The shit had well and truly hit the fan. As Mason pounded across hard dirt, his teams unleashed seven levels of hell on the Lycans. They didn’t have long until the creatures recovered from the flash-bang, so he’d told them to make every second count. Advice he was taking to heart himself.
They hit the outer perimeter of the camp, and he paused for a second as Andy peeled away. Pulling his rifle tight into his shoulder, he selected his targets rapidly and fired in short, economical bursts. Each time his muzzle spat bullets he hit his target. A knee here, through a throat there, even taking the teeth right out of the mouth of one wolf as it lunged at one of the humans. Suppressive fire, designed to put as many wolves down as possible so the others could get close.
His aim was lethal, punching holes through furry hides and making the turned Lycans bellow with pain. Without silver shot though, any damage he inflicted would be temporary. Where was a fifty cal when you needed one? He could really level the playing field with something like that.
His rifle clicked, the bolt holding open in a warning that his magazine was empty. No time to reload. Casting it aside, Mason pulled the Glock from his shoulder holster and moved further into the camp. He skirted between the groups already fighting, his eyes peeled for one figure. Screams from his left distracted him for a moment, as the group attacking the cage went down. Grimly he ignored them. They’d all known the risks before they’d come on the mission. He’d made sure of it. And he was damned if, after trying to kill him, he was going out of his way to cover their asses anymore. Nope, he was back into mission mode. He’d complete the objective, and then he was out of here.
“Jed. Get your furry ass out here and face me like a f**king man, rather than a whipped puppy,” he yelled, trying to taunt the alpha into the open. Truth be told, he had no f**king clue what the guy looked like, as a man or a wolf. None of them did, a fact Mason hadn’t been too happy about. Going into a hot situation without intel was usually a good way to get people killed. However, so was taking on a pack of Lycans on their own turf. But then, Mason had never claimed to be sane, Andy wasn’t even mortal and the people of Sanctuary were just plain desperate.
He didn’t have to wait long. A rumbling snarl sounded behind him, the sound full of menace. Of course, any Lycan snarl was full of menace but this was a very personalized sort of malevolence. Mason whipped around, the Glock already leveled and aiming right between the eyes of the large wolf behind him.
“Jed, I presume?” he asked, as though this was a society dinner, and they’d just been introduced. Regardless of his nonchalant attitude, the muzzle of the gun didn’t waver. If Jed looked like he was going to leap, Mason would double-tap him right between the eyes before taking his next breath. Unfortunately, now he’d actually seen Jed, Mason didn’t think that would put the bastard down for long.
He was huge. Possibly the biggest wolf-type Lycan Mason had ever seen, and he’d hunted more than enough of the creatures. Gray and black fur covered a frame straight out of a pre-war horror film, and his teeth wouldn’t look out of place on a sabertooth. Amber and black eyes fixed on Mason, hatred and anger burning in their depths. A silver bar cut through the creature’s eyebrow.
Mason’s brow winged up in surprise. One of the only things the old films had gotten right about Werewolves was silver. It burned them, ate at their skin like acid. Most avoided it like plague, or like the average Vampire did sunlight. It took a twisted SOB-Were to actually pierce himself with the stuff. Jed dropped his head lower to the ground and curled his lips from his teeth.
“I’ll take that as a yes then. Christ, you are one ugly f**ker, aren’t you?”
The lips curled back further, the massive paws shifting in the dust. It was all the warning Mason got before the massive Werewolf leapt. He pulled the trigger before his eyes and brain got their action together, his instincts kicking in. The Glock spat fire, but Jed was faster. He twisted to the side as the 9mm rounds tore through his shoulder instead of going through his brain.
Mason’s heart pounded, driving adrenalin around his veins in a survival-driven chaotic race. It galvanized every cell in his body as the age-old fight or flight instinct took over. Time slowed to a crawl as the Lycan launched towards him. Its jaws opened wide, giving him a good view of toothy death as it came for him.
He bellowed an incoherent war cry, falling backwards and still firing at the oncoming behemoth. His shoulder hit the dirt, barrel tracking the creature’s head as it sailed over him. His finger carried on, pulling the trigger independent of thought until the magazine was empty. The bullets slammed into Jed’s body, punching holes through his skin on the way. He snarled in fury and pain, landing on paws bigger than dinner plates and stumbled, face planted in the dirt by the still blazing campfire.
Mason was on his feet in the blink of an eye. He tossed the useless Glock aside. He wouldn’t get a chance to reload it anyway and went for the fighting knife on his leg. Most people, if they knew Mason had been a soldier at all, assumed he was American. An infiltration expert, he only had an accent when he wanted, and he could choose which accent that was.
Only those who had seen the winged dagger tattoo on one arse-cheek, done by his squad-mates whilst he was insensible, and clocked the Fairbairn-Sykes knife he carried, realized he wasn’t only not American, but also something a cut above normal for the British army.
