Chapter 30: Will

Chapter 30: Will

I looked at Alexis balefully one last time before I pursued the chase of Blair and Maurice. The sight of her bleeding leg had shaken me and had made me rethink about this quickly falling apart plan of ours. Perhaps it was better to retreat, regroup, and come back with reinforcements. But that would risk the lives of hundreds of werewolves. By then, Blair will have made more of Wolf’s Bane, and he’d have the means at his disposal to wipe out all the Grimm pack. It had to be now.

I had to end this tonight and make sure that the syringe containing Wolf’s Bane was not used at all. Better yet that it was wasted somehow. Not that I was planning on letting Blair live after tonight, but even if he were to somehow survive, it would take him a long time to remake Wolf’s Bane, if at all. I’d make sure to destroy this tower and all the information within it if that’s what it’d take for something like Wolf’s Bane to never exist again.

The staircase had hundreds of stairs, both leading up and down, but I could hear both Blair and Maurice heading upstairs rather than in separate directions. If only they’d gone in separate directions, the chase would have been much harder for me. But they had not thought of that, and that was good enough for me.

Good enough until I realized that the reason why Blair insisted Maurice assisted him was that Maurice was, like myself, a werewolf, and Blair was using him for his muscle. That would not pose a problem, I thought. The last time I confronted Maurice, it had been clear that he stood no chance against me in a physical battle. But Blair was a twisted man, capable of malicious cunning.

But no thought was enough to deter me as I chased them up and up. I’d cross that bridge when I’d get to it. Right now, my rage drove me. I let it strengthen me. If there was ever a time when I needed to let it loose, it was now. So I allowed it to course through my veins, empowering my wolf form and granting me clarity as I tracked my quarry.

But my quarry, it seemed, was in a mood of mockery and jest. They quipped and jeered as they ran, and occasionally I could hear what they were saying, despite the sound of the building-wide alarm.

“Teamwork makes the dreamwork, hermano,” Blair sneered. “Live to see another day.”

“Backup’s waiting,” Maurice said, among other things that I could not decipher. I had expected backup to be there, and it had been a bit alarming for me that so far, there hadn’t been any reinforcements. Had they really expected to kill us off with that gas chamber? If so, their planning skills were just a tad behind ours.

“Hold him back while I ready the chopper,” Blair said between other garbled mumblings. “Hold him. You can hold him for a little while. For fuck’s sake, you’re a wolf. Don’t forget that.”

Floor thirty. That’s where they finally stopped running. As they banged through the staircase door, I barged behind soon after, finding myself face-to-face with Maurice and Blair.

They were not running any longer.

All I could bring myself to see was the bulge in Blair’s breast pocket. That’s where he had tucked away the syringe containing my potential doom. Without getting close enough to Blair that he might inject me and without letting him run too far away for me to resume the chase, I had to somehow destroy the Wolf’s Bane.

But with Maurice shifting into his wolf form, that seemed like a less likely possibility with each passing second. The minute Maurice began tearing out of his clothes and began morphing into the meek beast he was, Blair turned and ran in the opposite direction, leaving me to face off the werewolf who had betrayed the trust of his entire pack.

I could not let Blair get to the chopper any sooner than I could let Maurice roam freely. Both of them had to be taken care of. With that in mind, I made the first blow, a lethal lunge at Maurice’s throat, immediately wrangling him by his neck and bringing him to the ground.

It appeared that Maurice had taken some fighting classes or perhaps used some manner of serum to enhance his strength, for if I had used this wrangling move on him earlier, he would surely have perished within a single blow, but instead of recoiling in pain or showing any sign that he was hurt, Maurice bore the blow and retaliated by lashing at my chest.

I could not swerve to avoid such a quick hit, and had it been a strong hit, I would have suffered some gashes or even bruises. But this was where Maurice’s newfound dexterity’s limit ended. His attacks were fast, and his reaction times were admirable, but his strength was lacking. The blow he landed on my chest barely did anything. It did not even deter me from advancing on him and digging both claws into his sides, ripping out tufts of fur.

Maurice snarled as my claws descended into him, piercing past flesh and digging deep into his skin. Blood began spurting out as I pushed forward. We were locked in a bizarre stance, my claws deep into him, his body trying to wrestle free. It wasn’t until Maurice threw himself back that I let go of him, not out of mercy but because I had run out of purchase in his skin, having torn a good amount of it with my claws.

As strong as I was, Maurice was just as fast. He recovered from the flurry of my attacks and circled around me, trying to find an opening to attack. In the flashing red alarm light, the notion of two wolves circling each other appeared macabre.

