Excerpt From New Series: The Seventh Shade

In one of my prior comments, I mentioned the other series I'd been working on and that I might publish excerpts from them. A reader asked when some of those excerpts might be forthcoming, so here's one from an urban fantasy I've been drafting (working title: The Seventh Shade).  As with my other excerpts, the usual caveats still apply (ie, this isn't fully fleshed out, hasn't been proofed, etc.):

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The house suddenly trilled, letting out a noise that most would interpret as some kind of creak or groan. It had recognized me, and I interpreted the sound it made as one of almost extreme bliss. Like everyone else, the house had probably assumed that I was long dead (or gone forever).

I smiled as Lucia and I walked up to the front steps, then laid a hand on the wall next to the front door.

“Yes, I’m alive,” I said, grinning. “And it’s great to be back.”

The house trilled again in excitement.

Simply put, the house was a vivo domus, a living domicile. There were other houses that were alive, but most of them were either cursed, haunted, or demonically possessed. In one manner or another, the bulk of them were sinister and wicked. My family’s manse was the only one I’d ever heard of that was benevolent.

I reached for the doorknob, only to have the house creak ominously as I touched it, indicating that there was danger inside.

I glanced back towards the various campfires. From the tracks on the ground, there had been scores of werewolves here last night. There could be dozens on the other side of the door.

Doesn’t matter, I decided. Even if there were a hundred lycanthropes inside, I didn’t have to fight them all.  I only had to beat one:  the alpha.  With that thought, I opened the door and stepped inside, with Lucia right on my heels..

We found ourselves in the foyer. As I closed the door behind us, the first thing I noticed was the smell. Here, in an enclosed environment, the stench of urine – and other pungent odors – was much stronger than outside. As before, Lucia announced her displeasure with an audible hiss.

I took a moment to get my bearings. Needless to say, the layout of the place really hadn’t changed. However, the interior of the house had suffered abuse that matched or exceeded the neglect I’d seen outside. Furniture and chairs lay upended or smashed, stair railings had been ripped off, the carpet in a nearby room was soiled beyond repair, and there was trash everywhere. In short, the place looked like a dump.

Not even the house itself had escaped damage, as chunks of plaster had been gouged out of the walls in various places – most notably in the form of three parallel lines that I recognized as claw marks. Seeing my home marred like this angered me far more than anything else I’d seen. Catching the sound of voices coming from the living room, I marched intently in that direction, smoldering with rage.

There were seven of them in the room when I entered – six males and one female.  They were in human form but completely naked, as werewolves tend to do when left to their own devices. One was in a corner, urinating; the others were on their haunches in a circle, heads and hands jerking in an odd fashion such that it took me a moment to realize what was happening: they were feeding. None of them immediately took note of my presence.

There was a three-legged stool lying on its side near my feet.  I picked it up and then angrily flung it at the fellow pissing in my living room. It struck him on the calf of his left leg, sweeping the limb out from under him. Off-balance, he toppled over backwards, arms flailing. His head hit the floor with an audible thunk, like a coconut falling onto a concrete sidewalk. He lay there and didn’t move.

The sound of their companion hitting the floor brought all the other werewolves to their feet. They glanced at their friend, and then – finally noticing me – turned in my direction.

“Get out of my house,” I said firmly.

There was silence for a moment as a couple of the lycanthropes exchanged glances.

“Wh-what?” asked the female, a gorgeous but wild-haired blonde, after a few seconds.

“This is my place,” I stressed. “My home. You don’t belong here. Get out.”

As I was speaking, I had noticed the nostrils of several of the werewolves flare. I smiled internally, understanding that they must be confused. Looking at me, they likely saw someone they thought was human, but my scent probably befuddled them. Back in the nether realms, seems like there was always something chasing you in order to eat you, enslave you, sacrifice you, or worse. You learn to camouflage your smell. Thus, the group in front of me probably wasn’t sure what to make of me. Then Lucia hissed and momentarily drew their attention.

The largest of the group – a big guy about six-six in height and built like a weightlifter – suddenly shifted his gaze back to me and smiled. He had obviously picked up my companion’s scent and assumed her smell was masking my own (which wasn’t too far from the truth).

“Listen,” said the big guy, whom I pegged as the alpha, “I don’t know who you are, but this place belongs to us. Now normally, you’d get ripped to shreds walking into the wolf’s den, but I’m still feeling buzzed from our party last night. Plus, I think it’s entertaining that you knocked Nick” – he gestured towards the unconscious fellow – “on his ass, so I’m going to give you a chance. Turn around and leave, then run as fast as you can. And maybe, just maybe, you can get away before we catch you.”

The big fellow’s companions snickered, and I could see in their eyes how elated they were at the thought of hunting fresh prey.

“I’m not going to be run out of my own house,” I stated.

