Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Alexis

It was nothing short of a miracle what had just happened. It was Will’s battle prowess, thanks to which we had just taken down the fifteen soldiers. I was still in disbelief as I stood there at the center of the crater that the collective explosions had formed in the forest. All around me, viscera, guts, and torn limbs hung from the branches of the trees splattered the dirt path and spread in the shape of a blast radius all around.

While I was monitoring the area, Will had trekked up ahead with the dead soldier’s body slung over his shoulders. We were both headed for the commune. The werewolves had to be warned of this new threat in such close vicinity to the Grimm Abode.

The only downside to this was that we weren’t able to get anything useful from the soldiers we had killed. Their armor had been irreparably destroyed, their bodies were unsalvageable for any identification, and their weapons had eviscerated in the explosion.

The explosion…People as far as the south of Fiddler’s Green will have heard it. The pack must be alarmed at something so disastrous happening so nearby.

“Don’t think of the pack right now. Think of how we’re going to get to the pack,” Will called from ahead. I was far behind, scouting from the back to see if any soldiers would turn up. But it seemed that instead of coming from behind, it appeared that they were coming from ahead.

“More of them?” I groaned. I was tired, not having slept properly for the past week. The exhaustion was beginning to show its many effects on me now. From the blurred vision to the dizziness, I was starting to show signs of fatigue. But I’d be damned if I let myself slow down before reaching the commune.

“Not more of them,” Will said, allowing me to breathe a sigh of relief. “Their truck, the one they all came in, it’s going back to where it came from. There’s no license plate. From the looks of it, it’s a military-grade truck. But from what I know of military trucks, they’re normally camouflaged and bear the license plates of the American Army. This truck is neither bearing any plates nor is camouflaged. It’s jet black. Looks to me more like a mercenary truck than anything else.”

“Is it going away?” I asked, feeling the pain crawl up my legs, beckoning me to sit down. If only I could. My spirit had not broken, but my body had decided to give up. But this wasn’t going to be my end. Not now. With this thought, I shifted into my wolf form, immediately feeling a surge of energy coursing through my body, allowing me to relax my muscles and recover my strength. The moon was still out in the sky, granting me the opportunity to siphon its power into my body.

“Why have you shifted? Is there something wrong?” Will asked as he turned around and looked at me in surprise.

Just tired. There’s no other reason, I confided in him.

“You’re my good girl. You have been so brave of late. I appreciate everything that you’ve done. I love you, Alexis,” Will said with such kindness that my heart brimmed with joy and purpose.

I love you too, I said. Before I could await his response, I realized something. It struck me as bizarre as to why I hadn’t thought of this before. Will, there’s got to be some form of tracking mechanism on this soldier. Don’t you think so?

“Yes, there has to be. That would explain why the soldiers were wading so deep into the forest. They were looking for him,” Will said, putting the soldier’s corpse on the ground and examining the functional parts of his armor. “But I don’t know where it is.”

It’s futile to search for it. It may be a Nano chip, no bigger than the tip of a needle. Or even smaller. My point is we can’t just take the soldier’s body to the commune. That would connect his death to the werewolves. Right now, whoever is behind this has no clue that it was us who killed this soldier. But if we take him to the commune, it could trigger a fight. We’re not there yet. We can’t have another full-blown battle on our hands, not so recently after that fight with Griswold’s vampires. So we can’t take him to the commune, I said.

“While normally I would agree with you, the point remains that if we leave this body anywhere else, the soldiers will come for it and reclaim it. We cannot have that. If we take it to the commune, all the wolves will be around it. They will be able to help if the soldiers come. Our pack is strong. It can defend itself,” Will said.

Okay, I said. This was his decision. He was the Alpha. My role in this relationship, other than the romantic component, was to give him the advice that I sought fit. It was not obligatory for him to follow it every time. He must have some genuine reason to do things his way. Otherwise, he, quite often than not, listened to me and implemented my advice.

Finally, after traveling from thicket to thicket under the cover of darkness, we reached the commune’s entrance. Here, I shifted back into my human form. I felt relaxed, comfortable, and quite relieved that I was back here. It was utterly strange that this new calamity had somehow wiped away the negative mental effects of the previous one. As much as I tried to dig into those old feelings of PTSD, I found that they had no place in my mind right now. It couldn’t all be because of this temporary adrenaline rush; Will must have had a part to play in it as well. His words had resonated with me earlier on.

