Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Alexis

“Big words from a bruised old wolf!” Blair cackled, clapping his hands sarcastically. Then he waved his arms around and pointed at the army standing behind him. “See these fiends behind me? They will rip you and your precious broodmare to shreds!”

“Not if we shred them first,” I said, coming to the center of the field and standing by Will’s side.

“You’re so precious, aren’t you? You’ve come a long way from being a mewling quim,” Blair sneered, looking at me with hate-filled eyes. “I will personally see to it that I desecrate your corpse when I’m done with you.”

“Keep her name out of your fucking mouth,” Will said, grabbing Blair’s collar and pushing him back. In a split second, thousands of guns cocked and aimed at Will.

“Those soldiers are waiting for my orders. And you may have guessed, I control them with my mind. How fucking amazing is that? Touch me again, and your entire pack goes extinct this very second.”

I placed my hand on Will’s shoulder and pulled him back. War was upon us, but it did not have to escalate at this very moment. We had to wait until Maliha and Vincent had done their bit.

“That’s right. Control your man,” Blair scoffed, adjusting his collar.

“I am not controlling him. He could kill you in a heartbeat, and I wouldn’t even stop him,” I scoffed back. In my head, I was doing basic arithmetic. There were around two hundred and fifty of us, excluding those who had gone to set a perimeter around the town. Blair, on the other hand, had an army of thousands. If each werewolf killed fifty soldiers, we might stand a chance. But we were not equipped with weapons. Blair’s soldiers were.

“So…are you sure you do not want to negotiate?” Blair casually asked, taking a step back. “I can be very reasonable, you know. This can all end if you just hand me your Alpha. I will have my revenge, and then I and my men will leave forever. There doesn’t have to be a bloodbath.”

“You’re a liar. You come here with this army. You already have a bloodbath on your mind. I do not trust a word out of your mouth,” I said. “And you can forget it if you think that any of us would simply turn Will over. Clearly, you do not know anything about the loyalty of wolves!”

“What loyalty? You are just a bunch of dogs,” Blair said. “And I am the canine control department.”

“That was genuinely lame, Blair. You can do better,” Will said, chuckling dryly.

“Yeah, that was a terrible analogy,” I said, laughing at his face.

Blair’s face turned red, his nostrils flared, and his eyes narrowed as he clenched his fist. He growled, “You want better? I’ll give you better. This fucking psychopath murdered my father, yet he’s been allowed to roam free without any penance or punishment. You think of me as the villain, but ask me this, who is the villain here? Me or him? He killed my father, and ever since then, Wilhelm Grimm has left behind a trail of dead bodies, including his brother! And you think of him as some hero? He’s a bastard. He thinks he is above justice. If there was justice in the world, where is justice for my father?”

“Do not speak to me of your father! If there was justice in this world, where was the justice for what your father kept doing to me for more than seventy years? No creature alive can bear such pain for so long as he inflicted on me with such sadism. What about the trail of dead bodies left in your wake? What about all the soldiers you mutated, all those lives wasted?”

“You got your justice when you killed my father. I do not come here for justice, Wilhelm Grimm,” Blair spouted. “I come here for revenge.”

“And I come here to defend my land, my people, and this city! For long, this city has lived under the shadow of unspeakable horrors. Tonight, it all ends. Tomorrow, a free sun shall shine upon Fiddler’s Green. You best believe it!” Will shouted, causing the werewolves to howl in affirmation.

“And how are you going to see that sunshine, Will? You haven’t even recovered properly from your old injuries. What about all the new injuries that I will inflict upon you? Oh, yes, I know about your weakness. I crafted that weakness in my laboratory. I made the serum that would make you vulnerable against my men. And that’s not all I made,” Blair said, laughing maniacally as his hand reached into his pocket.

He took out a syringe containing a neon-green liquid.

“What the fuck is that?” I whispered to Will.

“That, Alexis Richards, is the serum my father set out to make. He could never make it. I fulfilled his dream. This serum, derived from Will’s blood and DNA, allows me to become invincible, immortal, and unstoppable. Tonight, I will unleash hell upon all of you with this.”

“If you inject that serum into your body, Blair, there is no coming back from this. No one will be able to save you. There will be no normalcy in your life. We may be enemies, but I will implore you to see reason. That is no serum. That is madness in a syringe,” Will said.

“Shut your yapping. You just don’t want to be defeated. You know that this is your doom. This is my father coming back to haunt you from the grave. When I kill you, it will be in his name!”

