6: Bought with Blood
(May 5, 2015)
The beast, not human, not wolf, but a two-legged cross between both, leaped on Wendy before she could turn, slamming into her, knocking her off the log. She heard the sharp teeth click maybe an inch from her throat. Claws raked against her as she toppled.
Her reflexes let her make a half-spin as she fell, and she bent her knees, got her boots against the thing's gut, and shoulder-rolled as she kicked, using the monster's own momentum to throw it hard against a tree trunk.
She was on her feet in a heartbeat, axe cocked and ready. "Come and get it, sucker!" she yelled.
She heard a suggestion of an evil, low, liquid laugh. "You can't hurt me."
Wendy brandished the axe as if it were Grunkle Stan's Louisville Slugger. "Yeah? I'll ask the pieces after I finish with you!"
The inhuman thing—as well as she could see in the dark, it stood shorter than she, maybe five and a half feet, but far bulkier in shoulder and much thicker of neck—threw its misshapen head back and howled.
And from the forest, more howls answered, uncomfortably close. Wendy backed, found the fallen trunk, and stepped on it. As she had guessed he would, the creature called Freiki charged again, dropping to all fours to gain speed and then catapulting toward her.
She leaped aside as she swirled the axe in a circle over her head, sweeping it to chunk against his right shoulder. It bit deep and the creature screamed, yelping like a wounded dog, as it fell and scrabbled in the detritus of the forest floor.
But by then Wendy was running full-tilt, dodging between the pine trunks. She heard him, or another one of them, coming on hard, stopped with her back to a tree, and as the beast rushed past, she struck again, drawing a human-like scream.
"Can't hurt you, remember?" she taunted, already running as the creature staggered, holding its chest.
"Wendy!" Ford's voice. "To me! To me!"
She saw him and veered to join him, bursting through springy undergrowth and into the open. He grabbed her arm, but she shook him off. "Need two for the axe!"
Now the sounds of hot pursuit clamored louder, closer—some of them were baying almost like hounds, others ran in ghastly silence. The werewolves erupted from the forest edge. "There!" Ford yelled. "Inside!"
Wendy glimpsed it then, a ghostly disk of pale blue light, like a spotlight made of moonbeams, the place where Ford had sprayed his scent masker, where he had traced a circle in the grass. She ran, limping.
Something snapped at her foot, and she felt teeth close on her bootheel. A backward smash of the axe discouraged that attacker. Then she and Ford had stumbled inside the weird illuminated circle, twenty feet or so across—
And the wolves and half-humans drew up short, screeching.
"They can't cross the perimeter," Ford panted.
She counted six of them, four wolves, two wolfmen—wolfwomen? She couldn't tell. They milled at the edge of the circle, snarling and growling.
Ford raised a powerful flashlight beside his eyes and shone it on their attackers. Wolf eyes reflected like green embers. One of the wolfmen's eyes burned like orange coals. The creatures cringed and fell back from the light.
And then another limped out of the woods, a blood-streaked gray one. "I will eat her heart!" it rumbled, the voice revealing it to be Freiki. In the circle of light from Ford's flashlight, red, still-oozing blood from wounds on its shoulder and ribcage matted its fur.
"I don't think your master will let you," Ford yelled.
The shambling creature drew up short. "What? Another human? Or a ghost? It has no scent!"
"You others!" Wendy yelled, "We have no fight with you! Freiki has injured our friend! We help our friends! It's the Law of the Pack!"
The six drew back a little. One whimpered.
Freiki snarled and threw himself forward. At the very edge of the circle, power crackled in bright blue-white lightning bolts, seizing him like the legs of a grotesque electric spider closing on prey. He jolted, howled, and reeled backward, falling and pushing himself up again, staggering, lurching, and obviously disoriented.
"Ulva!" Ford shouted. "Are you among these?"
"She—she is as good as dead!" Freiki roared hoarsely, bracing himself against a tree.
"Ulva! If you hear us, we offer you sanctuary!" Ford shouted over his voice. "Come to us! We mean you no harm. The rest of you—get back, now! Run! Fair warning!"
Two of the wolves seemed to understand and slunk away into the forest. The two wolfpeople came to stand flanking Freiki, though they did not touch the leader of their pack. The remaining two wolves, cowering, tails tucked, fell back slowly, growling.
"Wendy," Ford said in almost a whisper, "close your eyes."
She did.
Ford yelled again: "You were warned. This is Freiki's fault!"
