Ysabella raised her left hand for Maisie to generously coat with the balm. Then she formed a spearhead with her fingers—and thrust her hand into the wolf’s mouth.
“Good God…” Hudson thought it was an internal exclamation, and maybe it was. But Maisie sharply shushed him.
As Ysabella forced her hand deeper and deeper, the werewolf made garbled, almost human sounds of anguish. Its eyes went full white.
Yoshida kept his head turned away, his eyelids crushed shut. He trembled and gnashed, his face distorting into a mask of agony that nearly matched the rolling-eyed wolf beast.
A gallon of blood burst and splashed out around Ysabella’s arm, now fully a foot deep in the monster’s maw. The crone remained calm, focused. “I have you.”
Yoshida fell to his knees, violently convulsing.
Reverend McGlazer ran to the deputy, setting down the rifle.
“Hold her neck, Deputy Hudson!” stammered Maisie. “Tight as you can!”
Hudson wrapped his arms around the giant neck, keeping an eye on Yoshida. “He okay?”
“He might be having a seizure,” Reverend McGlazer answered, prying at the deputy’s steel-trap-clenched teeth.
“He’ll be fine,” murmured Maisie.
Ysabella’s expression finally took on a hint of alarm, maybe even doubt.
Hudson tried to ignore the unreal sensation of writhing he felt beneath Aura’s hide, so much like Leticia’s belly in late-term pregnancy—writ much larger, and decidedly less poignant.
“Here we…are…” Ysabella said, as she began to withdraw her arm from the lycanthrope’s gullet.
Slick-scarlet, Ysabella’s dainty wrist and hand emerged. She had hold of something.
A hand. Hudson had the horrifying thought that Ysabella was dragging out the arm of someone Aura had eaten.
Ysabella clasped this larger hand with both of hers, straining to pull. “Come…out!”
“Come out!” repeated Maisie.
The pale hand, now connected to an arm streaked with blood, continued to issue from the monster’s snout till it was just past the elbow.
The wolf’s body shook so hard it blurred Hudson’s vision. He was grateful for this.
The animal’s gurgle suddenly became the scream of a woman violently giving birth. Fresh blood sprayed from the edges of the monster’s mouth as the flesh ripped, spattering Hudson’s face with blood and saliva. Looking away, he saw that McGlazer had gotten Yoshida on his back and was trying to straighten the deputy’s legs. “How is he?”
McGlazer looked at the bloody wolf with disgust and horror. “Better than that!”
Maisie chanted words that sounded as old as language itself, louder with every word, as she held tight to Ysabella’s wrists, helping her pull and pull.
The monster shifted forward—then set its four powerful legs in a strong stance and yanked Ysabella toward it. The monstrous maw stretched open further, impossibly, like a giant crocodile, to consume Ysabella. She screamed as her head disappeared within the tunnel of teeth and flesh. Maisie, caught off guard and off balance, shrieked in sheer terror.
Hudson held tight to the thing’s undulating neck with his right arm as he reached for the makeshift muzzle on the floor, wishing he had thought to drop it closer.
“No!” Maisie’s loss of control nearly broke Hudson, except that he didn’t have a choice. It was up to him now.
Ysabella’s petite form was sucked waist-deep into the werewolf’s mouth and gullet. Maisie pulled at her legs without gaining an inch.
Hudson let his headlock grip slide away, snatching the loose skin of the wolf’s neck before she could gain leverage.
With a great lunge, Hudson reached for the muzzle.
For an instant, it seemed the silver chain was going to fall away from the strap and render the restraint useless. But Hudson pulled the loose skin with him to gain the extra crucial inch.
He got both the strap and chain securely in his fist.
Hudson smashed himself chest-down across the skinwalker’s back and whipped the belt over the upper jaw like a horse’s bridle. The unnatural undulations of flesh beneath him became more disturbing and intense than before. Hudson cast away all thoughts of this, as he wrapped the ends of the belt in his fists and tugged like he was reining in a literal nightmare.
“Do your ritual!” he shouted to Maisie, shocking the young witch out of her panic.
She stood and raised her hands, shouting six syllables, faster and louder with each repetition.
Yoshida shook just like the wolf, foaming at the mouth. McGlazer hugged him tight.
Hudson pulled the silver-chained strap. The reverend’s grunts of effort joined the distressing chorus of Yoshida’s unnatural ululations, Maisie’s chant and Hudson’s roar of exertion.
Smoke rose from the beast’s snout, which began to shrink.
Whatever suctioning force was dragging Ysabella into the beast now started to fail.
Hudson again recalled when Leticia gave birth, feeling as queasy as when he held her hand in the moment of delivery—then worse. Between the sounds of ripping flesh and cracking bones, the weird movement in the monster’s flesh, the squeal of animal agony and the realization that Yoshida was approaching disintegration just a few feet away, Hudson was certain he would be spending this Halloween—and probably Thanksgiving and Christmas—in the loony bin.
Maisie wrapped her arms around Ysabella’s waist and dragged her out of the terrible tunnel, gaining momentum until the elder witch rocketed away from the monster’s mouth and landed hard, yards away. The naked, bloody and very human Aura came out along with her, falling atop Ysabella with a cry of shock and a splash of bloody mucus.
Hudson collapsed on his side. The skin he held was empty, more or less. The wolf’s head, its eyes sunken into the blackness of its crumbled skull, lay stretched and torn open like latex, the split flesh rendered grotesquely opaque, the gray fur falling out in clumps.
The hide smoked and bubbled. Hudson realized it would soon be gone.
Yoshida had calmed by a few degrees, though he wasn’t out of the woods yet. McGlazer had forced a handkerchief between his teeth to stop the distressing chatter.
The witches too had gone silent, their screaming replaced by Aura’s infantile cries, underscored by the hiss of smoke rising from the wolf’s dissolving carcass.
Barely conscious, Ysabella held Aura, rocking the biker-turned-baby as the thick
