Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space

by Brandon Getz

  “I saw it,” Lars said. “You’re right—they were shitty. Know who else’s family was shitty? Everybody’s. And yeah, the witch fed you a line, probably one she thought you needed to hear. But the planet seems to be doing okay. Fish here says it’s just shy of vamptopia—everybody’s getting what they need.”

  “I saw them. The people.” She was looking at the rows of armor like they were about to come to life and zombie shuffle. “The vortex dropped me in the city, near the edge. Even with the new towers and the wall holding back the sea, I still knew my way home from the shore. The streets still follow the same paths. Maybe you’re right, Lars—maybe everyone is getting all the blood they need, each with a coffin in a high-rise and free medicine and a job to do in town. But there’s still suffering here. Still sickness, still those who are forgotten and left behind.”

  “That’s life, Jay. In this universe or any other. Even the best of us can’t save everyone.” He stepped forward, hair on his neck bristling as his boot touched the haunting carpet. The gaslight holograms in the bone chandeliers were beginning to flicker, and darkness rose from the empty armor like the shadows of ghosts. For all its amusement-park artifice and museum sheen, Sangre City was a tomb, a place of death—and Lars was feeling more than a little creeped out. “Why not put the sword down, forget the whole vengeance thing, and let’s all go get a beer? Pour one out for the old king and queen.”

  Shadows flared from her breastplate, and Jay’s galaxy eyes turned hard.

  “Are you kidding?” she said. “I can still save this planet. I can rule the way I always imagined my father did. I can be better than he ever was.”

  “That ain’t just vengeance, that’s regime change. You’re gonna need an army for that.”

  “Not an army,” Jay said. “I told you before: just you.”

  Lars shook his head and scratched his beard. That’s all they ever said, Jay and the Hand—they needed only him. For what? He wasn’t a fucking one-man battalion. He was a werewolf. There was a big-ass difference.

  “I’m just one guy with fur and some teeth,” he said. “And I’m fucking done. I coulda used the neg, and it’s been great getting into all kinds of life-threatening shenanigans with you on this little mission—but it’s high time for me to get back to my ship, pop a cold one, and fuck off into the black. Adios, sayonara, so on and so forth. Now, if you could just bust out that puzzle box, give it a turn, and let Fish and me warp back to the big fat starry-skied universe we know and love, we’ll owe you a round. Top shelf, no well stuff.”

  Jay’s broadsword crackled with blue electric.

  “I can’t do that, Lars.”

  “Can’t because you lost the box—or won’t because you’re gonna make us do this the hard way.”

  Bringing the sword up to grip it with both hands, the vampire princess allowed herself a smirk—Lars could almost see her razor teeth.

  “Won’t.”

  Chapter LII

  Jay struck first. From the corpse on the floor, ropes of blood snaked wickedly for Fish and Lars as the princess sprinted through the rows of empty soldiers. As she moved, her armor cloaked her body in darkness and left shadow clones in her wake, each Jay-shade darting in its own random path before dissipating into smoke. The bloodropes lashed at Lars’ arms and ankles and wound themselves around Fish’s paisley torso. Gears whined, and the amphibian’s sword wings unfolded, cutting through the blood. Another rope came for him, but Fish sliced with his laser chainsaw, the bright orange blade sizzling as the blood lost its hex and splattered. Ropes coiled Lars’ left boot and pulled—until the wolfman pulled the trigger on one of the shotguns, and a solid silver-alloy slug cut through blood and blew a glittering hole in the strange carpet. Jay was on him then, a bloodwall ahead of her like riot shield. Lars managed one warning shot, the slug sticking wetly before the wall dropped and the broadsword slashed electric from her darkness. Metal clanked metal as the wolfman caught the blade in the sawed-off’s trigger guard.

  Through gritted teeth, the princess said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Color me convinced,” Lars said.

  He pushed hard on the sword. The smell of all the vamp blood was making the wolf in him hungry. Jay’s pale face, all rage, flickered into focus between roiling shadows, and Lars knew that if he didn’t duck away soon, one of them was gonna end up snuffed. He skidded sideways and dropped his gun, listening to it clatter as Jay stumbled. She fell forward, off balance from the sudden lack of pushback, and Lars punched into the dark, landing a softened blow somewhere in her guts. She slowed for a moment—but it was enough. With the three moons shining in from the skylight, the virus in his veins was soaked in lunar juice. He changed rapidly, fur sprouting and bones refitting, flesh mutating from man to beast. Straps broke; weapons clattered to the floor. Lars Breaxface, Werewolf in Space, dropped to all fours, snarled, and howled at the moons.

