Chapter 118 - Fractured

  I flew in like a rocket, hands outstretched. One grabbed Cerberus by the scruff of his neck while the other reached around and hooked under his jaw, my fingers digging into the soft tissue beneath his tongue. Then I pulled.

  Cerberus's jaws opened with a wet sucking sound as his teeth tore free from Marion's flesh. She screamed, a sound of agony I'd remember for the rest of my life, and collapsed backward onto the ground. I didn't give Cerberus a chance to recover. Using every ounce of Strength I had, I swung him around and hurled him across the Yard like a rag doll. He sailed a dozen feet before crashing into the trunk of a massive oak tree. He fell to the ground before the tree in a crumpled heap.

  "Marion!" I dropped beside her and Alex, who was already cradling her against his chest with his unbroken arm. His face was chalk white, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  "It's okay, it's okay," Alex was saying, his voice breaking. "Marion, listen to me. You need to cast Cleanse. On yourself. Right now. Before it takes hold. Marion, please—"

  But Marion couldn't respond. She was writhing in his grip, her face twisted in pain, gasping for air. Blood poured from the deep punctures Cerberus's fangs had made in her arm. I could see the curse already spreading from them, dark veins crawling up toward her shoulder.

  "Cleanse," Alex begged, holding her tighter. "Marion, you have to Cleanse yourself. You can do this. You're strong enough. Please, love, please—"

  Marion's eyes met his for just a moment. There was so much in that look—love, regret, apology. Then her face contorted and she screamed again, but this time it her cry turned into a howl halfway through. Fur was sprouting across her cheeks. Her ears were elongating. Her teeth were growing longer.

  "Alex, get away from her," I said, reaching for his shoulder. "You need to get clear, before she turns.”

  "NO!" Alex roared, clutching her tighter. "I'm not leaving her! Marion, fight it! You can fight this!"

  But Marion couldn’t, and we both knew it. The transformation was happening too fast. Cerberus's bite was too strong. Within seconds, her face had become more wolf than human. Her hands were changing, fingers lengthening and claws erupting from her fingertips.

  "Alex!” she managed to gasp, her voice gruff and deep from the change. "Alex, I'm sorry. I love—"

  Then she threw back her head and howled.

  The sound was heartbreaking. Half-human anguish, half-wolf cry. Alex tried to hold on to her. He struggled to keep her with him through sheer force of will, but Marion was far stronger than him, now. She shoved him away. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt him, so perhaps there was some lingering vestige of her humanity there. She scrambled to her feet.

  "Marion!" Alex screamed, trying to stand, but his broken wrist gave out and he collapsed back down. "Marion, come back! Please!"

  But Marion was already gone. She went down on all fours, fully transformed, her uniform hanging in tatters from her wolf-like body, and raced toward the north wall, moving with uncanny speed and grace.

  "MARION!" Alex's voice cracked with grief and rage. "Come back! Please! I need you!"

  She didn't stop or even look back. Within seconds, she'd cleared the wall and vanished into the darkness beyond.

  A howl split the night. It wasn’t Marion's anguished cry this time, but Cerberus's triumphant roar. His call echoed across Harvard Yard, loud and long. Like a switch had been flipped, every werewolf in the Yard responded. They broke off from their fights, abandoning opponents mid-strike. As one, the entire pack turned and fled toward the north wall, following their leader’s call.

  I watched them go, too stunned to move. Ruiz was among them, the brown-furred werewolf who'd been one of our best fighters. The two Harvard defenders Cerberus had bitten were there too, already fully transformed and running with the pack. And somewhere out there in the darkness, Marion was with them now.

  Cerberus pulled himself from where I'd thrown him. He was battered and bleeding, his fur singed black in places from Alex's Lightning. But he was still smiling. I wanted so badly to wipe that grin from his face.

  "Good fight, small one," he called across the distance. His yellow eyes found Alex, still collapsed on the ground. "Smart one gave great gift. Cerberus will treasure her. She make pack stronger."

  "I'll kill you," Alex said. His voice was quiet. Deadly. Filled with more hatred than I'd ever heard from another human being. "There's nowhere on Earth you can hide. I will hunt you down. I will find you. And I will make you suffer before I kill you."

  "Cerberus welcomes challenge," the pack leader said. He turned to leave, then paused and looked back at me. "Small one is strong. When ready to accept gift he was given, Cerberus will be waiting. All eventually join pack. All eventually understand."

  "Go to hell," I snarled.

  Cerberus yipped, and I realized that had to be his laughter. Then, he was running, following his pack out over the wall and into the night. Silence fell over Harvard Yard, but it didn’t last long before it was replaced with the groans of the wounded and the sound of people weeping.

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  I turned back to Alex. He was still on the ground, cradling his broken wrist, staring at the spot where Marion had disappeared. Tears streamed down his face.

  "Alex...“ I started trying to say something, anything that would help., but my voice trailed off as I came up empty.

  "Don't," he said, his voice flat. "Just don't."

  "This isn't your fault," I tried, anyway. "Marion was incredibly brave, and she saved you. Given the same choice, you know she’d do it again, too.”

  "I know what she did!" Alex's head snapped toward me, and the look in his eyes made me take a step back. "And she only had to make that choice because she was out here in the first place! She was supposed to be safe in the infirmary. Safe behind guards. Protected!"

  "She came out to help people," I said. "To Cleanse the wounded. She was saving lives.”

  "She came out because you brought those Heal crystals here," Alex cut me off. "You brought Maggie that spell. You put ideas in Marion's head about helping everyone, about being some kind of hero. And now she's—" His voice broke. "Now she's gone."

  That accusation hit hard, maybe because I had asked them to come help the people at Harvard. "That's not fair, Alex. Marion made her own choices. She always has."

