Chapter Eighteen

The boulder’s third booming hit to the bastion’s base sent spider cracks streaking up the tower, which began to shiver away its stones. The crumbling base could no longer support the tower’s heavy topside. The remaining guards took their chances and jumped from the bastion windows as the tower groaned forward, toppling across the moat.

Beate and Heinrich ignored Wilhelm, for they knew everyone within eyesight was focused on the tower’s fall. More inexplicable was the horned hulk that leaped atop the base’s rubble.

A dagger tip pricked unsuspecting Heinrich’s throat, and he and Beate, still mounted on Uli, looked to see Karl wielding the blade. A few feet away from the lord stood what they knew to be Karl’s horse. Karl rode here in his condition? Beate thought. He must really be angry at—

“Get down or I kill him.” Karl, one of his eyes twitching, edged the blade forward to draw blood. “You first, Beate. I insist.”

“My lord.” Beate’s eyes glanced back and forth from the bizarre beast to the fledgling rapist. “Mad as you are at me right now, I think you should look at what’s behind you.”

“Get off the horse. Now!”

Heinrich felt the blade trembling against his throat. “Do it, Beate. We’ll be all right.”

Beate nimbly slid down Uli’s side.

“Behind the horse.” Karl motioned with his head.

She acquiesced.

“Beate, if you run, I slaughter Heinrich.”

“She won’t.” Wilhelm, his bow shouldered, had caught up and, from atop Horst, snatched Beate’s arm.

“Your turn, Heinrich,” Karl said.

Heinrich slipped off Uli and stood next to Beate. Wilhelm had dismounted Horst and now clutched Beate from behind, holding his dagger to her throat.

“Wilhelm, should we kill them here or in the keep?” A star-rattling roar shook Karl enough to look at what every other soul in the castle was watching. The monster stalked down the stones, eyeing the hostage party the entire time.

“So, sticking something where you shouldn’t!” it yelled toward Beate.

Her eyes widened. “Wait! You’re mad at me?”

Both of the lords’ horses took one look at the beast and shrieked as they ran from their masters.

Karl ignored the groin pain and slung himself atop Uli. “Wilhelm, come!”

The elder lord ditched the peasants and scrambled onto the horse. “Go!”

The lords rode Uli toward the second gatehouse, still open.

“Beate!” Heinrich dragged her into a run and they chased the lords.

“Are you insane?” she gasped, looking behind her as the thing glowered at them.

The remaining castle workers in the court swarmed the gatehouse like ants on sugar.

“I think we’ll be safer in there than out here!” Heinrich said.

Karl and Wilhelm blew past the open gate. Beate and Heinrich saw Otto emerge with his broadsword from the pack of panicked people. He was joined by Franco and a dozen other chain-mail-armored, sword- and pike-wielding guards.

“Surround him!” Otto commanded the guards.

Krampus chortled. He still carried the thick chain and whipped it forward. Otto and Franco ducked as the boulder hurtled from the rubble and over their heads. Beate and Heinrich breached the interior gatehouse just as the rock wedged itself into the opening, preventing the portcullis from closing, leaving near the base a gap large enough for even the biggest knight to enter.

The monster dropped the chain and reached into its barrel for the ruten. Franco rose, his longbow ready, and fired. Krampus swatted the arrow with the switch and lurched toward the gatehouse.

“Attack!” Otto and the guards war-cried as they ran. The monster ducked and charged the two closest like a bull, skewering one on each horn, and stood so the twitching bodies could complete their bloody descent. It flicked its head, ridding itself of the corpses, and twirled with its outstretched ruten, smacking away swords and pikes, and crushing two guards in their faces. Otto barreled into the thing’s chest, sending it on its back. Franco fired another arrow as the monster sat up, but the beast was too quick and seized the sizzling arrow before the tip could split its eye.

Two guards, their pikes pointed at the sitting creature’s back, charged. Their battle helmets muffled a piercing shriek. The old lady arched over their heads, flipping in a circle midair, and landed in front of them. The guards continued charging, the beast’s spine within sight, and as they passed the woman, they felt their stomachs burning.

They began stumbling and slowed enough for the monster to hear them. It stood, whirled and was about to strike with its ruten when the pair collapsed, a line of intestines trailing underneath them.

The woman flicked blood from her blades and walked into the fray. Six guards, Franco and Otto remained. The humans stood with their backs to the gatehouse, the inhuman walking toward them like they didn’t exist.

“Don’t cower! This is why you’re here!” Otto yelled to his nervous guards. Arrows flew from atop the interior castle wall walks. Otto exhaled, buoyed by the sight of archers trying to take down the monsters.

Dozens of arrows poked from Krampus, who appeared a hairy, lumbering pin cushion—behind which Perchta hid for protection, but only momentarily. She sheathed her daggers and drew her remaining throwing knives and hopped to Krampus’s side, aiming and releasing at lightning speed.

She smiled as three guards fell backward, causing the remaining archers to cower behind the battlements.

“Stand and you die!” she screeched.

An archer ignored her and spun from a battlement to line up a shot. He hit the floor a second later, a throwing knife jutting from his left eye.

“See? I’ve got more!” she screamed, and then quietly to Krampus, “I’m out.”

Krampus roared at the wall, keeping the scared men shaking where they stooped.

Franco stood next to Otto. Each of the men walked backward, in time with each of the monsters’ forward steps.

“We’ll be in greater numbers inside,” Franco said.

The old woman slowly unsheathed her daggers from her back belt and grinned at Otto. Two guards standing to the knight’s sides saw this and retreated to the gatehouse.

“I can’t blame them.” Franco’s voice trembled. “That thing should be dead.”

“I told that thing I’d die before I’d let it breach the castle,” Otto said. “It’s mine.”

Krampus casually plucked the arrows from its body as it walked, and then reached into its barrel and pulled another stretch of chain, its links smaller in size, and brought it back like a whip. Perchta hopped behind Krampus.

Instinct told Franco and Otto to drop. Krampus swiped the chain sideways and ensnared the remaining guards in its links, bunching them together like bananas. Krampus jerked the chain backward and released it, sending the four screaming men over the bastion rubble and out of the castle.

“And then there were two,” it snarled at Otto and Franco.

“Get into the bergfried with the lords,” Otto said. Franco bolted but fell within a foot of the semi-obstructed gatehouse opening, a dagger through his back.

“After you,” Krampus said, and with that Perchta bounded by Franco, retrieving her blade as she ran, and scuttled under the stone.

“Bravery. I appreciate that in my prey.” The monster stopped ten feet from Otto. “But you’re not my prey and no longer a child. So you now have the opportunity not afforded to your compatriots. Step aside and you live.”

Otto held out his broadsword. “I pledged to the baron that I would protect his castle.”

“And where is this baron of yours? Cowering in that big tower with his boys? I know a bit about the baron. He is a much better man than his children. But that is not saying much.”

“Be that as it may.” Otto stepped forward, his broadsword tip touching the monster’s breastbone. “I pledged myself.”

Krampus tsk-tsked. “A brave fool is still a fool.”

Otto rammed the blade forward, but it snapped in half against this thing’s stony chest. The knight, his mouth agape, looked at his broken blade. Krampus rammed the ruten against Otto’s unarmored head, knocking the big knight sideways into the distant curtain wall.

Krampus scrunched under stone, mumbling, “I have a feeling my prey will not be as brave.”