A Pack Of His Own
Chapter Twenty-Two
Will was, for the first time in Tommy’s presence, scared for his life, and the life of his partners. The initial ‘call for backup’ had resulted in the almost immediate death of the mage Tommy had phoned for help. Not less than five seconds after his arrival, Tommy’s friend had died a quick and gruesome death, melting like butter in a microwave. So, what the hell were they going to do now that the cavalry had just collapsed into a puddle of seared flesh?
Turn and run, clearly, because Tommy was already sprinting towards the car.
“What happened to the backup, Tommy?”
“Some kind of area protection spell?” Tommy said as he unlocked the doors with the remote from his pocket. In the distance behind them, they could all see the building they’d fled coming apart at the seams, the earth below it starting to liquify and tremble. “Fuck! They’re coming out of the ground! We gotta get the fuck out of here!”
All four of them hopped into Cadillac as Tommy started up the engine, the beast of a machine immediately roaring to life beneath them. Will felt his heart start again, glad that whatever gods of fate were currently watching over them hadn’t allowed the car to stall inopportunely.
Just maybe they were going to get out of this.
Tommy put his foot down and set the vehicle into motion, with the unspoken plan being they would flee the scene, get a good distance away and then try and make another backup call. But the unspoken plan didn’t even last long enough to even be spoken before it all went to shit.
The vehicle accelerated to around 60 miles an hour quickly before it started slowing down. Finally it stopped all forward motion, although the sound of the engine fighting whatever forces were preventing them from moving kept thundering beneath them. The tires beneath them were squealing, burning hot against the pavement, but the vehicle was slowly starting to creep backwards towards the center of the town, smoke from the burning rubber below them forming a dark and unpleasant cloud.
“Everybody out!” Tommy shouted as he took his foot off the gas and the Cadillac started skidding backwards almost as fast as it had been going forward moments ago. All four of them jumped from the car and rolled on the ground as the Cadillac flew back, up into the air and then crashed down onto one of the buildings.
“This is way out of our fucking league, Tommy!” Will shouted at his friend, wondering if the mage had accidentally brought them to their deaths, as they scurried to move behind an overturned truck trailer. “WAY out of our fucking league! We need serious help!”
“No shit!” Tommy said, pulling his cellphone out of his pocket, stabbing at it quickly. Whoever he was calling must’ve answered quickly because he started talking almost immediately. “Hey! No, I fucking need him and I need him fucking now! No, I don’t give a shit what he’s doing! This is a Code Electrum! You know what that fucking means? Shit! The line went dead! We might be on our own.”
“It’s a horde of them and four of us!” Trish bellowed, glancing in every direction, trying to find a path outward and not seeing one. “This isn’t a fair fight!”
There were masses of vampires coming out of the wreckage of the buildings now, like ants swarming over a sugar cube, and Will could feel their chances draining away rapidly. There were so many bodies that it felt like they were being surrounded at a concert, in the center of the world’s most deadly mosh pit.
The worst part, however, was that most of them didn’t look like they were vampires—they were wights and zombies, an unholy combination of dead and undead, horrors and nightmares in various states of decay and collapse, and yet, none of them looked anything less than toxic. Somehow, this had become a shade problem.
Within seconds, they were lost among the sea of death and destruction, each fighting for their lives. Will lost track of the others almost immediately, as a mob of monsters swarmed around him and buried him beneath waves of rotting flesh. He shifted into his werewolf form again, lashing out with punches and kicks, the envelope of death around him trying to implode him, his furry form raging against the dying light he could see from the night sky above.
He could tell something had ripped into his flesh, but at that moment, he was simply concerned with survival, with getting himself out of this mess and living to fight another day. The nightmare walls around him weren’t going to swallow him whole, not today. He wouldn’t let them as long as there was air still in his lungs and blood in his veins.
Once he burst free from the top of the masses, he could see there were hundreds of the creatures around, but that wasn’t what disturbed him the most. No, that would be the golem ghast that had erupted from the ground and was standing two stories tall over just about everything, looming like a giant of death. Will felt his heart stop, as the gargantuan nightmare started charging towards them.
The bodies kept swarming around him, but his arms lashed out and shoved rotting horrors away from him, slicing them into pieces and crushing them into bloody pulp as he started fighting his way out of the sea of death and destruction.
Arms and legs would lash out in his direction, but he would simply rip them out of their sockets, tear them off the body they were attached to and start swinging with the torn limb like an improvised cudgel, hammering bodies away from him, chunking at endless walls of flesh.
