Werewolf The Forsaken ed 3 - Blasphemies ENG eBook (osloskop net).pdf - Forsaken - Kubz

BY AARON DEMBSKI-BOWDEN, WAYNE PEACOCK AND CHUCK WENDIG

WORLD OF DARKNESS CREATED BY MARK REIN • HAGEN

Among

the Dead

“This can’t be.”

The werewolf ran his hands across the basement wall,

feeling his skin tingle at the rough stone under his palm.

He brushed his ingertips across the images that looked so

much like cave paintings: the cavorting wolves and men,

the hundreds of spirit-igures and the howling wolves.

The nine howling wolves.

“This can’t be,” he said again, narrowing his eyes in

the darkness and peering hard to make out additional de-

tails. He knew his packmate was behind him — he heard

her breathing — but he still felt an uncomfortable pulse of

shock as she pressed her hand lightly on his shoulder.

“What is it?” she whispered. “You keep saying ‘it can’t

be’ as if I should be seeing something unusual here.”

The Cahalith trailed his ingertips across the wall

once more, roughly circling the howling wolf pack. “Here.”

He tapped the ninth wolf, which was slightly separated

from the others.

“I still don’t see whatever I’m supposed to be seeing.”

The Cahalith swallowed what would have been a

threatening growl. “There are nine wolves here. This

looks like the legend of the Firstborn, when Urfarah’s

spirit-children chose the eight tribes. Five Forsaken, three

Pure.”

“So what’s this ninth one there for?” She absently ran

her ingertips through her hair to keep a few stray locks

from tickling her cheeks as she peered at the wall. “I’m

thinking the artist actually knew his math and that there’s

something signiicant in all this, right?”

The Cahalith nodded and gestured to another part

of the wall. “Look here. Werewolves — in Gauru form

no less — killing Lunes. And here, in the sky, is a lunar

eclipse. So this massacre was occurring while Mother

Moon was blind to the world below.”

“How does that tie in with….”

“Look, look here. The same wolf that was apart from

the Firstborn in the other piece. He’s right here, watching

the slaughter of the Lunes.” The Cahalith took note of

the faint trails of blue paint that stretched out from the

lone wolf and into a large patch of blackness. Whatever

picture was once on the wall was now obscured by an old

scrubbing of charcoal. “It looks like this wolf — this ninth

Firstborn — isn’t tied to the other totem spirits. I don’t

know if that means he’s a false Firstborn or — or maybe

he’s just linked to whatever is under the black patch in-

stead. Maybe it means both.”

“You’re smart, boss.” The woman yawned lazily. She

had better things to do, and wasn’t afraid to let it show.

The Cahalith was gripped, and paid her words no heed.

“I think I’ve got it,” he said after a few moments of

awkward silence.

“Got what?”

“This black patch.” He traced a single ingertip over

the blackness, as if he could feel the shapes under the

dark cloud. “This isn’t a corruption of the original piece.

It’s intentional. This Firstborn is false, because he’s got no

connection to the rest of Urfarah’s children. What he is

connected to is the black patch.”

“Wow. You sure know your stuff.” The distracted

Cahalith heard his packmate’s words, but his own rush-

ing heartbeat drowned out the soft hiss of a knife being

drawn. “And what’s the black patch, boss?”

The Cahalith leaned closer to the wall, close enough

to smell the charcoal if it had had any smell left after so

many years. “This blackness — it’s got to be the Maeljin.”

He relaxed back a little, shaking his head. “Shit, it’s so

obvious now.”

“Is it really?” she asked without a smile. The Caha-

lith missed the edgy inlection in her words, and thought

nothing of her stepping a little closer. His wolf senses

would have smelled the silver blade clutched in her hand

behind her back. His human senses were still over-

whelmed by the stench of the basement.

“Yeah, don’t you see? This isn’t just some Pure grafiti

like we thought. This is a Bale Hound myth. Some kind

of false Firstborn that was created by the Maeljin, prob-

ably to interact with the Asah Gadar as a middleman or

something.”

“Is that a fact?” She took another step closer. “And

you’re sure?”

Now the Cahalith did notice something strange,

something threatening and predatory in his packmate’s

expression.

“Are you okay? This isn’t freaking you out, is it?” He

made the last mistake of his life by turning back to the

painted images on the wall. “Damn it — if only there was

some way of discovering just who this false Firstborn is.”

Section Title

Down

“His name… ” her words came out as a sticky growl

as she grew and changed and her blood heated with Rage,

“…is Soulless Wolf.”

The Cahalith turned, wide-eyed, into the lengthen-

ing, almost-Gauru face of his packmate.