  Mid-howl, a bloodrope surged from the shadows of Jay’s armor, noosed his throat, tightening to a strangle. Served his ass right for the horrorshow theatrics. He ripped at the rope with both claws, but the gore was thick, and kept pulsing. Overhead, the hologram lanterns began to glitch, casting the room in gaslight stroboscopics, or maybe he was just losing consciousness. Then a flash of orange, and he was heaving breath, his neck free, Fish gliding over him on those ridiculous wings, pyrotechnic chainsaw hand raging.

  “Okay,” the werewolf coughed. “Truce.”

  Shadows moved among shadows among shadows. Between Jay and the rows of guard armor, clouds of hexed darkness were swirling the room.

  “I can’t let you leave, Lars,” came Jay’s voice. “I can’t kill you either.”

  Then another voice, the familiar rasp of an old woman who’d been smoking since she bought her first training bra:

  “But he doesn’t need all of his limbs.”

  And through the blood he could smell her: patchouli oil, morning breath, the dust of the desert in her dry skin.

  The darkness began to clear, shadows slipping back into plate and mail. Jay stood at the foot of the throne with her sword still raised. Lars followed her gaze—to find Auntie Hand and Frank filling an arched doorway. The Hand hobbled in, leaning on one of Frank’s outstretched branches.

  “Go ahead,” she said, “cut off a leg or two.”

  “Auntie . . .” Jay started.

  The old witch held up her wooden hand. “I’m sorry, little bug. That I told you so many fictions. But,” the witch’s eyes flashed, “I needed you to get here. To be strong. This is the first step to restoring the throne, with you as rightful heir.”

  “They were horrible,” Jay said, sword beginning to waver. “They killed so many people.”

  “Don’t be such a bleeding heart,” muttered the witch. “They did what they had to. What they could do. They ruled this world. You don’t conquer a planet with benevolence—you conquer it with fear.”

  Auntie Hand, squinting through her red lenses, dragged Frank into the chamber. The tremuloid looked at Lars, and his eyes, what eyes were left, seemed filled with apology. As best he could with wolf claws, Lars offered a conciliatory thumbs-up. Fuck it, he wanted to say, we all have our roles to play. The werewolf growled as the witch leaned in to inspect Jay, the two vamps dwarfed by the throne wall’s immense hellscape relief.

  “Your mother’s armor,” Hand said approvingly. “Fits you well.”

  “I should kill you,” Jay said. She held the broadsword in strike pose, but her face had drained of anger. She looked the frightened orphan she’d been when Hand smuggled her out of that castle all those years before.

  “Don’t,” Lars said. “Turn the key—we can go. Leave the witch here.”

  Jay’s grip tightened, and she drew the sword up—and slid it into its sheath.

  “Good girl,” said Auntie Hand. She turned to look at Lars and the knife-winged Fishman. “Now, let’s get on with it. I’m sure one of us has tripped an alarm, and it’s only a matter of time before the peasant police make
their way into this sanctum. Frank, can you please?”

  The tree covered the ground between himself and Lars with surprising speed. Perhaps he hadn’t been so wounded by the sea serpents after all—or more likely, the Hand had done her healing hoodoo again, same as she had on Cairn, a trade to do her bidding. As Frank tangled the werewolf in every grasping limb he had, Lars didn’t give a fuck how the tremuloid had regained his strength—the wolf just wanted free from it. Wood creaked as he wrestled against the restraints. He heard Fish utter a weak battle cry and felt the heat of the laser chainsaw, then: the gust of a snaking tree branch and the hard thunk of a cyborg amphibian hitting stone.

  “Fuck is this, Frank?” Lars growled. “I gave you my beer, man.”

  “There are sometimes more important things than beer,” said the witch. She was busy feeling along the wall of the hellscape with her diviner hand, patting the asses of beasts and demons until she came to the right section and pressed the tongue of a lupine monster. White light glowed from her clockwork palm, and above the throne a chunk of the wall burned away, revealing an orb of black rock.

  Ah shit, Lars thought as his blood began to writhe in his veins. His shoulders strained against Frank’s hold, and he could hear the wood begin to splinter. That ain’t just some rock.

  He could feel it flooding him, blood burning: The mother lode of moon juice.

  “The Dark Moon,” Auntie Hand said. “The heart of our fourth satellite, harvested and imbued with the negative energy of our sun, according to the rites of prophecy.”