The alpha laughed. “Your house? Dude, we’ve lived here for fucking years and had full run of the place. Marked it as our territory. Carved our names in the floorboards. Taken dumps in the hallway.  Does it sound like this place belongs to anybody else?”

Completely livid, I clenched my fists. “You need to leave. Now.”

The alpha grunted I exasperation. “Man, you are really fucking up my mood, and I’m trying to be a nice guy here – give you a chance.”

“To hell with that,” said the blonde. “Fuck him up, Bone.”

“Yeah,” chimed in one of the other werewolves. “Tear him to pieces.” The rest of their friends murmured in agreement.

“Don’t try it, Bone,” I advised as I saw the alpha debating. “It’s piss-poor advice.”

Bone stepped towards me, but put a hand out when his companions attempted to follow, effectively telling them to stay back.

“I’ve got this,” he said over his shoulder, then turned to me. “Man, I don’t know if you’re drunk, or addled, or just plain stupid, but a minute from now when I’m ripping your arm out of its socket, you’ll be wishing you’d run when you had the chance.”

A moment later he arched his back, and a weird popping noise began to reverberate in the room. I recognized the sound as bones and tissue realigning themselves, sinew and muscle being reconfigured as Bone began to morph into his wolf form.

I quickly muttered a hex under my breath as hair began to sprout from his body. A moment later, Bone’s metamorphosis seemed to grind to a halt, but well before he had fully transformed. The result was something that was a little difficult to take in with a single glance.

Bone’s back was now large and hunched, full of muscle and obviously heavy. His hands had expanded in size, becoming hefty but lacking any claws. One of his legs had become digitigrade, the ankle extending up like that of a canine until it gave the appearance of a backwards knee; the other had just been starting to transform, but was still identifiably human for the most part. On his face, his mouth and nose had just begun extending into a muzzle. However, the lower jaw was noticeably longer than the upper, and his teeth had not fully reshaped into canines.

All in all, he looked like the failed genetic experiment of a mad scientist.

Bone let out a groan of confusion. “Wha rih ru ru ru rhee?”

His eyes went big as saucers and he put a hand up to his throat as he realized that the words coming from his malformed mouth were barely recognizable.

I smiled, noting that he was asking, What did you do to me?

Basically, I had used a spell to slow down his metamorphosis (but I wasn’t telling him that). He was still transforming, but at a much slower rate that what was normal. More to the point, in his current state, he really wasn’t designed for combat – a fact that I took full advantage of.

With one wolfhound leg and one that was still pretty much human, Bone lacked balance to a large extent. Planting my left foot, I then lashed out with my right, kicking him solidly on the side of his human knee.  The leg buckled, and he went down, yelping in pain.

Bone instinctively reached out his hands to catch himself as he fell. He did an adequate job of it, but a second after he hit the floor, I stomped down hard on the forearm of one of his outstretched hands.  I was rewarded with the sound of bone cracking and my adversary howling, then pulling the arm in and cradling it to his body.

I detached the tendril from my hip and extended the weapon, making it long like a staff. I then swung it forcefully at Bone’s side, like a golfer trying to drive a ball three hundred yards.  He didn’t go that far, but he did end up flying across the room, smacking against a wall and then dropping down to the floor.

Still furious, I marched towards him, the tendril now glowing in my hand with a crimson light. The other werewolves, recognizing that they were out of their depth, maintained their human forms and stepped lithely out of my way. (They'd obviously seen what I'd done to their leader when he tried to "wolf out," and none of them seemed eager to experience it firsthand.) When I reached Bone, I raised the tendril over my head, ready to cave his skull in. Whining in distress like an injured pup, the alpha raised his good hand in supplication, basically asking for mercy. As he did so, I saw white bone sticking out of his side, and I realized my last swing with the tendril had broken some ribs.

I hesitated, unsure of what to do. I was already in a bad mood, and these werewolves had pissed me off further with the mistreatment of family home. Moreover, they probably would have killed me if given the chance.  However, it just didn’t feel right to continue beating the stuffing out of this guy when he was clearly out of the fight.

I lowered the hand holding the tendril, but still held it threateningly. “For the last time, I’m telling you: get out of my house.”

The other werewolves, seeing an opportunity, rushed to their fallen leader and began helping him up while I took a few steps back. Once on his feet, Bone coughed once, spitting up blood. He really was in bad shape. Still, he gave me a steady look and then nodded, indicating that he understood what I’d said. His people then began helping him to the door.

“One more thing,” I said, causing the group to stop and look at me as a whole. “Don’t get any cute ideas about coming back here and getting revenge. If I see any of you around, if you piss within a mile of this house, if you so much as howl at the moon in a canyon and the echo reaches me, I’m going to decorate this whole fucking place with wolf pelts. Understand?”

Still looking at me, Bone nodded again. A moment later, his people resumed shuffling him towards the door. A short time later, I was alone in the house.