Chapter 27 #2
As he spoke, the battle reached its inevitable conclusion.
The wolf’s jaws closed around Mercer’s throat.
Mercer’s struggles grew weaker as the wolf’s teeth severed arteries and crushed his windpipe.
With a final, terrible wrenching motion, the wolf tore out Mercer’s throat entirely.
Then, the wolf chomped through is ribcage, devouring his undead heart.
I watched as the wolf tore Mercer apart, his immortal existence ended by one of the few deaths from which vampires could not return.
The wolf stood over his disintegrating remains, its muzzle stained with blood, its chest heaving with exertion.
Slowly, deliberately, its amber eyes turned again toward us.
Desiderius pulled me backward with insistent strength. “Now, Alice. We must go now.”
I plunged deeper into the forest, branches whipping past my face with a sting that my mind registered but my body barely felt.
Desiderius followed close behind, supporting Catherine whose weakened state—a combination of hunger, shock, and grief—threatened to overwhelm her newly turned resilience.
The depot still burned behind us, orange light painting the undersides of low clouds, transforming the night sky into a mockery of sunrise.
The heat of the inferno had seared away my tears before they could fall, leaving my grief trapped inside like a prisoner in a cell without windows.
Through it all, my mind replayed that final moment—Ruth’s eyes meeting mine across the flames, she and Rebecca falling to their knees in prayer just before destruction claimed them.
I could only hope that their last act of piety would save their souls. What other than the holy cross could merit such hope for the likes of us?
“We must mask our scent,” Desiderius said, breaking through my trance of grief. “The lycanthrope will track us otherwise.”
He veered toward a muddy depression where rainwater had pooled, gathering Catherine with him.
I followed mechanically, my body moving while my mind remained fractured between present danger and immediate past horror.
The mud was cold against my skin as I scooped it up, smearing it across my face, neck, and hands—any exposed skin that might release our distinctive vampire scent into the night air.
“Wolves hunt by scent and sound,” Desiderius explained as he helped Catherine apply the foul-smelling earth to her trembling form. “Their senses rival our own. This might confuse it long enough for us to find shelter before dawn.”
Dawn. The word penetrated my grief with fresh urgency.
We had perhaps two hours before the sun would render us vulnerable to a more implacable enemy than any wolf.
Without the abbey’s stone protection, we would need to find earth deep enough to bury ourselves or risk destruction from sunlight just as complete as what had claimed my flock at the depot.
Once covered in the mud’s masking scent, we moved deeper into the forest, away from both the burning depot and the direction from which we had come. The broken terrain offered countless hiding places, but none provided the security we needed to survive the coming day.
I reached for my rosary on my belt. The simple act of counting prayers, of meditating on the mysteries of Christ, had steadied me through a decade of undeath; it would not fail me now.
“Lord who walks with us in darkness,” I whispered, declaring my intention for the Rosary I intended to recite. “Receive the souls of those lost tonight. Guide them toward Your light though they perished in shadow.”
Catherine huddled beside a massive oak tree, her body shaking with hunger and fear.
The blood in the clearing and at the depot had awakened predatory instincts that her newer condition made difficult to control.
Her eyes darted constantly toward the direction we had fled, as though expecting the massive wolf to materialize from the darkness at any moment.
“I can’t go much further,” she admitted, her voice barely audible even to vampire hearing. “The hunger... it’s overwhelming everything else.”
I knelt beside her, taking her chilly hands in mine. “Focus on my voice. On the prayers. We will find shelter. I promise you.”
Catherine nodded firmly.
“I believe in God the Father, Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” I began, grasping the crucifix on the terminal end of my rosary.
Desiderius remained standing, his posture alert as he scanned our surroundings with senses honed by centuries of survival. “The abbey is compromised,” he mumbled. “As are all safe houses known to the military. We cannot return to any place connected to Mercer or Gallow.”
I closed my eyes briefly, the weight of our isolation pressing down with crushing force. We were alone in enemy territory, hunted by both human and supernatural forces, with dawn approaching and nowhere except abandoned trenches to hide.
I was about to begin my first decade of Hail Marys when a sound reached us then—so faint that even vampire hearing struggled to detect it.
A soft padding of heavy paws on earth, moving with deliberate care to minimize noise.
The slight crack of a twig breaking under considerable weight.
The subtle displacement of air as a large body moved through forest undergrowth.
Desiderius tensed, his body coiling like a spring. “It found us,” he whispered. “The mud wasn’t enough.”
I rose slowly, positioning myself between Catherine and the direction from which the sounds emanated. The forest had gone silent again—the artificial quiet of prey animals aware of a predator’s presence.
Movement flickered between the trees—a massive shadow detaching itself from the greater darkness of the forest. Silver fur caught moonlight in brief flashes as the wolf approached, its amber eyes aglow.