  The rock—the Dark Moon—spun on an invisible axis, glowing in a miasma of pulsing violet light. Frank’s grasp was beginning to give. Lars felt the wolf taking over, red blur closing in his peripheral vision. All that remained in focus were the Dark Moon and Auntie Hand. The werewolf howled. A branch burst with a boom, then another, raining sap and splinters across the sanctum. Frank dropped the wolf, limbs recoiling in distress, Lars launching bloodthirsty and moondrunk toward the old witch.

  Chapter LII

  Budge’s ink worked its magic. Against the otherworldly force of the Dark Moon, the minotaur monk’s tattoo-bound spells seared through the arcane designs on Lars’ arms and abdomen, fighting to keep the mercenary’s wolf-self in check. The Dark Moon still pulled, but the monk’s hex-ink held, funneling energy from fists to chest, from claws to lungs, centering, and the red blur dissipated from the edges of his vision. Lars felt himself take control, tension leaving his jaws and fingers. At the foot of the throne, he skidded to a stop in a hail of splinters and tree sap and snarled at Auntie Hand.

  “Fuck your prophecy,” he said. Behind him, Frank was twitching in pain, a couple of ragged stumps bleeding amber sap where his limbs had exploded, and Lars felt like a real asshole for doing the exploding. But Frank had plenty more branches on his old, scarred-up trunk, and Jay had her gloved hand outstretched, already pushing sap back into the wounds. Lars shook his head in half-apology. He couldn’t slow down now. He had a universe to get back to.

  Wooden claw crackling, the witch stood under the whirling Dark Moon and busied herself with some detail of the hellish bas-relief. Some old stone tongue or fingernail. She didn’t seem at all

  concerned about the werewolf stalking up the stairs behind her. Lars glanced back, hoping to see Fish at his heels with the laser saw charged. Instead, the amphibian was crumpled in a paisley heap against the far wall. Gills flapped lazily on his neck, and his bulbous eyes were sealed shut. Lars was on his own. The Dark Moon made his blood boil in his veins, and he had to clench his teeth to swallow the bloodlust. Heart of a moon hexed with nega-sun, he thought. Swallow the sun and moon . . . Fuck that. He wasn’t swallowing anything. He was getting that key from Jay and wormholing off this rock. The planet’s proletarian revolutionaries had taken care of bloodthirsty monarchs once, let them do it again. He wasn’t anybody’s hero.

  “Jay . . .” he said. “The key. The box. Use it.”

  The warrior princess kept her soldierly poise behind the throne of fangs.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  Lars loomed over her, shoulders hunched and bristling. Saliva dripped from his teeth and pooled on the seat of the throne. “Let me go,” he growled. “Fuck your mission. Kill ‘em all, I don’t care. But you do it on your own.”

  “When the world is in its twilight,” came Hand’s voice, as if reciting scripture, “the great beast will rend the sky, and violet fire will burn out its eyes. The beast will swallow sun and moon, and serpents will consume the rest in darkness.”

  The old witch hobbled toward him slowly, her robes emitting their trademark jingle. Even plotting the deaths of millions, she still seemed so much the grandmother. The Big Bad Wolf wearing Grandmother’s face. Lars shook his head and snarled. He’d had enough of the witch and her hocus-pocus. It’d been too long since he’d had a meal, and just then the Hand looked like four feet of witch jerky. He could feel the Dark Moon’s power flowing through him, zigzagging the network of tattoos like a circuit. He was as strong a werewolf as he’d ever been, no Dys-7 bullshit, no berserker mode, no lunar-battery weak sauce. He was Wolf—and he was going to eat that witch’s throat out.

  Lars leapt. Then dropped right out of the air.

  He hit the stone hard, pain blazing as one of the crystal teeth of the throne pierced his left leg. He shook his head, dazed, and standing over him was the Hand, Jay subserviently behind her.

  “The . . . fuck?” he heaved. He tried to swipe for the witch’s legs, but he couldn’t move.

  “Pay attention, beast,” Hand said. Rustling her robes, she knelt beside his head, leaned her face close to his, and sniffed. “You forget too easily. Do you remember how I held your blood back on that grub bitch’s planet?” She grinned at him like she was debating whether to eat now or take a doggy bag. “In my hands, your veins are puppet strings.”

