Chapter 40 A Massive Shadow in the Shape of a Man

— Ylva —

We were flying back to Blakemore. The little twit in tow. Kaden had left his office to his sister and her mate and he was sitting calmly with his men, his head back, eyes closed. I knew he wasn’t sleeping.

I received a text.

“You had one of them tortured,” I told Kaden reading what Dodson sent me.

“No, I just let the guys loose,” he said his eyes still closed.

“It’s the same,” I told him. He didn’t argue. “Dodson said he mentioned three packs names, but he was pretty incoherent, so they’re not sure what it means.”

“Which?” he asked still unmoving.

“Greysky, Akayume, Nubinero,” I said.

We knew the last one.

“Does it mean we move on Nubinero?” I asked.

“We were moving anyways, why wait.”

That got me smiling.

“I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’m in,” said the twit.

“No,” I just said.

“Come on, Vanessa.” I’m gonna rip him a new one.

One of the guys next to him scooted away a bit.

Another turned to him. “You’re gonna die if you keep that up. And her name is Ylva.”

“Cool,” Mishka said cheerfully.

I hate that face. I could punch it for years on end.

Once we landed, we geared everything ready to go, and ate a metric shit-ton of food, then crashed to catch some Zs before the next take off.

Within twenty-four hours, we were back in the sky.

— Kaden —

I was in the plane office as I called David.

“Yes,” he said half-asleep.

“You’re back home?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he mumbled.

“In twelve hours I want you back at Monaweard with all the Alphas involved,” I told him.

“What’s happening?” he asked a little more awake now.

“I’m making my move.”

“Now?”

“A small group attacked a pack where I’d sent my sister for information. They may have been involved with Nubinero. I’m not waiting.”

“Is your sister okay?”

“As much as she can be considering. They massacred the Alpha and his household.”

That made him spit curses.

“What do you want from me?” he said after a sigh. It was not aimed at me but the situation. He was asking me how he could help.

“I will need that meeting. Things are gonna take a direction they might not like, but they should know first.”

— Mishka —

I was told the gist of the situation. I wasn’t even officially part of the team, and they had me playing superhero twice in the same week. The contrast with my previous employer could not have been starker.

I told the Hellhound I was doing this free of charge. Apparently it might have had a link with Jerk-Team 6 so I thought it could be a gesture of goodwill. Besides, I saw the guy’s eyes, he’s going to keep his word. I should be fine.

We landed by boat on an island a few kilometres wide, which contain a facility and nothing else. We were to extract any possible living victims, and wipe everything else.

I volunteered for extraction.

I was told to keep back and watch how they operated, before engaging. It didn’t take me long to get the jargon, what sign was what. Most was standard military communication. Their click communication via comm, was new, so I couldn’t keep up with that and was curious to see how extensive it was. By not being standard Morse, meant that no one could listen in and follow along, but it also meant anyone not clued in couldn’t keep up, ergo me. But I was all docile and everything, listening to my assigned boss like a good soldier.

It’s not that I’m incapable of discipline or obedience, just that I don’t give it easily.

They were a well-oiled machine, every cog moving perfectly in sync with the other with little need for communications. They were not just training together often, this is a long-lasting team that as trained, worked, slept, ate together. Giving that this was a pack, they might even have grown together.

I’m used to being one of the most graceful actors in any job, moving efficiently, as flawlessly as one can, but I’ve never been that much of a team-player. I could play with the team, but I never truly blended in perfectly. They did, and it was beautiful. For a moment, it made me long for what I’d never truly had, for something I could gain. I never really saw it as something missing. Even now, as I made my move to join them, mostly to add a few advantages to my situation, but I didn’t take in the full scope of what it genuinely meant to join.

Any other day, this thought would have made me uncomfortable. Tonight, I was reevaluating.

Our team found nine women all huddled together, dirty and naked in one of the buildings allocated to our team.

The extraction went smoothly. Another man and I stayed back where the women used to be to stop any who would see them missing from raising the alarm, while other teams did their job too.

We stayed quiet, hidden in the darkness, unmoving, listening.

We got the signal three minutes and seven seconds later to move to phase two. All that needed rescuing were out of the way. Now we cleaned house.