It was with sorrow that I realized that this was what the enemy had intended all along. Not to pitch wolf against vampire or wolf against some evil pharmacist, but to pitch brother against brother, wolf against wolf, to weaken the bond that existed between all pack members. It had never been my intention to seek out my own pack members and battle them. But here I was, forced to fight someone who had been twisted into a sick, depraved, greedy version of himself through the bribery of power and wealth.

And it was for this very reason that Maurice had to be rooted out like a weed. His existence was a blot on the good name of the Grimm pack, his actions tarnishing the reputation of werewolves worldwide. A betrayer in our midst, someone who would sell his own species for the sake of money.

How could he?

I stopped circling and paced across the room, tackling his bleeding torso and plummeting him against the wall. Maurice yelped out in pain as his body collided and fell against the wall. No glass walls on this floor. This was pure concrete that Maurice rammed into.

In the midst of all this, I was concerned about Blair. I could sense Alexis fighting Ralph and was not concerned about the two of them. Compared to her strength, Ralph stood no chance. Compared to mine, Maurice stood none either. But it was Blair who had orchestrated this entire thing, Blair who held Wolf’s Bane in his possession, Blair who was escaping in the chopper waiting for him on the roof.

Maurice was just meant to be a distraction, and a means to stall me as Blair made off.

Through my keen sense of hearing, now heightened by the adrenaline racing through my body, I could pick out the faint sound of Blair climbing up a ladder hidden somewhere on this floor. But while Maurice was here, in wolf form, ready to fight me, I could not just ditch him and chase Blair. If left to his own devices, he would certainly go down and join Ralph, and the two would team up against Alexis, a werewolf and a vampire against my fated mate.

In the midst of my contemplation, Maurice had gotten back up and was now snarling at me. I could not help but commend his newfound bravado. As depraved and cowardly as he had been, his resilient stand against me without any backup or support was somewhat impressive. He was my foe, my opponent, but it was the mark of a good fighter to acknowledge the strengths of their foe.

Since he and I had no such bond linking our psyches, I could not communicate with him. I could only do that with Alexis and sometimes, on rare occasions, with Vincent. Part of me wanted to shift back and talk to him, tell him that there was still a way out of it if he were to only repent, realize the errors of his ways, pay the penalty for his crimes, and return to the Grimm Abode as a pack member. But then I recalled the crimes he had committed, the horrendous deeds he had done, and it brought me to the conclusion that a penalty for such perjury could only be his life.

This time, I let him attack first. Maurice gaped his maw and attempted to bite my neck. A wolf’s weakest and most vulnerable point in battle was always his neck. It was why female wolves would stoop in front of their mates in battle, snarling as they’d do so, to protect their mate’s necks. Even though my mate was not here, I made sure that my neck was protected. There was a reason for me to let him attack first. Just as his muzzle was within biting range, I slammed my paw into it, sending him hurtling across the floor a second time.

Maurice quivered where he lay, undoubtedly reeling from the brute blow he had just received. I gave him no quarter, and instead of letting him reel, I launched myself in the air, landing mere inches away from him, my face next to his neck, my teeth ready to pierce his trachea. It was my way of letting him know that the battle was over, that I had won the fight.

Maurice looked up at me and, instead of defending himself, presented his neck as a sign of surrender. The fight was over. I could see it, he could sense it, and there was nothing more left to be done other than kill him.

I left him there, still shivering in a tiny puddle of his blood coming out of various ruptured body parts, withering with tufts of fur falling out. Rather than take his life, I resumed the chase of Blair.

It was not because I had any feelings of sympathy for Maurice that I spared him. There was a brief moment where I was on the brink of biting down on his neck and ending his existence. But Alexis’s face swam before my eyes as I was about to do that, her face imploring me to seek the less-trodden path of mercy. She had begged me to be merciful once, back when I was about to kill Blair. Had I not acquiesced to her request back then, our relationship would not have bloomed into what it is now. Blair would have died. There would have been no Wolf’s Bane. I, however, would have been a wolf without a mate. A wolf driven by hate instead of mercy.

I did not want to be that wolf then, and I did not want to be that wolf now.

Besides, my objective was right there—in Blair’s pocket. All I needed was to get there in time and make sure that he didn’t get on the chopper. Even if that meant taking down the chopper somehow. I hadn’t done something like that before, at least not in my wolf form, but if that was what it took, then that’s what I’d do.

Five minutes after I had beaten Maurice, I found the secret entrance to the emergency ladders leading up to the rooftop. I could see the cloudy sky on the other side of this elusive tunnel. It only meant one thing: Blair had found his way to the roof, and at any given moment, he was about to escape.

