Ruger looked toward the sound and right into the swing of the stock of LaMastra’s shotgun. It caught him across the mouth and the vampire’s face seemed to disintegrate as he whirled down to the ground. Crow sagged, too, but LaMastra caught him with one hand and kept him up.
“Come on, man, we got to fall back and regroup.”
LaMastra’s face was crisscrossed with scratches and cuts, his clothes were torn, and he looked nearly spent. “Gotta find some space to reload. I’m dry.”
Crow felt the ground firming under him and he started to say something, but then something punched him in the stomach again. It was impossible with LaMastra standing face-to-face with him just inches away, but Crow looked down and when he saw what it was the whole world twisted sideways into madness. It was a fist. A fist covered with blood that steamed like soup, a fist wrapped in coils of purple intestine and red strings of muscle fiber, a fist that seemed to have sprouted like magic from LaMastra’s stomach. Crow looked slowly up from that fist to LaMastra’s face. The detective seemed confused; he frowned, gave Crow a weary half-smile, and then coughed up a dark pint of blood onto Crow’s chest. The detective’s big body sagged down and Crow saw Ruger standing close behind him, smiling. Always smiling.
With a grunt, Ruger yanked his fist out of LaMastra’s body and let the big man slump all the way to the ground.
Ruger raised his fist to his mouth and licked off some of the blood.
“VINCE!” Crow screamed as he tried to hold on to LaMastra, tried to keep the life in the young man by sheer force of will, by sheer need, but the lights in LaMastra’s eyes flickered like candles. He stared into Crow’s eyes, and his mouth formed a single word.
“No—” Then more dark blood bubbled onto LaMastra’s lips and poured out of his mouth and the flood of it extinguished the fragile light in his eyes. Crow held his friend in his arms and looked up in despair to where Ruger stood above them.
“And now it’s your turn,” Ruger whispered and took a single step forward.
Instantly a thunderbolt flashed across the flame-torn darkness and struck Ruger in the side, barreling him over, and he went down in a fighting, hissing ball with something monstrously huge and immensely powerful. The impact knocked Crow back a few steps and he stared in shock as the two bodies came to rest against a heap of sword-slashed and fire-burned corpses.
Ruger was pinned under something that was bigger and far stronger—something whose body was packed with knotted cords of muscle and whose hide rippled with a pelt of coarse red hair. Four vampires—survivors of Ruger’s elite guard—rushed in and tackled the thing and it went down as Ruger scrambled out from underneath. He rose to his feet, visibly shaken and slashed to the bone in a dozen places, but even as Crow watched the wounds began to close, the skin knit.
One of the other vampires was less fortunate, or perhaps less powerful, and he flopped onto his back with a head that was connected by a few grisly strands of meat. A second vampire catapulted back with a smashed skull. The creature just shook off the other two as it rose into a fighting crouch, facing Ruger. Instantly they began stalking one another, circling, snarling. The thing that had attacked Ruger was gigantic as it rose onto its hind legs, and even with its hunched back and misshapen legs it towered above Ruger. It had large piercing yellow eyes with catlike slits, and tall fur-covered ears that rose straight to tufted points high above the sloping skull. It had a long lupine muzzle that was wrinkled back to reveal spit-flecked teeth as sharp as spikes. The thing stood there, its chest heaving with predatory lust, its daggerlike claws rending the air. Crow stared at it and his mind nearly toppled into a shocked faint.
It was a werewolf.
For an insane moment he thought he was seeing Ubel Griswold reborn, and an atavistic terror threatened to tear the guts out of him. He reeled backward from it, but the creature’s whole attention was focused on Ruger.
A dozen more of Ruger’s guards circled the monster, but the creature didn’t wait for them to attack—it lunged at them and Crow flinched back as blood and torn chunks of meat showered him.
Val and Mike stood with their backs to a wall of flame.
She fired her guns dry time and again, and while she reloaded Mike fought with the sword. Twice they felt the ground under them rumble, but there was no sign of Griswold. Even the articulated limbs had receded into the mud.
Some of the vampires screamed at one another to kill the woman, but not the boy, and that gave Val and Mike a bit of an edge. When Mike rushed the attackers, they scuttled back, learning from the death of their fellows about the danger of being near this boy.
“I’m nearly out,” Val whispered to Mike as she slapped her last magazine into her pistol. Mike nodded, too exhausted to speak. The sword, which had been so light in his hands before, now felt as heavy as a sledgehammer. He looked around for Crow and LaMastra, but they were somewhere on the other side of the clearing, behind pillars of flame, if they were even still alive.
“I’m sorry, Val,” Mike said, and he fumbled one hand toward her. For just a moment their hands met and held, and Val gave a fierce squeeze.
