by Brandon Getz
The castle was shaking harder now. Everything rattled, and from the tunnels they heard crashing as museum exhibits fell to the quakes of the Hand Monster’s steps. Cracks webbed across the dirty skylight.
“We don’t have time,” Jay said. She pulled the broadsword from her back and, in a flourish, held it hilt-first toward the wolfman. “Here. If it’s easier.”
Lars swiped the sword away and bit deep into the princess’s wrist. Teeth buried into bone till it crunched, the black hot blood of the vampire spilling across his lips and tongue. It was delicious. Jay grit her fangs in pain but didn’t cry out. She closed her eyes, brow furrowed, and the blood began to slide out of his wolf-mouth, into the wound, coiling like smoke in reverse back into open veins. The hand was just a snack, and Lars chewed it up and swallowed. At the foot of the throne’s steps, Frank, who’d lost more than a few appendages himself in the last hour, had a look of sympathy in his myriad yellow eyes. Fish looked horrified.
Jay breathed deeply. With her right hand, she fit the witch’s wooden claw to her own raw stump. Black blood began to flow from the wound, only a thin ribbon at first, then more, spooling through the gears and hexworks of the diviner, the arcane prosthesis becoming an extension, a part of her. She flexed the fingers, and gears whirred, making a fist.
“All the fucking blue gods of the sea,” Fish muttered. “Lars, did you really have to eat it? I mean, she offered the sword and everything . . .”
Lars’ hulking wolf-shoulders shrugged. “Missed breakfast.”
They both shut up when they realized Jay was making for the Dark Moon. Walls shuddered. Glass fell from the ceiling, a couple of the skylight panes finally shattering from the tremors, and both Lars and Fish ducked for cover. Oblivious to the hail of glass, Frank shuffled up to the throne in reverence, offering a branch to the princess. She took it, and the battle-torn tremuloid lifted her to the magic, swirling rock. She reached with the witch diviner—into the violet miasma, fingers piercing the rock’s black curst—and grasped it. The Dark Moon pulled effortlessly from its hidden chamber in the wall, as if weightless. Frank set Jay down, the Dark Moon dwarfing her, at least as tall as the vampire and three times as wide. It stopped spinning on its axis, but purple sparks still flashed around its nega-black surface.
“Okay, boys,” she said, “Now what?”
Lars was ready for that question. He’d already been wondering that same thing—how the shit were they supposed to get the Dark Moon up to Handzilla’s snout to toss it in? He doubted Fish could buzz the princess up that high on his fancy sword wings. Then he’d remembered:
“We got wings,” he said. “Parked in the handicapped. Right outside.”
As glass and debris fell across the room, the four would-be monster slayers dashed for the parking lot, Jay dragging the Dark Moon in their wake.
Chapter LVII
Lars Breaxface had seen all manner of destruction. Wars and genocide, space-barge crashes and asteroid explosions. The wreckage of cities on his home planet, still glowing faintly with radiation, and of course, Dys-7, the massacre he’d caused all by himself before he figured out how to control the wolf. But, except in ancient movies, he’d never seen giant kaiju monster destruction. Giant kaiju monster destruction was its own thing altogether.
The smell slapped him like a dick in the face. Smoke and dust and newly dead bodies. Blood and burning metal. Torn bowels and crushed concrete. And the faint, omnipresent stink of old lady and patchouli. The streets outside the castle were obscured by clouds of dust, the occasional fire or sparking neon sign flashing through the smog. Rising from the dark clouds were the city’s cyber-gothic skyscrapers, several of them burning or smashed in or truncating at jagged wounds of half-standing walls where Handzilla had knocked the whole top of the tower right off. Small black dots were falling from the windows of the smoking towers, and it took Lars a moment to realize they were people—vamp people, the people of this night-planet, jumping to their deaths. People were screaming, somewhere, everywhere, and the sky was chaos: beneath the nega-sun and the trio of moons, a ragtag armada of armored zeppelins and darting scarabcraft had assembled in a ring around the white-furred wolf-witch, blasting her with laser weapons, rockets, harpoons, whatever they had on hand. The city had no military—it’d been labeled a tool of the monarchy and disbanded after the revolution—and police forces, even the uniformed corpses the Hand had left in the throne room, were all volunteer. They weren’t prepared for war with a mega-beast.
