Book Five, Chapters 91 and 92

~Kimberly~

I felt like my heart was connected by live wires.

The finale was moving forward so fast. As the day went by and the sun started to set, it was our last day. We had to survive, and I didn't even know if surviving through the night was enough or if we had to defeat all of the werewolves. Either way, if we didn't find a way to beat the pack leader, we would fail our rescue, and everyone who had died or been turned into a werewolf would stay that way.

I had to fight back tears. I wasn't the precious, beautiful starlet—I had to be a fighter. That's who my character was. But she never fought with guns; she fought with something else, something more tender, and she had lost.

In this dire moment, why was it I could only think of this woman I had never met? I could feel her tears running down my cheeks, her breath in my lungs, her solemn warning to run, to flee…

But not from the wolf. The She-Wolf gave her mind no unease at all.

I tried to lock those feelings away because they weren't useful to me, but I couldn't do that. Riley would have been able to. Antoine would have, too. Antoine could hide anything. But I couldn't, so I had to make them useful. I had to be the one to protect that scared young woman who was so mysteriously connected to me.

And I would have to do it soon.

Riley, as he often was, was right about what would happen next.

The fort was a large complex of old crumbling stone walls, but it was still just a large square with one rounded wall at the front. There were lookout towers hastily bolted onto the walkways upon the walls so that we could get a good view of our surroundings as the night wore on.

We waited hours without so much as a peep.

But when the fight came, it came all at once. I gripped my rifle like it was part of me. We had practiced shooting. Since we all had high Hustle, we were all crack shots. That made sense for our characters, and it helped us gain the respect of the remaining mercenaries.

From the top of the tower, one of those mercenaries who had stayed behind started screaming. Everyone inside became alert, picking up their weapons. None of us were going outside the fort; the main entrance was closed off.

The werewolves could jump over that wall, but that was part of Riley and Andrew's plan.

But the man on the top of the wall wasn't screaming about wolves. He screamed, "Survivors!" at the top of his lungs. The cold wind jerked a tear from his eyes, and his scream broke his voice.

Riley was up the ladder onto the wall, and I followed.

Breathe in. Breathe out. I had to be tough.

We did have survivors, all right.

In the distance, at the edge of the forest, I saw the blonde mercenary being hauled out by another of the mercenaries. The second one was bald and had a large claw mark on his chest. The blonde mercenary was limping like he'd been injured.

"Help!" the blonde mercenary screamed.

They were approaching the fort as fast as they could. The blonde mercenary kept screaming, "We were attacked! It was an ambush. There are more survivors. You need to go back the way we came!"

He kept repeating that in exasperated cries like it took every ounce of his will to keep screaming.

His cries echoed over the hollow field, and they were all I could hear outside of my own heartbeat.

I had to look suspicious of him. I was On-Screen, and this was my time.

The mercenary who had been on the wall with us, the one who had screamed, was calling for the others to go out and help them. But before anyone could follow along with that, I aimed my rifle and quickly pulled the trigger.

My Hustle was high, so my aim was true. The silver bullet struck the kneecap of the blonde mercenary's supposedly injured leg.

He roared in pain.

Roared.

The mercenary who had been on the wall with us heard that beastly cry and went suddenly silent. He looked at me like I was a stone-cold killer—or maybe like I was psychic. I couldn't tell.

We were On-Screen, so I decided to give Riley's explanation.

"That little drop of werewolf saliva transformed Antoine into a werewolf in a day and a half.” I shook my head. “I never believed it. It should have taken weeks. The only way someone transforms that fast is if they had help."

Suddenly, I was Off-Screen again, and the blonde mercenary and his friend were back On-Screen.

Riley was right. He was always right when it came to stuff like this, it seemed. After a few moments of trying to feign pain and confusion, the blonde mercenary began to laugh.

And then the hair started to grow.

The claw marks on the bald mercenary who had been supporting him began to disappear, and he, too, transformed, one bit at a time.

But they weren’t alone.

An army of wolves appeared from the forest beyond, and I didn’t have to pretend to be choked up with fear because this was an amount we had never even considered.

"Dozens," Riley said. "Hundreds. How is this possible?"

Was he pretending, or was he afraid too? Sometimes it was hard to tell with him. I knew that part of him was excited for the reveal as if he had been playing a game of chess with Carousel and finally figured out what it was up to.

