before he was able to shove Nikolai away.
The two moved with incredible speed, striking, blocking, each impact sufficient to kill a normal man. Nikolai grabbed Earl by the straps of his armor and rolled, throwing him down the aisle. Earl landed hard on his shoulder, but his hand fell on a weapon. Nikolai came in fast, but Earl slammed the wine bottle over the Russian’s head. The thump echoed through the entire store. Earl tried to club him again, but the bottle shattered across Nikolai’s raised forearm. Wasting no time, Earl drove the jagged remains directly into Nikolai’s abdomen. Nikolai’s responding snap kick launched Earl through a snack display.
They met in the next aisle. The two circled, breathing hard as their bodies healed.
“You’ve gotten slow,” Nikolai said, holding the contents of his stomach in with one hand.
“You’ve gotten sloppy,” Earl snapped. “I can’t believe you fell for that.”
“You’re the fool picking up booby traps…” Nikolai wiped the blood and sand from his face. “You snuck up on me. You could have changed first. You could have torn me apart. Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t need to be a werewolf to kill a punk like you. We’re in a town full of innocents,” Earl answered, blinking as his eye popped back into place. Everything was much clearer now. “How dare you bring a challenge here?”
For a moment, Nikolai’s expression changed. His voice was suddenly too deep. “ This is no challenge. You want a challenge? Let’s- ” Then he grimaced, gnashing his teeth together. When he spoke again, his voice had returned to a normal pitch. “No…Not yet. You’re a nuisance, Harbinger. A scourge.”
“You ain’t right,” Earl said. The Russian was nuttier than he remembered.
“I’ll never let you have it.” Nikolai closed his eyes and shuddered. The other voice came back. “Enough! We end this my way. ” Nikolai’s eyes flashed gold. The transformation had begun.
“We can’t do this here!” Earl took a step back. “You lunatic. You psychotic fucking lunatic. We’re in a town. People live here.”
“ Their mistake! ” Nikolai growled.
A transformation was incredibly risky, but he had no choice. Nikolai was changing, and if he didn’t, he stood no chance. Earl knew that he’d just have to destroy Nikolai and then maintain enough control to get away from civilization until the blood lust died down. He unbuckled his armor. “You could’ve done this the old-fashioned way, and nobody else had to get hurt.”
Nikolai’s strange voice roared, his hands curling into fists, teeth visible, every vein in his neck standing out, as he fought… something. “You have no room to talk!” The first Nikolai shouted. “You killed her! She was innocent, defenseless!”
“I’ve killed a mess of folks. You’re gonna need to be more specific.”
“Lila!” Nikolai was enraged. Bloody spit flew from his lips. “You murdered her. You murdered my wife.”
Earl paused, scowling. “I’m drawing a blank.”
Nikolai screamed as he leapt.
“I told you we’d have a good fight,” the Alpha said. The witch glowered at him, then went back to watching the battle. She didn’t like being proven wrong.
He was pleased to see that he’d made the right choice. Harbinger and Petrov were both unbelievably fearsome while still in human form. He could only imagine what they would do in their purified state. Certainly, he could defeat either of them in a challenge, but he was beyond such things. No slave to the old ways, he would set his own path, forge a new way for all of their kind. Harbinger’s foolish rules dictated that they were only men, nothing better, just different, and that they needed to live in humanity’s bloated shadow. On the other hand, at least Petrov understood that they were superior beings, super predators, but even then, he was content to remain a mere tool for human ideologies and lacked the imagination to do what needed to be done. Petrov had a slave’s mentality. Neither of them had the vision necessary to lead their kind into the future.
His superior senses told him that many humans were coming out of their homes. They’d heard Petrov’s explosion. Some of them had realized that they were under attack and were spreading the word. The streets were coming alive. His children were confused. The magical storm had reached an unbelievable intensity. But none of that mattered. The important thing was which of the mighty werewolves below would be the one whose soul would power his ascension.
It was a perfect struggle. Nature had selected these two as the ultimate predators in their sphere. One would die. One would live to feed his hunger. Which would fuel his metamorphosis? The excitement was unbearable.
The witch pointed at the street below with her flesh hand. “We have visitors.”
A black SUV was sliding into the parking lot of the Value Sense. The driver was clueless in the snow, and they gently collided with a light pole. The doors opened and five heavily armed humans got out. “MCB?” he asked. There should have been no way that they could have arrived through the storm. In fact, they wouldn’t even know about the slaughter of Copper Lake until morning.
“Worse,” the witch muttered. “Hunters.” She held a very special hatred for monster hunters.
“Harbinger’s men?” That seemed odd. His intelligence had said that Harbinger surely would have come alone. He would never involve his human pack in werewolf business.
“No…not even close. I’d know if they were. MHI has a certain… swagger. Nothing would make me happier than the arrival of MHI,” the witch grumbled as she extricated herself from the thick snow of the roof. “Enjoy your show. I’ll handle these intruders.” She made a clicking noise, and one of her diggers stepped forward, ready to serve. Eight feet of armored monstrosity bowed before its witch. This time she pointed with her artificial hand. The steel gauntlet seemed disproportionately large sticking out from the sleeve of her fur coat. “Destroy those humans.”
The massive digger leapt from the roof and fell silently to the ground two stories below. The Alpha nodded approvingly. The unnatural things were nothing if not efficient. It would eradicate those vermin. His attention returned to the grocery just as an ear-splitting howl rose into the night. The main event had just begun. “Beautiful.”
“Look what you did to my Caddy!” Horst shuffled through the three feet of freshly accumulated snow to where the Escalade’s front bumper was crunched into the light pole. It actually didn’t look too bad, but Lins had screwed up. Sure, it was hard to drive through slush, but that was no excuse for scratching his ride. “Is that a dent? That’s a dent. That’s coming out of your pay, moron.”
Lins was livid as he got out. “Screw you, Ryan. What do you expect in a blizzard?”
“Shoulda let me drive,” Jo Ann said. “I’m at least-”
The sound that cut her off pierced all of the Briarwood team to their cores. It started as the cry of a man, filled with anger and pain, only impossibly loud, but as it went on the cry changed, becoming deeper, fiercer, seeming to linger far after any mortal lungs would have run out of breath, until it slowly mutated into a full-on animal howl. A primal, terrible cry, instinctively more terrifying than anything that could ever emanate from a natural creature. The storm had frozen Horst’s skin, but that howl froze his blood.
The staff of Briarwood Eradication Services was actually quiet for once. Horst looked to his employees. Every one of them except for Loco was staring back at him with wide eyes. Their big man just grunted and went back to pulling his machine-gun out of the Caddy, probably too dumb to be scared.
“I think I just pissed myself,” Kelley said.
Jo Ann turned toward the grocery store. “What the hell was that?”
That was an actual monster. The other things they’d run into were nothing compared to that. The fear ran deep. It wasn’t any sort of conscious, logical thought. It was deeper, coming from the lowest part of his brain, warning him that they needed to get away before that awful thing consumed them all. Horst forced himself to speak, and tried to sound as confident as possible. “That’s the sound of money, baby.”
Then there was a second howl, even louder than the first, and somehow Horst instinctively knew that this was a different werewolf. Lins jumped. “There’s two of them? You didn’t say nothing about two of them!”
They were chickening out. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Everybody shut your stupid mouths.”
“This isn’t nothing like those zombies we killed,” Kelley exclaimed. “I’m outta here.”
Jo Ann and Lins were babbling, too, as the three of them started getting back in the Caddy. His dreams were falling apart right in front of his eyes. His people were scared senseless. None of them were cowards, but they