But when I thought of it, my words resonated harder. I had been anticipating something disastrous happening for the past week, and everyone had been telling me that there was no cause for worry. It was clear to me that my intuition had been right all along. The danger was upon us, whether the pack liked to admit it or not. We were not out of the water just yet. And to top it all, this new threat was more vicious and far more dangerous than any that we’d faced yet.

Once in the commune, we took the soldier’s corpse into the back of the Grimm Abode, in the horse stables. Back in the old days, when Will had newly consecrated this place decades ago, this place used to have horses. The commune members used horses, donkeys, and all types of livestock for their livelihood. Ever since the advent of cars and machinery, livestock had been rendered pointless except for the cow and the sheep that some of the commune members had kept for the purpose of organic farming and having fresh farm-to-table food available all year round. But these sheds were pretty much abandoned and secluded from the rest of the commune. Behind them was a great wall made of cement that barred the sheds from the forest in the back. All around them, there was a wire fence that ran up to twenty feet high. Atop it were barbed wires that prevented any wild animals from crossing over.

Will threw the corpse onto a pile of hay and regained his composure by taking long breaths.

“Now, we defer to your judgment,” Will said. “If you want to invite Maliha, you’re more than welcome to do so.”

“On it,” I said, taking out my phone and dialing my best friend’s number.

“Yo, yo, yo, what it is, homegirl?” Maliha spoke from the other end of the line. Her voice was raspy and coarse, making it obvious that she had been smoking weed.

“I need your help, and just as before, you’re not allowed to ask questions,” I said.

“No way. The last time you pulled that trick on me, it involved actual fucking bombs. There’s no way I’m going to be involved in whatever shit you’re pulling, and I mean that as your best friend. Beyond one point, someone as smart as me figures out what’s happening. So what really is happening?”

“Fine. You want the truth? There’s someone out there who has it bad for me and my family. I mean my extended family—the ones who live in Grimm Abode. Someone sent a murderous soldier with machinery and armor, the likes of which you have never seen. We have this dead body right now and want you to come here and identify the computing parts and use those parts to see who sent this soldier,” I said.

“Who’s we?”

“Me and my…oh, I didn’t tell you. Will and I got engaged very recently. It was a little hush, hush. We didn’t hold any ceremony or anything of the sort. It was just him proposing to me and me accepting his proposal,” I said, bracing for what was about to come next.

It came with such force as I had never imagined, a high-pitched scream of glee and celebration that nearly tore a hole in my eardrum. Maliha, after she finished screaming that everlasting shriek of ecstasy, finally said, “You have to tell me all the details. I bet it was magical. Will is such a fucking great guy, the absolute best of the best. You two have my blessing! Oh, man, when you have kids, I’m going to be an actual aunt!”

“Maliha, please let’s come back to the topic at hand. Will you come down and help us?”

“Consider it my engagement present to both of you,” Maliha said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Well, that’s that,” I said, looking exasperatedly at Will, who had heard the entire exchange from afar and was now giggling.

“She is one of a kind,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to retrieve our things from that resort. I trust that you’ll be able to pull this off.”

“Oh, right, the things at the resort!” I had completely forgotten the fact that right now, we were supposed to be on a mini-vacation. “I’m so sorry for running out on you.”

“I am not. If you hadn’t run, we wouldn’t have had that talk by the cove. We wouldn’t also have come across these soldiers. It’s good that you did that. It’s almost as if it was fated,” Will said, then leaned down and kissed me. His kiss was long and seductive, as if he was relishing the taste of my lips and the texture of my tongue. I kissed him back by coiling my arm around his neck.

“Kinda feels weird, doesn’t it? Kissing in such close vicinity to a corpse?” Will asked, chuckling to himself.

“Yeah, kinda, but no regrets,” I said, grinning back at him. “How are you going to go and come back?”

“I’ll manage. I’ll shift and travel as a wolf on the way. And I’ll come back with all our stuff in the car. I hope nothing’s happened to the car.”

“You mean the monstrously large Jeep. Don’t worry, it’s probably fine,” “I said, waving him off.

As he bade me goodbye and stepped out of the shed, I watched him go. He met with Maliha, who was just coming into the commune. The two of them exchanged remarks that I could not hear, but then Will pointed at the stables, and Maliha shook his hand. Then she skipped and jumped to where I was, toting her laptop bag at her side.

