A Pack Of His Own - Ch. 21 (alpha)

Chapter Twenty-One

            The vampires were starting to come out of the woodwork, quite literally.

            Each building had a couple of violent looking vampires emerging from them, almost all of them dressed in that biker garb, announcing them as “Crossroads Reapers.” They were big, burly and all of them were no longer hiding their vampire nature, fangs out and on prime display. Their hands now had long, sharp claws jutting from their spindly fingers, and they were deeply unpleasant to look at.

            Will clicked his tongue a little bit, as if he suspected it was going to come to this.

            “You see here, city boy,” the vampire who Will assumed must be Mitch McClarney and thus the coven’s leader said to them. “This whole town belongs to us now, and we don’t care much about your rules and compacts and bullshit. I never much cared for the laws of society, and so I done built an entire coven around people who feel the same as me. We hunt where we want, we kill where we want and ain’t nobody going to tell us otherwise.”

            “That’s unfortunate, Mitch,” Tommy said, his fingers snapping at his side, sparks starting to fly from his hand. “Because the Accords were what was protecting you. From me.” He glanced over at Will and offered a slightly sympathetic smile. “Sorry kid, looks like I’m gonna need you folks for the other thing rather than just standing and looking pretty.”

            “Not a big deal, Tommy,” Will shot back, a playful grin on his face. He’d actually sort of relished the idea of getting into a scrap, the more he’d thought about it. “I sort of expected this wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. Nothing in this life seems like it ever is.”

            “Don’t you worry, beanpole,” McClarney said. “Your life about to be a hell of a lot sh—”

            Tommy’s hand shot up and pointed in the vampire’s direction, as a gusher of sparks erupted from his fingertips, rivers of white-hot embers flooding into Mitch, engulfing him in fire. The vampire’s body burned up almost immediately, his bones turning to cinders, answering one of those lifelong questions Will had had about vampires – could you kill them with fire?

            As it turned out, that old expression had been right. “Of course you fight fire with fire; you fight everything with fire.”

            Immediately, the other vampires started to scatter, although one grabbed a discarded metal shopping cart and flung it in their general direction, the four of them scattering so it sailed by, hitting no one, just creating sparks where it skidded across the weathered concrete.

            “Stay in twos,” Tommy said to them. “Trish, you stick with me, and Will, you go with Freya. Werewolf senses should be able to smell vampires a mile away.”

            At that suggestion, both Will and Trish shed their human forms and transformed into their werewolf bodies, the pair of them suddenly much taller than their companions. Will could tell immediately what Tommy meant, though, as he now had a good sense of the dozen or so remaining vampires, and their general locations. It was almost like a kind of nasal radar, as weird as that seemed.

            “What are we—”

            “Kill or be killed, kid,” Tommy said to him, as his fingers started to channel another swirl of flame around them, the tips of his digits covered in balls of fire like little pads. The impish mage headed off towards ‘Carl’s Country Commodities’’ with Trish’s bulking form in tow, the mage kicking in one of the windows to jump inside, Trish leaping in right after him, neither of them much looking where they were going first.

            Will glanced over at Freya and noticed she was already holding an 8 Gauge shotgun, grinning over at him. “I came prepared. Wooden stake shells. Don’t worry about me – I was hunting vampires before I had my first period,” she told him with a giggle, as they headed for ‘Erica’s Etiquette,’ which had the least number of vampires in it, as far as he could smell. It wasn’t that he was cowardly; he wanted to be judicious about this and not get in over his head. Everyone else had far more experience at this sort of thing than he did, which meant it wasn’t second nature to him.

            Less than a year ago and he didn’t know about any of this, and here he was, about to roll into his first fight with vampires.

            The front door of the building was open and as soon as he set foot in the place, he was incredibly glad he could track the vampires by scent, because the interior looked like it was straight out of a location scouting for a horror movie, with creepy dolls along the walls and a vibe that could only be described as ‘extra spooky.’