Even with her eyes closed, Wendy could see—could almost see a red world, through the membrane of her eyelids, as an unimaginably brilliant light flared for a split second—and she heard the terrified yelps of the werewolves as they fled, seemingly panicked and blinded, for she heard them scramble and blunder against trees.
Ford had hold of her left wrist and half-dragged her. "Run!"
They left the protective circle, made it to Ford's car—he ripped open the driver's door and pushed her in and across the seat before climbing in himself and slamming the door. Of their besiegers only Freiki remained, and he came in a shambling, staggering run, obviously injured but anger-fueled. "I regret this," Ford said.
The driver's-side car window was down. Ford raised his arm, aimed some weapon—
Freiki was throwing himself at the car—
Wendy winced at the boom! The whole car reverberated as an orange flame licked into the night. Five feet away, Freiki dropped to the ground, rolling and screaming, as Ford started the engine, backed and spun like a stunt driver, and roared away, leaving behind a hanging cloud of dust.
"Did you kill him?" Wendy asked.
"I doubt it."
Wendy felt her leg. It was wet and sticky, and the denim felt torn. "What kind of gun was that?"
"Oh, it's a McGucket special. A three-shot revolver—"
"Three?"
"Yes, chambering twelve-gauge shotgun shells. These are loaded with pellets of pure silver. They scatter, so lethal distance is only a couple of dozen feet, usually. The gun also has, please pardon me, one hell of a kick. Anyway, this is small shot, number three birdshot, so while he's probably not going to die from the wound, I expect he's chewed up painfully. Are you all right? No bites?"
"No, he tried, but the oil and silver must've stopped him. My jeans are ripped bad, and he might've clawed me. Is that dangerous?"
"Claw wounds? That depends. Have you had a tetanus shot recently?"
"Nope."
"Then," Ford said, "we'll stop at the clinic and get the duty nurse to give you one. Then to the Gleeful house."
"Why there?" Wendy asked.
"To begin with, you have some of the creature's blood on your axe. Not much, but not much is needed. But then, too—there's Ulva. If she heard, if she wants to seek sanctuary—that's where she'll come."
"She'd have better luck at the Shack!"
"We'll try to explain that to her," Ford said as he turned toward the clinic. "If she gets to us. If she's still alive."
Moonrise. The outskirts of Reno, NV.
The false priest sat slumped at the desk of his motel room. He had been able to see through the corpse's eyes, to speak through its mouth, hear through its ears, but now—now his worn spirit had crept back into his own mind, and he hurt, he ached, he carried the muscle-memory of the woman's painful false life in every limb.
And he had lost blood. The pint or so he had loosed from his veins had activated the reanimation spell and had allowed him to move his flesh puppet, to inhabit it. He had thought himself safe enough here in the motel room, a hundred miles away from the isolated hiding place of Carl Debbinzer.
And he had been almost correct in his thinking. When the woman's body had finished its grisly work and had begun to fall apart, riddled with bullets and no longer held together by the spell, his last conscious act while animating the body was to turn on the two burners on the propane stove. And in a back bedroom—to light and leave a candle burning. Then he let go his grip, and a second death took the body as his spirit fought free of its dissolution.
It was a near escape, but his mind had not been caught in the undertow of her corpse's failing. It had crossed the distance with the speed of light, but then had crept back into his own body with agonizing slowness. He felt long before he could move.
He had been bent forward in his chair, arms and head resting on the desk. His face peeled up from the wood. In the reading light, he saw he had lost more blood—it had seeped through the bandages on his left arm, had spread in a pool that was already drying, that gave forth the unpleasant odor of coagulating blood, metallic but with a sick, sweet undertone, a fudgy smell like candy cooked in hell.
This blood loss had not been too major. Spilled blood always looks like a larger volume than it really is—a few ounces, but on top of his recent sacrifices, it left him weak.
He pushed up, walked to the bathroom on rubbery legs, and dug out bandages and cotton wool. He had to cut through the old bandage with a pair of medical shears—the gift of a now-dead doctor in Yuba City, California, an elderly man who had such a naïve faith in human nature that he stopped one night to pick up a hitchhiker on a lonely stretch of Browns Valley Road.
He had been so kind that he had willingly—true, while in a mental daze and not under his own control—driven the passenger into Nevada and, with the car pulled off in the shelter of a tumble of scree, had obligingly walked half a mile into the desert and had dug his own grave.
