41 
A TERRIBLE PLAN
Nikolai woke up to a nightmare. He was in the grove where Sig had cleansed the Russian olive trees, the clearing where the vedma had done whatever it is that vedma do in forests at night. The headless bodies of two of his claw members were lying on the edges of the clearing. Three others were sprawled within his sight, visible bullet wounds in two of their foreheads. The other was lying facedown in a huge blood stain, his heart next to his body.
Gabriel was impaled on a small broken tree stump like a letter on one of those old-fashioned note spikes.
I was fifteen feet away from him, methodically thumbing silver bullets out of the magazine of my new pistol.
Nikolai didn’t say anything. He rose to his knees and I slammed the magazine back into the H&K compact and pointed it directly at him. “Don’t rush me, Nikolai. I still have three silver bullets in this thing.”
“Where’s your bitch?” he growled.
He could have asked why I’d killed his clan mates. He could have cursed me or screamed or pretended not to know what was going on. But Nikolai zeroed straight in on what and where his threats were.
“I sent her back home,” I said. “This is clan business.”
Nikolai’s eyes widened at that. “You still think you’re clan? What the motherless fuck is wrong with you?”
“It’s your fault,” I said sadly. “You either shouldn’t have sent me after Mila Apraxin, or you shouldn’t have taken her in. I warned you, and you triggered my geas anyway, you dumb shit.” His face went unreadable. People think that means they’re not revealing anything, but that’s not true. It meant that Nikolai knew exactly what I was talking about. If he didn’t, his face would have been showing all kinds of things.
“I don’t want to do this, Nikolai,” I told him. “I don’t want to go on a clan killing spree. I don’t want to take Bernard’s head off. I don’t want to tell the knights everything I’ve learned about the Clan and how they operate.”
Nikolai’s heartbeat was steady. The man was stone-cold. “Then don’t.”
I sobbed and punched my forehead with my left fist. The gun in my right hand didn’t waver. “I’m trying. You have to help me. You have to kill me, Nikolai.”
“My pleasure,” he assured me. “Just put down the gun.”
“I’m trying,” I repeated. “You have to stop me, Nikolai. I think you’re the only one who can.”
“We’re your people, John,” Nikolai told me. “You can’t let those punks kill us.”
“You came here to kill me,” I said.
He didn’t deny it. “If I had to, yes. We do what we have to do for the good of the pack. It’s what makes us better.”
I took a deep breath. “We’ve got one chance at this, Nikolai. I think I can make myself throw the gun away, but I can’t commit suicide. You’re going to have to kill me.”
“You throw that gun away and I’ll see what I can do,” he promised.
I screamed and flung the gun down as if it were red-hot. “JUST DO IT!”
Nikolai was already up and across the clearing before the gun finished moving. I kicked a clump of dirt in front me like I was punting a football, and it went spraying upward toward his face. I tried to step on his ankle but his footwork was surprisingly light for such a big man, and his body was centered on mine so that I couldn’t get a good side angle. His right jab kept me back while he glided effortlessly and blinked the grit out.
He knocked my eye strikes away with his forearms and turned the blocks into punches and jabs. He kept pace with me effortlessly despite his heavier mass, and he hunched in his shoulder and chin to limit my target areas. I couldn’t find a good opportunity to take his feet out from under him, either.
When I attempted to break his arm by trapping one of his punches, he anticipated my turn and freed himself while I was still trying to bring my weight around. Instead of bearing down on a hyperextended elbow, I found myself catching an elbow with my chin. It was all the break in my concentration Nikolai needed.
As fast as he’d been moving, Nikolai had been holding back on his speed a fraction. Suddenly, his fists weren’t where my body thought they should be when my reflexes took over to block them. He was inside my guard, and his punches were brutal and devastating. He broke, ruptured, and fractured me, my jaw, my ribs, my teeth, my nose. I lost my air, blood got in my eyes, and he didn’t stop when I fell down. His foot came down on my right knee with all of his weight and broke it. I screamed and reached a hand up to stop him, reflexively, and he grabbed it and snapped my wrist using his forearm as a lever.
Then he backed off. There was no need to risk bringing his groin or throat or eyes or thoracic cavity into reaching distance by dropping down on me. I was done. I could barely see him, could barely breathe. One of my eyes was blind again. I think impact had turned it to insensate jelly.
“Just tell me it was worth it,” I gasped, though my words weren’t as articulate as their spelling might suggest. They came out more like “Juh teh me it wuh wuth id.”
Nikolai didn’t have any trouble understanding me, though. He spoke Broken. “What?”
“Juh teh me it wuh wuth id,” I bubbled through blood and saliva. “Teh me yuh nah evil.”
“By your standards, we probably are evil.” He walked over to pick up the pistol I’d flung away. “Remember you and Bernard’s little argument in the cave? Bernard’s real last name is Gandillon.”
Oh, shit.
Even as messed up as my face was, he saw something in it. “We are going to change the world, Charming. Take that with you.”
“The widj,” I gasped. I tried to raise myself up, but some fracture or crack in my breastbone was keeping me from propping myself up on my elbows. I wound up pushing myself backward awkwardly with one leg, making a furrow on the forest floor in a pathetic attempt to get away from him. “Chile killuh.”
“She’s going to become Bernard’s queen.” Nikolai raised his hand and leveled the gun. “She won’t have to do messed-up shit after that. None of us will.”
The gun jammed. This was because there was a piece of gum wedging the third bullet from the bottom of the magazine up, the angle preventing it from entering the chamber.
The gun that I pulled from the leaves behind me, on the other hand, worked fine. Nikolai and his claw had brought six pistols with silver bullets in them, and they were strategically hidden all over the clearing.
He avoided a killing shot the first three times, turned and caught one in the side, an arm, but the one he caught in his neck slowed him down and made him pivot and expose his torso, and I fired three more into his face.
I didn’t try to say anything witty. My jaw hurt too much and I wasn’t in the mood.
It seemed to take forever for Sig to make her way to the clearing even though I could hear her running. She’d had to conceal herself a long way off to avoid Nikolai’s senses. The profusion of trees hadn’t offered her one clear shot while we’d moved around, and she couldn’t scramble around to keep following us without him hearing her. She hadn’t liked that at all, but the clearing was a little like a boxing ring, and I’d needed Nikolai to feel confident.
Then she was looking over me, reaching and then pulling her hands away as if afraid to touch me. My face was bloody, one cheekbone crushed, jaw broken, teeth shattered, and I couldn’t even close my mouth so that I wouldn’t look like such a freak show. “My God, John.”
“It wuhked,” I said.
And no, the werewolves in the clearing weren’t really dead. It was all theater.
The werewolves with the bullets in their foreheads hadn’t really been shot by silver bullets. The headless bodies were two of the werewolves we’d executed earlier; we were still disposing of bodies, the freshest last, and it had been easy enough to dress those two in other werewolves’ clothes and position them downwind to help conceal their scent. The heart next to the overturned werewolf wasn’t his.
Gabriel was going to hurt like a son of a bitch when he woke up, but being impaled on that tree wouldn’t kill him.
Sig kissed my forehead. It was about the only part of my face that she could. “This was a terrible plan.”
“He dahked,” I said. I meant He talked.
And if I was right, mine wasn’t the only terrible plan.