Instantaneously, I shifted back as I was unable to climb those steep ladders with my wolf body. I began ascending the stairs, panting lightly as the built-up fatigue of the past hour’s activity started getting to me. There were at least a hundred ladder steps leading up, and I was just at the start.

The long length of the ladder lent me some time to ponder why I had spared Maurice’s life, other than the most obvious reason. Above everything, Maurice was Vincent’s father and Fred’s son. Both those relationships were extremely important to me. Fred was my brother, and Vincent was akin to a close friend. I could not soil the nature of either of those relationships by bringing about the death of a son and a father. The repercussions of such a deed would be too destructive. More importantly, Maurice was a werewolf. If word got around that werewolves were killing werewolves in Fiddler’s Green, how would the rest of the packs perceive it? They would seek to admonish us. They would think of me beyond reason and instead resort to reprimanding me with actions. Perhaps imprison me after charging me with the crime of harming another werewolf. Maybe such a tribunal would even find me guilty enough to sentence me to death.

I had barely climbed to the top when I saw that this wasn’t the roof. It was only a terrace midway along the length of the building. There were no signs of Blair on the terrace. But the door leading into the lobby of this floor was partly open.

Suddenly, from above, the whirring sound of the chopper’s rotor blades coming to life boomed, increasing my sense of urgency. If the helicopter had turned on, it only meant that Blair’s escape was imminent. Immediately after that, ropes slid down from the roof of the building, their ends dropping into the terrace. I looked upward and saw soldiers descending from those ropes. Just as the ropes had come from above, grapples hooked to the terrace’s wall from below. I shot a look down and saw more soldiers climbing up along the length of the building.

These soldiers bore no marks of military nor that of any militia. Their suits were black camo, and they had night vision goggles on. All of them had rifles hanging from their shoulders.

More soldiers swarmed from the corridor, the lasers of their guns aiming in my direction. I ducked immediately to avoid the first flurry of gunfire in my direction, then crawled along the terrace till I reached the door as bullets flew above me, shattering the glass and spreading it everywhere around me. By the time I got to the door, my forearms had tiny shards wedged in them, but I had no time to see to these new injuries as more soldiers stood inside the building, waiting for me. Once inside, the red flashing alarm light gave me a momentary cover to roll behind the furniture in the lobby and narrowly avoid the next bout of gunfire.

It was utter and pure mayhem in the lobby, with soldiers coming from every side, making me wonder how on earth I was ever going to close the distance between Blair and myself and how I would ever get my hands on Wolf’s Bane now.

Even though the glass windows were well shattered, creating a kaleidoscopic effect that did nothing to help me with scoping my surroundings, I saw a black shadow outside, rising from below and heading up to the roof. Upon first sight of this strange sight, I had no clue as to what I had just seen, but before the shadow disappeared, I caught glimpse of the face amid all the blackness floating upwards.

It was Ralph.

Folkloric tales that I had heard when I was young told of accounts where vampires could fly. Even as a child, that had seemed like an exaggeration to me. Their inability to come out in the daylight and their proclivity for blood were all within the realm of plausibility. But were they really able to fly? That was far-fetched. It had always seemed unlikely. Until just now when I saw Ralph flying up like a giant bat. If he were to rendezvous with Blair on the roof, the two of them would become an unstoppable force, what with the additional mercenaries swarming the building.

My heart sank a little as I realized that the only way Ralph could have escaped would have been after defeating Alexis. An image conjured itself in my mind: Alexis lying lifeless on the floor, her body drained of all blood, bite marks on her neck.

I am okay, a voice resounded in my head, laying my worst suspicion to rest. But Ralph escaped.

How?

He freaking flew! Didn’t you see?

Amidst the telepathic conversation, the sound of the chopper on the roof, and the gunfire blazing overhead, I tried to improvise a new plan in real-time, and upon thinking in a dozen different trajectories at the same time, I finally said, There’s no way we’re doing this alone. Regroup with me so we can take them on together.

In the meantime, I crawled further behind the bullet-riddled lobby furniture and hid behind the lobby desk where no bullets were flying. This allowed me to respite enough to remove the shards from my forearms and recalibrate myself to my surroundings.

The volume of gunfire was a bit misguiding, I learned. There weren’t as many soldiers as I had thought there were. Six of them were on one side of the lobby, while ten stood in a semi-circle in front of the staircase and elevator. But that still amounted to sixteen armed soldiers with a seemingly infinite amount of ammo for their fully-automatic rifles, leaving me stranded behind the desk.

A desk that would not hold for long under gunfire if the soldiers realized that I was hidden behind it.

I needed a diversion.