Chapter 2: Will

Chapter 2: Will

I couldn’t just stand there as those rabid beasts attacked my beloved Ariana. Whatever had transpired would mean nothing if I didn’t save her from the vampires. Vampires in Fiddler’s Green? Now that was something unheard of. How long had I been held captive? Surely it must not have been more than a couple of weeks or months.

I had no time to ponder over what had been in the face of what was happening in front of me. Despite every inch of my being aching with blaring pain and my body still being under the effect of the drugs that my captor had injected in me, I shifted into a wolf and pounced upon the swarm of those bat-like abominations.

Had my time in captivity rendered me a phantasm? The vampires never saw me coming. Or perhaps they were far too concerned with cornering the maiden that they had forgotten her protector stood sentinel nearby.

I dug my claws into the backs of the bloodsuckers, yanking them off Ariana, my heart frenzied with concern for her safety. It had barely been a few seconds since she was pinned down, but given what I knew of vampires, a few seconds were all they ever needed to bare their teeth and dig into the skin of their victims. It only seemed poetic that I dug my teeth into their skin and threw them off like ragdolls, lurching and screeching.

I had to protect her at all costs. In all my time spent bearing the torture and brutality of that eccentric occultist who had caged me like I was some common dog, the only thing that had sustained me through that cold and dark was Ariana’s warm and light memory.

I plucked them off her like leeches off a wound. They were bony creatures, all pale skin and teeth, and crimson eyes. With each blow I struck, with each slash that I cleaved across their repulsive skins, I could feel my strength returning to me.

Ariana lay there on the ground, weakened, whimpering, and shivering. She stared at me in disbelief and perhaps gratitude, not uttering a single word. I could see that her foot was injured. I did not expect her to shift and fight by my side. As the alpha of the pack, it was my sworn duty to protect her and all the members of the Grimm pack.

The vampires had rifles the likes I had not seen before. Now that they were getting back on their feet, their guns were aimed at me. What was this weaponry? I had not seen anything like this in my time during the war.

“Look out!” Ariana screamed at me. I barely had a second left to register what she was telling me to look out for. I had thrown off my enemies every which way, and now they had surrounded me, their bizarre rifles cocked at me.

Utilizing my recovered strength, I leaped high into the air, relishing the sensation of the cool night air as it ruffled my fur, and tore past the canopy, coming face to face with the splendor of the moon after such a long time. Below me, I could see the flash of their guns and hear the roar of the bullets as they tore past the leaves and flew past me into the night sky.

I dove with fierce force, crashing into a particularly hideous-looking vampire and knocking the gun out of his grasp. Upon my falling on him, the vampire stopped moving altogether. I’d struck him lifeless. Now for the dozen more that were left.

A vampire is an agile creature. Every lore about them has this much in common. It is their speed that lets them get their way with their prey, whether it’s sucking their blood or killing them for sport. However, a vampire is no match for a werewolf in his true form.

And I was in my true form after ages.

I traversed the forest in quick leaps, clawing at the shooting vampires, tearing apart their throats, their torsos, and every other part of their bodies that my claws could get a hold of. Those that were directly in my path faced an agonizing death through the crushing force of my muzzle. My mouth was bitter and wet with vampire blood. I cared not for the whizzing bullets that soared past me.

“Now there are two of them?!” screamed one of them in confusion.

“Retreat!” another yelled.

Those who had fallen in their battle with me were scrambling to their feet, hastily scampering back into the depths of the forest like rats. Many of them abandoned their firearms and their torches.

I intended to give chase and eliminate them as retribution for their attack on Ariana. But despite my will, my body seemed to say otherwise. I had overreached my limit, forgetting that mere hours ago, I was shackled in a dark basement, my body swollen purple with the bruises that my captor had inflicted on me.

Realizing that my strength was waning because I had just utilized the last dredges of it in fending off the vampires, I abruptly shifted back into my human form. My tattered clothes reminded me again that I, once the alpha of my pack, was reduced to nothing but a laboratory experiment.

The forest resumed its meditative quietness. The air no longer stank with the stench of blood and that festering odor that the vampires carried with them wherever they went. As far as I could see, there was no sign of them any longer. Now that both of us were no longer in immediate danger, I turned my attention to the woman who had enamored me all her life.

I could feel something stirring within my being. It was a magical prompt that resurrected itself in my heart, a desire I had long thought was dead. My feeble body was attracted to hers in an uncanny magnetism as I walked up to her as she walked up to me.

And when I touched her gentle cheek, electricity issued from her body and imbued itself in my fingertips. Only in lore had I read before about the sacred bond of fated mates. Only in my deepest dreams had I wished that I would one day bond with Ariana as her mate. My despair in my prison was lessened to mild irritation due to the hope that someday, I would be free, someday, I would be rejoined with her.

