Page 49 of Bloodbane
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Darkness Spreads
{ G R A Y S O N }
The scent of death greets me before my eyes sweep over the carnage. The world is stained red: dulling the shine of moonlight on snow, coating fur, dripping from muzzles, and pooling around the dozens of dead bodies, now human, strewn across the yard.
High-pitched yelps of pain punctuate the snarls of the wolves locked in desperate battle as Thayne, Ash, and the twins hold their own against more than double their number. The intruder wolves are smaller than Thayne’s pack—and so much smaller than Thayne. They’re frenzied and vicious but untrained: biting at flanks and legs and tails, lunging at anything within reach. But my pack moves with purpose, efficiently ripping out throats or snapping necks when they can get their jaws around them. The gray wolves are falling one after the other.
As if only noticing my arrival, three wolves peel away from their pack, separating as they near. I catch the front leg of the first, snapping it in two with a quick jerk. I drive the severed bone under the mutt’s jaw, spiking it through its skull. The makeshift weapon pulls free with a crack, and I swing it forward just as the second wolf lunges for my throat. The sharp shard slices through the shifter’s soft underbelly. Intestines spill out onto the snow as the third mutt collides with my chest and knocks me down onto the porch.
Teeth sink into my arm. I wrench the wolf’s head up, tearing teeth from flesh, before burying fingers in the thick fur around the mutt’s neck, twisting violently even as a new set of teeth pierce my thigh. The sound of the snapping neck is drowned out by the shotgun blast when Ruby presses the barrel to the wolf’s head and pulls the trigger. Blood, bone, and fur rain down on me and splatter across the landing.
The bodies—or what’s left of them—fall to the side, transforming in death. I tip my head back and stare up, upside down, at Ruby.
“ Did you make silver bullets? ”
“Silver-dipped.” Ruby grins down at me. “You really can find anything on the internet.”
“I’m not sure whether to kiss you or kick your ass.”
“Kick their ass now—” Ruby nods to the two new shifters rushing toward the house “—and kiss me later.”
She cocks the barrel and aims before sending silver pellets flying into the pelt of one of the wolves. Cooper’s shotgun echoes Ruby’s, his aim true, catching the second wolf in the chest. It yelps and stumbles like its kin, rolling before lifting and limping forward.
I grin despite myself and rush to finish the job.
* * *
After the fifth wave of attacks, it becomes clear that we’re being toyed with. Each time we clear one group, another line emerges from the forest.
Broken bodies lie where they fall, the wall of corpses slowly pushing us back toward the house. But as the number of dead rises, so does the injury count: Ash has a nasty wound on her flank and a torn left ear, the twins have an extensive collection of bites and deep scratches between them, and Thayne is covered in so much blood it’s impossible to tell how much is his. He’s limping, though, favoring his right front leg, but it hasn’t stopped him from slashing open the belly of more than one wolf. Still, their healing isn’t designed for such unrelenting attacks. At this rate, it will fail before sunup.
My strength is being tested too: my body working hard to fight the shifter venom coursing through my veins—already rising to the surface—borne from the dozen bites still carved into my body, and dozens more that have already healed. If I hadn’t fed from Thayne last night, I wouldn’t still be standing now.
Thayne growls low in his throat, and the twins shift positions, moving from beside Ash to flank me. Thayne turns to look at me, golden eyes glowing, and I wish I could understand the commands he’s giving to the pack.
An eerie silence falls as the moon disappears behind a cloud. Darkness spreads, a blanket of anticipation.
Almost hidden in the low light, a lean, dark wolf stalks from the tree line. I know this wolf—know its scent. It’s the wolf that tried to kill Ruby. The wolf whose kin had tried to kill me.
Arlo Pretorius.
The clouds above drift past the moon, and gentle light fills the yard once more, dancing through the fur of the line of wolves before them. They’re bigger than those that have come before. And smarter: hanging back, watching, not rushing forward into the jaws of death. Arlo’s head swivels from me to Thayne before returning. Black lips pull back, revealing blood-red gums and rows of curved teeth, and I have the distinct impression he’s smiling. But then his head tips back, muzzle pointing to the moon, and howls.
