Chapter Seven
I just watched as the battle lines were drawn, like out of some old movie I had to watch in high school where the greasers fought a group called the socs. Small steps were taken until the eleven pairs matched up, some werewolf against werewolf with others vamp against werewolf. The growls and hisses grew, nonverbal threats I guessed, as feet seemed to stomp on the ground, bodies appearing to shake to prepare themselves.
I held my breath, waiting for the first clash of bodies to happen. Like that stillness before a storm, the room grew silent, like no one even dared to breathe. Next thing I knew, I jumped half out of my skin as a stronger gust of wind blew and dropped another piece of window to the ground. While Nira grabbed onto me, I assumed expecting the worst, for that sound to be the final straw, all hell broke out in the room. Like I was a child, though I took no offense, she’d gone from having one simple arm around my shoulders to using her free hand to bring my head to her chest. I could still see enough of the room, though. I don’t think she meant to shield my vison, just my head from injury, given whatever might fly.
Closest to us, a werewolf raised up onto his hind quarters, almost daring the vampire across from him to come at him. In response, the vampire threw his hands out to his sides, fingers held ridged, tense, curling in. When the werewolf fell back to all fours, the vampire actually took two steps back. If I hadn’t met them prior to this point, I’d have thought this a sign of weakness, but I realized as I saw the vampire’s shoulders raise and his teeth elongate that he was just playing with the wolf, pissing him off, in fact. It was working all too well, I feared.
I had these fleeting moments of wanting to cry out, to tell one of them to look out, but again, I bit my lip so as not to do so. I’d only serve as a distraction. At times, I wanted to cover my face, to not have to watch, while at others, I wanted to root someone on. It was like watching a cage fight, that MMA stuff on TV. I’d gone out with a guy once that was into it. He’d thought it cool to introduce me to it. I’d never returned any of his calls after that.
While I expected at any minute for words to be exchanged, taunts thrown, maybe a few curse words tossed about, I remembered when I heard another frustrated growl that the werewolves couldn’t talk in this form. I felt like an idiot, even knowing how new this all was to me. The vampire, however, let out a wickedly evil laugh that chilled me to my core. The true werewolf’s next move was to shake his head before cocking it to the side and letting out a roar that was deafening, especially as combined with all the other battle sounds coming from the room.
The vampire closest to us opened his mouth and let out a wicked, indescribable sound, showing all of his teeth, more than just two fangs, longer than they should be by my brief count. I say brief because I looked away on instinct, the same sort of instinct that caused me to cover my eyes during a horror movie. This was an epic thriller playing out in real life before my eyes.
Yet, much the same, I peeked again, having a hard time watching but unable to completely look away. The werewolf raised up to stand on only his hind legs again. While at first I thought this left him rather defenseless, showing his underside which I would assume was vulnerable, like being punched in the gut left a human, he actually used that pose to go on the offensive. With a leap, he threw himself against the vampire. His four hairy, thick legs came around the thin, tall vampire, looking like he took him down in a bear hug.
A screech like none I’d ever heard emanated from the vamp. I tensed, waiting for the shake of the floor when their bodies hit the ground. Nira grabbed the wall, holding me to her as it felt like the floor would just drop out from under us. The earth may not have shook, but the floor damn well did, and then some. Not able to completely process all the sights and sounds around me, in my probably driven to delusional mind, I could see each floor hit another until we ended up bodies splattered all over the machines we’d encountered on the first floor.
It didn’t happen. We stayed put, though my body continued to be rocked with each hit, whether in front of me or not. I watched the bodies rock back and forth on the ground, an intimate twisted dance of fighting to the death, until something hot and wet hit me. As my breath whooshed out from my lungs like someone had just punched me in the gut, I realized the liquid to be werewolf blood.
As they’d wrestled, the vampire had ripped a large chunk from the neck of the furry beast. It yipped, a sound shocking and high pitched. I expected the wolf to just sort of fall over dead, but that didn’t happen. He got back up to all fours with a jump before leaping on the vampire again, this time using the full force of his animal body to hit the vamp right in his core, curving him over, pushing him back against the wall right beside us.