as quiet as we can, and meet up over yonder on the other side of the cabin. Keep an eye out for traps, particularly as you head toward the back door. That's where I'd put 'em, anyhow." I did as he told me, creeping through the woods keeping one eye to the ground and the other on the cabin. I thought I saw a flicker of movement through a window once, but when I froze and focused on it, I couldn't see it again. I stood there motionless for several breaths before moving on. There were no traps, and no sign of life from the cabin, by the time I met Grandpappy at the back of the clearing.
"Alright, sonny. Let's go." He pulled his .44 and I drew the sword and we crossed the expanse of grass to the back of the house. The sun had set, and the moon hadn't come up yet, so the shadows were playing hell with my depth perception. Enough so that I almost stepped right on Grandpappy when he froze in his tracks. He stuck a hand out and caught me as I stumbled, but his pistol never wavered from where he had it leveled at the back door.
"What's wrong?" I whispered when I had my balance back.
"I smell blood. A lot of it."
I sniffed. He was right, the air was full of it, the stink of butcher shops and slaughterhouses, the metallic tang that only smells like one thing. Something was killed in that house. But it wasn't there anymore. There was no stink of decomposition, no wretched cloying sweet-sickly smell of decay, just the not-quite crisp scent of days-old blood. "What do we do?" I asked.
"You scared of blood?"
"Been hurt losing it, ain't never been hurt by it. So I reckon not." I answered.
"Then we go in." And we did. We crossed the last few yards and stepped up onto the rotting back porch. Grandpappy covered me while I opened the door, and I went in with my sword held low in front of me. All those agility drills I'd been doing with Jase really came in handy, because my foot came down in a puddle of blood almost an inch deep, and it was all I could do to keep my balance. The room looked like the prom scene from Carrie, only in a 20x20 room. There was blood pooled on the floor, blood spattered on the walls, blood everywhere. There was so much of it that it hadn't all dried yet, even though most of the splatters had turned brown already. I spun around, looking for something to kill or blame for all the gore, but the room was almost empty. There was a black pot-bellied stove in one corner, with an icebox and a cobbled-together buffet beside it. What was left of a little table was over in the corner nearest the stove, with the shattered remains of a couple ladder-back cane chairs rotting beside it. What looked like the carcass of an old mattress and bed lay in the opposite corner in splinters, and dried blood covered everything. From the stove to the mattress to the busted-ass table, it looked like somebody had painted the place in reddish brown.
"Bubba," I heard Grandpappy say from the door.
"Yeah?"
"It's time to go."
"Why? We ain't found nothing yet." I turned back to him and the old man raised his finger to the ceiling. Drawn on the ceiling in dried blood was a warding circle ringed with a bunch of squiggles and shit I didn't recognize.
"What's that crap?"
"That's an alarm system. The second you crossed that circle, word went out to whoever did this that their workplace had been disturbed. Now we better go."
"Workplace? What the hell do you mean, workplace?"
"Hell is exactly what I mean, boy, now if you don't want to find out up close and personal what that looks like, you better get your ass out of here right now!" Grandpappy turned to head back to the woods, but just then a howl pierced the night.
Grandpappy froze. "Shit."
"What?" I asked.
"He's got control of the wolves. And the moon's up."
"The full moon? Don't that mean that . . ." I trailed off. "I don't know what it means."
"It means that the Weres won't be in control of their urges. On most nights they only change if they want to. On the full moon, they change no matter what. And if they bite you under a full moon, you're one of them. It also means they're faster, stronger and harder to kill than most nights."
Another howl echoed through the woods. Then another, and another. Soon a whole damn Harlem Boy's Choir of wolves were outside the cabin singing praises to whatever they worshipped for giving them a house full of rednecks for dinner. I looked out one window after another, and all I could see was hungry furballs coming out of the woods to surround the cabin.
"I think we've g
ot a problem, Grandpappy."
"I think your grasp of the obvious is something you get from our dumbass daddy, Bubba. Of course we got a problem! We got two dozen damn werewolves surrounding this bloodbath of a shack and nothing between us and them but one sword and one pistol!"
I stopped staring at the wolves and took another look around the inside of the cabin. There was nothing there that could be used as a weapon, unless you count a pot-bellied stove, and that was probably only good if I could throw it, which I couldn't. But I could drag it. So I did. I knocked the stovepipe chimney apart and dragged the stove over to barricade the back door. Grandpappy saw what I was doing, muttered something about me not being a complete idiot, and went to work trying to cover the windows. I picked up the mattress and froze. Underneath it, laying on the floor of the cabin, the grip slick with red blood, was Jason's Desert Eagle. The gun was loaded, and the holster Jase wore on his hip was about two feet away. I picked it up and sniffed the barrel. It hadn't been fired. The blood on the grip was the same color and thickness as all the rest in the room. It had all been there the same length of time, and that probably meant it all came from one source. Otherwise it would have dried to different viscosities.
"Pappy?" I said, holding up the gun and holster.
He turned to look at me, and the color went out of his face. He looked around the inside of the cabin, at the blood all around us, and I thought I saw a hint of water in one eye. "Well, now we know where all the blood came from. Now get back to barring them windows so we can avenge your brother."
I shoved the gun into the holster and threaded it through my belt. The big gun lay heavy on my hip, carrying it felt like a betrayal somehow, but I wasn't going to leave a hand-cannon like that laying around when we had monsters to kill. Half a dozen rounds of fifty-caliber ammo might be the difference between walking out of that shack and not. We wedged the mattress, headboard and everything else we could manage into the windows to blockade them until the only things left open were the front door and one window beside it. I was just starting to think we were set up pretty good when things got dirty.
Scattered, Smothered and Chunked - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 1 Page 26