Chapter Twenty-One: The Part Where They Slaughter the Castle Full of Vampires
Paddington gave Lisa a final kiss farewell, nodded manfully to Beck, and turned to the pack assembled around him in the ground-floor hallway of the apartment building. By now the Team would be nearly in position, covering the castle with sniper rifles and awaiting the wolf strike-team to run to the castle and make war.
Only problem was, no wolves.
As they were keen to remind him, they couldn’t change form at will. They needed time to build themselves up to it and the knowledge that they were about to make all-out war seemed to have startled them enough that many of them couldn’t manage the transformation. McGregor’s suggestion of injections of testosterone was greeted with deep suspicion. It wasn’t just that they didn’t trust Mainlanders. They also didn’t trust doctors.
However, McGregor had given Paddington another trick he thought might work.
“We’re ready,” Truman said through the radio’s wireless earpiece.
Paddington turned to the men to find their heads bowed down and eyes closed with Will leading them. “Enanti, we beseech you to come upon this group. Fill us with Your might for the coming conflict—”
“Oi!” Paddington shouted. “Stop wishing upon a star and wolf up!”
Will opened an eye so he could glare at Paddington. “It’s not that easy,” he said. “We’ll need about ten minutes before the first change. Besides, we must seek Enanti’s guidance over the group.”
“Weren’t you listening? Enanti is a force of base destruction!”
“The Enanti we know gives us strength, together,” Will said. “He is not a destroyer.”
“Are you really all so stupid that – even when you’re about to attack him – you still believe Adonis’s lies over what the God wrote down Himself?”
“You want us to trust your Mainlander over our God?”
“I expected you to use your brains.” Paddington threw his hands. “How stupid of me! Now wolf up!”
“We can’t!” Dom shouted back.
“Why not?” Paddington advanced on him. Dom stood his ground, even maybe thrust his jaw out – it was hard to tell, with Dom – but he couldn’t match Paddington in intensity.
“Are you scared?” Paddington invaded Dom’s personal space. “You a coward? How do you ever manage the transformation? I’m amazed you have the stones for it!”
“James, calm d—” Rick said.
“No!” Paddington slapped Rick’s hand off his shoulder. “I’m not going to calm down! I’m going to run into that castle and make the Andrastes sorry that they ever took advantage of me! I’m going to find the vampires that huddle in the dark! I’m going to show them they can’t dictate my life! That I’m not their lapdog and their puppet! Are you coming with me, or will your revenge get away because you’re too useless to sprout a tail?”
Paddington heard several sets of hands hit the carpeted corridor and the wolves started to change. It came like a tide, a rush, and once it took one of them the rest were swept up easily.
Watching it, the change was… inelegant.
Not painful-looking, exactly, but certainly not natural. The face distorted as a muzzle grew out from the nose. The fur spread across them before the faces were fully-formed, lending them an old-time monster feel: a man’s face with fur on top and a little black nose.
Soon, though, Curt had changed fully into a wolf. In moments, the others had as well. They fumbled out of the Team’s spare uniforms, sometimes helping one another by holding a shirt in their teeth as another wolf stepped out of it. McGregor had been right: anger wasn’t quite enough, but directed anger, especially concentrated on an image of success, increased testosterone.
Paddington shrugged out of his long tan coat and placed it on the stand beside the door. “So much for ten minutes. Oh, and Rick – you’re all right! How’s your tail?” The dark-furred wolf wagged it once. Seemed the wolf grew new from the man each time. The tail bones that had been hit by the car had disappeared when Rick had turned human and now new ones had emerged. Handy: it meant one more wolf for the fight. “Keep your heads in there,” Paddington said to them all. “Work together; look out for one another.” He let out a deep sigh. This was really it.
No. This had been it for a while. Since the wolves attacked. Since before then. This was always coming. Adonis had pushed too hard for too long for any other outcome.
One last time, Paddington checked that Bretherton Sabre was secure on its baldric and that the pistol the Team had given him was safely in its holster. “We’re ready to go,” he said into his headset.
“Looks clear,” Truman said, “but don’t take too long.”
