by Brandon Getz
The witch snatched the shard away and let him close his mouth. He coughed and growled, teeth still vibrating from the Dark Moon’s electric. He wanted nothing more than to eat the vampires’ hearts out, their livers, maybe floss with their intestines and wash it all down with a keg of dark beer. As he imagined clamping his jaws on the witch’s wrinkled neck, she spread her razor mouth wide—and clamped her jaws on his. Rows of jagged teeth found their way through fur and skin to arteries throbbing with adrenaline and wolf blood. He again tried to move, to lash out or pull away, but all he could do was lie like a frozen slab of beef as the vampire witch drained him. His heart slowed. His fingertips grew cold, then his arms. His tail was numb. As his lycanthropic blood pulsed into the witch’s mouth, he felt the pull of the Dark Moon subside, the red blur receding, hands snapping back into human fists. Little Red Riding Hood in reverse: This time it was Granny ate the Wolf.
“That’s enough,” Jay said. “Don’t suck him dry. We may still need him.”
Auntie Hand dropped the wolfman and stood, shard of Dark Moon still in her claw. Gore caked her face from nose to chin. “Princess . . . little bug . . .” The witch’s breathing strained. She struggled with the words. In the silence of the throne hall, Lars could hear the cracking of her bones. “I am your servant . . . always . . . This was all . . . for you. To be—who you were meant to be. My queen.”
Hand’s freeze spell began to loosen, but drained of so much blood, Lars could still hardly move. He watched as the witch, bones twitching beneath her loose and weathered skin, opened her mouth and dropped the fragment of Dark Moon down her own throat. She swallowed with ceremony—and the blood of the wolf, now flowing through her veins, took over.
Swallow the sun and moon . . . Lars thought. Well, this is gonna be shit show.
Jay was backing away, a look of horror on her face. From far off, Fish was shouting—screaming. Under the whirling Dark Moon, long thatches of ghost-white fur began to sprout across the witch’s skin. Fur stretched across her scarred face as bones broke apart inside, reforming into a vicious snout jagged with yellow razor-teeth. The witch hunched and grew, tail lashing, robes jangling until they tore. As the white fur spread down the scars of her arms, her good hand shifted and lengthened into a bestial claw—and the hand beneath the clockwork diviner re-grew. The stump regenerated into a second wolf claw, and the diviner’s straps strained and broke, the old wooden prosthetic falling hollowly to the stone floor. In the triple moonlight, the wolfed-out witch stamped her foot and howled, the stone beasts behind her pathetic facsimiles of the yeti-furred vamp-wolf hulking beside the throne. As she howled, her cosmic eyes glowed electric, wild and bulging, before bursting in a spray of sparks and light, and in their place burned the purple energy of the Dark Moon.
Even as she stood, the Hand Wolf grew, swelling with nega-lunar power. She towered taller than Lars ever had, growing still, eyes burning and fur bristling. The witch had chosen the form of the Destructor, and it wouldn’t be Mr. Stay Puft—it would be her own damn self, as a giant alien were-beast. The plan had gone off just as Budge had said, except it wasn’t Lars gone super-wolf—on Jay’s suggestion, the witch had switcheroo’ed that little piece of prophecy. The Big Bad Wolf would bring the wolfpocalypse . . . it just wasn’t gonna be Lars Breaxface. Now the old vampire witch, juiced up on his blood and Dark Moon magic, was what she’d wanted all along: A living weapon to terrorize her planet.
“Freeze!” someone was shouting. Someone else: “Oh gods . . . what is that?”
Out of the tunnelways, the Johnny-come-lately Imperium community police had made their way to the throne room. Four volunteer peace officers in threadbare uniforms, not a gun among them. One clung desperately to an electrified lasso—the others had nothing but their empty hands. Jay was already drawing her broadsword but seemed unsure of whom it was meant to skewer: cops or monsters.