“Hold on, honey,” she said, and then there was more killing to do as a fresh wave of vampires rushed them.
The werewolf slashed at his face and Ruger dodged back a little too late. He dabbed at the furrows torn on his chin.
He sneered at the werewolf. “Well, well, if it isn’t the Man’s lapdog.”
The beast growled low in its throat.
“I thought you were supposed to be on our side. Guess the Man was wrong about that.” Ruger ran his fingers along the gash that was already nearly healed. He sniffed his fingers, smelled blood, and licked off the taste. “Mmm. Yummy.”
Ruger glanced across the clearing to where Sarah lay sprawled, then he cocked his head at the beast. “Ah. I know why you’re so pissed. The Man really was wrong about you. You don’t want to share at all. You want her all for yourself. Bad dog-gie. No rawhide chew toys for you tonight.” He looked at Sarah again. “It’s a shame she’s already dead.” The beast’s head snapped around toward Sarah and it sniffed the air as if trying to smell the exhalations of her breath.
Instantly Ruger attacked, slamming into the monster with all of his inhuman strength and speed. The creature was larger and stronger, but Ruger was faster and far more cunning. He drove the werewolf back and down and then scrambled on top, straddling the beast’s barrel chest and pinning its arms with his knees. Ruger’s fists began their favorite game—
smashing, pulping, destroying—and his speed was blinding.
Blood danced up from torn flesh; the crack of bones sounded like gunshots. The werewolf howled in agony and surprise.
Snarling with fury, the beast twisted its hands on its powerful forearms and forced them up behind Ruger, then dragged those claws sharply downward from shoulder blades to waistline. Ruger howled in agony and threw himself away, trailing blood. The werewolf gave him no chance and dove at him, landing claws-first into the vampire’s chest and knocking him down. But as Ruger fell he snatched the pistol from his belt, the one he had taken from Crow; he dug the barrel into the monster’s gut and fired two shots.
The werewolf was lifted off him and pitched over onto its back, gasping in terrible pain. They were not fatal wounds, but the werewolf was momentarily helpless. Its metabolism could repair almost any amount of damage, but not with the miraculous speed of the vampire.
Ruger got back to his feet and stood over the beast. His body was a mass of long slashes, but they were healing quickly and the pain was inconsequential to him. His clothes glistened with blood that looked black in the firelight. He stared down at the beast, watching it struggle against its own pain and damage, and he grinned in triumph.
“So much for Lassie Come Home,” he said. “So much for the big dramatic entrance. Stupid shit.” He kicked the werewolf, and the creature made a feeble swipe at him, but Ruger easily evaded the claws.
He aimed the pistol at the werewolf ’s skull. “Let’s see how much this hurts.”
There was a flash of silver and then the pistol and the hand that held it went flying off into the night. They landed in a burning patch of dry grass and the dead flesh instantly caught fire. Ruger stared at the stump of his right wrist, at the blood that jetted from it, seemingly unable to compre-hend what had just happened. He turned slowly, his mouth working in soundless shock.
Crow stood on wide, trembling legs, his sword in his hands. Firelight glimmered on the garlic-coated edge of the weapon. Crow’s face was a mass of blood and dirt, his lips trembled with shock, but his eyes were infernos hotter than the fires that raged around him. “You’re a piece of shit, Ruger,” Crow wheezed. “You were a piece of shit when you were alive, and you’re a piece of shit now.”
Ruger’s face changed from shock to fury in the space of a heartbeat. Howling in uncontainable frenzy, he leapt forward and before Crow could raise the sword for another blow, Ruger used his bleeding stump to batter the weapon aside.
There was a sharp metallic crack! and ten inches of the sword went spinning into the smoking shadows, the reflective edges striking sparks in the air. Crow staggered back as Ruger swung again and he could feel the cold force of the blow slice the air an inch from his chin.
“You took my hand!” Ruger cried in wonder. “You took my fucking hand!”
Crow swung the broken sword at him, and this time Ruger jumped back, evading the cut easily. He laughed as Crow slashed again and again, the jagged stump of the katana cutting nothing but smoke and air. Crow lumbered forward doggedly, slashing, cutting, hacking, but each time Ruger lunged backward, and each time the blade missed.
Then something happened that Crow was never able to adequately explain. Ruger took another step backward as Crow lunged in once more, but this time Ruger’s evasion jerked up short as if he’d hit an invisible wall, so when Crow’s blade came slashing it caught Ruger across the middle. A deep red line, like an impossibly wide mouth, yawned in Ruger’s chest and more blood splashed into the air. Ruger looked down at his right leg, and Crow found himself looking, too.