Chapter 7 : The Wolf's Den - Part 2
Karl was fast.
Not human-fast. Not athlete-fast. Something deeper in the evolutionary ladder, predator-fast, the kind of speed that turned prey into meat before the brain registered danger.
I twisted sideways. Claws raked the air where my throat had been. The momentum of his lunge carried him past me, and I used the half-second of repositioning to put a concrete pillar between us.
[COMBAT ANALYSIS: BLUTBAD ATTACK PATTERNS]
[RECORDING...]
The System's clinical observations flickered at the edge of my vision. Useful data I couldn't process while trying not to die.
"Running won't help." Karl circled the pillar, his movements fluid, patient. He had all the time in the world. I had whatever seconds I could steal. "You smell like fear, Grimm. Like desperation. Like someone who's never actually fought for his life."
Behind us, Monroe and the other Blutbad crashed through stacked pallets. Snarling. Tearing. The sounds were barely human.
"Three days," I said, keeping the pillar between us. "I've had three days to figure this out. How long did it take you to become a disappointment to your species?"
Karl's woge deepened. The insult landed exactly where I'd aimed it.
He charged.
This time I wasn't fast enough. His shoulder caught me in the chest, driving me backward into a rusted meat hook. The impact rattled my skull. Something in my ribcage made a sound ribs shouldn't make.
Claws tore across my shoulder, opening flesh in four parallel lines. Blood—my blood, Daniel's blood, whoever's blood this was now—sprayed across Karl's face.
He grinned with too many teeth. "First blood. How does it feel?"
I drove the knife into his thigh.
The blade sank three inches before hitting bone. Karl howled, more surprised than hurt, and his grip loosened enough for me to roll free. I scrambled backward, leaving a smear of red across the concrete, and crashed into another pillar.
[INJURY SUSTAINED: SHOULDER LACERATION (SEVERE)]
[INJURY SUSTAINED: RIB FRACTURE (MINOR)]
[COMBAT EFFICIENCY: DEGRADING]
"Tell me something I don't know."
Karl ripped the knife from his leg and tossed it aside. The wound was already closing—Blutbad regeneration working faster than any human healing. In thirty seconds, he'd be fully mobile again.
I had maybe ten.
The second feral Blutbad appeared from the shadows, circling around to cut off my retreat. Younger than Karl. Hungrier. His eyes tracked the blood running down my arm like a shark scenting chum.
"Hold him," Karl ordered, limping forward. "I want this one screaming."
The younger Blutbad lunged.
My body moved without permission. Daniel's muscle memory—self-defense training buried in borrowed neurons—activated in the half-second before impact. I dropped low, letting the Blutbad's momentum carry him over my shoulder, and came up with a chunk of rusted chain that had been lying forgotten on the floor.
The chain whipped across the Blutbad's face. Not enough to wound. Enough to blind.
He staggered, clawing at his eyes, and I kicked his knee sideways. The joint bent wrong. He went down screaming.
Karl was on me before I could follow up. His hand closed around my throat, lifting me off my feet. The edges of my vision went gray.
"Clever," he growled. "But clever doesn't beat strong."
[GRIMM SIGHT: EMERGENCY ACTIVATION]
[WARNING: UNSTABLE MANIFESTATION]
The silver fire that erupted behind my eyes wasn't Grimm Sight. It was something older. Something that made Karl's grip falter as he stared into my face and saw—
I don't know what he saw. But his expression shifted from triumph to something closer to terror.
"What are you?"
The hesitation lasted half a second. Long enough for my hand to find a broken pipe on the floor. Long enough to drive it upward through the soft tissue under his jaw, through the roof of his mouth, into his brain.
Karl's eyes went wide. His grip released. He collapsed in a heap of cooling meat.
[KILL REGISTERED: BLUTBAD (FERAL)]
[XP GAINED: +50]
[ABILITY EXTRACTION AVAILABLE]
[ENHANCED BLUTBAD SENSES - ACCEPT? Y/N]
The notification pulsed insistently. I didn't understand what it meant, didn't have time to analyze. The younger Blutbad was recovering, dragging himself upright on his ruined knee. Behind me, Monroe's fight had gone quiet—winner undetermined.
"Yes."
The acceptance was instinctive. Whatever the System offered, I needed every advantage I could get.
[ABILITY EXTRACTION: INITIATING]
[WARNING: FIRST EXTRACTION - DISCOMFORT EXPECTED]
Discomfort was an understatement.