“How do you know? What the hell ?” His reactions

were fast, but not fast enough. He was changing, shifting,

when the shrieking blows struck, but they struck too hard

and too fast, and the Cahalith hit the ilthy loor with his

lifespan now numbering in seconds. Stab wounds gushed

in sick rhythm to his pounding heartbeat. She had taken

chunks out of his body with her slender klaive.

“I paint this.” The Gauru drooled as it spoke through

trembling jaws. “My work. My art.”

Moments later, the Cahalith’s body was inally

motionless among the others in the stinking cellar. The

Gauru shrank back to Hishu, panting and bloody all over.

“Everyone’s a fucking critic.” She spat on the still

igure of the Cahalith and made her way up the stairs,

wondering just what she was going to say at the pack

muster tonight. In the silent darkness of the basement, her

voice could be heard above, jokingly trying out excuses to

see how the lies sounded out loud.

• • •

In the near-darkness of the room, the Bale Hound

sliced open her wrists with a steak knife and wept at the

pain. Sticky gouts of blood spurted from her wounds in

time to her heartbeat, and her uncontrollable shivers sent

the hot luid spraying at every angle imaginable. With a

creeping, tightening sensation in her palms and wrists, the

slashes in her forearms sealed closed.

She didn’t stop crying when the pain in her arms

stopped. Instead, she crawled around the loor of the base-

ment, sobbing and drooling and near-blind in the dark-

ness, crawling on her hands and knees over bodies that

had been dead for weeks in some cases, months in others.

Her senses would have served her better in wolf form,

but she knew she’d never be able to stand the smell if she

shapeshifted in her hovel.

Finally, she reached the corpse of the packmate she

had murdered a week ago, and her hands moved over his

clothes and skin. He was already sticky with rot, and her

hands moved over ruptured lesh that showed signs of the

rats getting to him. As she rolled the decomposing body

onto its front, the smell was bearable no longer, and she

threw up sickening red-brown mush seasoned with nuggets

of cracked bone. Even in the semi-light cast by the candle

in her right hand, she clearly saw an undigested inger in

the pool of vomit.

That did stop her crying, if only for a while. She spent

the next few moments laughing drunkenly as she searched

the corpse of the Cahalith. She was too rushed, too keen,

and —

Burning.

Silver.

“Ow, fuck it!”

— she cut her hand on her silver klaive dagger as she

tried to pull it from the corpse’s spine.

It came free with slick ease, having been left there

since the inal stabbing blow seven days before. Now she

needed her ritual knife, and had crawled around in the

darkness of the basement for ive minutes trying to ind

it. No longer crying or laughing, the Bale Hound crawled

back to her makeshift altar by the stairs. Her knees

dragged through the cooling vomit, but she didn’t notice.

Her trembling hand set the lone candle in place in a small

beer bottle by her knee.

Kneeling in front of the suitcase of bones she had

been saving for just this occasion, she cut crazy, meaning-

less lines all over her left arm. The knife —

Burning.

Silver.

— sliced through her skin leaving a hissing trail of

tiny blood bubbles in the cracks of the thin wounds. It

didn’t cross her mind that she should have washed the

knife irst; the infections of a week-dead body meant noth-

ing to her.

Blood pissed out in graceless arcs, spattering on the

yellow bones jumbled together in the suitcase.

“Come to me, come now, and hide the sins of my

soul.” She talked without really hearing herself, and with-

out noticing the sick pleading of her voice. It would have

horriied her to have seen just how pathetic she looked

and sounded at this moment. “I beg of you, you who I have

served since my eyes were opened, I beg that you will send

the one who will eat my sins.”

More of her blood spurted out onto the bag of old

bones, and she felt herself growing faint. For endless min-

utes, she sat in silence, counting each second in her mind,

never realizing how she was just as often counting the furi-

ous thunder of her heartbeat.

Then the room shifted somehow. The still and rank

air moved for a moment, and a new smell, a smell of power

and sweat and ilthy animal skin, washed over her senses.

“I have come.” The voice was octaves below a mere

growl. There was no word for how it registered in her

mind. More than a vibration, less than a tremor — the

voice was as unexplainable as the creature itself.

She did not turn to see the creature behind her.

Instead, she tore strips from her sweater and used them to

bind the wounds in her arm. As she tied off the last strip

of her cheap and dirty tourniquet, the skin on the back of

her neck prickled at the touch of cold breath and scratchy

fur.

“Thank you for coming. Thank you so much.” Her

own voice was now a grateful child’s. She was dizzy from

blood loss and the gravity of the situation.

“I will eat your sins.” The wolf-thing growled as it

stepped past her. Their eyes met then, and she recoiled

slightly as she always did. The wolf’s eyes were dead,

emotionless, like those of a shark. Even his expression was

that of a dead thing, for this wolf never sniffed the ground

or twitched his ears. It was pure economy of movement,

but not out of any grace — this was economy of life; the

creature showed no more life than it had to. The wolf-

thing was simply not that good at emulating something so

alien to its nature.