It was happening. One had no control over this primordial force of nature. A bond formed of its own accord. You could never force it.

I saw in her eyes the same wonder that was in mine. Awe, at the sanctimony of the rite that was taking place so serendipitously. Her mouth was agape, gasping as both of us felt this surge of union strengthen our relationship.

Despite my weakened state, I lifted my other hand and gently held her other cheek, my faculties still in disbelief at the occurrence of this binding—in here of all places, with her of all people, and now out of all the times.

A gentle wind blew around us as our bond strengthened. Silent leaves slithered to life and sang a symphony of nature, serenading the cementation of our link. Moonlight fought past the darkness and sought our forms, lighting our bodies in a celestial glow.

And then, that fantastical moment was over. The forest went back to being a quiet forest, devoid of light and air. The charge I could feel upon touching her skin quickly simmered down, leaving only the soft sensation of her warm cheeks under my coarse hands.

“Holy shit,” she exclaimed. “What just happened?”

“Does it need to be any clearer than it is? My Ariana, at long last, we have bonded as we had always desired. I am your fated mate, and you are mine,” I gasped, unable to believe the very words that were coming out of my mouth.

“You keep calling me Ariana. I hate to break it to you, but I’m not Ariana. She died like fifty years ago,” she said, stepping away from me as if I was some sort of deranged madman.

I groaned in despair as my knees buckled, and I collapsed on the floor. My hands dug into my hair and tugged of their own volition, deriving pain all over my skull. Ariana? Dead? Dead for fifty years? A gut-wrenching moan escaped my lips, quaking through the entire forest. Tears followed soon after, hot billowing tears clouding my vision.

“If…” I stuttered. “If…if Ariana is dead…” I couldn’t even believe that it was true, even as the sentence left my mouth. How could it have been fifty years since she had died? How could I have been gone for so long? “If Ariana is dead, who is it that I have bonded my soul to?”

“I’m Alexis. Ariana was my grandmother.”

During my time in captivity, I had syringes that were thicker than my index finger pierced through my body. I had scalding irons clapped to my back in an effort to make me shift into a wolf. Liquids that burned like molten lava poured down my throat while I was chained in barbed wire that tore deep into my skin. My captor would prod me with an electric stick that would send jolts of volts burning through my system. When feeling especially frenzied, he would tear off a chunk of skin just for sport, leaving me thrashing in agonizing pain as I bled in my cage.

None of that hurt as much as hearing her say that Ariana had been dead for half a century did. My legs were the first to give away. Upon collapsing on the floor, I could feel consciousness leave my body like the last tendrils of night, fleeing the sky at dawn.

The girl knelt beside me as weakness took hold of my body. Darkness perforated my vision till it was all I could see any more.

“Who are you?” the girl inquired as she tugged my frail body. “Where did you come from? Why did you save me? Hello?”

The barrage of questions triggered my incredulity further. Yet, before blacking out, I managed to whisper, “Wilhelm.”

And then, I knew no more.

The sweet nothingness of unconsciousness was a welcome refuge from all the madness that I had gone through. This would be my respite from the pain, the agony, and the saddening news that, somehow, the woman that I had cared for had died long ago.

A sharp pain permeating through my chest brought me crudely back to awareness. With a sharp breath that served more to ache than rejuvenate, I opened my eyes to the strange sight of the girl bending over me, her hands pumping rapidly on my rib cage.

“Stop it, damn you! You’re going to break my bones!” I groaned.

“Listen up. The odds are stacked against us. You’re in no shape to be alive, and I’ve got a bad foot that’s making it impossible for me to walk. We’re going to have to work together if we’re gonna get out of this forest,” the girl said in rapid bursts of jumbled-up words. It was as if her syllables were crashing into each other.

“Leave me be. There’s nothing left to live for,” I said, misery taking hold of me. I closed my eyes and sighed dejectedly, feeling each muscle strain as I lay there limply.

“What are you talking about, man?” she asked. With my eyes closed, I could swear that it was Ariana speaking to me. This only worsened my melancholy. “You’re frail like a

skeleton. Don’t you want to go back to the commune? Where they can take care of you?”

“Who’s going to take care of me? Who? You say that Ariana has died not one or two but fifty years ago. It should make sense that everyone I knew should be dead as well.”

I could feel her hands closing around mine. She squeezed my hand in her gentle grip and tugged at me, beckoning me to open my eyes.

“Look, you say your name’s Wilhelm, right? As in Will Grimm, the pilgrim? The pioneer pack alpha who traveled with the Grimms from Germany to America during the Second World War? I’ve seen the old-timey pictures, those black-and-white shots of you, my grandma, and the elders. You’re Will. And somehow, you’re still alive. Still young as the day you were when you disappeared around seventy years ago or so,” she said softly. Her words only confirmed my worst suspicions.

