by M. D. Massey
Odilon looked at me like I was bent. “You always go barreling into situations not knowing what the hell you’re getting into? I’m trying to tell you, silver doesn’t work on the Rougarou. He’s all magicked up, and his power doesn’t come from the wolf vyrus. All silver bullets are going to do is piss him off.”
“Damn. I suppose I could decapitate him or burn him—going to be kind of hard to question him when he’s dead, though.”
The old man snorted. “Have fun, you.” He stopped and scanned the area for a moment, then he continued. “Look, when the time comes, I’ll help as much as I can. Frankly, I’d have put him out of his misery a long time ago if I had the strength.” He gave me a backward glance. “But if you’re as tough as Maman Brigitte says, maybe Jean-Michel can finally have some peace.”
“Maybe.” I watched the old man for a while as I trailed him. “You sure seem to know your way around out here.”
“I was raised in these swamps. Now, hush. We’re getting close to Jean-Michel’s stomping grounds, and I don’t want to scare him off.”
“Scare him off? I thought he was a big bad werewolf?”
“Haven’t you listened to a word I said? He was cursed. When he turns, he gets the moon sickness and can’t control himself. That’s why he lives way out here in the swamp. If he sees us coming before nightfall, he’ll just run away.”
“And after nightfall?”
Odilon harumphed. “You better be ready for a fight.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence, me preparing spells and Odilon picking a careful path through the swamp. As we walked, I considered what Maman Brigitte had told me.
‘The Rougarou was once friends with Saint Germain. If the vampire is back, he’ll surely check in on his old friend. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch him there. But if not, Jean-Michel should know where to find him.’
To be honest, I was pissed about getting such a sketchy plan from Maman Brigitte. For a goddess, I’d really expected more from her—like a map with a big “X” on it, or a magical homing device that would lead me right to Germain’s hideout. I sure as hell hadn’t thought I’d have to beat the vamp’s location out of some super-thrope, that was for certain. As far as I was concerned, she could find some other putz to take her granddaughter to the voodoo cotillion ball if this didn’t work.
Odilon stopped, raising a fist in the air as he crouched low to the ground. I came up alongside him, crouching down as well. He pointed toward a wisp of smoke drifting up through the trees ahead. I cast a cantrip to enhance my senses, and the smell of woodsmoke, tobacco, and gumbo plucked at my olfactory receptors—along with the stench of old blood and rotten flesh.
It wasn’t quite dark yet, so I tapped Odilon on the shoulder and turned my palms up in the universal gesture for, What now?
He tapped at his wrist, then pulled a rain poncho out of a fanny pack, spreading it out on the ground next to the trunk of a black tupelo. My guide sat and leaned his head back against the tree, pulling his hat down over his eyes. Within less than a minute, his breathing became slow and rhythmic.
Well, great. I guess I’ll keep watch then.
I’d been nodding off when we heard the first terrifying howl.
Besides coming up with a cantrip to keep the mosquitos away, I had nothing better to do but watch the swamp decompose while we waited for night to fall. I briefly tried meditating so I could tune into the local fauna and use them to monitor the region, but something was blocking me near the cabin, like there was a dead spot around the Rougarou’s home. I could detect no sentient life within a hundred yards of the place—not even the supposed inhabitant.
I reached out to shake Odilon awake.
He whispered before my hand reached him. “What do you want?”
“I’ve been using druid magic to try to monitor the cabin, and I can’t detect a thing there, especially not a human.”
“That’s the bokor’s black magic at work. Trust me, he’s there. Now, let me sleep.”
After that, I sat and watched and waited until the monotonous whine of the cicadas and mosquitoes lulled me to sleep. When that first howl veritably shook the swampy forest around us, it startled me into instant alertness.
“Looks like he’s awake—and on the hunt,” Odilon said in a soft voice. “Won’t be hard to find, so you do what you got to do, and I’ll be out there backing you up.”
“No plan, just attack?” I asked.
The old man scowled. “You’re the expert on hunting these creatures, aren’t you? I just study them, mostly.” He let that hang in the air for a couple of beats. “Just don’t shoot any gators. They’re not here to do you any harm.”
