He sneered with malicious delight as he turned toward Val. “I know you, too. I had your uncle. Very tasty. He screamed for mercy, did you know that? He begged and screamed and pissed in his pants, and I took him anyway. Weak, cowardly piece of garbage. But his blood was oh so sweet. And when Boyd killed your brother . . . I tasted that, too. It was delicious.”
He turned again, this time to the werewolf, who tried to stand erect, but failed and slipped back down to all fours.
The werewolf snarled at him and Griswold shook his head slowly. “You disappoint me,” he said. “You were supposed to be at my side, and yet you turn on me. I even brought your woman here to be my sacrifice—a sacrifice I would have shared with you, and yet you kill my servants. That will cost you.”
Finally Griswold turned to Mike. “And you. My son. My betrayer. Dhampyr indeed! I may not be able to kill you, but I can hurt you. I can make your world a screaming hell until you take your own life. I will delight in finding ways to torment you, dhampyr. Perhaps I’ll lock you and your other father in the same cellar and see what happens. He isn’t evil, it seems, and that means he can kill you and it won’t harm me at all. Very droll, don’t you think? Yesss, I will lock you away together and wait until he gets hungry enough. That will be sweet.”
Crow saw Mike stare across the clearing to where the werewolf crouched, saw the sight of the creature register on Mike’s face, and Mike scrambled into a defensive crouch.
“I used his body once. I wore it like a suit of skin and in it I used your mother. Oh . . . she was sweet, my little dhampyr!
Would you like to know the things she did? Would you like to know the things she liked? Would it shock you? Would it make you scream the way I made her scream?”
Mike snatched up his sword and rushed at Griswold. The sword flashed and Griswold reached down from his towering height and simply smashed the boy into the mud. The sword fell from his hands and he lay gasping in the muck, his eyes wide and staring from the enormity of the pain.
Griswold sighed. “God! I’ve wanted to do that since you were born, you worthless waste of blood.”
“Leave him alone!” yelled Crow as he lurched to his feet, took one decisive step toward Mike, and immediately fell flat on his face. He coughed and blood flecked his lips.
Griswold’s laugh shook the world. In the air above tens of thousands of crows screamed as the echo assaulted the sky.
Around him the forest was ablaze.
Then Griswold bent down and from behind the ridge of the crater he lifted the limp, sagging body of Sarah Wolfe.
Crow looked up and tried to call her name, but his voice was only a faint croak. Sarah stirred in Griswold’s grasp, but did not wake. Blood trickled from both of her ears; her eyes were half-open and sightless with shock.
“Ah, my sweet,” Griswold murmured, stroking her with a long talon. He sniffed at her, smelling her blood, and his eyelids fluttered as if he had just inhaled the most potent of opi-ates. “You are a gift for a god. Just a little sip, just a taste, and then I can leave this place. Just a tiny drop of your blood and I will leave here forever and this world will be mine.” He sniffed her again and then caught sight of Crow worming his way brokenly through the mud. “Did my son tell you what is going to happen? Oh, I know he looked into that schwartze musician’s mind—do you think he could have done that without me letting him? It amused me to have him look and to feel his pain at what he saw. Do you know what he saw?
Shall I tell you? He saw the end of your world. He saw the coming of a new Dark Age. I will darken your skies and your lives forever. I will build my armies and spread out across the face of this world, and every nation will fall because they will not know how to fight what I am. Do you think the cross will stop me? I piss on your cross! Do you think garlic and rosewood will stop me? Weeds and garbage! I’m above such nonsense. There is nothing in your world that can stop me, and my army will be vast and powerful. How can your armies hope to stop mine with guns and tanks? I can raise all of the dead across the whole of the world. Every cemetery is a fresh battalion for me, and as I kill my enemies they will become my newest recruits. Nothing can stop me. Not now, not ever again.”
He closed his flaming eyes for a moment and drew in a deep lungful of air through the dripping nostrils of his porcine snout. “Can you smell the fire and blood? That is the perfume of Armageddon.” He opened his eyes and raised Sarah once more to his mouth. A fat, mottled tongue lolled out and licked her throat. Even unconscious she gagged and shifted instinctively away. Griswold looked down at the werewolf, his voice filled with mockery. “To think I was going to share her with you. I was going to let her death be the bond between us. I would have made you a general in my army, equal to Wingate and Ruger. Together we would have washed all the nations of the world in blood. But you are too stupid, too small of mind to understand or appreciate those gifts. Well, see your woman die! See how her blood will set me free, set me on the road to conquest!” His mouth yawned wide and the serpent’s fangs dripped with venom and Sarah’s eyes snapped open and she shrieked with such a deep and overwhelming terror that it filled the whole world and lifted up into the smoky air.
