Werewolf single dad, p.30
Werewolf Single Dad, page 30
“Timberrrr!” I jeered.
“You motherfucker!” Jackal growled from the ground as he flipped over onto his back and swiped both his grappling-hook arms at me, but I managed to dance clear from his reach.
Jackal moved fast as he tried to get up, but given the fact I was slightly smaller than Jackal, I was much faster, and I jumped in the air and landed heavily with both my feet on his stomach.
The Alpha let out a groan as I scraped my clawed foot quickly over his guts like I was a bull about to charge, and blood rushed out from the gashes. But Jackal quickly equalized as he grabbed me by my ankles and threw me behind his head like he was competing in a hammer toss.
I skidded over the ground through another pile of shrapnel, and my shoulder took the brunt of the fall while a deep canyon was carved into my side from the jagged metal corner of an old car door.
I winced as the fur on my flank became sodden with blood, and I heard Jackal cackle as he walked up to me.
When I looked up, I saw the deep wounds I’d administered to the Alpha male’s stomach were already almost healed up.
How? What the fuck kind of drugs was this guy on?
“You’re the best opponent I’ve fought yet,” Jackal sneered down at me. “It’s almost a shame to kill you. We’d make a very good team. I might even consider letting you join me on my conquest, if you’d like.”
“Fuck you,” I spat. “I’d never join the legions of a child murderer.”
Although there was probably some harebrained scheme I could have come up with here by agreeing to join the Alpha’s ranks and immediately double-crossing him, my pride just wouldn’t allow it, not even for a minute.
“Only werebears!” Jackal laughed mockingly. “I’m just keeping the population of pests under control. Humans do the same for rabbits so they don’t start eating all their crops, and I’m doing the same to protect our wild food sources. Why are you so outraged? I’m doing our kind a favor… though I can tell you’re not very loyal to our kind, are you? I can smell the bears all over you. You’ve been working together.”
“I’ve had quite a few eye-opening life events happen to me lately,” I said as I subtly grabbed a handful of dirt from the ground. “I’m kinda steering away from the whole pack loyalties thing. From now on, I’m just gonna be loyal to whoever isn’t a complete jerk-off. So, I’m afraid that puts you out of the running.”
A crooked smile twisted itself onto Jackal’s teeth-lined jaws, and he opened his mouth to say something in retort, but all he got was the taste of trash and a handful of rusty screws in his eyes as I launched a giant handful of dirt into his face.
“Gah! Fuck!” The Alpha shook the dirt from his eyes quickly, but the temporary obstruction to his vision gave me the moment I needed to get back onto my feet and volley myself on top of him.
Like I’d learned from the best when Scott and Malcolm knew they couldn’t kill me by penetrating my body, I slashed my hooked claws into Jackal’s eyes in ferocious, repetitive strokes in an attempt to incapacitate him by other means.
Talk about a full-circle moment.
And I was only slightly grossed out when I pulled one of my hands back after a few swipes and found a glowing yellow eye skewered on the end of my claw, like it was some kind of grisly canape from one of Hannibal Lecter’s dinner parties.
I flicked the golden gooey eyeball like it was a pea from my plate, and Jackal wailed out in frustration and agony as he stood blinded on the spot.
I stole a quick glance at the rest of the battlefield. By the looks of the ocean of deep red blood and the Beta bodies I saw strewn across the ground, it became apparent that none of the Alpha’s infamous cronies were currently in a position to help him.
The part of the junkyard where the bears were still fighting off the last of the Betas looked like a mine had been blown up, and I was staggered by the amounts of body parts that were scattered in all different directions.
Jackal was still squinting the dirt out of his one remaining eye, so I didn’t have time to stop and stare too long, but it looked as though all the bears were still standing.
Well, actually, they were doing more than standing.
Oh, shit. So, that’s what they found while they were doing all that rummaging.
The bears had ripped the plastic casing off a gas lawnmower and managed to start it, and Buzz was currently chasing after a Jackal Pack member while offering the exposed blades up to kiss his Beta ass, while Red was slicing and dicing another Beta dudebro up with a katana.