Lars called hoarsely, “Get the fuck out of here!” But the cops, either by blood magic or pure terror, were frozen in place. The Hand Wolf roared and leapt, clearing the length of the room in an instant, knocking over suits of shadow armor that smoked as they fell. A bite through the throat of one officer. Another decapitated by the swipe of a claw. The other two, fleeing, and Frank valiantly attempting to wrangle the wolf-witch, only to lose two more limbs to her gnashing teeth. Sap and splinters rained, and the Hand Wolf barreled into the tunnels of the castle, white fur turning black with vampire blood. As she disappeared, screams echoed—and the howls of the wolf-witch faded into the distant noise of the city.
Chapter LV
Lars crawled to his feet. He felt like a freeze-dried zombie, death-flavored astronaut ice cream, but even half drained of blood, the werewolf virus was at work healing its host. The bite on his neck was sealing over with new skin, and blood cells were replicating, filling up his desiccated veins. He shook his head, scratched at the rags on his chest, and yelped at the pain. He looked down and his mind suddenly cleared: his left still human, but his right arm—his right arm was werewolf. The bones cracked and recracked under his tattooed skin, shifting back and forth between wolf and man. Ah, fuck . . . Somehow his wolf-self was on the fritz. Fine time for his blood to glitch—when there was a giant alien werewolf vampire witch monster on the loose. He knew the witch had caused it. The draining of his viral blood had left his power all out of whack in a way he’d never felt before. The wolf virus was clamoring to fix itself.
Jay stood dumbly with her sword out. Fish had stopped screaming. Frank was stuffing leaves against his wounds to stop the sap from hemorrhaging. Lars grabbed one of his silver-loaded sawed-offs from the floor and, in one fluid motion, had its barrel a sword-length from Jay’s throat.
“Gimme one reason not to blow your fucking head off.”
Jay let her sword blade drop. Her eyes were still on the tunnel where the Hand Wolf had escaped. “I just saved your life, for one.”
Lars’ grip tightened on the shotgun. His hand metamorphosed around the stock, but he kept his trigger finger steady. “Fuck you did. You played me. Recruited me on your little mission just to have the Wicked Witch of the Beast turn me into some monster. You didn’t want a massacre—you wanted B-movie Armageddon.”
“You’re half right,” Jay said, “You were just a means to an end. A way to punish my family’s killers and take back my throne.” The warrior princess shifted her gaze to the uniformed corpses on the floor. “Auntie wants to destroy everything. I thought she wanted justice for my family, but she doesn’t—she wants the end of the world, and for me to rule over its ashes.”
“No shit. That’s your wolfpocalypse prophecy at work,” said Lars. “Wolf eats up the sun and moon and everything, serpents take care of whatever’s left. Ragnarok-’n’-roll.”
“I want to save my people, Lars. I need you to help me do it.”
Lars sniffed. She was sweating, and he liked the smell. The scent of fresh blood from the corpses was making him a little hungry, too. He blinked and tried to focus on the gun. “Shit, why didn’t you just cut her head off while she was still just a little old lady in a bedazzled muumuu? Cosmic Christ, now she’s a fucking werewolfasaurus.”
“I don’t know.” The ornate scar on her chest rose and fell quickly as she breathed. She said, “I couldn’t kill her looking like that. Like the woman who raised me. But that,” she gestured toward the tunnel, “that monster, I can kill. I just can’t do it alone.”
“You’re not going to kill anybody,” Fish shouted from across the throne room. He was up on his sword wings, hanging in the air like a frog-headed angel. “You’re gonna be thirteen slices of princess sashimi.” He charged through the air, chainsaw ablaze. With a grunt, Lars swung the shotgun away from Jay—and aimed it at the flying amphibian.
“Not yet, Fishman,” Lars said, brandishing the barrel. He then shouldered the shotgun and turned back to Jay. “We help you with your monster problem, you give us that key. And throw in as much neg as we can carry. Maybe one of these fuckin’ shadow su
its too. It’d look good in Sheila’s hold. I could put a bottle opener on it or something.”
“Anything you want,” said the princess.
Fish squawked, “Just kill her, you ape! Take the key! You want to get mauled by her grandmother or whatever? That crazy wolf-thing that just stormed out of here? It’s coming back, I promise you. It’ll kill all of us. We’ll be monster food—a Breaxface breakfast with a side of Fish sticks.”
“You won’t find it,” Jay said. “I hid the key. This armor doesn’t have pockets anyway. Help me save the city—the world—and I’ll give you the box. You can go back home.”