Hand was menacing. Half hidden behind a gleaming pyramid, the giant were-creature swiped at the attacking aircraft with huge, deformed claws. She caught one of the zeppelins and crushed its graffiti-scrawled envelope in one hand, tossing it like trash as it erupted in fire. The ring of aircraft started to retreat, joining the swarms of others who were already fleeing or zooming up and down from the surface to rescue those trapped in the skyscrapers’ upper floors. White flocks of corpse birds screamed above the smoke and flames, the mocking clouds of lightning among them trying to take avian shapes, everything in the sky hauling ass now away from the apocalyptic Auntie Hand. Through her pale fur, the witch’s name-scars cut like ridges of flesh, pulsing purple as the nega-power coursed through them. Around the glowing scars, her skin swelled and split, bubbled and burst, only to close up again—the werewolf virus working furiously to heal its host—leaving the beast’s white yeti fur slick with hot black blood.
“Holy Frog Mother, save us,” Fish prayed.
“Hot Cosmic fucking Christ,” Lars muttered.
“Come on,” Jay said, dragging the Dark Moon through the castle’s front gates. “Before there’s no one left to save.”
Patches’ scarab was where they’d left it, though there was a small red-and-black security cruiser parked beside it and, taped to the scarab’s windshield, a paper ticket. Seemed that the team of volunteer rent-a-cops lying gutted in the castle had paused on their way inside to write them up for improper parking. Fuck it, Lars thought, if anything’s left standing, ol’ Patches can deal with it.
“Who’s flying this heap?” Jay asked. The Dark Moon was pulsing with light in her newly-attached clockwork hand. It hung from her fingers like a black stone balloon, hovering beside the princess as if outfitted with anti-grav. Its proximity pulled at Lars, threatened to incite either berserker mode or seizure, his skin and bones still twitching now and then with the glitch, though he’d gotten it more or less under control. His blood, healing, had nearly replaced itself, and he’d gotten used to the magnetic force of the Moon. But the planet’s orbiting moons were pulling too. Above, gleaming in the clear black sky, they were the lunar-power mother lode, and Lars knew from experience that a moon-juice source like that could keep a werewolf raging indefinitely. Maybe the Hand’s Dark Moon power-up was overloading her a little, but if she figured out how to stop the skin splitting, how to stop growing, she’d be unstoppable. In the always-night of the vampire planet, with those three moons shining down, a werewolf could wolf-out forever.
They had to blow the bitch up fast.
Fish grabbed the cockpit hatch with his metal fist. “I’ll do it.”
“You? pilot?” Lars grunted.
“It’s been a long five years on this rock,” Fish said. “I’ve learned a lot of things, and not just how to make sex lube for space vampires. Besides, you think I want to be anywhere near that monster’s mouth? You think I want to fall out of the back of this thing and be dinner? No thanks. I want the front row seat to Exitsville. Ejection seat, rocket-powered, with parachute.”
“Lotta confidence, Fishman.”
“I’m a realist.”
Jay cleared her throat. “We don’t have time for this. Let’s go.” She was already opening the hatch to the scarab’s passenger compartment. “Frank?”
The tremuloid went first, snagging a few branches as he squeezed through the doorway. Then the princess nodded for Lars. The wolfman took one last look at the monster in the distance, swatting at
the attacking police scarabs like a grizzly besieged by bees. This was it—they’d knuckleball that magic rock down her gullet, and if Fish and Jay were right, she’d pop like a possum butt-plugged with an M-80. End of Handzilla, apocalypse canceled, and a one-way ticket back to Universe Prime.
Lars kicked aside the empty beer bottles from his first trip in the scarab. Their presence made him thirsty, and he could see in Frank’s eyes the battered tree was thinking the same. After monster slaying, they needed to grab a brew. Let bygones be bygones and all that.
Jay pushed the Dark Moon into the compartment. It only barely fit, its top scraping the ceiling. She didn’t even bother to close the hatch. They’d need it open to execute the plan.
As Fish lifted the aircraft into the sky, wind whipped in through the doorway, carrying with it the city’s infernal smog. Over the PA, Fish’s garbled voice announced, “Heading straight for her. Most of the others are pulling back. Some gunfire still spraying, though—these guys couldn’t hit the broad side of a whorehouse.”
“Tell them to stop shooting and join the search-and-rescue,” Jay said. “We’ve got this. We’re the cavalry.”