The woman started crying again, this time from relief,

and the wolf began to lick the blood from the bones in the

suitcase and crack them into pieces with its jaws. As the

irst mouthful of various human bones slid down its throat,

the wolf-spirit drew a shallow, shivering breath. The wolf

seemed to be enjoying the taste of its meal.

“You have killed many of your own kind,” the wolf

growled, and somehow, the Bale Hound detected amuse-

ment in its voice.

“Yes.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “The

pack I was hiding in. I attacked them this evening.”

The wolf spoke even through a mouthful of bloody

bones. It sounded like a bear vomiting gravel. “Yes, I taste

it in your blood that coats the offering. And you killed

them all?”

The Bale Hound narrowed her eyes and shook her

head without saying a word.

• • •

Christopher was alone for the irst time in seven

years. Not literally, for there were other people in the

room with him, but alone in the sense that he was now

packless, without a totem and with no way to defend his

hunting ground.

The one thing he was certain he could do — or at

least, certain he could give his best shot — was exact a

little revenge.

He considered this fact as he lay on the basement

loor. Once Maryann’s betrayal had been revealed and

she and all her crazy-ass spirit allies had struck the pack,

Christopher had done his level best not to freak out, but

the truth of the matter is that Chris Roof-Runner was a

coward. He’d seen the overwhelming odds, seen Eric and

Jojo go down like twin sacks of kicked shit, and Christo-

pher had decided that it was time to get going from there.

He could have (perhaps, he admitted, even should have)

stayed and tried to ight, but he was certain that the last

sun had set on the Inner City Gurus, and his pack was

mighty fucked. First she took out Johnny the Blue (and a

better singer you ain’t ever heard), and then a week later

she’s lipping out and handing the rest of the Gurus their

own guts.

That bitch was going to get it. Coward or not, Chris

wasn’t going to let this go by unchallenged, even if it

meant beating the Bale Whore back to her “hidden” crash

pad, sneaking into the body-illed basement and hiding

under a pile of corpses.

The corpse he was laying under was none too fresh,

and the smell of the basement itself was more than

enough to make a guy throw up more than once. But

abject cowardice had its own virtues, and being too scared

to open your mouth is an advantage that Chris was rela-

tively happy with right then. Breathing slowly and softly

through his nose, he swallowed tiny chunks of the puke

in his mouth, and as Maryann chatted about sins and

sacriices, he licked his teeth clean of any residue.

The spirit-wolf-thing crunched its way through

whatever was in the suitcase. Chris had nearly panicked

when that beast had come along and turned things to

an ominous bent, but again, Chris’ cowardice kept him

rooted and immobile, half-hidden under the body of one

guy and half-lying on top of another corpse’s legs. His

eyes had adjusted to the darkness a little, and he could see

Johnny the Blue’s vacant, rotting face turned toward him

a little way away.

Christopher had a hard time swallowing his Rage but

managed by letting his fear come back to the fore.

He had to wait for the spirit to leave, because there

was no way he was leaping out of a small pile of bodies in

order to ight a Bale Hound and her freaky sin-fucking to-

tem. If Chris had known the expression about “discretion

being the better part of valor,” he’d have congratulated

himself on his caution. As it was, he just lay still, trying

not to tremble or twitch or even breathe too loud. He

needed a piss, too, and that was hardly helping matters.

Finally, the wolf–thing began to dissolve and vanish,

as if it were turning into smoke and dissipating. The mist

coiled around Maryann, and seemed to be whispering.

Chris didn’t even want to know what the spirit was say-

ing as a parting note, but he hoped to God that it wasn’t

anything like, “There’s a guy hiding in here.”

• • •

“Another heart beats in this room, Asah Gadar . You

have earned this warning because of your gracious offer-

ing. Until next time, then…”

The whispering died down as the spirit dissolved be-

fore her eyes completely. The Bale Hound, still feeling the

ache in her brain from the emotional and spiritual trauma

she had suffered this night, was instantly alert.

“Who’s there?” she hissed, reaching for her silver

knife. She believed she knew who was down here with her,

laying somewhere in the darkness. Slowly, again on her

hands and knees, she crawled along the loor. Every time

her hand brushed a motionless body, she rammed down

with the knife.

• • •

Chris was far beyond simple panic now. He could hear

her somewhere in the basement, scrabbling around on her

hands and knees, and giggling like a clown as she stabbed

into the dead bodies all around. It was time , he igured, to

make a scene .

A scufle from nearby — very nearby — galvanized

Chris into action. He tensed his muscles, ready to leap up

to his feet.

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