Where the hell did she get the sword from?
I would definitely need the bears to fill me in on all the gory details of their battle later, but for now, it was time to finish off Jackal.
And our very brief recess had given me enough time to figure out how I was going to overcome the issue of his instantaneous healing and put this sick puppy down for good.
Jackal blinked his only eye into focus just in time for him to see me lunge my teeth at his throat like I was the silver bullet with his name on it.
As I sank my teeth into Jackal’s throat, one of my fangs hit one of the bones at the top of his spinal cord dead on, and a warm shudder of satisfaction passed through me as I bit down harder and heard that fracturing cracking sound.
This was a new level of ASMR unlocked for me.
Jackal yelled out, and I could feel him tearing strips of flesh from my back as his claws strummed on my skin like he was one of hell’s own private harpists. But I ignored the agony, because I knew how close I was to actually taking this asshole down, and I had Jackal exactly where I needed him to enact my deadly plan.
I was going to puncture Jackal’s trachea and stop the very air that he breathed from entering his lungs.
The Alpha’s wide neck made it impossible for my teeth to pierce his windpipe alone, but unluckily for him, owing to my recent life events, I was an extremely adaptable guy.
As werewolves, we almost always forgot we were only half wolf, yet we tended to use either our teeth or our claws, or, if we used our teeth and our claws, we tended to use them on different sites of our opponents bodies.
Shamefully, we never tended to combine the forces of our jaws and our paws on the same wound, and seeing as Jackal’s neck was so goddamn wide and his thick muscles were like an impenetrable force field around his windpipe-- not to mention his accelerated rate of healing that meant his wounds all healed before any major damage could be done-- I decided it might be worth implementing my claws and my jaws at the same time.
I sank my teeth deeper into Jackal’s throat, and this time, I put a little extra pressure behind my bite and readied my claws at the side of my snout.
I could feel the Alpha’s pulse throbbing through his jugular, and he moved his hands away from administering lashes into my back. Then, in a desperate bid to get me off his neck, he sank his claws into my skull and pulled my head away from his throat.
I let Jackal pull my mouth away from his neck, but before this quick-healing bastard got the chance to recover from my puncturing bite, I forced my fingers into the holes I’d made with my teeth. I hooked the claws of my index fingers around his windpipe, and I strummed that motherfucker like a banjo string.
I suddenly saw real fear in Jackal’s one remaining eye, and the monster Alpha gasped and squealed as he felt my fingers tighten around his windpipe like I was about to fire an arrow from a bow.
I was enjoying the moment all too much, and I could feel Jackal was frozen in fear underneath my body, like he was worried any move he made could cause me to tear his trachea clean out.
Though, it turned out it wasn’t just me the Alpha had to be worried about.
All of a sudden, we heard a wailing battle howl in the air, and a lightning-fast dark figure soared over our heads and landed softly on the ground opposite.
Jackal’s windpipe was still wrapped around my fingers, and he rolled his eye back to see who’d just used us as a hurdle in a game of long jump.
The Alpha’s face said everything when he saw who was standing there.
Dayzee had transformed into a slick, black-brown wolf, and he was standing on top of Jackal’s discarded purple peacoat.
The lightning-fast Beta-Alpha spat on the coat and smooshed it into the dirt with his foot before walking boldly over to the silver knife on the ground and placing it back firmly in his hand.
“Where shall I put this?” Dayzee asked me as he pointed the blade at Jackal.
“Actually, I’ve kind of got my hands full,” I said with a grin, but I widened the wounds in Jackal’s throat by plunging my middle fingers into them alongside my index fingers that were currently playing cat’s cradle with his trachea. “Why don’t you just put it somewhere you think it would fit in nicely?”
I felt the vibrations in Jackal’s throat as he desperately tried to speak, but no one had any interest in what this asshole had to say.
Dayzee squared up to Jackal, and with zero hesitation, he submerged the solid silver knife hilt-deep into the murderous Alpha’s only working eyeball.
