Chapter 22
O ver the next few days, they had brief sightings of Phillipe here and there, but they were never able to corner him again. They had their regular jobs to do most nights, which left them with a limited window for thrall-chasing. With each passing day, the likelihood of his demise grew stronger. Amos suspected Phillipe had a nest somewhere nearby where he was sheltering for his daysleep. If they could find the nest, they could catch him as he was emerging. Thralls slept more than fully-turned vampires, which meant Amos would likely be able to get there before he woke.
Finally, Amos found the spot. One of the neighbors on the other side of the back alley had a pretty wooden garden shed—beneath which, Phillipe had burrowed like a badger. His scent was all over the yard, and especially potent by the hole under the back wall of the shed.
The next night she had off work, Tessa and Amos set out to catch him as he emerged from beneath the shed. Tessa waited a few feet away while Amos crouched beside the opening. He tilted his head, listening. After a moment his gaze flashed to Tessa and he nodded—Phillipe was in there.
Amos stood poised, ready to grab him as he emerged. But Phillipe had other plans. A sudden thunk sounded on the other side of the shed, and a huge chunk of grass went flying. Phillipe burst from the new opening like he’d been shot out of a cannon, taking off running.
“Son of a bitch!” Amos spat. He flashed to Tessa’s side, flinging her onto his back and then launching them both after the fleeing thrall.
Tessa clung to Amos as he ran, closing her eyes against the wind. Her stomach sloshed unpleasantly with every sharp turn, every sudden acceleration or deceleration. Periodically she opened her eyes to get a sense of where they were, but just as quickly closed them, head spinning.
They chased Phillipe through Lincoln Park, up past Wrigley Field, through a large cemetery, and then over towards the lakeshore. They followed him to Montrose Harbor, where docked boats creaked and shifted with the water’s gentle undulations. Amos stood beside the water, Tessa still clinging to him like a baby possum, and silently scanned the dark rows of boats.
Movement at the mouth of the harbor caught Amos’s attention and in a flash, they were moving again. When Amos stopped, they were standing at the lakeshore, wooded parkland at their backs, Lake Michigan stretching to the horizon in front of them. Phillipe stood trapped between the lapping waves and Amos. In a space this wide open, there was nowhere for him to run where Amos wouldn’t outpace him.
“You’re out of options,” Amos said roughly. “Let us help you. ”
Phillipe looked like he was already on the verge of death. His arms protruded from the rags of his clothing like two white sticks and his skin cleaved so closely to the bones of his face, he looked like a walking skeleton.
“You can trust us,” Tessa said gently, sliding off of Amos’s back. Phillipe flinched back, stumbling as he splashed into the lake, feet sinking in the sand.
Tessa halted, holding her hands up placatingly. “Phillipe, you need blood. You need a safe place to rest. Let us—”
A sharp, baying howl suddenly cut through the air, coming directly behind Amos and Tessa. They both spun to face a pack of unnaturally large wolves emerging from the trees.
Amos moved to shield Tessa as the wolves fanned around them. Their gleaming eyes shone with human acuity, their predatory postures signaling cruel intent. Tessa counted them as they moved into formation—eight. Eight massive werewolves pitted against a single vampire, an ordinary human, and a nearly-dead thrall.
“Where did they come from?” Tessa whispered, clutching the back of Amos’s shirt, her voice thin with fear.
“From the city,” Amos said grimly. “In their human form, they’re indistinguishable from ordinary mortals.”
The wolves eyed Amos warily as they circled, snarls reverberating in their throats.
“Are they the same ones from the park?” Tessa asked.
“Most likely.” Keeping Tessa behind him, Amos backed towards the water, preventing the wolves from circling them entirely. Phillipe was still there, ankle-deep in the lapping waves.
Tessa hissed as her shoe sank into cold lake water. Allowing Amos to guide her, she continued to trudge deeper into the water until it was up to her knees. For the first time, Phillipe willingly moved closer to Amos. He didn’t get quite within arm’s reach, but he waded out to the deeper water with them, shivering and wretched.