That part of him scared me but it was also the part we needed to win.

The werewolves charged.

"Shots only!" Riley called as he directed me back down the ladder.

"Pick them off as they come," he said to the mercenary who remained. And the mercenary did. He was a good shot, and these NPCs were built for battle.

He must have killed five werewolves—or at least hit five—before the first one jumped the height of the wall and tackled him into the courtyard below.

The werewolf had the man pinned to the ground right beneath us as we descended.

The werewolf raised its sharp claws against the man, but as we descended the ladder, Riley drew out a long silver knife, almost long enough to be a sword. It had a trope attached—something about blades.

It was the silver serving spoon. Riley must have had it melted down and reforged.

He then fell off the ladder—maybe on purpose—onto the back of the werewolf, skewering it and quickly bringing forward his small sidearm to pop it in the head.

As he drew his knife out, he looked up at me as if he wasn’t quite sure he had actually managed to kill one.

I wasn’t sure it was on purpose.

We were On-Screen for that, but it worked for his character too.

We didn’t have time to celebrate—more wolves were coming.

We needed to get to the back wall, where the palisade walls were the highest and the wolves would have the hardest time getting to us. If we could just get to the top, where a nice perch had been set up and Andrew was waiting for us, we would be on our marks for the plan.

The mercenaries that remained—however few there were—followed the exact orders that Andrew and Riley had given them, taking out any wolf that tried to jump over the walls.

And then the phases of the battle started to march by like clockwork, exactly as they were planned, more or less. All I could do was get a few shots in and wait for my moment. Because as soon as the waves of wolves thinned out, the real fight would begin.

~-~

~Andrew~

Phase One: Firearms

We were not conducting a battle against an experienced general. We never believed the werewolves would use advanced siege tactics.

Their attack would be simple. A powerful full frontal assault was expected with a few twists to keep things interesting.

Yet, when we designed our defenses, we did feel as if we were planning against a siege because Carousel was our true enemy. We had to cater our defense to its sensibilities.

Riley was proficient at this part of the planning.

Together, we developed a plan of battle that would give Carousel premium footage and hopefully result in an optimal outcome for us.

When the assault started, we did not immediately activate the advanced rolling silver (A.R.S.). Riley suggested we start with old-fashioned silver bullets.

The wolves attacked from all sides.

The back wall, where we had set up our stand amongst the destroyed remains of some old lookout tower, was right up against a steep drop-off, providing extra security for us as the wolves could not clear the wall and the embankment.

The wolves would pop up over a wall one or two at a time, at speeds I could hardly fathom, and we would shoot them back.

At first, it worked.

“Just keep on firing,” Riley said. “Knock ‘em down.”

Except, of course, that couldn’t work forever. Battle must ebb and flow, and soon, the enemy began to overwhelm us as the wolves started to pour over the side walls and into the courtyard below.

We lost most of our remaining mercenaries one at a time. They fought bravely and managed to get several clean kills in their time. They proved quite useful.

They, however, were not going to win this fight for us.

I steeled my nerves and simply shot enemy after enemy until it seemed my shots began to lose their effectiveness. I couldn’t describe why they were failing. I thought I was hitting my targets, but after the first handful, strikes became less effective.

The werewolves could only be killed in climactic ways, and getting shot out of the air while jumping over the palisade walls satisfied this for a moment, but it couldn’t last.

The wolves were now gathering en masse on the side walls to enter.

Riley predicted that silver bullets would be most effective at the beginning of the battle but only as a prelude to our chemical concoction, so we needed to get as many hits in with them as possible before the audience saw what we had prepared.

We were surprisingly successful with this method. I estimated we killed nearly ten percent of the wolves this way before their trope started to protect them from it. No matter how many trick shots you made, a simple barrage of bullets could not remain climactic.

I aimed my pistol a final time at a wolf that had leaped over the front wall of the palisade, and though I was certain I had hit it, reality begged to differ. They were practically immune to that attack now. We needed to escalate.

“There are too many!” I screamed. “We can’t get them all!”

Phase Two: The Funnel

“Light the fuses!” Riley cried as he fired another shot uselessly at a wolf bounding toward us.

The wolves crowded the fields to the front and sides of the palisade walls. Some tried to climb the back wall with little success.