            Tracking vampires by scent came to Will surprisingly easy. In his werewolf form, it was as simple as identifying the smells that were moving that didn’t have regular heartbeats. There were three of them inside of the shop, two in the back, one near the front.

            The one in front was jumpy, amping himself up, eager to strike, which made him the easy target for Will, as he could sense the guy was already looking to pounce as soon as Will set foot in the door.

            So, they didn’t.

            Freya reached inside through the open doorway and pointed the shotgun exactly where Will gestured for her to, then she pulled the trigger. The crack of the gun blast filled the room, immediately followed by the gusting implosion Tommy had warned them to expect. It sounded like a wet inward sucking sound followed by a sickly pop. It was something Freya was already familiar with, but it was Will’s first time hearing a vampire die.

            It would be far from the last.

            They were through the door in a matter of moments, and the other two vampires in the room were already panicking. Will suspected they must’ve been told something like nobody important would show up, and instead, in rolled a dangerous mage and his three deadly friends.

            The two of them darted into the room, and the place smelled of sulfur and blood, a splatter of loose blood up on the ceiling from the vampire Freya had just leveled. And the other two vampires were trying to race towards the front, thinking that if they waited, they were just going to get picked off one at a time. So, Will thought, the baddies must’ve assumed that pressing forward, together, they stood a better chance.

            That didn’t work out for them.

            As the shotgun barked again behind him, Will’s massive hand swiped at the vampire lunging at him and knocked his head clean off his body, which caught Will a little bit by surprise. He’d known he was strong, but strong enough to decapitate a vampire with little more than a slap? He’d had a duel with a werewolf and thrown much harder punches than that without doing much damage, but apparently whatever resistances vampires had to damage, it didn’t include raw force.

            Both vampire bodies imploded and the space was filled with sulfur except for whatever blood had still been in their digestive systems, which collapsed onto the floor with a dull wet splat, as the dusty embers of their corpses sizzled, falling into the sticky liquid only to be extinguished just before the vampire’s clothes dropped atop the mess of goo and ick.

            “Building’s clear,” Will said, looking around the room. “I don’t smell anyone else here.”

            The two headed back out to the crossroads, and Will could smell more sulfur lingering in the air, a couple more puddles of clothing strewn across the road. One of the buildings, ‘Erica’s Etiquette,’ looked like it was on fire.

            A giant section of metal whipped like a sawblade out from the bar and embedded itself in the building behind him, slicing the wall open like tissue paper before sinking into the space behind it. It had only been a few feet away from Will, so he was definitely catching on to the fact that this particular problem was a bit more out of hand than Tommy had let on.

            “That looks like trouble,” Will said to his partner, as she was sliding new cartridges into the shotgun. “We should probably go help them out.”

            Trish’s body came flying out of the hole next, although Will hopped up to step in the way and catch her, sliding one of his feet behind him to brace himself as she tumbled into him, the cradle of his arms doing plenty to soften her landing. She didn’t look harmed, thankfully. If anything, she looked downright pissed off.

            “You okay?” he asked her, as he set her down, his partner dusting herself off, flicking debris from her clothing. He was still a bit unaccustomed to how much deeper and more gravelly his werewolf voice was, but he was doing his best to get used to it.

            “No,” she grumbled, her footing still a little unsteady. “One of them bastards sucker punched me. I’m ticked off.” She got stable on her feet once more and then charged back into the building, leaping into the pitch-black open hole in the side of the structure.

            “Actually, I think she’s having a great time,” Freya said with a grin, as she slotted the final shell into her shotgun before racking it. “I certainly know I am. This is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”

            With that, Freya charged in and jumped into the dark hole herself, leaving Will behind with no choice, really, but to follow, so he sprinted in after her, continuing the fight. The inside of Erica’s Etiquette was a complete disaster, with whatever the interior of the shop had been before nothing more than splinters and debris, with some kind of oil or ichor splattered over parts of the walls, the light fixtures barely clinging on overhead, half of them already shattered, the other half swinging precariously, casting wild shadows across the walls and floor.