Among the wolves, a copper-pelted female stepped forward. The others quickly merged to close the space she’d left, keeping Amos, Tessa, and Phillipe blockaded. In a strange metamorphosis that Tessa’s eyes and mind couldn’t quite reconcile, the wolf’s body transformed into that of a human woman. She stood before them, nude and utterly unfazed by it, her expression trained on Tessa with urgent concern. She was tall and muscular, with pale pink skin and apparently naturally blonde hair.
“We can protect you from them,” the woman said, speaking in that looping cadence from northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. “Run to us.”
Tessa clutched more tightly to Amos’s shirt.
“I don’t need your protection,” she said, voice cracking. “I need you to leave us alone.”
“We won’t hurt you,” the woman insisted, taking another step closer.
Amos snarled a vicious warning. The woman froze, but the surrounding werewolves took up a growling chorus, their pacing becoming agitated. Phillipe suddenly dropped to his hands and knees in the water—whether from fear or simply near-death exhaustion, Tessa couldn’t be sure. She loosened one hand from Amos’s shirt in time to catch Phillipe’s rail-thin bicep, hoisting him up so that his head didn’t slip below the water.
“If you won’t hurt us, then leave,” Tessa pleaded.
“We won’t hurt you ,” the woman clarified. “The strigoi will be dispatched.”
“Don’t trust her,” Amos growled, pushing himself and Tessa another step deeper into the water. Phillipe gasped as Tessa’s grip on his arm dragged him along with them.
“We’ve never done anything to you!” Tessa objected. “Why are you doing this? Just leave!”
Amos shifted restlessly, head turning to keep a constant eye on all of the wolves. “I’m going to distract them,” he said in a low voice. “I want you to run back to the street, screaming at the top of your lungs the whole way.”
“Amos, I’ll get winded before I get past the harbor.”
He let out a low, frustrated growl.
“I swear to you,” the woman said earnestly, “you can trust us. Wolf-kin are protectors. But the man you’re with? He is a monster. The strigoi are killers. He may be kind to you now, but eventually he will kill you, just like he’s done to countless others.”
“You’re wrong,” Tessa said, equally earnest. “You don’t understand what you’re talking about. Please listen to me. I love him, and he has never been anything but kind. And the only people he’s killed have been predators of his own kind.”
The wolves howled in a shrill, discordant symphony, clearly disbelieving.
“It’s true! Please, just leave. Let us go. We won’t harm you or anybody else!”
“You’ve been enthralled by strigoi magic,” the woman said sorrowfully. “You have to see—your thoughts are being controlled.”
Tessa scowled, her fear abating minimally in a sudden flash of annoyance. “Fuck you.”
The woman sighed. “The harm two strigoi can do far outweighs the cost of a single human life. The devastation they wreak is catastrophic. If you will not come to us, we cannot offer you protection. It is our duty to destroy strigoi. If you will not abandon the monster, if you are caught in the crossfire, then so be it.”
Amos snarled, a sound so vicious, several of the wolves went still. “If you harm a hair on her head, you will all die.”
Tessa wrapped her arm around Amos’s torso, hanging onto him for support as she struggled to keep Phillipe hefted above the water. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “Just leave.”
The woman on the shore rolled her shoulders back, expression grim. “I’m sorry it has come to this.” As swiftly as she’d shifted before, her body rolled into that disorienting transformation. She fell forward onto fully formed wolf’s paws, lifting her canine head to howl a battle cry into the night.
At once, the wolves surged, a synchronized mass of claws, fangs, and muscle. Amos pulled away from Tessa so quickly, she didn’t realize he was gone until she dropped into the water. Her ass hit the sand as the water closed over her head. She coughed as she surged back up, struggling to haul Phillipe up with her.
On the shoreline, Amos was a blur, surrounded by snarling wolves. Tessa could only track his movement by the reactions of the wolves. Massive canine bodies went flying back from Amos’s strength, skidding over the sand like badly-thrown frisbees, before leaping to their feet and returning to the fray. Blood sprayed the sand, and canine yelps punctuated vicious snarls. The blur of Amos’s movement sometimes disappeared entirely—slipping into the shadows cast by the wolves’ own bodies, only to emerge from a different shadow and resume the battle from a different vantage point .
