Grimm Wolf - Julie Steimle (fantasy novels to read .txt) 📗

more epithets much worse than that, climbing up higher. “Not fair.” He pushed Rhett up ahead of him. Rhett was bleeding profusely from his bite wounds, unable to do much. “Are you wearing a belt?”

Rhett nodded, breathing heavily. 

“You gotta stop the blood and get higher. Take it off and make a tourniquet.” Emory swallowed. He tried to think of ways to fight off those werewolves.

And they were werewolves. He could not deny it anymore. They were real. Real monsters. That crazy professor they had met the day before had not been insane. He had been right. He had been right, and now Jordan was dead.

Emory looked to the castle.

Schwitzer, the psychopath was outside, gloating while pointing to the woods. His voice carried on the wind, but he was not shouting at the wolves or at them, but a Rick who had somehow survived. They saw Rick stagger out of the house, covered in blood and scratch marks. His shirt was torn, clearly by wolves. He looked like he was suffering from bite wounds, though, he looked mostly unharmed. The poor guy. He no longer had the knife. That Schwitzer did not have it either, though. And Jordan was nowhere to be seen. They wondered what had happened to him. Had he been eaten?

They could barely hear the maniac’s words through the wolf howls as the wolf men below attempted to climb the tree after them. “… get them! Are you a wolf or not?”

“You’ll pay for that!” Rick snarled back.

Then the unthinkable happened.

They could not believe what they were seeing, but Rick’s distraught human form contorted with hair sprouting from his scalp all the way down his neck and arms. His face elongated into a long teethy snout, his ears shifting high on to his head in furry pointy things. His hands and body sprouted fur the same color as his hair as he kicked off his pants and shoes, jumped out of them, a tail trailing behind. And he sprang on the German with his teeth—entirely wolf.

“No way.” Rhett stared, unable to believe it.

“Oh, crap.” Emory felt sick. “The entire time…”

And the German, Schwitzer, quickly became a wolf himself.

Emory and Rhett exchanged looks. They had been hanging out with a werewolf. All those stories about the Deacons… they had been true.

The wounded wolves down below yowled while the spry wolf-men huffed as they advanced on them up the tree branches below with gleeful hunger. The cannibalistic wolf-men were going to eat them if they didn’t do something fast.

Looking around for a longer weapon, Emory broke off a branch from over his head. Bringing it down, he shoved the end of it into the face of the nearest wolf-man climbing up, pushing him almost out of the tree. Emory stomped on the wolf-man’s fingers next, finally causing him to fall. He hoped the werewolf broke a leg, or his neck.

“There has got to be something else in this bag!” Rhett panted desperately in pain as he chucked down the paper part, lifting up the clear plastic to look for another bottle of that oil. It had been so perfect in getting rid of those two wolves. That pair was lying on the forest floor, barely moving. But the bag only contained one other knife and the large honey jar. He lifted the jar up. “Why did he give us honey?”

Emory whipped his eyes back to the brawling wolves near the house after shoving another man-wolf down off the tree. Schwitzer-the-wolf was now in an all-out battle with Rick-the-red-wolf. Teeth, fur, and claws were flying. “Because he’s allergic…. And he knows they are too.”

“Ah man…” Rhett opened the bottle, straining as he was in severe pain. It was all he could do not to faint and fall out of the tree. But he hesitated to use the honey, as there wasn’t very much in the bottle and he had wasted the oil in one go. However, the second he had opened the jar, the reaction below was automatic. The wolf-men shrank back and burst into sneezes.  

“Sneezing?” Emory complained. “Like that is going to stop them for long!”

But an idea came to Rhett in his hazy delirium of blood loss, and he squeezed the honey onto the branches below them, dizzily rubbing it into the bark.

“That might help…” Emory nodded, looking at Rhett’s pale face. “Hand me the bottle.”

Rhett passed it over. He then slumped back into the tree.

Emory spread the honey on his hands, tucked the jar into his shirt so it would not fall to the forest floor, and then rubbed the honey that was on his hands around everything he could below them, including the branch he was using as a weapon.

The wolf men cursed down underneath them, whipping up with yowls at their lost prey. Apparently the honey seemed to do it.

Ripping around with glares at Rick who was still fighting with their master, the wolves snarled. Watching them prowl below, Rhett and Emory noticed some of those wolves headed back towards the castle, eyes fixing on their werewolf friend.

“Oh no…” Rhett said, watching bleary-eyed.

“What?” Emory murmured. “They’re leaving.”

“Don’t you see?” Rhett said, waving a heavy arm to the castle. “They’re gonna kill him.”

All strength washed out of Emory. Rick was their only hope. They were done for. Neither of them knew what to do.

They had just seen their friend Jordan get murdered, and then their other friend turn out to be a werewolf. And all that time they had thought it was just a stupid hokey rumor. Little had they known that all those rumors had been true.