Paddington opened the front door and ran for the castle. He knew the theory: keep his head on what was in front of him and just run like mad. Don’t look up. Don’t look around. If one of the vampires took a shot at him, he’d be dead before he knew they’d fired. No point worrying, so don’t look.
He couldn’t help it. Every few steps his eyes jumped up to the castle, looming ever bigger as he ran across the street toward the still-open gate and, beyond it, the bridge. There would be vampires in those dark windows; there had to be. Vampires aiming at him. How could he not look?
No shots came. No sign of vampires at the windows or, if there were, Truman wasn’t firing yet. Waiting for a more secure shot, perhaps. Or dangling him like bait. They’d established the Andrastes wouldn’t kill him, which was why he was clearing the way solo.
Paddington stepped foot on the bridge and forced himself to watch his path not the windows. The stones here were uneven and the bridge was narrow enough that a bad stumble would bring him closer to the edge than he’d like.
Again, no shots. Paddington couldn’t remember running this long or hard as a human for a while, and the several layers of clothes, the several weapons, and the hypothermia certainly didn’t help. Panting, he arrived at the inner portcullis. This one the Andrastes had closed.
Mitchell had had a solution for that and Paddington now brought it out of his jacket pocket: an off-white putty called PE4. Mitchell had said he needn’t be delicate with it – he’d even thrown a bunch of it against the wall to prove the point – but this was the first time Paddington had handled explosives and caution seemed better than ending up in bits. He wedged the PE4 into the gate’s lock and inserted the blasting cap as Truman had showed him. The remotely-detonatable triggers had been with the bulk of the explosives, and had been left behind in the panic of fleeing the safehouse, so Paddington was using an old-fashioned fuse.
That lit, he ran for safety. It wasn’t a large charge – no rolling waves of fire and giant billowing smoke – just enough to destroy the lock. When it went off, the bang was loud but the debris was minimal: a few dislodged stones and some twisted metal. None of it made it to Paddington, halfway across the bridge, though the heat and the smell flashed past him.
He picked himself up, dusted himself off, and walked back toward the castle. No hurry this time. If the vampires hadn’t shot him when he’d set the charge they never would, so he turned his attention to the windows and spotted a dark shape lurking in one. His pistol didn’t want to come out of its holster – the press stud wouldn’t release – but he finally lifted the pistol free, flicked off the safety, and fired. He missed, of course; he’d never been much good with guns and the cold out here was making his arm shake, but the figure ducked out of sight, which was all he’d wanted.
Another figure must have gone to another window, because a sniper rifle boomed from behind him – not a sharp burst, it rolled and lingered like thunder as it ricocheted off the castle before him and echoed off the valley behind him.
A few steps later the Team shot again, then again. Paddington saw a bullet impact, he thought: far off, against the edge of a window. A small fall of stone below a puff of dust.
More gunshots came, some from behind him and a distance and others much closer and in front of him. Paddington saw mu
zzle-flashes in a few windows and fired at them. Five windows on the bailey to the right of the main gate overlooked the town. Three of them already had broken glass, either from the Team shooting in or the vampires shooting out. For several seconds the shots blurred together as the Andrastes did their best to kill the wolves and the Team did their best to put down any figure that appeared in a window.
The first of the wolves – Curt – overtook him then, so Paddington kept to the side of the walkway and made his way past the gatehouse and into the castle proper.
There was a small open-air stone courtyard in front of him with a large rectangular keep straight ahead. On the left, not quite joining the castle’s stone curtain wall, was a small church. A few candles burned inside and Paddington could see the symbols of the Three-God – three third-circles that, put together, formed a complete ring – in its stained glass. To his right, almost bulging out of the wall, was a long single-storey building: the bailey. A set of steps led onto its roof so archers could take up positions on the wall, but none of the Andrastes were perched there now.
“The bailey!” Paddington shouted. He’d had Skylar teach the wolves the terminology, but he also pointed in case they’d forgotten. The last wolf – Tony – followed the others with a hefty wheezing sound. There were two doors that opened onto the courtyard and both were closed. Three wolves assembled around each.
Paddington adjusted his grip on the pistol in his sweaty hand, stopped beside one of the doors, counted down from three on his fingers, and threw open the door.