Tessa clutched Phillipe’s arm, her back and shoulders burning with the effort of keeping his head above water. She stared at the fight on the beach, terrified for Amos, desperate for something to do, but paralyzed by the knowledge that there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t even see Amos well enough to know how badly he was hurt. He was an enraged tornado at the center of too many enemies.
The wolves were showing signs of injury—deep wounds revealing blood and muscle, limping gaits, broken limbs. Tessa hated to wish harm onto someone else, but she prayed that Amos would hurt them enough to drive them away. That he would survive.
Her breath came in rasping sobs as she watched the carnage unfold, the possibility of losing Amos becoming all too real. Abruptly, his unfathomable speed paused as he was knocked to the ground. The wolves surged onto him, becoming a single snarling mass of fur that boiled and churned around their quarry.
“Amos!” Tessa screamed, a shrill, broken sound that shredded her throat like shards of glass.
A canine head lifted at her cry, ears pricked, tongue lolling, eyes wild with hunting frenzy. He broke away from the mass surrounding Amos and bounded towards Tessa. She struggled backwards, still holding Phillipe, trying to drag them both to deeper water. But the wolf was too fast and too strong. Tessa’s feet slipped over algae-slick rocks and soft sand as the wolf closed in on her. Fangs flashed bright white in the moonlight.
Phillipe suddenly jerked out of Tessa’s hold. She flinched, instinctively raising her arms to shield herself from the wolf.
The wet, tearing sound of tooth on flesh assaulted her ears, but the pain of impact never came. She opened her eyes to see Phillipe’s wasted figure standing her front of her, hoarse snarls emanating from his throat as he grappled with the wolf.
He was losing—badly.
And then Amos was there, big hands closing on the wolf’s ruff, ripping him bodily away from Phillipe with terrifying ease. The wolf’s fangs had been closed on Phillipe’s throat, and they took a mass of blood and gristle and bone with them.
Tessa cried out as she caught Phillipe’s limp body. His head lolled back, eyes blank, long, snarled hair floating in the water. His throat was an unsalvageable pulp. Blood flowed from it into the water, a rapidly spreading dark stain.
“Are you alright?” Amos demanded.
Tessa looked up at him. His face was covered in a red mask of blood. As always happened in emergencies, cool detachment made her emotions remote, her reactions measured. “I’m alright,” she answered.
“Stay in the water,” he ordered, spinning away from her. In a flash of speed, he was back on the shoreline, taking on the wolves.
There were still too many of them. None had been injured enough to remove them from the fight. Eventually, their sheer numbers would prevail over Amos’s strength. Tessa held onto Phillipe’s cold, motionless body and watched. Her mind worked through scenarios methodically, searching for the best course of action.
They all ended in failure. In death.
But then a new snarl rent the air. A blur of motion burst through the trees and careened into the wolves like a missile. A cacophony of yelps greeted the newcomer, wolf bodies scattering like bowling pins .
And just like that, the tide of the fight had turned. Within seconds, Amos had the big copper she-wolf pinned to the beach, his hand poised to rip her throat out. The other wolves froze, attention focused on their apparent leader. The new ally went still, and Tessa’s eyes could finally recognize Etta, wearing a silk bonnet and lounge pants, arm locked around one wolf’s neck, prepared to break it.
“I do not want to kill you,” Amos snarled, chest heaving, blood and saliva dripping from his mouth in thick ropes. “But I will do whatever it takes to protect my bloodmate. Do you fucking understand me?”
One of the other wolves shifted into his human form, a man with the body mass of a Strongman champion. He fell to his knees arms spread wide. “Don’t kill her,” he begged hoarsely. “Kill me. But let her go.”
“I don’t want to kill ANYONE!” Amos roared, voice echoing off the trees and across the water.
The man flinched, but his gaze never wavered from Amos’s. “Then let her go.”
Amos’s hand visibly tightened on the wolf’s throat. The man made a pained, whining sound, body jerking forward instinctively. He checked himself at the last minute, recognizing the danger.
“Leave the city,” Amos growled, gaze scanning the crowd, holding eye contact with each and every wolf. “Leave the city and never return. If we meet again, I will be forced to kill you to protect my own.”
