Bad Moon Rising

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 doggie. 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 comprehend 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.

Ruger had backed up to where Vince LaMastra’s corpse lay sprawled in a lake of blood. Ruger’s retreating foot had brushed against the sergeant’s dead, slack hand—and that hand had closed around the ankle. The fingers were clamped as tight as a steel shackle.

It was impossible, of course. LaMastra was dead, and there was no power left in his limbs; he was dead, and his dead brain could not have sent the signal to clutch or to hold. Ruger’s face was knotted in confusion, and as he gradually raised his eyes to meet Crow’s, there was fear in those dark eyes as well.

“I killed you twice, you miserable prick,” Crow said in a hoarse voice that sounded like Ruger’s own graveyard whisper. “This time, stay dead!” The broken sword rose and fell with all of the dwindling strength in Crow’s battered body. It caught Ruger on the side of the neck and chopped downward into the chest and sliced Karl Ruger’s black heart in half.

Ruger stared at him in disbelief for a long time.

Then he fell. The fierce predatory light in Ruger’s eyes that had burned so brightly for so long, a light that had shone on so much death and destruction, went dark forever.

Crow stood there, unable to grasp the reality of what he had just done. After all of this, Ruger was actually, finally gone. It hit him as hard as Ruger’s punch and for a moment the enormity of it made him dizzy. The invincible, unbeatable Karl Ruger was gone. Really gone this time, but would anyone ever really know? He looked around, expecting to see death rushing at him, but for the moment he stood alone over Ruger’s corpse.

Then he looked down at LaMastra’s hand and for the briefest moment there was a shimmer in the air that seemed to rise from the dead man’s back, and then LaMastra’s fingers relaxed open and were still.

Forty feet away the werewolf was struggling to get to a kneeling position, blood streaming from its wounds; near him, Sarah lay on the ground and shook with palsy. Her face was gashed and bleeding badly and blood dripped onto the mud at her knees. The werewolf began crawling slowly toward her, making low plaintive sounds in its