Something reached into Karl's corpse—not physically, but through channels I couldn't see. Energy? Essence? The extracted whatever-it-was flowed into me like ice water injected directly into my spine.
My senses exploded.
The warehouse bloomed with information I'd never noticed. The younger Blutbad's fear-sweat, sharp and acrid. Monroe's exhaustion bleeding through his scent like copper and smoke. The lingering traces of Hap's death, still hanging in the air. And underneath it all, the industrial decay of the building itself—rust and rot and abandoned years.
[ABILITY ACQUIRED: ENHANCED BLUTBAD SENSES (PASSIVE)]
[EFFECT: +15% SCENT/HEARING SENSITIVITY]
[COOLDOWN: N/A (PERMANENT)]
The younger Blutbad saw my expression change. Whatever was in my eyes—the silver fire, the predator's focus—it convinced him that staying meant dying.
He ran.
I let him go. Couldn't have caught him anyway, not with my shoulder screaming and my ribs grinding. The flight instinct that kept me upright was fading fast.
"Monroe?"
The storage room had gone quiet. I limped toward it, leaving bloody footprints on the concrete, expecting the worst.
Monroe stood over a corpse. His woge was receding, the wolf giving way to the man, but his hands were still extended—claws dripping with fluids that had recently been inside another Blutbad.
"I killed him." Monroe's voice was hollow. "First time in years. I killed him."
"He would have killed you."
"That doesn't make it better."
No. It didn't. But it made it necessary, and that would have to be enough.
I sagged against the doorframe. The adrenaline was crashing out of my system, leaving behind pain and exhaustion and the dawning realization that I'd just murdered two people.
"Not people. Wesen. Monsters who set a trap to kill you."
The distinction felt important. It also felt like rationalization.
"We need to leave." Monroe's eyes finally focused on me—on the blood soaking my jacket, the way I was barely standing. "Christ, Cross. You look like you lost a fight with a wood chipper."
"You should see the other guys."
The joke surprised a sound out of him. Not quite a laugh, but close enough.
"Can you walk?"
"If the alternative is staying here, I can run a marathon."
Monroe crossed the room and got a shoulder under my good arm. Together, we limped toward the exit.
The third Blutbad—the runner—was long gone. He'd report back to whoever orchestrated this trap. They'd know their ambush failed. They'd know a Grimm with strange eyes had killed Karl and walked away.
Good. Let them wonder what else I could do.
The night air hit my face like a blessing. Cold. Clean. Carrying the distant sounds of sirens that meant someone had called the cops.
"I know someone," Monroe said, steering us away from the approaching emergency lights. "A medic. No hospitals."
"Wesen?"
"Fuchsbau. She owes me a favor."
I nodded, which was a mistake. The motion made my vision swim.
"Monroe."
"Yeah?"
"Why didn't you run? When the fight started. You could have escaped."
Monroe was quiet for a moment. His grip on my arm tightened slightly.
"Honestly? I don't know." He guided us around a corner, into shadows that felt safer than the open streets. "Maybe because you didn't use me as bait. Most Grimms would have. Most Grimms would have let me fight while they ran, or used me as a distraction to escape. You stood there with a knife against three Blutbaden."
"Stupidity, not virtue."
"Maybe." Monroe's voice held something that hadn't been there before. Grudging respect, perhaps. Or just confusion at a Grimm who didn't fit the pattern. "But you're worth more alive too. Someone has to explain what the hell just happened to my senses."
I would have laughed, but my ribs vetoed the motion.
[RELATIONSHIP UPDATE: MONROE - CONFLICTED (+15)]
[CURRENT STATUS: PROVISIONAL ALLY]
We kept moving through Portland's industrial bones, two wounded predators limping toward help. Behind us, the warehouse held three bodies and more questions than answers.
Who set the trap? Why frame Angelina specifically? How did the feral Blutbaden know where we'd be?
The questions could wait. Right now, I just needed to not bleed out in a city I'd only known for three days.
"Not bad for day three."
The thought was absurd. I'd been ambushed, nearly killed, and extracted my first supernatural ability from a corpse. Nothing about this was "not bad."
But I was alive. The System hummed quietly in my consciousness, cataloguing new data. And somewhere in the darkness ahead, an ally I hadn't expected was waiting.
The Bestiary grew.
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