He could feel claws cutting lines into his skin, ripping flecks of his blood out, but he was too amped up to let it get to him or even slow him down. They were fighting for their survival, and he could barely even see the others, their forms lost among the ocean of diseased and rotting bodies.
Somewhere, a few dozen feet off to his left, he saw a belch of green fire blast a dozen or so bodies up and away from a hole in the vampire mess, as he could make out a bloodied Tommy swirling coils of green flame around his body like a cage, ripping portions of his attackers off them, but the mage was still looking worse for wear, his face a bit bloodied, blood streaked to one side on his forehead, clearly having been wiped from his eyes with the back of his forearm.
Closer to him, he could see Trish in her werewolf form, throwing haymakers that were busting faces of vampires and wights alike, knocking them around in an effort to buy herself some space, but that was rapidly dwindling around her, much like it was Tommy.
The onslaught was relentless, and he could see Trish was doing her best, but that would only buy them so much time, and it didn’t seem like it was going to be nearly enough, not nearly enough by half. The gooey, darkened walls were closing in.
In the most trouble, however, was Freya, whose shotgun had run out of shells, and she was down to a handgun and a machete that she was using to try and chop her way through any problems in her way. But she was picking and choosing her shots much more carefully now, ammo clearly running low, preparing for her last stand.
None of them saw the hand coming, only it when it was pulling away. The golem ghast’s hands had wrapped around Freya’s legs, yanking her up into the air as she let out a horrific shriek. That was the moment when Will’s vision went red and he lost control.
It wasn’t until later that he would find out he went into a sort of rage trance and began attacking the golem ghast with a wanton level of carnage and a complete and total lack of his own personal safety. Tommy would later tell Will that he’d never seen an all-encoming berserker rage before that moment, but that Will had done everything he could to get the creature to drop Freya with as little damage as possible, ripping strips of rotting black flesh and blood-caked dirt off the creatures’ limbs in an effort to stop it, or at least slow it down.
Trish would tell Will it was the sort of thing that would’ve made his father proud, if he’d seen it, and had turned her on more than a little. The warrior spirit had come to the forefront, and Will’s rampant savagery was brutal and vicious.
But it wasn’t enough.
Not nearly.
Will’s enraged attacks had managed to get the wight to throw him and Freya across the intersection, the creature mortally wounded but not quite dead, a few ounces of fight left in it. It had tried to get Will and his partner as far away from it as it could. And still the horde itself was coming, and both of them didn’t have the strength to continue the fight.
Thankfully, the cavalry had arrived.
High in the sky above them, a tiny red dot of light exploded like a sudden supernova, rings of orange and red flame radiating outward as a single line of flame was barreling towards their place on the surface. There was a crackling sound of thunder, but a few seconds later, it became obvious those were sonic booms.
The approaching comet grew closer and closer, as the sky erupted into fire and flames, that singular spot of carnage approaching like an airstrike of death. And the moment it hit the ground, vampires and ghasts alike were incinerated by the droves, turning into ash as bellowing waves of green and blue flame ripped through them in shockwaves. The blast only cut through about a third of the crowd of undead, and didn’t even reach the golem ghast, who started charging at the blazing figure standing up in the small crater.
Will tried to catch a glimpse of who it was but all he could see was chaos and mayhem, ichor and sludge flying in all directions. The horde turned, trying to surge in the new direction, expecting their overwhelming numbers would be all the force they needed, but as the constant flux of raiders rushed towards certain doom, as their numbers dwindled rapidly, jets of eldritch green fire and ugly red light slicing through the attackers as if they weren’t even there.
And just like that, the tide had turned.
The endless sea of vampires and ghasts pivoted, and instead of running towards the impact point, they had redirected and were now starting to flee in panic. Will still couldn’t identify the person at the center of it all; they were surrounded by ribbons of fire and blood.
Eventually, the carnage began to fade, as the herd of marauders dissipated, vampires running in every direction, and many ghasts collapsing into pools of vile looking goo. As the dust clouds began to settle, Will glanced up and saw a familiar face looking down at him.
“Fairly impressive, you facing down a golem ghast, William,” Silversmith said, offering a hand to help him up. “Perhaps insanely foolish, but the fact that you stood your ground and it did not get the better of you means you are taking to your werewolf nature more quickly than anticipated.”