“I—huh?” Odilon was already gone, having slipped off into the trees like a swamp ninja.
Fuck. Alright, time to confront the Rougarou.
I had some spells prepped, but earlier I’d decided I’d like to see how plain-old firepower would work on the beast. If that didn’t work, I’d resort to spell craft. If that failed, I’d shift and go hand to claw with him.
Now, to find our furry friend.
Another roar came from the direction of the cabin.
Alrighty then. Here I come.
While I’d been fighting for my life hunting vampires in the Hellpocalypse, I’d managed to amass quite the gun collection inside my Craneskin Bag. It’s amazing what people will leave behind after they’ve been overrun and eaten by a zombie horde, military units included. One of the beauties I’d picked up was an AR-15 modified and chambered in .458 SOCOM, a round with nearly identical ballistics and stopping power to the much larger and scarier-sounding .50 Beowulf round.
Honestly, I wasn’t enough of a gun nerd to know that—some military dude who later got eaten had shared that little tidbit with me. All I knew was the rifle spat out big-ass bullets that punched holes in bodies like a freaking disintegration ray. I’d seen it rip softball-sized chunks of flesh from a vamp’s torso, so I figured it’d probably slow down our super-thrope, too.
I pulled the black gun from my Bag, slapped a thirty-round drum on it, and chambered a round. The drum made it heavy, but the weight was nothing to me in my stealth-shifted mode. I clicked the fire selector to full-auto and headed toward the cabin.
Since I was shooting at night, I’d chosen to rely on a vision-enhancing cantrip and open sights instead of using a night-vision optic. I could acquire a sight picture quicker with open sights anyway, and as fast as a ’thrope could move, I’d rather have the slight edge in speed than target visibility. I snuck through the marshy forest with the rifle shouldered, sighting down the barrel and scanning the trees as I went.
Bingo.
Rustling and snuffling from up ahead alerted me to the presence of my prey. While I couldn’t see the Rougarou yet, it sounded more like a grizzly moving around than a ’thrope. Creeping closer to the cabin clearing, I rounded a tree and sighted in on the biggest fucking werewolf I’d ever seen.
Hole-lee shit.
The Rougarou was down on all fours, sniffing the ground like a wolf on the scent. Then, he stood up on his hind legs, revealing himself to be well over eight feet tall. Either Jean-Michel was a giant of a man, or the bokor had shot him up with steroids when he’d cursed him.
Now I know why everyone is so scared of this thing.
The creature’s fur was shaggier than a normal lycanthrope, black and matted with what looked like dried blood and swamp detritus. He was in the classic half-man, half-wolf form, bipedal but with huge claws and long teeth set into an elongated, lupine jaw and snout. The Rougarou was muscular, but lean and built for speed. As he balanced on his reverse-jointed legs, I couldn’t help but admire what a magnificent and terrible beast he was.
Then, he turned and looked at me. Maybe he’d caught my scent, or I’d shifted my weight and snapped a twig. I couldn’t honestly recall, because one moment I was observing the damned creature, and the next he was bounding on all fours at me like a freight train.
Understandably, I opened
up on the fucker.
In the lighter AR-15 platform, the .458 SOCOM round kicks like a motherfucking mule. However, I was able to keep the muzzle down with my enhanced strength and mass in my stealth-shifted form. By my estimation, at least twenty out of my thirty rounds hit the wolf as he bore down on me.
Chunks of flesh and splinters of bone flew from the creature, spattering thick black blood on nearby vegetation as each shot hit its mark. And yet, the beast barely faltered as the heavy, hard-hitting rounds did their work, chewing away at him like a school of piranhas on a drowning cow.
By the time the beast was on top of me, he looked like a wet, fur-covered tatterdemalion. He’d lost maybe a third of his mass as the bullets carved jagged, cavernous paths through his body. One of the rounds had even taken a chunk from his skull, revealing ruined gray matter bordered by white bone that glistened in the pale moonlight.
How is he even still moving?