The false priest had driven the car to the outskirts of Reno, had carefully wiped down all surfaces so he left no fingerprints—although his were on file with no police agency anywhere—and had left the windows of the car open, the key in the ignition. It would be only a matter of time before some opportunistic thief stole it.
Then the false priest carried a suitcase with medical supplies and drugs packed inside. The late doctor no longer needed them.
Anyway, in the motel bathroom he used the medical shears to cut off the blood-soaked bandage on his left arm. The puncture wound still oozed blood. He splashed disinfectant on, wincing at the burn, and then with wide adhesive tape tightly bound a gauze pad, folded and re-folded, against the wound.
He drank glass after glass of water. He knew he would have to rest for days now. Such a major magic took much of his energy, and he would have to rebuild it.
No matter. He had money enough, and the motel was not an expensive one. Eating places clustered nearby. A pharmacy was within walking distance if he needed to replenish bandages or alcohol.
Despite his bone-deep feeling of exhaustion, he carefully mopped up and scrubbed away the spilled blood. The housekeeper did not need to see that. He had no wish to waste more of his blood on possessing flunkeys.
He lay back on the bed and let his mind reach out.
What he found nearly brought him to his feet in a blind rage.
He had thought he had arranged the enslavement of the Pentagram very neatly. The beast-creature, the were-creature, Freiki, was easy to bend to his will. Now, infuriatingly, Freiki's mind clouded red with pain. Something had fought against him. What? He had an impression of silver. Who would know that? What human would even suspect the existence of the carefully elusive pack of werewolves? And the other sensation, what was it? Coldness? The Ice? Could his targets and his foes even be aware of his movements?
No, impossible. They were not even together in one place. There had to be ten of them, he knew—but he could account so far for no more than five, perhaps six. Two were so nearly identical he could not be sure if he was reading one or two psychic signatures. Anyway, he could not yet locate them. No matter, for he had time. They could pose no threat unless they all ten gathered together, with knowledge that he doubted any living man had in this scientific age. Then, too, to have any hope against him, they would have to know of him and be united against him—and they still seemed scattered.
And—yes, he knew it well—though if they gathered, they could be a threat, until they had gathered, he could not rob them of power. He had hoped to turn one of them at least, more preferably a third of them—bend the three most vulnerable among them to darkness. He knew the Good. The untouched would foolishly try to help if he corrupted a few of their number. They would foolishly gather then.
But if three of their number secretly worked for him, they would all be doomed.
They would be his.
Wendy's left jeans leg had been ripped from the bottom of the side pocket to halfway down her calf. Four bloody lines scored her flesh—not deep, not requiring stitches, but dark red and angry-looking against her pale skin, and they had bled enough to stiffen the denim of her ruined jeans. Nurse Everett, a no-nonsense, heavyset woman who had lived in Gravity Falls for most of her life, took the news that Wendy had been raked by a werewolf's claws right in stride. She had Wendy strip off the bloody jeans. On an examining table, the redheaded girl lay on her right side, a folded sheet draped over her hips for modesty, while the nurse-practitioner poured cold hydrogen peroxide solution over the claw-gashes. They boiled pink.
Then came a gentle cleansing, then reddish-brown Betadine, burning. Finally, a series of four-inch gauze pads, bound against the pads with a self-adhesive stretchy bandage. And after all that, the quick sharp bite of the hypodermic needle with the tetanus toxoid shot.
Ford had driven over to the Shack for spare clothes. Nurse Everett brought them back to the examination room and helped Wendy get into them without snagging the bandage. "That should do it, as far as normal germs go," she told Wendy. "As for the other—"
"Dr. Pines has that covered," Wendy said.
Ford had explained as they were driving in: "I'll take your axe and get a few drops of blood from it. With half of that, I'll make a vaccine for Gideon, and the other half is for you."
"But he didn't bite me," she said. "He tried, but he couldn't get close enough with his teeth."
"All the same, we'll call it a preventive measure. It won't harm you if you're not infected, and just in case you are, it will stop the infection cold. I'll need a few drops of your own blood, too, and of Gideon's. I'll work all night and it should be ready tomorrow. Stan has agreed to stake out the Gleeful house."
"You think they'll attack him?" she asked.
Ford shook his head gravely. "No. But truthfully, I'm worried about Ulva. If she comes seeking help, they may be bold enough to try to track her and kill her."
"But Stan doesn't have your smarts," she said.
Ford smiled. "He has brass knuckles," he told her reassuringly. Then he paused and adjusted his spectacles. "More accurately—he has silver knuckles."