Will let the Red Joker pull him to his feet with a groan, feeling like every inch of his body hurt. Even when he shifted out of his werewolf form and back into his human body, he still ached, like he’d been going twelve rounds in a boxing ring. He couldn’t see any bruises or wounds, but somehow he knew they were still there, and that he’d be healing up for a while now. “I’m guessing Tommy called you in for help?”
“He did, and you’re lucky that he did,” Jonas said, his smile a bit grimmer than it normally was. “No offense to you and your friends, but Tommy gravely underestimated what you lot were up against here. You stood toe-to-toe with a golem ghast and lived to tell the tale, so that in itself is impressive enough, but my word, the number of ghasts here was truly terrifying. Some kind of strange ritualistic spawning nest. I’m going to have to spend some serious time investigating this.”
“I thought that was what Tommy was supposed to do,” Will said as they headed over towards where the Green Wizard was already working to repair Freya’s form, Trish having shifted back to her human form as well, and looking just as put through the wringer as he was, but neither of them looked half as bad as Freya did.
“Yeah, well, this is way more than our intel said was supposed to be here,” Tommy growled. “I’m gonna find Ellie The Fish and I’m going to show her what happens to informants who give potentially fatal intel and it off as ‘a small flap.’ Slow death’s too good for her.”
“Now now, Thomas, good informants are hard to come by, so let’s not get reckless.”
“Good informants, sure,” Tommy said, shaking his head. “Ellie’s come up short too many times now for the intel to be considered valuable anymore. And this? This isn’t bad intel. This was a fucking setup. Green Wizard Captain Micah Gosher is dead and I’m gonna have to go and explain that to the House, how I didn’t think to look for spells designed to prevent teleportation in.”
“You did, Thomas,” Silversmith said, placing one of his hands on Tommy’s quaking shoulder. “I’d bet my life on it. You looked when you got here. They erected it after that. That golem ghast sprung a whole litany of defensive spells when it activated, and there’s no way you could be expected to recognize them all. You were under siege, Thomas.”
“How the hell did I stumble into this?”
“More than likely, I think were caught up in an attempt to make a run at the Green Wizards’ House, so yes, the more I consider it, the more I think your informer was told to give you specific intel that would bring you here, so maybe you’ll want to slow roll the torture in order to find out who fed them the information. The deeper you dig, the more this will pay off.”
Jonas leaned down and waved his hands over Freya’s body, speeding up the recovery as best as they could. Will would learn later that healing magic was by far the most difficult of magics, and that some degrees of it just had to be healed up naturally. The biggest, most deadly of the wounds had been sealed up, stitched up and repaired in the big picture, but that there would be aches, pains, wounds and slow recovery periods associated with everything growing naturally back to where it was supposed to be.
“This sucks, you know that?” Freya grumbled as Will helped her to her feet, clutching her tightly to his chest. “Hey hey hey! Ow ow ow! Wounded person here! Go easy on me!”
“Sorry,” Will said, wiping a few tears from his eyes. “I saw that giant grab you and I swear I thought you were fucking done for and I got lost in the anger and I don’t know what came over me and—”
“Relax, Will,” Trish said to him, wrapping her arms around both of them. “It’s called a berserker’s rage, and our kind gets them when one of our own is in danger. You were pretty badass. Thing like four times your size and you damn near took it down. So please don’t do that again unless you absolutely have to.”
Tommy drew in a deep breath, held it in then slowly pushed it back out again. “I’m sorry again, man. I didn’t know it was… shit, I didn’t even think we were walking into something like this. I owe you and your family a handful of very big favors, Will.”
“Hey, I saw that you were just as surprised and scared as we were, Tommy, so I’m not upset with you,” Will said, putting his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “You can owe me the favors, but don’t beat yourself up about it. The bad intel thing can happen to anyone.”
The young mage nodded, although his frown didn’t fully disappear. “I appreciate it, Will. I’ll try not to blame myself too much for the mishap. Hopefully Grand Captain Feng will see it the same way.”
“I’ll go with you to make certain that he doesn’t,” Silversmith said. “You don’t deserve to be punished for bad intel, no matter the outcome. Feng might be short-tempered, but he can be reasoned with. He’ll have a conversation about it and realize he can’t take you to town over it. I promise you.”