Except for those trapped by Amos and Etta, and the man on his knees, the wolves edged back slowly, whines filling the air, ears pinned back, tongues licking nervously at their snouts. When they had backed a suitable distance, Amos nodded to Etta. She released her wolf. He joined the rest of his pack with the same anxious body language.
Amos turned his attention to the man. “I’ll need a demonstration of good faith. Join your fellows.”
Clearly anguished, the man shifted back into his wolf form and backed away, head low, hackles raised.
At last, Amos turned his attention to the copper she-wolf beneath him. She stared up at him with transparent hatred.
“Don’t make me kill you.” Reluctantly, he released her, stepping back.
She rolled cautiously to her feet, keeping her gaze pinned on Amos. Slowly, she edged back to the rest of the wolves. When she was safely back amongst their number, the pack turned tail and fled.
As soon as they were out of sight, Tessa began struggling towards shore, dragging Phillipe’s dead weight. “Help!” she called weakly.
Amos was at her side instantly, hauling her off her feet with one arm, taking hold of Phillipe with the other. He carried Tessa to shore, towing Phillipe behind. Out of the water, he set Tessa on her feet and laid Phillipe out on the sand.
“Are you okay?” Tessa asked, both hands cupping Amos’s bloodied face.
“Well enough,” he answered, gaze pained as he looked her over. “And you?”
“Just cold.” She turned to Phillipe’s lifeless body and a choked sob rose in her throat. “He protected me,” she rasped, blinking as tears blurred her vision.
She sank to her knees beside Phillipe’s body, taking in the mess of his throat, the ravaged state of his body. But as she watched, a small bubble formed in the thick, pooling blood in his throat. She stiffened, then leaned closer. Another bubble formed and popped.
“He’s still breathing!”
Etta appeared at her side, leaning over Tessa’s shoulder to look at Phillipe. “He’s still alive. Just barely. He’s got minutes left—if that.”
“What can we do?” Tessa asked, hands itching to reach for medical tools that she didn’t have.
“We can let him go,” Etta said. “Or one of us can turn him.”
Amos stepped closer but didn’t say anything, his expression contemplative.
Etta shot Amos a meaningful glance. “ I already have progeny.”
“I don’t want any progeny,” Amos said. “Let alone one of Markov’s line.”
“He saved your bloodmate,” Etta said plainly.
Amos looked to Tessa.
“Please,” she whispered. “Save him.”
Amos closed his eyes for a moment, drawing in a breath. When he opened his eyes again, his bloodied expression was resigned. He went to Phillipe’s other side, sinking to his knees. Carefully, he turned the thrall’s head, first to one side, then the other, until a stretch of intact skin was revealed, just over the carotid artery. With none of the finesse he used with Tessa, Amos bent down and sank his fangs into Phillipe’s throat.
Amos’s shoulders rolled as he drank. Phillipe’s eyes fluttered open, gaze wandering sightlessly, lips working soundlessly. His feet pedaled weakly, finding no purchase in the wet sand.
Amos pulled away for a moment, turning his head to retch. “Good god, he tastes like he’s been fermenting in a sewer.”
“He’s a starving, half-dead thrall,” Etta said dryly. “He wasn’t going to taste like Christmas dinner.”
With a groan, Amos bent back down to continue drinking. Another deep pull, and Phillipe’s eyes fluttered shut again. His feet slowly stopped moving. His mouth fell open and slack.
One more deep draught from Amos, and Tessa sensed with a strange certainty that it was done. Enough blood had been taken to tip Phillipe into death.
Amos sat up, wiping his mouth.
“Now what?” Tessa asked nervously.
“It’ll take about a day before Amos’s venom revives him,” Etta answered as Amos got up and walked to the water. He crouched, cupping handfuls of water and bringing them to his mouth. He swished, gargled, and spit—and then started again.
After several rounds of rinsing his mouth, Amos came back. He stood next to Tessa, looking dispassionately down at Phillipe. Sighing, he bent and hefted Phillipe’s body up, slinging him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Phillipe’s emaciated arms draped limply down Amos’s back.
“Congratulations,” Amos said wryly to Tessa. “You’re a mother.”