zg_shadows | Zero hour

His face was smeared with tears and ash. He stepped across the metis’s body, the limbs twisted by impact and the horrors that came after. He could only recognise Captain Dan by the dwarf’s height.

He looked back at the two women standing behind him. His reddened eyes locked with theirs for a moment as they stared at him helplessly.

“How could they? How could these warriors do this?”

He looked over the carnage in what was once the Hive’s vaulted hall. Then he stiffened.

“No.”

He leapt across the bloody mess that was the remains of his packmate. The man he had stood back to back with, the man he had dragged out of the gutter when he had been cast there by the Fianna.

He rolled back what must have been Charlene’s corpse and stooped down. Then he stood slowly, reverentially. In his arms he held a tiny scrap of flesh, the blood covering his white shirt.

“She must have turned from the blast, shielded the child with her body. Crawled over her to keep her from harm even as her last breath left her.”

The tiny metis body was terribly limp in his hands.

The change rippled across him, his muscles twisted and bulged and he flung his head back and howled his outrage, his loss and his love into the tunnels underneath London, his two surviving packmates joining him discordantly.

With a shake of his head he returned to his bestial glabro form.

“Give word to the Tribe. This place is now Golgotha, the Gaians of London have sown death here, and it will take seed and grow. We are not just their enemies now, we are plague, we are vengeance. We will shred their hearts in the night as they have torn ours. We will bring back every inch of stolen skin tenfold and make from it a shroud for their dying mother.”

He was shaking with passion. And then his mouth twisted upwards in a grim smile.

“It is time we talked, this Alpha of wolves and I.”