“What the fuck!” she yelled out right after she stepped into the stable. “I mean, I knew what to expect, but Jesus Christ, what the fuck. That man…his skin is blue, and not the dead person kind of blue. It’s like someone freaking put a lot of silver in his skin. Do you know that whole thing about people turning blue because they inject silver into their bodies?”

“What?” I was lost. Was this an actual thing?

“Yes. There’s an actual physical condition called argyria. It’s when someone has been exposed to so much silver that their skin turns blue, mostly by injection or some other form of imbuing. Look at this poor chap. His skin looks like that of some Dragon Ball Z character,” Maliha said.

It occurred to me that her remark was quite close to home. Of course, someone would inject a soldier with silver in hopes that they’d have a better chance against werewolves in battle. Is that why this foe seemed stronger than any other enemy that we had faced?

“Maliha, my friend, I need you to find the computing unit in this armor,” I said.

“First, tell me how you killed him. I’m not one for gnarly details or anything, but it’s sort of like necessary to ask in case this whole thing blows up and goes to court. I need to know,” she said.

“First of all,” I said, shaking my head, “nothing’s going to court. The only thing you do need to know is we killed him in self-defense. He came to attack us. We fended ourselves and killed him.”

“Holy shit, with what? Giant swords? Look at all the slash marks on his armor, the gashes on his skin. You lynched executed him,” Maliha said, fiddling with the armor and finding the input terminal.

“It had to be done,” I said. “Otherwise, Will and I would have been dead.”

“Well, I am glad that you’re alive. Aha! There’s the computing chip. Let me just plug it into my laptop and bingo! We’re in. Uh-oh, what’s this encryption? Haven’t ever seen this before. This is like quantum-level encryption,” she said, her face turning into a furrowed frown.

“Can you get past it?”

“I don’t think we need to. You wanted to find out who controls this person? It says right here on the login screen. Look.”

I turned the laptop towards me, and my jaw dropped as I read the name “Beckett Corp” written at the top of the login terminal.

“Blair?” I spoke out loud.

“I didn’t know you were on a first-name basis with that motherfucker. He’s the vilest person in this town, you know?” Maliha said. “He’s been involved in so many scandals and controversies regarding his pharmaceutical business, it’s no wonder he had to shut it down, and now look at what he’s doing. Creating mercenaries.”

“It’s more complicated than that, dear girl,” I said to Maliha.

“You have my ear. No matter how dubious this whole thing is, I’ll believe you.”

It just so happened that right at that moment, the west wall of the stable broke open as if it was made of cardboard. I didn’t understand how it happened. There was a ten-inch thick cement wall on the other side. Who could have gotten through?

And then, through the smoke and the rubble, a soldier stepped through, wearing the same armor as the one that the dead one was wearing. Except, this time around, there was something remarkably different. For one, this soldier moved like a maniac, as if he was out of control. Almost frenzied.

He cast one look at me, then at Maliha, who was bent over the corpse’s body, inspecting the computing terminal.

“What’s happening?” Maliha screamed, but it was too late. The soldier was upon her, attacking her. He threw her against the wall as he lifted the corpse of the soldier and slung it over his shoulder. Then he did the same with Maliha’s unconscious body.

I confirmed first to see that Maliha had indeed passed out, then immediately shifted into my wolf form and attacked the soldier. My first tackle struck him square in the chest, causing him to fall over. But as he fell, he delivered a strong kick to my face, causing me to become disoriented.

In response, I slashed at his face, taking his helmet off with my brute strength. And there it was, the difference between the soldier we had just killed and the soldier who faced me in battle right now: Every single vein on his face was pulsating so hard that it was about to erupt. His eyes were glowing a deep orange as if there was a fire burning behind them. His mouth was bleeding, and so were his eyes and ears. Instead of speaking, he snarled loudly, spitting blood everywhere.

If he was a man, it was a lifetime ago. Now, this soldier had been reduced to some frenzied being that was only capable of insanity. And yet, through all his erratic behavior, it seemed as if he was being controlled by someone or something.

Using his grenades against him was out of the question. There was Maliha in the blast radius. I tried to snag his gun away and dominate him by climbing on top of him and ripping his armor piece by piece with my teeth, but before I had gotten half the breastplate off, the soldier zapped me with his gun right in the face at point-blank range, throwing me in the air, lurching as the jolts stunned my entire body.

As I lay there stunned and helpless, I watched the soldier leave with Maliha and the corpse through the seven feet tall hole in the stable wall.

Before I passed out of sheer exhaustion and pain, I called out to Will.

They’re back! They have Maliha!

And then I knew no more.