“You say that I’ve been gone for seventy years? It only seemed like a few weeks to me in that godforsaken cell,” I said.

“Cell? You were captured?”

“Aye. I was. By a most malevolent occultist who went by the name of Edward Beckett. He is the devil incarnate. Or, at least, was. Until I killed him and freed myself,” I said. It all started coming back to me slowly. The cloud of daze began lifting from my memory, recalling horrible torture.

“My point is, Will. You’re somehow alive and in one piece. It’s almost like a miracle. Would you like to give up now? After all you’ve been through? That doesn’t seem fitting for the bravest wolf of our pack,” she said.

“Is that what they say about me?” I chuckled. “That I was the bravest?”

“The pack reveres you. Every weekend, when the pack assembles for a campfire at the Grimm Abode, they talk of you as if you were a legend. Fred Grimm, your brother, speaks of you, speaks of your bravery, tells us tales of how you rescued your entire pack from the horrors of the Second World War in Germany and took ‘em all to safety by charting a course through the seas across Europe to America. Now, in my opinion, that’s the textbook definition of bravery,” the girl spoke.

Bizarre as it was, the words that she spoke served as a balm to my bruised soul. I assembled myself and sat up straight, feeling embarrassed at my lack of proper clothes. I had worn these ragged tatters for how long I could not recall.

“Seventy years, you say?”

“Well, more like seventy-six. It’s twenty-twenty-two, you know. You disappeared

sometime around, say, nineteen-forty-six. Or at least that’s how the story goes,” she said.

That vile occultist had kept me under lock and key for seventy years?! Even for a madman such as him, keeping me imprisoned for more than seventy years was gratuitous, to say the least.

“Very well, Ariana…I’m sorry…Alexis, was it?”

“Yeah. Alexis. Pronounced like Texas,” she said as she smiled at me. “I still can’t believe that I just came across you. So random. So weird.”

“You say words that I know the meaning of, but you say them in a fashion I don’t understand. What does ‘so random’ mean?” I asked. Every word I uttered made sharp pain issue in my ribs, making me wince and groan as I struggled to sit still.

“Oh, my bad. That’s totally like a generation gap thing. I get it. So random sort of means, like, you know, coincidental,” she said.

“Then say that,” I snapped.

“Geez. I’m sorry,” she said.

“How do you propose we get out of here?” I asked as she helped me to my feet. “Why are there so many vampires here? Do they plague these lands?”

“Dude, you have no idea how bad it’s been for decades. Even before I was born, really. Vampires run this town. This forest, that cove, the harbor, the wharf, everything in between. It’s all their turf,” Alexis said. Even though she put on a brave face, the evidence of pain betrayed her as she helped me to my feet. I could see her foot drenched in fresh blood.

“Vampires in Fiddler’s Green. That is most strange. You must tell me more,” I said. “And you should also get that foot looked at. It can get infected. You could end up losing it.”

“Thanks for the grim reminder,” she said. “And yeah, the vampires run this entire town. There’s nothing one can do about it.”

“One can fight,” I said. We were moving extremely slowly, relying on balancing each other as we walked arm-in-arm along the dirt path. Tortoises moved faster.

“Oh, yeah, right. Fight. Try telling that to our alpha,” Alexis scoffed. The disdain was plain as day in her voice.

“You do not approve of the alpha that you have?” I asked, my concern growing graver for the integrity of my pack.

“Maurice Grimm is a man with no backbone. He’s a politician first, a greedy bastard second, and a werewolf third. You try telling him that we can fight the vampires. He’ll laugh at your face,” she said in a voice trembling with rage.

I prodded the matter no further. I would see to it once we’d get to Fiddler’s Green.

“What were you doing out here, risking your life at this hour?” I asked. It had piqued my curiosity that I would encounter a lone wolf out here in the forest, a lone wolf surrounded by vampires.

“Promise you can keep a secret?” she asked.

“Given that I saved your life, and then you resuscitated me, and given that we’re helping each other hobble back to the commune, sure. I promise I can keep a secret,” I said.

“I was running away. At least that was the plan,” she said, weighing her words. “Until the vampires caught up to me. Until I came across you. Until we freaking bonded together.”

“Ah, that we did,” I said, my heart sinking upon remembering that not minutes ago, the bond had surreptitiously worked its magic, binding us together as fated mates. The woman I had yearned for was dead. And here I was, bound to her granddaughter.

As if to compensate for any lacking in the grief that I was struck with, the forest graciously produced a fresh hell for us to deal with.

The vampires were back in greater numbers than before, armed with far more than just flashlights and guns. They were combing the trees ahead of us, quickly closing in on our location.

A wild panic shot through my peripheries, freezing me to my spot. Beside me, I could hear Alexis whimpering in fear.

What was the saying? Out of the frying pan and into the fire?