Standing in the doorframe with the city beyond her, the vampire looked every bit the badass she was, even with one hand stuck in a rock. Shadows smoldered like black flames across her armor, and the broadsword’s hilt stuck up silver and gleaming behind her head. She’d tied her head-tendrils back in a slack bun, but even then the tendrils’ ends lashed in the wind. Her face was drawn, lips tensed, and galaxy eyes sparked beneath a furrowed, scar-laced brow. Lars hoped for all their sakes it was as easy as a drive-by drop, and they’d be home free. They needed a win.
The scarab banked, and suddenly there she was: Auntie Hand, monsterized. Her snout was twice long as the scarab, each razor fang longer than Lars, and red-black froth dripped from her shredded lips. Fish hadn’t flown them within swiping distance yet, but the wolf-witch had noticed them, had picked them out of the swarm of aircraft. No doubt she’d sensed the Dark Moon on board.
Jay braced against a wall. “Here she comes.”
Lars breathed and let the wolf blood course through his veins. He clenched his claws and howled. Just a drive-by drop . . . but if shit went wrong, he was ready.
The scarab lurched, climbed, and banked hard again. Through the open hatch, they could see below: the wolf-witch’s monster mouth, wide open.
“Throw it!” Lars growled.
Jay pushed—but she didn’t let go.
“The fuck?”
Before Lars could say more, he saw fear flash across the face of the vampire princess. She was struggling, pushing, but the witch’s hexed prosthetic wouldn’t let go of the Dark Moon.
“It’s stuck!” Jay shouted.
Over the PA, Fish was yelling, “Drop it, drop it, she’s—”
Then the universe rolled like a hamster ball. Upside-down, end-on-end, spinning. Lars crashed headfirst into the compartment ceiling. Frank’s branches scraped against him as the tremuloid struggled to find a hold. The Dark Moon had wedged between a seat and a cargo locker, and from it Jay hung in the air, attached only by her wooden hand, where it remained stuck in the crust of the rock. Metal wrenched, and the tail section of the scarab tore free. Where the back of the cabin had been, two giant violet-flaming eyes stared up at them, blank and demonic.
A grating, heavy voice erupted from the Hand: “You . . . lit-tle bug . . . you would . . . stop me . . .”
It was almost a question. With her free hand, Jay unsheathed her broadsword, energy whining down its blade. She shouted, “If not me, Auntie, who?”
The vampire werewolf witch-monster threw its heavy head back and howled. The sound shattered the scarab’s windows, and then Lars heard nothing, total silence, dulled. Then the slight whine of a high-pitched ringing, his ears throbbing, hurting like hell but the wolf blood’s healing factor was already at work patching up his eardrums. Even the monster’s howl was apocalyptic. The wolfman scrambled to an upside-down seat and dug in his claws. Plan A had gone to shit—it was time for Plan B. Berserker mode. Eat his way into her chest like a starving rat and start tearing up organs till the old witch keeled over. He felt the Dark Moon’s energy surge and readied himself for the leap—
—until the universe flipped again, the scarab dropping like a stone out of the air.
Chapter LVIII
The scarab fell away as Lars, still juiced on Dark Moon, launched himself through the torn-open tail section. Leaping across the city, he felt like a lycanthropic Spider-man, without the webs, which were kind of important actually, he realized, as he found himself loose in the air without a parachute, nipple-high to the big beast. The Hand Monster’s roiling skin was only meters out of reach, and he was falling like a goddamned idiot, somersaulting in the air towards near-certain death.
Something wet and black swallowed him whole.
His first thought was he’d been eaten by the Hand-beast. But he hadn’t passed her jagged teeth, and the hole he was in didn’t stink of monster breath. It smelled like blood.
Vampire blood.
He clawed through the wall of blood surrounding him and looked around—he was in a bubble of monster gore, suspended in the air by thick umbilicus of bloodrope. Not far away, Jay was standing midair on a round, dripping platform of blood, her boots sinking a little into its hexed surface. She still held the Dark Moon, weightless as ever, and her other hand was outstretched, manipulating the dark blood that erupted from the monster’s skin. Lars found himself in a kind of half-cocoon of blood, hanging from the witch’s thigh by a long bloodrope like some blood-clot dingleberry. Not far away, Frank hung from a web of bloodropes looped through his upper foliage. The sound of an explosion reached him, then the heat of it, and Lars looked down to see the wreckage of Patches’ scarab burning in the middle of an already wrecked street. Fish . . . No sign of the amphibian or his parachute, at least not in one of Jay’s blood-magic lifejackets. Sorry, pal. Woulda gotten your frog ass home if I could’ve.