We slipped out of the building, moving slowly, not advancing too fast until the rest of our team would be back with us.

We were to engage silently for as long as possible without casualties on our teams. We would not have engaged anyone with just the two of us, unless the opponent was alone. Always outnumber the enemy if you can. So when we found one alone, in no one’s line of sight, we engaged.

We got closer still in silence and made sure to stay downwind for our scent not to betray our presence.

My partner grabbed the man by the neck hard enough to shut his windpipe so he wouldn’t scream and drag him down to cut his throat so the blood would splatter low and not attract attention too quickly. I moved things to make sure the body would stay out of view, I checked for signs of anything that would betray the attack early.

Thirty-nine seconds later, the rest of our team made contact and we moved to our next target.

Inside a building there was three MAM. We moved carefully to position ourselves correctly and silently. One of them was near a window, so two men got behind that window. One was near the door, so two stood next to it, on the other side. The last one was a little bit trickier. To get him without being seen, without giving him time to alert anyone with screams or comm systems, and without using noisy guns would be a doozy. He was at the other end of the room, right in front of the door. He’d see anyone come in right away.

We waited.

Ten seconds.

Fourteen seconds.

Nineteen seconds.

He turned his back to the door.

We made our move.

One man behind the window grabbed the MAM nearby, with his hand inside reinforced gloves over the man’s mouth making sure he wouldn’t scream or bite through, and while making sure he would stay out of his partner’s way. The partner shoved an eight inches long knife in the man’s neck at an upward angle, right below the jaw, stabbing all the way to the brain.

The two men on the side of the door slid in. One wrapped his left arm around the closest MAM’s neck and mouth, and stabbed him in the eyes with an equally long knife of his own. Probably scrapping the back of the skull in the process. The other, being me, I walked right behind him and kept myself out of the way, lowered my stance and got ready to shoot if anything went wrong.

Our fifth and last man, ran in at full speed, and pounced as he crossed the threshold, his progression barely audible. He had his knees hit the back of the last enemy before the man even realized what was going on, and sunk his elongated claws in the face of the man, reaching to it from the back.

We made sure the two bodies we could control would fall down with barely a whisper and had to accept than the third would hit loudly with one of us atop him.

We all slipped in, shut everything up—lights and doors—then left and took position to observe the building we just raided.

No one came to investigate and we couldn’t see signs of our deed from the outside. When we were sure it wouldn’t change, we changed location.

The other locations we hit was even easier, and quicker.

As we approached the centre, and their HQ, we knew it was just a matter of seconds before someone would be clued in on what was going on.

Maybe six seconds after I thought this I heard the first sign of struggles. It took five more seconds for the first gunshot to be heard.

In the next beat a massive shadow in the shape of a man, jumped maybe twenty feet in the air, only there were a few anatomically incorrect details to make this really a man. The claws were long enough to be visible from my vantage point, the head more massive, the face slightly elongated, the hair longer, the ankles articulated like that of a canine. It was a half-shifted werewolf.

Partial shifts are really hard to pull off. Generally, the claws are the first thing one learns to shift alone, when one can. But a shift that turned you into a bipedal wolf was extremely difficult. But it had allowed this man to jump, and this high, effortlessly.

I lost sight of him as he landed behind a building, but I saw a body being thrown all the way through a wall.

Flesh is not made to be used as wrecking balls and what was left was probably unidentifiable.

We rushed quietly to come to aid to the teams ahead.

It probably didn’t take us more than forty seconds to reach them. By that time the fight was over.

I saw the wolf-man melt effortlessly back into a man. The shift had been controlled enough to keep the clothes intact, and only the footwear was missing.

Damn, I’ve never seen anything this impressive from a werewolf.

The sheer staggering amount of control is mind-boggling. I could only do claws and teeth before I had to complete the shift. The hellhound still had his claws out. No one shifts back partially. That I’ve never seen. You shift back fully and then get the claws back on. It’s too hard otherwise. The human mind is more open to restraint than that of a wolf.

Man, I don’t ever want to fight this man one on one. If there’s no choice, I’ll do it from three kilometres away with a sniper rifle, I’m not even going to confirm the kill, and just run for my life and disappear after that. That or poison. I don’t see how it could even be feasible otherwise.