Lars shrugged and shoved the shotgun into the ragged waistband of his ripped fatigues. Gray fur kept growing and shrinking across his tattoos, and his shoulders lurched with wolf-mutation. “You got a deal.”
“Breaxface,” Fish started, “but she—”
“Save it,” the wolfman said. “No other way home, Fish.”
As Frank slunk toward them, still nursing his trunk wounds, a thundering beast-howl cracked across the city and shook the ground beneath their feet.
A shadow fell over the castle. The light of the three moons vanished, and above them, through the skylight, the Hand Wolf lumbered into view—HUGE. Super-kaiju Rita-Repulsa-Make-my-monster-grow ultra-gigantic huge. The apocalypse beast loomed skyscraper high and titanic, fangs as big as houses foaming with waterfalls of bloody spit. White fur crisscrossed with black bleeding wounds as the monster’s skin swelled and split. In what seemed like slow motion, the Handzilla swung a barge-sized claw, and a building burst and crumbled. Neon flashed and shorted, smoke and dust billowed in wild clouds. The Hand Monster’s eyes still burned, each socket a blazing sun of hot white-violet. She turned her massive head down as if seeing through the castle’s skylight, and a long black tongue split her teeth—licking her lips.
Lars thought of Budge’s teaching and the mountains of that moon. The power channeling through his tattoos and surging through his chest. Get your head outta the lilacs, Breaxface. He was a few tattoos short now, all that magic ink just a stain on the floor. Now all he had were Budge’s mutterings, the chants as ancient as the light from dead stars. He muttered a prayer to the Hot Cosmic Jeezus and any other gods in earshot, or hell, really only to himself, a whisper and a mantra to get his shit under control. He couldn’t do this. He needed the tattoos and a beer. That was the only way. Monk spells and malt beverage—he was powerless without them, just what the witch had said, an animal. His body kept shifting. Wolf, man, wolf. In the shadow of the Hand monster, he breathed and remembered the old minotaur’s meditations. The quiet mountains, the smoke of roasting beets. Blackness and nothingness and the geometric music of the infinite universe. Lars remembered. He took another breath, and his bones began to quiet, fitting themselves easily into werewolf form.
He soaked in the three moons and the negasonic magic of the Dark Moon and belted out a full-throated werewolf howl. Among the ruins of the throne room and his beaten and ragged crew of transdimensional companions, Lars grinned a wolfish grin and growled, “Let’s slay us a giant-ass monster.”
Chapter LVI
“So, what’s the plan?”
It was Fish piping up, flashing that neon-orange laser chainsaw hand of his a little too eagerly. They couldn’t see Handzilla anymore; the werewolfosaurus had disappeared behind a half-demolished tower, and anyway the glass of the skylight had been mostly covered with ash and debris from the crumbling buildings. But the ground still shook with her footsteps, making the holo-lantern chandeliers swing and the shadow suits of armor rattle on the castle floor.
Lars shrugged. “Fuck if I know. Punch her, blow her up, shove a rocket-sized stake through her heart. Throw some water on her and watch her melt? Oh, what a world, what a world . . .” The werewolf whirled to face Jay. “Any ideas?”
“I . . .” the princess started. “I don’t know. The prophecies aren’t a roadmap. They only say the beast will tear apart the ground and the sky and then the serpents and darkness, and then fire. The elders never mentioned a killswitch for the apocalypse—they wanted this to happen.”
The castle shook. Inside, it was almost quiet, the Hand Monster’s howls and the city’s destruction distant noise beyond the thick heartstone walls. Lars could only imagine the panic in the streets, the piles of dead and dying. Nothing grander than what a few regular city-busting bombs could accomplish, but infinitely more terrifying. Bombs don’t have teeth, or eyes of violet fire. Bombs don’t laugh and howl when they kill you.
“Well, Fish,” Lars said, “say your prayers to the Frog Mother. ‘Cause this is suicide.”
Lars started for the exit, when Fish squawked, “That’s it!”
Jay and Lars exchange a look. The amphibian was cackling, gill flaps wagging with each staccato intake of breath.