Before I could answer my own question, the Rougarou tore the rifle from my grasp and sent it sailing into the swamp. Damn it, I liked that gun. I had no time for remorse, because I was flying through the air a split-second later, the result of a backhanded blow from the beast that felt like a cannonball striking me in the chest.
I bounced off a giant cypress, discovering that the folds and creases in the trunk of said species made for a shitty landing pad. I heard ribs crack, then gravity took over and I fell some fifteen feet to the ground. “Oof,” was about all I managed to say as I hit the dirt below with the wind knocked clean out of me.
In this state, my Fomorian lungs and physiology could go without oxygen for several minutes with little ill effect, but the amount of time I could stay in this partially-shifted form was limited. Back in the Hellpocalypse, I’d managed to hold my stealth-shifted form for up to an hour, but it had taken a toll on me to do so. And if I had to fully shift, being in this state beforehand reduced the length of time I could hold my larger, fully-Fomorian form.
I was beginning to suspect I’d need to completely Hulk out to take Jean-Michel down, and I needed to do it fast if that was the case. The last thing I wanted was to be in a prolonged fight with the Rougarou, then collapse due to magical and physical exhaustion while the fight was still on. I only allowed myself a moment’s respite, willing my diaphragm to stop spasming so I could take a decent breath and get on with the fight.
The clock is ticking, Colin. Move!
It’d take me several seconds to finish the shift, so I needed a distraction to give my Hyde-side time to come out and play. I wobbled to my feet just as the giant ’thrope came at me in a rush to finish me off. His wounds were already nearly healed and he looked fresh, which kind of put a damper on my plans to use magic to defeat him. Yet all I needed was a momentary diversion, something to keep him busy while I made the shift—and magic might just do the trick.
I reached into my Bag for the first surprise of many I’d prepared while in the Hellpocalypse.
At the last moment, I spun out of the way, tossing a small semi-spherical object at the Rougarou’s head. Six months of surviving against overwhelming odds with limited resources had taught me a lot, and one thing I’d learned quickly was how to take down a ’thrope, fast. Since I hadn’t always had silver rounds on hand—I’d run out of what I’d had the first week, and good silver hadn’t always been easy to come by in an apocalypse—I went for the next best thing.
Fire.
The glass bulb burst on impact, and a sticky, viscous liquid soaked the beast’s fur. Light bulbs were the most fragile container I could easily find in that hellhole, and one that would shatter and release a payload nearly every single time. It would never have worked if I’d had to carry them on my person, but my Craneskin Bag kept them intact until I needed them. The hardest part about turning them into Molotovs was cutting the foot contact off without breaking the glass. After that, it was just a matter of filling them and plugging the hole with melted wax and duct tape.
The combination of gasoline, kerosene, dish soap, and dissolved styrofoam splashed all over the Rougarou’s head. A spark flew from my hand, igniting the solution so the ’thrope’s head burst into flames. The beast roared in fury at being momentarily blinded. I hoped like hell his senses of smell and hearing would be greatly diminished as well.
I backpedaled away from the creature, getting enough space so he couldn’t easily locate me while I shifted. I tore off my clothes along the way, shoving them inside my Bag. No way I’m messing these clothes up—not after what I paid for them. Once I’d stripped down to my skivvies, I triggered the shift.
Like every time I’d done this, I knew that shifting as fast as I could would be a living hell. First, my skeleton would thicken and lengthen, splitting my skin and tearing muscle and tendon from bone as I gained two feet in height in seconds. Then, my muscles and sinews would catch up, healing and reattaching themselves while they doubled in mass and density. My skin would follow suit next, repairing the bleeding rents left earlier in the transformation while transmuting into something akin to rhinoceros skin—thick, rough, and nearly bullet-proof.
And while this was happening, my body would become twisted and misshapen, grotesque and malformed. Every time I shifted, I developed a huge kyphotic hump in my shoulders, the result of a knot in my spine that caused me to hunch like a larger, uglier version of Quasimodo, with one shoulder always higher than the other. My right hand would become almost club-like, with my forearm, fingers, and palm swelling until the whole limb became a Morningstar made of flesh and bone. My left hand, however, always warped into a claw-like appendage, with long, sinewy fingers that ended in sharp nails I knew could tear through skin and muscle like a hot knife through butter.