As far as signals go, it’s not subtle, but it is effective. The dozen wolves fringing Arlo spring into motion, hurtling toward Thayne and Ash and the twins. Arlo lunges at me.
I dodge the attack, flipping high over the mutt and landing behind him in the snow. But what Arlo lacks in size, he makes up for in agility. Mid-stride, he pivots, kicking off the ground and slamming into my chest. Smooth peaks sink into my flesh, and with jaws clamped around me, Arlo shakes his head. The teeth cutting into me shift and tear.
My elbow connects with Arlo’s nose and he recoils, whining and pawing at his bloody muzzle. Satisfaction spills free inside me—the second time breaking the bastard’s nose feels as good as the first. Jumping to my feet, I press my advantage. Rushing forward, my well-aimed kick is rewarded with the sound of ribs breaking. Again. But in a full, natural shift, Arlo is stronger than our last meeting, and he doesn’t turn tail and run.
He rallies.
Arlo charges, slipping to the left at the last second and catching my leg with sharp teeth, cleaving flesh from bone. My advantage is lost as I stumble, and Arlo slams into me and knocks me back to the ground, sharp claws carving deep grooves into my chest. I seize the snapping jaws just as they stretch for my neck, turning my face to the side, darting away as Arlo strains forward.
A flurry of movement steals my focus, a flash of frenzied fur—grey, brown, and white-stained-red—in a tumbling pile: snarling, snapping, biting, bleeding. I can’t see Thayne, can’t tell who’s winning and who’s dying. All I can hear are the yelps of pain, bones breaking, hearts beating fast enough to burst, shotguns firing and reloading, and above it all, Ruby and Cooper shouting.
I turn my face back to the open jaws above me.
This is not how it ends. Not tonight. Not by this mutt—a poor imitation of his father.
Hooking my fingers behind the curved spikes of sharp teeth, one hand on each jaw, I wrench them apart. Arlo whines as the gap widens unnaturally, struggling frantically to escape. Jaw hinges pop, and the brown wolf writhes in my grasp, shaking his head, trying to retreat.
“You’re going to die tonight,” I promise, tightening my hold, edging the jaws open further still. “For your sins, the sins of your father, and the ones that came before. Your line ends tonight. No one will carry your name, Arlo Pretorius. No one will even remember it.”
Arlo tries in vain to scramble backward. Claws dig through snow. A howl rises above the sounds of desperation and death surrounding us. I funnel every shred of remaining strength into my arms, and with one last ferocious heave, I force the jaws apart until the sickening sound of bone and flesh rending in two replaces the shifter’s wailing and Arlo goes limp in my hold.
The blaze of emotion I expect after years of hunting the bastard doesn’t come. The victory feels oddly hollow. I’ve spent too much time chained to the past, but none of that matters now. Arlo is dead, just like his father, but for all I know, Thayne could be, too. I drop the carcass to the side. I don’t wait for fur to recede before I race into the wolf pile, snapping necks and slashing throats, tossing the broken and beheaded bodies to the side, discarding them in the snow.
I find Thayne in the center of the hoard with Ash standing over him. Blood streams from a deep gash in his chest.
“Move! I can’t see what’s—”
The rest of my words disappear in a shotgun blast and Cooper’s anguished scream of Ruby’s name.
All at once, the world is moving in slow motion. I’m sprinting to Ruby, but I might as well be crawling, my heavy limbs don’t seem to be making any ground.
From what feels like a world away, I watch as Cooper lifts his shotgun and presses it to a gray wolf’s head. With a twitch of the trigger, the lycan’s head disappears into chunks of flesh and bone as the body falls away, rolling down the steps and landing, human, in the snow.
But none of that matters, it’s just a distraction from the fact that Ruby is lying lifeless in Cooper’s arms.
An age passes before I’m beside Ruby. I can’t hear a heartbeat, can’t hear anything over the strange buzzing in my head. I lift Ruby’s broken body and carry her into the house.