“JESUS CHRIST,” Derek whispered as the spectacle unfurled before him.
By rights Ballaro had the monsters hopelessly outgunned, but he and his might as well have been packing pea shooters for all the good their subbies were doing. Barrels flopped this way and that like hoses in the hands of incompetent firemen, spraying water over a grease fire of canine fury. A few of the men turned and fled; others dug desperately in the pockets of their camouflage jumpsuits. Those who stayed faced the first wave of charging wolf-things, who sank fangs into bellies with obvious hunger, eviscerating the wise guys as they stared in disbelief at their exposed entrails, some still firing their guns pointlessly into the air.
Derek swallowed. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His saliva had congealed into a parched and sticky film, salt and moisture rendered into sour glue. He was more comfortable in the presence of death than most men, but the display beyond the river sickened him somewhere deep in his core. Yes, he had killed—for preservation and for profit, in anger and in an assassin’s icy calmness—but the killing he’d done had always served some human interest, if not necessarily his own. Did that make it moral? Did that make it just? He expected the answers were no and no, and if a divine judge sat the throne of heaven, he doubted the sentence would fall in his favor. But for all his flaws, he remained an agent of man against other men. In following Luka, Derek realised he’d raised a far darker flag. Whatever was attacking Ballaro beyond the river, it was not his brother. To fight on its side was to betray everyone he’d ever known, including himself. The lowest folds of his cerebellum cried out in Cro-Magnon revulsion, that he might forge an alliance with such beasts.
Traitor, they said. If you weren’t damned before, you sure as hell are now.
Across the river, Ballaro ejected a half-spent magazine and slammed another into the housing, all the while screaming “You fucks, you kill my fuckin’ boys, huh?!” A wolf-thing raked his face while diving onto the man beside him, curled claws peeling back his cheek like wax paper. Ballaro barely flinched. He finished loading and plugged a single shot into the side of the leaping wolf-thing. Its ribcage exploded with silvery light. Though Frank Ballaro just about topped the list of people Derek longed to see ripped to shreds, he still felt in his heart a savage thrust of jubilation as the mobster’s bullets found their mark. He buried his celebration in a noncommittal grunt.
Luka had no need to mask such feelings. He growled low in his throat, an inhuman sound that rattled Derek’s spine, and narrowed his eyes at the kingpin, his lips curling upward as the other wolves rounded on him. Two leapt for his throat and were pulled back by one of their own, a creature far larger than the rest, with sleek grey fur hackled spine-stiff along its muscular back.
Majka.
She loomed over Ballaro like a great steel sickle, teeth and fangs converging into a single ruinous arc. Ballaro brandished his gun as if it were a conquering knight’s sword, thrusting towards her heart. He fired twice before her claws met his throat, parting him into twin curtains of meat and bone. Exit wounds burst from her back, spewing columns of white light.
“Motherfucker!” Luka charged into the river, pausing as Majka rose on her haunches, locked eyes with him, and slowly shook her head. She limped into the woods after the retreating gunmen, leaking dollops of sticky blood.
Luka turned back and marched towards the woods on the bank opposite the action, his face a stone mask. “C’mon,” he grunted.
“Where we going?”
“To round up the boys. It’s almost time for your baptism.”
“What, now?”
“Majka needs help, and blood don’t leave blood hangin’ like that. The pack’s gonna have its first real hunt.”
Luka stormed off. Derek paused for a moment, casting his gaze back across the river. Luka’s words echoed in his ears: blood don’t leave blood hangin’.
A bilious wad wormed its way up Derek’s throat. He swallowed it down, wincing against its stinging residue, and followed Luka into the woods.