Finally, my face and skull would change to ensure my visage was as terrifying as the rest of me. My jaw would widen and lengthen, giving me a mug reminiscent of Lockjaw from those eighties He-Man cartoons. In much the same manner, my teeth would grow into long, jagged rows of yellowed ivory, reminiscent of the Dolomites and pretty much an orthodontist’s nightmare. And finally, my brow would jut out from my forehead as my beady, dark eyes recessed, obviously serving function over form to protect the most vulnerable and exposed organs this mangled form possessed.
When the change triggered on its own, it happened almost instantaneously. That near-instant change was presumably the product of genetically-encoded survival mechanisms, and it was a phenomenon that had saved my bacon on multiple occasions. Partial shifts were easy as well—especially “stealth-shifting,” since it didn’t require an increase in mass or size. Plus, I’d gotten better at it with practice during my time in the Hellpocalypse.
But the fastest I could completely shift into my full Fomorian form was just a hair under twenty seconds. And while I made that change, I was understandably preoccupied and fairly vulnerable, as least until the process was complete.
Thus, I lost track of the giant ’thrope as soon as I started to shift.
I was only halfway through the process when the Rougarou rose from the waters of the swamp not ten feet in front of me, the flames from the napalm extinguished and his eyes and fur almost fully healed. The creature sighted in on me immediately, bursting out of the water in a massive leap that would bring him right on top of me, well before I completed my transformation.
Well, this is going to suck.
12
Time seemed to slow, and I watched helplessly as the Rougarou descended upon me, arms outstretched and slavering jaws spread wide. Clearly, the beast intended to rip me limb from limb as soon as he landed, and I had full confidence that was exactly what was about to happen.
Just as I’d resigned myself to a very unpleasant and bloody demise, a huge crocodilian head snatched the creature from the air, clamping its jaws down before flinging the ’thrope away across the clearing. My eyes followed the trajectory of the Rougarou’s flight, then I looked back to take in this new potential threat.
Standing in front of me was a creature that was not wholly reptilian
and not wholly man. The monster was covered in skin that was thick, scaled, and marked just like a gator from the bayou. It had the head of an alligator on top of a humanoid body and a thick, ridged tail that was nearly as long as the rest of it. Although it stood seven feet tall balanced on its hind legs and tail, it had to be twenty feet long from nose to tail.
The crocothrope opened its massive jaws, and a harsher, deeper version of Odilon’s voice came out.
“You might want to hurry up, druid. I don’t think I can hold him off for long.”
The wolfman came loping out of the swamp at speed, colliding with Odilon in an apparent attempt to tackle this new threat. The crocothrope managed to stay upright by bracing himself with his tail, but that didn’t keep the werewolf from ripping and tearing at the alligator man with tooth and claw. Soon, the two of them were locked in mortal combat, each grappling for dominance as claws struck and jaws snapped in an effort to disembowel or exsanguinate the other.
In the few short seconds it took to complete my transformation, it was clear that Odilon was engaged in a losing battle. While he had the advantage in size and the sheer massiveness of his jaws, the Rougarou had the edge in speed and reach. The crocothrope put up a good fight, but he could never seem to lock his teeth on Jean-Michel’s body. Every single time Odilon snapped at the were, the beast would slip out of the way, leaving the crocothrope to snap at empty air while taking a vicious claw swipe across the snout.
By the time I stood, Odilon’s face had been shredded and he’d been blinded in one eye as well.
“Feel free to jump in any time now, Druid,” he croaked in his deep, crocodilian voice.
“Don’t mind if I do,” I growled.
I ran at Odilon’s back, attempting to stay in his shadow and the wolf man’s blind spot as I entered the fray. Of course, the Rougarou spotted me coming anyway, and he kicked the crocothrope in the chest, causing him to stumble into my path. I had anticipated the move. Instead of tripping over my companion, I stepped on his thigh, then on his shoulder, running over him Jackie Chan-style in order to leap on our opponent.