I aimed my pistol at a small black string sticking up over the side of the left wall of the palisade. Focus. Control. Fire. The bullet struck the black fuse against the stone of the wall, and a spark flew, igniting the fuse.

The fuse started to burn down, down, down into the ground outside the wall, and out across the outside of the wall itself. To my surprise, the wolves seemed to understand what was going on—or at least they thought they did—as they braced for an explosion.

Riley extolled the value of a fuse being lit On-Screen. He said everyone loves the shot of a fuse burning as it snakes along the ground. Great for tension, he said.

On the right side, Riley had shot another fuse.

The payoff was huge because the fuses were not connected to bombs.

The design was based on an idea Riley had that I perfected.

We created many containers of silver nitrate and distilled water. We laid them out strategically, burying some and hanging others on the outer walls. We affixed the fuse so that it ran over the top of the container—mostly glass jars and bottles—and then used copper wire to hang copper scraps from the fuse above the open mouth of the container.

It was tricky finding a way to bury the containers and the fuse then, but we managed it with the help of the diligent mercenaries and some roofing shingles that could be used to stop dirt from falling into the silver nitrate.

When the fuse burned, the copper wire would have nothing suspending it any longer, and the copper scraps would fall into the silver nitrate, beginning the process of precipitating pure silver.

I would never sign off on this plan in real life, but in a movie, it was practically guaranteed to work with our high Savvy. And, it was technically a feat of Hustle because of those accurate shots we did. Riley wanted us to use Hustle.

The fuses burned as planned, and as I watched over the left wall, a blue glow, artificially inserted by Carousel to match the natural hue of copper nitrate, started to light up the battlefield as the fuse ran from container to container, creating an intricate pattern of light that seemed to come from the dirt and grass itself.

I could almost hear the reactions happening, even though they should have been silent. What I did hear moments later was the wolves.

The wolves climbing the walls were immediately incapacitated and fell.

Those standing in the fields to the left and right of the fort ran like they were on fire—those that could. Others dropped to the ground immediately.

They were in excruciating pain as the jars we had buried began to react, purifying silver and, in some manner I didn’t quite understand, causing immense pain to any nearby werewolf.

The werewolves were smart. They learned their lesson quickly: if they were going to get to us, they’d have to do it from the front wall.

An ebb and flow.

The funnel had been successful.

And yet, as I observed the wolves’ reaction to the A.R.S., I noticed something odd.

Several of the wolves began to flee.

That might not have been unusual, but every scrap of literature I had found suggested that wolves were unflinchingly loyal to their pack leader. That is the reason so many were charging enthusiastically to their deaths.

Why were some just now losing heart? Some of the wolves fleeing didn’t even appear to be substantially damaged.

As I watched, shooting any wolf that leaped over the front wall, I felt I could see a faint shimmer in the blue of the A.R.S., a shimmer… a line that shone over the wolves.

I could have been imagining it, but either way, a hypothesis started to bubble into my mind.

What if the connection the werewolves had wasn’t metaphorical? What if it wasn’t hand-wavy nonsense magic?

After all, we never figured out why rolling silver worked. Perhaps there was some interaction inherent to rolling silver that we didn’t understand. What if the reaction wasn’t simply for the story, created by our dogged pursuit of the rolling silver subplot? Perhaps this reaction was a real observable phenomenon that Carousel was using.

I had to think on it.

Phase Three: The Frying Pan

As the funnel succeeded, we enjoyed a renewed effectiveness of silver bullets for a short time, but then they began to fail again.

The courtyard below started to fill up with wolves that would soon be in the range of our platform.

I carried a jar of silver nitrate in my hand, and as soon as the werewolves started threatening to jump up to us, I dropped copper bits into it and shook it gently.

Oh, Carousel had fun with that.

The wolves would leap—twenty feet into the air, almost reaching us—and as they neared our chemical-rolling silver, they’d go limp like fish and drop back to the ground, howling the whole way down.

They wouldn’t get back up. The mercenaries placed strategically around the courtyard made sure to shoot any wolf immobilized by the silver nitrate concoction.

But they couldn’t get most of them.

The wolves were fleeing. Not all of them. Not enough of them, but many of them were fleeing as soon as they came in contact with the A.R.S.

If I wasn’t mistaken, it looked like the wolves were pausing and thinking for a moment before they ran.

Thirty, forty, fifty wolves… the numbers were unfathomable. Fleeing into the night.