  Once again, he wished he was back in Sheila’s pilot seat beating off into a tube sock and staring out at a sea of stars. He’d followed Jay on her righteous mission because it promised a paycheck and he didn’t have shit else to do. But shit else was looking pretty good right now—anything anywhere, even a stilt-shack in his shithole town on his shithole home planet, with a brood of kids and a wife with no teeth. At least he’d be alive. His heart was beating like the double bass in a speed metal tune. You were right, Budge. This shit’s gonna kill me. He felt the fingertips of the diviner hand press against his chest, and the wood was cold, even through his fur. As the fingers pulsed with electric sorcery, the hair across his body stood on end.

  “Ink-based hex,” the Hand scoffed. “Amateur work. Looks like a wild animal did this.”

  He felt it first in his wrists, the tight binds of Budge’s tattoo voodoo loosening. The witch lifted the diviner, and he saw the ink flowing out of him, a growing ball of black liquid swirling in the magic grip of the clockwork hand. There would be nothing to keep the Dark Moon’s energy from overpowering him now—nothing to keep the wolf at bay.

  “Fish,” Lars shouted, struggling. He couldn’t move an inch. Flash frozen, neck to tail, from the inside, he might as well have been blasted with a Medusa beam. “Fish—could use some laser action here.”

  “Your guppy is out cold,” said the Hand as she shuffled toward the Dark Moon. The ink that had been his binding tattoos spattered across the stone floor, oozing into cracks. “And you,” she spat at Lars, “there are rodents in the sewers beneath this castle who’ve got more brains. But you’re what my princess dredged up from the cesspool of that cancerous universe, and you’re the only weapon I’ve got to teach these rebel scum who the really owns this planet. Now, with that pathetic hexcraft out of the way . . .”

  Auntie Hand’s crimson eyes gleamed behind their lenses. Her clockwork claw whirred as she reached toward the Dark Moon, into it, breaching its rock and pulling out a black shard pulsing with sparks of purple. For a moment, she looked at it, frowning, and Lars wondered if maybe she’d messed up her sacred prophecy, busted up
her holy Dark Moon.

  “I was a young girl when this spell was cast,” the Hand said. “Can you imagine it? I was younger than you, little bug.” She nodded absently toward Jay, then stood over the frozen Lars. “I was a knockout back then. My tits were fabulous.”

  “Bet they still clean up nice,” Lars croaked. He felt himself beginning to lose control, swelling with the Dark Moon’s super-juice. It wouldn’t be long before he was full-on beast—a rabid animal seeing red. Again, Hand hunched over him. The shard sparked. She waved her flesh hand over his snout, and the veins inside obeyed. His mouth splayed wide. Drool soaked the fur on the sides of his face.

  “They do,” the witch said, and pressed the shard of Dark Moon into the werewolf’s gaping mouth.

  Chapter LIV

  The taste of the rock was live wires and cigarette ash. As the witch dangled the shard of Dark Moon between his jaws, his tongue burned, his teeth thrummed, and frothy spit pooled in his throat, choking. At the edges of his vision, the red berserker blur crept inward.

  “Wait.” Jay’s voice came from some corner of the room. “Auntie, stop.”

  Auntie Hand snatched the rock from his mouth and whipped to face the princess. “Stop? Little bug, I’m doing this for you. This animal . . .” She sneered at Lars. “This loaf of hair is the weapon of prophecy. You said it yourself, my princess—you looked all over that sick universe to find it. We have the weapon. When Imperium falls, the rest of the cities will cower.”

  “I don’t trust him.” Jay was standing over him, glaring. “Like you said, he’s a wild animal. He just tried to kill me. What do you think he’ll do if we make him a monster and let him loose?”

  “The prophecy—”

  Jay shook her head. “The prophecy is wrong. We don’t need the beast,” she said, staring down at the frozen werewolf. “We only need his blood.”

  The Hand looked at him over her red lenses, a shark-toothed grin spreading across her scarred and sallow face. Lars choked back more spit. Jay was right—not that he’d tried to kill her, but that he goddamn would the second they set him free. Shared my beer, my bed, my tunes, my starcruiser . . . Just to get stabbed in the back by this whole fucking crew. Jay, Frank, Hand . . . Even Fish had slashed him with that laser-saw back at the mansion. His friends, or the nearest approximation he’d had in a long time, since Budge or maybe earlier: since the crew of the salvager, who’d saved his life and in turn had been a werewolf’s lunch. He reminded himself: This was why he rolled solo. Lone wolf. You couldn’t trust anybody, in this universe or the next.