Jackal tried to scream, but as I had pincered his windpipe almost completely closed with my four fingers, all that came out was a shallow, squeaking little wheezing toot.
Jackal sounded so close to a penny whistle that I was almost tempted to bust multiple holes in his trachea and ask him for a rendition of “Hot Cross Buns.”
Blood overflowed from the Alpha’s penetrated eye socket, and I figured Dayzee had surely pierced his brain with the silver dagger. There was no coming back from that, so it was finally time to put Jackal out of his misery.
I worked my four fingers around that asshole’s windpipe, and with one hard-and-fast twist-and-yank, I felt the resistant chord snap.
Jackal’s face contorted gruesomely as he struggled for the breath he couldn’t take in, and when it was time to retreat from inside his blood-gurgling gullet, I yanked my hands back with violent force and pulled Jackal’s throat apart like I was opening a pair of bloody velvet curtains.
Blood spurted out from Jackal’s throat and watered the shit-and-shrapnel-covered terra of the junkyard.
The asshole Alpha choked for breath as his lungs filled up with blood, and he squirmed on the ground beneath Dayzee and me, but we all knew he was finished.
After a short few moments of gurgling, grunting, and twitching, Jackal’s head finally lolled to a standstill as a river of claret poured out from his gaping wound and soiled his infamous russet fur.
Dayzee and I stood in stunned silence, but we offered each other a wide, triumphant smile, and as we shared a huge back-patting embrace, I realized it had suddenly gotten very quiet.
There was no more shouting from the bears or the Betas, no more squelching of body parts, and no more whirring of Buzz’s dangerous mower.
I looked up, and all five werebears were absolutely drenched in blood and staring back at me and Dayzee in total disbelief as we stood over Jackal’s mutilated corpse.
I realized my method of killing Jackal might have seemed a bit crazy and deranged, but it did the job, right?
And besides, they couldn’t judge me-- I just watched Red julienne a Beta with a katana.
Dayzee and I looked at each other again before looking down at Jackal’s absolutely decimated head, and then we smiled, turned our backs on the dead bastard, and stomped through the sea of Beta blood and guts to rejoin our allies.
“Well, guys,” I said with a blood-spattered grin. “We did it.”
“We did…” Ally repeated in an amazed kind of daze.
“You certainly fucking did it, put her there, son!” Buzz extended his lawnmower-free hand to me, and we shook hands enthusiastically. “I’m glad I caught that last bit, it was among the most metal shit I’ve ever seen in my life. That Jackal absolutely got what was coming to him.”
“An absolute treat,” Scar chimed in with a whistle. “That was a total bloody spectacle.”
“Justice has been served,” Black-bun said with a modest nod, and he kind of reminded me of a monk.
Though the blood soaked all into the fur on his face and body dissuaded any delusions I may have had that he might have actually been peaceful.
“I-I can’t believe it,” Red said with a shakiness to her voice. “It’s over. Jackal is dead.”
“It wasn’t easy,” I sighed. “The bastard had skin thicker than a rhino. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on some sort of steroids for werewolves or something.”
“He probably was,” Ally said as she blinked herself into focus. “No one could lay a finger on him… that is… until you came along.”
“Well, that’s why I laid four fingers on him.” I grinned and held my fingers up, and there were still some rubbery remnants of Jackal’s windpipe on the sharpest points of my claws.
“Ha, that’s awesome!” Buzz let out a loud amused laugh. “Four fingers!”
“Not only that, but sometimes you just gotta think outside the box a little.” I turned around to bring the focus of the conversation onto Dayzee. “And sometimes, you gotta put something sharp right down deep inside the box. Dayzee, what you lack in brute strength, you make up for in lethal speed! That was awesome. I’ll bet it felt great.”
“Oh, yeah, little man, you were awesome!” Scar patted a blood-sodden hand on Dayzee’s shoulder, and the well-dressed Beta instinctively recoiled a little as he saw the red bear print stain on his designer sweater.
“I didn’t know you had it in you,” Red added with a sincere smile. “Pebble the badass.”