Lars and Frank shook as Handzilla walked, slow and lumbering, fighting gravity with her enlarged mass. As Jay glided over to the wolfman on her blooddisc, he saw the glint of metal in the corner of his eye. Then a flash of neon orange. Soaring on sword wings was Arcturus Fishman, amphibian archangel, with laser chainsaw ready to slice up some monster ass.
“Fish,” Lars said. “You’re not a corpse.”
“Not yet,” said the amphibian. “But it was close, too close. You remember what I said about not wanting to be anybody’s dinner? Still true, don’t get me wrong. But also I think it’s time to this nasty old lady learned the name Arcturus Fishman . . .” From the stump at the end of his arm, the chainsaw blazed.
The wolfman grinned. “Groovy.”
“Lars,” Jay called. “There’s nothing we can do. Even if I can fly us all up there, she’ll see us coming. We lost the element of surprise. We need something to really hit her, something bigger than the firepower those cops are spraying. Something that will knock her off balance. If I can surprise her, I can get the Dark Moon in.”
Fish frowned. “All I brought is the saw. Left the rest of my toys back at the mansion.” Then the amphibian’s eyes brightened, and he began tapping furiously at a holo-interface on his mechanical arm. “Calling reinforcements. I don’t know what’s left, after you sons of bitches wrecked the place. But maybe there’s a drone or two. Radio my security team, too, if they’re still standing.”
Doesn’t matter, Lars thought. The Hand Monster wasn’t going to be fazed by some goggle-wearing rent-a-cop or self-lubricating dildo bomb. There was only one thing that would shake this beast-witch: wolf-on-wolf ultraviolence. Straight to the chin.
“The Dark Moon,” Lars barked. “Break me off a piece.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” Jay said, nodding up at the Hand. “You see what you’re attached to? The Moon created this. It’s what turned her into this creature.”
“One sliver. A speck. Not a whole chunk—I
’ll hit her, you drop the Moon.” He looked up at the gigantic wolf-monster and wondered if maybe he really was fucking crazy. What did he know about the Dark Moon’s powers? Maybe it didn’t matter how much you bit off—maybe all it took was an atom to make you monsterfied for life. What choice did he have? Auntie Hand had to go down. And he was the son of a bitch to make sure it happened. He growled, “Now.”
“Fuck you,” the princess spat. “I don’t need two giant wolves trashing my planet.”
“Agree with the lady,” said Fish. “You don’t know what this thing will do. You have to science it first—test it, determine its properties, measure against control groups. So far, it seems to, uh, just turn whoever eats it into a mega-monster. You shouldn’t risk it. We might have to kill you too.”
From the way Frank was looking at him, Lars could tell the old tree was with them—three against one on the Operation: Make Lars Humungous. Lars started swinging in his blood bucket, toward Jay. Because sometimes democracy fails. Yes, his plan might end up with him plowing across the planet in a gigantic werewolf berserker rampage until the others devised a way to King Kong his ass off a tall building, but Lars didn’t think so. He was controlling his wolf self better than he ever had. Even with the Dark Moon close, he calmed his mind, kept it zen.
Around them, the Hand was walking glacially and buildings crumbled and, high above, the motley armada had all but scattered, their paltry barrage of harpoons and laserfire waning. It was now or never. Jay’s gauntlet clenched into an armored fist, and her other hand—the diviner—moved toward him, pulling monster blood with it. “Lars, don’t—”
But he was already there. On his blood-bucket’s next swing, he flopped over, into the air, toward the Dark Moon. Jay pulled it away, but not fast enough. He fell on top of it claws first, slashing, and then, just as before, the Dark Moon repelled him, shooting him upward toward the mega vamp-wolf’s mega wolfgina. But he’d gotten what he needed, could feel it sizzling under his fingernail. The tip of his claw was sparkling like he’d just finger-banged a unicorn. He’d breached the moon-heart’s magical miasma, if only for a second, and scratched off a speck. He hoped it was enough. As the wolfman soared upward, he licked the dust from his claw. To himself, he muttered, “It’s morphin’ time,” just before shit went crazy.