The werewolf ’s shriek was almost human as it leapt at Griswold.
If Terry’s mind was still in that hulk of a body, then at that moment, hearing those words, it snapped. Hate can sometimes transcend everything, even injury and fear of the grave. Love is a powerful a force than can move mountains.
As Griswold bent to consume Sarah, Terry Wolfe threw himself at Griswold, slashing and tearing and biting in an insane frenzy of murderous need; his talons opened great rents in the diseased hide and instead of blood it was a torrent of ants and spiders and roaches and slugs that poured from the wounds.
But love and hate were not enough and in the perverse scheme of things on which the universe was built this was not Terry’s fight to win; as powerful as he was, he was no match for the thing that Ubel Griswold had become.
Griswold bellowed in pain and struck out at the werewolf, knocking it dozens of feet through the air; his monstrous hand opened reflexively and Sarah dropped to the torn mud by the massive goat legs, and she lay there as still and silent as the dead. Griswold bent toward her and then recoiled when new pain flared in his chest as Val knelt by the edge of the crater with Crow’s Beretta held in both hands firing spaced shots, punching dark holes in Griswold’s flesh, trying to hit a heart that didn’t exist. There was no blood for the garlic to pollute, no nervous system for the oil to disrupt—
but Griswold’s flesh was alive and he could feel pain, even if he could not be killed. He swiped angrily at Val and she scrambled backward, but not fast enough. Just the edge of Griswold’s massive hand struck her forearm, but it was enough. There was a loud crack! and the pistol dropped into the mud. Val screamed as she fell, clutching her broken arm to her stomach.
“Val!” Crow yelled. “Look out!”
Val looked up as Griswold took another thunderous step forward and reached for her, but she was already slithering away through the mud, pushing herself backward with her heels. The huge cloven hoof came down right where she had been and the whole floor of the Hollow shook. Val stumbled to her feet and ran.
The werewolf lunged again, and as it attacked, Crow could see that half of its face was smeared with fresh blood and one ear was hanging by a few red threads; but the claws and fangs were undamaged and it flew at Griswold with supernatural ferocity, catching the towering monster in the back.
Griswold hissed in pain and staggered with the impact; he reached around with both hands, trying to dislodge the werewolf, but the creature had buried its fangs into the putrid flesh of Griswold’s waistline and was shaking its head back and forth, worrying the flesh into tatters. Griswold tilted backward as if overbalanced by the werewolf ’s weight, and for a moment Crow’s heart leapt in his chest. It looked like the werewolf was winning, was ripping the giant down, was killing him. Griswold tipped backward and only as he fell did Crow realize that Griswold was making himself fall. His gargantuan body crashed backward onto the ground with the werewolf under him. Tons of weight crashed down onto the werewolf ’s chest and drove Terry’s body inches into the mud.
Crow could hear the snap of bones and a canine yelp of pain.
Griswold rolled over and got to his knees. The werewolf was nearly buried in the mud, pushed deeply into the swampy earth in a tangle of fur and blood. Sharp edges of white bone stood like cactus needles all along the creature’s body, and the chest labored to breathe with tattered lungs.
Griswold reared above him and curled his right hand into a powerful bucket-size fist, then with a growl of triumphant hate he punched downward, driving the fist into the werewolf ’s chest. The whole rib cage exploded in a spray of blood. A pitiful howl of defeat and agony burst from the creature’s mouth, propelled by a bright red jet of gore. Griswold grinned and punched down again and again and again.
Blood splashed the entire clearing and bits of bone flew up and bounced off Griswold’s chest.
Crow was sickened by what he saw, but was helpless and compelled to watch.
Griswold paused for a moment to admire his work. The werewolf was clearly dead, its body destroyed beyond any hope of its superhuman ability to cure. Its spine was shattered in a dozen places, its skull was smashed in, the heart and brain pierced. Griswold peered at the beast and a look of pleasure dawned on his features, then he and Crow watched as a sudden and awful change came over the werewolf. In the space of just a few seconds the thick red fur was sucked back into the body, the musculature shifted, and the shattered bones reoriented themselves even; it was as if Crow was watching some splatter-house film speeded up to superfast motion. In just seconds the werewolf completely vanished and the man emerged.
Crow looked down at the dead man and his heart tore itself to pieces. “Oh my God . . . Terry!”
Griswold laughed as he raised his fist for a final blow. He put all of his incalculable strength into it and slammed down so hard that blood flew everywhere and the ground shook with earthquake force and the body of Terry Wolfe was driven totally into the ground, out of sight, buried forever in the wormy earth.