Wolf of the Tesseract

Chapter 20

In the blink of an eye Rob transformed. Leaping to his feet, the werewolf snarled ferociously, causing most in the congregation to take a cautious step backwards. He warned them off with bellow of animal fury.

The man standing closest to them, the priest, dove for nearby knee-height table and reached under it. He yanked a shotgun free from the hidden restraints.

"Run, Claire! Run!" Rob insisted in his gravelly, lupine voice.

Claire took a step back. Her mind still reeled from the confusion addling her thoughts; it grappled with the foreign consciousness. The two minds stitched themselves together even as they fought.

The first gunshot rang out. A loud kra-boom echoed through her head and the concussive force of the nearby shotgun blast put her hair on end and snapped her to action.

"Run! And don't look back," Rob howled; he only bled slightly from the priest's scatter-shot. The chest-plate from his royal armor absorbed the brunt of it.

Claire turned on her heels and ran. She slipped behind some machinery at the rear of the church and hid as a mob tried to give chase.

Rob wouldn't stand for any pursuit. He pounced into their midst and clawed at the maniac cultists. Blood and screams spilled from the mob as they piled on top of him with a gang tackle violent enough to make Claire's Vikings jealous.

"Kill the beast," the priest howled. "This is the monster that has been stalking your children in the parks—the monster that The Seven warned us about! And somebody find that girl. She is the chosen one!"

The pile of cultists flipped in every direction as Rob burst upwards, casting them off with superhuman fury. He dashed ahead on all fours as the startled priest pumped two more loads of buckshot into the werewolf. Rob caught him in his claws with a vicious, whirling uppercut. He kicked the shotgun far away as the cleric collapsed in a gory heap.

He turned again to the pulsing congregation and cringed against their small arms fire. The armor turned back some bullets; many lodged in his flesh. Rob howled in pain and rage. He charged into the mob so that they risked hitting each other if they shot, but they did not stop firing. Bullets that missed their mark hit other cultists.

The horde pressed in on Rob again just as a shimmering window between the worlds opened. Caivev—Vivian stepped through from the Prime. She shook her head in bewilderment at the scene. Noticing the familiar werewolf, she unholstered her blaster and yanked the tracking device from her belt and activated it.

Glancing at the handheld screen she pointed to the lycan and shouted, "I've got this!" Vivian tossed the tracker to a nearby cultist, the nearby blip on the screen glowed only faintly as the tracking poison had mostly ebbed from her system. "Follow that! Capture the girl!"

Vivian turned and pumped a scorching bolt of energy into Rob's back. He howled in agony and grabbed a nearby cultist to use as a human shield. Rob stared over his prisoner's shoulder and growled at Vivian. This was not the first time they had played this game.

Vivian poured fire into him anyway, shredding the cultist, trying to burn through and into her prey. This time, the stakes were higher than ever!

The hunter with the tracking device grabbed a small crew of accomplices and stalked Claire. They moved directly towards her hiding place. Claire watched Rob, praying that he could somehow escape.

"Get out of here!" Rob yelled again. "They must not catch you!"

Claire stayed, watched, riveted by fear and hope. "But our answer was yes," she whispered. "I do!" she wiped a tear. "Bithia would have married you." She prayed that he already knew the answer to that fated question, even if it had never been voiced.