            Tommy’s hands were encased in what looked like spheres of lightning that rippled and sparked each time he slammed them into the massive vampire biker he was engaged in a fistfight with. As much as Will wanted to get involved in that fight, it looked like Tommy had it mostly under control, as the wizard punched the vampire with a right hook that set the creature’s head ablaze.

            He couldn’t spot Freya or Trish in the carnage, but as soon as he heard the deafening spout of a shotgun blast from the back of the building, he was pretty sure where to find them, and as he stepped into the backroom, he could smell the stench of sulfur once more. Trish’s had a gash in her stomach, but it didn’t look especially deep, or if it had been, her healing factor had already done most of the work to repair the damage. Werewolves healed insanely quickly, and Trish’s body had seen more than its fair share of combat.

            “I don’t see any more vamps back here,” he said, glancing over the small stockroom.

            Trish kicked a bookcase off the ground and over to one side, revealing a heavy metal sliding door covering part of the floor. “There’s a cellar. One of them ran down there and slammed the door shut. I think they hoped by pulling down a bookcase on top of it, we wouldn’t notice them.”

            “What do they take us for, Keystone Cops?” Freya asked.

            “As I recall, not too long ago, you were dousing me with holy water…” Will said.

            “That was my half-wit cousin, not me,” Freya scowled.  “I knew you were a werewolf right from the start, but nobody in my family wanted to believe me.”

            “I sort of suspected as much, but figured it would be rude to point it out.”

            He’d realized within the first day or so of Freya joining their little group that she was much much smarter than the rest of her cousins, but he still delighted in teasing her about it now and then. The hunters, as it turned out, were a group with just as broad a spectrum of personalities, ranging from the geniuses to the not-so-bright, who it turned out were mostly related to Freya.

            “You gonna open the door for us?” Freya asked him.

            “Looks pretty damn thick to me.”

            “Forget it. I already gave it a go, before the bookcase fell on top of it,” Trish said. “It’s pretty well clamped shut.”

            Tommy stepped into back room, giving the place a quick once over. “Looks like you three handled your assignments pretty well,” he said, admiration in his voice.

            “Not well enough,” Trish grumbled, gesturing to the heavy metal door that impeded their progress. “I was pounding on that thing for almost a minute, and I couldn’t make a dent in it.”

            The Green Wizard’s hand brushed across the surface of the rusty metal and eldritch runes appeared in green fire, burning calmly but somehow also threateningly. “That’s odd… vamps shouldn’t have access to this kind of curse magic. This is faerie casting,” Tommy mumbled to himself.

            “Can you break through it?”

            “Of course I can break through it,” Tommy said, annoyance in his voice. “I’d be a pretty piss-poor wizard if I couldn’t shatter some fae’s sloppy weekend work.” He snapped his hand into a series of drawn sigils and whipped it across the air, only for some purple sparks to sputter and pop around the text, which remained undiminished.

            “Failure to launch there, Tommy?” Will teased.

            “Shut up, Will,” Tommy chuckled back. “I don’t see you volunteering to break down a faerie protection spell.”

            “I’m just saying, someone was saying something about being a piss-po—”

            “Yeah yeah, I know what I said. I heard what I said. You know how I heard what I said? ‘Cause I was standing there when I said it. I’ll get it, just gimme a few minutes. It’s more complicated than it looked on first blush. You wanna take a swing at it, be my guest.”

            “Magic’s not my wheelhouse, Tommy,” Will laughed. “My job was to stand around and look either pretty or threatening, depending on what you wanted. But you said we were probably just going to be window dressing.”

            Tommy clicked his tongue in a tutting fashion, shaking his head. “Looks like that option’s down the drain, but hopefully it won’t get too out of hand.”

            “I’m thinking your bosses expected it to get out of hand, Tommy,” Trish said. “That’s why they sent you. A bunch of the older, more experienced mages didn’t want to risk running into trouble, so they let you handle something they knew was going to be more trouble than it was worth.”