But then it explained everything—the whole werewolf business did—why Rick always seemed to vanish from human society on the full moon, one day before and after as well. It also explained why Rick was allergic to garlic and never used silver flatware, no matter how rich he was. It also explained his family’s wolf fetish. It explained their numerous wolf reserves. It also explained how Rick always seemed touchy about his mother leaving his father… and how defensive he was of her choice. He had never held it against her. She hadn’t lost her mind. She had discovered the truth, and had run away. It also explained why Rick was being hunted by a crazy organization which believed in monsters. He was a monster.

And yet, as Rick-the-wolf battled it out with Schwitzer-the-wolf, they knew that the guy had tried everything to keep them from coming there, and they had not listened. He had known this German was a killer. He was trying to prevent it. And looking at the knives in their hands and the remaining honey in the bottle, they knew he was still trying to save them.

“I don’t get it…” Rhett murmured, pale-lipped. “If he’s one of them, why…?”

“I don’t know,” Emory said.

But Rhett weakly lifted his head, nodding. “That Schwitzer said Rick’s mother was a human.” He then grasped the nearest tree branch, feeling faint again.

“Oh, you’re still losing blood!” Emory grabbed him, and then removed his own belt. Rhett had not made that tourniquet. Instead Emory quickly wrapped his belt around Rhett’s thigh, putting on pressure to quit the flow of blood. He then peeled off his shirt to make a bandage of it to stop the rest of the bleeding out of the worst of his wounds. Rhett leaned against a steady branch and closed his eyes.

“We need to get out of here.” Emory peered across the yard again, watching as Rick-the-wolf staggered back from Schwitzer-the-wolf—Rick worse off than the German. But then he had started out worse in the first place.

“You’re pathetic,” Schwitzer-the-wolf shouted at his wounded adversary in clear English.

“They talk?” Emory grabbed a branch to keep him from falling out of the tree from shock.

“Let them go!” Rick-the-wolf snarled through his bloody maw.

“Not a chance! You brought this on them yourself!”

“Lass uns ihn töten, Boss!”

“Nein!” the German wolf growled, “Er gehört mir!”

“What’d they say?” Emory asked.

Wiping off sweat, Rhett translated, “They want to kill Rick for him. But Schwitzer that wolf’s got some kind of ‘mano y mano’ thing going on.”

“What?” Emory was flabbergasted, staring at the wolves at the house.

Rhett nodded, feeling faint, struggling to stay in the tree. “Yeah. ‘Mano y mano’ though I guess it is some kind of macho ‘wolf verses wolf’. He’s been doing this the entire time. The freak wants to prove Rick is the lesser wolf than him.”

Emory looked to the road. “We gotta get out of his horror story.”

“I’m with you man…” Rhett breathed faintly.

“Ah no,” Emory turned to him, holding him up. “Keep conscious buddy.”

“Sorry…” Rhett struggled to open his eyes.

“Just stay with me.” Emory looked down below to see if the wolves were still there.

They were. Two looked dead—probably killed by the garlic oil. Three others were stumbling, wounded and cursing in German to get a first aid kit to treat their wounds. Rhett listened to their language, murmuring translations: “They’re calling Rick a traitor. And a heretic.”

“A heretic?” Emory peered down, wondering what that meant.

“I dunno. Something about blaspheming the goddess they believe in for helping us.” Rhett cringed against the pain. “They’re calling us meat.”

Emory peered down. “That is not good.”

Rhett groaned, clenching his teeth to keep himself from passing out. He was seeing spots before his eyes. “They’re going to bandage up their wounds and find some way to get us out of the tree.” He swallowed, panting. “They’re talking about get a ladder.”

“And not a gun?” Emory asked bitterly.

Rocking his head side to side, back against the tree branch, Rhett got out, “Nope. They want to eat us alive.”

Emory swore under his breath, teeth clenched. “Damn.”

“What we need is a miracle,” Rhett breathed out.

“Will I do?”

The voice came from above, bright and brisk. And a bit loud.

They looked up.

Standing above them, lightly on a tree branch that could in no way hold a man’s weight, was none other than Rick’s freaky friend Tom Brown.

Friends of the Wolf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Six

 

 

Standing palely like a ghost in the tree, Tom was wearing a three piece suit, pulling out a Walther p99 from a cross draw shoulder holster under his suit jacket, his finger not on the trigger. He was not wearing his customary sunglasses, but was staring down to them with his orange eyes which seemed to glow in the dark like an owl’s.

“You two appear to be in a bad spot,” Tom said as if he were acting as superman, come to save the day.

Emory and Rhett stared at him, realizing now that nothing was normal about Rick or his friends. How had they not noticed?

Tom crouched down and pointed to the castle. “The signal led me here, but it looks like wolf boy is over there having a bad time of it.”

They looked to the castle, seeing Rick fend off that German wolf again, clearly fighting to keep the wolf-man away from them.

“Rick doesn’t generally lead me to packs,” Tom murmured grimly, “But then I guess this is an emergency, isn’t it?”

Both Rhett and Emory nodded.

“Is this everyone?” Tom asked, gesturing to the wolves below and them also.

Emory shook his head while Rhett felt faint again, his mouth dry and throat