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I stood fidgeting as the sheriff gave his orders, wondering what I should do or hold. I settled on fingering the necklace around my throat, wondering if my blood could soak the sapphire now, or if it was more an in-the-moment situation. The book hadn’t explicitly said.
When he was done, Caelan had me outfitted with a belt to better carry everything I might need. My knife I made sure was tucked in a pocket. And then remained a handgun loaded with silvered bullets in my sweaty right hand, and a flashlight in the left. I turned the light onto the path ahead, bouncing off the shuttered iron gates and its metal letters labeled ‘Entrance.’
A werewolf of the bipedal variety slashed the gate chain and kicked open the screaming iron. Above, something hooted. I angled the light onto the arched lettering.
A tattered owl perched on the final, dilapidated letter. Its head twisted, wringing flea-ridden feathers from its throat.
“Find it, bleed it, bind it,” Caelan said. His hand fell hot and heavy on my shoulder.
He changed beside me.
Snarls overtook quiet grunts and groans, and when the wind blew the steam of coppery change past my sneakers, a pack of werewolves waited at my back. Eyes of all colors—Caelan’s and August's bright harvest moons, dimmer, greener, browner—all focused on me.
The lone human.
The hair on my arms prickled. I felt their eyes on my back, felt the pull of something dark and dead deep in my gut. My lips tasted bitter, my throat a track of ice. I made my way beneath the sign, past the creaking gate, squeezed through a rusted turnstile, and let the single beam of my flashlight illuminate the forward path.
Even in the throes of summer, every tree was dead and wilted. Orange pine needles and dried wildflowers padded the steps beneath my feet. The air, a cold dead wind, retreated through the brush with the ebb of the sea before a tsunami. Nearby, the concessions and gift shop stood vacant and neglected. There wasn't anything alive this side of the entrance except an overwhelming sense of coiled darkness.
The gate creaked.
Caelan shouldered past his brother and headed around the ticket booth. August, a black wolf more grayed around the muzzle, followed with flattened ears. The remaining sheriffs passed beneath the entry and dispersed like black ghosts as the rest of the false pack entered.
Big, healthy werewolves, of muscle and thick fur and blood-tested fangs: how could they lose?
I passed a sign covered in thin boards which had once upon a time directed excited visitors to the main exhibits.
A leaf skittered across the ground before me. My light caught its erratic dance, and then the wind roared through. Trees snapped. Shingles whipped into the air. A force, invisible, hard, slammed into my chest. I fell backward into Caelan. The wolf caught my shoulder without biting down and kept me upright. The flashlight rolled along the ground. Behind us, the werewolves straightened or rolled back onto their feet as I snatched the flashlight.
Three of the last wolves past the turnstile barked. I turned. One, a lanky, gray wolf, had stretched up on his hind legs, pressing his paws on something invisible in the dark. I flashed my light towards them; a faint shimmer of some kind of barrier glistened in the thin air.
The wolf ran several feet in either direction along the invisible blockade, but there was no opening to be had.
We were trapped.
That was when I heard it, the slithering, the crawling, the climbing. Gargoyle-like figures on rooftops. Hisses in the tiger's den.
And a voice, calling without words; without words, and yet I understood.
Caelan crouched beside me, sticky fur gleaming copper. I climbed onto his back, let the flashlight drop and bounce.
The light caught dozens of white, lifeless eyes. For a moment they waited, unblinking soldiers awaiting command.
And then the dead descended.
chapter 29
THE CONDUIT
Werewolves crawled as carrion possessed, down roofs, over enclosure fences, as if pain or circumstance did not matter. They attacked without regard for their own injuries, lurched forward in a sickening, putrid mass. Those squatted retained their human features. The rest spanned the endless range of transformation: from repellent, four legged beasts with tapered snouts and sunken eyes to bipedal creatures of terrible distortion.
Their smell alone—resin, musk, hot garbage—was enough to make a smart person run the other way, but there were only brave people here tonight, and stupid ones.
Remembering James, I told myself they were people once, and my friends were people still, but as tooth met claw and the first wave shattered the living ranks, I saw unstoppable, ravenous monsters all around.
There was a voice in the chaos, calling me on with the chilled patience of a glacier. I turned my head to locate the sound, trying to determine if it was in my head or in the fray.
I thought I glimpsed my grandfather’s hateful face emerging from an arena marked animal presentations, then the scrawny older man with white eyes and broken teeth threw himself onto August. Twisting around, the sheriff sank his teeth into the man's skull and flung him back into the horde. A smaller werewolf, brown, bipedal, ripped a second zombie from the sheriff’s back, leaving one arm clutched in his dark fur. A moment later she yanked that loose, waving it over her head with a wild howl.
