CHAPTER 23
WOLF IN THE HENHOUSE
The noise outside was a chaos of gunfire, shouting and the roar of Nero’s rotating reaper.
But for the hunter, all of that noise disappeared, replaced by a single thread of sound coming from behind.
The mimicked whistle. Mia’s voice crying, perfectly reproduced, coming from inside the thick glass windows of the Commander’s house. Nero locked his jaw.
He knew it was a psychological trap of the Hidebehinds, but the instinct to protect that Vance had planted in him spoke louder. He let go of the machine gun’s crank with a metallic snap.
“Elena!” Nero bellowed, his voice cutting through the noise, looking at the vaquera as she reloaded her pistol. “Take the reaper! Turn it and don’t stop, or they come over!”
Elena looked at the machine gun, then at Nero, understanding immediately what was happening. She ran and seized the bronze crank, setting her feet in the mud, ready to hold the line of fire alone.
“Gideon!” Nero shouted at the inventor, who was desperately trying to repair the warped phosphorus launcher. “Keep the light coming! If the light goes out, everybody dies!”
Gideon nodded, terrified, hammering at the brass tube with a stone to try to clear it.
Nero jumped down from the parapet and rolled into the mud of the inner yard of Fort Ross.
He drew both modified Colt Patersons in perfectly synchronized movements.
The fog inside the walls was even denser, colder and more silent than out on the rampart.
The contrast was terrifying. The hunter ran toward the main house.
He did not run like a soldier but like a hunting wolf.
He passed between the wooden cabins, hearing the terrified weeping of Russian families in hiding.
When he reached the door of the main house, the horror was confirmed.
The double doors of solid oak, decorated with imperial crests, had been shattered from the inside out.
On the floor, two elite Russian guards lay stretched in pools of black, boiling blood.
Their throats had been opened with surgical precision from below, the signature attack of
What Hides Behind.
The Hidebehinds had not merely scaled the rear wall; they knew the layout of the fort.
Someone — or something — had opened the rear gates silently.
Nero kicked in what was left of the door and stepped into the main hall.
The heat of the stone hearth collided with the cold of the fog that came in with him.
The hall was in gloom. The polished bronze samovar lay overturned on the floor.
The silence in there was absolute, broken only by the muffled echo of the battle outside.
Nero moved slowly, the Colts cocked and pointed forward.
His glacial blue eyes scanned the darkness.
He was not looking for a figure; he was looking for the reflection of yellow eyes, for the sound of metal scraping the wooden floor, for movement in the air of the fog.
Clack. The sound of a claw striking the floorboards came from behind a large ebony cabinet.
Nero stopped. He knew the Hidebehind did not attack from the front.
The creature moved at impossible speeds, always keeping itself behind an obstacle until the moment it struck from behind.
The hunter was in the monster’s own back yard.
Slowly, Nero began turning his body counter-clockwise, keeping his guns aimed at the blind spot of his own peripheral vision.
In the reflection of a large wall mirror, Nero saw the thing.
The Hidebehind was creeping, elongated and macabre, pressed against the wooden ceiling, moving silently from one beam to the next, always setting itself exactly at Nero’s back.
Nero did not wait for the creature to attack.
In a movement that defied gravity, he spun a hundred and eighty degrees and fired the Colt in his right hand.
The report of the .44 in that closed hall was deafening.
The heavy lead ball struck the Hidebehind in the chest. The creature let out a guttural cry of pain, purely inhuman, and dropped from the ceiling, rolling across the wooden floor.
Without hesitating, Nero advanced, firing the left-hand Colt and then the right one again.
The shots tore down the corridor, ripping immense splinters of wood out of the walls and out of the furniture the monster was desperately using as cover, moving with the speed of the wind between obstacles.
The creature was wounded, its black steaming blood fouling the bearskin rug, but it was far from dead. It sprang from behind an armchair, its colossal claws tearing the air inches from Nero’s throat. The hunter dodged with an abrupt movement, kicking a low table into the monster’s skeletal legs.
The Hidebehind rolled behind the main staircase, the one that led to the second floor, and Nero felt the cold climb the back of his neck as he understood what the creature was looking for inside that house.
It was not him. It was the corridor above — the oak door at the end of it, the iron bolt, and the two people locked behind that wood.
Nero reloaded the Patersons in seconds, the soot of black powder covering his face.
He looked at the staircase. He knew the final confrontation was only a few steps away.