  "Fair?" Alex laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Nothing about this is fair, Castle. Nothing."

  He struggled to his feet, still cradling his broken wrist. Around us, his team was regrouping, helping the wounded, and securing the perimeter. They moved with the efficiency of trained soldiers, but it was easy to see the shock and grief on their faces. They'd lost people tonight.

  "Alex, we need to talk about what we’re going to do next,” I said.

  "Not now," Alex said coldly. "I need to see to my people. Make sure the ones who are left don't die while I'm wasting time talking to you."

  He stalked away without another word, leaving me standing there feeling like I'd been punched in the gut.

  "Cameron?"

  I turned to find Maggie approaching, her face pale and drawn. Her hands were still glowing faintly with healing magic. "You're hurt. Let me help?”

  "I'm fine," I started to say, but she was already reaching for my arm.

  "You're not fine. None of us are fine. But at least let me fix what I can." Her Heal spell washed over me, warm and soothing. Cuts sealed, bruises faded, and the ache in my ribs where Cerberus had gotten in an especially good punch lessened. Then her hand paused on my shoulder. Her fingers probed at something just above my collarbone, near my neck. Her eyes went wide.

  "Cameron," she whispered. "This wound here..."

  I looked down. There was a small puncture, already mostly healed over by my Regeneration. But the skin around it was discolored. Dark veins spread from the wound, subtle but unmistakable. It was a bite. One of the werewolves had gotten its teeth through my Natural Armor, after all.

  "Oh God," I breathed. I’d known there was a risk. I’d fought like hell to keep Cerberus’s teeth away from me, but after the first dozen werewolves tried to bite through my protection and failed, I’d figured I was safe. Apparently not. “Well, that seriously sucks.”

  Maggie didn't answer. Instead, she pulled up her sleeve, showing me her own arm. There, just above her wrist, was a row of round scars. It was clearly a bit wound. She’d Healed the damage, but the scars were surrounded by the same dark veins I wore.

  "I got bit right after Marion. One of the werewolves attacked me right after she ran to save Alex,” she said quietly. "I Healed the wound, but that doesn’t remove the curse. We're both infected, Cameron. And without Marion to Cleanse us…”

  We were going to turn. Maybe not for hours. Maybe not until tomorrow. But eventually, we'd become the very things we'd been fighting.

  “Castle!” a voice called out across the Yard. I turned to see Catherine Reynolds approaching, her face grim. Behind her, a line of wounded were being tended to by medical staff. Shit, was Maggie the last healer we had, here?

  "Cameron," Reynolds said. "We have a problem. A big one. We've counted at least forty people with bite wounds. Most of them are minor. They'll probably take hours to turn. But some are serious. I don’t know if that impacts the curse’s speed. And without Marion…” She trailed off, the implication clear.

  "I know," I said. "We need more Cleanse spells."

  "Can anyone else cast it?" Reynolds asked. "Anyone at all?"

  I shook my head. "Marion was our only one. She'd ranked it up as high as she could with all the spare stones we collected from that dungeon run. Nobody else in the city has Cleanse at all, as far as I know."

  "Then what do we do?" Reynolds demanded. "When these people start turning, it’s going to be a disaster!”

  "We get more Cleanse spells," I said, the idea forming even as I spoke it. “We’ll need to raid the dungeon. That's where Marion got hers. We go back in, fight through it again, get more white crystals."

  "That could take days," Reynolds said. "Maybe longer. We don't have days."

  "Then we move fast," I said. "I can get a team together, go in tonight—"

  "You're not going anywhere," Alex's voice cut through our conversation. He'd returned, his broken wrist now healed. That’s right, Alex had a Heal spell, too. "Not into any dungeon, anyway.”

  "Alex, we need those Cleanse spells.”

  "What we need is to kill Cerberus," Alex said, his voice flat. "That thing is out there right now, building its pack. Turning more people. Every minute we waste, it gets stronger. I'm taking my fighters back to City Hall and gathering every warrior I have. Then, we're going to hunt that monster down and put an end to it."

  "And what about the forty people here who are going to turn?" I demanded. "What about Maggie? What about me?"

  Alex's eyes narrowed. "What about you?"

  I pulled down my collar, showing him the bite mark. "I'm infected. So is Maggie. We need Cleanse, Alex. All these people need Cleanse. We can't just abandon them."

  For a moment, something flickered in Alex's eyes. Concern, maybe. Or guilt. But then it was gone, replaced by cold determination.

  "Then you'd better move fast and get that taken care of,” Alex said. "But I'm not waiting. Cerberus took Marion. He turned her into a monster. And I'm going to make him pay for that, even if I have to burn down half of Boston to do it."

  "Alex, that's not—"

  "I don't care what you think, Cameron," Alex said, his voice like ice. "You want to waste time in a dungeon? Fine. Go do that. But I have more critical things to handle, like making sure that monster never hurts anyone else the way it hurt Marion."

  He turned to leave, then paused. "Oh, and Cameron? Stay away from my people. You've done enough damage for one night."

  The words hit like a slap. I watched him walk away, saw his team fall in around him as they prepared to move out. It stung more than I wanted to admit. I felt like our friendship, everything we'd built, everything we'd survived together, was crumbling right before my eyes.

  And I didn't know how to stop it.

  "Cameron?" Maggie's voice was quiet. "What do we do now?"

  I looked at her. At Reynolds. At the wounded scattered across Harvard Yard. At the north wall, where Marion had fled into the darkness.

  "We survive," I said finally. “I’ll go to the dungeon and get those Cleanse spells. We save everyone we can. And then?” I paused, looking toward where Alex had disappeared. "Then we figure out how to put this mess back together."

  If we even could.