“Not to be insensitive or anything, but do you think we could get the fuck out of here?” Will said. “I know you’ve fixed up most of what happened to Freya, but I’d still like to get her in bed and let her rest. Shit, we could all probably use a few days rest.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said, starting to snap his fingers together. “Gimme just a—”
Silversmith smiled, placing his hand on Tommy’s back. “You’re exhausted, my friend. Let me.” The Dragonborn waved his hand from down to up, drawing a line from his knee to above his head, leaving a trail of bright red swirling mists in its wake. Then he swiped his hand to the right, drawing open a curtain of the mist into a large glowing crimson square. A moment later, the mists shimmered, and Will could see the inside of the backroom of the diner back home. “Go, my friends. I will swing by in a day or two to check upon you.”
Trish helped Freya to her feet, the tall Nordic woman stabilizing herself between Trish and Will, as the trio stepped from the Nebraskan fields into their quaint cozy Colorado diner, hundreds of miles away, in the blink of an eye. Will looked back through the portal, saw Silversmith give him a slight wave, and then suddenly, it was gone, and they were left alone in the dark storeroom of the diner.
The two of them helped Freya to one of the booths while Will called April to come over to the diner and pick them up. The people he’d hired to work at the diner had been trained to expect the unexpected, so when Will and his partners had walked out of the back, nobody had so much as even batted an eyelash. Most of them were supernatural creatures themselves—werewolves, mostly, but they had a grill man named Edgar who was a vampire and didn’t seem to bother anyone, as he mostly stuck to the night shift, and kept his blood bags (plastic, not human) in the fridge.
Ten minutes later, April and Lacey had brought the Subaru Outback to pick up Freya, with Trish and April taking the wounded girls home as Will was too wound up to be able to go home and rest, deciding to put in a shift working at the diner to help him cool down. Edgar was manning the grill and a local faerie girl named Jubilee was working the counter. Will didn’t want to do anything too strenuous, so he decided to help out bussing tables while talking to Lacey about just how badly everything had gone south so quickly.
“It couldn’t have been that bad, Will,” Lacey said when the two of them had time to just hang out in a booth, waiting for additional customers to come in. “Freya just mostly looked tired.”
“Yeah, that’s because Silversmith himself knitted up her wounds,” Will replied. “You should’ve seen this fucking monster, Lace… it was at least two stories tall. Damn thing was uglier and more deadly than anything I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Well, you’re safe now,” Lacey said, running her fingers through Will’s long dark hair, tussling it just a bit. “All the more reason for me to start getting faerie magic lessons, so I can take care of things like on our own.”
“Oh, I was gonna tell you, Lace,” Jubilee said from the counter. “If you really want to learn fae magic, I could, like, totally get my sister to come by and teach you for a pretty reasonable price.”
“A reasonable price isn’t a first-born child, is it?” Will asked.
“Not usually, but if you’re offering…”
“We’re not.”
“Then she’ll usually teach in exchange for weed or cash.”
“Your sister teaches fae magic in exchange for pot?” Lacey asked, cocking her head to one side.
“We all gotta get our vices in somehow.”
“Sure, but she could just use the cash to buy her weed.”
“Well, sometimes you get a better rate if you cut out the middleman.”
“She… knows it’s legal here, right?”
“Oh, she does, but a lot of the dispensaries ask for an arm and a leg to give you the good shit, which is why so many people still just grow at home,” Jubilee giggled. “And sometimes we faeries like to goose the pot up a little, and nobody wants a written record of that.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Will said. “Well, if she thinks she can teach Lacey the basics, I mean, even just the rudimentary fundamentals, that’d be a start.”
“At some point, I’d kind of like to get a glimpse of what faerie culture is like,” Lacey said. “Do you think that’d be possible?”
Jubilee paused, taking the question very seriously before she nodded. She was usually capricious and flighty, but for this, it seemed she thought the subject matter merited a serious response, something she wasn’t entirely comfortable with, but was going to try and give her honest best. “Possible, sure. But I wouldn’t rush into it, and I would make sure if you do, you listen to your guide very, very, very carefully.”
“Why’s that?”
The faerie girl, who was dressed in sort of a goth Lolita style, frowned slightly. “Look, I don’t wanna lean into uncomfortable stereotypes, but about my people? They’re mostly true. We’re kinda sorta total dicks, and we love tricking people, and that’s just sort of what we do. It’s part of our nature. So you gotta, like, warn people who aren’t familiar with that world when they dabble with it that they gotta, like, be super careful and stuff. That’s all. Just, like, be careful and shit.”
“That should be our new motto for all of this,” Lacey said, giggling. “Be careful and shit.”
“I like it. It’s got a nice ring to it.”