Dozens died there, of course, and others took their moment of clarity to decide to continue the fight.

Time wore on in the courtyard below, which was filled with wolves. We went from fighting successfully to being overwhelmed within moments.

As nearly seventy wolves entered the courtyard, climbing and leaping, we realized we were at capacity.

It was time.

This time, we didn’t use the fuses. Riley wasn’t sure they’d work again. He couldn’t articulate his reasoning well.  Instead, we used a simple string method.

Twenty large jars of silver nitrate had been buried in the courtyard. They were fitted with lids and a unique mechanism that allowed me to thread a string through the lid and dangle bits of copper from it. When I pulled the string, the copper would drop into the silver nitrate.

Similar to the fuse.

So, I did.

I pulled the string, and suddenly, the jars at the front of the courtyard started to activate, their unnatural blue glow filling the fort. I continued to pull as the string activated more and more jars until all that was left were the cries of wolves in a pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

“It’s time to go,” Riley said after we had activated it.

And so it was.

Phase Four: The Grenades

We had also employed devices with a much simpler design. We took Mason jars and soda bottles, added silver nitrate, and glued bits of copper wiring to the tops inside. As they sat still, the copper didn’t touch the silver nitrate. But when turned over, thrown, or rolled—well, the reaction was obvious.

As we ran, these “grenades” had been laid out for us along a path. All we had to do was knock them over and they would activate, leaving any wolf that managed to follow us with a nasty surprise.

During our experimentation, Riley and I had argued about different techniques and tactics to employ.

This kind of peer review was invaluable in academics—and, apparently, in setting traps for werewolves. We had developed some truly useful ideas, some only theoretical.

“You know those silver nitrate tests you wanted to do on the effectiveness of the solution itself against werewolves?” Riley cried out to me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Let the testing begin!” he shouted, throwing one of the grenades into the air toward a group of wolves standing in our path to the next phase of our plan.

I knew what he wanted. I grabbed my sidearm, aimed at the bottle, and fired as it sailed over the wolves.

It turned out that silver nitrate was quite effective as an acidic solution against these creatures. Even though it wasn’t pure silver and the effect wasn’t as extreme, it was clear the acid was doing tremendous damage—melting their fur right off. It almost appeared as if parts of them were turning human again, but they never fully did.

“Where is the pack leader?” Riley screamed.

How prophetic.

Across the ground, by the light of the moon, and surrounded by the largest wolves of the bunch, was a gigantic wolf whose title on the red wallpaper read, “Serena, the Cursed Lover.”

Beside her was a rather large wolf whose entry on the red wallpaper differed from the rest.

It was Antoine.

Now, a full enemy.

Kimberly and Riley seemed to have noticed this, and even the three surviving mercenaries looked on in awe.

Well, we drew out the big bad.

Riley said we needed to give an opportunity for the pack leader and Kimberly to interact for story reasons. That would surely happen now.

“I’ve got one right here for them!” he said, holding a jar in his hands, ready to throw when the time came.

So far, we had used Riley to great effect. Him being the target in the meta and Kimberly being the target in the story made the werewolves predictable.

But it couldn’t last forever.

The jar Riley was holding shattered, and he quickly dropped to the ground, clutching his gut.

We looked around, trying to figure out where the shot had come from. In the distance, I saw the blonde mercenary holding a rifle.

It was so easy to forget that humans were weak to silver bullets, too.

The blonde mercenary quickly fled out of sight.

Riley lay on the ground, still alive, but barely. This was a wound someone with higher Grit might have survived, but he was bleeding fast.

I thought about stopping to help him as the resident healer, but he sent me away, screaming for me to run. So, I followed Kimberly as she raced toward the field where the next part of our plan was to take place.

I looked back at Riley and was surprised to see him sitting up. I didn’t understand how he could survive that wound.

But I noticed many wolves—twenty, maybe more—gathering around him. Their acid burns enraged them, their human parts seeping through their wet, burnt fur.

He looked up at them and, in a tired, defiant voice, said, “You fellas ever seen a mummy movie?”

And with that, his stats jumped. He gained Grit, Hustle, and Moxie.

What was his plan?

He stood to his feet and started to run—not toward the field, but toward the manor itself. The wolves didn’t care about me. They followed him.

After all, he did have the lowest effective plot armor, even with his buff.

Was he really going for it?