            “That wouldn’t surprise me too much,” the wizard sighed. “While there’s some good people inside the Green Wizard’s House, over half of the captains are lazy vainglorious bastards. Tossing me onto the fire seems like just the kind of sloppy shit they’ll pass off as ‘another test’ when I’m done with it.” His hand snapped across the surface of the door again, and this time the sigils appeared but baked in reds and blacks, their resistance crackling and finally disintegrating under the power of Tommy’s magic, shredding them down to nothing. “Told you I just needed a minute.”

            Once they’d pried the door open, another gaping dark hole awaited them, a deep void that seemed to go straight down, although the top of a ladder could be made out against one part of the deeply descending tunnel.

            “Very dangerous,” Will joked. “You go first.”

            Tommy reached into his satchel and grabbed a small copper sphere with a dividing line down the middle, and as he turned the two hemi-spheres, it started to glow with a cool blue light that bathed them all in illumination. Then he dropped it down the hole.

            The ball of light rushed downward and what felt like almost ten seconds before it thumped softly into loose dirt at the bottom of the ladder.

            “That is a deep hole,” Tommy said with a sigh. “Fuck it, I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go… I’ll go. Fuck.” The Green Wizard moved to the ladder and started slowly moving step-by-step into the receding darkness, visible for only a few seconds before it engulfed him entirely.

            Will began to climbdown into the hole after him, with Trish following and Freya taking up the rear. The climb felt like it took a minute or two as they descended deep within the earth. When they reached the bottom, Tommy was already carefully surveying the small room they found themselves in, as Will moved over to him. “Are we in a cave of some kind? I didn’t think Nebraska had caves.”

            “It doesn’t,” Trish said confidently. “Not beyond Indian Cave, which isn’t really even that much of a cave.”

            “This looks a lot more like a tunnel than a cave,” Freya said.

            “This is worse than either a tunnel or a cave,” Tommy said, shaking his head, as he picked up his glowing sphere. “The faerie magic makes more sense now, although I don’t know how the hell the vampires figured their way around it.” He gestured to the only way out of the room other than the way they came, a steel door in a frame, inset within a rock wall, firmly closed.

But the door was far from the most interesting thing the sphere illuminated. All around the door frame was an elaborate mural, done in a fresco style with bright pigmentations and colors blossoming across the cool stone surface, everything given a slightly blue hue from Tommy’s glowing sphere. The images depicted a number of faeries engaged in combat with what looked like wizards riding dragons, although based on the attire, the images had to be centuries, maybe even millennium old, with robes and capes and cloaks and armor.

“What the hell am I looking at, Tommy?”

“A catacomb… a crypt, I suppose,” Tommy said. “From one of the Old Wars, back before the Wizards were recordkeepers, so the tale has been told and retold so many times that nobody knows how much, if any of it, is true. But the tale has lots of different variations. Nobody knows who started it, or even what it was over. All we know for certain is that it nearly wiped out both the mages and the faerie on this continent, and relations between the three tribes were set back centuries. I think the general consensus is that the dragons were probably at fault, and they simply did the best to cover it up so nobody could blame them. They hid their dead and we hid ours. Then, eventually, both sides forgot where they hid them, and we tried to let the past be the past. But there were always rumors that the crypts of the lost dead contained weapons of great power, dangerous and unnatural spell things, ready to destroy the souls not only of the wielder’s enemies, but the wielder themselves. That maybe the weapons contributed to the toxicity of the fighting, that they’d gained sentience and were corrupting those who held them. Every so often, there would be a treasure seeker who’d go off looking for the crypts, and they’d never come back.”

“Well, looks like somebody sure as hell found them,” Trish said, gesturing at the door. “That’s modern construction. And these murals have been restored.”

            “Maybe the faerie knew where theirs was all along, and simply kept it safe and secure and quiet,” Tommy said. “Until a pack of vampires came and stumbled into it. Then, thinking they’d found themselves a weapon they could use to deal with anyone and anything, they decided to start ignoring the Accords. And that would bring us to where we are now.” He shook his head, looking at the steel door in frustration. “Y’know, I’m presented with a problem here. I should probably take us all back up and we should call for back up, but I do so hate looking weak in front of the other wizards. That said, if this is that crypt, and they have those weapons, going and getting backup would only be a smart thing to do in the first place.”

