The battle had been going on for nearly ten minutes. Almost everyone was dead — or, for two of them, boning in some bushes down the street. Corpses and parts of corpses littered the block. Traumatized children in dresses and capes and cardboard boxes sat crying in puddles of their own urine, mourning dead friends or parents or just losing their little minds after taking an intestine to the face. Parents were on the phone with the police or their conspiracy-minded, gun-hoarding, neo-Con cousins, or frantically leaving messages with their therapists.
Three werewolves remained to fight — Jeff, Brian, and this other guy they knew, Toby, who they weren’t super fond of, but, whatever, enemy of my enemy and all that, right? The witches were down to Mabel and Suzette. The two factions stood twenty feet from one another, covered in injuries and gore, staring one another down with a hatred that spanned centuries.
“The redhead’s mine,” barked Brian, wiping someone’s blood from his mouth.
“Works for me,” snarled Jeff. The werewolves pounced.
His claws less than an inch from her midsection, Mabel sidestepped Jeff, tearing his beating heart from his chest as she did so. The werewolf’s body skittered across the ground, finally coming to rest at the feet of a girl who was going to have hella issues with hirsute men in her future.
Tossing the organ to the side, Mabel turned toward the next wolfman, her hands glowing like hot irons.
She found Toby knee deep in two of her coven mates. He was soaked in blood and guts and clearly enjoying himself, throwing chunks of witch into the air like confetti.
Mabel paused. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but you seem to like being a ravenous murder beast.”
“It has its perks,” replied Toby, tearing the spine out of one witch through the other’s chest.
“How’s about you switch sides, then? We could use a hand taking out your leader. He looks like he’s just about to kill my friend.”
“I don’t know, she killed a couple of our friends, so…”
“The sooner we’re done here, the sooner we can all go murder us a bunch of kids.”
“In that case,” said the werewolf, dropping the spine. He immediately leapt from the hollowed out corpses and raced toward Brian on all fours.
Brian was pressing Suzette’s neck against the curb with one mammoth paw while slowing working the knife-like claws of the other one through her chest. Choking and beginning to black out, Suzette nonetheless hurled spell after spell at the werewolf. His vengeance, though, would not be stopped. Well, that and the fact that Suzette was losing a lot of oxygen to her brain and was mostly throwing water and ice chips at the werewolf, along with harmless anti-lottery-winning hexes and a couple curses that only affected his maternal great-grandparents. Also, there was a rotting potato at one point. It didn’t affect him much.
Getting tackled and driven six inches into the pavement by an eight-foot-tall bundle of brawn and murderous intent, however…
Brian kicked the other werewolf off and pulled himself backward on his elbows.
“What the hell, Toby?!” he barked. “I had her! We were almost done!”
“Yeah, about that,” said the traitorous wolfman, standing to his full height. He cracked his neck. “This isn’t going to end the way you thought it was.”