“Yeah, I did feel pretty badass.” Dayzee sounded bashful and almost nonchalant at first, but then he took a deep breath in and let out a slightly hysterical laugh. “Aw, who am I kidding? That was fucking awesome! I jumped right over both their heads, and I grabbed that knife like I was some kind of trained assassin or some shit, and then WHOOSH. I pushed the knife straight down inside his eye! I saw it split open-- and that little popping sound it made! Mm!”
The bears and I all laughed as we reveled in the gory details of the retelling of Dayzee’s tale of triumph.
“See, you’ve got more of a fighting spirit than you think!” I smiled as I hooked my arm around the Beta’s head and gave him a gentle noogie.
Dayzee sputtered as he tried to push me off him, and the bears all laughed and whooped.
When I let the pint-sized warrior go free, the werebears grew a little more serious. And grateful.
“Thank you for your help, Mike,” Ally said as she stared deeply into my eyes. “I really mean that.”
“Hey, I couldn’t have done it without you guys,” I said. “You were vital in this. If you weren’t around to keep that pack of Beta freaks at bay, then I would have never been able to get Jackal on his own. And hey, I know we all hate to admit it, but I think us wolves and bears make a pretty damn good team.”
“Well… there’s definitely going to always be some rivalry between us,” Buzz said with a hint of sadness in his voice. “I’d almost say it’s a shame we have to go back to being enemies now.”
“Maybe we can just… live and let live?” Scar said. “I think the fact we all came together like this has got to mean something… even if that something is just that we don’t lunge for each other on the streets.”
“Live and let live,” Dayzee repeated with a light chuckle. “I can roll with that.”
“Live and maybe occasionally text each other if there are any more vigilante justice killings to be done?” I asked with a grin.
“I think something can be arranged,” Ally chuckled. “I’m sure you’re going to find yourself a little bit busy going forward, so you’ll need eyes and ears all over the city.”
“Wait, what do you mean?” I asked with a slightly nervous laugh, and I was starting to worry I’d missed something very important here.
“You just killed the Alpha of the Jackal pack!” Ally laughed.
“What, and you think now I’m gonna have a target hanging over my head for saving the city from a murderous dictator?” I couldn’t help but snort. “And you guys are offering to be my werebear bodyguards?”
“Man, this guy’s a hoot!” Buzz let out another enormous laugh. “I think I do like werewolves, after all.”
“Me, too!” Red grinned.
Okay, now I was really getting confused.
“Come on, Mike, how hard did Jackal shake your head? ” Ally raised an eyebrow. “You’ve just killed an Alpha that owned upwards of seven territories. By killing him, you’ve now inherited all his turf.”
“Oh, shit.” I gulped.
The realization dropped like a kettlebell in my stomach.
I’d fled to Chicago so I wouldn’t have to have anything to do with any territories, and now I was the rightful leader of a league of werewolf packs all in close vicinity to one another.
What the fuck was I going to do now?
End of Book 1
Cast of Characters from Book 1:
Mike Brewyer: Beta/Alpha Werewolf. Main character. Chestnut brown hair, blue-green eyes. Mike is a father of two. He was born a Beta and was part of a small pack of werewolves in Wisconsin, but his world gets turned upside-down when the anger brought on from the murder of his wife causes him to shift into an Alpha. He flees to his children with his two children and starts a life in Chicago.
Dionne and Charlie Brewyer: Werewolves. Dionne is three years old with blondish hair and blue eyes, and she is very outgoing. Her brother, Charlie, is around five months old, and he’s just beginning to get his first tastes for real food.
Katherine Brewyer: Beta Werewolf. Sandy-brown hair, hazel eyes. Mike’s wife. She is killed in a pack war, and leaves behind Mike and their two children.
Trent Felder: Beta Werewolf. Thick black hair with frosted tips, brown eyes. Trent is Mike’s old friend from college. He runs a fast food restaurant in Chicago called Full Moon Burger Co, which has a menu tailored to werewolves and those following the increasingly-popular primal diet. He takes Mike and his children into his home when Mike flees Wisconsin.