            “They certainly didn’t seem all that deadly upstairs,” Will said. “We sort of tore through them like they were paper mâché.”

            The metal door suddenly reverberated as a heavy thud pounded against the other side of it, and the indentation in the shape of a fist about as big as Will’s head appeared in its surface about shoulder high, although the door frame looked like it wouldn’t take too many more strikes to collapse.

            “Never mind, decision made, time to go!” Tommy said, but Freya was already scrambling up the ladder and Trish had already started in behind her as well.

            The four of them were rushing up the ladder, and Tommy had just exited the room below Will when the metal door came flying across the room and crashed into the ladder, shattering the base of it, but thankfully it was bolted into the side of the tunnel in sections, because there was nothing left of what had been at the bottom before.

            That was when Will got his first sight of it, a giant monstrous hulk of horrid, rotting flesh, what looked like several decaying faerie corpses stitched together and reanimated as one behemoth berserker, trying to reach up into the tunnel only being unable to pull its grotesque body into the narrow space, as it let out a bellowing roar that shook loose dirt from the tunnel around them to drift downward into the eyes of many grimacing faces on its many misshapen heads.

             Freya was out of the shaft first with Trish and Will following right after. Will helped Tommy out of the death hole, even as the creature below was starting to rip portions of the shaft open, pulling portions of the dirt, trying to dig the space open to make room for it to crawl upwards.

            “What the fuck is that thing?” Will asked.

            “Faerie flesh golem,” Tommy said, dusting himself off. “Seriously nasty business. They’re basically established as part of a curse for disturbing a tomb. I imagine our vampire friends must’ve set it off when they fled down there and were destroyed by it.”

            “Tommy,” Freya said.

            “At least it’s one problem we won’t have to worry about.”

            “Tommy!”

            “What?”

            “Do those look like vampire fangs on that thing to you?” she said, shining a flashlight down the hole at the creature, which was still trying to burrow its way to the surface.

            Tommy and Will both moved back over to look down the hole, and sure enough, the faces that sneered up at them all had long, sharp fangs in their mouths.

            “Motherfucker,” Tommy grumbled. “They turned a fucking flesh golem into a ghast… what kind of insane vampires are we fucking dealing with here?”

            “Look, I said we had your back on this one, Tommy, but…” Will started.

            “No no, this isn’t just out of your weight class, Will; this is out of all of ours,” Tommy said, his hands starting to whip together a bit of magic that was sweeping all the available debris from around the room and dumping it down the hole, on top of the turned flesh golem that continued to try and fight its way upwards. “We need to call in some back up for this…”

            Trish gestured for them to head out of the building, and the three of them immediately followed that suggestion, deciding that getting into the open air might be a better idea. They sprinted into the open intersection and Tommy pulled out his cell phone, snapping the flip phone open and speed dialing what Will assumed was another member of the Green Wizard Captains. “Hey, Micah, this shit’s gone south fast. There’s a faerie tomb underneath the vampires nest and it looks like they’ve turned a faerie flesh golem into some kind of super wight. Yeah. Yeah, ha ha. A’ight, come on through.”

            Will grinned. “Back up?”

            “Yeah,” Tommy said, “one of the other Captains is going to use a locator spell and then teleport out to us.” A circle of sparks formed a few feet away from them. “Looks like that’s him.”

            But whatever Tommy expected to see, it suddenly went horribly awry as a form of a man stepped through the circle of sparks, but the sparks turned red and angry and bathed him in a terrible shower, which started ripping through his flesh, as the man shrieked and died before he knew what hit him, his body shredded into a puddle as they could only look on in horror.

            “Fuck me,” Will muttered beneath his breath.

            Tommy clicked his tongue stoically. “Well, that ain’t good…”