“What’s ‘it’?” Jay said. “Is your Frog God going to hop out of her swamp-heaven to help us?”
“No . . .” Fish said. “No, but the Frog Mother . . . ‘Holy Frog Mother, from whose pond we all have sprung, in whose mouth we shall all be swallowed.’ The prayer, Lars—you remember. The Frog Mother will swallow the world, and then the world will be born again.”
Lars growled, “Fuck is your point?”
Fish’s laser chainsaw flickered away, and the mechanism at the end of his arm whirred and transformed back into a webbed metal hand, pointing at the Dark Moon. “I’m talking about death and rebirth, Lars. Alpha and Omega, right? The cycle of all things. And the cycle of this thing is we have to make the monster swallow that whole magical piece of moon.”
Before Lars or Jay could respond, Fish added, “You saw her skin, right? All those oozy, nasty bits? Gross, really, probably get infected and gangrenous, and then you got a big problem. But what I’m saying is this: The witch’s body can’t handle all that power. Even with your werewolf blood. She’s too big already, just from that little shard she ate. So, what if she eats the whole thing? All that magic . . . pop!”
“Like a frog in a microwave,” Lars said.
Fish choked. “Like . . . what?”
Jay sheathed her broadsword and stepped toward the Dark Moon. Its purple light played across her face, lighting the intricate scars that laced the skin. Lars almost felt guilty for wanting to eat her heart and liver only a few moments before. To be fair, she had let the old witch blood-trap his ass and guzzle on his veins. But seeing the warrior princess beside her throne, in the disco light of that magic moon-heart, he remembered the first time he’d met her, the cat-infested bar on Victor’s Halo, and the brawl with those Siskelian ass-clowns, the run from StatSec, the jaunts across the black in Sheila and the rest of the trouble they’d gotten into. They weren’t family, and they might not’ve even been friends. But they were a team, sort of. A motley crew of mostly losers who were the only hope this planet had of slaying this city-killing monster.
“That’s stupid,” Lars said. “We do it old school—with fists and teeth.”
“No. He’s right, Lars,” Jay said. “I saw it, too. She’s barely holding together.” The princess turned to Fish and nodded toward the Moon. “If this is how we destroy her, how do we get it up there? Cover it in blood and hope she’s hungry for a snack?”
“Let me at it,” Lars said. The werewolf strode up to the whirling Moon. Its energy pulled him, made all the fur on his body stand on end. He snarled, tensed his claws. His fist flickered human, then back to wolf. Think of Budge, you mutt, he thought to himself. Don’t even think that berserker shit. He gritted his teeth and reached for the Dark Moon—only to be blown off his feet, zapped straight through and thrown ten meters into a pile of shadow armor. He landed in a splash of smoky shadow, a hard metal gauntlet poking his grundle.
Fish flipped out his sword wings and soared up to the orb. “Maybe it’s wolf-proof,” he said, smirking. The amphibian reached with his metal hand, only to suffer the same fate as Lars. A surge of energy from the circling stone, zap, and the cyborg fish-man roared overhead, cr
ashing in a heap just beyond Lars’ own landing spot.
“It’s not going to work,” said Jay. “None of us can hold it. Not without help.”
She was looking at something on the stone floor—a severed hand, shriveled and brown. No, not a hand—not really. Lars recognized it then: Auntie Hand’s clockwork prosthetic. The wooden diviner she’d used to pluck the shard of Dark Moon that had made her go full-on super beast. Jay lifted it, inspected it, looked at her own gloved left hand. She shook the glove loose, letting it drop with a small, echoing click. Even her hand was marked with her name: thick curlicues of scar tissue looping over white-white skin, across tendon and bone. “Lars,” she said, “you have to it.”
“Do what?” the werewolf growled.
“Take my hand.”
“Like—hold it?”
“No, motherfucker, I mean cut it off. Bite it. Eat it if you want.”
Fish’s eyes went wide. “Holy Mother, are you nuts? You’re gonna cut your hand off? No way, we you need to do your crazy evil vampire ninja stuff on this monster, okay? Let me tell you what it’s like to lose your hand—it sucks. Yikes,” he muttered, shaking his own prosthetic, “cutting your own hand off. That’s crazy.”