Man and the beast who’d once been a man eyed each other up. Mason had always wondered, would he have become something like this? If his DNA had been slightly different? It was a thought that had plagued him for years. At first, in the first bloody years after the war, when those who had turned preyed on those who hadn’t, he’d gone to sleep each night expecting it to be his last. Expecting to wake the next morning as something else, something not human.
It had never happened. Whatever evils he’d done in his former life, they hadn’t been visited on him in this version of hell on earth. Something Mason wasn’t sure whether he was grateful for or pissed off about. Was it reward or punishment to live in a world gone mad?
“Come on then, you f**ker. Let’s be having you,” he roared, his native accent out in full force.
The hilt felt good in his hand as he faced down Jed. The familiar grip fit his palm like a glove, the weapon an extension of his being as he circled Jed. Everything else…the sounds of the other groups fighting, the pitiful whimpering behind him as a team finished off one of the Lycans…all fell away as he concentrated on one thing, and one thing alone. Killing something considered unkillable.
There was nothing Mason liked more than a challenge. He grinned slowly, the expression making Jed blink and falter a little in surprise.
Jed feinted to the left, paws kicking up dust, and then to the right. Mason kept to his low crouch, knife held along his forearm and glinting dully in the light cast by the fire. He was only going to get one shot at this, so he had to make sure it was a good one. His gaze focused in on a small spot on Jed’s broad, lupine chest. Any second now, confident that Mason didn’t have another gun on him, the wolf was going to go for the kill, then Mason had him.
His FS was dipped in silver nitrate, something guaranteed to give any Were a bad day for all of ten seconds. Unfortunately for said Were it would be the last ten seconds of its life. Unfortunately for Mason, getting close enough was also close enough to get his throat torn out. Something he hadn’t planned on doing this morning but, hey, shit happened.
His gaze still locked with Jed’s, he saw the moment the Lycan made the decision. Then the air was full of pouncing wolf, fur and sharp teeth. He didn’t even try to avoid the creature as it bowled him over. His breath was knocked from his body in a savage whoosh as he hit the deck hard. A grin of fury and triumph crossed his face as his head slammed against a large stone near the campfire and stars filled his vision.
Teeth clamped around his throat, the sharp points popping through the skin like fingernails though a balloon. Warm blood streamed as they drove in, but Mason was already there. Even as he felt his jugular and more tear, he rammed the knife between two ribs and right into Jed’s heart.
Chapter Nine
Lycan blood coated her blades and ran down her arms, but Andy didn’t bother to wipe it away. She’d only get bloody again. Using both hands she dispatched the wolf in front of her with a vicious, cross-handed swipe and watched without emotion as it dropped lifeless to the ground. Blood surged from the ruin of its throat onto the thirsty dirt below. Idly she wondered what would grow there, with the soil being watered with wolf’s blood. Plants with a tendency to bite and snarl at other plants?
Then it happened. She looked up at the howl behind her, and started to turn. They’d heard plenty of howls during the attack, but this was different. The fury and defiance, the general bad-assed, I’m-a-wolf tone was gone, replaced by a sound of unimaginable torment so complete it made even Andy shudder.
She whipped around. A huge wolf was on its side, writhing in pain. Its shape-shifting ability seemed to be completely out of control. Its body was in a continuous state of flux, each part shifting from human to wolf independently of any other. Bones popped and cracked, breaking only to reform themselves, then start the cycle all over again. She winced as its ribcage inflated to the size of a barrel but its shoulders turned human. Even from here she could hear muscles tearing and bones creaking as they tried to settle into a form even the current, twisted version of nature had never intended.
The skin was worse. Sickeningly worse. It bubbled and slid, flowing over the monstrous forms beneath, but like everything else, it couldn’t seem to make up its mind what to be. One second it was hide and fur, and the next it was soft human skin regardless of what lay underneath. A massive paw formed from the end of a human arm, then covered itself in skin before the bones within, too large for the casing, ripped through it.
She turned her head away for a second, covering her mouth as bile rose, and fought the urge to lose her lunch. She hated to be sick but just looking at that was enough to make her forget the habit of a lifetime.
The sound of torment rose into a plaintive plea for mercy. A death howl which called to every non-human instinct she had. All emotion leeching from her, Andy stepped forwards and into the Shade, her blades already raised for the killing blow.
Warmth and color disappeared as she left the land of the living behind. Here things were calmer, so much simpler. Spectral souls, human and Lycan, waited by their bodies, nice and orderly, for her to go along and reap them. She ignored them. They were dispatched. First she needed to deal with the tortured wolf.
Without asking, she knew it was the alpha, Jed. The power rolling off him was unmistakable. Just as she knew what had killed him. The silver-treated knife lodged into his heart glowed white hot in her enhanced vision. Even if she’d been of a mind to kill him, he was done for. After the blade had entered his heart to deliver its fatal payload, the continuous form changes had locked it within his flesh, putting protective layer after layer over it. The only way they were getting it out would be with a gifted surgeon, or a chainsaw.
She sure hoped that wasn’t Mason’s favorite knife.