Desiderius moved with blinding speed, grabbing a long shard of metal shrapnel from the bottom of the trench. With strength born of centuries, he lunged forward, driving the makeshift weapon toward the advancing wolf.
The metal found its mark, pinning the massive creature against the trunk of a needle-bare pine. The wolf’s howl of pain tore through the night, its body writhing against the improvised spear that transfixed its shoulder to the wood behind.
I expected savage retaliation—expected the wolf to tear free and attack us with the fury of a wounded predator.
Instead, it went still, its amber eyes fixing on me with that same unnerving intelligence I had witnessed in the clearing.
Blood matted its silver fur where the metal had penetrated, but it made no move to free itself, no attempt to attack despite Desiderius’s proximity.
“We should destroy it while we have the chance,” Desiderius urged, reaching for a second piece of shrapnel . “Before it breaks free.”
I raised my hand to stay him, drawn forward by something I couldn’t articulate—a connection beyond reason or explanation. The wolf watched my approach, its breath coming in pained pants, its gaze never leaving mine.
There was something in those eyes—something beyond animal awareness, something that spoke of a consciousness as complex as my own.
“Alice,” Catherine’s voice shook with urgency. “The sky to the east...”
I turned to see the first subtle lightening along the horizon—not yet the deadly rays of direct sunlight, but the unmistakable warning of approaching dawn. We had perhaps thirty minutes, no more, before the sun would rise fully.
“Leave him!” I shouted. “When the sun rises, he’ll revert to his human form, right?”
Desiderius nodded, dropping the shrapnel. “I suppose this won’t be enough to do the deed, regardless. We’d need silver.”
The wolf made a sound—not a growl, but something almost like a whimper. Its eyes moved deliberately toward the north, then back to meet mine, the motion so human-like it sent a chill through me despite my inability to feel cold.
“We go north,” I decided, though I couldn’t have explained why I trusted this silent communication from a creature Desiderius insisted was our enemy.
“The wolf could be leading us into another trap,” Desiderius objected.
“Or to safety,” I countered, already moving in the direction the wolf had indicated. “We have little choice, regardless.”
We abandoned the injured wolf and fled northward, Catherine’s weakened condition forcing us to move slower than safety dictated. The eastern sky continued to lighten with alarming speed, each minute bringing us closer to destruction more certain than any human weapon.
After what seemed an eternity but could only have been ten minutes, we crested a small rise to discover what the wolf had silently directed us toward—an old cemetery, its weathered gravestones tilting at odd angles, overcome by decades of neglect.
At its center stood a massive stone crypt, its door hanging slightly ajar, its interior promising the absolute darkness we required to survive the day.
“Perfect,” Desiderius breathed, his skepticism temporarily forgotten in the face of salvation.
We hurried across the overgrown cemetery, pushing aside tangled weeds and skirting toppled monuments. The crypt loomed before us, its stone facade carved with angels whose features had been eroded by time and weather until they resembled ghastly approximations of celestial beings.
The first ray of direct sunlight broke over the horizon as we reached the crypt’s entrance. Catherine cried out as it touched her skin, raising a wisp of smoke from her exposed hand. I pulled her forward into the blessed darkness of the mausoleum, Desiderius following close behind.
Together, we heaved the heavy stone door closed, sealing ourselves within just as true daylight flooded the cemetery outside.
The interior was pitch black, but vampire sight quickly adjusted to reveal a space larger than its exterior suggested—a chamber containing stone sarcophagi arranged in solemn rows, their surfaces carved with the likenesses of those who had long ago returned to dust.
“Not the most pleasant of accommodations,” Desiderius observed, gesturing to the stone floor. “But it will preserve us until nightfall.”
I nodded, helping Catherine settle against one of the sarcophagi. Her trembling had intensified, her need for blood becoming critical after the night’s exertions. We would need to address that when darkness fell again—another problem to add to our growing collection of impossibilities.
As Catherine slipped into the torpor that claimed vampires during daylight hours, I found myself thinking of the wolf we had left pinned to the tree. Had he directed us here on purpose? Had he known we’d find shelter here?
“Rest,” Desiderius advised, his own body beginning to succumb to daylight’s irresistible call. “Tomorrow night we will assess the situation, figure out if there’s a way out of this situation. I doubt we’ve seen the last of the Order of the Morning Dawn.”
I settled onto the stone floor beside my remaining companions. All I could think about were those who were gone, who I hadn’t saved. Or had I? I wouldn’t know until my time arrived, until I beheld the glory of heaven—if I ever made it.
“Requiescat in pace,” I whispered to the darkness, the Latin prayer for the dead falling from my lips. “May they rest in peace.”