Will looked at me just as I looked at him, both of us communicating non-verbally. Neither of us had prepared for this. We had thought that Blair’s attempts at making a serum would only result in failure. Could it be that he had succeeded against all odds?

If we don’t make it tonight, just know that I love you forever and always, Will whispered telepathically in my mind.

We’re going to make it. I love you to the moon, and back, I said.

We grabbed each other’s hands as we looked at Blair.

“Aww, that’s fucking cute. But sentimentality won’t save you now. Nothing can save you. Say your prayers, and then grab some popcorn for the show. It’s going to be your last,” Blair said. “Tonight, the legacy of my father lives on.”

Suddenly, without any warning, he injected the serum into his neck, emptying the contents of the syringe into his bloodstream. The neon green disappeared from the syringe, entering Blair’s body. For a second, all of Blair’s veins glowed neon green, and then nothing happened.

“That’s it? That was your big super serum?” Will asked. Even then, he had braced himself for the unexpected.

“Wait…” Blair’s skin was turning green as if he was getting sick and was ready to puke. Then, he did puke, collapsing on all fours, shooting blood out of his mouth and nostrils. He looked up helplessly, blood dripping from his ears and his eyes.

I could swear he was mouthing the words, “Help me.”

Blair lay on the ground, coughing, wheezing, spouting out more blood, and hugging his chest in a fetal position.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“Stay back,” Will said, holding his arm out, preventing me from going any closer.

I was more concerned with what would happen to the soldiers. Were they still under Blair’s mind control now that Blair was dying? They just stood there, their weapons in their hands, like a mindless mob. No one came forward to check on Blair as he lay there, convulsing and vomiting.

Before I had a chance to recollect myself, something swerved in my direction. I could make out that it was in the shape of an arm, just not any kind of arm that I had ever seen before. It was long, broad, muscular, hairy, and disproportionate.

“Alexis, watch out!” Will shouted, grabbing me by the shoulders and throwing me back as hard as he could. I hit my head against a tree, losing my vision for a few seconds. It baffled me as to why Will had thrown me that hard.

When I opened my eyes again and once my vision regained its clarity, I saw Blair convoluting on the floor, flailing his limbs around. Only Will stood against him as he morphed and distorted into some sickly creature. Green puss and ooze were coming out of him in addition to the copious amount of blood that his body was covered in. Pieces of his armor lay tattered on the ground.

First, his hands stretched out into the form of claws, but not like any claws that I had seen before. These were monstrous claws, four times the size of a werewolf’s claws. Then, his legs began growing in size, tearing off the armor that he was wearing, revealing hairy flesh that turned red as he grew.

Blair’s face no longer looked like a human face. Long ears jutted out from the back of his head. His eyes had big black slivers in them. As he opened his long mouth and ushered a scream, I could see that his teeth had grown to the size of spear tips. He was easily fifteen feet tall and half as wide, a berserk creature devoid of reason and proportion.

He might have made a serum, but that serum had mutated him just as it had mutated all his soldiers. Now Blair was crazy, just like the rest of them.

When Will shifted into his wolf form again, I shifted as well, joining the battlefield again. But as I came near Blair, I realized that he was way too tall for any of my blows to strike. His arms and legs, on the other hand, were long enough to strike us from afar.

We have to move back! Regroup with the rest of the pack! I desperately called out to Will.

I watched as Will considered his options. He could stand there and fight, but that would be suicide. Will shot a look at me, then understood the gravity of the situation, choosing to retreat to the rest of the pack.

We ran back to our pack’s formation, bracing ourselves for the incoming mutant were-animal that Blair had become. Some of him resembled a werewolf, but for the most part, he looked like a creature unleashed from the depths of hell.

At that moment, it appeared that every single odd was against us. The soldiers who had been up till now standing idly, aiming their guns at us, were now rushing towards us—thousands of soldiers stampeding towards the werewolves, led by Blair.

What gave me courage as I braced for impact was how each and every single werewolf stayed put where they were, readying themselves for the fight that was charging at them. Will was at the head of the formation.

He looked at us, then at the moon, and then unleashed a long howl that signaled the start of the fight.

All of the werewolves rushed after him as he raced toward the center of the field, both armies on the brink of impact.

I could already see the effect of Blair’s newly rendered insanity on the soldiers. They were not behaving rationally because Blair could not maintain control over them as a rational man. He was controlling them as the monster he was now. Instead of shooting at us, the soldiers rushed past one another, eager to fight with their hands.

As both sides neared the center of the field, I wondered what was taking Vincent and Maliha so long.